Echoes from the Babbling Brooks Envision a New Conservatism. The New York Times Advises Us on Society, as Usual: Higher Taxes.

As the world progresses we are always regretful that we failed to take the best advice of our sages who command a higher view than mere mortals. History has condemned us for straying off the best path. Today, we are treated to a sound analysis of the History of Conservativism and how to mend it by the New York Times, aka the Walter Duranty Papers. [1]In this current article, David Brooks gives us some kind of a Socratic Essay: Fresh Start Conservatism. [2]

We need to change, we are advised. Now, change is the political buzzword of the day and the one that will probably defeat Hillary with all her ‘experience.’ But, we wonder what we should change to? We also wonder what the word might mean in its current frenzied context.

To wit:

“In the 19th century, industrialization swept the world. Many European nations expanded their welfare states but kept their education systems exclusive. The U.S. tried the opposite approach. American leaders expanded education and created the highest quality work force on the planet.”

Brooks left out the word public here, but the rest is mostly correct. We cannot even hope to match the tutelage and university systems of Oxford, Cambridge and more ancient places in Rome, Carthage and Egypt given a reading of their works. Yes, public education was offered to many and that, among other things, made our society the greatest ever although we wonder about the Greek, Egyptians, Romans and Carthaginians and their societies. Actually, business people were highly educated and they taught workers how to be productive. Our schools do not do that.

“That progress stopped about 30 years ago. The percentage of young Americans completing college has been stagnant for a generation.”

Now, the babbling of the Brooks can be heard, faintly, as we surge on to the notion that we can educate all members of our society. Liberalism is at hand.  The Bell Curve[3] assigns certain confines upon this notion with facts and force and history and millions of test results, but let us continue on anyway. Test scores and facts seem not to perturb the gurgling waters in this article. This will be interesting. In a previous post I wondered if Brooks ever read the BC book.[4]

Continuing along:

“[First] Doing that [citing the education advances and policies of the 19^th Century. ed] would mean taking on the populists of the left and right, the ones who imagine the problem is globalization and unfair trade when in fact the real problem is that the talents of American workers are not keeping up with technological change.”

Very good. Certain undefined elements of both the left and the right have misidentified the politically correct reason why we cannot compete with the rest of the world: education,  This is hooey. We have no absolute advantage [5] [6] to sell many of our goods, such as cars, textiles, rice, steel  and more in both US and global markets. There is no way we can match prices with our higher labor costs compared to  products produced at lower cost in India, China and many other places.  We have to make and sell things that we hold the advantage, so, certain sectors of our economy will not be competitive and will have to be dropped or subsidized in some way.

“Doing that [dittos, ed.] would also mean transcending economic policy categories. If there is one thing we have learned over the bitter experience of the past 30 years, it is that per-pupil expenditures and days in the classroom are not sufficient to produce superb information-economy workers. They emerge from intact families, quality neighborhoods and healthy moral cultures.”

This is all very good, but we wonder how more education dollars translate into success. If we look at the spending on education we find that places like Washington, DC have the very highest per pupil spending levels and positively the worst educational system in the US. I think we can look at spending on education in the last 30-40 years that has doubled in real dollars and that  the expected result education has been flat, or lower, in most places and the SAT averages have dropped. One way for the SAT scores to drop is push in more test takers with lower IQs and that will do it. How do we produce superb information-economy workers from a pool of citizens with low IQs?

“The second group of policies would involve early-childhood education….Third, the next president has to loosen the grip of the teachers’ unions….Fourth, Democrats like to talk about college affordability, but that’s the least important explanation for why so many students don’t complete college. The real reasons are that students are academically unprepared and emotionally disengaged…Fifth, portable health insurance and retraining accounts would give adult workers security.”

Head Start is deemed a failure as the effect disappears by the 5^th grade [7] Students from the bottom of the Bell Curve do not have the cognitive skills to complete in college.  Advocates for Head Start have made the incredible claim that IQ can actually be increased by this program and mumble about the others who ‘catch up’.[8] IQ cannot be changed with education as there are several ways to measure IQ and many of these are not education based. [9] [10] This is clearly demonstrated in the well-observed educational gap. [11] The nasty comment about the teachers unions will probably get this brook damned up, so we can ignore this. It will not happen anyway. Others have a different view from the NYT:

“Some think test scores are unimportant. But studies clearly demonstrate that students [whatever their color ] who have equal skills and knowledge, as measured by reliable tests, will have roughly equal earnings later in life.”[12]

Your expected financial outcome on the average will be strongly related to your IQ as the Bell Curve states and that has nothing to do with race if the IQs are equal. Asians and Jews seem to have solved this problem. Their IQs are also higher than other whites or other minorities:

“In the United States, Jews, Japanese, and Chinese earn incomes 1.72, 1.32, and 1.12 times the American average, respectively (Sowell, 1981, p. 5). Jews and East Asians have higher rates of college attendance, greater educational attainment, and are many times overrepresented in the Ivy League and many of the United States' most prestigious schools”[13]

The left cannot seem to explain this: If you look at the 14,000 school districts in the US you will find that Afro-Americans score lower than whites in nearly every district that publishes results. My state publishes scores sorted by race for every grade in the entire school system. There are no cases where blacks and Hispanics score higher than whites. Not a single case can demonstrate the opposite. Hispanics also score lower than whites across the board on average and in every case in my state. If you look selectively  at school districts in places were affluent blacks send their kids then why do we not see a range of schools where the blacks routinely rank in the upper 50%  when compared to whites and not always mired  in the lower half as they do now? Clearly, economic status and such have nothing to do with IQ and success in education at this time. There should be many school districts in the US [hundreds if not thousands] where blacks routinely outscore whites in all subjects and we see none. What we do see is 50% dropout rates, high crime and other social factors for many minorities. One third of all black males will do some serious prison or jail time. Look at the IQs in prison [14] and see how low they are and the racial distribution in that system.

The left continue on with claims “…that it is not lower average intelligence that leads to the lower status of ethnic minorities, it is instead their lower status that leads to their lower average intelligence test scores.”[15]

The authors of this book mumble around the meaning of IQ, question what it means, deny that it is definitive and focus on other effects on social outcomes. They cannot seem to address the millions and millions of test scores sorted by race since 1912.  This book is a political polemic and ignores the basic science that is necessary to define, analyze and discuss the problem and its antecedents. Why don’t they just correlate outcomes with IQ and show us that they do not correlate? Politics is the answer.

The lefties will not publish college SAT scores, GPAs and other achievements such as graduation rates sorted by race. Why not have the Ivy League and state schools show us their students by number to disguise their identity and put in race and let us sort out the lists and examine them? They could do this, but will not. The national test scores continue to show that minorities do not compete very well. The teacher’s unions fight to prevent testing of teachers and insist that this feature be ‘voluntary.’ That is a fact. We wonder what affirmative action is all about. It is the blunt leftist political policy statement that many minorities cannot compete in our society and, for their votes, we will pretend to help them by handing out money and securing them jobs from which they cannot be easily discharged for incompetence if we can count on their votes.

The SAT scores correlate very well with IQ and this shows us that college is only for the top 1/3 or so. The rest will fail if they are given the same regimen as they did at Cornell in the 60s when they tried to incorporate minorities with low SAT scores. The solution at Cornell was to create easy courses to keep their students in school. Their academic credentials crashed for a decade or more.

“That’s the conservatism of the fresh start.”

This is all very interesting and Brooks comes close to attacking the very powerful teacher’s unions at his peril. But, he makes the fatal assumption that we are all equal or can made to be so by carefully-crafted social programs and education. This is the old leftist theory of social engineering:  If people cannot be actually equal then we will use taxation and job allocation to make them equal at least in income. This ‘equality’ theory is just not true and Brooks today presents this as though we had not spent 50 years on the education process that was strangled by the far left and that those test scores were not proof of their failure.

And what do we do about the 2 million in prison now, the some 15 million felons in our society, the hopeless drug addicts. What about the lazy and others? Are we to believe that ‘education’ will cure druggies, keep people away from getting AIDS or stop crime in the streets of Philly or Baltimore. We can perform a magical transmutation upon these felons into computer experts and communication wizards?

“Education” is always the last resort of the sordid left. This is all the more amusing as they frenetically ‘teach’ that the problems of minorities derive from low taxes and the intrinsic racism of the rich and their arrogant and greedy corporations. The ‘education gap’ is the perfect paradigm that justifies how we can throw billions of dollars into the bubbling brook and get little or nothing out and do it again and again. The next step, of course, is to blame somebody, make sad speeches and then continue on with the spending. The fact that the problem will never go away gives solace and cushy jobs to the left.

What we need to change is the notion that the left can guide education in this country. They cannot. They have proved this.  They cannot handle spending either. Apart from doing drugs, there is little they can do but bawl. The rest of us can soar above liberalism, get our education in spite of their incompetence and bias and eternal thirst for more tax monies and get good jobs and have a good life. Vote accordingly.

rycK

Comments: ryckki@gmail.com