Bob Somersby of the Daily Howler Writes on: Likability watch: Who is Candidate Perry! WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

Likability watch: Who is Candidate Perry!
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

The dumbest reactions on earth: For better or worse, many voters will find a good deal to like about Rick Perry’s personal history.

In Monday’s New York Times, Deborah Sontag offered a standard candidate profile concerning Perry’s personal background. She wrote about the candidate’s upbringing in Paint Creek, Texas.

Sontag threw in one “Confederate” reference just to keep us happy. But trust us: Voters will find a lot to like in Candidate Perry’s smaller-than-small-town background.

Sontag’s profile appeared one day after a pair of New York Times columnists offered the dumbest possible reactions to Perry’s smaller-than-small background. Needless to say, the scribes in question were the twin regents, Collins and Dowd.

Lovers of irony will enjoy the idea that Maureen Dowd could devote a full column to the dumbness of others. But Dowd, dumbest scribe of the past thirty years, was on quite a tear this morning:
DOWD (9/16/11): Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

[…]

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.

So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity?

The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.
After making that know-nothing, anti-science remark about our educational system, Dowd took after the rest of the nation. Everyone was stupid this day, including the nation’s students! She was mad at the know-nothing voters, of course—but also at the know-nothing candidates! But along the way, she offered these mots. Especially from a national journalist, this is a very dumb comment:
DOWD: Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

The Texas governor did help his former chief of staff who went to lobby for a pharmaceutical company that donated to Perry, so he at least knows the arithmetic of back scratching.

Perry told the students, “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” What does that even mean?
Darlings! Whatever could that awful man mean?

As several anti-Perry commenters noted, Dowd’s question was massively dumb. The concept of “broken people” seems to be quite common for many Christians, as a quick Google search shows. This rather obvious possibility didn’t even occur to Dowd, who couldn’t wait to play the role of sneering East Coast liberal.

“God uses broken people to reach a broken world?” That isn’t part of our own cultural framework. But Dowd couldn’t wait to show the voters how pathetically dumb she thinks they are—even as she rushed to showcase her own cultural know-nothingness.

It has been 39 years since Pauline Kael made her famous clueless remark about the inscrutable public. (As reported in the New York Times: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”) Thirty-nine years later, people like Dowd can’t wait to announce that they themselves have no earthly idea about the outlooks, beliefs, culture and views of vast numbers of voters.

If Maureen Dowd didn’t exist, the RNC would have to invent her. But then, the high Lady Collins made a remark about Perry in Sunday’s Times that struck us as quite clueless too. Quite clueless, and politically dumb:
COLLINS (9/16/11): Rick Perry has never spent any serious time outside of Texas, except for a five-year stint in the military. Nobody sent him off to boarding school to expand his horizons. He grew up in Paint Creek, where he graduated third in a high school class of 13. He went to the most deeply Texas of all the state’s major institutions of higher learning. He was a terrible student, but won the prized post of yell leader, the most deeply Texas of all possible Aggie achievements. Then he joined the Air Force and flew transport planes out of Texas, Germany and the Middle East. “There was no telling what you were going to haul around on any given day, from high-value cargo like human beings to the colonel’s kitty litter,” he once told a reporter in Texas.
“Rick Perry has never spent any serious time outside of Texas, except for a five-year stint in the military.” Do you have any idea how dumb that will sound to a wide range of voters? A quick guess: Collins does not.

Dowd of course is a hopeless case; we remain puzzled by Collins. The ID line on her Sunday piece said this: “Gail Collins’s book on Texas will be published next year by W. W. Norton.” Uh-oh! Given the way Collins like to sneer at red states and the rubes within them, it’s entirely possible that her book will elect Perry all by itself!

We’re puzzled by Collins. She loves to sneer at folk in red states. But where in the world did she get the idea that this was the essence of her regency? Darlings! Collins grew up in St. Louis herself! And oh our god! She went to college in Milwaukee! But somewhere along the way, Collins adopted the idea that she exists to sneer at the rubes whose towns still have Dairy Queens.

This is stupid on the merits. Even worse, it’s politically dumb.

Just a guess: Voters will like Rick Perry’s small town background—especially once our side gets through with all the requisite comments.
Posted by bob somerby on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 3 comments
Email This
BlogThis!
Share to Twitter
Share to Facebook

THE ABSENCE OF THE PROFESSORS: Good grief—even Krugman!
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

PART 3—THE AUTUMN OF 96: It’s amazingly easy to get disinformed concerning Social Security. Consider the plight of the poor shlub voters who watched last night’s Special Report.

In an early segment, correspondent Shannon Bream reviewed the things “Floridians are talking about ahead of Thursday night's [GOP] debate.” Bream had interviewed Justin Sayfie, whom she described as a “Florida political analyst.” She had also spoken with Jeff Niefeld, a Florida Democratic voter.

Before long, the 1.6 million people watching the show were being treated to this:
BREAM (9/20/11): There's also the issue of Social Security and a term used by Texas governor, Rick Perry.

NIEFELD: You can call it a Ponzi scheme implies that it's a criminal enterprise. Social Security is not criminal. It's not criminal. We all pay into it, and at the end of our time, allotted time, we can draw out of it.

BREAM: But attitudes are shifting here in Florida along with demographics. Nearly half the state's electorate is now under 50 and willing to acknowledge some hard truth about the solvency of Social Security.

SAYFIE: If you're a younger voter, if you're a voter between the ages of 18 and 30 and you're paying into the system and you don't have a reasonable belief that you're going to be paid, the term Ponzi scheme probably sounds about right.
The Democratic voter defended the system. But the political analyst told younger viewers that they shouldn’t expect any benefits from the Ponzi-like program.

Fox viewers were hearing this presentation for perhaps the ten millionth time. Bream offered no contradiction or challenge. Neither did Brett Baier, the program’s irresponsible anchor.

Alas! American voters have been disinformed in precisely this way for the past thirty years. Today, the liberal world is no longer completely asleep in the woods. Today, many liberals get the chance to hear analysts explain what's wrong with this rank disinformation.

But in earlier decades, the situation was worse. Consider what happened in 1996 when the New York Times reviewed Pete Peterson’s book, “Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old? How the Coming Social Security Crisis Threatens You, Your Family, and Your Country.”

Peterson was a well-known alarmist on Social Security; he had been for quite a few years. A well-known economist did the review—and he seemed to be buying the premise:
KRUGMAN (10/20/96): In this silly season politicians are once again promising that we can have it all—that we can cut taxes, spare every popular spending program from even the smallest cut and still balance the budget. Nobody really believes them; if the public is willing to indulge such fantasies, it is because it does not, when all is said and done, really take the budget deficit seriously. After all, we have run huge deficits year after year as far back as anyone except economists can remember, and the sky has not fallen. Where is the crisis?

Just over the horizon, that's where. Through a kind of sound-bite numerology, the political debate over deficits became fixated last year on the seven-year prospect; each party insists that its economic program will balance the budget in the year 2002. Neither will, but that is beside the point. Responsible adults are supposed to plan more than seven years ahead. Yet if you think even briefly about what the Federal budget will look like in 20 years, you immediately realize that we are drifting inexorably toward crisis; if you think 30 years ahead, you wonder whether the Republic can be saved.

Peter G. Peterson states the reason for this succinctly in his brief, scary new book, "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?"
Good grief! Could the republic be saved? Prospects weren’t looking real good.

The Times’ reviewer was in fact Paul Krugman, an eminent economist who wasn’t as well-known at that time as he is today. If you’re familiar with Krugman’s current work, you may be surprised to see the things he wrote in the autumn of 96.

(In this 1996 piece, Krugman also reviewed a book about the AARP. To read the review, click here.)

We haven’t read Peterson’s book, nor are we Peterson haters. But if you were an average shlub, it was very easy to get alarmed about the future during this era. As Krugman proceeded, he pretty much bought every part of Peterson’s thesis. For those who know Krugman’s work today, this passage will sound quite peculiar:
KRUGMAN: Generous benefits for the elderly are feasible as long as there are relatively few retirees compared with the number of taxpaying workers—which is the current situation, because the baby boomers swell the workforce. In 2010, however, the boomers will begin to retire. Every year thereafter, for the next quarter-century, several million 65-year-olds will leave the rolls of taxpayers and begin claiming their benefits.

The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension. Mr. Peterson, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, a private investment bank, informs us that "the combined Federal cost of Social Security and Medicare, expressed as a share of workers' taxable payroll, is officially projected to rise from the already burdensome 17 percent in 1995 to between 35 and 55 percent in 2040. And this figure does not include the many other costs—from nursing homes to civil service and military pensions—that are destined to grow along with the age wave.”
Does that sound like Krugman today? As he continued, Krugman even made it sound like those “trust funds” might be a big bag of air:
KRUGMAN (continuing directly): But aren't Social Security and Medicare basically pension funds, in which workers' contributions are invested to provide for their retirement? Hardly. A private pension fund that planned to pay the benefits these programs promise would be accumulating huge reserves. In fact, the so-called "trust funds" are making barely any provisions for the future. In another spectacular statistic, Mr. Peterson notes that if Medicare and Social Security had to obey the same rules that apply to private pensions, the reported Federal deficit this year would be not its official $150 billion, but roughly $1.5 trillion.

In short, the Federal Government, however solid its finances may currently appear, is in fact living utterly beyond its means. While the present generation of retirees is doing very nicely, the promises that are being made to those now working cannot be honored.
Gack! As Krugman closed, he pictured a semi-dystopia:
KRUGMAN: Both Mr. Morris and Mr. Peterson offer plans to avert the crisis ahead. The details differ, and Mr. Peterson's proposal is more completely fleshed out, but the general thrust is clear: slow the growth in benefit levels, gradually raise the retirement age, impose limits on expensive terminal medical care that prolongs life for only weeks or days and—last but not least—raise taxes moderately now, rather than massively later. We need not dwell on their sensible proposals, however, because there is not the slightest prospect that they will be put into effect—or indeed that we will do anything serious about the looming crisis until it is almost upon us.

Both books take comfort from the economist Herbert Stein's famous dictum that unsustainable trends tend not to be sustained. Something is bound to give—but what? Will retired boomers—who will have even more political clout than today's smallish population of retired voters—be willing to accept a sharply reduced standard of living? That is hard to imagine. Will younger voters be willing to accept huge increases in tax rates to support the boomers in the style they have been promised? That is equally hard to imagine. Or will the Government try to square the circle by simply printing the money it needs, creating runaway inflation? Surely that is inconceivable. Yet one or more of these unthinkable things will happen, because something must.
Something "unthinkable" was going to happen, Krugman said as he closed his review. For the average shlub, even the average liberal, it was very easy to get alarmed in the autumn of 96.

Was Krugman “wrong” in his assessments? In 2007, a flap blew up about his past statements on these subjects, including those in this review. At the time, Krugman seemed to say that the facts had changed since 1996; some defenders noted that he had lumped Social Security and Medicare together in his review. But that wasn’t the stance he took in real time concerning this review. In real time, Dean Baker wrote a letter to the Times, chiding Krugman for his assessments. (Baker: “It should not be necessary to explain simple concepts to an economist as distinguished as Paul Krugman.” Full text below.) By the late autumn of 96, Krugman was taking back what he had said in an exchange with Jamie Galbraith in Slate:
GALBRAITH (11/8/96): Is there a crisis of the Social Security system? The most recent issue of Challenge carries a fine assortment of views on this vexing question. Of these, the most persuasive argue that there is no crisis, that possible shortfalls in Social Security can be fixed by very modest adjustments, at most. Unfortunately, alarmists like the dedicated anti-Social Security campaigner Pete Peterson, an investment banker, are dominating this debate. It is regrettable that certain serious economists—it might disrupt present comity if I named a name—have recently stated their categorical support for the alarmist position.

KRUGMAN (11/12/96): First of all, a mea culpa of my own. Ignore Galbraith's coyness: I was the economist who went overboard in supporting Pete Peterson's position on entitlements and demographics. Demographics play a smaller role in Peterson's forecasts, and debatable projections of medical costs a larger one, than I realized when I recently reviewed his book for the New York Times. I broke my own rule that you should always check an argument both with a back-of-the-envelope calculation and by consulting with the real experts, no matter how plausible and reasonable its author sounds. Do as I say and normally do, not as I unfortunately did in this case.
Only three weeks had passed, but Krugman was bailing on his review. Remarkably, he seemed to say that he had failed to check Peterson’s arguments “by consulting with the real experts” before he wrote his review. He seemed to say that he’d gone with the flow because Peterson sounded so reasonable.

That was then, not now. Over the past dozen years, Krugman has become our most important, constructive, informative upper-end journalist. But in yesterday’s post, we took you through Larissa McFarquhar’s detailed review of Krugman’s career—which at one point was rather careerist, according to Krugman himself. In McFarquhar’s review, Krugman was quoted saying this: “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000.”

It’s hard to argue with that assessment if he was writing reviews for the nation’s most important newspaper without bothering to check the author’s argument—reviews concerning a major topic on which the public was being disinformed and had been for many years. (The piece appeared in the widely-read and influential Sunday “Book Review” section.)

Where have the professors been over the past thirty years? In large part, last night’s garbage still sells on Fox (and in other precincts) because of their thirty-year silence. After he took his post as a New York Times columnist, Krugman became the giant exception to this rule. But we’ll suggest that you read his review of Peterson’s scary book in conjunction with the McFarquhar profile, in which Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, describe the contempt the professors had in the late 1990s for people who would lower themselves to speak to the public, the rubes.

By Krugman’s own account, his life changed after 1999. But the public remains highly disinformed. In large part, the thanks for this can go to our sleeping professors.

At one time, professors were absent-minded. For the past thirty years, they’ve simple been absent. Over and over, this cohort has failed you.

Crackers! What should we do?

Tomorrow: What should we do?

Baker replied: Dean Baker responded to Krugman’s review. Here’s the full text of his letter:
LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (11/17/96): It should not be necessary to explain simple concepts to an economist as distinguished as Paul Krugman. Unfortunately, his review of two recent books on entitlement programs for the elderly (Oct. 20) shows he is as susceptible to prevailing misconceptions in this area as the rest of the nation's pundits.

Mr. Krugman comments approvingly on "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?," by Peter G. Peterson, which purports to show that the elderly are going to bankrupt the nation. Mr. Krugman, like Mr. Peterson, lumps Social Security and Government health care programs for the elderly together. But the issues are completely different.

In the case of Social Security, according to the trustees' report, it will be possible to meet all scheduled benefit payments over the next 75 years with relatively minor tax increases (2.2 percent of payroll, if done tomorrow). These increases would allow future generations to enjoy substantially higher after-tax income than workers do at present. The main reason taxes will have to rise at all is not the retirement of the baby boom generation, but the fact that people are living longer.

The Medicare and Medicaid projections are indeed a nightmare, but this is because of underlying projections in the cost of health care more generally. The Health Care Financing Administration's projections show that private sector health care spending will be nearly $4,000 per person by the year 2005. This means that a family of four at the median income will be spending approximately 30 percent of its before-tax income on health care. That is a crisis, but it has nothing to do with entitlement programs for the elderly.

Dean Baker/Washington
Today, Baker’s easy-to-follow points are understood by many liberals. But in the fall of 96, it was still extremely easy for liberals to get disinformed.
Posted by bob somerby on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 4 comments
Email This
BlogThis!
Share to Twitter
Share to Facebook

Defiant silly-bill watch: Bruni and Brooks on the rampage!
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

A deeply inane public culture: Just a fairly obvious guess! The New York Times added Frank Bruni to the team make its op-ed page even dumber.

This morning, the scribe is back from Milan—and he’s quite upset with one of those silly-bill pols! Throwing life-style in our faces, Paul Ryan has staged “a minor masterpiece of image calibration:”
BRUNI (9/20/11): Paul Ryan may not be running for president this time around, but if you have any doubt about his ambitions for a long, prominent future in government, just look at his comments in a Q. and A. published in Sunday’s Times. They’re a minor masterpiece of image calibration.

In the span of two dozen sentences, Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, mentioned the Bible, or rather a beginner’s version of it, which he said he was reading aloud to his 6-year-old son. He mentioned his truck and his appetite for hard rock, thus establishing automotive and musical affinities that balance his wonkier, number-crunching bona fides. He mentioned hunting—with a bow, no less.

Then came the capper. He mentioned his talent for what I’d like to call venison charcuterie, just because he so clearly wouldn’t. “I butcher my own deer, grind the meat, stuff it in casings and then smoke it,” he said, making clear that Sarah Palin in all her moose-eviscerating glory has nothing on him.
Bruni just can’t handle the phoniness of Ryan’s comments—his silly-bill musings about music and hunting. Bruni goes on to rage against the dying of the light. More specifically, he rages against the way those pols force us to listen to silly shit about their proletarian lifestyles.

“The relationship between lifestyle and political priorities is at best oblique,” the thoughtful fellow muses. “You really can’t judge how politicians will govern by whether they hunt or windsurf, frolic in the Texas brush or the Martha’s Vineyard sand, favor corn dogs or arugula.”

Bruni fails to note an obvious fact. In the case of Ryan, those were the silly-shit topics the New York Times asked him about! In the edited interview, he also notes that he watches CNBC—and that he is currently listening to “a series of provocative lectures by Professor J. Rufus Fears of the University of Oklahoma.”

Ryan didn’t seem to be kidding, but we don’t plan to google Professor Fears. “With the help of a Kindle, I’m reading John Mauldin’s ‘Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle,’” Ryan also throws in, though it doesn't make Bruni's column.

There’s no way to know how much dull shit got left on the cutting-room floor. Playing the fool, Bruni complainsabout what Ryan said "in the span of two dozen sentences." But the interview may have lasted for hours. It's edited. Let's say that again!

For ourselves, we recalled the hard-as-nails, just-the-facts approach Bruni brought to his own work as a campaign reporter. Here he was, following Candidate Bush on the New Hampshire trail:
BRUNI (9/14/99): When Gov. George W. Bush of Texas first hit the Presidential campaign trail in June, he wore monogrammed cowboy boots, the perfect accessory for his folksy affability and casual self-assurance.

But when he visited New Hampshire early last week, he was shod in a pair of conservative, shiny black loafers that seemed to reflect more than the pants cuffs above them. They suggested an impulse by Mr. Bush to put at least a bit of a damper on his brash irreverence, which has earned him affection but is a less certain invitation for respect.
That was the start of a lengthy “news report” during Campaign 2000. Two months later, on the front page, Bruni was still pursuing his defiant, hard-news approach:
BRUNI (11/27/99): As George W. Bush loped through the headquarters of the Timberland Company here, he might have been any candidate in the hunt for votes, any pol on the path toward the presidency. He tirelessly shook hands, dutifully took questions and let a multitude of promises bloom.

But there was something different about Governor Bush's approach, something jazzier and jauntier. It came out in the way he praised a 20-year-old man for his "articulate" remarks, then appended the high-minded compliment with a surprising term of endearment.

"Dude," Mr. Bush called his new acquaintance.

It emerged again when Mr. Bush crossed paths with an elderly employee, and she told him that he had her support.

"I'll seal it with a kiss!" Mr. Bush proposed and, wearing a vaguely naughty expression, swooped down on the captive seamstress.

Mr. Bush's arm curled tight around the shoulders of other voters; he arched his eyebrows and threw coquettish grins and conspiratorial glances their way. It was campaigning as facial calisthenics, and Mr. Bush was its Jack LaLanne.

He is frequently that way. When Mr. Bush is not reciting memorized lines in an official speech or rendering careful answers in a formal interview, he is physically expansive and verbally irreverent, folksy and feisty, a politician more playful than most of his peers.
Bruni may be a great food critic. But when it comes to politics and policy, he is one of the emptiest suits the Times has dredged up yet.

Then too, there’s David Brooks, self-flagellating today over the failed Obama. Brooks was so angry at his failed pal, he decided to play an old card:
BROOKS (9/20/11): It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.
You never forget your first narrative! At the Times, columnists write their own headlines. Today, this is Brooks’ boxed sub-head:

“Al Gore without the earth tones”

Through some sort of programming error, that just can’t get these themes out of their heads! For the record, Candidate Gore did not propose “tax increases for the rich.” But it feels good to pretend.

Brooks is playing the fool today. Here, he offers a rare attempt at making an actual argument:
BROOKS: [Obama] claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)
“The top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes?” As almost anyone can see, that fact doesn’t refute the “half-truth” in question—and that fact is completely meaningless unless you include the percentage of income received by that top ten percent. (Even then, you have to be careful.) Of course, that next set of facts doesn’t refute Obama’s half-truth either.

For the record, a half-truth can contain a lot of truth. Brooks is semi-right about one thing today: Obama’s pledge to avoid raising taxes on the bottom 98 percent is a rather strange artifact. But in today’s New York Times editorial, the editors report that Obama’s proposed tax hikes on upper-end earners would produce $1.3 trillion over ten years.

Do Obama's tax proposals make sense? Brooks never quite finds time to say. He’s too busy flashing back on Candidate Gore's brown suit.

Today, Bruni forgets his own silly shit. Brooks flashes on his.
Posted by bob somerby on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 11 comments
Email This
BlogThis!
Share to Twitter
Share to Facebook

SAT score watch: Why are average scores down? Day 2!
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

At the Post, you can take your choice between information and spin: In yesterday’s Washington Post, Michael Chandler did a follow-report about this year’s SAT scores. More specifically, he provided more information about the way the tests are being taken by a wider student population.

This wider participation might explain why average scores are slightly down this year. (For yesterday’s post on this topic, just click here.)

First, Chandler described a “technical shift,” a change to which he briefly alluded in his original front-page report. According to a College Board spokesperson, a change in reporting procedures this year may have lowered average scores:
CHANDLER (9/19/11): The College Board has traditionally calculated average SAT scores for graduating seniors through March of that year. For the Class of 2011, it began including scores from tests taken through June.

The switch added about 50,000 test-takers, or 3 percent of the total. Although not a huge number, these late entrants to the college process are more likely to be "VERY low performers," a College Board spokeswoman said in an e-mail.
For the first time, the last-minute Charlies and Charlenes were included. This may tend to lower the average.

Next, Chandler reported another possible factor in the lower average scores—“the growing popularity of the ACT, a rival college entrance exam.” How would that work? “Although the SAT is dominant in the Washington area,” Chandler writes, “more local seniors are trying both, rather than seeking to improve their SAT scores by retaking it.”

Presumably, if seniors don’t try to improve their SAT scores, this would tend to lower the average, though Chandler doesn’t check this logic with the College Board.

In a final point, Chandler noted another way the tested population is growing. Some states now require or enable all students to take the SAT:
CHANDLER: Increasingly, the SAT and the ACT are being used to encourage students to apply to college, not just to enable them. [sic]

Delaware has a new four-year contract with the College Board to administer the SAT to all high school juniors.

Texas offers all students vouchers to take the SAT or ACT for free, and Idaho is moving in the same direction. Seven states offer the ACT to all juniors: Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.

"Obviously, not all these students go to college, but it helps to focus them on the idea of going to college," said Ed Colby, an ACT spokesman.
It isn’t clear that any of this would have affected this year’s average scores. But at least Chandler was trying!

Unheard of! In two reports on this topic, Chandler provided real information! But if it’s spin and partisan screeching you like, the Post had something for you as well! Right next to Chandler’s report, the Post published this information-averse analysis by Valerie Strauss. That was the place a reader could go to learn that it’s all Bush’s fault.

For years, we liberals slept in the woods. Now we’ve emerged, and we enjoy our silly spin too! Strauss’ “logic” is very weak—but it does let “liberals” feel good!

Strauss is sure it’s all Bush’s fault. This is about as close as she gets to making an actual argument:
STRAUSS (9/19/11): The College Board also noted that nearly 1.65 million students from the 2011 graduating class took the SAT and that it represented the most diverse class in history. Forty-four percent were minority students, 36 percent were first-generation college-goers and 27 percent do not speak English exclusively.

It further noted that “it is common for mean scores to decline slightly when the number of students taking an exam increases because more students of varied academic backgrounds are represented in the test-taking pool,” and it said that “there are more high-performing students among the class of 2011 than ever before.”

Who’s kidding whom? If there are more high-performing students, there must be more low-performing students, too, to bring down the average.
Sad. Strauss jumped on an upbeat claim by the College Board, thus ignoring the larger claim—the claim that wider student participation tends to bring average scores down. In fact, Strauss never even mentioned the fact that participation went from 47 percent in 2010 to “more than half” this past year. Why glaze the eyes with that?

Strauss then cherry-picked a datum or two and her work was done.

Why did average scores inch down this year? Like Strauss, we can’t tell you. But people like Strauss always know in advance! In truth, the world was a better place before pseudo-liberals joined pseudo-cons in pretending to reason like that.
Posted by bob somerby on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1 comments
Email This
BlogThis!
Share to Twitter
Share to Facebook

THE ABSENCE OF THE PROFESSORS: Don’t do it, Krugman was told!
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

PART 2—PLANET OF THE PROFESSORS: It’s very easy to be disinformed in this particular country.

In part, it’s easy to be disinformed because of the professors.

Has any group failed you more reliably over the past several decades? As more and more parts of our public discourse have been seized by disinformation, you could always count on the professors to stay away from the field of battle. No explanation or clarification was likely to come from their refined aeries! Just consider a few basic areas where the professors have failed to help:

Medicare cuts, mid-1990s: Was Newt Gingrich’s GOP proposing “cuts” to the Medicare program? Or were they proposing that we slow the rate at which the program would grow? For two years, this inane discussion dominated the political wars.

Al Franken explained the matter in his book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. But the nation’s “journalists” couldn’t. In their hands, the discussion ended up where every discussion did in this era—with the claim that Clinton was lying again, although rather plainly he wasn’t.

Which professors stepped forward during this era to clarify this gong-show discussion? Which health care experts? Which logicians? Keep searching for a name!

Campaign 2000: For twenty months, the national press corps worked very hard to make Candidate Gore a liar. (Just like President Clinton!) They did this by inventing a series of ludicrous paraphrases of innocuous things Gore had said. Rather, they adopted a series of paraphrases from the RNC, which was scripting the national press during that gruesome campaign.

(Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal! Except actually, no—he didn’t.)

Which professors stepped forward during this era to clarify this rolling gong-show? To explain how reasonable paraphrase works? Which “logicians” stepped up to the plate? Go ahead! Search for a name!

The future of Social Security: For three decades, a relentless disinformation campaign has surrounded the Social Security program. A string of deceptive talking-points has left the public deeply confused—disinformed—about the future prospects of this venerable program.

This problem was clear by the early 1994, when a survey showed that younger voters didn’t believe they would ever receive Social Security benefits. (Famously, they were more likely to believe in UFOs.) Which professors have ever stepped forward to clarify this decades-old gong-show? Go ahead! Name all their names!

The cost of American health care: Every American is getting ripped off by the costs of American health care. Most Americans don’t understand this fact. They certainly don’t know the reasons why we pay so much for health care.

In 2009, the nation spent a year pretending to discussing health care. Go ahead! Name the professors! (You can’t name Michael Moore.)

We could list other topics, but you get the general idea.

People! Where are all the professors? In theory, the country is crawling with learned folk who are expert in various disciplines. Why don’t they lend their expertise—if it exists—to the national discussion?

We’ve been asking this question for years. Last week, we read a profile of a well-known, very public professor. The profile seemed to shed some light on this matter.

The professor in question is Paul Krugman, who has thrown himself into the public discourse over the past dozen years. The profile appeared last year, in the New Yorker, although we don’t recall seeing it at the time.

In the profile, Larissa McFarquhar traced the route by which Krugman became involved in the public political discourse. As noted, Krugman has been deeply involved in the public debate over the past dozen years. But in her profile, McFarquhar described Krugman’s attitudes and beliefs before his somewhat belated political dawning.

It seemed to us that this profile may have answered some of our questions about the defiantly useless class from which Krugman emerged.

McFarquhar interviewed Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, for her detailed profile. (Wells is an economist.) In the following passage, Krugman describes his attitudes early in his career:
MACFARQUHAR (3/1/10: In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren’t especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focused mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn’t think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. “I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues,” he says. “I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned.” He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn’t get him thinking about politics. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he says. “I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn’t really have a sense of how deep the divide went.”
In the past twelve years, Krugman has played a major role in our public political discourse. But during the 1980s, he was “career-building,” he said. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he told McFarquhar.

Krugman has emerged from that dream. Other savants have not.

In the following passage, McFarquhar describes Krugman’s political horizon during the 1990s. In the argot of the 1960s, Krugman still hadn’t been politicized. We’ll offer a fairly large chunk:
MCFARQUHAR: When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren’t earning American wages and didn’t have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren’t the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation…suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990…have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right.

In writing his first popular book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations,” he became preoccupied by the way that inequality had vastly increased in the Reagan years…After the book was published, in 1990, various people denied that inequality had increased, and this really annoyed him. He began to get into fights. He was taken aback by the 1994 midterm elections, and during the impeachment hearings he began to think that the Republicans were getting pretty radical, but he still wasn’t angry about it. “Some of my friends tell me that I should spend more time attacking right-wingers,” he wrote in 1998. “The problem is finding things to say. Supply-siders never tire of proclaiming that taxes are the root of all evil, but reasonable people do get tired of explaining, over and over again, that they aren’t.”

Certainly until the Enron scandal, Krugman had no sense that there was any kind of problem in American corporate governance. (He consulted briefly for Enron before he went to the Times.) Occasionally, he received letters from people claiming that corporations were cooking the books, but he thought this sounded so implausible that he dismissed them. “I believed that the market was enforcing,” he says. “I believed in the S.E.C. I just never really thought about it. It seemed like a pretty sunny world in 1999, and, for all of my cynicism, I shared a lot of that. The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”
In McFarquhar’s account, Krugman was still largely distanced from partisan politics during this period.

In the late 1990s, the New York Times approached Krugman about writing a column. McFarquhar records a fascinating reaction from his professional colleagues:
MCFARQUHAR (continuing directly): When the Times approached him about writing a column, he was torn. “His friends said, ‘This is a waste of your time,’ ” Wells says. “We economists thought that we were doing substantive work and the rest of the world was dross.” Krugman cared about his academic reputation more than anything else. If he started writing for a newspaper, would his colleagues think he’d become a pseudo-economist, a former economist, a vapid policy entrepreneur like Lester Thurow? Lester Thurow had become known in certain circles as Less Than Thorough. It was hard to imagine what mean nickname could be made out of Paul Krugman, but what if someone came up with one? Could he take it?
Quoting Wells, McFarquhar records a fascinating reaction from the other professors. Frankly, ick! Why would any Serious Person want to write a mere newspaper column? Why would any serious person want to speak to the rubes?

According to Wells, the unseemliness of such conduct was impressed upon poor Krugman. Luckily, Krugman made the right decision. But that passage offers a fascinating look at the culture of the important people who have failed you so reliably, for so many years.

Darlings! It just isn’t done! Who would write a mere newspaper column? A column for the unwashed!

Finally, McFarquhar describes the process which produced the Krugman of the present day. He has become a fallen man. He gets upset about public lying—lying to average people:
MCFARQUHAR (continuing directly): It was the 2000 election campaign that finally radicalized him. He’d begun writing his column the year before, and although his mandate at the outset was economic and business matters, he began paying more attention to the world in general. During the campaign, he perceived the Bush people telling outright lies, and this shocked him. Reagan’s people had at least tried to justify their policies with economic models and rationalizations. Krugman hadn’t believed the models would work, but at least they were there.

After the election, he began to attack Bush’s policies in his column, and, as his outrage escalated, his attacks grew more venomous. Krugman felt that liberals were unwilling to confront or even to acknowledge the anger on the right with some of their own, so he was going to have to do it. “He saw that it had been very, very painful during the nineties to get American fiscal policy in order, and he saw all of that being thrown away callously and with very little thought,” Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at Berkeley, says. “And it turned out to be true that Alan Greenspan was going to meetings at the White House saying we’re going to regret this. Paul was simply six years behind those of us who had worked in the Clinton Administration, who found the collapse of reality-based Republicanism coming much earlier.”
As Hector said of Paris, "Silly man!"

For the record, the “outright lie” which played the largest role in this conversion seems to have been Candidate Bush’s repeated misstatements about the basic outlines of his own budget proposal. In the fall of 2000, Krugman devoted three columns to this topic (September 24, October 1, October 11). Needless to say, these columns were ignored by the rest of the press corps. The rest of the press corps was busy inventing several more “lies” by Gore:

Al Gore lied about the union lullaby!
Al Gore lied about the cost of his pet Labrador’s arthritis pills!
Al Gore went to those Texas fires with Unknown Person X, not with Unknown Person Y!

That’s what the “press corps” was yapping about as Krugman wrote those columns.

Back to our original question: Where have those lofty professors been? Relentlessly, this group has failed you. McFarquhar described the process by which Krugman left them behind.

Tomorrow, we’ll show you how bad things can get before a professor makes this break. It has been extremely easy to get disinformed about Social Security.

Krugman himself was a bit out to lunch before he abandoned Versailles.

Tomorrow: The autumn of 96