Imagine if Restaurants Worked Like Public Schools

I just finished filling in the Idaho Education Association's candidate questionnaire (a very good one, by the way, if a bit unintentionally self-revealing), and I found myself wondering: What is we had a public restaurant system similar to our public school system, that provided lunch and dinner to every Idaho resident who lived in that restaurant district, funded entirely from taxes?

1. No one would go hungry--especially the poor.

2. We could guarantee that everyone was served a nutritious and well-balanced meal. Now, a lot of people wouldn't eat their salad or vegetables, and some people might not eat enough of the broiled chicken, but at least they would have the opportunity.

3. I'm sure that the public restaurant system would provide at least one vegetarian entree. It might even (after lawsuits were filed by the ACLU) offer at least one kosher meal and one halal meal. But in many parts of Idaho, a lot of those specialty meals would be stored in freezers waiting for an Orthodox Jew or Muslim to show up. I suspect that they wouldn't be terribly appetizing by the time someone came to eat them.

4. Vegan meals? I rather doubt it. There's no Constitutional basis for demanding the government provide what a strong majority would regard as bizarre or unnecessary accommodations.

5. There would be a few kooks (or so some would call them) who would insist that their religion requires them to eat meals with their family in a private setting. Well, they would be free to do so. But there would be no reduction in your taxes that paid for the public restaurant system. You chose not to use the perfectly fine public system that is already in place.

6. Of course, being a public system, the restaurants would have very, very limited options on refusing service. I suppose that "no shoes, no shirt, no service" might survive court challenge, but someone who hadn't bathed in a month (and there are homeless people in that situation) would have just as much right to eat at the table next to you as anyone else. Much of the inappropriate behavior that would get you bounced out of a private restaurant would have to be tolerated--and the public restaurant workers wouldn't be happy about this, either.

7. Because only pretty gross incompetence or misconduct would get a public restaurant worker fired, some of the waiters would be surly, and completely unconcerned about whether they did their jobs right. Most of them would make a serious attempt at doing their jobs, of course--but seeing that you didn't get rewarded any better for doing more the minimum necessary would, over time, take away your incentive to work hard.

8. Private restaurants work hard at keeping costs under control as well as looking for new and interesting dishes to attract in customers--because they have competitors. The public restaurants would have effectively no competition--since you couldn't on a regular basis eat outside of your district.

9. If you weren't happy about the food or service provided in the public restaurant system, you would be, of course, free to go to private restaurants. You would still be paying taxes to support a public restaurant system that you didn't like or use. After all, this way we can be sure that no one goes hungry, no matter how poor they were.

10. If you suggested that this wasn't fair--that you shouldn't be required to pay for a system that you didn't want to use--indeed, might regard as violating your right of conscience--the Idaho Restaurant Workers Association would insist that the public shouldn't be forced to fund your weird restaurant choices. They would hunt around until they found a biker bar somewhere in the U.S. with swastikas on the walls and tell the public that this is where money would be spent in a voucher system.

11. Because most people couldn't afford to fund the public restaurant system and either buy their own groceries or eat out very often in private restaurants, the private restaurant market would be highly distorted. It would have a few places that catered to the very wealthy, or it would have a lot of places that provided meals for those who felt that the public restaurant system was failing them. Consequently, the private market would be overwhelmingly dominated by kosher, halal, vegetarian, and vegan restaurants. Not surprisingly, many of those who were not happy with the public system would not be particularly enthused about these other choices.

12. The shortage of funding, because most people were already paying for the public system, would mean that private restaurants that weren't for the wealthy would have continual struggles to stay afloat financially. The pay for workers in the private restaurants would probably be lower than it was for the public system employees, and often, private restaurant workers would be doing so because they saw what they were doing as a mission: to provide members of their faith/eating belief system with an alternative to the public system.

13. Because the public restaurant system was effectively a monopoly (with 95% of all meals served being ultimately paid for by the state government), wages for workers would be lower than in a free market system--but the Idaho Restaurant Workers Association would simply refuse to believe that working for a monopoly system was bad for their wages--and they would then point to the lower wages in the private restaurant industry as proof this, with no awareness that there was a significant market distorting effect caused by the monopoly.

Okay, I've had enough fun with this analogy. Like most analogies, it isn't perfect. I'm not proposing that we scrap public education--only provide a voucher system to provide more choices. There are definitely parents out there who, if they had to pay for education for their kids, either couldn't afford it, or would put a higher priority on beers, cigarettes, and meth.

But let's not exaggerate this problem. It costs somewhere between $600 and $2400 a year to put basic foodstuffs on the table on the table for a child. A private school tuition right now costs about $3600 to $5000 a year (depending on the school). There are parents who would simply neglect their children's education, if the government didn't provide for it free of charge. There are parents who do neglect their children's need for food--and the government doesn't run a public restaurant system. That's why we have laws about child neglect--and they are needed. Over the years, I have met very, very few parents who didn't care at all about whether their children received an education. Nearly all parents care some, and many care a lot.

There are parents who, without question, would make poor decisions about what sort of education their children should receive--just like there are parents who keep the house stuffed with potato chips, cookies, and soft drinks, producing the current epidemic of obese kids. Still, I've met a lot of fat parents with fat kids who still cared about getting their kids a decent education. I can't recall ever running into a family where the parents had healthy, properly nourished kids but who didn't care if their kids were getting a good education.

How Affirmative Action Hurts Blacks

It is not surprising that affirmative action works to the detriment of whites and Asians (who are no longer racial minorities, when it comes to affirmative action). But this recent report from the April 21, 2008 Inside Higher Education reveals that what Thomas Sowell has repeatedly written about--how affirmative action hurts blacks--is still the case:

A report being released today by Education Sector suggests that, at many campuses, the gap in the graduation rates of black and white students is embarrassingly large, raising questions about the experience of black students once enrolled. The report finds that some institutions — including those outside the elite ranks of private higher education — have strategies that result in black students graduating at relatively similar rates to white students, while other institutions appear to accept gaps of 25 percentage points or more in the rates.

The new report, “Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority,” is largely based on data that colleges are required to report on graduation rates, broken down by race, under the Student Right-to-Know Act, which was enacted in 1990 with a major of drawing attention to the historically low graduation rates of athletes. While that was the goal, the law required colleges to report graduation rates on all students, for comparison purposes, making possible the kind of analysis Education Sector has done.

Nationally, about 57 percent of students at four-year institutions graduate within six years — with some private colleges reporting rates well above 90 percent year after year while others have rates that are quite low. Black students disproportionately attend colleges with low graduation rates for black students. Only about 30 percent attend colleges with six-year graduation rates of 50 percent or higher. About 50 percent of black students attend colleges with six-year graduation rates for black students that are less than 40 percent.

The article puts the entire discussion in terms of the failure of colleges to make sure that black students receive enough assistance to graduate. But why do black students need all this extra assistance? Even at historically black colleges (many of them public institutions that were originally set up by Southern states that didn't want black students at the white colleges), there is a big problem with the more competitive institutions:

The study briefly explores trends in graduation rates at historically black colleges, where average rates for all institutions are low, but where there is a split between institutions with competitive admissions (which tend to have high rates) and other institutions, which tend to have low rates.

Why? And what does this have to do with affirmative action? A lot of the elite universities desperately want black students to attend. At the same time, blacks are disproportionately concentrated in some of the worst public school systems: Los Angeles, D.C., New York City, Chicago. Many of the graduates of these often hellhole high schools who are college bound have been inadequately prepared for the demands of Harvard, or Yale, or UC Berkeley.

So what happens to students who might have able to survive the demands of UC Berkeley, but get lured into Harvard by extraordinary scholarships? Or what about the student whose grades and test scores would have put him in the middle of the class at San Jose State, but instead goes to UC Berkeley? He is competing with students (white, Asian, and black) who were admitted without any special treatment, and whose SAT scores may average 200-300 points higher, because their K-12 education was markedly superior. High dropout rates are inevitable.

Is it better for a black kid from an inferior inner city school system to drop out of Harvard or Stanford, or to graduate from UCLA or San Jose State? College administrators can feel good about themselves for admitting students under affirmative action who aren't ready for the rigors of their institution. But I rather doubt that it is making the students who drop out feel good about themselves.

Barack Obama's Associates

It just keeps getting better and better. RedState points to this video of Larry Lessig, one of Obama's advisors on technology policy, where he runs this video of a very effeminate Jesus stripping down to his loincloth while singing the Gloria Gaynor song, "I Will Survive" before getting run over by a bus. Lessig admits that some people actually are offended by it, but doesn't have any idea why. "I just don't get it."

I look forward to Lessig doing something similar involving Mohammed. Or would that be dangerous?

Obama's Lying Again

Patterrico's Pontifications discusses Obama's involvement with the Joyce Foundation, the major funder of gun control efforts in the U.S. I (and many others) have also blogged about Obama's previous involvement with the Joyce Foundation--while claiming that he believes that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. Patterico has managed to combined a number of quotes from Obama in which he claims that the Joyce Foundation grants were only trying to promote "dialogue" about reasonable gun control. If Obama really believes this, then he and his fellow board members are not very bright.

Intelligent Design and the Pursuit of Science

Intelligent Design and the Pursuit of Science

I had a friendly and thought-provoking conversation with a reader, an economist, who seems to misunderstand the reason why there are scientists asking the questions that are called "Intelligent Design."

Yes, Newton was a religious man, and yes, he noticed there were flaws in the current naturalistic explanations in astronomy. What was his response? Did he say perhaps we should look for nonnaturalistic explanations? That we should look for theistic causes beyond the natural ones (such as God purposely intervening in the motion of the planets to cause them to behave differently than they should have naturally). Thank God (and I mean that literally) that he did not. What a disaster for science if he had. Understand what theistic science means in the context of intelligent design theory. It is not a belief that the natural laws that govern biology were created by God. It is a belief that natural laws do not explain biology, so the idea of natural laws is to be dumped in favor of explaining the details by appeal to a supernatural agency. This bears no resemblence to the working philosophy of Newton and Boyle.

My response is this. If intelligent design advocates were saying, "Don't bother trying to understand anything--it's all God's handiwork, and we have no reason to try" he would have a valid point. But looking over the list of scholarly papers published by people like Michael Behe and Scott Minnich suggests that they have hardly abandoned the pursuit of science in an orthodox manner. They are merely saying, "You know, some of what we are seeing is unlikely to be a blind process. Let's keep that possibility open for discussion--especially since there are some serious problems figuring out how some of these components got here by the blind evolutionary process that we have all been assuming up to now."

Intelligent Design is not a return to medievalism. It is saying that the current theory, built on methodological naturalism, has some significant holes in it. As I mentioned a few weeks back, even orthodox biologists seem to be aware that the current theory has some significant flaws. As I also mentioned a few weeks back, the time available from sterilizing heat to the first surviving microfossils is somewhere between 300 and 500 million years--short enough that a blind, random process for the formation of life from inorganic materials seems implausibly short.

Picking Up Trash

I went to the Men's Prayer Breakfast this morning at my church to talk about mental illness. My experience is that many people, unless they have studied it in college, or had the misfortune to have family or friends affected, are at best ignorant, and serious misconceptions about mental illness from the popular culture.

Afterwards, a group from the church was headed out to pick trash along Victory Blvd. between Eagle and Cloverdale, since we have taken that on as a responsibility. We put on our orange safety vests, grabbed our safety orange trash bags, and started walking.

I wasn't surprised by the number of empty--or partly empty--alcoholic beverage containers. I think Idaho is one of the states where an open alcohol container is a no-no. (I never bothered to find out because I don't drink.) If you think that you are in danger of being pulled over at night, discarding the beverage probably makes sense. What startled me was the number of cigarette butts I found along the side of the road. Doesn't anyone use an ashtray? It isn't like they are options on cars.

One of the recurring arguments about punishment of crimes is severity vs. certainty. There is a school of thought that says that the certainty of punishment matters more than the severity of punishment. Pretty obviously, a $50 fine for speeding would be a strong discouragement if every single time you exceeded the speed limit, you were pulled over and ticketed. This would probably more reliably stop people from speeding than a $1000 fine that had only a tiny chance of being assessed.

These cigarette butts should be a pretty good indication of this. Idaho Code 18-3906 provides for a $300 fine for littering along public roads. (And amusingly enough, the court may order the defendant to pay $50 of the fine be paid "to the person or persons, other than the officer making the arrest, who, in the judgment of the court, provided information that led directly to the arrest and conviction of the defendant." A finder's fee! Excellent incentive system!)

A $300 fine for failing to put the butt in your ashtray is truly huge--and yet the chance of getting caught and fined--even with that finder's fee provision--is trivial. I don't know anyone who has ever been fined for littering. Pretty clearly, even a $2 fine--if it was nearly certain--would achieve the desired result.

I'm not suggesting that there is any solution to the littering problem (except trying to raise the consciousness of litterers--don't hold your breath), just that this is a reminder that certainty matters more than severity.

UPDATE: A reader reminds me that sometimes these "incentives" have their own set of problems--such as people looking for a way to get rich by turning others in. I would hope that a $50 fee, even for the poorest Idahoan, wouldn't encourage intentional false reporting.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

This is Ben Stein's new movie. I will confess, I had some misgivings going into this that it might be the right's equivalent to Michael Moore's "documentaries." There are aspects of it that seem intentionally mocking key elements of the Moore style. For example, trying to get into the Smithsonian to talk about the retaliation against Richard Sternberg, a scientist who allowed a peer-reviewed piece that mentioned intelligent design to be published in a Smithsonian-affiliated science journal. There's a cartoon about the origins of life casino clearly intended to parody the history of America in Bowling for Columbine.

I also had some nervousness when the opening credits were, very cleverly, added into archival footage of the building of the Berlin Wall. I feared that perhaps this was going to be heavy-handed.

Nope! The first half was actually quite amusing, once we got past the credits, partly because of Ben Stein's deadpan delivery, and partly because the film uses a lot of very funny 1930s movies clips intercut with what otherwise might be excessive numbers of talking heads.

The primary point of the film is that the biological sciences (and to a lesser extent, astronomy) has reached a point of simply refusing to allow any serious criticism or discussion of any alternative models--and interviewed a number of people whose careers have been cut short for raising questions or even, in some cases, simply for pointing out that there are legitimate scientists who suggest that methodological naturalism (the dogma that says that only non-theistic explanations are allowed or even considered) might be a mistake.

Now, I don't know how fairly Expelled portrays all of these incidents. I know that, if anything, they understated what happened to Richard Sternberg. With respect to Guillermo Gonzalez, he is an astonishing superstar of astronomy. That he was turned down for tenure for having argued that perhaps there's some merit to intelligent design claims is certainly a plausible explanation. I would have preferred that Stein at least mentioned the claim that it was because Gonzalez wasn't very good at getting research grants that he was denied tenure. Still, Stein does a nice job where he interviews Gonzalez's former boss. He asked this guy to explain the email he sent to the faction that was trying to get Gonzalez kicked out of Iowa State where he referred to "religious nutcases." It was obvious that the department chair didn't expect Stein to actually ask him about this. I would say in conjunction with Gonzalez's publication history, the most logical explanation for failure to get tenure is the profound contempt that much of the academy has for ideas that even slightly smack of any religious beliefs.

Where the film gets a lot heavier is where Stein points to the connection between Darwinism and Naziism. This is hardly new; Stein does a nice job of using Nazi propaganda films justifying eugenics that are awash in Darwinian terminology. Stein is also fair in pointing out that while Darwinism was a major factor in Nazi racial ideology, it was not the only factor. Certainly, there are big chunks of leftover Romanticism, nationalism, and radical environmentalism that went into brewing up Naziism. But Naziism without Darwinism, as most historians admit, would have been a very different beast. Probably still beastly--but just differently beastly.

Stein also interviews a left-of-center philosopher who does raise some interesting points about how evolution, because it deprivileged man, reducing him to just another animal, fundamentally changed the notion of ethics. Stein interviews Professor William Provine, who is a loud and vigorous atheist, and who argues that evolution inevitably leads to no God, no fundamental ethics, and no free will. In that respect, Provine is right up there with Clarence Darrow, whose defense of Leopold and Loeb, two smart rich kids who murdered a 14 year old boy (probably after raping him) was that they had no choice--they were simply biological organisms driven by biology to do what they did, and therefore not fully responsible for their actions. In light of the role that Darwinism played in Naziism, and the various eugenics movements here in the U.S., one would think, if Provine had any awareness at all of where his idol has taken us before, that he would recognize the dangers involved.

Like any good Michael Moore documentary, there's some scary music in places. But scary music doesn't add much when you are going through one of the T-4 species improvement extermination facilities, and through Dachau.

At one point, the film is trying to give some idea of the enormous complexity of the interior of a cell. The graphics are impressive--but I wish that they had made a bit more of an effort to explain what you are seeing: how DNA unzips; becomes a pattern for creating messenger RNA; how transfer RNA ends up used to manufacture proteins, folds them for a purpose, and then exports it. Unlocking the Mystery of Life does an excellent job with this same subject--but it would have taken a bit of the humor out of what is still fundamentally a film intended to entertain (and maybe do a little educating).

By far the best part of the film is the very end, where Stein interviews Richard Dawkins, the biologist who insists that teaching children about God is a form of child abuse. Dawkins insists that intelligent design is absurd--and then Stein asks Dawkins a few questions which leads Dawkins to admit that perhaps life on this planet was intentionally created by another species, which must have come about because of evolution. And it wasn't like Stein was being very manipulative. Dawkins strikes me as a very angry person--but not necessarily all that bright.