School vouchers are pretty much the clincher on why I think we are moving to FL/TX soon. Yeah, the taxes and housing are nice too and may even be worth as much or more. But it's hard for me not to get over the fact that they respect my basic right to decide how my kids are educated. And while I could afford to send them all to private regardless, most can't, and as such they will be growing up in an indoctrinated society. I think there will be positive externalities to growing up in a state with educational freedom.
I was looking at a school down in Florida the other day and it's amazing the flexibility they offer. How many days a week you want to come to dayschool. Homeschool and micro school support. In person, online, hybrid. Include field trips and extracurriculars or not. All at a reasonable price covered mainly by the voucher.
In the same sentence, Strong makes a contradiction I see too many right-wing critiques makes. Schools, he says, teach nihilism, the belief that there is no morality. But they also teach "debilitating woke politics". Woke politics are very moral. In fact, "woke" pretty much comes from commonly accepted moral principals combined with "bad science". So everyone agrees that racism is bad and people should be treated fairly. You combine that with the idea that there are no inherent differences between groups and it follows as the night the day that any differential outcomes are unfair, must be caused by bad things, and must be changed. Disparity proves discrimination and everyone knows discrimination is bad.
The model extends to sex and international affairs.
I don't wish to defend Strong since I am not sure what he means, but I would contend that woke politics does not in fact include commonly accepted moral principles. Putting the locus of responsibility for behavior not on the individual but on the group, thus some individuals do not need to follow the same rules as others because of the group they are in, that's not commonly accepted.
I might go so far as to claim that woke is anti-morality in that it pushes hard to show that generally accepted moral principles such as don't steal do not generally apply and are at best contingent on identity. In other words, woke is anti-principle, and everything is contingent.
The only principle in wokism is, for lack of a better term, the führerprinzip of the collective. If the herd shifted to say that all women were evil and had to be forcibly transitioned, that would be the new principle and they would forget all of their old principles. It's a lot like communism without the Comintern or the pigs in Animal Farm but with more occultation.
There are leaders, and I'm sure if you pulled off the scooby-doo mask it'd be some irritating Rockefeller heir or something behind the whole thing calling the shots, but for the purposes of speculative analysis we can just call it a herd.
I might argue a flock of starlings or school of fish would be more accurate. I am not sure their "leadership" are really leading or just happen to be standing in the front at the moment. I think there definitely some functional control in the narrative, but I don't know that it is condensed enough into point to leaders who could willfully change the collective to move in a different direction.
Many governments and other actors create the flock effect by puppeting bot accounts on social media sites, not disclosing PR relationships with major influencers, and playing with jurisdiction to avoid consequences for illegal payments and statements. The US is more free in its criticism of these practices in foreign countries, but you can see the shape of what various actors are doing in the US as well (see e.g. https://pomeps.org/social-media-manipulation-in-the-mena-inauthenticity-inequality-and-insecurity).
However when we look at the effects on ordinary people, they perceive it as flocking and feel that it is authentic. In the era in which television and print has lost default authority status, people look to social media flocking as a signal of trustworthiness and authenticity, so whomever can efficiently create and maintain flocks can execute effective 20th century style propaganda operations even in the 21st century.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that flocking made it authentic. Just the reverse really: people are responding ONLY to what those around them profess, not thinking for themselves based on principles or even discussing or interrogating the beliefs of others and thinking about what is good or desirable. Their interest isn't in morality or principles only "be in step with everyone else so I don't stand out". Even the apparent leaders are only such because they change their views and beliefs to match movement of the crowd, and just happen to be on at the front for the moment.
I don't see e.g. Robyn DiAngelo (or however you spell it) leading people but rather happening to be in the right place at the right time to become popular as the swarm decided to go that way. If the swarm decides "White Fragility is bad, actually," she won't be convincing them to go the other way, but will rather just memory hole her work and move on with what ever is deemed true today, and hope to cash in on the next current thing.
That said, this is al observationally equivalent to there being some actual leaders somewhere who pull strings from the background, the power behind the transient holder of the throne. Could be either or some mix.
Yes quite. Another interesting bit is that a lot of the ideological weapons sit in storehouses for a long time without getting armed and used, like Judith Butler gender theory or Robyn DiAngelo popularizing Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Now, you could argue that Crenshaw caused DiAngelo caused the riotous reaction to the martyrdom of St. Floyd, and such arguments can be convincing. But how much of that matters without the money, the organization, and the legal muscle set to work bending that arc of history towards justice? There are whole storehouses full of Crenshaws and DiAngelos to be used and discarded by whatever baffling network of moron heirs and heiresses wants to use them before they get bored and go play Pokemon with some other set of flunkies.
I think you are absolutely right that "woke" has double standards but I think they are at least partially within "commonly accepted moral principles". Just as a person on crutches doesn't have to participate in gym class, so members of "oppressed" groups get passes on certain things in certain circumstances. So if you're rioting after George Floyd, that's okay, but if you're beating your wife or stealing from members of your own community, that's wrong. The first can be seen (foolishly I think) as political action by other means. And doesn't everybody think that violent resistance is acceptable if the circumstances are bad enough? There's the "bad science", thinking that America in 2020 was much worse than it was.
I see your point I think, and it makes sense, but I don't think that is functionally how the thought process at hand works. You are assuming I think (in good faith!) that the arguments go "Beliefs about the world + moral principles -> identify things you don't like -> woke politics", because that's how people often behave. Moral principles bind unless there is clear justification as to the exception.
I think instead the process for wokism (and other such ideologies) is roughly "identify things you don't like / belief about reality you don't want to change -> identify necessary exception to moral principles -> adapt beliefs about the world to suit exception -> woke politics". Moral principles are obstacles to be worked around via finding a justifiable exception.
In your rioting example, I agree that people agree that violent resistance is acceptable if the circumstances are bad enough. However, looking at MN in 2020, why call the protests "mostly peaceful" when they clearly were not if they were justified? How is looting Target of large screen TVs appropriate resistance? Was Target in particular oppressing people? What about the small Hmong nail salons that were looted and torched? How is all this political action by other means, or war, against those who oppressed you? I can see attacking police stations if you think the police are the bad guys, but the rest is just wanton, so why try to justify the wanton bad behavior instead of just the justifiable stuff?
The alternate pattern based on my theory would be that those who saw the rioters go bad and violently criminal were stuck; it looks bad to argue that all minorities are good decent people who are just oppressed by the police and that's why they end up in jail so much when there are a whole lot of minorities setting fire to the city after looting it. That's the belief you don't want to change in the face of facts. So the first thing is to change the belief about reality that says "they are being violent criminals" to "mostly peaceful." That's hard in this case, so the next one is "Their behavior is good, actually, an exception to the normal moral rule" and we get arguments like the case for looting. It isn't the normal presumption of principle, "the principle holds until demonstrated that it should", but rather starts with the exception desired and figures out how to justify it. That is anti-principle.
Long story short, the bad science is created ad hoc to justify the desired exception to the principle. They don't accept the same morals, but see them as rules to be worked around to get whatever end result is currently expedient. Not double standards, no standards for them and whatever is convenient for them for everyone else.
I see your point I think, and it makes sense, but I don't think that is functionally how the thought process at hand works. You are assuming I think (in good faith!) that the arguments go "Beliefs about the world + moral principles -> identify things you don't like -> woke politics", because that's how people often behave. Moral principles bind unless there is clear justification as to the exception.
I think instead the process for wokism (and other such ideologies) is roughly "identify things you don't like / belief about reality you don't want to change -> identify necessary exception to moral principles -> adapt beliefs about the world to suit exception -> woke politics". Moral principles are obstacles to be worked around via finding a justifiable exception.
In your rioting example, I agree that people agree that violent resistance is acceptable if the circumstances are bad enough. However, looking at MN in 2020, why call the protests "mostly peaceful" when they clearly were not if they were justified? How is looting Target of large screen TVs appropriate resistance? Was Target in particular oppressing people? What about the small Hmong nail salons that were looted and torched? How is all this political action by other means, or war, against those who oppressed you? I can see attacking police stations if you think the police are the bad guys, but the rest is just wanton, so why try to justify the wanton bad behavior instead of just the justifiable stuff?
The alternate pattern based on my theory would be that those who saw the rioters go bad and violently criminal were stuck; it looks bad to argue that all minorities are good decent people who are just oppressed by the police and that's why they end up in jail so much when there are a whole lot of minorities setting fire to the city after looting it. That's the belief you don't want to change in the face of facts. So the first thing is to change the belief about reality that says "they are being violent criminals" to "mostly peaceful." That's hard in this case, so the next one is "Their behavior is good, actually, an exception to the normal moral rule" and we get arguments like the case for looting. It isn't the normal presumption of principle, "the principle holds until demonstrated that it should", but rather starts with the exception desired and figures out how to justify it. That is anti-principle.
Long story short, the bad science is created ad hoc to justify the desired exception to the principle. They don't accept the same morals, but see them as rules to be worked around to get whatever end result is currently expedient. Not double standards, no standards for them and whatever is convenient for them for everyone else.
I can't help thinking back to Edward Banfield's famous chapter in The Unheavenly City, "Rioting (Mainly) for Fun and Profit". It was in response to the many people who had said black rioting in 1967 was justified or at least a to-be-expected response to being screwed by white people. The blue ribbon Kerner Commission appointed by LBJ had "concluded that the rioting was a response to decades of "pervasive discrimination and segregation." Said the Commission, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II . . . What white Americans have never fully understood--but what the Black can never forget, is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."[4]" wikipedia "Kerner Commission"
There are always lots of moral principles floating around. I don't think most people develop a strict moral system and then abide by it. Rather they have ideas about how the world works, they sense how the people they care about think and feel, and they have their own feelings. That all gets put together into what they think/feel about a particular situation.
Everyone believes murder is wrong. Most everyone believes self defense is justified and that just war makes killing all right, as long as the war is "proportionate". But nobody puts those together with mathematical precision. How you feel about what Israel is doing depends on "feels" and on how you interpret the history of the region (and the world for that matter).
"Woke" provides a nice simple "narrative" for history and you can then slot what's happening today into it. "The modern world was created/ruined by European colonialism. Colonial peoples are revolting against that. They have a right to use extreme measures. What looks like self defense to the colonialists and neo-colonialists is just continuation of unjust colonialism." (While not usually a big part of "woke" in America, "post-colonialism" is the big deal in Europe.)
I think "woke" is factually wrong, and causes more harm than good. But I don't think most "woke" people are more morally sloppy or shady or phony than most other people. We are a highly imperfect species, or as some old lawyer once said, "We are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God."
I disagree. I think that if your "principles" never result in a restriction of your behavior, you do not have principles. If your principles say "Whatever people of group X do to people of group Y is always ok" then... well I don't think you have moral principles, but I suppose that is strictly a principle. However, I don't think most woke whites are fine with their house being looted and burned down so long as it is by a minority.
I do, however, think that many people do actually have principles, however fuzzily understood, that limit their behavior. They don't cheat even if they won't get caught, etc. While motivated moral reasoning is certainly common ("How do I justify/excuse doing what I feel like doing?") it is effectively the hallmark of wokeism. Consistency of narrative with their fellow travelers is the paramount concern, and reasoning and beliefs about the world seem to be in service of that.
I think in many cases, there is a positive feedback loop. The people who matter to you believe in a certain narrative, a certain "the way the world works". So you believe it, too. That narrative carries several moral implications, which you also adopt. From then on, you want to believe that this is indeed the way the world works and you notice things that support it and minimize things that contradict it. So you believe it more. That makes you more sure of the moral implications. And round and round it goes.
I think most "woke" people have "principles ... that limit their behavior". Mostly, they also "don't cheat even if they won't get caught". Yes, they do motivated reasoning on various things. So does most everyone.
And, as you say, whites who will excuse blacks for various things will only go so far. Very, very, very few have the principle, "Whatever people of group X do to people of group Y is always ok". Though they may be willfully blind to those bad things done by people of group X and sensitive to those bad things done by people of group Y.
If you are going to teach woke morality as if it weren't in the same position as alternative moral frameworks of equal validity but instead not really mere 'morality' at all, but as if it were objective scientific truth, then there is no possibility of sincere pluralism, and you necessarily annihilate all morality because you've defined your own values as outside that category. That's the nihilism.
Okay. But lots of philosophical systems say their morality is "objective scientific truth". Certainly, Catholicism does, though it usually just says "objective truth". And, in practice, I think most people get their morality not by deep philosophizing and choosing but by what the people around them seem to feel is real, just "the way it is". No one in America is going to publicly say that "racism is bad" is just one of a number of "alternative moral frameworks of equal validity." (Yes, left critiques have their own contradictions, like "all cultures are equally valid, but western culture sucks.")
I admire that your definition of nihilism is stated clearly and up-front, so it can be examined and criticized. In that spirit, I don't think it is what most people mean when they use the word.
"but as if it were objective scientific truth, then there is no possibility of sincere pluralism, and you necessarily annihilate all morality because you've defined your own values as outside that category."
Maybe it's taught as truth but not scientific truth. It's no different than religious morality being taught as truth, which I'm sure you agree is not scientific. It is still a morality and does not annihilate morality.
Nihilism is an extremely ambiguous term I don't much like and don't think it helps here. I'm a nihilist in the sense I don't think there is one true morality. Among other things, it's a balance between individual and group needs, benefits, and desires. We approach a "perfect" morality asymptomatically and can do so on different paths, some better than others but all somewhat imperfectly understood and misunderstood. I also don't think life has meaning beyond what we make of it as individuals and society. That is a L O N G way from there being no morality at all.
Teachers used to have their subjects, perhaps, with an unchallenged mastery thereof or at least dedication to them.
The English teacher passionate about English, the science teacher who took kids on field trips because he loved to be in the field, etc. They had desegregated the schools by my time, grudgingly at first, no doubt with efforts to obey without exactly obeying, like testing, and building ugly new schools in the 60s in an effort to stabilize demographic constituencies, and naming them for Confederates [all very stupid; looking it up I see that the school that now stands in the footprint of my old school is 6% white and but 12% black and apparently the fights, instead of being black v. Hispanic are now Hispanic v. .... Afghan?] ... and so this was experienced by me mainly in having African-American teachers rather than classmates in high school - one of whom, an algebra teacher, recurs in memory as the Platonic ideal of a teacher. Her knowledge of her subject was complete, her classroom an orderly temple of algebra. Even her chalkboard was not the dusty mess of her colleagues but immaculately green and we arrived each day to find the lesson, and a list of names of who had excelled on the previous day's test, differentiated (a column for those who got 110 - she always offered bonuses - and 109, and so on down to 100) in her neat script which could have been used to address wedding invitations,* and which it seemed like she wrote with some sort of level, unlike the other teachers. No list of champions could have been more important to us, in that year, though none of us was a math prodigy that I recall.
She had a calm, kind, but detached manner - no favorites, no intimacy - and I want to say that it was almost axiomatic that a roomful of mostly white (and a handful of Asian, mostly Vietnamese) children would have eaten their shoes rather than be other than respectful to her. There was always perfect clarity about her assignments, also written in detail on the board; she took the time to curate, "do #5-8, and #10-12", etc. (Another African-American teacher, with more of an extroverted, zany preaching-from-her- podium affect, who seemed to be on uppers, and didn't always make sense, was held in affection enough but did inspire the boys to joke or play pranks on her, which she seemed not to mind.)
(I really believe that woman may have been the greatest algebra teacher that ever lived, and it's striking to me that I encountered her in an otherwise spotty education. The only thing that could have made it better would have been to have a little history of algebra and its origin and purpose, but that wasn't part of the curriculum in a public school; the administrators probably had little notion of that themselves.)
We didn't talk about anything but math in that class, as I recall. If we did, it was polite chitchat as we waited to begin, with no pedagogical purpose.
I remember that some of the male teachers at my high school liked to direct conversation, usually with the boys, towards things other than the subject, and even politics. It was the 80s and we had some budding Alex P. Keatons. I think the kids enjoyed that. I would have been reading and not listening. But I think that went on.
But as now when it's a school made up largely of women - probably nice enough, to be sure, but all of roughly the same intelligence level - spouting the things they think they know, that are tediously all the same thing, which they themselves imbibed like sponges, as it was perfectly marketed to them - it is no longer fun, at least for the intelligent boys, to stray from the subject matter. And it is not always clear that the subject is any longer the point, or the focus. I think those women have been done a disservice, in a way.
For some of us, with a 145-160 IQ boy in school, suppressing arrogance and inculcating humility and respectfulness at school - can become almost the chief goal of their educations, sadly. And nature being what it is ...
At my kid's high school, the physics teacher of decades was celebrated. There was much pride in "our" physics department, and indeed an inordinate number of kids got mostly-passing thoughts of becoming "physicists". Which was great. I learned a few things myself, secondhand.
I never laid eyes on this teacher, but in hindsight, I think what the praise was all about was this: the physics teacher was very smart, obviously; he really grasped physics and loved it; he made it fun, yes, a bonus but not necessarily a requirement, perhaps, see my fond recollection of algebra teacher above. He taught physics full stop, for 45 minutes or whatever it was.
He did his exact job, in other words.
*I'm seeing that maybe my perpetual craving for order is beginning to manifest here.
"... we arrived each day to find the lesson, and a list of names of who had excelled on the previous day's test, differentiated (a column for those who got 110 - she always offered bonuses - and 109, and so on down to 100) ..."
If she did that today, she would be called into the department chair's or vice-principal's office and told that was not appropriate, that it made students feel bad, even shamed. That how a student did was not public knowledge. Etc.
It can easily be seen as increasing "feminism" of education, away from proud overt competition for achievement.
Of course. Note that she did not write everyone's grades, only the top excellers - everyone else might just as well have gotten 99 for all we knew (or whatever the cutoff was, for that exam). So that if it was very hard and no one got the bonus, or etc., we would know that too. No one was perfect. Even the best occasionally made a careless error. And it was something to get on the list when you were not the sort of student who could count on always being on it. And note also that I have no recollection of whether I was always up there - I would not have been tops, certainly, and I think it likely I did not make it every time. And this doesn't color my memory of her at all.
"The difference with other OECD countries is that more of our spending is covered by employer-provided health insurance, whereas more of their spending is funded by taxpayers."
I'd argue its taxpayers either way. After all, employer group is tax deductible for a start. And it's so regulated it might as well be run by the government.
When you include employer group health insurance, there is little daylight between the US and most other OECD countries in terms of government spending as a % of GDP (there are some higher outliers like France, but we are a lot more like the anglos, nordics, and East Asians then is commonly assumed).
With IQ being dependent on many more separate genes (poly-genetic) that height/weight it seems that a lower heritability would be a normal outcome. Height/size is a simple one making it easy to breed in as we see in many plants and animals with growth hormones being big factors. It isn't the accuracy of measurement, it is the simplicity of possible genetic structures.
What world does Strong live in? Why does he assume that perfect schools would end mental illness? Most schools will never be like he describes and even if they were I don't see schools as a top three contributor.
What are your top three contributors? I would put schools in top 5 perhaps, definitely top 10, but I might be missing some things or breaking down categories differently.
That seems like a pretty good list. I might order and divide it thusly:
1: Social structure (includes social media, schools and civil/government society. Overly big grouping perhaps)
2: Brain chemistry/structure/damage (including from drugs or injury)
3: Home life (parents, step parents, mom's baby daddy)
4: Life events that do not directly break the physical brain but traumatize otherwise
If I break up 1 into parts they might start being even with 2. The other problem is that 2 is probably highly correlated with the effects of everything else; crazy parents are likely to give birth and raise crazy kids, for a variety of reasons. I agree that you aren't removing all of 2, and so you aren't ending mental illness, but fixing 1 and mitigating 3 and 4 would go a long way.
I place social structure so highly because I think it both drives and exacerbates other problems. Schools, both k-12 and college/university, seem to really screw a lot of kids up, worse than there home life and physical structures necessitate.
To the extent we've specified, it sounds like we agree except maybe on one point. If school means the classroom and other primary parts of education, I think it ranks pretty low. If you are including the social aspect then it ranks much higher but I'd prefer not to include that with classroom, etc
I think the structure of school matters, in terms of how it is organized (a lot of kids largely being socialized off each other and not functioning adults, doing mostly busy work instead of useful things) and how it is staffed (modern teachers are a sad lot, and many seem more interested in proselytizing than teaching). The content of what is taught doesn't help either.
I don't think you can fully separate the various aspects. Having higher quality people teaching would help, but you would need different administration as well to keep those teachers being driven out as they have been. You need to have more teachers and focus on more functional topics while getting kids moved through faster to do more valuable work (in their opinion.) Smaller schools with more focus on student teacher interaction than swarms of kids interacting primarily with each other in the sociopathic way most young people do.
In other words, so long as we use the factory school + Prussian structure it is very difficult to not have it slide into a social nightmare. Larger schools without school choice also open up too many problems with discipline, which means that the craziest students have outsized influence in the day to day lives of other students. The crazier teachers as well.
Small question: given that we generally think that most dollars that employers currently pay for health insurance would be compensation to employees if not for the differential tax treatment, isn’t the cost borne directly by individuals for health care still quite high?
(Not saying that this is necessarily bad, except that the way the cost is borne makes most of us insured insensitive to the marginal cost of care. But isn’t that the most accurate comparison of personally-borne costs, once accounted for in each country?)
It's pretty hard to do, mainly because the US requires certain treatments that other countries don't. A local talk show was visited by Australian tourists. Up came health care. An elderly gentleman called in and said, yes basic health care is cheaper in Australia, but their health insurance (public and most private) won't cover quality of life issues like the US does. Angry shouts of "not true!" from the Australians. Except one, who then said " he's right, we're helping with my parents, and we're finding out what Medicare doesn't cover". Medicare would probably be solvent if it didn't pay for knee, hip, and joint work.
“millions of parents are spontaneously creating more humane learning environments for their children through homeschooling, microschooling, virtual schooling, private schooling, and religious schooling.” This is progress toward the America I want to live in. Of course “millions” pales in comparison to the many tens of millions putting their children in public schools—things are getting better. The most important thing to realize is that each of us has the ability to create our own private education for our children. It might mean sacrificing career, higher income, exotic vacations, etc, but we have choices and significant freedom of conscience, even in the face of “free” public schools. The way forward is less about persuasion and more about brute force. Brute force in creating a private education of your liking for your own children.
If the market will not provide 30-year fixed-rate mortgages it means that they are too risky and the government should not take on that risk. Instead, banks will provide 5-, 10-, or 15-year mortgages as they do in many other countries and they will reset the interest rate to reflect the market assessment of risks. I believe that's what banks do in Canada, which historically has had a home ownership rate close to or slightly above the United States.
It might, however, be possible to save the 30-year mortgage by changing some of the rules around it. For instance, I understand that in Panama, which is dollarized and also has 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, lenders have greater security than they do in the United States, because mortgage payments are automatically deducted from wages like taxes, rather than being subject to the borrower's discretion every month whether to pay the bill or not.
"The only mortgages that they could purchase would be 30-year, fixed-rate first mortgages for purchasing owner-occupied homes."
In at least two cases I don't see a benefit in being that restrictive. I think it creates some rather important unintended consequences.
1 I don't understand the advantage of not offering 15, 20, or even 10 year mortgages. Without the federal backing, they could very well end up priced higher than 30 year. That seems like a loss for both borrower and lender. I'd think the more people who have shorter loans the better for everyone, including economic stability. It seems my concern also applies to adjustable rate mortgages but I'm not as sure. Maybe be second mortgages, second homes, home equity, and multi-unit for other reasons. IDK.
2 if loan refinances aren't included under the government program then when interest rates go down there would be an unintended incentive for people to move. I see only downsides in creating that incentive.
I do not think FM/FM should incentivize fixed rate mortgages. If there is market demand for 30 fixed rate assets, fine, but I think interest rate risk is better decentralized in millions of mortgage payers than concentrated in financial institutions.
Regarding the Abaluck tweet claiming that “the US is below the OECD average for out of pocket health care spending as a fraction of per capita consumption.” The chart contained in the tweet purporting to support this claim actually shows “Out-of-pocket spending as share of final household consumption, 2017.” “Per capita” and per “household” are two different things. Per the OECD glossary, “The concept of household is based on the arrangements made by persons, individually or in groups, for providing themselves with food or other essentials for living.” Household thus introduces many variations that will differ from nation to nation rendering health spending comparisons somewhat nebulous.
If we actually want to make international per capita out-of-pocket spending comparisons, OECD doesn’t appear to do that. However, we could look at Peterson-KFF reporting:
“Higher health costs in the U.S. leave Americans paying more out-of-pocket at the point of care ($1,315 per person) than people in peer nations ($825 per person), on average.
Patient cost-sharing responsibility, particularly for people with serious conditions, can quickly add up. For example, out-of-pocket costs for inpatient COVID-19 admissions among people with large employer coverage averaged $1,880 in 2020 (for admissions with at least some cost-sharing). Large employer plan enrollees’ emergency department visits cost $646 out-of-pocket, on average. Privately insured women who give birth pay almost $3,000 more out-of-pocket than women their same age who don’t give birth. Among privately insured people with large employer insurance, 1 in 5 taking insulin pay over $35 monthly.
While cost sharing is intended to encourage patients to make cost-effective decisions, it can also make care prohibitively expensive. Even though the vast majority of Americans have health insurance, 1 in 10 adults in the U.S. either delayed care or did not get care due to cost.”
(“The state of the U.S. health system in 2022 and the outlook for 2023” December 22, 2022)
In addition Peterson-KFF reports:
“Ninety percent of workers with single coverage have a general annual deductible that must be met before most services are paid for by the plan, similar to the percentage last year (88%).
The average deductible amount in 2023 for workers with single coverage and a general annual deductible is $1,735, similar to last year. The average deductible for covered workers is much higher at small firms than large firms ($2,434 vs. $1,478). Among workers with single coverage and any deductible, the average deductible amount has increased 10% over the last five years and 53% over the last ten years.
In 2023, among workers with single coverage, 47% of workers at small firms and 25% of workers at large firms have a general annual deductible of $2,000 or more. Over the last five years, the percentage of covered workers with a general annual deductible of $2,000 or more for single coverage has grown from 26% to 31%. … ...Regardless of their plan deductible, most covered workers also pay a portion of the cost for a physician office visit. Many covered workers face a copayment (a fixed dollar amount) when they visit a doctor, but some workers have coinsurance requirements (a percentage of the covered amount) instead. The average copayments are $26 for primary care and $44 for specialty care physician appointments, and average coinsurance rates are 19% for primary care and 20% for specialty care. ”
Thus it might be fair to conclude the claim that “Americans are not used to spending their own money on health care” is at best misguided and misleading if not indeed ill-informed.
Similarly, the claim that “The difference with other OECD countries is that more of our spending is covered by employer-provided health insurance, whereas more of their spending is funded by taxpayers” does not withstand scrutiny. Although about 66% of Americans are covered by employer or other non-governmental health plans, only about 29% of health insurance spending is private with the rest coming from government plans. (https://www.cms.gov/files/document/nations-health-dollar-where-it-came-where-it-went.pdf ) Because the US spends so much more on public healthcare, the relative share of our higher private spending is smaller in many cases https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health-expenditure-by-country/ .
The narrative that Americans are unconstrained healthcare gluttons and that is our big problem would well be considered in comparison to more fact-based alternative explanations:
“Health costs in the U.S. were $5,683 more per person than costs in similarly large and wealthy countries. The difference in spending on inpatient and outpatient care is $4,531 per person, accounting for almost 80% of the difference in spending between the U.S. and comparable countries. The U.S. spent $681 more per person on administrative costs compared to comparable countries, which represented 12% of the difference in overall spending. The additional dollars the U.S. also spent on medical goods and drugs than comparable countries accounted for 12% of the overall difference in spending.” (“What drives health spending in the U.S. compared to other countries?” KFF-Peterson, August 2, 2024)
And utilization is not the reason:
“Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates in the United States do not differ significantly from other wealthy OECD countries. Prices, therefore, appear to be the main driver of the cost difference between the United States and other wealthy countries. In fact, prices in the United States tend to be higher regardless of utilization rates. For example, the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker notes that the United States has shorter hospital stays, fewer angioplasty surgeries, and more knee replacements than comparable countries, yet the prices for each are higher in the United States.
There are many possible factors for why healthcare prices in the United States are higher than other countries, ranging from the consolidation of hospitals — leading to a lack of competition — to the inefficiencies and administrative waste that derive from the complexity of the U.S. healthcare system. In fact, the United States spends over $1,000 per person on administrative costs — almost five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than it spends on long-term healthcare.”
As a dedicated sprawl-hater, would that your solution had been the norm, as it has also common sense on its side. Bigboxville is not really a place and it seems it never can be.
The alternative to sprawl is living in dense, congested high-rises. Some people like this. I think the evidence shows that most do not. I personally could not stand to live like that.
Certainly I too cringe at the urbanists when they ooh and ah over Taipei ("why can't we have this?") but I see no reason to adopt false binaries, that render policymaking or planning empty/futile. Most places in the world are not "either one or the other".
Not really. With occasional exceptions, there is a very material difference between postwar ring neighborhoods and later 20th-century/21st-century sprawl. I personally could not stand to live in one of those sprawl neighborhoods with their almost-deliberately-offensive "you will take it" aesthetics, and I would happily live in many an older development. I would be sorry to tell my kid, you can ride your bike over to the truck stop on the interstate, and that's about it. We'll be in the car the rest of the time.
I think there is a lot of lack of clarity about what the different options look like. I would be interested in seeing more concrete examples of the different types. I am a rural/mountain man at heart so anything denser than "I can throw a rock and hit my neighbor's house" seems unlivable to me, and so I think I just don't understand the different distinctions people are making.
I guess I don't really know what you mean by sprawl. If you have more people, you can either build up or out. It sounds like you like some kinds of sprawl but not others. OK. I might even agree with you, but it's not clear to me.
My thoughts on the matter tend to flow not in the direction of "up or down" but more to streetscapes, land uses, public buildings, parks or the lack of, and so on. I grew up in a neighborhood of single family homes that I now see was quite nice in many ways, though when I went off to college it was diverting to live in a more urban environment. Nonetheless I did as a kid ride my bike, even from that old neighborhood, to a job in a strip center a few miles away, or to the library. These things wouldn't be as doable now, as the roads involved have been altered to accommodate faster traffic. My high school was about 5 miles away on what was then already a stroad, and they did not send a bus, or not enough of us went to public school or rode it to send one. That was unfortunate, I think. I believe in schools being part of the neighborhood fabric.
There was nature nearby - "the bayou" - not given to us in the form of a park - though there is now a trail, thanks to the energies of one woman - but entered via the sufferance of nearby private property owners.
It was not then the custom to scrape, so my neighborhood especially in those early decades, was marvelously like a forest with houses. More manicured now.
I have not been to Paris, will never go, and almost certainly would not like it - I especially like the high desert, and never make cities a travel destination - but as has often been pointed out, Paris has density without great height.
That all sounds fine. My reaction was simply because when you hear people talking about sprawl, usually what they mean is that they want everyone to live in a dense urban setting like Manhattan (or Taipei, as you said in another comment). That has no appeal to me (and, as I said, evidence is that is true for most people). That said, The never-ending urban/suburban landscape of a place like Los Angeles has no appeal to me, either. I don't know much about Houston, but I think it's probably similar. My wife is from San Antonio, so I have a little bit of familiarity with it. But it's way bigger than it used to be, and neither of us would want to live there, either. (Though, honestly, it's mostly the weather that makes us want to stay away from San Antonio. And Houston.)
I should note that when I was a kid living in what was then (I think) the 5th, trending toward 4th, largest city in the country - and *already* synonymous with sprawl - the majority of the county in which nearly all of the city was contained, was in agriculture.
What happened between then and now, is what I am talking about.
Cities are appealing in exactly the degree to which they stop and give way to countryside. The endless outward edges, frayed and unlovely - which makes travel difficult ("how can I miss you if I can't leave?") - are dismaying especially when you consider that all some kids will ever know is a freeway exit and its associated commerce, same as any other down the road, indistinguishable from any other state, nothing "native" about it, especially the absence of nature, but cultural too if that's more your bag.
Texas cities are mostly defined by one thing: there is no land use regulation at the county level. If you think you are for this state of affairs in the abstract, then you can't have spent your life marinating in it.
People who love San Antonio love, if they love it: living on the south side (if Mexican-American); or living in Alamo Heights or one of the historic districts, or on the base, or Helotes, or one of a number of inner ring neighborhoods. No one loves it because of the sprawl.
ETA: last Thanksgiving it took us two hours to get out of the San Antonio metro, as we were embarking on the 380-mile drive to family. A good deal of this is the fault of TXDOT, of course, endlessly making everything worse with their ongoing, never-completed "improvements", often moronic.
Why fixed rate mortgages? Floating rates mortgages are better from all possible perspectives. Monetary policy transmission and financial stability improves.
Even for the consumer is better: low interest rates are often related to a colder economy, so when income is lower, you also pay less in the mortgage.
They're supposed to be basically welfare agencies, and not "sin eaters" for large speculative interests. Restricting their purchases to support the market for the type of homebuyer that the agency is supposed to support is I think what he is getting at, vs. what the agency actually supports, which are the spiritual heirs of the great Anthony Mozilo.
I started wondering if Arnold's restrictions would in effect eliminate Frannie and Freddie for a similar reason but it appears that the vast majority (roughly 70% by volume) of mortgages originated are 30 year fixed rate, at least according to these 2022-2023 stats from Bank Rate Monitor
I know, but this is bad. Both for bonds and mortgages, rate indexation is good. It is hard to understand why is not more general. I think there is no reason, but historical inertia.
On the contrary, variable rates are terrible for many of the same reasons that inflation is terrible for most people.
Now, I'm going to back off that hotake just a bit and admit that I understand perfectly well in the narrow, economic sense, why variable rates are good.
However, economics isn't all there is. The benefits of flexible rates are dramatically offset by the costs it introduces to individuals in terms of risk and planning. How much do I need to make to pay off my mortgage and retire is a problem people can grapple with if they have fixed rates. There are risks, but they are mostly calculable.
Under variable rates, There's more risk but more uncertainty as well. You know from the outset that forces completely out of your control can make everything go belly up.
At a societal level too, this is the same sort of risk via complexity that those mortgage backed securities exacerbated. It creates a lot of complex and potentially spiraling problems.
The general point is that the government, to the extent it's going to be involved, should be involved in ways that promote simple, stable economic transactions that have a high degree of success even if their potential upside is limited. KISS. We don't want the government encouraging or acting like investment bankers out to squeeze every theoretical, speculative dime out of every possible transaction, and damn the risks that it all blows up.
The floating rate is (obviously) more variable in nominal terms, but (in principle) less variable in real terms. There is comovemet between interest rate and the economic conditions, so by using variable rates, in principle you are covering risks: you pay more for mortgage when the economy is stronger, less when weaker.
That is true, but only in a world where general equilibria are reached extremely quickly, I think. It assumes your income changes as quickly, and in the same direction, as the economy over all, and interest rates in particular. That need not be the case, and generally does not seem to be the case at all for most people.
I don't know but my suspicion, derived from those numbers and intuition, is that most mortgage originators have no incentive to put favorable interest rate *reductions* into an ARM provision which means the only upside for the home buyer is likely a low 'teaser' initial rate. Only about a quarter (per that link) of mortgages are held by the originator which means the majority know they will be passing the problems (either defaults because rates go up, or re-fis when they fall) on to somebody else.
School vouchers are pretty much the clincher on why I think we are moving to FL/TX soon. Yeah, the taxes and housing are nice too and may even be worth as much or more. But it's hard for me not to get over the fact that they respect my basic right to decide how my kids are educated. And while I could afford to send them all to private regardless, most can't, and as such they will be growing up in an indoctrinated society. I think there will be positive externalities to growing up in a state with educational freedom.
I was looking at a school down in Florida the other day and it's amazing the flexibility they offer. How many days a week you want to come to dayschool. Homeschool and micro school support. In person, online, hybrid. Include field trips and extracurriculars or not. All at a reasonable price covered mainly by the voucher.
In the same sentence, Strong makes a contradiction I see too many right-wing critiques makes. Schools, he says, teach nihilism, the belief that there is no morality. But they also teach "debilitating woke politics". Woke politics are very moral. In fact, "woke" pretty much comes from commonly accepted moral principals combined with "bad science". So everyone agrees that racism is bad and people should be treated fairly. You combine that with the idea that there are no inherent differences between groups and it follows as the night the day that any differential outcomes are unfair, must be caused by bad things, and must be changed. Disparity proves discrimination and everyone knows discrimination is bad.
The model extends to sex and international affairs.
I don't wish to defend Strong since I am not sure what he means, but I would contend that woke politics does not in fact include commonly accepted moral principles. Putting the locus of responsibility for behavior not on the individual but on the group, thus some individuals do not need to follow the same rules as others because of the group they are in, that's not commonly accepted.
I might go so far as to claim that woke is anti-morality in that it pushes hard to show that generally accepted moral principles such as don't steal do not generally apply and are at best contingent on identity. In other words, woke is anti-principle, and everything is contingent.
The only principle in wokism is, for lack of a better term, the führerprinzip of the collective. If the herd shifted to say that all women were evil and had to be forcibly transitioned, that would be the new principle and they would forget all of their old principles. It's a lot like communism without the Comintern or the pigs in Animal Farm but with more occultation.
There are leaders, and I'm sure if you pulled off the scooby-doo mask it'd be some irritating Rockefeller heir or something behind the whole thing calling the shots, but for the purposes of speculative analysis we can just call it a herd.
I might argue a flock of starlings or school of fish would be more accurate. I am not sure their "leadership" are really leading or just happen to be standing in the front at the moment. I think there definitely some functional control in the narrative, but I don't know that it is condensed enough into point to leaders who could willfully change the collective to move in a different direction.
Many governments and other actors create the flock effect by puppeting bot accounts on social media sites, not disclosing PR relationships with major influencers, and playing with jurisdiction to avoid consequences for illegal payments and statements. The US is more free in its criticism of these practices in foreign countries, but you can see the shape of what various actors are doing in the US as well (see e.g. https://pomeps.org/social-media-manipulation-in-the-mena-inauthenticity-inequality-and-insecurity).
However when we look at the effects on ordinary people, they perceive it as flocking and feel that it is authentic. In the era in which television and print has lost default authority status, people look to social media flocking as a signal of trustworthiness and authenticity, so whomever can efficiently create and maintain flocks can execute effective 20th century style propaganda operations even in the 21st century.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that flocking made it authentic. Just the reverse really: people are responding ONLY to what those around them profess, not thinking for themselves based on principles or even discussing or interrogating the beliefs of others and thinking about what is good or desirable. Their interest isn't in morality or principles only "be in step with everyone else so I don't stand out". Even the apparent leaders are only such because they change their views and beliefs to match movement of the crowd, and just happen to be on at the front for the moment.
I don't see e.g. Robyn DiAngelo (or however you spell it) leading people but rather happening to be in the right place at the right time to become popular as the swarm decided to go that way. If the swarm decides "White Fragility is bad, actually," she won't be convincing them to go the other way, but will rather just memory hole her work and move on with what ever is deemed true today, and hope to cash in on the next current thing.
That said, this is al observationally equivalent to there being some actual leaders somewhere who pull strings from the background, the power behind the transient holder of the throne. Could be either or some mix.
Yes quite. Another interesting bit is that a lot of the ideological weapons sit in storehouses for a long time without getting armed and used, like Judith Butler gender theory or Robyn DiAngelo popularizing Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Now, you could argue that Crenshaw caused DiAngelo caused the riotous reaction to the martyrdom of St. Floyd, and such arguments can be convincing. But how much of that matters without the money, the organization, and the legal muscle set to work bending that arc of history towards justice? There are whole storehouses full of Crenshaws and DiAngelos to be used and discarded by whatever baffling network of moron heirs and heiresses wants to use them before they get bored and go play Pokemon with some other set of flunkies.
I think you are absolutely right that "woke" has double standards but I think they are at least partially within "commonly accepted moral principles". Just as a person on crutches doesn't have to participate in gym class, so members of "oppressed" groups get passes on certain things in certain circumstances. So if you're rioting after George Floyd, that's okay, but if you're beating your wife or stealing from members of your own community, that's wrong. The first can be seen (foolishly I think) as political action by other means. And doesn't everybody think that violent resistance is acceptable if the circumstances are bad enough? There's the "bad science", thinking that America in 2020 was much worse than it was.
I see your point I think, and it makes sense, but I don't think that is functionally how the thought process at hand works. You are assuming I think (in good faith!) that the arguments go "Beliefs about the world + moral principles -> identify things you don't like -> woke politics", because that's how people often behave. Moral principles bind unless there is clear justification as to the exception.
I think instead the process for wokism (and other such ideologies) is roughly "identify things you don't like / belief about reality you don't want to change -> identify necessary exception to moral principles -> adapt beliefs about the world to suit exception -> woke politics". Moral principles are obstacles to be worked around via finding a justifiable exception.
In your rioting example, I agree that people agree that violent resistance is acceptable if the circumstances are bad enough. However, looking at MN in 2020, why call the protests "mostly peaceful" when they clearly were not if they were justified? How is looting Target of large screen TVs appropriate resistance? Was Target in particular oppressing people? What about the small Hmong nail salons that were looted and torched? How is all this political action by other means, or war, against those who oppressed you? I can see attacking police stations if you think the police are the bad guys, but the rest is just wanton, so why try to justify the wanton bad behavior instead of just the justifiable stuff?
The alternate pattern based on my theory would be that those who saw the rioters go bad and violently criminal were stuck; it looks bad to argue that all minorities are good decent people who are just oppressed by the police and that's why they end up in jail so much when there are a whole lot of minorities setting fire to the city after looting it. That's the belief you don't want to change in the face of facts. So the first thing is to change the belief about reality that says "they are being violent criminals" to "mostly peaceful." That's hard in this case, so the next one is "Their behavior is good, actually, an exception to the normal moral rule" and we get arguments like the case for looting. It isn't the normal presumption of principle, "the principle holds until demonstrated that it should", but rather starts with the exception desired and figures out how to justify it. That is anti-principle.
Long story short, the bad science is created ad hoc to justify the desired exception to the principle. They don't accept the same morals, but see them as rules to be worked around to get whatever end result is currently expedient. Not double standards, no standards for them and whatever is convenient for them for everyone else.
I see your point I think, and it makes sense, but I don't think that is functionally how the thought process at hand works. You are assuming I think (in good faith!) that the arguments go "Beliefs about the world + moral principles -> identify things you don't like -> woke politics", because that's how people often behave. Moral principles bind unless there is clear justification as to the exception.
I think instead the process for wokism (and other such ideologies) is roughly "identify things you don't like / belief about reality you don't want to change -> identify necessary exception to moral principles -> adapt beliefs about the world to suit exception -> woke politics". Moral principles are obstacles to be worked around via finding a justifiable exception.
In your rioting example, I agree that people agree that violent resistance is acceptable if the circumstances are bad enough. However, looking at MN in 2020, why call the protests "mostly peaceful" when they clearly were not if they were justified? How is looting Target of large screen TVs appropriate resistance? Was Target in particular oppressing people? What about the small Hmong nail salons that were looted and torched? How is all this political action by other means, or war, against those who oppressed you? I can see attacking police stations if you think the police are the bad guys, but the rest is just wanton, so why try to justify the wanton bad behavior instead of just the justifiable stuff?
The alternate pattern based on my theory would be that those who saw the rioters go bad and violently criminal were stuck; it looks bad to argue that all minorities are good decent people who are just oppressed by the police and that's why they end up in jail so much when there are a whole lot of minorities setting fire to the city after looting it. That's the belief you don't want to change in the face of facts. So the first thing is to change the belief about reality that says "they are being violent criminals" to "mostly peaceful." That's hard in this case, so the next one is "Their behavior is good, actually, an exception to the normal moral rule" and we get arguments like the case for looting. It isn't the normal presumption of principle, "the principle holds until demonstrated that it should", but rather starts with the exception desired and figures out how to justify it. That is anti-principle.
Long story short, the bad science is created ad hoc to justify the desired exception to the principle. They don't accept the same morals, but see them as rules to be worked around to get whatever end result is currently expedient. Not double standards, no standards for them and whatever is convenient for them for everyone else.
I can't help thinking back to Edward Banfield's famous chapter in The Unheavenly City, "Rioting (Mainly) for Fun and Profit". It was in response to the many people who had said black rioting in 1967 was justified or at least a to-be-expected response to being screwed by white people. The blue ribbon Kerner Commission appointed by LBJ had "concluded that the rioting was a response to decades of "pervasive discrimination and segregation." Said the Commission, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II . . . What white Americans have never fully understood--but what the Black can never forget, is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."[4]" wikipedia "Kerner Commission"
There are always lots of moral principles floating around. I don't think most people develop a strict moral system and then abide by it. Rather they have ideas about how the world works, they sense how the people they care about think and feel, and they have their own feelings. That all gets put together into what they think/feel about a particular situation.
Everyone believes murder is wrong. Most everyone believes self defense is justified and that just war makes killing all right, as long as the war is "proportionate". But nobody puts those together with mathematical precision. How you feel about what Israel is doing depends on "feels" and on how you interpret the history of the region (and the world for that matter).
"Woke" provides a nice simple "narrative" for history and you can then slot what's happening today into it. "The modern world was created/ruined by European colonialism. Colonial peoples are revolting against that. They have a right to use extreme measures. What looks like self defense to the colonialists and neo-colonialists is just continuation of unjust colonialism." (While not usually a big part of "woke" in America, "post-colonialism" is the big deal in Europe.)
I think "woke" is factually wrong, and causes more harm than good. But I don't think most "woke" people are more morally sloppy or shady or phony than most other people. We are a highly imperfect species, or as some old lawyer once said, "We are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God."
I disagree. I think that if your "principles" never result in a restriction of your behavior, you do not have principles. If your principles say "Whatever people of group X do to people of group Y is always ok" then... well I don't think you have moral principles, but I suppose that is strictly a principle. However, I don't think most woke whites are fine with their house being looted and burned down so long as it is by a minority.
I do, however, think that many people do actually have principles, however fuzzily understood, that limit their behavior. They don't cheat even if they won't get caught, etc. While motivated moral reasoning is certainly common ("How do I justify/excuse doing what I feel like doing?") it is effectively the hallmark of wokeism. Consistency of narrative with their fellow travelers is the paramount concern, and reasoning and beliefs about the world seem to be in service of that.
I think in many cases, there is a positive feedback loop. The people who matter to you believe in a certain narrative, a certain "the way the world works". So you believe it, too. That narrative carries several moral implications, which you also adopt. From then on, you want to believe that this is indeed the way the world works and you notice things that support it and minimize things that contradict it. So you believe it more. That makes you more sure of the moral implications. And round and round it goes.
I think most "woke" people have "principles ... that limit their behavior". Mostly, they also "don't cheat even if they won't get caught". Yes, they do motivated reasoning on various things. So does most everyone.
And, as you say, whites who will excuse blacks for various things will only go so far. Very, very, very few have the principle, "Whatever people of group X do to people of group Y is always ok". Though they may be willfully blind to those bad things done by people of group X and sensitive to those bad things done by people of group Y.
If you are going to teach woke morality as if it weren't in the same position as alternative moral frameworks of equal validity but instead not really mere 'morality' at all, but as if it were objective scientific truth, then there is no possibility of sincere pluralism, and you necessarily annihilate all morality because you've defined your own values as outside that category. That's the nihilism.
Okay. But lots of philosophical systems say their morality is "objective scientific truth". Certainly, Catholicism does, though it usually just says "objective truth". And, in practice, I think most people get their morality not by deep philosophizing and choosing but by what the people around them seem to feel is real, just "the way it is". No one in America is going to publicly say that "racism is bad" is just one of a number of "alternative moral frameworks of equal validity." (Yes, left critiques have their own contradictions, like "all cultures are equally valid, but western culture sucks.")
I admire that your definition of nihilism is stated clearly and up-front, so it can be examined and criticized. In that spirit, I don't think it is what most people mean when they use the word.
"but as if it were objective scientific truth, then there is no possibility of sincere pluralism, and you necessarily annihilate all morality because you've defined your own values as outside that category."
Maybe it's taught as truth but not scientific truth. It's no different than religious morality being taught as truth, which I'm sure you agree is not scientific. It is still a morality and does not annihilate morality.
Nihilism is an extremely ambiguous term I don't much like and don't think it helps here. I'm a nihilist in the sense I don't think there is one true morality. Among other things, it's a balance between individual and group needs, benefits, and desires. We approach a "perfect" morality asymptomatically and can do so on different paths, some better than others but all somewhat imperfectly understood and misunderstood. I also don't think life has meaning beyond what we make of it as individuals and society. That is a L O N G way from there being no morality at all.
Teachers used to have their subjects, perhaps, with an unchallenged mastery thereof or at least dedication to them.
The English teacher passionate about English, the science teacher who took kids on field trips because he loved to be in the field, etc. They had desegregated the schools by my time, grudgingly at first, no doubt with efforts to obey without exactly obeying, like testing, and building ugly new schools in the 60s in an effort to stabilize demographic constituencies, and naming them for Confederates [all very stupid; looking it up I see that the school that now stands in the footprint of my old school is 6% white and but 12% black and apparently the fights, instead of being black v. Hispanic are now Hispanic v. .... Afghan?] ... and so this was experienced by me mainly in having African-American teachers rather than classmates in high school - one of whom, an algebra teacher, recurs in memory as the Platonic ideal of a teacher. Her knowledge of her subject was complete, her classroom an orderly temple of algebra. Even her chalkboard was not the dusty mess of her colleagues but immaculately green and we arrived each day to find the lesson, and a list of names of who had excelled on the previous day's test, differentiated (a column for those who got 110 - she always offered bonuses - and 109, and so on down to 100) in her neat script which could have been used to address wedding invitations,* and which it seemed like she wrote with some sort of level, unlike the other teachers. No list of champions could have been more important to us, in that year, though none of us was a math prodigy that I recall.
She had a calm, kind, but detached manner - no favorites, no intimacy - and I want to say that it was almost axiomatic that a roomful of mostly white (and a handful of Asian, mostly Vietnamese) children would have eaten their shoes rather than be other than respectful to her. There was always perfect clarity about her assignments, also written in detail on the board; she took the time to curate, "do #5-8, and #10-12", etc. (Another African-American teacher, with more of an extroverted, zany preaching-from-her- podium affect, who seemed to be on uppers, and didn't always make sense, was held in affection enough but did inspire the boys to joke or play pranks on her, which she seemed not to mind.)
(I really believe that woman may have been the greatest algebra teacher that ever lived, and it's striking to me that I encountered her in an otherwise spotty education. The only thing that could have made it better would have been to have a little history of algebra and its origin and purpose, but that wasn't part of the curriculum in a public school; the administrators probably had little notion of that themselves.)
We didn't talk about anything but math in that class, as I recall. If we did, it was polite chitchat as we waited to begin, with no pedagogical purpose.
I remember that some of the male teachers at my high school liked to direct conversation, usually with the boys, towards things other than the subject, and even politics. It was the 80s and we had some budding Alex P. Keatons. I think the kids enjoyed that. I would have been reading and not listening. But I think that went on.
But as now when it's a school made up largely of women - probably nice enough, to be sure, but all of roughly the same intelligence level - spouting the things they think they know, that are tediously all the same thing, which they themselves imbibed like sponges, as it was perfectly marketed to them - it is no longer fun, at least for the intelligent boys, to stray from the subject matter. And it is not always clear that the subject is any longer the point, or the focus. I think those women have been done a disservice, in a way.
For some of us, with a 145-160 IQ boy in school, suppressing arrogance and inculcating humility and respectfulness at school - can become almost the chief goal of their educations, sadly. And nature being what it is ...
At my kid's high school, the physics teacher of decades was celebrated. There was much pride in "our" physics department, and indeed an inordinate number of kids got mostly-passing thoughts of becoming "physicists". Which was great. I learned a few things myself, secondhand.
I never laid eyes on this teacher, but in hindsight, I think what the praise was all about was this: the physics teacher was very smart, obviously; he really grasped physics and loved it; he made it fun, yes, a bonus but not necessarily a requirement, perhaps, see my fond recollection of algebra teacher above. He taught physics full stop, for 45 minutes or whatever it was.
He did his exact job, in other words.
*I'm seeing that maybe my perpetual craving for order is beginning to manifest here.
"... we arrived each day to find the lesson, and a list of names of who had excelled on the previous day's test, differentiated (a column for those who got 110 - she always offered bonuses - and 109, and so on down to 100) ..."
If she did that today, she would be called into the department chair's or vice-principal's office and told that was not appropriate, that it made students feel bad, even shamed. That how a student did was not public knowledge. Etc.
It can easily be seen as increasing "feminism" of education, away from proud overt competition for achievement.
That should be "feminization" of education.
Though in some ways opposites in other contexts, they curiously work interchangeably in that sentence.
Of course. Note that she did not write everyone's grades, only the top excellers - everyone else might just as well have gotten 99 for all we knew (or whatever the cutoff was, for that exam). So that if it was very hard and no one got the bonus, or etc., we would know that too. No one was perfect. Even the best occasionally made a careless error. And it was something to get on the list when you were not the sort of student who could count on always being on it. And note also that I have no recollection of whether I was always up there - I would not have been tops, certainly, and I think it likely I did not make it every time. And this doesn't color my memory of her at all.
"The difference with other OECD countries is that more of our spending is covered by employer-provided health insurance, whereas more of their spending is funded by taxpayers."
I'd argue its taxpayers either way. After all, employer group is tax deductible for a start. And it's so regulated it might as well be run by the government.
When you include employer group health insurance, there is little daylight between the US and most other OECD countries in terms of government spending as a % of GDP (there are some higher outliers like France, but we are a lot more like the anglos, nordics, and East Asians then is commonly assumed).
With IQ being dependent on many more separate genes (poly-genetic) that height/weight it seems that a lower heritability would be a normal outcome. Height/size is a simple one making it easy to breed in as we see in many plants and animals with growth hormones being big factors. It isn't the accuracy of measurement, it is the simplicity of possible genetic structures.
Right. Height can be measured along one axis. To measure IQ precisely would require multiple axes.
What world does Strong live in? Why does he assume that perfect schools would end mental illness? Most schools will never be like he describes and even if they were I don't see schools as a top three contributor.
What are your top three contributors? I would put schools in top 5 perhaps, definitely top 10, but I might be missing some things or breaking down categories differently.
Agreed.
In no particular order:
Parents.
Brain chemistry/structure.
Some combination of social structure, social media, and economics (which could be separated).
Tragedy/catastrophe in one's life.
That seems like a pretty good list. I might order and divide it thusly:
1: Social structure (includes social media, schools and civil/government society. Overly big grouping perhaps)
2: Brain chemistry/structure/damage (including from drugs or injury)
3: Home life (parents, step parents, mom's baby daddy)
4: Life events that do not directly break the physical brain but traumatize otherwise
If I break up 1 into parts they might start being even with 2. The other problem is that 2 is probably highly correlated with the effects of everything else; crazy parents are likely to give birth and raise crazy kids, for a variety of reasons. I agree that you aren't removing all of 2, and so you aren't ending mental illness, but fixing 1 and mitigating 3 and 4 would go a long way.
I place social structure so highly because I think it both drives and exacerbates other problems. Schools, both k-12 and college/university, seem to really screw a lot of kids up, worse than there home life and physical structures necessitate.
To the extent we've specified, it sounds like we agree except maybe on one point. If school means the classroom and other primary parts of education, I think it ranks pretty low. If you are including the social aspect then it ranks much higher but I'd prefer not to include that with classroom, etc
I think the structure of school matters, in terms of how it is organized (a lot of kids largely being socialized off each other and not functioning adults, doing mostly busy work instead of useful things) and how it is staffed (modern teachers are a sad lot, and many seem more interested in proselytizing than teaching). The content of what is taught doesn't help either.
I don't think you can fully separate the various aspects. Having higher quality people teaching would help, but you would need different administration as well to keep those teachers being driven out as they have been. You need to have more teachers and focus on more functional topics while getting kids moved through faster to do more valuable work (in their opinion.) Smaller schools with more focus on student teacher interaction than swarms of kids interacting primarily with each other in the sociopathic way most young people do.
In other words, so long as we use the factory school + Prussian structure it is very difficult to not have it slide into a social nightmare. Larger schools without school choice also open up too many problems with discipline, which means that the craziest students have outsized influence in the day to day lives of other students. The crazier teachers as well.
I generally agree with all of issues you raise but I put those pretty far down on the list of causes of mental illness, etc.
Small question: given that we generally think that most dollars that employers currently pay for health insurance would be compensation to employees if not for the differential tax treatment, isn’t the cost borne directly by individuals for health care still quite high?
(Not saying that this is necessarily bad, except that the way the cost is borne makes most of us insured insensitive to the marginal cost of care. But isn’t that the most accurate comparison of personally-borne costs, once accounted for in each country?)
It's pretty hard to do, mainly because the US requires certain treatments that other countries don't. A local talk show was visited by Australian tourists. Up came health care. An elderly gentleman called in and said, yes basic health care is cheaper in Australia, but their health insurance (public and most private) won't cover quality of life issues like the US does. Angry shouts of "not true!" from the Australians. Except one, who then said " he's right, we're helping with my parents, and we're finding out what Medicare doesn't cover". Medicare would probably be solvent if it didn't pay for knee, hip, and joint work.
“millions of parents are spontaneously creating more humane learning environments for their children through homeschooling, microschooling, virtual schooling, private schooling, and religious schooling.” This is progress toward the America I want to live in. Of course “millions” pales in comparison to the many tens of millions putting their children in public schools—things are getting better. The most important thing to realize is that each of us has the ability to create our own private education for our children. It might mean sacrificing career, higher income, exotic vacations, etc, but we have choices and significant freedom of conscience, even in the face of “free” public schools. The way forward is less about persuasion and more about brute force. Brute force in creating a private education of your liking for your own children.
If the market will not provide 30-year fixed-rate mortgages it means that they are too risky and the government should not take on that risk. Instead, banks will provide 5-, 10-, or 15-year mortgages as they do in many other countries and they will reset the interest rate to reflect the market assessment of risks. I believe that's what banks do in Canada, which historically has had a home ownership rate close to or slightly above the United States.
It might, however, be possible to save the 30-year mortgage by changing some of the rules around it. For instance, I understand that in Panama, which is dollarized and also has 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, lenders have greater security than they do in the United States, because mortgage payments are automatically deducted from wages like taxes, rather than being subject to the borrower's discretion every month whether to pay the bill or not.
"The only mortgages that they could purchase would be 30-year, fixed-rate first mortgages for purchasing owner-occupied homes."
In at least two cases I don't see a benefit in being that restrictive. I think it creates some rather important unintended consequences.
1 I don't understand the advantage of not offering 15, 20, or even 10 year mortgages. Without the federal backing, they could very well end up priced higher than 30 year. That seems like a loss for both borrower and lender. I'd think the more people who have shorter loans the better for everyone, including economic stability. It seems my concern also applies to adjustable rate mortgages but I'm not as sure. Maybe be second mortgages, second homes, home equity, and multi-unit for other reasons. IDK.
2 if loan refinances aren't included under the government program then when interest rates go down there would be an unintended incentive for people to move. I see only downsides in creating that incentive.
Try this:
The Next Wokety Woke Madness - US Navy Gender Neutral Submarine https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/the-next-wokety-woke-madness-us-navy
I do not think FM/FM should incentivize fixed rate mortgages. If there is market demand for 30 fixed rate assets, fine, but I think interest rate risk is better decentralized in millions of mortgage payers than concentrated in financial institutions.
Regarding the Abaluck tweet claiming that “the US is below the OECD average for out of pocket health care spending as a fraction of per capita consumption.” The chart contained in the tweet purporting to support this claim actually shows “Out-of-pocket spending as share of final household consumption, 2017.” “Per capita” and per “household” are two different things. Per the OECD glossary, “The concept of household is based on the arrangements made by persons, individually or in groups, for providing themselves with food or other essentials for living.” Household thus introduces many variations that will differ from nation to nation rendering health spending comparisons somewhat nebulous.
If we actually want to make international per capita out-of-pocket spending comparisons, OECD doesn’t appear to do that. However, we could look at Peterson-KFF reporting:
“Higher health costs in the U.S. leave Americans paying more out-of-pocket at the point of care ($1,315 per person) than people in peer nations ($825 per person), on average.
Patient cost-sharing responsibility, particularly for people with serious conditions, can quickly add up. For example, out-of-pocket costs for inpatient COVID-19 admissions among people with large employer coverage averaged $1,880 in 2020 (for admissions with at least some cost-sharing). Large employer plan enrollees’ emergency department visits cost $646 out-of-pocket, on average. Privately insured women who give birth pay almost $3,000 more out-of-pocket than women their same age who don’t give birth. Among privately insured people with large employer insurance, 1 in 5 taking insulin pay over $35 monthly.
While cost sharing is intended to encourage patients to make cost-effective decisions, it can also make care prohibitively expensive. Even though the vast majority of Americans have health insurance, 1 in 10 adults in the U.S. either delayed care or did not get care due to cost.”
(“The state of the U.S. health system in 2022 and the outlook for 2023” December 22, 2022)
In addition Peterson-KFF reports:
“Ninety percent of workers with single coverage have a general annual deductible that must be met before most services are paid for by the plan, similar to the percentage last year (88%).
The average deductible amount in 2023 for workers with single coverage and a general annual deductible is $1,735, similar to last year. The average deductible for covered workers is much higher at small firms than large firms ($2,434 vs. $1,478). Among workers with single coverage and any deductible, the average deductible amount has increased 10% over the last five years and 53% over the last ten years.
In 2023, among workers with single coverage, 47% of workers at small firms and 25% of workers at large firms have a general annual deductible of $2,000 or more. Over the last five years, the percentage of covered workers with a general annual deductible of $2,000 or more for single coverage has grown from 26% to 31%. … ...Regardless of their plan deductible, most covered workers also pay a portion of the cost for a physician office visit. Many covered workers face a copayment (a fixed dollar amount) when they visit a doctor, but some workers have coinsurance requirements (a percentage of the covered amount) instead. The average copayments are $26 for primary care and $44 for specialty care physician appointments, and average coinsurance rates are 19% for primary care and 20% for specialty care. ”
(https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2023-summary-of-findings/ )
Thus it might be fair to conclude the claim that “Americans are not used to spending their own money on health care” is at best misguided and misleading if not indeed ill-informed.
Similarly, the claim that “The difference with other OECD countries is that more of our spending is covered by employer-provided health insurance, whereas more of their spending is funded by taxpayers” does not withstand scrutiny. Although about 66% of Americans are covered by employer or other non-governmental health plans, only about 29% of health insurance spending is private with the rest coming from government plans. (https://www.cms.gov/files/document/nations-health-dollar-where-it-came-where-it-went.pdf ) Because the US spends so much more on public healthcare, the relative share of our higher private spending is smaller in many cases https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health-expenditure-by-country/ .
The narrative that Americans are unconstrained healthcare gluttons and that is our big problem would well be considered in comparison to more fact-based alternative explanations:
“Health costs in the U.S. were $5,683 more per person than costs in similarly large and wealthy countries. The difference in spending on inpatient and outpatient care is $4,531 per person, accounting for almost 80% of the difference in spending between the U.S. and comparable countries. The U.S. spent $681 more per person on administrative costs compared to comparable countries, which represented 12% of the difference in overall spending. The additional dollars the U.S. also spent on medical goods and drugs than comparable countries accounted for 12% of the overall difference in spending.” (“What drives health spending in the U.S. compared to other countries?” KFF-Peterson, August 2, 2024)
And utilization is not the reason:
“Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates in the United States do not differ significantly from other wealthy OECD countries. Prices, therefore, appear to be the main driver of the cost difference between the United States and other wealthy countries. In fact, prices in the United States tend to be higher regardless of utilization rates. For example, the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker notes that the United States has shorter hospital stays, fewer angioplasty surgeries, and more knee replacements than comparable countries, yet the prices for each are higher in the United States.
There are many possible factors for why healthcare prices in the United States are higher than other countries, ranging from the consolidation of hospitals — leading to a lack of competition — to the inefficiencies and administrative waste that derive from the complexity of the U.S. healthcare system. In fact, the United States spends over $1,000 per person on administrative costs — almost five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than it spends on long-term healthcare.”
(“How Does the U.S. Healthcare System Compare to Other Countries?” August 15, 2024, https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2024/08/how-does-the-us-healthcare-system-compare-to-other-countries )
> I offered a better solution
As a dedicated sprawl-hater, would that your solution had been the norm, as it has also common sense on its side. Bigboxville is not really a place and it seems it never can be.
The alternative to sprawl is living in dense, congested high-rises. Some people like this. I think the evidence shows that most do not. I personally could not stand to live like that.
Certainly I too cringe at the urbanists when they ooh and ah over Taipei ("why can't we have this?") but I see no reason to adopt false binaries, that render policymaking or planning empty/futile. Most places in the world are not "either one or the other".
Not really. With occasional exceptions, there is a very material difference between postwar ring neighborhoods and later 20th-century/21st-century sprawl. I personally could not stand to live in one of those sprawl neighborhoods with their almost-deliberately-offensive "you will take it" aesthetics, and I would happily live in many an older development. I would be sorry to tell my kid, you can ride your bike over to the truck stop on the interstate, and that's about it. We'll be in the car the rest of the time.
I think there is a lot of lack of clarity about what the different options look like. I would be interested in seeing more concrete examples of the different types. I am a rural/mountain man at heart so anything denser than "I can throw a rock and hit my neighbor's house" seems unlivable to me, and so I think I just don't understand the different distinctions people are making.
I guess I don't really know what you mean by sprawl. If you have more people, you can either build up or out. It sounds like you like some kinds of sprawl but not others. OK. I might even agree with you, but it's not clear to me.
My thoughts on the matter tend to flow not in the direction of "up or down" but more to streetscapes, land uses, public buildings, parks or the lack of, and so on. I grew up in a neighborhood of single family homes that I now see was quite nice in many ways, though when I went off to college it was diverting to live in a more urban environment. Nonetheless I did as a kid ride my bike, even from that old neighborhood, to a job in a strip center a few miles away, or to the library. These things wouldn't be as doable now, as the roads involved have been altered to accommodate faster traffic. My high school was about 5 miles away on what was then already a stroad, and they did not send a bus, or not enough of us went to public school or rode it to send one. That was unfortunate, I think. I believe in schools being part of the neighborhood fabric.
There was nature nearby - "the bayou" - not given to us in the form of a park - though there is now a trail, thanks to the energies of one woman - but entered via the sufferance of nearby private property owners.
It was not then the custom to scrape, so my neighborhood especially in those early decades, was marvelously like a forest with houses. More manicured now.
I have not been to Paris, will never go, and almost certainly would not like it - I especially like the high desert, and never make cities a travel destination - but as has often been pointed out, Paris has density without great height.
That all sounds fine. My reaction was simply because when you hear people talking about sprawl, usually what they mean is that they want everyone to live in a dense urban setting like Manhattan (or Taipei, as you said in another comment). That has no appeal to me (and, as I said, evidence is that is true for most people). That said, The never-ending urban/suburban landscape of a place like Los Angeles has no appeal to me, either. I don't know much about Houston, but I think it's probably similar. My wife is from San Antonio, so I have a little bit of familiarity with it. But it's way bigger than it used to be, and neither of us would want to live there, either. (Though, honestly, it's mostly the weather that makes us want to stay away from San Antonio. And Houston.)
I should note that when I was a kid living in what was then (I think) the 5th, trending toward 4th, largest city in the country - and *already* synonymous with sprawl - the majority of the county in which nearly all of the city was contained, was in agriculture.
What happened between then and now, is what I am talking about.
Cities are appealing in exactly the degree to which they stop and give way to countryside. The endless outward edges, frayed and unlovely - which makes travel difficult ("how can I miss you if I can't leave?") - are dismaying especially when you consider that all some kids will ever know is a freeway exit and its associated commerce, same as any other down the road, indistinguishable from any other state, nothing "native" about it, especially the absence of nature, but cultural too if that's more your bag.
Texas cities are mostly defined by one thing: there is no land use regulation at the county level. If you think you are for this state of affairs in the abstract, then you can't have spent your life marinating in it.
People who love San Antonio love, if they love it: living on the south side (if Mexican-American); or living in Alamo Heights or one of the historic districts, or on the base, or Helotes, or one of a number of inner ring neighborhoods. No one loves it because of the sprawl.
ETA: last Thanksgiving it took us two hours to get out of the San Antonio metro, as we were embarking on the 380-mile drive to family. A good deal of this is the fault of TXDOT, of course, endlessly making everything worse with their ongoing, never-completed "improvements", often moronic.
Literally, the MAGA “concept” of a plan is “they think they are better than you".
We’ve all had co-workers like this.
They were never leaders.
“millions of parents are spontaneously creating more humane learning environments for their children…”
Look for the unionized teachers to oppose this to the death. And if the teacher unions oppose it the Democrats will oppose it.
Our school district just adopted collective bargaining. Time to leave.
Why fixed rate mortgages? Floating rates mortgages are better from all possible perspectives. Monetary policy transmission and financial stability improves.
Even for the consumer is better: low interest rates are often related to a colder economy, so when income is lower, you also pay less in the mortgage.
They're supposed to be basically welfare agencies, and not "sin eaters" for large speculative interests. Restricting their purchases to support the market for the type of homebuyer that the agency is supposed to support is I think what he is getting at, vs. what the agency actually supports, which are the spiritual heirs of the great Anthony Mozilo.
I started wondering if Arnold's restrictions would in effect eliminate Frannie and Freddie for a similar reason but it appears that the vast majority (roughly 70% by volume) of mortgages originated are 30 year fixed rate, at least according to these 2022-2023 stats from Bank Rate Monitor
https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-statistics/#term
I know, but this is bad. Both for bonds and mortgages, rate indexation is good. It is hard to understand why is not more general. I think there is no reason, but historical inertia.
On the contrary, variable rates are terrible for many of the same reasons that inflation is terrible for most people.
Now, I'm going to back off that hotake just a bit and admit that I understand perfectly well in the narrow, economic sense, why variable rates are good.
However, economics isn't all there is. The benefits of flexible rates are dramatically offset by the costs it introduces to individuals in terms of risk and planning. How much do I need to make to pay off my mortgage and retire is a problem people can grapple with if they have fixed rates. There are risks, but they are mostly calculable.
Under variable rates, There's more risk but more uncertainty as well. You know from the outset that forces completely out of your control can make everything go belly up.
At a societal level too, this is the same sort of risk via complexity that those mortgage backed securities exacerbated. It creates a lot of complex and potentially spiraling problems.
The general point is that the government, to the extent it's going to be involved, should be involved in ways that promote simple, stable economic transactions that have a high degree of success even if their potential upside is limited. KISS. We don't want the government encouraging or acting like investment bankers out to squeeze every theoretical, speculative dime out of every possible transaction, and damn the risks that it all blows up.
The floating rate is (obviously) more variable in nominal terms, but (in principle) less variable in real terms. There is comovemet between interest rate and the economic conditions, so by using variable rates, in principle you are covering risks: you pay more for mortgage when the economy is stronger, less when weaker.
That is true, but only in a world where general equilibria are reached extremely quickly, I think. It assumes your income changes as quickly, and in the same direction, as the economy over all, and interest rates in particular. That need not be the case, and generally does not seem to be the case at all for most people.
I don't know but my suspicion, derived from those numbers and intuition, is that most mortgage originators have no incentive to put favorable interest rate *reductions* into an ARM provision which means the only upside for the home buyer is likely a low 'teaser' initial rate. Only about a quarter (per that link) of mortgages are held by the originator which means the majority know they will be passing the problems (either defaults because rates go up, or re-fis when they fall) on to somebody else.