Jimmy Margulies

A new study of Sweden’s nationwide private school choice program reveals that both non-profit and for-profit private schools outperform state-run schools. And, after the most comprehensive set of controls for confounding variables, they do so by an almost identical (and highly statistically significant) margin.

Is there any reason, then, to prefer one form of private organization over the other? Yes. While non-profit private schools have tended to increase the size of their waiting lists in response to growing demand, their for-profit counterparts have done what all commercial enterprises would do in that circumstance: they’ve grown.

For more insights on this crucial distinction, have a look at Peje Emilsson’s presentation from our “Cloning Superman” event, which was broadcast on CSPAN.

If you want more good schools and fewer bad ones, make it easier for entrepreneurs and investors to team up with great educators, and let them earn profits or suffer losses in direct proportion to their ability to serve children.

Via Erik Voeten, Thanassis Cambanis has a long piece in Sunday’s Boston Globe about academic critics of America’s bipartisan grand strategy. Cambanis rightly points out that Republicans and Democrats basically agree about American strategy, and spend all their time haggling over price and implementation. By contrast, there is a burgeoning group of critics in the academy who disagree:

[The critics’] call for a humbler foreign policy hasn’t gained much of a hearing with the foreign policy elite, and is hardly talked about in mainstream circles. They question many of America’s basic habits and reflexes, at a time when it’s increasingly clear that the “long war” has not eliminated the threat of terrorism or neutralized rogue states and their nuclear black market.

Not every danger rises to the level of an existential threat, these thinkers say; often, the best way to project power is to stay out of other people’s fights. Or as [Barry] Posen, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who is one of the most acerbic proponents of restraint, puts it: “We need to get out of the world’s face.”

[…]

div[caption align=right]

Barry Posen[/caption]

Posen’s thinking has evolved markedly. In the late 1990s he derided “neo-isolationists” who wanted to minimize American involvements abroad (“Isolationist is what we called the people whose ideas we didn’t like,” he said). Now he counts himself among their number, and has embarked on a book and lecture tour expounding his case for restraint.
divThere are plenty of reasons why retrenchment should get more of a hearing in contemporary America, Posen says, but he doesn’t think power brokers will take the idea seriously until a definitive crisis limits the Pentagon or the Treasury. “It’s almost as if in foreign and security policy, democratic debate peters out,” Posen says. “If you argue for restraint, people hold up garlic like they would against a vampire and shout ‘Isolationist! Isolationist!’ ”

[…]

divFor now, the old consensus is running strong. But for the new isolationists, America is at the tail end of an unsustainable experiment that has cost progress at home. America’s interventionist reflex has embroiled it in wars big and small and political disputes whose value to American interests is hard to fathom.
div“Maybe I’m hallucinating, but there’s an awareness that this project we’re running isn’t sustainable,” Posen says. “The way we run our strategy generates new little dragons faster than we can slay the old ones.”

The piece mentions, in addition to Posen, my old professor John Mearsheimer, who had a solid cover story in the current issue of the National Interest (video clip of recent talk on the article here), as well as Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich.

Cambanis’s piece is interesting and hits on themes I have tried to drive home in the past. At last year’s APSA Annual Meeting, I highlighted the gulf between academic grand strategists and the Beltway foreign policy elite and tried to explain it. I’ve also written a bit about the “isolationism” canard, and how it was designed–and coined by A.T. Mahan–with the intention of demonizing the opponents of an activist American strategy.

I’m still shopping an article dealing with these themes, but I would suggest that while “hallucinating” might be too strong a word, Posen is too optimistic about the prospects of a major strategic shift along the lines that he–and I–would like. There is simply no interest group support for it in Washington and no external pressure that looks likely to force us to pull in our horns. Maybe I’m being too pessimistic, and maybe it’s a function of having been working on this project for a long time in DC with very little success, but I think the prospects for significant change are a long ways off, and sound arguments emanating from the academy are unlikely to get us there.

To my mind, there are two things that could bring substantial change to American strategy: the rise of some external security threat that would force us to make smarter, more prudent choices, or a shift in the domestic-political balance of power that involved the rise of a faction within Washington that had vested interests in strategic restraint. To my mind, we’re miles away from either of those scenarios, and thus the status quo is likely to persist for decades.

From my latest Kaiser Health News op-ed:

When 34 Senate Democrats joined all 47 Republicans last week to repeal ObamaCare’s 1099 reporting requirement, their votes confirmed what their talking points still deny: ObamaCare will increase the deficit, no matter what the official cost projections say…

This public-choice dynamic [of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs] is why the Congressional Budget Office, the chief Medicare actuary, and even the International Monetary Fund have discredited the idea that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit. It is one of the principal reasons why, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” In other words, the game is rigged in favor of bigger government.

It also explains why the Obama administration is sprinting to implement ObamaCare in spite of a federal court having struck down the law as unconstitutional. The White House needs to get some concentrated interest groups hooked on ObamaCare’s subsidies – fast.

Read the whole thing here.

Steve Kelley

In today’s Los Angeles Times I write that social conservatives are pointing to real problems, but the only policy solutions they discuss are completely irrelevant to what they call “the high cost of a dysfunctional society”:

… Reducing the incidence of unwed motherhood, divorce, fatherlessness, welfare and crime would be a good thing. So why the focus on issues that would do nothing to solve the “breakdown of the basic family structure” and the resulting “high cost of a dysfunctional society”? Well, solving the problems of divorce and unwed motherhood is hard. And lots of Republican and conservative voters have been divorced. A constitutional amendment to ban divorce wouldn’t go over very well, even with the social conservatives. Far better to pick on a small group, a group not perceived to be part of the Republican constituency, and blame it for social breakdown and its associated costs.

That’s why social conservatives point to a real problem and then offer phony solutions.

But you won’t find your keys on the thoroughfare if you dropped them in the alley, and you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and preventing them from adopting orphans.

Boeing subsidiary Narus reports on its Web site that it “protects and manages” a number of worldwide networks, including that of Egypt Telecom. A recent IT World article entitled “Narus Develops a Scary Sleuth for Social Media” reported on a Narus product called Hone last year:

Hone will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e‑mail address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and work addresses of people. Another component can trace the location of someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or phone.

Media advocate Tim Karr reports that “Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.”

It’s very hard to know how Narus’s technology was used in Egypt before the country pulled the plug on its Internet connectivity, or how it’s being used now. Narus is declining comment.

So what’s to be done?

Narus and its parent, the Boeing Company, have no right to their business with the U.S. government. On our behalf, Congress is entitled to ask about Narus’s/​Boeing’s assistance to the Mubarak regime in Egypt. If contractors were required to refrain from assisting authoritarian governments’ surveillance as a condition of doing business with the U.S. government, that seems like the most direct way to dissuade them from providing top-notch technology capabilities to regimes on the wrong side of history.

Of course, decades of U.S. entanglement in the Middle East have created the circumstance where an authoritarian government has been an official “friend.” Until a few weeks ago, U.S. unity with the Mubarak regime probably had our government indulging Egypt’s characterization of political opponents as “terrorists and criminals.” It shouldn’t be in retrospect that we learn how costly these entangling alliances really are.

Chris Preble made a similar point ably on the National Interest blog last week:

We should step back and consider that our close relationship with Mubarak over the years created a vicious cycle, one that inclined us to cling tighter and tighter to him as opposition to him grew. And as the relationship deepened, U.S. policy seems to have become nearly paralyzed by the fear that the building anger at Mubarak’s regime would inevitably be directed at us.

We can’t undo our past policies of cozying up to foreign autocrats (the problem extends well beyond Egypt) over the years. And we won’t make things right by simply shifting — or doubling or tripling — U.S. foreign aid to a new leader. We should instead be open to the idea that an arms-length relationship might be the best one of all.