Quiet Declarations

This article about millennials who think the American Dream is broken is required reading for understanding why the younger generation favors big government solutions.  In a nutshell:

“They’ve been set up by going to college and thinking if you work hard at something you enjoy doing, you’ll be rewarded,” says Nan Mooney, author of Not Keeping Up with Our Parents. “But it’s not true anymore.”

And later in the article:

“There is still a rhetoric in this country that if you do work hard, you should be able to do well,” says Mooney. “And if you’re not doing well, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t smart enough. So then when you’re still working at Starbucks at 30 years old, you feel like, I screwed up, what do I do? It generates a lot of self-doubt that will stay with you.”

Basically, some moron (sounds like it was usually a parent) gave millennials bad advice about how to get a job in this world.  Here are three things every millennial needs to know right now about getting your dream job:

1. Each additional college degree does not move you along some sort of probability curve toward a guaranteed high-paying job in your desired industry, and moreover, grad school can sometimes hurt you in foregone income, experience, and networking, or by limiting your choices by saddling you with debt.  Sure, an additional degree almost always increases the probability of getting a better job all else equal, but when is all else equal?  Opportunity costs, people!

2. Networking is the best way to get jobs, and the bigger your obstacles are to getting your dream job — few positions open, blemishes in your past, fewer socioeconomic advantages — the more important effective networking becomes.  And by the way, effective networking is not stalking, it’s relationship building.  The best networkers develop many friends and acquaintances, not mere connections.  Networking also is not nepotism.  These words mean different things, so get off that high-horse… or stay on that high-horse if you prefer, it doesn’t change the way things are.  Want to get a job at an advocacy nonprofit to fight the evils of networking?  I’ve got bad news for you: without networking, you won’t get it.

3. Having a quarter-life crisis about your “plight” gets you precisely nowhere.  Whoever said the American Dream was supposed to be easy?  If you’re one of the people described in the article who’s upset that you’re still working at Starbucks and living in your parents’ basement, think about the fact that you got to spend four to seven years jacking around in college.  Or better yet, think about the people in a much worse position than you who leave their families behind and cross the border every day in pursuit of the American Dream only to be greeted with outright bigotry by many citizens, some of whom exercise said bigotry through government force.

Millennials: The bottom line is if you want to get your dream job, the best thing you can do is put yourself in a position to know everything you can about the paths into that industry, the skills required for that industry, and the people involved in that industry, then go from there.  the keys to success Mommy and Daddy told you are no longer true, if they ever were, so suck it up and take control of your career path.

I really do appreciate the sentiment of these analyses — now that the health care legislation has passed, it seems like we should test the hypotheses of health care proponents.  If even their most conservative predictions bear out, that might well be an argument to support other policies that are presently contentious.  If their predictions turn out to be a colossal overstatement, they should eat crow and we should look for a better way.

The only problem with asking proponents of this bill to relocate their money in the direction of their mouth is this fundamentally misunderstands what just took place.  For the vast majority of the ground troops, the calculus wasn’t that x billion over x years is okay if it saves x lives and reduces the debt by x percent.  The calculus was either “universal enrollment good, costs be damned” or it was “Democrats good, Republicans be damned.”  Everything else was daily talking points to persuade independents.

Libby puts it another way:

Supporting health care reform is kind of like turning your twitter avatar green, or having one of those Jesus fish or Free Tibet stickers on your car; it’s supporting a cause that you think is righteous, without personally doing or sacrificing anything. Much like an audience at a play, you know how you expect events to play out morally and logically, and when reality agrees with your expectations – math and finances be damned – you’re happy and you feel like justice has been served. If not, then a great injustice has occurred, the nation is ungovernable, the other team is being underhanded and deceptive, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Don’t believe me?  Ask yourself how many ardent supporters of this bill would have backed off if the CBO estimate had come back a trillion dollars higher.  (Many ardent supporters lamented that the bill wasn’t expensive or sweeping enough, you will recall.)  And I’m not even trying to pass moral judgment here — maybe achieving universal enrollment or Democrats beating Republicans really are victories worth limitless cost.  I don’t think so, but I suppose I could be mistaken.  I’m just saying that, short of actual catastrophe, I don’t think ardent supporters would care one bit if the figures they cited in order to get the bill passed turned out to be horribly incorrect.  The bill passed, end of story.

I know many people are uninsured and suffering through no fault of their own.  It’s certainly not all of them — plenty are uninsured by choice and will now be saddled with a mandate — but it’s many of them.  I truly hope they get the relief they’ve been praying for, because that’s the most obvious benefit of this bill.  Now that the bill has passed and there’s no turning back, I really do hope that ten years from now there are families who will be able to say that it made their lives better.

And I do believe that will happen.  Do I know how many people will be better off?  Not a clue.  Do I think it will make enough people better off, and to a great enough degree, that it’s worth the costs it will impose on the majority of Americans for decades to come?  I have no idea how to answer that question, at least not without some sort of a priori appeal to either egalitarian or individualist virtues, and now we’re in a moral debate.

I suppose I could attempt to weigh the costs and benefits, but it’s an incalculable exercise.  Sure, I’ve written several times about direct costs, but that’s an easy lie to expose to anyone willing to listen.  The bill won’t save us money over 10 years or 20 years or ever — if you actually believe that, you don’t understand economics or politics, and I’ll debate you any day of the week.

It’s incalculable because of the unseen costs, which few people on either side of the aisle are talking about.  A libertarian professor I know once said he believed that libertarianism’s greatest intellectual contribution is a recognition of the unseen.  We’ll never see what open competition could have done to health costs in markets for health care left free of government interference.  We’ll never see how the voluntarily uninsured would have spent the money they’re now required to spend on plans.  We’ll never see how many lives could have been saved or how much healthier we could be in a world with technological innovations that are more costly and burdensome to develop as a result of government.  I’m not saying there will be no technology and no innovation, I’m saying when we make these choices “as a society” we sacrifice the unseen what-could-have-been for a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” philosophy that defies the most basic tenets of economics.

I know a cautiously optimistic public intellectual who says we’re going to get freer and more prosperous only because the pace of human ingenuity will always outpace government’s ability to stifle it. It’s a sad irony that government’s inefficiency relative to individual entrepreneurship is precisely what allows it to impose huge burdens on society and come back later to say “see, things aren’t nearly as bad as you thought” thus paving the way for further intrusion.  There’s a seemingly endless debate between those who say “think what economic growth we’d have with less government” and those who retort “but without government, what makes you think we’d have growth at all?”  Except that thanks to politics, the debate is awfully one-sided in favor of a intervene-more approach.  Surveys of past presidents bear this out especially well: a few presidents deliberately did very little to get in the way of the people, and even where increased prosperity resulted, you’ll find those presidents sitting comfortably at the bottom of the popularity lists.

Do I think the world’s coming to an end because we have sweeping health care legislation?  Absolutely not — certainly not before 2014 (remember, the start date was pushed a few elections back for precisely the reasons you’d suspect) and probably not at all.  I simply have to believe that the more dismal predictions won’t bear out.  We’re certainly not going to get most of was promised, no question about that.  At the end of the day I suspect, as I do with most government legislation, that we’ll be much better off than the worst fears of the naysayers but much much worse off than we could have been in a world without it.  But because it’s unseen, no one will ever know.

A very good read in today’s Times.

I’ll say again what I’ve said before: although I disagree with you, if you want to support a really bad bill in order to lay the psychological architecture for a permanent entitlement program, or because you can’t bear the thought of the Democrats not winning this one, that’s your business.  But if you believe the bill is financially solvent, you are deluding yourself.

[Update 3/21/10: Not to mention another sobering reality: “this legislation would set in motion political forces that would make additional spending inevitable.”]

Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. says employers lose $1.8 billion each year, but Ryan Young believes the potential cost is blown way out of proportion.

I’ll side with the guy who bothered to take substitution effects and positive externalities into account.

As you’ve probably heard, the Texas school board recently gave preliminary approval to a new social studies curriculum — changes that will potentially impact social studies and history curricula nationwide because Texas is one of the largest textbook markets in the nation.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

In short, the changes were made because the conservative majority on the board believes the curriculum proposed by high school and social studies teachers reflects their left-wing bias.  And the list of proposed changes is indeed radical — see here and here.

Here’s my take:

I have no trouble whatsoever believing that the current curriculum has a left-wing bias.  History professors are most certainly biased — they vote at least 7-to-1 Democrat, just one statistic in a mountain of evidence — and high school social studies teachers learned how to teach by taking lots of classes from history professors.

That said, McLeroy and his friends clearly have little interest in teaching an “unbiased” version of history.  There’s a big difference between tempering the unwavering enthusiasm for LBJ’s Great Society, or ensuring the gold standard is explained properly, and specifically mandating a Judeo-Christian chronicling of the nation’s founding.  There’s a big difference between reducing errors of omission and rewriting history to favor your own ideological persuasions.

Okay, so at least we can all agree on the problem — that both the teachers and the school board are biased — right?  Not exactly.  The Times, for one, reliably sticks its head in the sand on this point:

It was a disturbing intervention by the board’s Republican majority into educational decisions best left to the teachers and scholars who have toiled for almost a year to produce the new curriculum standards…. [Students] deserve to have a curriculum chosen for its educational value, not politics or ideology.

I do sympathize with the teachers, but my sympathy is more in line with Art Carden’s insights:

I would suppose that being a public school teacher in the face of such controversies is demoralizing because control of your classroom is in the hands of some far-off board or bureaucrat indulging the pretense of knowledge. Theirs is a fatal conceit for everyone involved: teachers’ hands are tied, students’ options are limited, and everybody loses. I know I would be demoralized if my syllabi were handed down from a College Board in Nashville or Washington, and I’m pretty sure our students would be demoralized if they couldn’t take their business elsewhere.

Maybe there simply isn’t any solution to the problem of bias in educating future generations of leaders, but Art alludes to a more practical solution: getting out of the business of mandated statewide curricula.  As Russ Roberts explains:

Of course it’s going to a political decision instead of the one that’s best for the students. But maybe just as importantly, it imposes a one-size-fits-all solution. So while I happen to like more Hayek, I’m sure there are many things I wouldn’t like about the Texas state schoool decision. But all parents are stuck with the state-wide decisions….  [I]nstead of competition among schools over what children should learn, it’s a top-down decision. Bad idea.

Although some people will be more than a little upset at the thought that someone, somewhere, might be learning social studies in a manner they feel to be harmful, it sure beats having a small and politicized group of people decide for students all across Texas (and the nation?) decide what’s in the best interests of all concerned.

The Post reports on Nancy Pelosi’s comments Monday:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

As of this writing, InTrade currently shows 77.5 on the question of whether health care will become law by the end of June, which is up considerably from Scott Brown’s election.  It turns out if you’re willing to skirt the 60-vote obstacle, ignore polling data, eliminate transparency, and risk getting your entire congressional representation voted out of office in November, a president really can bring people together to get things done in Washington.