Kevin Burke

Nearly every public school teacher in the USA belongs to a teachers’ union. The unions have big lobbies in Congress, and donate lots of money to legislators, so they are favorable to the union agenda, which happens to be, keeping current members of the union employed. The teachers unions are responsible for laws that make it extremely difficult to fire teachers who receive tenure, and it only takes teachers two years to be granted tenure in most states. They also require that new teachers get certification, increasing the cost of entering the profession, even though education degrees have little effect on teacher performance. They are also responsible for a pay structure which rewards teachers for getting college degrees and for experience, neither of which correlates very well with teaching success. They oppose school choice, which would allow more parents to send their children to private school (or neighboring public schools) and provide competition for the public school system.

The end result is that the teaching profession is resistant to any force which would make it better. In part because successful teachers are not rewarded, mediocre teachers are comfortable and there’s no incentive to improve performance anywhere.

The obvious losers are the kids, especially poor kids, who are receiving a worse education than they could get, and dropping out of high school in large numbers (the nationwide graduation rate in 2006 was 69.2). I’m not saying that we can get students to like school if we encourage better teaching (our brains are not designed for thinking), but we might be able to improve on the percentage of Americans that can accurately summarize data from a table (currently, 11%), compete in the modern workforce, and lift themselves onto a higher income track. The teachers unions will tell you they support “education,” but that’s wrong – they only support education as much as it helps keeps union teachers in jobs. That’s why unions exist.

So when the new head of the Education Department, Arne Duncan, gives a speech to one of the largest teachers’ unions in the country, making the tiniest hints at positive steps we can make, to improve our nation’s education system and give our kids, and other people’s kids, a more prosperous future.

The LA Times article included these gems:

A group in the California section of the audience booed loudly when Duncan praised Green Dot Public Schools, which independently operates more than a dozen schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District with union contracts.

Green Dot has increased attendance at its schools, made its campuses more safe, boosted graduation and college attendance rates, and standardized test scores. The founder, Steve Barr, “has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools,” resulting in Green Dot’s takeover, and subsequent improvement of, a horrible Los Angeles high school. Not to mention that Green Dot is one of the only independent school systems that actually uses unionized teachers. But rather than use their success as a model for our own failing schools, let’s boo and hiss.

Not that the crowd was won over Thursday. “Quite frankly, merit pay is union-busting,” said one educator to loud applause during the question-and-answer period.

AHHHHHHH!!! I agree that merit pay is union busting. But if you’re a good teacher, what is there to be afraid of? And why isn’t the half of the teacher union that contains good teachers saying, “Yes let’s have merit pay, please! I want to get paid what I’m worth!”

Union members are not dumb; it’s an easy mistake to accuse people that you disagree with as lacking in general intelligence. They’ve found excellent ways to protect their members, ensuring they have good benefits, high salaries, and protection against getting fired. It’s natural for them to continue to protect their interest, and even to develop rationalizations for why teachers union policies are good for the country, and for education in general. But reading about the reaction to Arne Duncan’s speech makes me feel sick to my stomach. He’s trying to help, but faces massive opposition from dinosaurs like the teachers unions. Let’s hope they go extinct soon.

This topic arose while we were dipping delicious homemade cookies into whole fat milk – the best 5 food combinations of all time. The rules are that the foods have to be enjoyable alone but much better together (so, PBJ was out because no one eats plain peanut butter, etc). The list is American-centric but, in no particular order:

Chicken and waffles
Wine and cheese
Pizza and beer
Bacon and anything
Cookies and milk

What do you think?

Every address on the Internet has an associated IP address, a series of four numbers connected by three periods. For example, Google owns the range of IPs from 74.125.0.0 to 74.125.255.255. Typing the IP address into your user bar works – try it by typing 74.125.1.1 into your address bar, and the Google homepage comes up. We could browse the Internet this way, but it’s a really crappy way to browse – it would be harder to remember web addresses if they were all numbers and harder for companies to advertise – they’d have to focus really hard on getting you to remember their IP address.

And yet this is something that we do with phone numbers every day. Once upon a time, phone numbers were analog – you had to dial ‘1′ before a non-local call, so the router knew where to send the call – and the second digit of the area code had to be ‘1′ or ‘0,’ while the second digit of the exchange (the middle set of 3 numbers in a 10 digit number) was never ‘0′ or ‘1′ so the phone company could send your call. But now, everyone has mobile phone numbers, and it’s just as easy to dial New York from a mobile phone as it is to dial my next door neighbor. I can also send text messages to crazy numbers like 37523, like Verizon wanted me to do to enter some contest at the Oakland A’s game on Saturday. My point is, why are we still using the actual numbers? Why can’t we use screen names, which everyone agrees stand for a number, like we do with IP addresses? How much easier would it be to, instead of writing down your number at a bar, to say, Call me at “kevinburke”? Or for businesses to say, Dial “Verizon” or “James Sokolove” – a simple message at the end of their ads?

We have a small attempt at this by bundling letters together on the keyboard (for example dial 1-800-FLOWERS), but when three letters are bundled together there are way fewer combinations, and the combinations have to be exactly seven characters long. One potential problem is this makes personal phone numbers much easier to remember and dial – your ex girlfriends and enemies would always know your screen name.

On a related note, digital cable and satellite companies still make you browse channels in their linear order, and remember that 038 means ESPN and 551 is HBO, with 200 channels in between that I never watch. That’s lunacy. I don’t watch more than ten channels – let me assign my favorites and arrange them on the screen horizontally as well as vertically, like the new Safari 4 homepage. This would make browsing a snap (although the cable companies may arrange the channels as they do to protect bundling their cable packages instead of offering a la carte channels).

Anyway, digital companies should embrace the freedom that new technology gives them.

The California government faces a $24 billion dollar shortfall. Here are some sensible proposals for helping cut the budget deficit, that will never happen.

#1. Charge market prices for utilities like water and electricity. Every other year, the State goes through a water shortage, or blackouts, because the state keeps the price of electricity and water artificially low, encouraging wasteful uses for water, like maintaining golf courses in Palm Springs. If utilities were allowed to charge market prices for water, gas and electricity, we would never have shortages, the state could raise more revenue from taxes, and consumers would make smarter decisions about consumption of resources.

#2. Allow companies to sponsor government things. People are used to sponsorships and advertisements – hence Oracle Arena in Oakland, giant billboards lining 101 in SF, even the school I attend, named for Donald McKenna. Why not allow companies to sponsor government operations? The MTA in New York is trying to sell naming rights to a subway stop, which, in an ideal world they would not have to do but should, because that gives them more revenue. California should consider the same. Unfortunately, CCSF just tried to let people sponsor courses that were about to be canceled, but the Board of Trustees is considering canceling the plan, which, in my opinion, is such a stupid decision to be grounds for throwing all of them out.

#3. Let public transit sink or swim. Public transit is, around the world, a money pit. In California less than 1% of all trips are made on public transit. Furthermore, subsidies for public transit average about 45 cents per passenger mile, while federal subsidies for highways average about 0.1 to 0.3 cents per passenger mile, which is not even a close comparison. With subsidies making up so much of public transit’s budget, their routes and ideas for new lines are political decisions – a Congressman wants the public transit to run to his district, or his mom’s house, etc. Furthermore, the subsidies make it impossible for private transit and bus companies to compete with public lines. Giant subsidies for public transit also mean that more money gets spent out of general transportation funds for public transit, rather than for highways, which are much more efficient.

I believe the government should let BART, Muni, LA Metro and the other lines to become nonprofit groups, responsible for raising revenue to match their costs. Then these companies would be forced to make business decisions – raise prices or close down lines that are unprofitable and focus on the lines that are making money. They would not build two new stations less than a mile from each other within five years, like they just did in Dublin/Pleasanton. The companies would have to figure out ways to keep worker salaries manageable. And the state would not have to subsidize these companies any more. 

(A quick caveat: BART is one of the best-run public transit companies in the country. And by best-run, I mean that people actually want to ride it, for the most part. In that case, it shouldn’t have much of an issue surviving without subsidy).

#4. Legalize and heavily tax marijuana. I don’t have much to add to this discussion, although the consumer benefit would far outstrip the revenue for the state. If you want to discourage something, tax it heavily – don’t ban it! The street price of marijuana is higher than it would be if it was illegal. All of the profits go to drug dealers, who use the money to invest in growing marijuana, which makes our ban part of the reason that the problem will never go away.

#5. Charge people fees for driving on the freeway. Traffic jams are terrible for three reasons. They waste time (and increase stress) for everyone that drives through them, they increase pollution, and they cause the whole region to become less desirable, because it takes longer to go places. This is because it’s free to drive on the highways, so everyone does, and everyone does so at times that are convenient for them, leading to massive backups. If it cost money to drive on the roads during peak use hours, people would reconsider their driving habits.

When London introduced congestion pricing earlier in the year, charging a fee for driving in the city center, overall traffic fell about 17 percent, but congestion fell 30 percent. My favorite example is SR 91 in Orange County, which was built by a private company because the regular highway was chock full of traffic but the local government had no money to build a new highway. There is no congestion on SR 91, because if there were traffic jams, fewer cars would pass through the toll plazas and the company would make less money. When there’s an accident, the company quickly sends a crew to move the car to the side of the road, to keep the cars flowing. While these services cost drivers in cash, they save money in time and frustration, because the highway is not congested. The state could sell off sections of highway to private firms, like the city of Chicago did with the Chicago Skyway (an immediate $1.8 billion cash inflow). Competition would ensure the tolls reflected the costs of maintaining and operating the highways.

#6. Raise sales taxes on socially damaging products. Alcohol served at bars (which leads to drunk driving), cigarettes (health problems, secondhand smoke), gasoline (pollution), fast food (obesity and other health issues), bullets not used on hunting grounds or firing ranges (which lead to murder, accidental discharge, etc), fall into the category of products which, when consumed, impose a cost on the public at large.

Most economists would support these proposals, but they will use the rest of their breath to tell you that most of these are regressive taxes. Higher costs for gasoline, transit, and utilities will hurt poor people more than they will rich people. This could be offset by a decrease in the income tax for the poor (a greater incentive to work) and an increase in income taxes on the rich, who have enjoyed historically low income taxes.

Do a google search for “$10 billion.” The results also match with “$10 million,” which is a smaller number by a factor of 1,000. Helping people conflate the two is not good for the public.

Many students promote their events by handing out colorful flyers outside student dining halls. Most students will do anything to avoid taking one; successful defenses include mumbling, faking a cellphone conversation, or staring at the ground, essentially the same tactics people use when the homeless ask for money. While I don’t often give money to the homeless I always take flyers for three reasons.

1. Most students hand out flyers within easy reach of a trash can – a tactical mistake. My time isn’t worth very much either, which makes the cost of taking a flyer low.

2. The odds I will be interested in following up are low, but the potential benefit is large. Flyers expose you to a wider range of activities than normal, like reading a newspaper.

3. If you’ve ever had to hand out flyers, especially at a large school you know how soul crushing it can be to see people refuse to look you in the eye and ignore you. By taking a flyer or looking interested you can give a person a big boost.

Today’s failure of the mainstream media is inserting “balance” into a story where there is none. The media often gives groups the appearance of legitimacy by acting as if some issue is open for debate, when in fact the issue clearly favors one side or the other. As George Orwell often wrote, language is extremely important in framing issues, and a falsely balanced story can give readers a skewed perception of reality.

Example #1 is this NYT story on the continued unrest in Iran. The “balance” in the story is that the Mousavi camp disputes the election results, and the Ahmadinejad camp, which won the election, calls it legitimate. All of the evidence the NYT presents about the disputed election is from the Mousavi camp, which may lead the reader to conclude that their protesting is all sour grapes. But we know the election was thrown. Ahmadinejad won, in every province and region of Iran, between 66 and 69 percent of the vote, with over 85% of those eligible to vote casting a vote. Not only is that impossible (the more people who tend to vote in an election, the closer it gets), but Iran’s own elections commission called the results illegitimate. Furthermore, the early returns suggested a win for Mousavi, and the Interior Ministry even called to congratulate him on his victory, and then abruptly changed course and announced wildly different results.

The Mousavi camp is not rioting in the streets because they’re mad their candidate lost; they’re mad because some conspirators have fixed the election and their candidate, in all likelihood, won over 50% of the vote. But the impression you get from the article is that one side is simply whining while the other side rejoices. In the interest of “balance,” the NYT has given the Ahmadinejad position the appearance of legitimacy, when it’s clearly the case that he did not actually win the election. Readers would come away from the article with a skewed perception of the rioters’ reasons for rioting.

Example #2 is the continued cowardice of the media on the issue of torture in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Waterboarding is torture under the Geneva Convention, which we have signed. The United States has prosecuted several other governments and individuals for waterboarding, in statements which clearly label it “torture.” A waterboard is now prominently displayed in a museum in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge’s use of torture to elicit false confessions during the Vietnam War. Christopher Hitchens and Mancow Muller, who agreed to be waterboarded and each lasted less than ten seconds, agree that it is torture, as does Jesse Ventura (and do take time to watch those videos, as they are gut wrenching and prove the point more effectively than words). We have tortured detainees in other ways, including depriving them of sleep (by chaining their ankles to the wall) for days at a time, forcing them into cramped boxes, forcing them into public nudity, beating them, and so on. Nearly 100 inmates have died in US custody, some as a result of torture.

But the media continues to act as if the issue is in doubt, only because Republicans believe the issue to be in doubt, labeling all torture as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which suggests something a tough guy might do to you if you get in trouble with the casinos or the Mafia. This is despite the fact that when other people do the things the USA has done in its prisons, the media calls it torture. This is done in the interest of “balance,” because Democrats call it torture but Republicans don’t.

Imagine that some senator woke up tomorrow and declared that they believed that the circumference of a circle was three times the diameter, not 3.14159 etc, because the Bible says so. If this is news, “balance” requires the reporter to say that “The senator presented evidence that the circumference is three, while Harry Reid declared this preposterous and that the true value is 3.14″ or some such thing. Nowhere in the article does the statement’s actual truth get evaluated. Meanwhile you have a whole group of readers who leave the article believing that there is real doubt surrounding the ratio of a circumference to the diameter, and that we just don’t know what the value is. The MSM can’t just call the Senator’s position bullshit, because of “balance.” Hopefully that will change soon.

Tommy Craggs of Deadspin has an excellent new post up on why Scott Boras, the most hated agent in sports, is not actually that evil. Currently, teams take turns selecting players they like, which means that the player can only sign with that team, has to live where the team tells him, can get traded to another team at any time and have to move, etc. This limits players’ ability to earn wages fitting their ability, because if they don’t like the offer given to them, they can’t start talking to another team. Boras has been more effective than any other agent at finding ways to make his players’ salaries more closely track their actual earning potential, either through making them eligible for free agency earlier, or by squeezing teams for more money than they usually give. This has made Boras the enemy of every GM, and disliked among the public. Given that Boras has made many teams shell out significantly larger amounts of money for their draftees than they would normally have to, it makes sense that he is disliked by most fans, but it is a shame, from a libertarian perspective.

The draft system is another example of a place where America has less economic and political freedom than Europe; in Europe every player is a free agent, and can sign with any team at any time.

Consider a talented 18-year-old player. He’s probably spent every day for the past eight or nine years working hard on his baseball skills, in the batting cages, taking grounders and fly balls. His parents have put in a ton of money so he can play on traveling teams all summer and have good coaching. The result is that this kid is five-tool fierce, dominating the local high school league, hitting towering home runs, etc. Everyone thinks he’s on pace for the major leagues. All of the effort and time he’s put in are worth something. But because of the draft, he must negotiate a take-it-or-leave-it contract with exactly one MLB team, and put in time in the minors before breaking the majors, becoming a free agent and being eligible to get paid his share. The problem with the current system is he can get hurt at any time and not be able to play, and get dumped out of the baseball system with no money – there’s no insurance against this, but there would be if young players got paid more.

If we allowed players full freedom to sign contracts with teams  our sports leagues would closely resemble Europe’s. Players’ earnings would increase, at every level, but especially among talented youth. The teams with the highest revenues (the Yankees, Red Sox, Braves) or teams with deep-pocketed owners would gain a huge competitive advantage, as they can afford better players at every level of development. In the English Premier League, the top four teams, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool, dominate the standings every season; we should expect a similar result in the MLB. Teams in small markets and teams with stingy owners would suffer, especially because we have such a good statistical understanding of baseball now that there are hardly any more inefficiencies to exploit. For fans 20 of 30 teams in the MLB, a World Series title would be something that occurs once a century, if that.

Teams would also construct baseball academies in the United States as alternatives to high school and college, and sign young players to stay there, to take classes but mostly to play baseball. Most MLB teams already have academies in the Dominican Republic, which is one of the few areas where all players are immediately eligible for free agency (Boras considered moving one of his clients to the Dominican to make him eligible). All good Premier League teams fund youth academies to develop young talent; every good player in England goes through the academy system, not the regular high school system.

Furthermore, we should expect some teams and owners to go bankrupt. Spending enough on players to win the World Series would surely require owners to make a loss on their investment. While some owners go bankrupt now, their ability to do this is limited by the salary cap, revenue sharing and other factors.

The net result is that players would have more freedom to pursue wages that pay them what they are worth, which they deserve, like anyone who puts in years worth of time and energy to become good at something. But the competitiveness of the MLB would probably decrease, and because the league has only a few rewards in place (making the playoffs, the pennant, the World Series) this would spell mediocrity and more frustration for smaller teams’ fans. But the MLB should make this tradeoff, because it’s not fair to the players to have their wages held down. So we should praise Boras.

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA.

From an essay by Scott Aaronson, “Who Can Name the Bigger Number?” The essay traces the history of really big non-infinite numbers, and explains why it’s important that we try to conceive these numbers.

There’s a widespread belief among people who say they care about the environment that if only every person, and corporation, cared about the environment as they do, we would solve our environmental problems. Certainly they believe that by purchasing carbon offsets, voting for high speed rail and expensive public transit, shopping at Whole Foods/purchasing locally, buying Priuses/Vespas/used cars, investing in solar panels or ethanol, and/or recycling (which does provide benefits), that they are 1) making a difference in the fight against global warming, and 2) that if everyone were to make the same sacrifices, the world would be safe from melting ice caps.

I believe that these actions, and the beliefs that follow, have a negligible effect on global warming, and may ultimately be damaging to the problem of stopping the rise in global temperatures.

(There is little doubt that the Earth’s temperature is rising and that our pollution is causing this rise in temperature. See here).

1) For most people, it’s much more important to signal care for the environment than actual care for the environment. Good will toward the environment tends to have very visible signs. The government wants to construct new high speed rail lines, wind farms, and have cars running on ethanol. As one of six billion polluters on Earth, I am not going to observe any difference in the Earth’s temperature whether I drive a Prius, Hummer, used car, or bicycle. The social benefit from signaling care for the environment outweighs the observed environmental benefit.

2) It is nearly impossible to put a price on “benefit to the environment.” Many people act as though helping the environment is worth any price, like the tagline in the Visa commercial. As Arnold Kling writes,

Once you stray from using market prices, you can have all sorts of unintended consequences. How many gallons of fresh water should you be willing to use up to save a pound of carbon emissions? Do you know how much more water is used in the manufacturing of biofuels compared with the refining of gasoline? The whole point of market prices is to do these calculations for us.

The usual result is overpayment for little actual benefit.

3) When the laws are set up so that the cost of pollution is low, it makes economic sense for people and firms to pollute. The environmental problem is known in economic terms as the Tragedy of the Commons, which I will explain in terms of fishing. Fish are a valuable resource that live in the ocean, a common resource. A certain number of fish need to survive each year to spawn, and maintain the population. But without any regulation, fishermen will “over-fish” and destroy the fish population, and their livelihood in the process. Like the scorpion and the frog, they can’t help it. Let’s say you’re a commercial fisherman. If you fish with all your might you can sell $50,000 worth of fish. Your equipment (boat, fuel, etc) costs $20,000 per year, and you need to support a family of four. Now, an environmentalist comes along and tells you about the problems of overfishing, and that we must save the fish. He says that every fisherman needs to fish only $35,000 of fish per year. But you can’t do that, because you can’t support a family on $15,000 a year, so you and every other fisherman continue to fish, even though in the long run your livelihood is doomed. We are like the fisherman – we continue to pollute because it is cheapest for us to do so, even though in the long run society is worse off.

Furthermore, firms have one goal, and one goal only: to maximize profits for their shareholders, by providing services or goods that people want at the lowest possible cost. Environmentalists tend to view this as evidence of the evilness of firms, but it’s not environmental evil; it’s indifference. Extra costs for helping the environment, in the form of “social obligations,” will raise a firm’s costs, reduce its profits, and make it less competitive relative to firms that are not worried about the environment. I believe most current environmental efforts by firms are merely for good public relations, as in #1.

4) If people think their voluntary efforts are actually making a difference, they may be less likely to support the massively expensive regulations that we are going to need to actually solve the problem. As Richard Posner writes,

If people believe that voluntary efforts will suffice, there will be no political pressure to incur the heavy costs that will be necessary to avert the risk of catastrophic climate change.

The people who are most likely to buy carbon offsets, go local, support the environment, are the people who we need most to support useful legislation on the environment. If they are content to “avoid cognitive dissonance by exaggerating the practical efficacy of largely symbolic gestures, such as purchasing carbon offsets,” as Posner says, they will be less likely to push for the deeper sacrifices that we need to make to save the planet.

The solution to the problem is to place a higher price on pollution, so that people and firms make environmentally beneficial decisions as a normal result of cost-benefit analysis. Prices are an unbelievable tool for aggregating costs. The price of milk tells you exactly how much it costs to raise a cow, milk it, bottle the milk, drive it to the store, and pay someone to stock it, without having to worry about how much the individual components cost. If pollution is adequately priced, firms just include its cost in their prices, and consumers do not have to second-guess market prices, produce their own benefits of estimates, research pollution costs on their own, or engage in high-cost low-benefit environmental signaling.