(Ballard Street via GoComics.com)
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I’m actually pleased that Irene has been a severe disappointment to the television weathermongers, since there’s been enough damage and disruption to satisfy the rest of us, thankyewverymuch.
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How’s the upcoming week looking in your area, with or without existential moments?
It’s hard out there for a pimp
Tbogg is right, soon these guys will be teaching third-graders and moving their own lawns:
One investment banker who participated in the survey described a breach of the “tacit understanding” that he or she would be well compensated. Considering “the sacrifice I make in my personal life (100-hour work weeks, canceled vacations, etc.), this business has to be more rewarding,” the person said, according to Capstone.
That banker isn’t alone. Of about 2,000 associates and vice presidents in their first three years, 67 percent identified “disappointment with compensation” as one of the biggest reasons to leave the field. Almost the same percentage described their jobs as “satisfactory,” according to Kopelan.
More than 80 percent said they don’t believe that their compensation is mainly predicated on performance. Instead, Kopelan said, young investment bankers worry that it’s “based on the profitability of the firm, based on how powerful the group heads were, based on capricious things.”
Last year, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Wall Street paid out $20.8 billion in cash bonuses, instead of the $22.5 billion a year earlier.
clarification and student mobility
Fairness prompts me to direct you to this post from Matt Yglesias, who feels that my earlier response to him misrepresented his views. I’ve never been one for half apologies, and I do think that a lot of what I said was and is relevant to his points. (I really hate the “I’m sorry if he’s offended, but…” thing.) However, I do regret focusing on charter schools when he didn’t intend to be discussing them specifically.
To be as direct to his points as I can, then– there is still an assumption here that is lacking evidence. Matt argues that because of the high price of land and housing in the best school districts, poor parents lack the means to enroll their children in the best schools. That’s true. But note something here.
If you took the Washington DC metro area and somehow managed to change the current unfair situation where the low-income neighborhoods have the worst schools and instead made it that the lowest-income neighborhoods have the best schools, people wouldn’t just stay in place. Parents of means would start relocating to the places where the schools are best.
The question is, if we gave poor students equal mobility to their rich counterparts, what would the consequences be for their educational performance? If the assumption is that it would improve, I have to challenge that assumption. That is an empirical question that has to be answered empirically. I’m not sure what Matt’s preferred policy regime would look like to achieve equity in student/parent mobility. I focused on charter schools in large part because they are one of the primary mechanisms advocated by school reformers for increasing student mobility and parent choice. It’s true that this is not a perfect analog for having the money available to move to wherever you want, but along with magnet schools and private school vouchers, charter schools are a primary means of achieving this mobility. And as you are surely bored of hearing from me now, we lack credible empirical evidence that these mobility-increasing measures work to improve student outcomes.
The pessimist will point out that there’s the thorny cause/effect problem here, as several of Matt’s other commenters have done in the past. Are poor people trapped in bad school districts? Or are bad school districts bad because they house poor students? I am not a strict economic determinist by any means. (If I was, I wouldn’t be chasing the career dream that I am.) But I think that Matt is assuming a simplicity about school quality when it is an immensely complicated issue, and he knows better. I’m tempted by the half-serious old challenge: swap the students from the worst public high school in New York with the students from Stuyvesant and see which school looks good and which bad. In fact, we’ve had some evidence on that score recently, albeit obliquely.
So the same old boring critiques apply: we lack evidence that student mobility improves educational performance for the students who are falling behind. Additionally, we still lack effective metrics that, with high validity and reliability, can assess which schools are good or bad, meaning that even parents with the means to move their children lack the information necessary to do so intelligently.
If the assumption is not that increasing student mobility improves student outcomes but merely that choice is a benefit in and of itself, I’m back to a simple philosophical disagreement. I don’t think it’s responsible for government to fund different choices (of whatever kind) simply to provide choice.
Update: Commenter Roger Moore says
Watch out, though, because you’re in dangerous territory there. I’ll agree that we shouldn’t redesign our national educational system around a concept that hasn’t been adequately tested, but it’s never going to be adequately tested until somebody tries it. You have to have some kind of trial for new ideas or they’ll never get a chance to prove themselves.
Agreed. I’m an advocate of experimentation with policy, certainly. I’m not strictly opposed to charter schools, although the details (particularly in their orientation towards the teachers unions and the attendant political dynamics) matter very much. Pilot programs for increasing student mobility are important. I’m just curious what form they’ll take, and I want us to be responsible about waiting for the data.
What the Hell is He Talking About?
I’ve read this Frank Bruni stream of consciousness about three times now, and I swear I can’t figure out the point of it.
Then they came for the overpriced produce…then they came for the sports network
As a first step towards following all the right-wing fantasies that dominate our discourse, I’m trying to keep track of what wingers are boycotting right now.
Whole Foods is in trouble because somebody suggested Muslims could buy food there during Ramadan if they wanted to.
ESPN is in trouble because they told one of their idiot “analysts” to tone down the public teahadism.
Anything else? There should be — maybe there already is — a site that keeps track of al this.
Then they came for the overpriced produce…then they came for the sports networkPost + Comments (111)
Eternal Vigilance…
… is the condition upon which God hath given liberty to man, you know.
And while “liberty” is rapidly rising to the level of “patriotic” as a word as hollow as Annie Dillard’s frog, all of John Philpot Curran’s fury still holds when we’re talking the defense of our own minds in the face of the relentless, repetitive, numbing, booming bullshit machine of the right.
Case in point? The usually estimable David Leonhardt, economics correspondent and soon-to-be Washington bureau chief for The New York Times. In today’s Week in Review section, he’s written a mostly fine piece on the vexing question of why Bush appointee Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has led the central bank to its current state of inaction in the face of all the economic hardship the United States now endures.
Most of the piece is on the money — so go read it. In brief(ish…remember who’s blogging–ed.) Leonhardt notes, correctly, that within the academic community both liberal and conservative economists are having a robust debate about exactly what the Fed can and should be doing. But, he documents, the Fed has essentially collapsed the public debate to whether we should worry about essentially flat inflation at every waking moment, or merely most of them.
Howard Dean, Libya and Being “Anti-War”
Howard Dean is a fairly vocal supporter of the Libyan intervention:
“It’s very smart. You don’t put boots on the ground. You don’t commit trillions of dollars to a war in Iraq,” he said. “You do it with the other tools that we have that frankly work much better over the long term because you don’t get a lot of public resistance — drones, special operations forces, use of intelligence agencies. That’s exactly what he did.”
I think Larison gets it about right:
As Scott Lemieux remarks, Dean was a Democratic “centrist” by reputation before he became the unlikely tribune of progressive antiwar sentiment. When he was still a presidential candidate, Dean made a point of saying that the real problem with invading Iraq was that the administration had ignored the “greater” threats from Iran and North Korea. Dean happened to oppose the Iraq war, but this was partly a matter of taking advantage of a political opening in a field dominated by pro-war candidates. Very much like Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war, it was an isolated judgment that seems to have nothing in common with the rest of his foreign policy thinking. When trying to understand the weaknesses and limits of the antiwar movement in America, a good place to start is the frequent habit it has of endorsing and backing candidates who happen to be aligned with that movement on one issue almost by accident.
The only real anti-war candidate in either party is Ron Paul. The rest are either gagging to drop freedom bombs everywhere, or they’re foreign policy pragmatists who are going to endorse intervention when they can get away with it politically (which is essentially what Dean is saying in that first quote). I think there’s a place in the Democratic party for a candidate with a tougher antiwar stance, based in part on a pragmatic argument about cost. Since the opposition paints every Democrat as a wimp for even expressing the possibility that some wars are stupid, I doubt that someone with a bit stronger antiwar stance would have a tougher time than Obama or Dean. But it’s important to remember that Obama and Dean’s opposition to the Iraq War was mainly because that venture was remarkably stupid, not because they are anti-interventionists. They aren’t.
Howard Dean, Libya and Being “Anti-War”Post + Comments (126)