Author Archives: jsh54

The Kurdish Serbia.

Posted on by
Reply

Arab historians like Ibn Khaldun noted the tension between the simple, tough, and often war-like people of the mountains and deserts, on the one hand, and the refined, soft, and often feckless people of the towns and plains, on the other hand.[1] It’s not bad as an organizing principle, but in fact the silk slipper was often on the other foot. The Kurds offer a good example of this truth. Their hopes for a nation of their own were frustrated by the nationalism of other peoples. After the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Sunni Muslim, non-Arab Kurds found themselves divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. All of these governments repressed the Kurds. Iraq draws most of the attention for this, but all the governments did it.

Saddam Hussein found the Iraqi Kurds disloyal during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989), so he used poison gas to slaughter some and then had many of the male survivors shot. The Americans encouraged and then betrayed a Kurdish revolt at the time of the First Iraq War (1990-1991). To show remorse, the Americans then fostered a semi-autonomous Kurdish area in Iraq through a no-fly zone and humanitarian aid. This potential nation cooked along better than the rest of Iraq for a dozen years.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 greatly stimulated Kurdish separatism. Elections in 2005 made the Kurds the second largest group in Iraq’s parliament. More adept at bargaining than their Arab compatriots, the Kurds wrestled-away ever greater degrees of autonomy from Baghdad. The American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 allowed the Shi’ite government to run amok at the expense of the Sunni Arabs. Again, the Kurds were better able to defend themselves. They built an oil pipeline to Turkey to gain a greater degree of economic freedom from the central government. The crISIS of 2014 then provided the Kurds with yet another opportunity to loosen the bonds between themselves and the failing Iraq state. Kurdish troops took advantage of the collapse of the Iraqi army in the north to expand their territory to include the city of Kirkuk. Similarly, the Kurds of Syria have looked to their fellow Kurds in Iraq and Turkey for aid against ISIS. Regardless of how the crISIS ends, it will be hard for Baghdad to corral the Kurds. The shattering of Syria and Iraq could lead to an enlarged Kurdistan on its way to statehood.

This will have long-term consequences. For one thing, it will be harder to hold Iraq together if it is merely a federation of mutually-hostile Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni Arabs. Kurdistan’s wresting-away of much of Iraq’s oil will leave Baghdad with fewer resources with which to buy-off opponents. For another thing, the majority of Kurds live inside Turkey. The Turks have fought a long struggle to repress separatism among the Kurds. For the moment, they seem willing to have the Iraqi Kurds serve as a bulwark against ISIS. However, an independent Kurdistan will again come to be a magnet for Turkish Kurds. This will threaten Turkish territorial integrity. The Turks might be well-advised to concede this demand ahead of time. They’re not likely to do so. The artist formerly known as Yugoslavia grew out of the Serbian desire to gather all the South Slavs in one state. The Austro-Hungarian Empire might have been well advised to concede this demand ahead of time.   Vienna preferred war.

“The other Iraq,” The Week, 25 July 2014, p. 9.

[1] European Orientalist art of the 19th Century adopted the same perspective as a way of introducing some adventure and soft-core pornography into the lives of highly inhibited European bourgeois gentlemen. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=Orientalist+art&client=firefox-a&hs=i1a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Hg0oVPhByoHKBKe4gKAL&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1150&bih=657

College costs: the old eat the young.

Posted on by
4

It is always worth asking whether a consumer is getting value for money. Is a college education today worth the higher price than that paid by earlier generations?

Everyone knows that inflation-adjusted college tuition has more than doubled since 1992. Except that it hasn’t. Everyone knows that it can cost $60,000 a year for college. Except that it hardly ever does.

The real price of college has to include the financial aid (other than loans) supplied to the student. This gives the net price. Since 1992, the net price for community college has fallen; the net price at a private four-year college has risen 22 percent; and the net price for a four-year public college has risen 60 percent. The average of the two falls into a range between a 40 percent and 50 percent increase in net tuition. This puts college tuition in the same ball-park as medical costs (35 percent) or day care (44 percent).

The “sticker shock” tuitions beloved of the media and the politicians only apply to people from affluent families who are not eligible for financial aid attending elite schools that can charge what the market will bear for a prestigious degree.

Taking lower costs and higher aid into account, the average price for a student attending a four-year public college was $3,120 a year in 2013; the average price for a student attending a four-year private college was $12,460.[1]

Why has the net cost of a four-year public college risen so much more than the cost of a four-year private college? In the United States, about eighty percent of college students attend public colleges. Between 1988 and 2013, nominal tuition at these institutions more than doubled. This has created a terrible problem of debt for parents and students when most incomes have been stagnant. However, the revenue earned by these colleges stayed flat. In 1988 colleges earned an average of $11,300 per student; in 2013 they earned an average of $11,500 per student. If colleges aren’t getting rich, then where did the additional tuition go? To tax-payers, that’s where.

Traditionally, public colleges were subsidized by state legislatures. In 1988, each student at a public college received an average of $8,600 a year to subsidize his/her studies. The student and his/her family kicked in the additional $2,700 a year. In 2013, each student at a public college received an average of $6,100 a year to subsidize his/her studies. The student and his/her family now have to kick in $5,400 a year. A four year BA went from costing the state $34,600 to costing $24,400. That same four year BA went from costing students and parents $10,800 to costing $20,800. People who got a cheap BA paid for by others, now want to pay lower taxes.

The Obama administration has the idea that introducing ratings for colleges will help “education consumers.” They want to consider factors like affordability, drop-out rates, and the earnings of graduates. Federal subsidies—“Jump, boy, jump” versus “Bad dog, no biscuit”—would reward colleges which score well on the standardized test.[2]   People push back, saying that there is too much difference among students to make a single standard meaningful. The economist Susan Dynarski has suggested that the “risk adjusted” rating system used for hospitals might offer a useful means of adapting any rating system.[3] Better still, restore the state aid.

[1] David Leonhardt, “How Government Exaggerates College’s Cost,” New York Times, 29 July 2014.

[2] I can foresee the criticism that this will lead colleges to “admit to the test” just as schools “teach to the test.”

[3] Susan Dynarski, “Where College Ratings Hit the Wall,” New York Times, 21 September 2014.

MPs–Militarized Police.

Posted on by
Reply

The police response to civil unrest in Ferguson, MO, brought to public attention the “militarization of the police.” The irony is that rioting and looting of the sort that took place around the edges of the legitimate protests in Ferguson is one of the events in which a more robust police presence is appropriate. What got lost in the discussion was the far more common use of “militarized” police.

Once upon a time, the local authorities responded to trouble by calling the National Guard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcJ5WQSamQ. Then a lot of “civil unrest” hit American cities in the 1960s-1970s: riots, rock concerts run amok like Altamont https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qTKsylrpsg, holed-up radicals http://www.nbcnews.com/video/dateline/32129377#32129377, hostage situations, and just crazy people packing a lot of fire-power.

Police department Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams became common after the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) pioneered them in 1967. Subsequent events multiplied the demand and the occasions on which they might be used. The Columbine school massacre in 1999, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and the escalating violence of the war on drugs all argued for a more militarized police force as the first-responders to unimaginable dangers. The Department of Homeland Security, which is now headquartered at the old St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, has poured $35 billion into up-arming local police forces. Some of the results are so ludicrous that they attract even media attention: armored vehicles (MRAPs) that were produced to respond to IEDs in Iraq, and helicopter gun-ships.

Far more important, however, have been the militarization of attitudes among police officers. Incessant talk of policemen as the front-line soldiers in “wars” on crime, drugs, or terror combines with training in military tactics to create the ideal of a “warrior cop.” One can’t help but wonder if police officers start to think of citizens as a foreign enemy. This is far removed from the boiler-plate slogan “to serve and protect.” Radley Balko, author of Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids (Cato Institute Press, 2006) and The Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (PublicAffairs, 2013), warned of the danger long before it began to make headlines

One thing that alarms observers has been the conversion of SWAT teams from a sensible “extreme case” response into a common feature of policing. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) estimates that SWAT team raids take place on an average of 124 times a day. Some observers wonder if having the capacity to conduct such operations creates a pressure to use it. The vast majority of SWAT operations now occur in support of drug searches. Apparently, theory holds that when policemen looking like big fighting insects bust down the door, suspected criminals will be too petrified to destroy the evidence by flushing it down the toilet. Carried to an extreme, these operations have included raids on illegal barbershops, cockfights, Tibetan monks on a peace pilgrimage in Iowa, and a guy who bet too much on a college football game. Several dozen people have been killed during these raids, although the most common victim is a family dog shot by amped-up policemen responding to incessant barking. (But who hasn’t felt that impulse in the middle of a summer night?) “The militarization of America’s police,” The Week, 1 August 2014, p. 11.)

The well-known gap between the American citizens and the military that protects them from foreign dangers, the broad reach of NSA communication searches, and the militarization of policing raise questions about the direction in which American democracy is headed.

The gun that made the Nineties roar.

Posted on by
Reply

The story of the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle can stand in for the history of the Soviet Union more generally. First, there is the story of its designer. Timofey Kalashnikov was a “kulak” (one of the well-off peasants who had profited from the pre-revolutionary regime’s “wager on the sober and the strong”). In 1919 Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born. His parents nurtured him through the Russian Civil War. In 1921 the Bolshevik Revolution ran up against the resistance to “common ownership of the means of production” by the peasant-proprietors like Timofey Kalashnikov. The Bolsheviks settled for control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, while allowing peasants and shopkeepers to retain possession of their property. They didn’t like doing this, but they recognized reality. Then Stalin came to power. In 1928 he launched the transition to real Communism. He ordered the “collectivization” of agriculture, by seizing the lands of the kulaks, and by plowing resources into building industry. The Kalashnikov family had their farm seized, then were deported to Siberia. Old Pa Kalashnikov soon died. An older brother mouthed off and got slammed into the Gulag. So Mikhail Kalashnikov grew up in fear and hardship. In 1938 Kalashnikov got drafted and learned to drive a tank; in June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union; in October 1941 Kalashnikov was badly wounded. While in hospital he became interested in weapons design and managed to get transferred to a design unit for the rest of the war. No Stalingrad for him. At the end of the war the Allies captured a bunch of German designers. The US got the great rocket scientist Werner von Braun; the Russkies got the great arms designer Hugo Schmeisser. Taken to Russia, Schmeisser “helped” design the AK-47, which—oddly—bears a marked resemblance to his own earlier design for the Wehrmacht’s “Sturmgewehr” assault rifle. So, what did Mikhail Kalashnikov add?

That question brings us to our second theme, the Soviet system of industrial production. There was a Soviet-era joke that ran: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Even the best-rewarded Soviet workers weren’t always delighted with their situations. A lot of people did sloppy, crude work, chipping at the vodka bottle during the work day. As a result, the AK-47 is garbage by Western engineering standards. It isn’t very accurate: it has an effective range of only 200-300 yards. It is crudely made, rather than engineered so that the pieces fit tightly together. Perversely, herein lies one of its virtues. You can get it dirty; you can forget to oil it; and you can blaze away at something without cleaning out the carbon build-up: it still fires. Then, it is stubby, especially with the butt-stock folded forward, and light, only about ten pounds. Herein lies a second virtue. Short and light made it the weapon-of-choice for both child-soldiers and terrorists. Short, light, and reliable made untrained, even moronic, soldiers a deadly enemy. In sum, it is a weapon perfectly adapted for war in the Third World.

Third, there is the story of the Communism versus Capitalism. Colt only manufactured as many M-16s as the market demanded. The Soviets manufactured stuff to keep their workers employed, without any regard for what the market wanted. As a result, there are 10 million M-16s, but there may be 100 million AK-47s. The Soviets gave the surplus arms away to “movements of national liberation” all around the globe during the Cold War. Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are awash in these things.

As for Kalashnikov, he had all the rewards and special privileges reserved for a “Hero of the Soviet Union” heaped upon him: he was rich enough to buy a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, and even a car. All were built on the same lines as the AK-47. No wonder the place folded up.

See: C.J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

The Arms Barometer

Posted on by
Reply

Great attention has focused on the dangers posed by Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). However, more than 80 percent of the violent conflicts waged during the 1990s employed only “small arms” (weapons ranging from pistols to RPGs). Consequently, the availability of small arms is a matter of real concern. How many guns are there circulating in the world? A lot. The Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, runs an annual Small Arms Survey. The 2002 edition estimates that there are about 640 million small arms worldwide. Some of these guns are newly manufactured. About 8 million new guns were produced in 2000 alone. Some of them are used guns left over from earlier conflicts. Back in 2002, there were estimated to be about half a million small arms in Cambodia, which the Cambodians were busy selling all over the place through the conduit of Thailand.

The “belle of the ball” in small wars appears to be the old AK-47. (See my post on “The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar.”) The black market price of an AK-47 works as a barometer of conflict in a particular society. When the price is really low (say $40 for a used, but functional assault rifle), every little thug in the neighborhood can afford one. Violent robberies and the settlement of petty quarrels by means of homicide spread like wildfire. This is typically the case in the aftermath of some conflict, when the demand for guns has fallen sharply. A price range between $230 and $400 per weapon is the normal market price. Prices above $1,000 a weapon indicate a desperate, time-sensitive demand for weapons. Civil war is about to break out, so people will pay any price to get an assault rifle.

What do local market prices tell us about the state of civil peace in various countries around the world? Well, in 2002, an AK-47 sold for $15 in Mozambique, $40 in Cambodia, $90 in Sudan and Afghanistan, and $100 in both Nigeria and Nicaragua. Happy days were here again in these places after bitter wars. Other places, not so much. At the same time that the price of an AK-47 fell below market level in those places, they were bringing $800 each in Columbia, $1,200 in Bangladesh, $2,400 in Kashmir, $3,000 on the West Bank (more than twice as high as in 1999), and $3,800 in Bihar state in India. This indicated that a new catastrophe loomed over South Asia. It wouldn’t have to turn into a nuclear war to be deadly.

It is worth noting that the “merchants of death” aren’t always, or even mostly, Western industrial nations. One of the key forms of industrialization pursued by developing economies appears to be an arms industry. Many developing countries seem to want to alter their balance of payments by producing arms for sale abroad in a burgeoning world market, rather than importing arms in exchange for other exports. Small producers of arms now include Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Portugal, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Australia. To some extent, these countries obtain the means to produce arms by attracting European arms manufacturers to license factories in the developing countries. Take the example of Heckler and Koch. The German-based firm licensed factories in Greece and Iran. However, Greece exported some of the weapons manufactured in the licensed factory to Libya. Reportedly, Libya transferred some of these Heckler and Koch weapons to Lebanon. The Iranian Heckler and Koch factory exported some of their weapons to the Sudan. From Sudan the weapons went to Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt.

I suppose that somebody could use the AH-47 index to run a futures market in No Future.

 

Don Peck, “The World in Numbers: The Gun Trade,” Atlantic, December 2002, pp. 46-47.

MyQ

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve been testing “intelligence” for about a century. What does an IQ test “test”? It tests what is called “abstract intelligence,” basically solving logic problems. There is a correlation—not a cause-and-effect linkage—between high IQ scores and both good grades and good job performance. In contrast, many of the standardized tests (SAT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT, GMAT) that hold the keys to opportunity in life measure verbal and quantitative ability. Apparently the two types of tests measure different things because IQ scores have been rising steadily for decades, while measures like the SAT have stalled or even fallen. (Then there’s the third kind of test called “personal judgment” used by employers, teachers, and voters. I don’t see scholars doing much work on what I conjecture to be a key factor in individual success.)

Raw IQ scores rose steadily in all developed countries throughout the 20th Century and continue to do so today. Three points per decade is the normal increase. That means that my older son should have an IQ about 20 points higher than my father and about a 12 points higher than myself.[1] They are rising across all groups tested, rather than in just part of the population. The dumb are getting smart and the smart are getting smarterer.

It’s hard to tell why they are rising. Improved nutrition and health may play a role by allowing most children to develop more rapidly. IQ tests are usually given to captive school or draft age populations, so a fast first step in life might contribute to rising scores. Also, more education became available to the lower income groups in the course of the 20th Century. This could move the “left tail” of a standard distribution to the right. On the other end of the spectrum, smart kids increasingly hang with smart kids. A “social multiplier effect” may explain why the IQ scores of this group continue to rise when improved nutrition and education cannot be factors. There is an intriguing third possibility. Both computer games and popular television shows have become increasingly complex. The narratives in each art form stress complicated plots and lots of characters. Perhaps this fosters a constant analysis of abstract relationships.

Then there are Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. These aren’t discussed much, if at all, in the media. What one analysis of the scores since 1968 shows is that the Torrance scores for American children have been dropping since 1990.

While something is causing IQ to rise, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with what is going on in the classroom. Better nutrition, more years in school, watching “Lost,” and playing “Call of Duty” might be the most reasonable explanations. In contrast, the stagnation (at best) in the SATs and the decline in the Torrance Test scores might be related to what is happening in classrooms since they test things that schools claim to teach and foster.

There are implications for social policy. First, improving both childhood nutrition and education help poor children. That could get tangled up with questions about the quality of parenting supplied by poor people. FDA guidelines on nutrition and good advice on stimulating the intellectual development of children has been available for decades. Not everyone uses them. Second, schools and colleges might want to think about incorporating complex television series and electronic games into their tool-kit. If William Shakespeare were alive today, would he prefer to write “Kinky Boots” or “Breaking Bad”? Third, mixing higher IQ students with lower IQ students in the classroom may be good for the lower IQ students. It won’t be good for higher IQ students. I can hear the Republican outcry against Democrats’ “redistribution of grey cells” already. I might be part of it. (“Smarter than ever,” The Week, 16 September 2011, p. 11.)

[1] This may be an argument for having children as early in life as possible. It cuts down on the IQ gap between yourself and your children. Otherwise the little bastards will be just insufferable.

Save the Pagan Babies!

Posted on by
Reply

Poor countries cannot run what contemporary Americans would regard as “adequate” orphanages. They don’t have the surplus economic resources to provide robust social welfare institutions. Furthermore, as political scientists say, the state institutions lack capacity to achieve their goals. At best, they’re something out of Dickens. At worst, they’re warehouses in Hell. This is probably going to have some kind of long term psychological impact.

Long wars, especially civil wars, fought under barbarous conditions produce lots of orphans. The process of getting orphaned may involve something like watching your father have his arms chopped off with a machete. This, too, may have a lasting impact.

One report states that in Azerbaijan, “Many children are abandoned due to extreme poverty and harsh living conditions. Family members or neighbors may raise some of these children but the majority live in crowded orphanages until the age of fifteen when they are sent into the community to make a living for themselves.”

Finally, as in America not all that long ago, people use mental institutions and orphanages as receptacles for family members who are permanently disabled in some way. (One problem with tenement living was that you lacked an attic in which to confine Great-Aunt Grace who spent all her time talking about Kate Chopin’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Putting her in the storage locker in the basement just got the neighbors talking.)

Promoting international adoption can be one way of reducing the burden on taxpayers.

Still, there can be problems.

“Child laundering.” No, really, that’s what it’s called. Basically, “gringos” and “farangs” spend so much time with their cell phones that the radiation fries their little swimmers. So, no kids. So, they come to some developing country to buy a kid from an orphanage or some helpful soul who knows a starving child and would like to set him/her up in an American suburban home with a swing set in the backyard and 999 television channels. They’re rich, so there’s money to be made if you have a spare kid to sell. What if you do not have such a kid? Well, that’s what shopping malls are for in the United States. In developing countries you probably have to snatch them in a market-place or on their way home from school. Then, sell to “gringo” or “farang.” It helps if you know a “poor, corrupt policeman” who can help you with fake identity papers. (The US government has been prosecuting an American woman for her part in the fraudulent adoption of 800 Cambodian children.)

UNICEF estimates that there are 700,000 orphans in Russia. The number increases by over 100,000 a year. The striking thing is that these are “social orphans.” They have at least one living parent. The parent feels unable to care for the child, so they abandon the child to the care of someone else. Most go to other relatives or to foster homes. About a third are in the care of the state. Same thing is true in Haiti, where poor parents “hoped to increase their children’s opportunities by sending them to orphanages.” After the Haitian earthquake, the number of orphans sky-rocketed (although so did the number of suddenly-childless adults). American aid agencies descended on Haiti. One impulse was to promote the adoption of children from the orphanages to American homes. The obvious problem was that the Americans completely misunderstood the nature of Haitian orphanages. (On the other hand, they perfectly understood the motives of Haitian government officials who objected to the adoptions: they hadn’t got their cut.)

Little of this kind of “news” makes the headlines.

Origins of the War on Drugs

Posted on by
Reply

You used to be able to get cocaine eye-drops off the shelf in a drug-store and the Sears and Roebuck catalogue offered cocaine and a syringe for $1.50. Doctors regularly recommended opium to patients suffering from “female complaints.” Cramps? Get your head up.

Then domestic and international influences came together to launch a “war on drugs.” On the one hand, opium was legal in Asia. Chinese immigrants brought opium-smoking to America and the United States conquered the Philippines, where opium was legal. In 1901, Charles Brent, an American missionary in the Philippines, began to campaign for the international control of addictive drugs. President Theodore Roosevelt helped create an International Opium Commission (1906), then appointed Dr. Hamilton Wright as the first U.S. Opium Commissioner. The International Opium Convention (1912) tried to regulate the trade.

On the other hand, Americans began to associate drugs with both crime and race. African-Americans and Chinese immigrants became centers of concern, as did the white women who supposedly fell prey to non-white men as a result of drug use. A 1914 law limited the sale of narcotics and cocaine to those with a doctor’s prescription. A 1922 law regulated the import of narcotics. A 1924 law outlawed heroin. A 1935 law assigned enforcement responsibility to the states.   A 1937 law banned marijuana. Between 1914 and 1945 the number of addicts in the United States reportedly fell from 1 in 400 people to 1 in 4,000. Things cooked along quietly for the next two decades. Charlie Parker and Robert Mitchum, people like that, used drugs.

Then recreational drug use began to spread as part of the counter-cultural strife of the Sixties and Seventies, along with long hair, peasant dresses, pre-marital sex, draft-dodging, and really great music. The “Up With People” crowd pushed back hard. President Nixon seized on the issue of drugs in 1969. The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (1970) created the current system of classes of drugs. President Nixon announced a “war on drugs” (1971). A National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Policy (1972) reported that marijuana was not addictive and did not pose any serious threat to society or its users, and recommended de-criminalization. “Shut up” President Nixon explained. A presidential order (1973) created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to co-ordinate and lead efforts to halt drug smuggling into the United States and to suppress the illegal black-market for drugs within the United States.

The current “war on drugs” has both international and domestic fronts.

On the international front, the United States seeks to attack the foreign sources and supply lines that feed the American market. The principal growing sites for opium poppies (the source of heroin) are highland Burma (the “Golden Triangle”), Afghanistan, and Mexico. Of these, Afghanistan is by far the most important, with 93 percent of opiates now (well, 2007) coming from Afghanistan.[1] Interdiction of drug traffic can involve support for local police; aerial spraying of defoliants; interception of ground, sea, and air shipments; and discovery of drug factories where the raw materials are turned into a finished product for sale.

On the domestic front, the chief anti-drug measure has become sharply increasing arrest rates. During the 1970s drug arrests scarcely increased, in spite of Nixon’s call for a “war on drugs.” Only during the 1980s did policy change. While arrests for all crimes rose by 28 percent during that decade, arrests for drugs rose by 126 percent. Between 1980 and 2010 the share of Americans imprisoned quadrupled. Half a million people a year go to prison for drugs.

[1] Revenues from sales in Western countries provide Afghan traffickers with over $60 billion of “foreign aid” each year.   In comparison, the United States provided the Afghan government with over $50 billion of aid over ten years. Since much of the trade is controlled by the Taliban, we are paying more money to our enemy than to our ally.

The last helicopter from Baghdad.

Posted on by
Reply

As we embark on an attempt to salvage Iraq from both the misdeeds of its post-Saddam Hussein/post-American occupation government and from the claws of ISIS, here’s a cold, hard lesson from History.

After his election as president in November 1964 Lyndon Johnson increased American troops in the war in Vietnam to a maximum of 540,000 men. In January 1968 the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) launched a massive offensive to coincide with the Tet lunar New Year celebration. The Americans and the South Vietnamese managed to defeat the Tet offensive on the ground, but not in the eyes of American voters. Up until Tet Americans had tended to believe the assurances of progress that were being made in Vietnam on the part by their leaders. Tet changed that. Now a majority began to doubt that victory was possible and that American leaders were telling them the truth about the war. In March 1968 President Lyndon Johnson announced a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, solicited peace talks, and announced that he would not run for re-election.

Peace talks began in Paris in May 1968. When they failed to make progress, President Johnson resumed bombing until the North Vietnamese came to their senses in October 1968. However, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon encouraged the South Vietnamese to block further talks until after the November 1968 elections.

Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey in the November 1968 election. Nixon’s goal was to extricate American forces from Vietnam without the whole house of cards coming down immediately. As his foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger put it, “We’ve got to find some formula that holds things together for a year or two [i.e. until late 1970 or 1971].” That formula appeared to be “Vietnamization”: shifting the chief burden to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). While negotiations with North /Vietnam continued, Nixon began to draw down American forces. By late 1971 the total number of American troops had fallen from 540,000 under Johnson to 157,000 under Nixon. Unsurprisingly, the negotiations went nowhere since the US was obviously withdrawing and the North Vietnamese could anticipate swift victory once the Americans were gone. In March 1972 Nixon unleashed a massive air attack on North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese gave in, negotiations resumed, and a cease-fire was declared in January 1973. Most of the remaining American troops were withdrawn by March 1973.

The Republic of South Vietnam survived until early 1975. Then the North Vietnamese attacked. The ARVN collapsed, and huge numbers of refugees-in-the-making converged on Saigon in hopes of being evacuated by the Americans. Many (6,200) were, but most were not. Saigon fell on 30 April 1975.[1]

What are the parallels, if any, between South Vietnam then and Iraq now? Neither government enjoyed much legitimacy in the eyes of at least a large minority of their people. Both governments were up against ruthless and competent enemies. There are limits to what can be accomplished by airpower. The American administrations that had to clean up the mess weren’t the ones who had caused it.

Perhaps the differences are more important. Having escaped the Indochina disaster, Americans refused to recommit when a new crisis arose. The world did not end.

[1] “Leaving Vietnam,” The Week, 9 February 2007, p. 11.

 

Value for Money in College Education

Posted on by
Reply

A Pew Research Center report from 2011 made two interesting points. First,” less than half of members of the general public agrees [that students should pay for their own college education], with a majority saying either the federal or state government, private donors, or a combination of those should pick up the largest share of a student’s college tab.” Second, “nearly 60 percent of Americans say the U.S. higher education system is not providing students with a good value.” These attitudes put average Americans sharply at odds with college presidents and faculty, who feel themselves best by Yahoos.

It’s time for some plain speaking. First, college does cost more than most families care to afford. Second, most colleges don’t give good value for what they charge, at least not in educational terms. Third, it is the same general public that complains about low value for a high price that is the cause of these problems. An examination of the historical record makes this clear.

One part of the explanation comes from demography.  The Baby Boom (from 1946 to 1964 approximately) went through American society like a mouse through the rattlesnake my college room-mate used to keep.  In the Forties and Fifties a tsunami of students hit the schools.  In the Sixties and Seventies the same tsunami hit the colleges.  The result of massive demand was a huge increase in the size of colleges and college faculties.

Then the Baby Boom gave way to the Baby Bust.  This brought a decline in the number of 18 year-olds in 1982 and for years to come. The number of students no longer matched up with the size of colleges and faculties.  What to do?  In business, of course, lots of places would just have gone under, like nail or tanning salons. Supply would have returned to balance with demand.  Not in higher education however.  Colleges fought for survival. First of all, they molted into country-clubs attached to classrooms.  Sports facilities, luxury dorms, and improved food services became the hall-marks of a good college. Second, adult education and degree-completion programs multiplied. Third, they played to the American reverence for diplomas, if not for learning as an abstract concept.  Everyone emphasized the economic value of more education.  Everyone celebrated a liberal arts education for all as a form of democratization.  Graduate programs to confer credentials sprang up like mushrooms.

The end result was that not enough colleges were down-sized.  Instead, they passed the rising costs along to others: to parents (through tuition increases), to students (through larger student loan debt), and to taxpayers (through government aid to higher education).

A second part of the explanation is cultural.              On the one hand, we are living with the consequences of a regulatory society created to pursue well-intended, but ill-defined goals like “justice” and “well-being” for citizens.  The outcome of this has been the growth of a massive apparatus of administrative staff at every college.  If you compare a college phone directory of twenty years ago with one of today, you will be able to measure the scale of the growth of administrators, new offices, assistants, and secretaries.  These people largely respond to mandates imposed by the federal and state governments, and accrediting agencies.  The costs of those mandates, however, are carried by the colleges and passed on to the consumer.

On the other hand, we are living with the consequences of the “de-bourgeoisification” of the American middle class.  Being bourgeois used to mean valuing hard work, self-restraint, living on less than you earn in order to have savings and–in old age–to be able to leave “an estate” to one’s children to help them get started in life.  It did not mean being happy or “fulfilled.”  Even so, bourgeois used to have a positive association.  Since the 1960s being bourgeois has gone the way of fedoras and torpedo bras.  Increasingly, the cultural emphasis has been on individual fulfillment and happiness.  There isn’t much that is fulfilling or happy about hard work, so it is de-valued.

The average American home now has five books in it.  The average home also has a big screen TV and a huge range of channels on its cable package.  You can’t get literacy or analytical skills from reality shows or video games.

Furthermore, in 1950 about 40 percent of students never finished high-school.  They didn’t need much education to drive a truck or work a drill-press or dig a ditch.  THEN high school and college were for people willing to do the work and to respect authority in the form of unreasonable teachers and parents angry about report cards.  NOW the schools have shifted toward keeping kids in school regardless of the cost to the state of education.  The quality of education has suffered because it isn’t fashionable to do the work required for learning and almost impossible to coerce kids with threats of flunking out.  Parental authority also has declined.  (You try involuntarily institutionalizing somebody over the age of 14 in any state except Utah.)

The outcome of all this is that many students come to college without the intellectual or cultural or psychological capital that their predecessors brought.  They struggle–or don’t bother to–in the classes.  They require remedial course work and second chances.  The survival imperative driving many colleges leads to a dilution of course work and grading standards.  They need the tuition, so they need the students.

For many students, college is a rite of passage, not an education.  They get to live away from their parents for the first time.  They’re semi-adults on their way to being minor-league adults on their way to being full-scale adults on their way to being safely dead where nothing can go wrong now so they’re Winners!  (The movie “Trainspotting” may have been repellant, but it wasn’t wrong.) The country-club with classrooms environment reinforces this feeling.

Public attention has focused on the real-estate bubble and all the evidence of corporate misbehavior.  Much less noticed was the explosion in ill-considered consumer debt and use of home equity loans to finance consumption.  Basically, most people don’t save a ton of money to pay for their kids’ college education.  The attitudes reflected in the Pew survey are unrealistic on several grounds.  First, it would be one thing publically financing the higher education of some sort of elite.  In fact, most students in college are not part of some intellectual elite.  Second, the money just isn’t there.  The federal deficit is going to be cut through some combination of tax increases on most people and spending cuts for all.  How we would expand public aid to everyone seeking a college education in that environment is beyond me.  Certainly, Princeton could buy the moon if it was for sale. However, most colleges do not have large endowments to provide additional income.  Public colleges live off direct state aid and tuition.  Many private colleges are in the same leaky boat.  That means that the “someone” who will pay for college if parents and students don’t pay will be—parents and students in their capacity as taxpayers and tuition-payers.

Is there a solution to this problem? Sure. Shape up. Turn off the television. Get rid of the xBox. Take the kid to the library once a week. Ground the kid if the grade report isn’t good. Paint the house during your summer vacation or drive out to Gettysburg, but forget about going to Disney World or down the Shore. I hate having to quote Chris Christie, but “why are you mad at the first person who told you the truth?”