Month: July 2005

Fred Kaplan at Slate.com has a nice article on the combat capacity of the US armed forces. The key point is that only 40% of military personnel are combat troops. Right now, there are about 390,000 troops who are prepared to fight in Iraq or elsewhere, although the Army has nearly a million soldiers. The rest are in support roles like medicine and administration. Kaplan says this is good. Volunteer soldiers are better motivated and better trained. The draft requires the armed services to accept people who don’t want to be soldiers, or who simply don’t have the right personality or skills.

Although it comes at the end of the essay, Kaplan makes a deep observation about the volunteer Army and democratic politics:

“Does America want to be–can it be–the world’s policeman, colossus, liberator, call it what you will? If so, with what resources? By itself or with allies? Through international law or by whim?

Whatever the answers, there is a potentially calamitous mismatch between the Bush administration’s avowed intentions and its tangible means. They can print or borrow money to float the national debt. They can’t clone or borrow soldiers to float an imperial army.”

So there you have it. The volunteer army is a natural check and balance on the executive branch. There is nothing about the democratic process that will stop a popular leader from waging wars. Voters, courts and legislatures are willing to cut the executive branch a lot of slack when it comes to war. However, a volunteer army imposes a strict limit on how many wars the President can fight. Ask yourself this: Would Lyndon Johnson have pursued his relentless escalation of the Vietnam war if he had only 400,000 American combat troops to cover the entire world?

Last year, I ripped Dave Eggers when he complained about low teacher pay. But there he goes again – he was in last week’s New York Times lamenting the fact that teachers have to work in the summer! Dave might enjoy this debate between economists Michael Podgursky, from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Lawrence Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute. They’ve spent the last couple of years figuring out how much teachers get paid when compared to other professionals. Click here to read a nice exchange between them. As you might imagine, it’s tricky. How should one account for summer vacation? Part time employment? Extra hours spent at home grading papers? How about fringe benefits and perks? It’s not a question for meek.

The key issue isn’t how much they get paid, or whether they get paid less than other people. It’s all about supply and demand. Just ask yourself: what’s the supply? What’s the demand? In a nutshell, teaching is a profession with modest to high demand but low barriers to entry. Eggers & co propose higher teacher pay. And, of course, higher pay will attract better applicants. But that’ll only go so far. Low barriers to entry will always produce downward pressure on wages.

As one skeptic pointed out, the real problem isn’t low pay. You don’t want to pay people just for being teachers. You want to pay good teachers. Even if you get good applicants, they could still flake once they get the job. So here’s my suggestion for the state governments and teacher’s associations:

• Create a system of voluntary standardized tests in different subjects. Make ’em tough so you can really figure out who knows their subject.

Here’s my suggestion for teachers:

• Create a teaching portfolio that shows what you’ve done. It could have syllabi, student projects, testimonials, standardized test scores, analyses of student performance, etc.

School districts should then demand portfolios and test scores from teachers and then pay them according to how well they do in these two tasks. Even if a math teacher isn’t a master of calculus, they could still show that they are really good at teaching basic math, or working with underprivileged children. A school district that publicizes teacher knowledge and abilities can then make informed judgments and come up with a decent strategy for hiring, given their budget. Maybe I’m misguided, but it’s probably a better approach than just raising everybody’s paycheck.

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, NeXT and Pixar, recently gave
a most excellent speech at Stanford University (click here – it’s really good). Among other things, Jobs talks about what he learned
from his time at Reed College before dropping out to be an entrepreneur. Jobs’
speech made me think about my own undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, where I
made many lasting friendships and met my future spouse.

Berkeley is like a lot of state schools: massive classes
with atrocious instruction, poor facilities and the students are a little too
concerned about sports. However, Berkeley, at least during my time, had two
features that made it really stand out, even from other big public schools and
elite private schools.

First, Berkeley was a remarkably open institution in the
sense that most classes were open to most students. The advisors might try to
steer you one way or another. In practice they didn’t try very hard, so most
any student could take most any class. This meant that a student with a clear
sense of what they wanted could craft any sort of education they wanted. If
they so desired, they could skip to the most challenging classes and not waste
time. This also meant that you could avoid the classes taught by graduate
students and learn from the most talented scholars out there. I’ve discovered
that you can’t do this in many colleges because there aren’t enough students to
support lots of advanced courses, or the students aren’t talented enough to
support advanced classes in fields like foreign languages and the physical
sciences. For a determined student, Berkeley was an intellectual buffet.

Second, the student population was really unique because
anyone who worked hard enough could get in. This is not true for elite private
schools because they demand that students show “well roundedness,” often shown
through travel, violin playing and other expensive activities. And even if you play your cards right, tuition was really prohibitive. If you could score
high enough on the SAT and GPA, you would automatically get into Berkeley. The
fees were substantial but not prohibitive. As a result, you had a really
fascinating combination of students.

Of course, there were lots of folks who
spent four years wondering why they weren’t in Palo Alto or Cambridge. But you also had a lot of amazing students who were at
Berkeley because they were really smart and it was cheap, or they didn’t quite
fit the profile of a typical private school admit. There was a just a great
energy to be had from throwing these folks together. For these reasons, I tell
people that “Berkeley is the great walk-on team of American higher education.”
You don’t need $36,000/year to audition or a specific last name. Just get good
grades and SAT scores, and they’ll give you a shot to play with the pros. No
guarantees, but work hard, show up and you’ll get your chance.

Tyler recently mentioned a paper by Ronald Fryer and Paul Torelli that looked at the correlation between academic achievement and popularity among ethnic groups. Click here to read the original paper. Motivated by research claiming that academically successful black high school students are less popular with their peers, Fryer and Torelli crunch some numbers to figure out if it’s really true.

Here’s the main finding. For White students, the higher the grade the more popular the student. For Black students, the same holds true except for kids with GPA’s > 3.5, who experience decreases in popularity. For Hispanic kids, popularity starts to go down when they hit a GPA of 2.0 to 2.5. (This is from Figures 1A-4A listed after page 43).

Here’s the puzzle for Marginal Revolution readers: Why is the peak popularity so different for Black and Hispanic students? In other words, why is the "Acting white" penalty only relevant for high achieving black students while it kicks in at a meager 2.0 GPA for Hispanics?

Readers are invited to email me their thoughts on the topic (frojas at indiana dot edu). Fryer and Torelli allude to this Black/Hispanic difference, but they don’t really get into an explanation of it. Don’t quibble with the data – it’s from a high quality survey and popularity is objectively measured, rather than self-reported. I’ll post reader responses and my own thoughts in a few days.