Why Vote at All?

I didn’t vote for President last time. A lot of people find this repugnant to some sort of degree. After all, the right to vote is something that people have risked their lives for over thousands of years to secure. Meh, so what.

I believe that a “reckless vote” is a lot worse than a “non-vote.” I think that a lot of people who vote do it based on bad reasons. Studies show that a decent chunk of people vote for candidates based on their personality only. That’s a reckless vote. I think that the large majority of voters are not as informed as they should be. Does anyone think that more than 0.1% of people voting for the Cook County judges to it on anything more than the Chicago Tribune endorsements and/or party affiliation? Am I obligated to vote just because I am a citizen? I believe voting for President is somewhat inefficient and irrational because my vote will not make a difference. I am registered to vote in Illinois, where Barack Obama will surely win. In that case, my vote is only going to be a “moral support” type thing and, frankly, I don’t want to feel in any way responsible for some of the policies he does.

Well, someone has to win Will, so you gotta vote for somebody. So do I have to vote for the lesser of two evils? Maybe I’ll vote for Gary Johnson. Johnson is the Libertarian Party nominee. He also happens to be a successful businessman, a popular ex-Governor of New Mexico, and the highest elected official to ever call for an end to the War on Drugs. Johnson ran for the GOP nomination but never had the chance to pick up steam because he was shut out of the debates. But at the end of the day, if I vote, I can realistically choose between voting for one of the two candidates who have a shot at winning or a candidate in hopes of increasing LP’s federal election funding.

I also think that voting, and democracy in general, have little to do with how “liberal” America is. A ranking of the freest and most democratic countries in the developed world shows a weak correlation. America isn’t too high on the democratic list compared to other developed countries, but also has some of the most permissive speech laws and economic liberties. I’d explain democracy and liberalism as a correlation thing, not a causation thing. America has the laws that it does because of our culture and history, not because we are all huge participants in the great government machine. Proponents of democracy don’t like to talk about ‘illiberal democracies’ like Russia that have formal schemes that resemble democracies but give terrible results.

So, why vote? To get better policy? In my case, Illinois will go easily to Obama. Because I have a moral obligation? Ok, then I’ll vote for a third party candidate that I genuinely am enthusiastic about.

Even Gary Johnson has ideas I disagree with. Hell, if I ran I’d probably disagree with myself. So every candidate is the “lesser of x evils” to the extent that no candidate will ever really be 100% in line with one’s beliefs. So when’s it appropriate to not vote, and when is it appropriate to just vote for one of the major party candidates? We’re not dealing with a Hitler vs. Stalin situation here, but I think most people agree that situation would warrant some sort of non-vote (in addition to a major uprising). So there’s a gray area. My next post, which hopefully will come soon, will deal with whom I would vote for in Barack vs. Mitt.

 

Reflections on a School Year

My job as an in-class math tutor at a Title I middle school in Austin has come to an end. Some thoughts a week after I finished, some of which I have written about before:

• There needs to be a new incentive system. Merit pay or bonuses based on performance have their flaws. But something definitely needs to change. Positive incentives for rewarding hard-working teachers need to be present just as much as sanctions for lazy teachers. How to fully evaluate it? I don’t know. But something needs to be done. The lack of accountability for everyone in the entire system seems outrageous.
• The “schools” can’t be confused with the “education system.” Policy can be changed regarding teacher incentives, administration decisions, and funding. But the fact is that performance in schools reflects society as a whole, for better or for worse. In the case of my school, low-performance comes from things as broad as low English language proficiency, broken down homes, lack of finances, and overarching discipline problems that start way before the kids get to school. The welfare state solution known as the American public school system is not equipped, and frankly shouldn’t be equipped, to solve all of these problems. As such, I now know that comparing American test scores or performance to other developed countries without our cultural and lingual homogeneity or relatively small welfare state is not fair at all. Korean or Danish results cannot be expected to be replicated.
• Apathy: it consume everyone, even the most well-intentioned. The state of American schools is so dire that even the most highly motivated person can’t help but be defeated. One amazing teacher can change many kids’ lives forever. But even then it takes 16-hour days and often times the satisfaction won’t be seen for years to come. There are so many problems with the kids that come to low-performing schools, especially in terms of behavior, that one cannot help but feel helpless against all the problems. Suddenly, it’s easy to get in the mindset of “there’s only so much I can do” that one gives up on turning the children into well-functioning members of society. Helplessness blues sets in and it’s easier to pass the kids onto the next grade than give the extra mile for the 1% chance that you make a demonstrable difference. This is tough.
• While I still think the incentive scheme for teachers, administrators, and staff are pretty shoddy, this experience has made me blame the aforementioned personnel a lot less. From a statistical perspective, America spends so much on education and gets so little out of it. It’s easy to blame this on the monopoly of the public school system and teachers unions. There’s still a lot to be said for the detrimental effect of low school competition and the monopsony of teachers unions, but I now realize that comparing America’s performance to other countries is very much an apples and oranges comparison. The schools’ low performance is a reflection of society as a whole and not just the “system.”

 

American Cuisine

I wouldn’t say I have much of a sophisticated palate. I am not very conscious of herbs, spices, oils, and different flavorings when I cook. That being said I do not eat fast food (and haven’t in probably a decade), eat relatively little red meat, and generally don’t like junk food. I believe my culinary tastes are purely a reflection of the household I was raised in as well as my generally active lifestyle. Growing up my mom always managed to make a pretty diverse array of meals each day of the week. My brother was also a vegetarian and so I became accustomed to, and developed a taste for, foods that were not based around a piece of meat.

There is a ‘food crisis’ in America, many would argue. Depending on one’s views it is one or more of factors including obesity, the over-industrialization of food production, the blandness of American food, rising food prices, and the need for quick and convenient food. I tend to not blame agribusiness or consumerism for any of these problems. I recently purchased (long overdue) Tyler Cowen’s An Economist Gets Lunch for my iPhone (also available in physical text form). In addition to explaining contemporary American culinary tastes, Cowen goes through interesting personal narratives of food exploration, macro-food solutions, locavorism, eating environemtally friendly, and some valuable general rules for finding the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of food.

While the book is interesting throughout, what I find most interesting thus far is how he explains how American cuisine got to where it is today. Despite having more options than ever, American cuisine is generally boring. He doesn’t blame it on agribusiness or consumerism, though. He divides it into three main historical occurrences.

Cowen notes that Europeans used to come to America in the 19th century and marvel at how fresh and high-quality our food was. Not anymore, of course. So what happened?

1. Prohibition - Making alcohol illegal had a significantly negative impact on American culinary tastes. For decades America couldn’t cook with wines like Europeans do. Eating fine food with alcohol no longer became a regular occurrence. Speakeasies weren’t interested in developing a fine culinary reputation. Similarly, drink tastes in America switched to more hard liquor than beer or wine in an order to binge drink quicker. This has had a long-lasting impact. Think of ‘quintessential’ American eating establishments – the diner, the candy shop, the soda shop. Diners are a reflection of eating entirely without alcohol. They also, with candy and soda shops, reflect that without alcohol we suddenly were switching our tastes to cater more to children’s. He elaborates on this more, showing how as a culture we are more willing to give our kids what they want (sugars, salts, etc) instead of what we want. Having lived in Britain for four years, I can confirm that diners don’t really exist. Cowen argues convincingly how this has negatively impacted most of America’s culinary tastes.
2. World War II – we switched from better quality meats to SPAM. Even in a world war, we Americans don’t want to cut back on meat. So we developed a taste for a conveniently packed but terribly tasting meat. Further, more women went into the workforce. This meant less time in the kitchen and suddenly more convenient and less time-intensive food were demanded by American consumers. Why didn’t this happen in Europe, which was literally destroyed in some areas? We had the infrastructure to mass transport foods, whereas Europeans necessity needed to eat local and have things fresh. If you can’t ship and store, you’ve got to have what’s nearby. Ironically, European cuisine had more in the way of quality cuisine by having less.
3. Immigration – immigration was essentially open for the first century and a half in America. We had ‘old world’ tastes and recipes being mixed with American ingredients and ideas. Food innovation, Cowen argues, was our greatest contribution to world food. In the 1920s and for several decades later, nationality quotas and other immigration restrictions outlawed this. Suddenly “ethnic” restaurants were run by second or third-generation immigrants with little memory of what their ethnicity’s cuisine was like in the old world. This made for a blander cuisine all around. Furthermore, xenophobia and the desire to be more “America” produced a homogenization of foods. Only recently has immigration picked up and this trended started to reverse. Most interestingly, Cowen notes that barbecue and Tex/Mex are America’s greatest original contribution to food. Because of the history of lax immigration enforcement of the Mexican border, the immigrant influence was still felt in Texas and the southwest, producing barbecue and Tex/Mex food. Being in Austin, and never really having had such delicious barbecue before, I agree wholeheartedly with him.

These points obviously have much more elaboration than I have provided here. Still, I think thinking about these three things and their effect on American cuisine is pretty interesting. American tastes are thus not the effect of dumb consumerism or agribusiness tricking us into eating high levels of saturated fats and high fructose corn syrup, but instead cultural and historical events. Check out Cowen interviewed on the EconTalk podcast and the Freakonomics podcast. Also, consider buying the book. It has been positively reviewed by pretty much everyone (NYT, USA Today, The Independent) and is a very easy read.

 

The Real Price of College

NPR’s Planet Money podcast recently exposed one of the strangest yet most important point about college tuition costs today. Although college tuition has increased by gargantuan amounts in the last couple decades, this doesn’t take into account what people are actually paying.

The list price of college has definitely gone up, as Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have been talking about in their campaigns. But this doesn’t mean people are actually spending that much on it. The average sticker price of a private college is $28,500 for the current school year. What the average person pays? $12,970. That’s essentially the same as the $12,650 students paid in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2000-2oo1.

The difference between the “sticker price” and the actual cost comes from financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc – usually from the colleges/universities themselves. So what’s the deal? Pretty simple, when you think about it. You go to a store and see two seemingly similar sweaters, both priced at $30 – except one has been marked down from $50. They both look the same so you might as well take the one that was marked down, right? You assume you’re getting a $50 quality sweater for the same price as the other. Similarly, if a college is insanely expensive you think that that price is a signaling of quality of sorts. Further, giving prospective students huge grants or aid after they get in is a sneaky way to “recruit” students by convincing them that they are truly wanted at the institution.

This means that college tuition payment is fairly progressive. Those that can pay $50,000 a year are paying it. And, sometimes, those with very little money are paying close to nothing. The price of college is still a barrier financially for many, but the amount of aid given definitely needs to be taken into consideration.

I still think American colleges feature way too many frills and is too expensive nonetheless, but at least the amount paid isn’t skyrocketing as much as we think it is.

 

Money and Happiness

Loyal Upset Patterns reader Peter recently sent me an article about the relation between money and happiness. The article cites research showing that up to a certain point ($75,000), more money does tend to correlate to a higher self-reported satisfaction of living. I took a few lectures of “economics of happiness” in college and there were a few things I gathered from them. First of all, anything related to people’s well-being can be difficult to quantify when it comes to something as subjective as self-reported “happiness.” One’s happiness could be overstated because they have convinced themselves their wealth is making them happy. Similarly, one’s happiness could be understated because of an irrational level of discontent with their surroundings. The happiness surveys that I am familiar with ask a handful of questions and ask the participant to answer them on a scale from 1-7. Doesn’t that sound like a situation ripe for error? I think there are so many problems with trying to quantify happiness that all I’m going to say is that anything related to it should be taken with a large grain of sodium chloride.

The Coding Horror post that Peter sent me goes on to give some prescriptions for how to make people happier. While I agree with the basic gist of all of them, my number one task is not to argue with them. Instead, I’d like to focus on the bigger point: money can buy happiness! The fact that there is a pretty strong correlation between money and happiness (even if up to only a certain point) should be a pretty good case for the efficiencies of capitalism rewarding hard work, smart investments, and creative talent. After all, isn’t it a strong merit of a system if it makes people happier by doing well?

Critics of America’s ‘capitalist’ or ‘materialistic’ lifestyle like to point out how the developed world is not that much happier than the developing world. But that’s an oversimplification. Ok, money doesn’t solve all your problems; in fact, it causes a lot of them. But lack of money is an even bigger problem. Financial instability, lack of access to education and healthcare, and literal poverty cause a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction in America and the world. Absolute wealth doesn’t have a huge linear correlation with happiness. Maybe we can manipulate the data to see that money earned buys happiness. Or maybe it really is all about relative wealth, as many studies have hinted at.

I’m not totally sure how to dissect the data regarding income and happiness. The research is blossoming and I look forward to seeing what it uncovers. But I believe for the time-being it is safe to say that the capitalist mantra of hard work rewarding a good lifestyle holds true. Yes, there are the idiots that are insanely money-driven and miserable, and there are people who are perfectly content with very little income. But the point still holds that there is a strong positive trend between happiness and income.

That being said, I believe that we need to start measuring quality of life by a more sophisticated measure than Gross Domestic Product. Bhutan has even started reporting a gross national happiness. Perhaps Human Development Index (HDI) factors like literacy rate, gender equality, life expectancy, or other quality-of-life proxies are a better way to gage standards of living. The weaknesses of GDP measurement have always been around but I believe they are getting even more relevant. Writing this blog is giving me utility and, hopefully, reading this blog is giving you utility. But there is no market transaction and thus GDP has not gone up. A lot of user-generated utility on the internet takes place with no market transactions and is totally ignored in GDP.

 

Nutrition Part II: Are the American Poor Starving or Obese?

While discussing his latest book in an EconTalk podcast, Tyler Cowen brought up something I’ve generally believed: the problem with food for the American poor is not that they are starving, it’s that they’re fat. We can see this from the gross proliferation of fast food amongst the American poor. After all, they are eating this unhealthy food because it’s what they can afford. Obviously there are a non-insignificant number of people in America that are malnourished or literally starve, but amazingly obesity seems to be wrecking a historic amount of havoc on the American poor.

With my classroom currently focusing on daily nutrition, the students have been keeping food logs. Although the data keeping is definitely not scientific nor close to being reliable, I have noticed two trends that describe at least 95% of the diets: 1) the caloric intake is not NEARLY close to what they should be having and 2) the food they are having is as nutritious as eating a pair of socks.

For the first issue, it’d be easy to explain it through a lack of financial means to eat. But this explanation isn’t convincing. Most the students at my school qualify for Federally subsidized free breakfasts and lunches due to low income. They are all in the cafeteria when breakfast is served. And although the length of their lunch period is sub-optimal, they still are there and have time to eat more than they actually do. Often times, the students say they’re not hungry. Or maybe they didn’t like the food the cafeteria was serving. But with the help of choosemyplate.gov and its diet tracking technology, I observed that a lot of these kids are getting under 1,000 calories in a given day. That puts them on a level doctors classify as starving. Remember, the food is available to them. It’s being served in the cafeteria they’re sitting in. This lack of caloric intake probably explains a lot of their common exhaustion and grumpiness.

When they do eat, it’s crap. More common than a child bring a pencil to class is a child munching on multiple bags of Takis. For those not familiar with them, take my word that they are absurdly unhealthy and synthetic-tasting. They also like to drink one sometimes two energy drinks in a day. Again, no nutritional value.

Obviously, my experience with an unscientific food log of sixth graders is not a conclusively large sample space. But I have a feeling this is a pattern amongst low-income children: an unfortunate combination of low caloric intake and snack food grossly lacking nutrition.

So what are the possible policy solutions? Even neglecting the public choice issues and feasibility of successful implementation, I really don’t know what to do. Force kids to eat the breakfast and lunch they are fully provided and paid for? Educate them about nutritious options (an easy solution that is obviously easier said than done)? (Relatively) healthy food is being offered to them two meals a day and they are turning it down. We can’t make them eat that food. They’re eating crap, if anything, once they get home for dinner, and that definitely doesn’t seem like an easy place for policy to affect. I really can’t think of anything. I’d like to see when their eating habits change. Is this an adolescent thing where they’re worried about body image? Once they start actually working do they eat more calories out of necessity?

The poor in America are obese (just like a lot of middle-income and wealthy people). I don’t even feel the need to find a link to prove that. But I’ve been struck this last week by the real issue for these kids’ diets being eating enough food. Watching Super Size Me almost seems less relevant than watching some sort of documentary about the dangers of malnourishment.

 

Nutrition Part I: Making Children Eat Not too Much (but keep eating, you’re still beautiful! … but still be nutritious because everyone’s fat)

Now that the life-or-death STAAR test is done in the class I work in, less academic matters have taken over the classroom. Right now, we are focusing on nutrition. In addition to keeping a food log, we are watching Super Size Me. While the merits of the movie are a matter for a later debate, watching the movie renewed an apparent contradiction I’ve always noticed with increasing awareness about healthy eating: we are simultaneously telling people (children, mostly) 1) Americans are unhealthy, we need to be more conscious about what we eat, we need to exercise, and 2) Don’t obsess about trying to look like the air-brushed models in those magazines, we are all beautiful, don’t worry too much about body image. I think both points are valid: people should be more concerned about their physical health – which includes nutrition as well as being active by means of walking more or just outright exercise. People also should stop worrying about the two pounds of arguably excess fat on their bodies, the extra hair on whatever, or how they wish they were .00001 shades less pale than they are. I suppose girls tend to be more bombarded with pressure about body image (though don’t think for a second males don’t worry about their appearance) so I don’t totally understand the pressure for a more-perfect body.

But teaching these two lessons walk a fine line. By teaching kids to be more conscious about nutrition, we are implicitly telling them that they don’t look good. In Super Size Me, and most campaigns to raise awareness about healthy eating, the most common image I see is the shock value of showing a morbidly obese person. It makes sense. After all, there is something very convincing about the image of someone that is clearly unhealthy and unattractive in a physical sense. Especially for kids, the idea of being that fat and being prey to the judgmental peers of adolescence is enough to eat fruits and veggies and exercise. Or is it?

Unfortunately what I’m about to say is currently politically incorrect: we should be shamed by people who are five hundred pounds and the image should give us motivation to be healthy. For some reason, as Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine points out in Super Size Me, obese people can’t yet be criticized in society like we criticize chain smokers or drug addicts. Smoking crack or cigarettes to the point of self-deprecation both produce repulsive images of things we don’t want to be. Lack of will power aside, the vast majority of the population has the ability and means to not be a chain smoker, meth addict, or five hundred pounds.

But pushing this “shame” too much then goes into the other murky waters: you don’t want to be like this; these people are bad; these people are so bad that you need to be super skinny. But then kids get so skinny they don’t eat enough and develop eating disorders. Or they just simply starve themselves (the food logs I see of my students have a disturbingly low amount of calories…that will be tackled in part II of this post).

So pushing the idea that you don’t want to look like these fat people has the negative unintended consequence of people overcompensating and being too skinny, by certainly unhealthy means. And then pushing the idea too far that you shouldn’t be concerned at all about body image gives people the impression that it’s ok to totally neglect your health and it’s fine to have the consequences of bad nutrition and lack of exercise.

I don’t have an answer for how exactly to put across these two messages without getting the negative side-effects of both. My main prescription would be to encourage a more active life-style with exercise. Exercise, after all, increases hunger for healthy foods and just improves everything in your physical health.