The Whole Story

Matt Yglesias points out something interesting that is often overlooked when we discuss important people: place.  He refers to a concept in the economics of cities known as "agglomeration externalities", "basically the idea that individuals and firms obtain productivity boosts by clustering together."  He sees the ways in which a Steve Jobs could not have existed outside of his particular place and time.

"As a sophomore in high school, for example, Jobs worked at an electronics store called Haltek that Isaacson describes as “a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard.” The presence of an excellent electronics stores is helpful to the young Jobs as he builds his skills. But there would be no gigantic electronics specialty store except in a place with an unusually high concentration of people interested in electrical engineering. The presence of the engineers creates the market for the store, which drives the interest of the younger generation of engineers."

These patterns exist throughout history.   Often emerging organically, serendipitously, they tend to gain their own momentum, as others are attracted to what has become something important.  Aside from no small element of happenstance, this process can be best explained by the interaction of human and social capital.  In Silicon Valley, individuals with the human capital - the educated, success-minded parents, combined with the concentration of technological resources, created a tinderbox of creativity and enthusiasm for building new technologies.

In America there seems a curious resistance to this notion of social collectivity.  There seems a preference for the vision of solitary genius and individualism.  One wonders how much this has to do with the immigrant experience, and the forced severance of connections to our past.  Of course, despite the attractive notion of the immigrant going it alone, succeeding on his own merits, this is rather the exception to the rule.  The history of immigrant communities is one of networking, cooperation and group goal orientation.  Where individuals have succeeded without family help, they have done so despite the odds.


And yet, the fact remains that America is incredibly heterogeneous, with great generational mobility, and a national character defined in no small part by communal isolation.  A number of known cognitive biases could contribute to this tendency to see American success in isolation, removed from communal context.  A basic impulse of the sentiment could be a desire to deflect the painful experience - the anxiety, the stress - of "going it alone", by remembering events as not just better than they were, but as positively productive.  In this sense, one's trials and tribulations are not seen merely as unfortunate handicaps, but actual necessities for personal success.

This is certainly not a valid model of social activity.  Success is almost always built from human and social capital resources.  To the degree that it is not, more often has to do with good fortune.  Now, there certainly is an element of success-inducing tribulation.  Being forced to make do with little can be profoundly inspiring of creativity and tenacity.  But tribulation alone does not equate with success - that is surely absurd.  A crucial component in leveraging tribulation is sufficient human and social capital to allow for both its weathering and subsequent creative transcendence.  To a large degree, this capital is formed by an individual's family - how he is raised, but also by community resources and availability of alternative options.  Where there is success, no matter how devoid of opportunity an environment may appear at first glance, there will always exist an underlying story of human and social capital.

The Good Old Days

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post on things that had once been considered acceptable, but that are now not.  He comes up with:

1. Spitting on the sidewalk.
2. Drunk driving.
3. Wife-beating.
4. Most indoor smoking.
5. Ethnic denigration.
6. Not cleaning up after your dog.
7. Not wearing seatbelts or bike/motorcycle helmets.
8. Coming back to work drunk after lunch.
9. Taking sexual advantage of workplace and classroom power.
10. Purchasing sexual services.

One of his commenters observed that many of these could have been ripped straight from Tea Party-Republican-Limbaughian talking points.  Considering how much progressivism is about social change, and conservatism is about the opposite, it's a profound insight.

I imagined the right-wing list would be things that are not now acceptable because of wimpy political correctness, and that should be acceptable again.

It made the list a little easier:

1. Treating women as mere sex objects.
2. Defining masculinity by how “tough” a man is.
3. Acknowledging that there are many valuable non-European cultures in America.
4. Treating gays as decent human beings.
5. Accepting that atheists or non-believers, or God-forbid… Muslims(!), can be moral, decent people.
6. Caring for and respecting the environment.
7. Recognizing that foreign citizens have human rights.
8. Making accommodations for the disabled.
9. Acknowledging that might does not make right, and that expressing one’s feelings is often the clearest path to peace.
10. Peace.
11. The idea of the unconscious.
12. The concept that tradition isn’t an argument by itself.

This could go on for quite a while.  An item surely to be included on the list ought to be corporal punishment, something the right has been pining to return to for decades, and upon the lack of which it blames all manner of ills.

Not Free to Bully

The Michigan senate's passage of an amendment to an anti-bullying bill that allowed for a religious exemption is drawing criticism.  The full ammended text is as follows:

“This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil and parent or guardian.”

I'm not as convinced as others that this gives open season to bullying.  But I do agree it is very dangerous.  However, Neal McCluskey at CATO apparently doesn't.  He thinks it's an issue of free speech.

"[A]s odious as one might find the religious beliefs of many people, they are entitled to freedom of speech the same as anyone else. That is a basic American right, and all the desire in the world to protect kids from hearing things that might make them feel badly must not change that. Abridge that right, and any speech becomes imperiled if a majority simply deems it unacceptable."

Actually, students aren't as entitled to free speech as anyone else.  Kids in public school do not have the right to say whatever they want to anyone.  It isn't a black/white issue, but courts have consistently found that schools have considerable authority to limit student speech.  It's worth remembering that students are required by law to be in school, and would thus in a sense be "required" to listen to speech that they otherwise would be able to avoid. 

It's also worth remembering that kids can be downright evil to each other, and do things to one another that would get them serious jail time as adults.  Therefore we must have the utmost respect for the vulnerability of innocent students, who often face great peril on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, the worst bullying goes on out of sight of adults, and thus any kind of hate speech has a good chance of merely being the tip of a much more brutal and dangerous iceberg. Allowing verbal bullying to continue is not only cruel to individual students, but it paves the way for the escalation of much worse.

Closing the Crime-Gap

Matt Yglesias puts his foot in his mouth when he suggests that progressives wouldn't complain if we talked about corrupt, abusive, "bad" cops the way neo-liberal education reformers talk about bad teachers.

What I have in mind, of course, is perennial internecine fighting over K-12 education policy in the United States. This is obviously a complicated subject. But my experience is that a lot of people on the left, rather than arguing the merits of the issue, seem to take it as self-evidently un-progressive to try to improve the performance of a public agency in part by doing things that the people who work at the agency don’t like. When it comes to big city police departments, I think a much healthier attitude exists. Not one that says cops shouldn’t have rights in the workplace or that “cops are bad,” but one that recognizes a substantial tension between the liberal desire to have police departments work well and the police officers’ desire for high levels of job security and low levels of accountability. 

The analogy is terrible for countless reasons.  Firstly, the "Bad" teacher, as the term has come to suggest, generally isn't corrupt or abusive.  In the main though, the analogy tries to compare police abuse with teacher efficacy, assuming that both represent the efficacy of their respective institutional missions.  The criticisms of neo-liberal education reform are not that we shouldn't hold abusive teachers accountable, but rather that the assumption that the achievement gap in America is driven by bad teaching is wrong - just as it would be wrong to assume that different crime rates in different neighborhoods are caused by bad policing. 

As far as I know, no one is in favor of protecting abusive teachers.  Rather, protection is sought for institutions such as tenure and unions, both of which provide a foundation for grassroots, bottom-up teaching practices and sustenance of professional community and solidarity, something very important in a field in which so much is sacrificed for the common good.

But the analogy of teaching and policing is actually quite illustrative, in ways that Yglesias obviously missed.

If we talked about crime like we talked about education,

• we'd blame America's high crime rate on bad policing and their unions. 
• we'd spend roughly the same resources on wealthy neighborhood policing as we do on poor neighborhoods. 
• we'd then say to people who point out that socioeconomics drives crime are just "making excuses", and call it the "soft bigotry of low expectations". 
• we'd begin shutting down police departments in favor of private contractors. 
• we'd seriously consider giving people vouchers to spend on private security.
• we'd talk about closing the crime-gap through better police training, punitive evaluations and performance pay

just for fun: In my last post, I whipped up a little graphic detailing the correlation between neighborhood income, property values and school performance. 

How much do you want to bet it also correlates with crime?
Yearly average crime rate (per 100,000)
Santa Monica:       282
Downey:               318
Huntington Park:   513

Well, what do you know?

Child Development in America

A common problem in education debate is the failure to make a distinction between demographic populations.  Deborah Meier recounts what she has witnessed in the past 40 years of education:

I entered teaching in 1963 during the early civil rights movement and allied myself with a growing new progressivism. Sometimes called "open education," its advocates were given a warm reception in some places of power for about five years, maybe 10. By 1985, I thought we were on the cutting edge of a transformative movement. I was dead wrong. We were declared to be too slow in showing test success and our vision hard to mandate from the top down. The New Reformers decided on a different path, which they have pursued now for between 20 and 30 years of unprecedented attention and resources.

Performance map of Los Angeles, CA

Open education requires in children high levels of development in a variety of spheres (emotion, cognitive, language, etc.). Yet American communities are developmentally quite diverse, generally arrayed across this spectrum along socio-economic lines. The difference between communities with high levels of child development and those with low levels is quite extraordinary. In one classroom 90% of students might have a minimal vocabulary, uneducated parents who work for low pay, and live in a neighborhood in close proximity to drugs and violence.  In another classroom 90% of students might have an enormous vocabulary, highly educated, professional parents, and live in a safe neighborhood with access to many highly academically stimulating activities. Thus, in some communities, Open Education is going to be much more successful, as it falls within the boundaries of the childrens' respective zones of proximal development, while in others the students aren't as prepared for it.

Yet, as Deborah points out, the alternative - rote, scripted - education, hasn't been dramatically more successful either, even if it is at least more attentive to traditional academic skill-building.

But after more than two decades of these New Reforms—more and more testing, higher stakes, charters, and mayoral control—we do know some things for sure:
(a) Test scores have not risen, and the test-score gap hasn't narrowed.
(b) We have moved further away from building a profession that retains and uses its experienced teachers well.
(c) We are witnessing unimaginable hours spent on test-prepping and a narrowing of the rest of the curriculum while cheating is being ignored and teachers are being demoralized. Hardly trivial side effects. 

(Another critique would be that it is overly cold, authoritarian, punitive and dehumanizing, especially for students who come from communities that don't model the sort of "life-long learning" and joy of academic discovery that school is in part designed to inspire.)

I think the real question, and one with no easy answer, is how exactly to differentiate our provision of education to such developmentally distinct communities. Of course, these are generalities, and there will always be diversity within communities. This would be one of the problems in designing a policy of proper differentiation. But the fact remains that our neighborhoods are designed to self-differentiate by socio-economics and class. Ignoring this fact, pretending that everyone in America is somehow, naturally "free" is harmful wishful thinking; it leads us away from seriously grappling with what is maybe the one fundamental goal of public education: how to properly ensure that every citizen grows up with access to developmental resources that allows him or her to be an equitable participant in our country.

Our traditional model has been one classroom, one teacher, one group of 25-35 students. Within this framework, we fiddle about with pedagogic strategies and interventions, yet the basic framework remains. Yet given the degree of developmental diversity across communities and schools, relying on this model for the entire developmental spectrum seems crazy. Any teacher who has taught at both ends of the spectrum (almost certainly in two different socio-economic communities) knows that these are two completely different teaching experiences. This is why unions scream when all teachers are expected to deliver equal outcomes. It's absurd.

Personally, I find Open Education model the absolute pinnacle of what education should be, encouraging in children self-reliance, skepticism, engagement and ultimately, joy of discovery that should last a lifetime. Yet to implement this in different communities, a different model must be used. I have theories as to what models might work, and they would be, in the short-term, rather expensive. But if all we really care about is results, they would ultimately be more than worth it.

A Greater Inequality

The Occupy Wall Street movement is no doubt about many things, but I think it could be said to be at its core about income inequality.   My greatest problem with income inequality may have less to do with actual equality of income, but rather the inequality of opportunity it represents.   

The ownership of capital gives one an advantage in a capitalist economy.  We can accept that a certain amount of private capital is necessary to a healthy, competitive, robust marketplace, as its incentive structure tends to foster innovation and efficiency, often towards the common good.  But this is not necessarily the case, as it can also hamper innovation and efficiency, generally as accumulated wealth tends to accrete into entrenched interests.

But something I think is often missing from this part of the discussion is the degree to which human capital also accretes and gives structural advantage to the few.  I recently wrote about this in response to Eric Cantor's evocation of his poor Jewish immigrant grandmother's overcoming poverty to live out the American Dream through her grandchildren.  He speaks - as so many often do - of poverty in purely financial terms, as if financial capital is the only leverage point in capitalist society, and it is possible for anyone without it to begin to accumulate his or her own leverage.

Yet there is another, more powerful form of capital that needs to be leveraged in order to even begin to compete in a capitalist economy.  This is human capital.  What Cantor didn't mention (although was implicit in his narrative), was the amount of human capital his immigrant grandmother possessed.  Malcolm Gladwell raises the point in his book, Outliers, that Jewish immigrants in early 20th century New York tended to have access to human capital that other immigrants, such as Italian and Irish, did not.  Ironically, because of their oppression and marginalization in European society, they did not have the "luxury" of relying upon low-skill labor in the countryside, and instead were forced to develop skill-intensive occupations such as tailoring, jewelry, etc.  This provided an enormously useful form of capital they could then leverage in America, as such corollary skills, such as accounting and business-management, enabled them to make a profitable new life.

The problem the notion of human capital poses to the traditional economic debate is one of human behavior.  It makes a case that even in a relatively competitive and "free" market, even when you overcome the problem of access to capital, you're still faced with the dilemma of human means, where it simply isn't the case that "everyone" can succeed, because everyone does not have access to the same levels of human capital - that which allows them to leverage themselves in the economy, their ability to work hard, play by the rules, learn new skills, apply their knowledge, have productive social interactions, plan for the future, delay gratification, etc.  These are all skills that have little to do with inherited traits, but rather what they have learned from family, friends, neighbors and cultural interactions.

Most damning of all, just like financial capital human capital has a tendency to accrete.  Not only is the capital self-leveraging (healthy self-esteem = determination = study skills = more knowledge = more self esteem), but it brings up those around it, whether children or friends and neighbors, or schoolmates.  And because property values tends to create communities of homogeneous financial capital, so too do they create communities of homogeneous human capital.  So you end up with communities either both low in financial and human capital, or high in financial and human capital.  The clearest evidence of this can be see in public schools, where academic progress, the product primarily of human capital, aligns almost perfectly with financial capital.

It is a fact that opportunity is a product of human capital.  Without these core skills, one has no real self-efficacy.  Thus, to the extent that American citizens are growing up in families and communities which are failing to provide them with human capital, all the objective opportunity in the world will be essentially inaccessible.  It is rather like dangling fruit just out of reach of one whose legs are simply not long enough to reach.

The situation is clearly unfair.  People are growing up without opportunity.  For them, there is no real American dream.  Likewise, there are those who have been privileged with an abundance of human capital, and have been able to leverage it into great wealth. The million dollar question is not whether this is fair (it obviously is not), but whether there is anything we as a society can do to help them.  Public education is a great first start.  Other social programs that aim to guarantee access to the means to build human capital are equally important.  But it remains to be seen how effective any of these programs can really be.

So the next question that must be asked is whether a sort of "palliative care" might be owed to those lacking both human capital itself, and for whatever reason the means to develop it.  First on this list might be access to health care.  Millions of Americans will be stuck in poverty wage jobs with no access to it.  They will not have the means to develop sufficient human capital in the foreseeable future.  This will lead directly to great hardship as they inevitably become sick and injured.  Other quality of life issues can be remedied through such things as parks, libraries, public museums.  As this population will continue to be at risk of financial catastrophe, a basic social safety net will be required.

A case can be made that provision of these services runs the risk of disincentivizing the development of human capital.  However, I find claims that the strongest factor in the development of human capital is the desire to avoid the punitive effects of life without healthcare, food stamps or temporary welfare to be quite weak.  Millions already live in dire poverty, without these supposed barriers to human capital development, due to their acquisition of menial, poverty-wage labor, and obviously are not climbing out of poverty in large numbers.  American generation poverty is vast, and multi-causal.  Structural concerns are much more deterministic than the paltry government assistance offer. 

For instance, take the example of a common problem in poor neighborhoods.  A single parent household, in which children return home from school and are essentially left unattended, to roam the streets with neighborhood peers.  This will more often than not contribute to a net weakening of human capital.  Some strengths will be gained, but many more will likely be lost, or rather, weaknesses gained.  Many forms of human capital will be gained that provide some real benefit in the context of the norms of that marginalized neighborhood - such as fighting, acting tough, becoming fluent in cultural norms - but these will more than often represent patterns of thinking and behaving that are obstacles in wider society.  Even to a family with the best intentions, a child may not be able to avoid developing these negative behaviors and attitudes, sometimes referred to having been "lost to the streets".  This is a problem of structural failure, when even high degrees of human capital in a parent are overwhelmed by its opposing forces in other areas of a child's development.

Not only is capitalism, or free marketism, not competent to address this age-old dilemma, but it often actively contributes to it, through the accretion of unequal distributions in human capital and structural impediments to its formation and leveraging.

Invoking the Myth of Means

In a speech to a student newspaper, Eric Cantor uses his poor grandmother to remind us that, as he sees it, the American dream is still alive and well in America.

"Widowed by age 30, she raised my father and uncle in a tight apartment above a tiny grocery store that she and my grandfather had opened. She worked day and night and sacrificed tremendously to secure a better future for her sons. And sure enough, this young woman – who had the courage to journey to a distant land with hope as her only possession – lifted herself into the ranks of the middle class. Through hard work, her faith and thrift, she was even able to send her two sons to college."

I assume that by referring to his poor grandmother, Cantor was attempting to overturn what he likely considers the myth of means. That is, that one does not need means to become successful - that poverty is no excuse.  Yet this is a misunderstanding of socio-economics. It isn't necessarily the fact that someone is poor that makes success difficult. It is what is so highly correlated with poverty - things like single-parenthood, lack of education, lack of parenting skills, lack of cultural knowledge, etc. Cantor's grandmother no doubt possessed many forms of social capital that she was able to leverage into social capital for her family.

In this sense, she would have been financially, but not socially impoverished.  The former is a hardship, but no where near as devastating as the latter.  Without knowledge, one is indeed powerless.  What Cantor assumes in his grandmother, he assumes away in what he would no doubt consider the "undeserving" poor: he assumes she made her own social knowledge, as he assumes others can make their own.  Yet this type of knowledge is not self-made.  It comes from generations before you, and generations before them.  In America we have poverty - social poverty - that goes back generations.  Despite whatever convenient faith Cantor and other conservatives claim to have in the individual, their faith cannot overcome the reality of finding oneself without the knowledge and power to be successful.