Articles 22 (Economics: Contrasting Liberal & Conservative Approaches)

The New York Times “The Two Cultures” November 15, 2010
By David Brooks

Many of the psychologists, artists and moral philosophers I know are liberal, so it seems strange that American liberalism should adopt an economic philosophy that excludes psychology, emotion and morality.

Yet that is what has happened. The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.

Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.
Other people get moralistic. This country is already too profligate, they cry. It already shops too much and borrows too much. How can we solve our problems by borrowing and spending more? The liberal technicians brush this away, too. Economics is a rational activity detached from morality. Hardheaded policy makers have to have the courage to flout conventional morality — to borrow even when the country is sick of borrowing.

The liberal technicians have an impressive certainty about them. They have amputated those things that can’t be contained in models, like emotional contagions, cultural particularities and webs of relationships. As a result, everything is explainable and predictable. They can stand on the platform of science and dismiss the poor souls down below.

Yet over the past 21 months, it has been harder to groove to their certainty. To start with, the economy has not responded as the modelers projected, either in the months after the stimulus was passed or this summer, when it was supposed to be producing hundreds of thousands of jobs. It has become harder to define how much good the stimulus package is doing. An $800 billion measure must leave a large footprint, but it is hard to find in a $70 trillion global economy.
Moreover, it has been harder to accept that psychological factors like uncertainty and anxiety really are a mirage. The first time a business leader tells you she is holding off on investing because she is scared about the future, you dismiss it as anecdote. But over the past few years, I’ve had hundreds of such conversations.

It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.

Nor has the world come to look simpler and easier to manipulate since the stimulus passed. It now looks more complicated. It’s one thing to hatch an ideal policy in an academic lab, but in the real world, context is everything.

Ethan Ilzetzki of the London School of Economics and Enrique G. Mendoza and Carlos A. Vegh of the University of Maryland examined stimulus efforts in 44 countries. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper, they argued that fiscal stimulus can be quite effective in low-debt countries with fixed exchange rates and closed economies.

Stimulus measures are generally not as effective, on the other hand, in countries like the U.S. with high debt and floating exchange rates. The authors of the paper pointed to a series of specific circumstances that complicate, to say the least, the effectiveness of increasing public spending: How much stimulus money ends up flowing abroad? What is the relationship between fiscal policy and monetary policy? How do investors respond to fear of future interest rate increases?

One could go on. It’s become harder to have confidence that legislators can successfully enact the brilliant policies that liberal technicians come up with. Far from entering the age of macroeconomic mastery and social science triumph, we seem to be entering an age in which statecraft is, once again, an art, not a science. When you look around the world at the countries that have come through the recession best, it’s not the countries with the brilliant and aggressive stimulus models. It’s the ones like Germany that had the best economic fundamentals beforehand.

It all makes one doubt the wizardry of the economic surgeons and appreciate the old wisdom of common sense: simple regulations, low debt, high savings, hard work, few distortions. You don’t have to be a genius to come up with an economic policy like that.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16brooks.html?ref=opinion


The New York Times “Mugged by the Moralizers” October 31, 2010
By Paul Krugman

“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” That’s the question CNBC’s Rick Santelli famously asked in 2009, in a rant widely credited with giving birth to the Tea Party movement.

It’s a sentiment that resonates not just in America but in much of the world. The tone differs from place to place — listening to a German official denounce deficits, my wife whispered, “We’ll all be handed whips as we leave, so we can flagellate ourselves.” But the message is the same: debt is evil, debtors must pay for their sins, and from now on we all must live within our means.
And that kind of moralizing is the reason we’re mired in a seemingly endless slump.

The years leading up to the 2008 crisis were indeed marked by unsustainable borrowing, going far beyond the subprime loans many people still believe, wrongly, were at the heart of the problem. Real estate speculation ran wild in Florida and Nevada, but also in Spain, Ireland and Latvia. And all of it was paid for with borrowed money.

This borrowing made the world as a whole neither richer nor poorer: one person’s debt is another person’s asset. But it made the world vulnerable. When lenders suddenly decided that they had lent too much, that debt levels were excessive, debtors were forced to slash spending. This pushed the world into the deepest recession since the 1930s. And recovery, such as it is, has been weak and uncertain — which is exactly what we should have expected, given the overhang of debt.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

But the moralizers will have none of it. They denounce deficit spending, declaring that you can’t solve debt problems with more debt. They denounce debt relief, calling it a reward for the undeserving.

And if you point out that their arguments don’t add up, they fly into a rage. Try to explain that when debtors spend less, the economy will be depressed unless somebody else spends more, and they call you a socialist. Try to explain why mortgage relief is better for America than foreclosing on homes that must be sold at a huge loss, and they start ranting like Mr. Santelli. No question about it: the moralizers are filled with a passionate intensity.

And those who should know better lack all conviction.

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness?
Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Meanwhile, the administration’s mortgage modification program — the program that inspired the Santelli rant — has, in the end, accomplished almost nothing. At least part of the reason is that officials were so worried that they might be accused of helping the undeserving that they ended up helping almost nobody.

So the moralizers are winning. More and more voters, both here and in Europe, are convinced that what we need is not more stimulus but more punishment. Governments must tighten their belts; debtors must pay what they owe.

The irony is that in their determination to punish the undeserving, voters are punishing themselves: by rejecting fiscal stimulus and debt relief, they’re perpetuating high unemployment. They are, in effect, cutting off their own jobs to spite their neighbors.
But they don’t know that. And because they don’t, the slump will go on.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/opinion/01krugman.html?ref=paulkrugman


The New York Times “The Election That Wasn’t” October 23, 2010
By Thomas L. Friedman

In the past two weeks, I’ve taken the Amtrak Acela to the Philadelphia and New York stations. In both places there were signs on the train platforms boasting that new construction work there was being paid for by “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” that is, the $787 billion stimulus. And what was that work? New “lighting” — so now you can see even better just how disgustingly decayed, undersized and outdated are the rail platforms and infrastructure in two of our biggest cities.

If we were a serious country, this is what the midterms would be about: How do we generate the jobs needed to sustain our middle class and pay for new infrastructure? It would require a different kind of politics — one that doesn’t conform to either party’s platform. We will have to raise some taxes to generate revenue, like on energy or maybe a value-added tax, and lower others, on payrolls to stimulate work, and on multinational corporations to get them to bring the trillion dollars they have offshore back to the U.S. for investment. We will have to adjust some services, like Social Security, while we invest in new infrastructure, like high-speed rail and Internet bandwidth; the U.S. ranks 22nd in the world in average connection speed. And, most of all, we will have to have an honest discussion about how we got in this rut.

How we got into this rut is no secret. We compensated for years of stagnating middle-class wages the easy way. Just as baseball players in the ’90s injected themselves with steroids to artificially build muscle to hit more home runs — instead of doing real bodybuilding — our two parties injected steroids, cheap credit, into Wall Street so it could go gambling and into Main Street so it could go home-buying. They both started hitting home runs, artificially — until the steroids ran dry. Now we have to rebuild America’s muscles the old-fashioned way.

How? In the short run, we’ll probably need more stimulus to get the economy moving again so people have the confidence to buy and invest. Ultimately, though, good jobs at scale come only when we create more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, more productive, more secure, more comfortable or more entertained — and then sell them to more people around the world. And in a global economy, we have to create those products and services with a work force that is so well trained and productive that it can leverage modern technology so that one American can do the work of 20 Chinese and, therefore, get paid the same as 20 Chinese. There is no other way.

Sure, more countries can now compete with us. But that’s good. It means they’re also spawning new jobs, customers, ideas and industries where well-trained Americans can also compete. Fifteen years ago, there were no industries around Google “search” or “iPhone applications.” Today, both are a source of good jobs. More will be invented next year. There is no fixed number of jobs. We just have to make sure there is no fixed number of Americans to fill them — aided by good U.S. infrastructure and smart government incentives to attract these new industries to our shores.

But not everyone can write iPhone apps. What about your nurse, barber or waiter? Here I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an “artisan” — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs.
For instance, says Katz, the baby boomers are aging, which will spawn many health care jobs. Those jobs can be done in a low-skilled way by cheap foreign workers and less-educated Americans or they can be done by skilled labor that is trained to give the elderly a better physical and psychological quality of life. The first will earn McWages. The second will be in high demand. The same is true for the salesperson who combines passion with a deep knowledge of fashion trends, the photo-store clerk who can teach you new tricks with your digital camera while the machine prints your film, and the pharmacist who doesn’t just sell pills but learns to relate to customer health needs in more compassionate and informative ways. They will all do fine.

But just doing your job in an average way — in this integrated and automated global economy — will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of “extra,” and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer. “People will always need haircuts and health care,” says Katz, “and you can do that with low-wage labor or with people who acquire a lot of skills and pride and bring their imagination to do creative and customized things.” Their work will be more meaningful and their customers more satisfied.

Government’s job is to help inspire, educate, enable and protect that work force. This election should have been about how.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24friedman.html?ref=thomaslfriedman

Article 21 (Evil, Theology, & the Social Sciences)

Please consider reflecting on what your particular church or communion teaches about evil and how the Bible speaks of it. Discussing evil joins us in an ongoing philosophical and theological inquiry going back to the beginning. And I think wrestling with the idea of evil is one of those endeavors that has very clear, concrete implications, whether we're addressing questions of international relations and criminal justice or raising children and confessing sin. I would be interested to hear thoughts on this article, and on evil more broadly, in any of these contexts. -NB

First Things, “Rescuing Evil: Pondering the consciences of Hitler, Hamlet, and England’s Psycho-Cabbie Killer” (October 2010).

By Ron Rosenbaum

At the close of the final 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship seminar series in Cambridge this June, after writer Rob Stein’s informative discussion of “Conscience,” as everyone began packing up, one of the moderators, Sir Brian Heap, turned to me and asked (presumably because I’d once written a book entitled Explaining Hitler): “Did Hitler have a conscience, Ron?” Having spent a decade examining that very issue, which was at the heart of my book, I was able to reply, crisply and cogently: “Um, well, I’m not sure . . . I mean, it all depends.” Yes, it all depends. It all depends on how you define conscience, and how you define conscience depends on how you define evil, the cancer for which conscience is the soul’s MRI.

Evil has gotten a bad name lately. It always was a name for some sort of badness, yes; but lately the word sounds antiquated, the product of a less-sophisticated age. Evil belongs to an old, superstitious world of black and white, and we all know now that everything is gray, right? It belongs to aworld of blame in which the Enlightenment tells us that “to understand all is to forgive all”—no blame, just explanation. There are some who argue it’s an unnecessary word: Having no ontological reality, no necessary use, it’s merely a semantic trap, a dead end.

After a century that saw the slaughter of more than a hundred million souls, we seem to be insisting on one more casualty: the word evil. Perhaps because by eliminating its accusatory presence and substituting genetic, organic, or psychogenic determinism, we escape the accusatory finger it points at the nature of human nature. Things go wrong with our genes, or our amygdalas, or our parenting, but these are aberrations, glitches. The thing itself, the human soul, is basically good; the hundred million dead, the product of unfortunate but explicable defects, not the nature of the beast.

But there are losses to the glossing-over process that has made the concept of conscious evil so unfashionable. If we could rescue free-will evil from the various determinisms that have been substituted for it, we could also set free will—the freely made choice to do good or evil—free again. Doing so would reestablish the possibilities of freely chosen courage and nobility, of altruism and self-sacrifice, rather than reducing them to some evolutionary biology survival stratagem. We diminish and marginalize the idea of evil because we don’t want to face the accusatory consequences that the free choice of evil—a choice contrary to conscience—entails.

Serial killers and mass murderers are frequently spoken of, in the mumbo jumbo of popularizing science, as people “without conscience.” But if they lack conscience, they lack transgressiveness; they cannot consciously violate an entity they lack. Consider Derrick Bird, a cabdriver in England’s West Cumbria, who, on a June morning in 2010, with no evident warning signs, turned into a spree killer who murdered twelve people and then shot himself. The murders took place at a time when I was in Cambridge for the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship and so was able to observe the cultural schism over the notion of evil and free will as it played out in the intensive coverage (virtually absent in the United States) of the murders and their aftermath.

Bird—or “psycho-cabbie” as the tabloid News of the World’s front-page headline dubbed him—became an emblematic case study of how science and religion have shaped the split in society and culture over the nature of evil. Just take that headline moniker, psycho-cabbie. On the one hand, it melodramatizes the killings. On the other hand, it serves to defuse their malevolence: The murders were performed by a “psycho,” not a “normal” person, and psychologists tell us that psychos suffer from a disease, not from evil. They have poor “impulse control,” and so it’s not something we have to fear from normal people like ourselves.

On yet another hand, on its inside pages the News of the World featured an exclusive photo of psycho-cabbie’s dreary kitchen, a shot taken from outside his kitchen window that spotlighted a bottle of HP sauce on his sad, loner’s kitchen table. The headline on that read “the devil’s kitchen.”

Tabloids believe in evil. And yet, if someone is possessed by evil spirits, does that mean he’s a victim, too? Was the headline saying that the devil was cooking up evil in that kitchen, using his special brew of satanic HP sauce on the previously nondevilish psycho-cabbie?

It’s complicated. But at least evil is still a problem to the moralists of the tabloid press. To the bien-pensant columnists of the serious press, it’s virtually a vulgarism. On the day after the psycho-cabbie’s killing spree, The Independent ran a story on the killings by an “investigative psychologist” with the headline, “A simmering anger fuelled by low self-esteem and paranoia.”

Ah, that old (and shopworn) villain, low self-esteem. The allegedly more sophisticated media, with their investigative psychologists of various stripes, think we’re on the way to giving evil a local habitation and a name in the brain. Neuroscience will clear up the problem of evil that has troubled philosophers and theologians since before St. Augustine: Pinpoint the site of evil on this or that temporal lobe or cortical matrix and predict and perhaps interdict evil behavior.

Geneticists have recently proclaimed, with all the confidence of Columbus discovering the Indies, that they have located evil in the “evil twin” copy of the “warrior gene.” Brain-scan analysts say it’s located in “an imbalance between the orbital cortex and the amygdala,” as neuroscientist James Fallon recently informed listeners to National Public Radio. The morning before psycho-cabbie started on his murderous rounds, the ever-dependable Independent credulously informed us, at breakfast, of a different finding, in a story headlined “How a deprived childhood leaves its mark on the brain.”


Written by “Social Affairs Correspondent” Sarah Cassidy, the story promoted the brain scan–based theory being peddled by a charity called The Kids Company, which, we were told, spent £1.6 million on a study to establish that “over-exposure to fright hormones damages children’s brain development and leaves them prone to violent outbursts and unable to calm themselves” when they grow up and perform evil acts.

The story was accompanied by two scary-looking brain-scan slices, in each of which a sinister-looking, crescent-shaped swath was helpfully highlighted by The Independent in blood red to demonstrate the effects of “cortical atrophy,” seen in the difference between a “healthy three-year-old” and one who “suffered severe sensory deprivation with minimal exposure to language, touch, and social interaction.” It turns out that Rousseau’s child of nature, the epitome of unsocialized innocence, untainted by “social interaction,” is likely to harbor evil—or “cortical shrinkage”—rather than natural nobility within.

The red areas bore an unmistakable, if perhaps inadvertent, resemblance to Satan’s horns, growing inside the brain, but the story was another instance of the organizing of evil, the implicit determinism: Anyone with cortical shrinkage showing up on the brain scan, like anyone with the wrong orbital-to-amygdala ratio, was destined to commit evil acts—and to be absolved of them by science because they were only the product of neuronal defects.

The Kids Company study also showed “enlarged ventricles in the center of the brain.” Now we’re talking. Hasn’t evil as an “absence of being” been a theme of post-Thomistic discussions of the subject? Hole in the brain = absence of being, no? Curiously, on the page opposite the damaged-brain scans was a story about human remains found in the river Aire in West Yorkshire that turned out not to belong to two murdered prostitutes; evidently there had been speculation that a serial killer—a cortical-atrophied, poorly ratioed orbital / amygdala type—was at work emulating the famous “Yorkshire Ripper.” The juxtaposition of stories suggested an account of evil: Cerebral atrophy means murdered prostitutes. A description of evil that, in effect, exculpated the evildoer by blaming his crimes on a bad brain scan.

Indeed, brain scans are the new phrenology of forensics, with the key bumps actually inside the head, on the soft parts of the brain, rather than outside, on the knobby protrusions of the skull. To my great satisfaction, the story in The Independent ended by quoting one of my favorite skeptics of pseudoscience, Raymond Tallis, a doctor and philosopher more well known in the U.K. than here, who suggested we not get too excited: “I do not think brain scans will add anything to what we already know,” he said. “The trouble is that that leads to a general sort of claim that ‘My brain made me do it.’ This neuromitigation of blame has to be treated with suspicion.”

Neuromitigation! Exactly the word we need to describe this organizing of evil. But evil is a problem not just for science. To promoters of a new religiosity—such as Terry Eagleton, who writes so well for someone whose thinking is so muddled, strangled in his own sophistry like Laocoön by the snakes—evil really isn’t a problem, barely exists at all. Of course, Eagleton’s sophistic denial of evil’s relevance, in a book called Evil, demonstrates even more strongly what a problem it is. As Alan Wolfe noted in the New Republic, Eagleton thinks evil is “boring, supremely pointless, lifeless, philistine, kitsch-ridden, and superficial. Indeed, lacking any substance, it ‘is not something we should lose too much sleep over. People can be wicked, cruel, and indifferent. But the concept of evil, with which theologians and philosophers have wrestled for centuries, can be safely tucked away. When it comes to evil, we must be social and economic realists. ‘Most violence and injustice are the result of material forces, not of the vicious dispositions of individuals.” The neo-Marxist Christian view of evil.

There have been few takers lately for Jung’s view that evil has an ontological reality—that it has real being, something to watch out for. Although I have met two very different people whose sanity and stability I respect who have said they have encountered the presence of palpably ontological evil. One was a New York City cop, from the Dominican Republic originally, who, because of his background, was assigned to investigate allegations of Santeria killings and a subterranean ring of exorcists who were actually extortionists.

In effect, he was often called upon in his job to try to distinguish who was truly possessed by evil spirits and who was being conned into believing it or was suffering delusions of possession. I watched him perform an exorcism in his off-duty role as spiritual counselor in an old, candlelit Lower East Side church. It was chilling. And somehow convincing.

He told me something much like what I also heard from Fraser Watts, a thoughtful, mild-mannered Anglican priest in Cambridge, also a trained psychologist, who described his experience of “deliverances,” as the Anglicans call exorcisms of those possessed by evil spirits. He conceded that most of the cases he saw were likely psychogenic, but he believed that in a few instances he felt he had been in the presence of genuine evil spirits.

Of course, even evil spirits are a problem for evil, since belief in them displaces responsibility from the individual possessed to the possessor. Still, it’s more than intriguing that similar language would be used by a hard-bitten New York cop and a soft-spoken Anglican priest in Cambridge.

Evil remains a problem, not just for its victims, though they should not be forgotten in all this theorizing, but for those who try to conceptualize it. This first came to trouble me during an exchange with the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has grown in estimation as one of the most scrupulous and discerning historians of his time.

At the end of the Second World War, as a member of MI-6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, he was tasked with going into Hitler’s bunker to reconstruct the details of Hitler’s death, in part to halt rumors of the Nazi leader’s escape and survival. In the process, Trevor-Roper learned an immense amount of previously unavailable information. This included the discovery of Hitler’s “final testament,” in which, shortly before he killed himself, he commanded the German people never to cease and desist from their war to exterminate the “eternal poisoners of humanity, the Jews”—a job he’d left unfinished.

From the evidence he gathered, Trevor-Roper produced perhaps the first, certainly one of the finest, early biographies of Hitler. He agreed to be interviewed by me in the Oxford-Cambridge Club, to which I had brought a tape recorder, which I nested in the shelter of what looked like a five-century-old chess set and at which he looked disapprovingly.

“A solecism,” he said tartly, indicating the recorder. I decided to brazen it out, and I’m glad I did because I might not have retained the stark reply he gave to my question, “Did Hitler know he was doing wrong when he was committing his crimes?”

“Absolutely not,” he shot back without hesitation. “He was convinced of his own rectitude.” Yes, rectitude. All that Trevor-Roper discovered confirmed him in his belief that Hitler was a true believer—a man who did not consider himself evil but a heroic doctor, a veritable Pasteur, a great benefactor to humanity purifying the human race of infection.

This is an old—but still unresolved—philosophical question: Can someone be evil if he thinks he’s doing good, no matter how deranged his thought process? It has troubled everyone from Plato to Augustine and their heirs, but it remains a genuine problem—because most people we think of as doing great evil think of themselves as doing the right thing. Indeed, who does evil while thinking he actually is doing evil? Only a few characters in literature—Shakespeare’s Richard III, notably—and those cartoon villains twirling mustaches.

This is a hard notion to assimilate. In fact, the following week at Oxford, I placed it before Alan Bullock, Trevor-Roper’s rival as an early historian of Hitler and the author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. He exclaimed, with North Country bluntness: “If we can’t call Hitler evil, then who can we?” One way to sort all this out is to note that it is possible for evil to inhere in ideas as well as in men. There are evil ideas that men can become true believers in—thinking they are doing good in carrying them out. It is the intellectual version of possession by evil spirits.

In any case, back to psycho-cabbie, who raises a whole host of new questions about evil and its depiction in our culture. Beginning at 5:30 on that morning in June, the man whose name was not psycho-cabbie but the oddly cheerful name of Derrick Bird, began a killing spree that racked up twelve murders, not including his own suicide, in what was almost invariably referred to as the “sleepy seaside town of Whitehaven.”

Was he feeling “simmering anger fuelled by low self-esteem” that morning? Other psychiatrists and savants lined up to weigh in. In a full-page diagnosis in a later edition of The Independent entitled “There is no one either good or bad, but circumstances make them so,” Julian Baggiani junked “self-esteem,” “paranoia,” and other such old-fashioned jargon for “situationism,” which he announced was “the dominant school of thought in psychology and philosophy now.”

Ah, situationism, which, we were told, “claims that the best predictor of how people behave is the circumstances they find themselves in, not their predispositions.” In other words, “everyone was doing it, you can’t blame me.” As the leading theorist of situationism, Philip Zimbardo, has put it, “We have underestimated the power of social situations because we overestimate the power of individual dispositions.”

It’s sad that conventional wisdom has thrown in its lot with “situationism.” One dramatic refutation of it can be found in Christopher Browning’s study Ordinary Men, which examined the choices made by the members of one of Hitler’s killing squads in the period before mass murder had been industrialized in death camps such as Auschwitz.

Browning studied letters and diaries from members of a reserve police battalion which slaughtered whole towns full of Jews and buried them in mass graves.

Browning learned that participation in the slaughter was not mandatory; troops had the choice to opt out, and some did. Despite the fearfulness of making such a choice, they refused, of their own free will, to participate in the evil. Which removed the “situationist” exculpation from those who did.

But there’s no indication, contra Julian Baggiani, that situationism has the slightest relevance to psycho-cabbie’s choices. He made them himself. Derrick Bird left the Devil’s Kitchen at approximately 5:30 a.m. Shortly thereafter he arrived at the much larger, more luxe home of his twin brother David and shotgunned him to death.

Here we enter into one perplexing question raised by psycho-cabbie’s spree—the degrees of evil. “The primal eldest curse” is on the murder of a brother, Hamlet tells us. And a twin? It more than recapitulates the First Murder. And indeed there were other Biblical elements to the psycho-cabbie’s first murder. There was a struggle over a birthright and who was favored by the father’s blessing. Apparently the younger but better-off of the twins (David) had received a £25,000 chunk of the father’s estate—and then, when the father died, he didn’t feed it back into the evidently depleted estate to be shared with his brother.

Psycho-cabbie seemed to be wrought up over this, and over the way his solicitor had been handling it, and over the concomitant problem of Derrick’s keeping £60,000 pounds of his cabbie earnings under the floorboards of the Devil’s Living Room. He believed his brother and solicitor were “stitching him up” for the Inland Revenue so the brother wouldn’t have to come up with the £25,000 pounds.

So one could see Derrick “simmering with rage and paranoia” and perhaps even the dread low self-esteem, too. But we are all simmering to some extent. And yet: Murdering his twin in cold blood and then driving over to his solicitor’s house and shotgunning him in bed, too? Are these bad choices psychogenically determined, organically inevitable? Crimes just waiting to happen if we’d had a proper brain scan to warn us? Or are they evil? Can we utterly eliminate the fact that he had a choice, that he made a choice, and that it was an evil choice? Or do we just look at his brain scan posthumously for the real trigger? And what do we make of the nine further killings that morning, and of the dozen or so attempts that left several critically wounded?

From the murdered solicitor’s office Derrick drove to his customary post in the cabbies’ rank in Whitehaven, where he shot to death one of his fellow cabbies. There was talk that he did it because of a rumor that this poor fellow had gone out with Derrick’s ex-wife. In each of those cases one could say there was a rationale, a reason—not a good one, not an excuse, not an exculpation, but a reason, however inadequate. Does the existence of a reason, however selfish and prideful, make these killings less or more evil?

Less, one could say, because they weren’t killing for killing’s sake. They were killing for ancient human grudges against twins and lawyers, perhaps. More, one could also say, because they were killings for selfish, greedy, felonious reasons. Felonious in the sense that they were about money and rivalry and ego and emotional wounds of being second twin in a father’s love.

In capital-punishment law in most American states, premeditated murder in the first degree is not enough to put one in jeopardy of the death penalty. It must be murder in the service of, or accompanied by, another felony—kidnapping, robbing a liquor store, and or the like—to put it over the top, because the murder is then done for some kind of gain beyond mere murder.

I wonder if here the law has it backward, that killing for the sake of killing is worse than killing with some further motive. At this point, after murdering three he knew, psycho-cabbie started killing complete strangers, killing for the sake of killing. He set out in his cab and started shooting just about everyone who crossed his path, shotgunning motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians point-blank in the face and head.

In other words, virtually every time he saw anyone—a person with whom he did not have any kind of psychogenic, emotional, legal relationship—he chose evil, more and further evil, until he totaled a dozen dead victims and then shot himself. He was in a world of utter freedom offered by the fact that he could not become any more morally or legally culpable than he already was. He was free to be as evil as he wanted to be. He could have shot himself after the first three, but he chose to blast open the faces of a dozen or so more, nine of them fatally.

The reason I focus on the factor of choice in thinking about evil, rather than its ontological status, is that giving evil ontological status—positing that it is something external that may enter into or possess a previously nonevil being—makes that being less culpable.

Perhaps it could be argued that some people are culpable in “leaving the door open” for evil. Tempting evil. But what I want to emphasize is not that I know what evil is, but that abandoning the concept of evil, refusing even to see it as a problem that cannot be reduced to organic dysfunction, is to abandon free will. Because if we are not free to choose evil, we are not free to refuse it.

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars, is a cultural columnist for Slate.

Reference: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/09/rescuing-evil

Articles 20 (School Choice)

The following articles address the current state of public primary and secondary education in the U.S. I think the public education debate revolves around three themes: 1) freedom and empowerment of parents and students 2) religious freedom of families 3) accountability of teachers, administrators, parents, students, and entire schools. The following four articles share many of the same goals but are deeply divided on how to achieve those goals. Christians can always begin with the question, what approaches to public education will be most beneficial to poorest among us (Catholic Social Teaching’s “preferential option for the poor”)? There are other important considerations as well. Many on this blog have children, have chosen to live in neighborhoods specifically because of the quality of the public school there, have paid property taxes (funding local public schools) while also choosing to pay private school tuition, teach in a major urban public school system and have chosen to placed their children in that same system, and so on. I am curious to hear any responses to the current education debate, particularly implementation of school choice programs vs. further investment in traditional public schools. -NB

Reason.com “Knowing is Half the Battle. But It's the Easy Half.” (September 1, 2010)

By Katherine Mangu-Ward

Liberating teacher performance data is a great way to start out the school year. But it's not enough.

They say that knowing is half the battle. But it’s the easy half.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times caused quite a stir by releasing individual performance data about 6,000 of the system’s primary teachers after weeks of hyping the story. The paper took the simple but ingenious step of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the district’s raw math and reading standardized test scores over several years. For each teacher, the paper calculated a score based on the gains shown by his or her individual students from the time they arrived in the classroom in the fall to the time they left—a value-added score—and then rated the teachers’ effectiveness.

Information is power, and the school system and teachers union had access to this data long before theTimes. But instead of releasing scores—and thus seizing the opportunity to frame the information and the debate—they sat on the data for years, stalling, hoping no one would notice that it existed at all. Their mindset dates from a time when processing a large amount of data and offering a granular analysis was a difficult and expensive business. But number crunching on this scale is no longer the province of big bureaucracies with major computing power. Anyone can do it, and it was only a matter of time before someone did.

Naturally, the teachers union flipped out. In addition to announcing a boycott of the paper, union reps have condemned the release of the scores to parents as “dangerous.” (To his credit, Obama education chief Arne Duncan backed the release of the scores, saying “What’s there to hide?”)

But all the data in the world won’t do kids or their parents any good if they can’t make choices informed by that data.

In a world where we can get rankings and information about every book, every household appliance, every restaurant, and every manicurist, we are in the habit of casually seeking information and making well-informed choices about the things we buy and the people we contract with for services. But in education (and, for that matter, in medicine) users are mostly working in an information vacuum. One reason doctors and hospitals are frightened of the popularization of information about patient satisfaction and pricing is that people can, with some constraints, take their broken legs, strep throats, or brain tumors elsewhere. But parents don’t have that luxury when it comes to public schooling.

Even if parents know who the good teachers are—and they often do already—it often doesn’t matter, since kids are randomly assigned. They’re allocated to a district, a school, a schedule, and a classroom, all without any input from students or parents. The biggest decision public school parents get to make about their child’s primary education is where they choose to live. Short of staging a mini-sit in at the guidance counselor’s office (something my parents were known to do from time to time) there’s not much you can do once the die has been cast. And if you’re a parent who doesn’t have the luxury of taking a day off from work to spend fighting the school bureaucracy, your kid is stuck wherever he was randomly assigned, no matter what. Teacher data doesn’t do a lick of good if you don’t have input about which teacher you wind up with.

Instituting a small degree of teacher choice wouldn’t be overwhelmingly difficult. Schools at all levels could opt for the kind of first-come, first-served lottery that large colleges use. It's not an ideal system, but it’s an improvement. Again, computers these days, they can do amazing stuff. Once a system is in place, this kind of limited choice would be neither time consuming nor expensive. But it would create one outcome that teachers unions will do almost anything to stop: It would quickly become obvious which teachers aren’t desirable. The teachers with the half-empty classrooms would be ripe for firing. And that’s the scenario that makes teachers unions (and to a lesser degree school boards and other education bureaucracies) fear a flood of data, especially if it’s accompanied by even a little choice.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, this troublingly common sentiment showed up: "As a parent, I think I have a right to know," said [school] board member Nury Martinez, who added that she did not believe that the general public should be able to see a teacher's entire review.” Giving parents all the information that’s available is a bad idea, the argument goes, in part because they might start trying to make the kind of choices for their kids that they make every day about their lunches, their jobs, or their dry cleaners.

Asked about the release of the Los Angeles teacher data at a recent community meeting, reformist D.C. school Chancellor Michelle Rhee replied with a personal story and a similar gut reaction: “I was looking at the data in my own children’s school,” she says. “I could see the teacher data. One good, one not so much. I pride myself on not giving my kids preferences. But as a mother i was like whoa! From an administrative point of view, it’s pretty terrifying.”

There were a lot of mothers in Los Angeles on Sunday who were like whoa. But none of those whoamoments will amount to much in a system starved of choice.

“I’m kind of waiting for the FOIA request in my mailbox,” says Rhee. It’s coming, alright. But it won’t be enough.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/01/knowing-is-half-the-battle-but

Guidelines for Government and Citizenship, "Education"

A Publication of The Center for Public Justice (www.cpjustice.org)

1. Parents bear primary responsibility for the nurture and education of their children. This fact is recognized in both American and international law.

2. In justly exercising its responsibility to provide for the general welfare, government may – and indeed should – help parents meet their responsibilities. For most of American history, such assistance has included the funding of elementary and secondary education.

3. With its support of schooling and its mandate that all children receive an education, government should concentrate on upholding public equity provisions, assuring that each child has fair access to quality education.

4. To honor the educational responsibilities of families and to fulfill its own responsibility to treat citizens equitably, government should be impartial in its treatment of the diverse types of schooling parents choose for their children.

5. Those who educate and establish schools should be free to decide on the philosophical and pedagogical approaches they offer, the curricula they adopt, and the means of governing and administering the schools they open to the public.

6. When government certifies a variety of schooling options that fulfill the public purpose of educating children and when parents choose schools for their children, justice demands that each child should receive the same kind and degree of public financial support. Equitable public funding should be offered without regard to the religious, philosophical, or pedagogical differences among the variety of certified schools parents choose.

7. At present, government fails to do justice when it does not fund equally all of the schooling options it legally certifies. Instead it discriminates against many American families and schools by not funding the education of children who attend non-government schools, including religious schools. This stands in contrast to public funding of school choice in most other democracies in the world.

8. The Center for Public Justice advocates equitable public funding for all children, allowing parents to choose the means of education that is best for their children. A school-choice system of this kind does justice to parental responsibility for children, to the diversity of publicly approved schools, and to the religious freedom of all citizens, ensuring a just and proper relationship between government and society’s diverse families and schools.

Implications

1. State education vouchers for each student may be the best means of covering tuition costs equitably for students at all schools, including religious schools.

2. Schools receiving public support, whether via vouchers or directly, should be free to hire staff and to design curricula that reflect their distinctive educational, philosophical, and religious missions.

3. State laws that authorize specialized charter schools may be the best legal means of expanding choice in American education. In order to be fair and equitable, however, charter-school laws should be revised to include religious schools as eligible schooling options.

For Further Reading

Glenn, Charles L. Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies. Princeton University Press, 2000.

McCarthy, Rockne M., James W. Skillen, and William A. Harper. Disestablishment a Second Time: Genuine Pluralism for American Schools. Christian University Press, 1982.

Skillen, James W., ed. The School Choice Controversy: What Is Constitutional?Baker Book House and Center for Public Justice, 1993.

[Read more about this Guideline in the Public Justice Report, Fourth Quarter 2006.]

Sourece: http://www.cpjustice.org/content/education

National Education Association (website), “Study Finds Vouchers Fail to Raise Student Achievement” (April 13, 2010)

By Kevin Hart

Milwaukee’s school vouchers program has lasted 20 years and has channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to private schools. Now, an ongoing study on the academic performance of voucher students is casting serious doubt on whether the program is effective.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, established in 1990, currently serves more than 20,000 students who receive public funds to pay for private school tuition. The University of Arkansas’ School Choice Demonstration Project has been commissioned to perform a five-year study comparing voucher students to demographically similar public school students. Two years into the study, the results are not looking promising for vouchers.

Through the 2007-2008 school year, two years into the study, researchers found that there was no difference in academic achievement among the elementary, middle, and high school students who were tested. Students receiving vouchers failed to outperform their public school counterparts.

Ironically, the research was funded by several groups with a history of supporting school choice, such as the Kern Family Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. The study also found that, to date:

▪ Religious schools have been the primary beneficiaries of the vouchers program: Of the 124 participating private schools, 82 percent are affiliated with one of 10 distinct religions.

▪ Teachers at schools receiving voucher funds may be less qualified: More public school teachers had teaching certifications and master’s degrees than teachers at the private schools participating in the vouchers program.

▪ Boys and girls are not benefiting equally: Girls in the vouchers program were considerably less likely to experience growth in reading than boys.

The University of Arkansas research is not the first study that failed to show achievement gains among Milwaukee students receiving vouchers. As the study authors point out, a previous study by University of Wisconsin researcher John Witte compared voucher students to public school students from 1990-1995 and found “no clear evidence” that vouchers improved student achievement.

The results are unsurprising for those who follow research on voucher programs. Research on a controversial vouchers program in Washington, D.C. yielded similar results.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, students from schools labeled “in need of improvement” – the very students vouchers are supposed to help – have not experienced any gains in reading or math after using vouchers to attend Washington, D.C. private schools.

Source: http://neatoday.org/2010/04/13/study-finds-vouchers-fail-to-raise-student-achievement/

The following text consists of excerpts of this report taken from NAACP.org. -NB

NAACP.org “Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act”

Sponsored By:

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

National Council for Educating Black Children

National Urban League

Rainbow PUSH Coalition

Schott Foundation for Public Education

Today there is nothing short of a state of emergency in the delivery of education to our nation’s communities of color. As our communities quickly grow on pace to become a numerical majority, it is clear that confronting the issues we face is not just our challenge alone but all of America’s challenge. As a nation, we are failing to provide the high-quality educational opportunities that are critical for all students to succeed, thereby jeopardizing our nation’s ability to continue to be a world leader.

As a community of civil rights organizations, we believe that access to a high-quality education is a fundamental civil right. The federal government’s role is to protect and promote that civil right by creating and supporting a fair and substantive opportunity to learn for all students, regardless of where and to whom they were born. This objective is advanced by many components of the proposed FY 2011 education budget and the Blueprint for Reform setting forth the Administration’s priorities for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). For instance, we applaud the Administration’s goal for the United States to become a global leader in post-secondary education attainment by 2020 and its efforts to develop specific strategies for turning around low-performing schools.

While there are numerous positive aspects of the Administration’s education agenda, more comprehensive reforms are necessary to build a future where equitable educational opportunity is the rule, not the exception. As civil rights organizations, it is our responsibility to seek to close and ultimately eliminate the opportunity and achievement gaps experienced by communities of color. To this end, we outline six major principles that we will collectively advocate to strengthen the ESEA and ensure that the federal government provides the support necessary to protect every child’s civil right to a high-quality education:

Equitable opportunities for all;

Utilization of systematically proven and effective educational methods;

Public and community engagement in education reforms;

Safe and educationally sound learning environments;

Diverse learning environments; and

Comprehensive and substantive accountability systems to maintain equitable opportunities and high outcomes.

....we also offer specific recommendations to implement the principles outlined above. We advance proposals to leverage federal resources available to all states in order to create the preconditions to achieve equitable opportunities for all. As a part of extending an opportunity to learn as a civil right, we call for: “universal” early education for all students in all states; policies that will provide access to highly effective teachers for all students, including incentives to recruit and retain well-prepared, highly effective teachers in high–need, low-income, and rural areas; and community schools that offer wraparound services and strong, engaging instruction with adequate supports. We urge the federal government to institutionalize a federal resource accountability system so that students, parents, and teachers will have the school and community resources necessary for students to achieve high standards, regardless of where they live....

....We propose that the federal government adopt Common Resource Opportunity Standards, which would support the states’ common student outcome standards movement by ensuring sufficient resources to address extreme state budget cuts and interstate inequities. These standards would include national benchmarks for the following resources: (i) high-quality, early childhood education; (ii) highly effective teachers; (iii) a broad, college-bound curriculum that will prepare all students to participate effectively in our democracy; and (iv) equitable instructional resources.1 As a condition for receiving federal funds under the ESEA, each state would be required to submit a plan for closing opportunity gaps in these areas and ensuring that all students

1An outline of Common Resource Opportunity Standards was presented to Secretary Arne Duncan by several organizations on November 4, 2009.3

have access to these core resources. As envisioned in the now pending Student Bill of Rights Act, H.R. 2451, federal funding should be tied to each state’s demonstrated progress toward equitable access to these education resources.

The federal government should also require that states make progress in achieving resource equity for their schools. It should do so by enforcing existing requirements for comparability in the funding provided to high- and low-poverty schools and close the loopholes in those comparability requirements by incorporating into the ESEA the provisions of the now pending ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act, H.R. 5071....

....We applaud the Administration’s Blueprint for proposing that information on school climate and the health of students’ learning environments should be incorporated into school accountability measures. But it is critical that these measures are designed well and implemented effectively. At the school level, we urge replacing the ESEA’s ineffective “persistently dangerous schools” label with a “safe and supportive schools” metric, focusing on indicia of positive school conditions that support learning. Criteria should include infrequent use of 11

exclusionary discipline measures, high pupil and teacher attendance rates, low arrest rates, and survey results showing good rapport and personalization between students and staff. Research has shown that high marks on these indicators are predictive of learning environments that keep students in school until graduation rather than pushing them to drop out of school prematurely.

The shift to a “safe and supportive schools” approach must be coupled with changes to discipline practices at the school level. A school’s failure to perform well under this metric should trigger local and state support to implement evidence-based approaches to improve school climate....

....The ESEA’s “right-to-transfer” provisions should be retained and strengthened. States should be required to ensure that every low-income child assigned to a school that consistently underperforms on the ESEA’s accountability standards has the guaranteed right to enroll in a high-performing school. If no such school is available within the same school district, the student should have the right to enroll in a high-performing school outside the district that has available seats and, if the school receives federal funds, it must be required to accept the student. The ESEA should also provide transportation, resources, and services to support families who exercise their child’s right to transfer. Additional incentives, coupled with the resources proposed in the DOE’s Magnet School Assistance Program, could aid states in promoting these opportunities....

....CONCLUSION

More than fifty years ago, it took the persistent efforts of parents and students in cities and hamlets across the country to persuade the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education to rule that all students should have access to an inclusive, high-quality education. Today, our nation is still struggling to fulfill Brown’s promise.

As a community of civil rights organizations, our objective is not to support prescriptions that only have the capacity to change a few schools for a few students. We want a blueprint for a federal commitment to education reform that embraces the entire nation and all of its people.

We therefore call on the Administration and Congress to take four important direct actions:

1. Adopt the recommendations in this letter for current discretionary education spending, budget proposals for FY2011 and subsequent years, and ESEA reauthorization;

2. Convene a Summit on the Opportunity to Learn in fall 2010 where administration and legislative officials can meet with key stakeholders to outline a federal role and blueprint for fulfilling the fundamental civil right of all students, in all states, to a fair and substantive opportunity to learn; 15

3. Establish a White House Commission on the Opportunity to Learn as a standing interagency and intergovernmental commission tasked with identifying and monitoring the coordination and investments necessary to place the United States on a trajectory to meet the 2020 goal of becoming a global leader in post-secondary education attainment and to provide all students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn; and

4. Convene a panel comprised of leadership of the Department of Justice, the DOE, the National Governors Association, civil rights organizations, and other key stakeholders to recommend steps towards confirming that education is a federal civil right.

Some have articulated a belief that our nation is unable to garner the resources to provide a high-quality education for all students and therefore we should just save those we can. But as civil rights advocates, our objective is not to support prescriptions that only have the capacity to change a few schools for a few students. We invoke the leadership and drive of the candidate and Senator from Illinois who told a nation, “Yes we can.” Securing equal access to high-quality education is the civil rights battle of this generation.

Source: http://naacp.3cdn.net/bbe013962d37e1c6a9_com6btgji.pdf