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School's out for mailbag
Matthew Yglesias
27 - 34 minutes
My kid had his last day of school this week and we got what I thought was an interesting answer to last week’s question about year-end slacking in American schools, so I thought I’d start by quoting it:
Stephen: Not a question, but a professional secondary educator here chiming in about learning nothing in the last weeks of school, from a prior week. I've taught in public schools in multiple states and in private schools, and this varies significantly in my experience. In NY, public high school students take regents exams required to graduate at the very end of the school year in June. This means that the end of the school year is, in many NY schools where graduation is not an automatic assumption, crunch time, complete with optional Saturday study sessions.
In other places without this timing of exams, however, the gradebook locks often a week or more before the last day of class, I believe in order for administrators to flag who needs to attend summer school to make up courses for students who have failed. Teachers at these schools can't reasonably assign major projects due on that last day grades are due; we need time to grade, and some grace period to accept work from students who were absent for the exam/on the due date. So in these places, it looks like weeks of low intensity while teachers finish their grades of all major assignments, and then several more days where grades are locked. I've been the person trying to offer new instruction past that point; it didn't go well.
In independent schools, I've seen this end of year fade as well. Fundamentally, people choose private schools, I think, because they want to be able to pick up the phone if their kid says "I had a problem at school today" and get the adult on the other end of the line to fix it. I made the mistake my first year at an independent school of having a big test very late in the school year. A student bombed the test, and so their grade for the whole year dropped. Their parent was disappointed when that report card went out, to understate it a bit, that they hadn't been able to intervene in time to save their kid's grade (note: the kid's grade did in fact get saved with a packet of work they completed, supervised by a private tutor, over the summer). So that leads to what I feel that end of year fade looks like at the schools at the top of income and entitlement scale; teachers want to end the year with assignments that students won't bomb/stress out about to minimize stressful interactions with parents, so assignments designed not to be bombed look (and are!) a lot lighter for students. There may be asymmetry in this between many parents all slightly disappointed by this fade out, but not mad enough to demand change, versus a few parents who would be mad if assignments that ended the year were bomb-able and their kids bombed them.
That's my perspective - hope it helps!
In terms of good news, I’m so old at this point that I rarely hear new bands that I like, but 100 gecs was recommended to me this week and I like them. Here’s “Frog on the Floor,” a great mashup of the ska-punk sound of my youth with some Zoomer social attitudes. More substantively, I liked this look at the subjective impact of Ozempic, Anthony Blinken’s visit to Beijing seems to have calmed things down a little, we got a new look at starlight from distant galaxies, and it’s nice to see Wuhan University students finally able to have a graduation ceremony.
Last but not least, real wage growth is positive again!
Bo: I’m curious about what you think about this idea: West Point for cops?
The link is to Megan McArdle saying we should have something like a national service academy for training police officers. I like the idea a lot. I like it so much, in fact, that I feel in my gut that I specifically wrote this proposal 10 years ago or something, but despite my best efforts to find such a column and claim prior art I can’t find one.
Stepping back, there are sort of two angles on this. One, which I’ve written on several times recently, is that we urgently need to develop new talent pipelines for urban policing. The basic logistics of this are that if you want to hold cops to a higher standard, you need more people to want to be cops. Some of that is just spending money, but there’s more to life than money. In some communities in the United States, being a police officer is considered a prestigious job that’s held in high esteem. In other communities, it’s a profession that’s mildly derogated. Cities would be better off if they could make the kind of people who live in cities and like them want to be cops. The other, which is closer in spirit to my Police for America proposal, is just that we would benefit from getting, specifically, more educated liberal types to try policing.
Megan’s service academy proposal is another idea in that spirit and I endorse it on those grounds, but I also endorse it on the grounds that creating new institutions of higher education is, I think, the right way to deliver on the concept of “free college.” That was the context in which I believed (falsely, apparently) that I’d written about this before — that we should try to create a few more $0 tuition schools oriented around things like training people to be teachers, cops, diplomats, etc.
Michael Adelman: Do you have a take about Vivek Ramaswamy's proposal to raise the voting age to 25 except for military and first responders? I disagree with this on the merits because I think voting should be more of a fundamental right, and of course it would require amending the Constitution. But this proposal strikes me as very savvy politics and I'm sure it would poll well. It seems to me the GOP could use the very popular “Men With Guns” as a wedge to roll back all sorts of social rights and benefits (example — let's gut Medicaid and redirect some of the money to the VA and police pension funds, and if you oppose our bill you're SOFT ON CRIME AND HATE THE TROOPS!!!!!). Do you agree that this is a potential problem for liberals? What can we do to head it off?
I seriously doubt that restricting the franchise would be politically popular. If you think about the history of global politics, there are way more examples of democratic regimes being overthrown by coups than there are of broad classes of formerly eligible voters losing their voting rights. I don’t want to say it’s entirely unprecedented because it did happen in the American South during the redemption period.
But I literally cannot think of another example of this happening anywhere, while there are plenty of examples from the 19th and 20th centuries of the franchise expansion — weaker property requirements, lower ages, extension to women.
I don’t have specific polling on this or anything, I just think there’s something pretty fundamental at work.
Sam Cole: I've seen you tongue-in-cheekily (?) boosting Robert Kennedy Jr. on Twitter. To what extent is this just ironic? I find his anti-vax activism and conspiracy theories disturbingly Trump-like.
I’m not going to vote for Robert Kennedy Jr. and I don’t think you should either, but what I am trying to do is push back a little against the impulse to say that Democrats should try to exile this guy and his admirers from their coalition.
And I say this as a guy who didn’t like RFK Jr.’s influence on the party back when he was getting written up very respectfully in Mother Jones, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He’s an avatar of the style of anti-modern environmentalism that I really deplore, was critical in getting New York to shut down the Indian Point power plant, and is all things considered not my kind of guy. Still, the fact is, he’s someone with deep roots in American progressive politics, there’s a nontrivial fraction of the country who likes his style of thinking, and I think if you’re a Democrat, you should try to get people with paranoid anti-corporate views to vote for you, not condemn them to the outer stratosphere.
Joe Biden is a very savvy coalitional politician, and he made a lot of efforts after the 2020 primary to make Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their key people feel included in the Biden tent. I think that even though it will annoy the pro-Biden internet, he should try to find ways to extend a similar courtesy to Kennedy — make it clear that he respects him and his supporters, search for common ground on issues, and remind him that Trump and the GOP are absolutely awful on core clean air/clean water issues, as well as on pharmaceutical pricing and regulation. It seems like a bunch of rightist figures are currently gassing Kennedy up in hopes that he’ll spend the general election bitter at Biden and mainstream Democrats, helping Trump win.
It’s important for Biden and Democrats to try to flip that and create a situation where people who’ve been exposed to Kennedy’s message — via Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson or whoever else — end up hearing in the summer and fall of 2024 that Kennedy is endorsing Biden and to try to keep Trump out of the White House. You don’t want to give away the store to the guy in pursuit of that goal, but you should be willing to give him something — some respect, some credit for raising awareness about atrazine, kudos for his work on solar power, maybe a review of the evidence in the RFK assassination. At least see what he wants.
Eric P: I’ve noticed that your commentary on affirmative action still mostly ignores the delta between a college applicant’s actual aptitude and how that applicant looks on paper. It cannot be true that Asian students are intrinsically wildly more academically adept than students of other races. Despite the affirmative action disadvantage, Asian students are still overrepresented at elite universities. I think it seems pretty reasonable to both sniff out parental/outside involvement and to instead find the diamond-in-the-rough types who are extremely bright but didn’t have the opportunities to extensively pad a résumé. In the employment market, this is seen as common sense.
I don’t know exactly what “intrinsically” more adept means in this context. I am familiar with this Bruce Sacerdote study of Korean-American adoptees, which suggests large non-genetic family influence on college selectivity:
I analyze a new set of data on Korean American adoptees who were quasi-randomly assigned to adoptive families. I find large effects on adoptees' education, income, and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families. Parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics. Outcomes such as drinking, smoking, and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment. Using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition, I find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment, 35 percent of the variation in college selectivity, and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior.
That’s an interesting finding, but obviously a very large majority of children are raised by their biological parents, so the question of whether that family influence operates through nature or nurture is of limited practical relevance. But I also don’t think that’s just “resume padding.”
If I look at my National Center on Education Statistics fast facts website, I see that the mean SAT score is 1050 and the Asian mean is 1229. Over on this page, they say the standard deviation is 217. Is that a huge difference? Your mileage may vary. But it’s consistent with the top 5% of SAT scorers being very disproportionately Asian relative to the population average.
Richard Weinberg: I'm old and disconnected with contemporary ideological speech, so I apologize for any possible offense in this question: In the old days, an “enslaver” was someone who enslaved people who had been “free,” like the West Africans who captured unfortunates for sale as slaves to Europeans. The term was reasonably expanded also to encompass the people who operated the slave ships, and those involved in sales in the New World. My impression is that the word is now used instead to refer to all those who used to be called “slaveholders.” Is this correct? If so, is it a sensible expansion of meaning, or is it mainly virtue signaling?
As I’ve written before, I think the practical function of all linguistic reform movements is just to draw in-group/out-group distinctions.
I wouldn’t call it “virtue signaling,” though, because it’s just the general nature of language change and not a particular attribute of this movement. As an example that you might sympathize with, consider an outdated term like “the Jews.” If you go back to 1973, there’s probably an old guy somewhere in Queens (let’s call him Archie Bunker) who’s talking about “the Jews,” “the Blacks,” “the Italians,” and so forth. He doesn’t particularly use those terms with malice, but it’s also true that he has a bunch of retrograde social attitudes. His son-in-law, Mike, with more progressive values says things like “Jewish people” and thinks Archie’s use of “the Jews” is gross. On some level Mike is just virtue-signaling here; the words aren’t what matters. But other people hear Archie and they hear Mike, and it becomes the case that younger and more progressive-minded people don’t say “the Jews,” just bigots and old guys. Over time, the old guys die and by 2023, if you hear someone saying “the Jews” this and “the Jews” that, you are pretty sure this person is vice-signaling — they are going out of their way to use derogated vocabulary.
If a 25-year-old white person told you tomorrow “I have a Negro neighbor,” you’d wonder what the hell was wrong with him. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with the term — civil rights movement leaders used it all the time — but because in the present-day context it’s just an incredibly weird thing to say.
So back to the present day. The intention behind the switch from “slaves” to “enslaved people” and from “slaveowners” or “slaveholders” to “enslavers” is to, in the former case, emphasize the humanity of the enslaved and, in the latter case, to emphasize the agency and moral badness of the enslavers. Is there some metaphysical truth whereby the words actually accomplish those things? Absolutely not. It’s a mostly arbitrary fad that started in academia and has trickled out from there into the nonprofit world, some museums, journalists who are younger than I am, etc. But it’s now entrenched enough that which word you use really is a signal about where you stand on some larger questions like “should we celebrate Braxton Bragg as an admirable figure?” or more broadly “was the ‘Reunion’ compromise whereby northern whites accepted the legitimacy of the Jim Crow system wise or wicked?”
I personally do not think it’s a good idea to put a lot of emphasis on this kind of linguistic politics, but it is what it is.
Lenzy T Jones: You talk about my former hometown, Chicago, quite a bit. So I’m curious to know why you see Chicago as an outlier compared to every other non-coastal big city? Like why has it succeeded when they failed and do you think they have a better shot at rebounding than those other cities?
Two reasons to write about Chicago a lot:
It’s a very large city so it’s worthy of attention.
Outside of the three cities I’ve lived in, it’s the city I’ve spent the most time in.
But it’s definitely not an outlier “compared to every other non-coastal big city” — consider Dallas. Or even in the midwest, Minneapolis. What I do think is true is that there’s a broad arc of cities sweeping from Milwaukee down to St. Louis over to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse that have generally been struggling a lot. The true outlier in this zone is probably Columbus, Ohio which used to be small and has become large during the broad period of Rust Belt decline. But Chicago is kind of the de facto capital of this region of the United States, and it did manage to keep its head above water in a way that Detroit and Cleveland and Akron and St. Louis did not.
I think the shorthand explanation for why is “really gigantic cities have cool amenities that make them stand out,” but per my posts on the subject, I now think Chicago is seriously imperiled in part because of this broader regional weakness.
Daniel: I teach High School Economics and had two questions related to my work with students.
First, how useful is the quantity theory of money to understanding inflation? Does the quantity theory of money, coupled with the Milton Friedman’s oft-quoted line that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” actually create a misconception about the causes of inflation? If you were teaching economics to high school students, for example, would learning about QTM give the students a deeper understanding of inflation a mismatch between production and spending?
Second, what’s the most important thing students need to know currently about monetary policy? Is it still worthwhile to teach students about open market operations or the reserve ratio?
I think quantity theory is a good entry point into the subject. What would you do if you had more money? You’d buy more stuff and increase your standard of living. So if Jerome Powell printed up $5,000 and handed it to you, you’d be pretty happy. So why not print up a couple trillion dollars and hand $5,000 to everyone? Well, if everyone rushed out to try to buy more stuff, prices would rise and we wouldn’t actually end up with more stuff. But then you ask yourself, is that always the case? What if there were lots of unemployed workers and idle equipment and production could easily expand? In that case, you might get some inflation, but you’d also get a rise in real output.
Back to the inflationary scenario. In terms of Friedman’s dictum, if you did the money-printing and then prices went up, you’d see profit margins rise. A lot of people would say this shows that “greed” and profiteering are the real cause of inflation, but Friedman’s point would be that money-printing was the deeper root cause. Conversely, if unemployment were high, people would say the unemployed are lazy or that automation is reducing demand for labor or whatever else, but the deeper root cause would be insufficient printing of money — with more money in circulation, those workers would be re-employed.
I would just caution students against taking the quantity theory too literally, because it turns out nobody can even agree on how to count the money supply. There are some important insights here, but the actual banking system is very complicated.
Evan Bear: One thing immigration proponents correctly say is that immigrants don't steal jobs, because they don't just increase the supply of workers, but also demand for workers. With inflation being high right now partly because of worker shortages, some writers have argued that immigration would help resolve the problem. Can those two arguments be squared, and if so, how?
Stepping back, I think that in general, the impulse to present supply-side solutions to inflation is misguided. If your rent drops, you might go on vacation more and push airfares up. Or if airfares drop, you might take a longer vacation and push hotel prices up. If childcare costs fall, you might have more kids and push up housing prices. “Lower prices don’t reduce inflation” is a very counterintuitive-sounding thing to say, but it’s why I prefer frameworks that focus on nominal spending and nominal income.
That being said, lower rents would be good. Cheaper airfare would be good. Cheaper childcare would be good. All of these things are good because they would increase the quantity of goods and services that people consume. In other words, they would raise living standards.
By the same token, an intelligent immigration policy is a beneficial supply-side reform that increases real output and raises living standards. I wouldn’t say it’s an anti-inflation policy. It’s an answer to the question “how do we boost economic growth in a world where we are trying to reduce demand?”
Wigan: I accidentally discovered that there is an online debate over pit bulls. Do you have a take?
On one side the data appears to show they are wildly overrepresented in serious and fatal dog attacks and even more overrepresented in dogs that end up in shelters (in my area it seems like 90%+). On the other side you have the argument that 90% of pit bulls will not attack anyone, or the top result from google which say pit bulls are overrepresented in shelters due to “pit bull stigma,” and / or that bad owners are especially attracted to them, and any type of dog can bite or attack.
I have no opinions about dogs that I care to share in a public forum.
Monkey staring at a monolith: If you were the dictator of a non-elite university getting a raft of new funding, where would you spend it to maximize impact? Hiring more staff, higher staff salaries, facilities, amenities, cutting tuition, scholarships? Something else?
There’s a cynical answer to this question and an idealistic answer. The idealistic answer is that I’m glad a raft of new funding came to my non-elite school because promoting effective education in non-elite contexts is a very underrated problem in higher education. I’m not 100% sure what I would invest that money in beyond the fact I would invest a good chunk of it in making sure to build measurement and evaluation into everything I do.
My goal in this idealistic vision is to remain a school that enrolls students with average to below-average SAT/ACT scores but does an above-average job of teaching them. My guess is that a key modality of action there is hiring faculty who are enthusiastic about this mission in a way that most college professors aren’t. But it’s fine if most college professors aren’t that jazzed-up about teaching average-to-below-average undergraduates as a mission in life — I’m just one school and I just need to recruit those professors who do find this appealing.
The cynical answer, though, is that I want to climb the college rankings, and that’s achieved not primarily by improving the quality of instruction but by improving the quality of your applicants. I think you mostly achieve that by investing your money in merit scholarships and nicer amenities, which is in turn part of the reason why college costs keep rising. By the same token, though, this is the strategy almost every school is pursuing. To differentiate the product a bit more, I think it would be smart to dabble in some “anti-woke” branding which could let you punch above your weight in recruiting students. Again, not because most students are interested in this, but because if even a relatively tiny fraction of students are interested in it, that gives you a useful differentiating factor.
Isaac: In last week's mailbag you mentioned the “larger framework that incentivizes middle-class savings and wealth building almost entirely through the vehicle of opaque subsidies for owner-occupied housing. I think we could do a lot better than that as a national savings strategy.” What specifically would you prefer? And how can we get from here to there?
There are two big tax preferences specifically for owner-occupied housing wealth — the mortgage interest tax deduction, which people talk about a lot, and the partial exclusion of home sale profits from capital gains taxation, which people talk about less. You could eliminate both of those and slightly bump up the 0% capital gains tax bracket or cut the 15% rate slightly or create some kind of savings tax credit. The basic idea is to try to be more neutral between specifically encouraging middle-class people to save in the form of owning a home that they live in versus owning a diverse stock portfolio.
Why care about this? Well, according to the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (that’s the most up-to-date one), the median household had assets of about $204,000, of which about $180,000 is equity in their primary residence.
That encourages people to be very, very risk-averse about anything that could have a negative impact on the value of their home. That in turn encourages restrictions on the actual supply of homes, which has the perverse impact of making the overall supply of housing wealth lower rather than higher. By contrast, when people own a diverse portfolio of shares of stock, they don’t think to themselves “now I should lobby Congress to prevent any new startups from forming because that will protect the value of my equity investment in old companies.” If they did, we’d have a big problem. But they don’t, in part because when you have a diverse portfolio of stocks, you clearly benefit from overall economic growth, even if a dynamic economy hurts some particular companies that you own. So we’d have a healthier political economy if we, at the margin, had somewhat more renters and somewhat smaller houses and everyone owned more stock instead.
Brian: Who is the best Democratic president in your lifetime?
I think Obama. Biden’s presidency is still happening, though, so he could pass him.
David: On the Weeds you once said that you were not “a passionate gun control person.” Has that changed at all? If so why?
Somewhat related. How do you feel about the Ja Morant suspension? Obviously, unless the union can stop it, the NBA can suspend Ja for acting kind of dumb but it is a very large suspension for doing nothing illegal.
I write some different version of my gun control take every once in a while, but I think it really comes down to progressives underrating the extent to which shootings are done by people who are already prohibited from owning firearms.
Now, what conservatives miss is that lax gun laws do encourage more homicide because there is a divergence of guns from the licit to illicit markets. The gun control people are correct that if every state adopted New York’s gun laws, we would have fewer murders — and this is in fact why New York has fewer murders than Florida or Texas. That said, New York still has plenty of murders, and it’s not because the gun laws aren’t strict enough. It’s because enforcing the rules against illegal gun-carrying is a nontrivial logistical problem. I think we would have a much healthier country if both sides would at least acknowledge these broad descriptive facts.
Thomas: Why has the narrative stuck that the middle class is shrinking even as data show that to the extent that it’s true, they’re moving upward out of the middle class? Why are some people (particularly though not exclusively on the left) so invested in the idea that America is in decline? Why does the Squad like to make people’s livelihoods sound more precarious than they actually are?
I’m feeling cranky today so instead of answering your question, I’m going to complain.
I’ve been thinking lately about how people are awfully selective in identifying who it is that holds The Bad Opinion for any given value of The Bad Opinion.
Just earlier today I was reading some work from the national conservative group American Compass which developed something they call The Cost of Thriving Index, which is supposed to prove that the middle class is shrinking. They had an event this week with Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and others to talk about this idea and how to fix it. So is the myth of middle-class shrinkage a Squad problem or is it a conservative nostalgia problem? Or is it both?
dysphemistic treadmill: Do you support or oppose the municipal regulation of AirBnb-like short-term rentals?
What the anti-Airbnb people get right is that supply and demand matter to housing markets. Airbnb raises the demand for housing units, which presses up the price, so you can reduce prices by banning or otherwise restricting Airbnb.
By the same token, of course, you could lower rents by making it illegal for left-handed people to live in your city. You might think that’s unfair in a way that banning Airbnb isn’t, that banning lefties is kinda like doing racism. So you could do something more neutral like saying that in order to live in your city you have to learn to recite Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” by heart. Anyone could accomplish that (it’s a short poem), but it would create a barrier that reduces housing demand and therefore rents. Or you might think that this is a pointless and economically costly way to accomplish the goal.
I think having a lot of people want to visit your city is good. Whether they stay in a hotel or an Airbnb, they are growing your tax base, providing customers to your retail establishments, supporting the existence of a thriving network of cultural amenities, and otherwise creating economic benefits. In general, a thriving economy creates upward pressure on housing prices, and the solution is to eliminate regulatory curbs to construction so as to ensure that economic growth is maximally win-win. In the same spirit, I think taxing Airbnb rentals makes sense (every city I’m familiar with has taxed hotel stays forever) to ensure the gains are widely spread. But Airbnb should be broadly welcomed.
C-man: Why is Freddie DeBoer so obsessed with dunking on you?
You’d have to ask him. I think he’s a pretty persuasive writer on non-Yglesias subjects, but he has some kind of weird hangup about me. I used to enjoy internet feuds but now that I’m in my 40s, I try not to get into that kind of thing.
