Tag: Julian Sanchez

GIFTED ECONOMY

Matt Yglesias responds to a Washington Post op-ed on how public schools fail gifted kids with the understandable but, I think, misguided thought that public schooling “should try to do well for the hardest to teach kids, included ones coming from difficult backgrounds and ones who simply for whatever reason have a hard time with school,” and not worry excessively about “the easiest cases,” which is to say, the gifted kids.

First, I want to echo some of Matt’s commenters in questioning whether those gifted kids really are the “easiest” to teach, especially given that they too may come from “difficult backgrounds.” As the Post article observes:

Nor do test scores indicate whether these students are being sufficiently challenged to maintain their academic interest, an issue of particular concern in high school. Shockingly, studies establish that up to 20 percent of high school dropouts are gifted.

And it’s at least possible that even on a strict egalitarian basis, there’s an argument for “taking the most talented as far as they can go.” Pushing a gifted potential-dropout to realize her full potential is, of course, a benefit to that student. But it’s also a benefit to the rest of us—the worst off included. I’m just guessing about the numbers here, but I’ll hazard that the per-pupil cost of some kind of program to keep those gifted kids engaged and stimulated is, at worst, no greater than that of remedial programs for their counterparts at the other end of the curve. And the payoff for that is, at least potentially, not missing out on the next Jonas Salk or Steve Jobs or… well, pick your favorite modern genius. Granted, some of them will go on to socially useless functions like, say, political magazine writer—but on the whole I’d hazard it’s a good investment over the long term even for the kids who don’t directly benefit from those programs, at least along some margin. I don’t know what that makes the optimal balance of remedial vs. gifted spending, but I think it means you can’t just do a crude maximin and suppose that equity demands not dropping a nickel on gifted programs until you can’t buy a jot more improvement on the low end.

—posted by Julian

LOW MORALES

Writing in The New York Times, Alvaro Vargas Llosa argues that the election of Bolivian demagogue Evo Morales is less worrisome than it might seem. He seems awfully sanguine—especially given that the case for optimism is tied to the U.S. responding in some quasi-sane fashion if the growing of coca is decriminalized—but there are a number of sound points.

—posted by Julian

CORY MAYE

If you haven’t been following Radley Balko’s posts about the case of Cory Maye over at The Agitator, you should. In a nutshell, the story is this: Late in 2001, police in Prentiss, Mississippi, got a tip that Jamie Smith, who lived on the other side of a duplex with Cory Maye, was dealing drugs. Police execute a no-knock raid, bursting into Maye’s side of the duplex late at night, while Maye and his young daughter are asleep. Maye (who is black) wakes up, sees armed intruders, and fires off a shot—killing the (white) son of the chief of police. Maye now sits on death row.

You can read Radley’s first post on the case here, and here is his most recent post with trial transcripts, but it’s really worth scrolling through for the whole series.

—posted by Julian

LIVE, FROM THE PUNDIT NAVEL OBSERVATORY

Amid all the high-profile chin-stroking about journalistic ethics in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been wondering: Why does nobody much seem to have a problem with the common-as-water practice of op-ed ghost writing? Sure, presumably the nominal author of a piece written by some research assistant endorses the contents, but isn’t it a little odd that editors who make “disclosure” and “transparency” professional mantras seem not to blink at running articles purporting to be written by one person and actually written by another? I bounced the question off a few D.C. friends who seemed to think that precisely because the practice was so common, it didn’t really count as deceptive: Everyone assumes that an op-ed festooned with a sufficiently famous byline (of someone not a professional writer, anyway) was actually penned by someone else. But I rather doubt that really is most people’s assumption outside the Beltway. Sure, I can think of various reasons why you might not regarded at a terribly big deal, but it’s still a little surprising that it doesn’t even seem to be a topic of debate.

—posted by Julian

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, SPY, SPY AGAIN

Like Ross’ friend Jesus, the Department of Justice was denied three times by the federal courts when it sought to use cell phone networks to trace suspects’ movements without first going to the trouble of making a showing of probable cause. Earlier this week, however, the DoJ lucked out in the federal court for the Southern District of New York.

Without wading too deep into some exceedingly hairy legal territory, here’s the basic gist of the decision on the basis of a quick skim: The Fourth Amendment restrictions that would apply if the government had planted a tracking device don’t apply because (1) unlike in other requests, they’re not asking for enough data from cell towers to triangulate a precise physical location, and (2) they’re only seeking data from the towers when the user is actually on a call, so that the user is held to have voluntarily disclosed the cell tower information to a third party (the phone company). Now, statutes authorizing “pen registers” and “trap and trace” devices permit the government to obtain information about a communication by meeting a much lower evidentiary standard that would be required to get the contents of the conversation. But those statutes explicitly say that information about the user’s location can’t be gathered via those statues alone. So the government wants to combine the pen register authorization with other statues allowing the government to gather information about information service subscribers, subject to a slightly higher oversight standard—still short of probable cause.

The government has thus far refused to appeal any of these cases, so for the time being, it looks like we’ll be left with a confusing patchwork of rules about what kind of tracking then government can do with what level of judicial oversight. If the details interest you, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s archive of legal documents from the relevant cases.

—posted by Julian

FREE TO CHOOSE

I just got back from a bit of caffinated kvetching with Will Wilkinson and Tim “Undercover Economist” Harford about the recent spate of books bemoaning how affluence and the glut of market choices that go with it are making us all miserable—The Paradox of Choice and its many precursors and clones. Critiques of the “choice paralysis” argument typically focus on questions like whether the empirical data really does demonstrate more choices make people unhappy, and if they do, whether it’s not part of a temporary adjustment period as we become more adept at narrowing our choices in response to the glut—as, for instance, social filtering software such as Amazon uses makes it increasingly easier to do. But Harford pointed to a good John Kay piece that makes an elementary but underemphasized point:

The choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee may not matter much to the chooser but it matters a lot to Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

In other words: Maybe ceteris paribus having to pick from 20 very similar sorts of corn flakes at the supermarket is just an added hassle, and we’d be just as well off if the supermarket only stocked one or two of them. But ceteris ain’t never paribus: Having to compete with 19 other close substitues puts strong price and quality pressure on each manufacturer. So it’s not enough to point out that choice between a gaggle of similar products might be more annoying than a choice between some small subset of those same products—if the choice set were persistently limited for everyone, then you wouldn’t have those same products, put probably significantly worse ones. The fact that some people agonize over which of a dozen sorts of corn flakes to buy means you’re likely to do better picking one at random than if you agonized over the choice between the only two brands in the world.

—posted by Julian

JELL-O WRESTLING WITH ROSS

Well, far be it from me to dissapoint Matt Yglesias if he’s looking for a catfight. I suggested that pushing for a more Christianized public sphere was a risky proposition, likely to dilute and secularize the shared symbols Christians prize. That, Ross ripostes, is a “counsel of despair,” and ultimately just evidence of the need to Christianize even harder. And that makes sense insofar as it goes—the risk of dilution presupposes that there’s a broader commercial and secular mass culture to do the diluting. If you could change mass culture wholesale, you’d avoid that problem. I don’t think that strategy is likely to succeed—and, from my perspective, so much the better—but it’s worth considering why.

The kind of deep change Ross is contemplating fairly requires the deployment of semiotically “thicker” stuff than a few creches or an “In God We Trust.” Their suitability for that sort of transformative work is limited by people’s ability to interpret them in a wide variety of ways. But if thin symbols are too blunt for the task at hand, thicker ones are likely to bump up against as much dissent from other Christians as from the secularist boogeymen. Consider Abington v. Schempp, one of the seminal Supreme Court cases on religion in school. Respondent Ed Schempp (who won on an 8-1 decision) wasn’t a wild-eyed atheist, but a Unitarian who objected to morning Bible readings in public schools on the grounds that he wanted his son exposed to scripture in the context of his own interpretations of it. As your buddies at Americans United like to point out, even with relatively “thin” symbols like the Decalogue, you’ve got multiple competing versions of the Big Ten to contend with. If the Narnian Final Battle with the secularists were won—or before it came to the forefront—how many of your evangelical allies would show the level of enthusiasm they did for Mel Gibson’s distinctly Catholic vision of the Passion?

That points, I think, to a more general problem: There’s increasingly not all that much of a “mass culture” to capture anyway. There was a New York Times op-ed about a year back (on another topic) noting that “Plain-vanilla Top 40, once the chief vehicle for hit songs, is now the format for only 5 percent of the nation’s 10,000-plus stations.” So if Christian families’ cultural consumption increasingly consists of Christian radio stations and Veggie Tales videos ordered online, it’s not because they’re retreating into quietism out of despair; it’s because the rain of cultural fragmentation falls on the just and unjust alike.

—posted by Julian