Tag: Matt Yglesias

Obama to Seek Cap on Federal Pay Raises

USA Today reports that President Obama is seeking a cap on federal pay raises:

President Obama urged Congress Monday to limit cost-of-living pay raises to 2% for 1.3 million federal employees in 2010, extending an income squeeze that has hit private workers and threatens Social Security recipients and even 401(k) investors.

…The president’s action comes when consumer prices have fallen 2.1% in the 12 months ending in July, because of a massive drop in energy prices. The recession has taken an even tougher toll on private-sector wages, which rose only 1.5% for the year ended in June — the lowest increase since the government started keeping track in 1980. Private-sector workers also have been subject to widespread layoffs and furloughs.

Last week, economist Chris Edwards discussed data from the Bureau of Economic research that revealed the large gap between the average pay of federal employees and private workers. His call to freeze federal pay “for a year or two” received attention and criticism, (FedSmith, GovExec, Federal Times, Matt Yglesias, Conor Clarke) to which he has responded.

As explained on CNN earlier this year, the pay gap between federal and private workers has been widening for some time now:

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

I Would Rather You Just Said “Thank You, Private Schools,” and Went on Your Way…

By
Adam B. Schaeffer

Some well-known bloggers are being terrible bullies, beating up on private schools.

Felix Salmon kicks things off by hoping the government tightens the definition of a “charitable” organization and begins taxing private schools who don’t “do a bit more to earn it.” Matt Yglesias agrees that private schools are mooching deadbeats and ups the ante, calling them actively harmful as well. Finally, Conor Clarke at The Atlantic agrees, but makes the other two look like panty-waists by proposing the government radically narrow what is considered a charity in the first place.

Yglesias even has the temerity to indict private schools for the failure of NYC public schools:

And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect. You’d have to believe that New York City’s public schools would be both better funded and free of this kind of nonsense if a larger portion of the city’s elite were sending their kids to them.

Really? Would we have to believe what Yglesias says? No, it’s not “the best one can tell.” According to the evidence, Yglesias’ breezy, offhand accusation is demonstrably wrong. Increased competition from private schools actually improves public school performance.

And the more kids who leave public to go private, the more money the schools have for the kids who remain.

What ingrates. They complain about the lost tax revenue while dismissing out of hand the billions of dollars that parents and donors spend every year to educate children outside the government system. They dismiss the fact that these parents and donors are saving taxpayers in the neighborhood of $60 Billion a year based on current-dollar public school spending and the number of kids in private schools.

Finally, if this is all about rich people getting a free ride, why aren’t these guys screaming about means-testing public schools? Why shouldn’t we charge rich parents tuition to attend public schools? If a charitable deduction for private schools is so bad, why isn’t a free public education even worse?

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General

Matt Yglesias on School Choice in Sweden

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Following up on Dana Goldstein’s American Prospect blog post, Matt Yglesias calls the Swedish system and U.S. charter schools better education policy models than education tax credits.

He doesn’t say why, and I’d be interested to hear his reasoning. As I documented on Cato-at-Liberty in response to Goldstein, the econometric evidence shows that the greatest margin of superiority over state-run schooling is enjoyed by truly market-like education systems. By that I mean systems that are minimally regulated with respect to content, staffing, prices, etc., and which are funded at least in part directly by the families they serve.

Yglesias also claims that choice supporters want to “eliminate public education.” On the contrary, choice supporters are fundamentally more committed to public education than anyone who refuses to consider the market alternative.

“Public Education” is a set of ideals. It is not a particular institution. It is the ideal that all children should have access to a good education, regardless of family income; that schools should prepare students not just for success in private life but for participation in public life; and that our schools should foster harmonious relations among the various groups making up our pluralistic society – or at the very least not create unnecessary tensions among them.

School choice advocates are more committed to those ideals than is anyone wedded to the current district-based school system, because that system is inferior in all of the above respects to a universally accessible education marketplace. This is documented in the literature review linked-to above, in my book Market Education: The Unknown History, and in the work of James Tooley, E.G. West, my Cato colleagues, and many others.

The education tax credit programs my colleagues and I have proposed would ensure universal access to the education marketplace, while leaving essentially intact the freedoms and incentives responsible for the market’s success. I know of no other policy capable of achieving this. Certainly charter schools and the Swedish system fail to do it.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Work, Social Production, and Inequality

By
Timothy B. Lee

Matt Yglesias links to an interesting discussion about the growth of activities that raise our standard of living without being captured in economic statistics. Wikipedia is a great example of this: it’s tremendously valuable to hundreds of millions of Internet users, but because it’s given away for free that value is not reflected in our economic statistics.

I think this general insight is right, but I don’t agree with John Quiggin’s conclusions about the social implications. In particular, Quiggin writes:

It seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes.

If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours.

The first point ignores the fact that rich people are a crucial part of many public-spirited enterprises. Jimmy Wales was able to finance the initial development of Wikipedia (then called Nupedia) because he had previously earned profits building commercial websites. The Ubuntu project, creators of an extremely popular Linux-based operating system, is supported to the tune of millions of dollars a year by successful entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Brewster Kahle used the profits from his successful Internet businesses to build the Internet Archive, a crucial repository of public domain works. John Gilmore, who made his fortune as one of Sun’s first employees, has used his wealth to promote a variety of free software projects, including GNU radio and Gnash. I could provide plenty of other examples.

The important thing to recognize is that these projects could only exist because of the combination of their founders’ expertise and their money. Without cash, these folks would have been unable to provide the support necessary to get these projects off the ground. But even more important, these projects also wouldn’t have succeeded without their deep understanding of their fields. Only someone with years of experience in the software industry would have the judgment and the relationships necessary to make a project like Ubuntu successful.

In particular, if the policy option on the table is to reduce inequality by redistributing wealth from rich people to the government, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the federal government could support these kinds of projects with anything like the degree of success that these private actors have done. Congress has plenty of cash, but members of Congress and their staff haven’t the faintest clue what it takes to build an operating system. Moreover, they wouldn’t even know how to tell a competent operating system designer from an incompetent one, so if they sought outside expertise they’d likely get bad advice.

I think it’s a little bit surprising that Matt would endorse Quiggin’s argument about working hours. If you read Matt’s blog, it’s obvious that he works a lot more than the 1824 hours/year national average. I suspect that Matt works so much in part because his job involves goofing off on the Internet and because he’s excited about the mission of his non-profit employer. Moreover, I’d wager that a large fraction of Matt’s readers read his blog at their jobs while they’re theoretically “on the clock.” In other words, one of the most important but unmeasured ways that our standard of living has improved in recent decades is that more and more of us are blessed with white collar jobs with intellectually-engaging work, pleasant working conditions, and the flexibility to spend time at the office doing things like reading blogs.

Probably the best illustration of these trends is Google. Google is, of course, a fabulously profitable company. It’s also a company that’s famous for the long hours put in by its employees—one reason they offer their employees free food and other perks is so they’ll be less likely to go home in the evenings. At the same time, Google has a policy of “20 percent time” that officially encourages employees to spend company time working on personal projects that may or may not contribute to the company’s bottom line. And Google is also one of the most enthusiastic users and supporters of free software, employing a number of key free software developers such as Guido Van Rossum and Jeremy Allison.

There is, in other words, no particular reason to think that the growth of the non-monetary sector of the economy can or should lead to reduced working hours, on average. Rather than using higher wages or shorter working hours to attract employees, firms may increasingly compete for workers by giving workers more interesting work and more on-the-job flexibility. Indeed, it seems likely that an increasing fraction of the time the Labor Department considers as time spent “working” actually consists of employees reading blogs, editing Wikipedia, and otherwise contributing to the richness of the non-commercial sector of the Internet.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Who’s Blogging about Cato

Here’s a round-up of bloggers who are writing about Cato this week:

  • Writing at the Adam Smith Institute blog, Phillip Salter discusses Patrick J. Michaels’s proposal that scientific articles should be available online for public comment.
  • Penning his thoughts on Obama’s plan to raise taxes on oil and gas usage, Wintery Knight cites Jerry Taylor’s research that shows why similar price control programs didn’t work in the 1970s.
  • Reihan Salam quotes William Niskanen on The Atlantic’s Washington blog in a post about the “starve the beast” theory that says lawmakers can slow government’s growth by lowering taxes and running up deficits.
  • Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias responds to Michael Cannon’s work on health care reform in a post about Obama’s White House health care summit.
  • Dr. Paul Hsieh of FIRM (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine) and Brian Schwartz of Patient Power cite John H. Cochrane’s Cato paper on free market solutions to health care security.
Topics: 
Cato Publications, General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Will the ‘Rise of the Counterinsurgents’ Lead to Fewer Counterinsurgency Wars?

By
Justin Logan

Matt Yglesias picks up on the Bacevich review I referenced below and points to a post from counterinsurgency (COIN) scholar Andrew Exum in which Exum argues that learning to do counterinsurgency better will lead to our doing less of it:

No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.

This doesn’t make much sense.  Exum has previously excoriated COIN skeptic Gian Gentile for pursuing an “anti-COIN crusade.” But by Exum’s reasoning above, it is Exum who should be on an anti-COIN crusade.  Instead, Exum thinks that DOD needs to allocate more resources to doing COIN.

Academically, Exum is interested in insurgencies.  And indeed – they’re interesting.  But for the COIN clique to think that their realistic appreciation of the difficulties of COIN and their private reticence to do it is going to outweigh their technocratic advice and willingness to obey orders in the minds of policymakers, I think they’re gravely mistaken.  The work of the COIN crowd is going to create the impression in the minds of policymakers that the military knows how to win counterinsurgencies and therefore we don’t need an “Iraq syndrome.”  But we do need an Iraq syndrome.

Take, for one example of my argument, the thinking of Bush NSC official Peter Feaver.*  He thinks, as I do, that making COIN doctrine central to American foreign policy thought is going to create a future in which US foreign policy will continue to look like that of President Bush.  Except for Feaver, that’s a feature, not a bug:

The problem with Chris’s post on COIN is that it takes the existing debate at face value, as if it really were a debate about the best way to do COIN or its place in American national security. I don’t think it is.

Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda. Setting them aside, the larger debate seems driven by one of three deeper considerations. First, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue against American military involvement in any fashion because the most urgent near-term threats requiring military operations involve COIN. So if your ideology tells you that the dominant problem in the world is American militarism; if you look at recent history and can only find cases where we did use military force and shouldn’t have and can find no cases where we did not use military force and should have; if you think that getting defeated in Iraq (or Afghanistan) would have a salutary chastening effect on American adventurism; if any or all of that applies, then it makes sense to argue against Gates’ emphasis on COIN now. If the U.S. military cannot or will not do COIN, then the U.S. military cannot and will not be operational.

Does Exum think this policymaker’s view is wrong?  Aberrant?  I think its descriptive content is exactly accurate and characteristic.  Orienting planning and resources more toward COIN is likely to lead to more counterinsurgency wars.  I’m pretty confident in this prediction.  If somebody disagrees, I’d like to hear a better fleshed out argument behind the idea that telling policymakers “we now know how to do COIN pretty well” will lead to those policymakers to decide we ought to do it less.

* One really ought to note how sad it is to see this sort of mendacious, straw-man writing coming from an academic, intimating as Feaver does that anti-COIN scholars aren’t “sincere patriots” and that they have some “deeper agenda.”  Both Bacevich and Gentile, to whom Feaver is referring in particular, are military veterans, and Bacevich’s son was killed in the sands of Iraq while Mr. Feaver was working at the Bush NSC, trying to come up with innovative ways to convince Americans that the war was going well.

UPDATE: Professor Feaver writes in to say that by “Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda” he meant to make the positive statement that these people are patriots with noble intentions and didn’t mean to intimate they could be insincere patriots of questionable honesty with deeper agendas. He also disputes the factual accuracy of the Times article linked above and points to this Commentary piece as the definitive account of his work at the Bush NSC.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

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