Category: folly

Categories
folly ideological culture responsibility

Judicial Temblor

A scientist does not kill anybody by failing to predict an imminent earthquake, even if he believes and says that it is unlikely to occur just before it does occur. Non-​omniscient seismologists don’t kill people; earthquakes kill people.

Nevertheless, Judge Marco Billo sentenced six Italian scientists and a government official to six years in prison for manslaughter, and also billed them for court costs and damages to the tune of $10.2 million.

Some residents of the Italian town of d’Aquila applaud the penalties.

The seven defendants were members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risk, which had convened not long before the earthquake struck d’Aquila in April 2009, killing 309 people. Commission members did not issue a warning because the kind of small tremors that had been putting townsfolk on edge were, in their experience, not often the prelude to a major earthquake.

Their crime, then, was for uttering less-​than-​omniscient judgments in their field.

Suppose the defendants had instead determined that there should be an evacuation, that the town were then evacuated, and that a person died on the way out of town in a way directly attributable to the evacuation — but no earthquake then ensued. Also manslaughter?

If inability to eliminate uncertainty about future hazards is a crime, then we’re all guilty. But the real crime was committed by anyone having anything to do with this miscarriage of justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly responsibility

The Stockton Bust

Stockton, California, had seen a flurry of new home projects right up till the mortgage market crash. But, boy, did that come to a screeching halt. The crash led to foreclosures, which led to lower revenues from property taxes for the city. And though the city tried some spending cuts, they haven’t been enough. The Stockton City Council just voted, six to one, to seek federal bankruptcy protection.

Reasons for the bankruptcy, however, are not confined to reduced revenues. Add “soaring pension costs” and “contractual obligations” to the list of disaster factors.Stockton Bankruptcy - an illustrative image, not a photojournalistic artifact

And it’s pensions and medical insurance that make up the elephant’s share of “contractually obligated” must-​pays. We’ll see if official bankruptcy will allow the city to get out from under that mess. The Chapter 9 plan includes dropping medical benefits for currently fully-​covered retirees.

Who’s to blame? Politicians who negotiate really cushy deals for their (our) employees. The contracts obligate future taxpayers to pay out huge pensions for future retirees, rather than being funded (through insurance and investment) at the time of salary disbursement. The problem is that politicians love to make promises others must keep. Specifically, in this case, they contract defined benefit pensions not defined contribution pensions.

It makes no sense to do this, of course. It encourages irresponsibility, and is (to use a buzzword that should be used often against its usual purveyors) unsustainable. As proven by the Stockton bankruptcy.

Stockton is, so far, the largest American city to go belly up. We can expect further such busts, since the cause of Stockton’s problems — under-​funded pensions coupled with full-​coverage, gold-​plated, lifelong health insurance for government retirees — remain endemic throughout the country.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly national politics & policies

Digital Divide 2.0

Remember the worrying over “the digital divide”?

During the “concern’s” heyday, I was more than a tad skeptical, as were many others. There’s only so much hand-​wringing that a balanced, working person can stand.Newton Message Pad, by Apple

Now we learn that all the yammering “inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-​income families.” I’m not aware of any government programs to accomplish this, but then I don’t follow the handouts economy as closely as I could. But I do know that some charities got involved, putting computers into rural libraries and computer centers, for instance. (The Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation did a lot of this, years ago. Funny, though: I notice they didn’t supply any Macintosh computers.) And recylcing centers and garage sales made used computers — often hampered only by slightly out-​of-​date tech — available for pennies on the dollar.

If you want a computer in America, you can find one.

The New York Times tells us about an “unintended side effect” of all this computing power in the hands of the poor. The miserable masses, yearning to breathe free, are misusing the technology!

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-​off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This is called a “growing time-​wasting gap.”

Reason’s Jacob Sullum neatly mocked this: “Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-​improvement, not for pleasure?”

Maybe it’s time to stop taking politicians — and the “experts” who plead with politicians (to gain access to tax monies) — seriously.

Seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling folly

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Schools

Sticks and stones break bones, but words hurt more subtly. Old-​school advice was that, growing up, one had to grin and bear it, let a few of our psychological wounds scab over, and get on with life.

But that is not “new school” wisdom. Nowadays, moved by a perhaps overweening sense of kindness (or politicized fear) educators tend to prohibit certain words, the better to protect some folks from taking offense.

The New York Post reports that, in a “bizarre case of political correctness run wild,” the people in charge of public schools have

banned references to “dinosaurs,” “birthdays,” “Halloween” and dozens of other topics on city-​issued tests.

That’s because they fear such topics “could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.”

Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays aren’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism.

Even “dancing’’ is taboo, because some sects object. But the city did make an exception for ballet.

The “educrats” say such exclusions are nothing new, and I believe them. They’re inevitable when you have a government-​run school system that “services” a wide diversity of “clients.” The only real solution is to stop having the government run the schools. If you must support education with tax money, give vouchers to poor people. That would let a diversity of tutors and schools compete for parents’ and students’ attention … perhaps sometimes by catering to fears of dinosaurs, Halloween and dancing.

Odd, though, in one sense: If you really want not to “evoke unpleasant emotions in the students,” you could stop making them take tests. For most kids, tests are the most unsettling, truly horrifying aspect of schooling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly links too much government

Townhall: Dim Bulbs in Congress

My Townhall column this weekend is “Another Forced-​Innovation Fiasco,” which shows that another congressional cost-​cutting measure has gone up in smoke. Here are some relevant links to that article:

Oh, and folks: Common Sense publishes every weekday, and, if you sign up for it at right, you can get it in your email box. Why not?
Categories
Accountability folly national politics & policies

Getting It Wrong at the Fed

The Federal Reserve is America’s central bank, and its managers are political appointees. But transparency — an essential feature of the republican form of government — is something that doesn’t quite describe the information we (and our representatives) get about that institution.

“Opacity” is probably the best word to describe former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s speeches to Congress — deciphering his testimony was often more difficult than a line-​by-​line interpretation of a Sorbonne phenomenologist.

And full transcripts of the Open Market Committee reports go public only after a long lag. Only last week did 2006’s Federal Reserve insider badinage escape the confines of secrecy, and boy, what a pathetic situation was revealed.

Remember, in 2006 the mortgage boom was reaching its peak, and its excesses were obvious. Federal Reserve insiders made jokes about it, yet “gave little credence to the possibility that the faltering housing market would weigh on the broader economy,” as Binyamin Appelbaum noted in the Wall Street Journal. Geithner went so far as to say that the market’s “fundamentals” looked good, and that outgoing chairman Greenspan’s “greatness … was not fully appreciated,” which Appelbaum cautions is “an opinion now held by a much smaller number of people.”

This weekend at Townhall​.com, I wrote that Rep. Ron Paul was surely right to focus on the Federal Reserve all these years. He bucked the tide and proved himself prescient, just as the folks within the Fed, engaging in groupthink and chummy insider-​to-​insider praise, proved themselves quite clueless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.