Look For the Union Libel

 

That's where David F. Brooks was yesterday, too, though he didn't sound quite as much like QAnon as the Senate Republicans do, but with the same child sacrifice theme, in his Times column ("Children Need to Be Back In School Tomorrow"—don't know if he was aware tomorrow was Saturday). In fact, his tack is to explain that the AFT is exactly like QAnon, anti-intellectual:

There’s a wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping America. There are people across the country who deny evidence, invent their own facts and live in their own fantasyland. We saw it in the Republicans who denied the reality of the Biden election victory and we see it now in the teachers unions that are shutting down schools and marring children’s lives.

Which is really kind of libelous, I think, especially if he means that progressive present verb ("are shutting") the way it's usually used in English, and is complaining specifically about approximately one local, the Chicago Teachers Union, which is not currently shutting down anything but rather fighting against Mayor Lightfoot's plan to reopen K-8 schools that were closed 10 months ago by order of Governor Pritzker, and not with the intention of marring children's lives, which I believe most people who have devoted their lives to the not very remunerative occupation of elementary and middle school teaching would not want to do, but in the interest of making the environment safe for themselves, with a more satisfactory testing regime, PPE supplies, adequate ventilation of school buildings, and priority for vaccination for teachers and support staff, much of which the city says it's now ready to do (Lightfoot won't bend on the vaccination, at least outside the hardest-hit zip codes), but that's a genuine matter of dispute:

It's the principal of the thing

Good budgeting makes good schools in Chicago as elsewhere, and everybody knows it, even the Republicans complaining about Rahm Emanuel while the Democrats complain about Bruce Rauner. They just want somebody else to supply the money. Photo via Illinois Review.

Sorry about the headline, but yesterday's Brooks ("Good Leaders Make Good Schools") really kind of forces my hand, because it turns out that principals are the thing that will bring on the Brooksian social transformation:

When you learn about successful principals, you keep coming back to the character traits they embody and spread: energy, trustworthiness, honesty, optimism, determination. We went through a period when we believed you could change institutions without first changing the character of the people in them. But we were wrong. Social transformation follows personal transformation.

All "we" have to do is change the character of "our" principals, making them energetic, trustworthy, honest, optimistic, and determined, and "we" will change everything. This is simple. We'll send them to principal reeducation camps. (Actually we have something like that in New York City, but Brooks is all on about Chicago for some reason.)

Mysteries of bloat

To explain to us all what's going on with the Chicago teacher strike, David Brooks has come up with a totally new basic economic theory!

In place of the conventional Samuelson model of consumption goods

	excludable	non-excludable
rivalrous	private goods (cars, shoes)	common goods (forests, fish)
non-rivalrous	club goods (movies, golf)	public goods (water, knowledge)

he has devised one that is an order of magnitude more efficient, that looks something like this:

Economy I	Economy II
tradable sector	bloatable sector

Whereas the conventional model looks at the world of goods from the demand side, the narrow and selfish standpoint of the consumer, the new model is from the supply side, that of producers, job creators, people who make a difference, so it's much more important and serious.

Economy I is the tradable sector. This includes companies that make goods like planes, steel and pharmaceuticals. These companies face intense global competition and are compelled to constantly innovate and streamline. They’ve spent the last few decades figuring out ways to make more products with fewer workers.

Economy II is made up of organizations that do not face such intense global competition. They often fall into government-dominated sectors like health care, education, prisons and homeland security. People in this economy believe in innovation, but they don’t have the sword of Damocles hanging over them so they don’t pursue unpleasant streamlining as rigorously. As a result, Economy II institutions tend to get bloated and inefficient as time goes by. 

Naturally getting things from Economy I is good for consumers, who benefit from that intense global competition when it lowers the prices you have to pay for stuff; you will have noticed how much cheaper airplanes and prescription drugs have become in recent years. Or maybe you haven't noticed, if your insurance plan pays for the meds, but it's probably true.

Pencil draw graph image by Anatoly Tiplyashin from Fotolia.com. The source, "How to make a Pareto graph", explains that "A Pareto chart is used to graphically illustrate a complex set of data. It is based on the Pareto Principle, which says that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes."

By the same token, when your Economy II stuff starts getting bloated, the best thing you can do is start getting it produced in a more Economy I kind of way. Prisons, for example, used to be ridiculously luxurious institutions, like cruise ships, with as much as a one-to-one ratio of staff to customers and who knows what kinds of on-board facilities: gyms, celebrity lectures, single rooms for those who don't care to socialize so much, etc.

This bloat has been remedied by the introduction of market forces in the form of privately run for-profit prisons; the competition inspires them to cut costs drastically, making every penitentiary a taut, profitable hell-hole. Of course your government won't see any of the resulting cash, but it'll be in the hands where it can do the most good, those of job creators.

The same kind of thing holds for public schools, as in Chicago, horrible places pullulating with children and overpaid teachers earning nearly as much as a  management consulting consultant for Accenture, whatever that is; compare that to the quiet, refined atmosphere of a typical private school, with its small classes and friendly non-union teachers. They'd better be, you say, at tuition fees of $40,000 a year, but that's not the point.

In traditional economics, it's hard to see how you could make a public school (public goods) more like a private school (club goods) without charging tuition. Brooksian economics explains it with the simple and elegant Sword of Damocles principle: keep your workers in a permanent state of fear. This is bound to make them as innovative as you could want.

Charter Schools under the Microscope. By Nathan Golub for IndyWeek.