Political MoJo

I haven't read Chris Mooney's new book, The Republican War on Science yet, but a piece he recently wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists probably gives a flavor of the argument. Mooney reports on how, after the GOP took the House in 1994, the party quickly abolished the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in order to save a few measly million bucks—peanuts in the grand scheme of government spending. Prior to that, OTA had provided Congress with comprehensive and unbiased scientific assessments of various public policy issues; yet conservatives harking back to the 1980s had despised the agency after it voiced skepticism over the feasibility of the Reagan administration's Star Wars project.

The problem, of course, is that no other agency is currently doing the sort of publicly available, easily readable, comprehensive assessments that OTA could do. The National Academy of Sciences does very extensive studies that take years to do, not always appropriate for judging policy debates, while the Congressional Research Service does more "he said, she said" type reports, laying out the arguments on all sides in brief, rather than sorting through the bickering and giving solid answers as to who's right and wrong. Without agencies like the OTA, political groups and partisan think tanks are free to seize the mantle of science with their own, often biased, scientific assessments of policy. As a result, science in Washington has become truly postmodern—with truth claimed by those who can shout the loudest, rather than those who are actually, you know, right.

The irony here is that it's not entirely clear that the Gingrich Republicans intended all of this—mainly they just wanted some agency to kill in order to look like they were cutting government waste, and the OTA had irked Reagan less than a decade earlier. Gingrich himself was and is a technology buff. But it certainly goes hand in hand with what Mooney describes as conservative distrust of scientists and technocrats, and the overriding belief that the free market and business interests provide the real driving force behind scientific progress—even if actual scientists are saying otherwise.

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So Bush gave his big post-Katrina speech yesterday, pledging a big reconstruction effort that will have Karl Rove running things, ushering in the long march toward authoritarianism via "greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces" at home, and generally trying to get people to like him again. Looking at more substantive matters, though, Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post gives a rundown of some of the possible problems with Bush's specific policy proposals:

1) Bush plans to "give away federal land through a lottery to low-income evacuees who pledge to build homes on the property." This one doesn't seem very objectionable on the surface, though Bruce Katz of Brookings worries that it doesn't come with assistance to help people build or maintain their houses. (And what about renters?)

2) "Bush also proposed to create a Gulf Opportunity Zone, or GO Zone, in which businesses would get substantial tax breaks to invest in equipment and build structures." Some economists think these zones just amount to tax breaks for businesses that would have invested there anyway. Harold Meyerson notes that these zones, first proposed by Jack Kemp in the 1980s, did little to revitalize poor urban areas. Counteracting any hypothetical surge in investment, meanwhile, is the fact that Bush has suspended prevailing wage laws for federal reconstruction. (Which may create its own hassles since, as Nathan Newman points out, by law, service workers would still receive prevailing wages but construction workers would not—likely leading to complaints from all corners.)

3) "Bush proposed worker recovery accounts of as much as $5,000, which evacuees could use to finance job training, child care, transportation or any other impediment to a new job." This is a longstanding Bush idea that no doubt he'd like to experiment with before pushing it on Congress, but it doesn't seem to be a good one. The Economic Policy Institute has noted that the accounts "are too small to purchase meaningful training but just large enough to discourage workers from pursuing cost-effective, short-term services."

So basically the area devastated by Katrina will be the perfect testing-ground for some half-baked conservative ideas and tax breaks in dire need of a laboratory and a few test subjects. No wonder he put Karl Rove in charge. On the other hand, Bush's address had precisely zero words about lending a hand to those who might go into bankruptcy as a result of Katrina, and nothing about extending health insurance to those who have lost their jobs and livelihood. (One idea, of course, would be to temporarily extend Medicaid, but of course he said nothing about it.) Sorry, I don't agree with those who call Bush's speech "Democratic"—though having a bunch of GOP political hacks running around, spending freely on boondoggles and half-baked schemes to enrich their friends will give certainly big-government liberalism a bad name from now until eternity. Maybe that was the point.

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Two links to Josh Marshall in one day, I know, but he seems wrong when he says that the Social Security battle is over: "Not forever. But at least for the next few years." Really? I mean, the odds seem long that the GOP will want to inch near any sort of privatization bill right now, but nevertheless, the Republican leadership hasn't explicitly given the battle up. This Bloomberg piece offers a variety of different quotes, including one from House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, who notes that he's "optimistic" about passing some sort of limited privatization bill; presumably he plans to stuff it with enough pension-related goodies to try and peel off Democratic support.

More notably, the president hasn't given it up. Right before Katrina struck, Bush was cavorting around at various events for seniors, touting his Medicare prescription plan and promising that they would have nothing to lose from privatization—only those under 55 would get screwed. He seems serious. Now granted, the president lives in a cocoon, and would certainly be the last to know that most Americans don't want to abolish Social Security, that the GOP's losing this fight, and that he's crazy for trying. Still, declaring victory seems a bit premature.

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Dan Drezner links to a new OECD study (pdf) on education, and the results aren't entirely encouraging for the motherland—the United States is still lagging behind its developed-country peers in math and science education—but we seem to be improving. As far as the "What is to be done?" question goes, this passage deserves comment:

Lower expenditure cannot automatically be equated with a lower quality of educational services. Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands and New-Zealand, which have moderate expenditure on education per student at the primary and lower secondary levels, are among the OECD countries with the highest levels of performance by 15-year-old students in mathematics.

The study also notes that the United States spends, on the aggregate, much more on education than any other OECD country besides Switzerland. Seems the answer to fixing schools in America does not involve spending more money, right? Maybe, but not necessarily. First question: A good deal of public education spending in the United States, after all, goes towards spending on students with disabilities; in 2004, IDEA grants to states totaled $12 billion, roughly a tenth of all federal education spending. So I wonder what the OECD numbers look like with that factor removed.

Second question: looking only at aggregate expenditures seems misleading to me—as Jonathan Kozol reminds us in Harper's this month, the United States boasts a segregated public school system in which many (often white, suburban) districts rake in obscene amounts of money from local property taxes, while others (often black or Hispanic, urban) have very little to spend on their students. A chart merely showing that the U.S. spends a lot on education obscures some of these points. On the other hand, the "between-school variance" on public education in the United States was fairly low, when compared to supposedly stellar countries like Japan, Germany, and South Korea. I don't know if this means that our savage inequalities aren't quite as savage as they are elsewhere around the world, but it's fairly surprising.

Flipping through some of the other charts, it looks like the United States pays its secondary-school teachers more than most other countries, on an absolute level, but in the context of GDP per capita, our public school teachers don't make very much. Incidentally, Norway and Sweden pay their teachers even less than we do, when compared to GDP per capita, and they seem to be lagging in math and science too. Coincidence? No idea; it would be interesting to see some regressions on this. I also see that teachers in the United States teach far and away more hours than any of their OECD peers, while teachers in Japan—a country generally noted, with caveats like the above, for its educational excellence—teach only about half as many hours as their American counterparts. This doesn't pass for proof that underpaid and overworked public-school teachers are partly the reason for America's poor education showing, but on the surface that idea has at least some plausibility.

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