A Useful Idea: Pay Teachers

I saw this today online at The New York Times, and you know, it needs to be said loudly and often: part of any stimulus to the economy has to target education. And it seems to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea to give anyone teaching a break. At the end of the day, teaching at any level is a less and less desirable occupation. If the idea is to get the best and brightest to want to help shape the next best and brightest, finding ways to help make teaching desirable rather than simply profitable seems in order.

There's a lesson in this, incidentally: what's cheapest and most convenient (what a market view pushes) is not always the best in the long run. This is certainly the case in education.

And let me make the point, briefly, that innovation isn't just due to math and science. If the recent problems in banking tell us anything, it's that there's a substantial need for some of those fluffy liberal arts ideas out there: things like ethics and history and economics seem like they'd go a long way to helping shape the future.

The other economic crisis...

..so panic on Wall Street with lenders and such made me think about my student loan debt which is a topic I've managed to largely wall off into some back part of my brain. I go through the usual routines to keep the monster in check, but it's always there lurking because I just can't deal with it. But sometimes it gets out, and when it does, it's frightening.

A quick run through of my payment schedule is pretty depressing. If I could afford it, to pay my loans off in 30 years will run me roughly 1/4 of my salary each year (based on what my salary is currently). Of course, I can't afford that, so I'm paying less which means it'll slowly grow.

All of this had made me contemplate other options for trying to make a dent in it. This is, in part, why I've thought about trying to leap out of academia. But I also took a look at Sallie Mae's deal with UPromise, and I've signed up for it. I'm also considering begging all of my friends and family to join it, in a move that makes me feel just a little dirty. But I'm curious, has anyone else used the service? Any thoughts on it?

Thank You, Mister Keynes, may we have another?

For whatever reason - call it nerdiness - I found myself thinking in the shower this morning that there was one name I'd not heard mentioned so far during all of the discussions of the current economic crisis/bailout: John Maynard Keynes. And I imagined that somewhere, his ghost is going fraternity on the Milton Friedman's spectral bum.

If we think about it too much, the current moment with its bailout feels just a bit like we're being sold snake oil. And so we're being urged to not think. Just act. Part of that discomfort we're having, though, is because that the bailout and the policies behind fly in the face of how we've been told we should believe and want the economy to work.

We probably shouldn't be surprised at polls that show the average American is either confused or untrusting of the whole thing, and probably generally apathetic. At the heart of the bailout is the idea that has been at the forefront of mainstream economics for the last several decades: that whatever is left over will be passed down to the guy at the bottom of the chain. And what the bottom of the chain has learned is that what's always passed on is cost. Sure, this time it's astronomical. But it's more of the same. Remember this when you hear the phrase trickle down economics.

There's a lot to be considered in the midst of this argument, not the least of which is whether we're going to learn that the market, left to its own devices, is perhaps best compared to a child left home alone for the first time. It isn't bad, exactly, but it's going to do bad things.For Keynes, the economy was always political. To think that it could be divorced from it was folly. Economic policy for the last forty years or so has vehemently tried to deny this, suggesting that the market should correct everything (except when it doesn't). Privatization isn't bad, but as David Ignatius so succinctly concludes, "public purposes are best served by public institutions."

And that means the public has to get something out of it.

Why I Agree With Fiorina

Wow, politics is farce. John McCain helped create the Blackberry? And we should be thankful for that? Have you seen what twits most people become when they get one? And the economy is fundamentally sound. Pay no attention the Man behind the curtain, or the queue forming at the ledge.

But I digress.

In case you hadn't heard that one of McCain's advisers, Carly Fiorina, said that none of the Republican or Democratic candidates have what it takes to run a company, and it has the talking heads yapping. The heads are, of course, spinning this as a betrayal (however inadvertent) of McCain by the former head of Hewlett-Packard (who, it is worth noting, caused the company major woes). And no doubt, to politicians anything that suggests they can't do anything is a betrayal.

Fiorina, though, attempts the argument that running the government isn't like running a company. I agree, though probably not for the reasons she thinks. What I'd love to hear spun out of this is the idea that the government shouldn't be run via the free market the way business is. I'd love to hear that government is something different, something that should be a limit on the free market, not one of its subjects.

Wouldn't that be something?