Well, okay. If you want to read the Bible here, come on in…

The U.S. government recently granted asylum to a German homeschooling family of seven, which is very encouraging and inspiring as long as you don’t ponder the many glaring ironies:

[I]n Germany it’s compulsory for children to attend school, and the Romeikes soon found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Local authorities slapped the couple with a $10,000 fine, and police even took their children to school when the Romeikes refused to send them. Fearing that they could lose custody of their kids or even be put in jail, the Romeikes fled to the U.S. in 2008, looking for a community where they could educate their kids as they saw fit.

That’s exactly what they found in Morristown, Tenn., a town of about 27,000 deep in the Bible Belt. Donnelly says the Romeikes flourished in the environment, becoming “very disciplined” teachers tackling subjects like math, history and social science with the help of textbooks and other teaching materials, all in accordance with state law.  (A New Basis for U.S. Asylum Claims: Homeschooling – TIME)

Among the many ironies is that America basically imported its compulsory schooling philosophy from Germany, and that German and American apologists for legalized child conscription sound spookily alike:

While there is a thriving homeschool movement in the U.S. — some 2 million children are now taught at home, or about 4% of the total school-age population, according to HSLDA — it is still a very new concept in Germany. According to the German media, there are only between 500 and 1,000 families in the country who homeschool their children — most in violation of the law. According to the compulsory-education statute introduced by the Prussians in the 18th century, all children must attend school from the ages of 6 to 16. And it’s traditionally been viewed as a child’s right rather than an obligation. “Compulsory schooling is one of the greatest social achievements of our time,” Josef Kraus, head of the German Teachers’ Association, tells TIME. “This law protects children.”

I’m disappointed that the head of the German Teachers’ Association failed to provide a balanced perspective on the advantages and disadvantages of compulsory schooling.  It’s not as though he might be biased in any way toward the perpetuation of compulsory schooling for all.

Other ironies:  America persecutes some of its own homeschoolers and restricts the rest; Germans of a certain religious background were not allowed asylum in the 1940s;  women fleeing FGM meet only an indifferent bureaucracy; Haitians aren’t allowed in; only a trickle of the refugees of our wars are admitted…I don’t have all day, but I’m sure an exhaustive list would take at least that long.

Prepare to Get Schooled in My Austrian Perspective

The Apple vs. PC commercials cast a smug hipster as Apple and a tubby, earnest suit as PC, which is supposed to make the viewer associate Apple computers with coolness and buy more of their products.  I know I’m not the only one who finds that PC is by far the more endearing one.

In this excellent video from Russ Roberts on The Economic Rap Battle of the Century, however, I find that I prefer bad boy Keynes, hangovers and all, to sweaty ideological underdog Hayek.  Am I just a contrarian?  Or are there baser impulses at work?

[Lyrics here]

Yes, I know, I know who the libertarian is supposed to root for in this one.  It’s just not a good PR move for the Hayekians to concede all the hotness, and well-groomed mustaches, to Mr. Animal Spirits.

The Economic Rap Battle Of The Centu

In Which I Semi-Approvingly Quote a NYT Op-Ed

Don’t blink:

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.  (Sex Ed in Washington, Ross Douthat, by way of Who is IOZ?)

I can think of a common denominator between federally-funded contraceptive-oriented programs and federally-funded abstinence-based courses, aside from their common ineffectiveness at bringing down teen pregnancy and STD rates.  That’s right:  stupid, reckless, useless, hormone-driven teenagers! If throwing federal dollars at them doesn’t work, what the hell will?  Hopefully the outlawing of teen sexuality will finally do the trick.

30 is the New 20: Might the Brain Follow?

Now that adolescence goes on for longer than ever, we’re being told that  the human brain doesn’t mature until age 25 or 26.  Of course, this in turn is used to justify the ever-increasing restrictions on children and adolescents, and to explain away the irresponsible behavior of adults in their 20s or 30s.

Might there be a feedback loop?  If we find that the decision-making parts of the brain are impaired or undeveloped in young people, could it be that the opportunities for young people to make decisions are extremely limited?  After the K-12 years of age-segregation and removal from responsibility, many kids are funneled into colleges and possibly graduate schools, where they encounter yet more age-segregation and limitation of responsibility.  “Use it or lose it” may be a cliché, but how could these restrictions help but affect the structure of the brain?

Psychologist Robert Epstein, who wrote The Case Against Adolescence, has said that “American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons.”   He has “also found a correlation between infantilization and psychological dysfunction. The more young people are infantilized, the more psychopathology they show.”

If Epstein is correct, the findings that reckless teens have the best-developed brains shouldn’t be surprising:

The most common-sense explanation for teens’ carelessness is that their brains just aren’t developed enough to know better. But new research suggests that in the case of some teens, the culprit is just the opposite: the brain matures not too slowly but, perhaps, too quickly.

In a paper just published in PLoS ONE — a journal of the Public Library of Science — a team led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta shows that adolescents who engage in more dangerous activities have white-matter pathways that appear more mature than those of risk-averse youths. White matter is essentially the brain’s wiring — the neural strands that connect the various gray-matter regions, where the actual nerve cells reside, that are otherwise independent of one another. Maturation of white matter is important because it increases the brain’s processing speed; nerve impulses travel faster in mature white matter.  (The Teen Brain: The More Mature, the More Reckless)

I suspect that reckless teenagers may just be trying to seize agency in the only ways available to them.   If you can drive like a maniac but aren’t allowed to buy a pack of cigarettes or to be seen outside between the hours of 8 am and 2 pm (not to mention 11 pm – 6 am in curfewed areas), what would you do?

Also, how is there such a thing as a brain maturing too quickly?  Can you imagine a mainstream publication treating any other group with such disdain (e.g. “some women’s brains develop too much”)?   We expect the young to develop according to an established timeline that happens to serve more than a few special interests, such as the public school teachers’ lobby, and punish them when they deviate by becoming “too brainy.”

The State Can’t Parent

After 16 years of decline, teen pregnancy is up, in tandem with the highest out-of-wedlock birthrate ever:

Three percent more girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant in 2006 than in 2005, four percent more gave birth, and one percent more had abortions, the report by the Guttmacher Institute showed.

Three-quarters of a million women younger than 20, or seven percent of the 15-19 age group, became pregnant in 2006, the report said.

That made for 71.5 pregnancies for every 1,000, 15- to 19-year-old girls, compared to 69.5 pregnancies per 1,000 girls in the same age group in 2005, when the US teen pregnancy rate reached its lowest point in more than 30 years.

The rise was “deeply troubling” and “coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration,” said Guttmacher Institute senior public policy associate Heather Boonstra.

US teen pregnancy rate up for first time since 1990: study.

I am in agreement with those who blame the abstinence-only programs.  But obviously it is the programs that are not working, not abstinence itself.  There’s no debate that abstinence would bring the rate down, but journalists scoff at the idea that abstinence can be inculcated.

We need only compare the failure of government-funded abstinence programs to that of DARE, as amply documented by James Bovard:

A 1993 study of fifth- and sixth-graders in Wisconsin, conducted by the University of Wisconsin, concluded that DARE-trained pupils actually had worse self-esteem and were more poorly educated on drug issues than comparable pupils who did not receive DARE training. “The DARE group failed to show improved decision-making skills, one of the major claims of the program,” the Associated Press reported.

Lloyd Johnson, a University of Michigan researcher in charge of a nationwide survey of adolescent drug use, observed: “I have to conclude DARE has had little or no effect except to give police officers something to do.” A 1996 University of Kentucky study compared thousands of students who took DARE classes and students who took other drug education classes and found no positive lasting effect from DARE training.

Destroying Families for the Glory of the Drug War, Part 1.

I’m sure studies of the abstinence-only programs would be similarly depressing, but at least in the case of DARE, we do not see the baby thrown out with the bongwater.  Nobody would publicly conclude from the failure of DARE that preteens should indulge in a snootful of cocaine whenever the fancy strikes them, so long as they practiced “safer” straw-sharing, etc.

In contrast, the failure of abstinence-only government programs means that the concept of abstinence is ideologically abandoned, rather than the federally-funded program.  Thus the idea that abstinence should be encouraged by parents will also be dismissed, with deafening repetition on the competent use of birth control, in spite of the increasingly dismal results.  And this is what we observe.  Take the response of the popular blog Jezebel:

Probably not to blame is the much-vaunted “hookup culture” — a Seventeen magazine study found that among teen boys, serious relationships are about as common as hookups. A more likely culprit is abstinence education — the Guttmacher Institute’s Lawrence Finer says, “The focus on abstinence and the shifts in pregnancy occurred about the same time.”

Teen Pregnancy Rates Rising on TV, Real Life

Yes, indeed, what relation could there possibly be between teen pregnancy rates and the hookup culture?  None at all, apparently.  And how exactly do “serious relationships” among teenagers preclude teen pregnancy?  It’s not very reassuring that the folks who exhibit this sort of logic want the state to continue parenting your children, but with the message of their choice.

Warning: Reading Reason Comments Threads May be Triggering for Those Who Have Read Reason Comments Threads

It can be dangerous to comment on comments, but the temptation can prove unbearable.  Here Rad Geek succumbs, in defense of colleague Roderick Long’s article, “The Winnowing of Ayn Rand“:

Bryan Caplan takes notice of Roderick’s article [The Winnowing of Ayn Rand] and offers (what I take to be) a rather ill-thought-out critique of the economic stuff in it over at EconLog. (Search down for Roderick’s spot-on reply in the comments.) Meanwhile, Brian Doherty takes notice of the article over at Hit & Run, where the comments thread is its usual fascinating self.

While it can’t top that thread in which the very first entry consisted entirely of Fuck you Roderick Long, I have to say that my current favorite is this one:

¢ | 1.20.10 @ 9:12PM | #

I haven’t kept up with Long’s quest to be the David Brooks of (increasingly nominal) libertarianism lately. His establishment-toadying got too embarrassing to watch a couple years back. Looks like it’s even worse now.

Let us know when he gives up the pose and busts his McGovern gear out of storage.

—Re: Ayn Rand: Radical for Something Other Than Capitalism

(Rad Geek People’s Daily 2010-01-22 – Somebody’s gotta say it..)

Honestly, this sort of misinterpretation, if that’s even the right word here, is small potatoes compared to some of the stuff I’ve encountered there.  I think I’ve had borderline panic attacks triggered by some threads, e.g. the one accompanying “Kerry Howley and Megan McArdle on Lipstick Libertarians.”

I’m not going to track it down, but I’ll never be able to forget the one where a woman voicing reservations about limited government was told that she must have been molested as a child to exhibit such fear of predation (the kind of predation she feared would follow a scaling down of government police forces).  Yes, you read that correctly:  “You must have been molested” was supposed to be an intellectual trump card.  Ya ever wonder why libertarianism just doesn’t jive with the womenfolks?

So glad I am the proprietor of a liberty-oriented blog that nobody reads or comments on!  I think I need a shower now.

Update:  I tried to find the comment I discussed above, and found this one instead:

Grist|2.5.09 @ 1:07PM|#

“Look, I just want to know what we’re arguing about here.”

Why must you argue? Why not just discuss? You know, compare and contrast? That is what sane people do.

What is wrong with you that drives you to argue? Why the need to dominate? Were you molested as a child? Are you seeking any help to overcome your psychological disorder?

You gotta hand it to Reason readers; they sure do enjoy conjuring up sexual violence to silence women and men alike.  Sadly, it’s not as though they have the monopoly on such shaming and shameful tactics.

Strike Up the Root

Thursday’s edition is served up; the permalink is here.  Though yesterday’s edition is more important:  please read Anthony Gregory’s essay on “Bush’s ninth year.”

2010

My goal in 2010 is to blog daily.  I’ve announced this intention before, and I already missed the 2nd of the month, but I figure that announcing the goal will keep me from lapsing for weeks at a time.  I note that author Tim Ferriss recommends posting no more than 3-4 times per week, but I was never the type to imitate what works.

I’d like to see how the frequency of posting affects quality; when I wait to have “something to say” before I blog, thoughts don’t actually get developed into posts.

The other big goal is to clean up/standardize citations for future and past posts.  Also to floss more.

Peter Breggin: Silly or Sharp?

I hate to impugn Peter Breggin, because even on his worst days he comes out pretty far ahead of the average NYT columnist.  Nonetheless, I’ll acknowledge the silliness in a recent column without comment:

Almost all of us are orphans who have lost our connection to people like George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams and James and Dolley Madison. We do not know and love our Founding Mothers and Fathers, and we do not benefit from their wisdom. We do not know how they wanted us to live and so we must reinvent ourselves again and again.  (We Are All Orphans Now)

That is just silly.  (Okay, I said I wouldn’t comment, but it’s bad enough that some people think of living, breathing politicians as metaphorical parents.  I really don’t want people to get in the business of exhuming the dead ones as substitute nurturers.)

Moving on to his more recent column, Stimulus Packages and Prozac: The Unintended Consequences of Intervention, my jury is a little more divided.  Here he compares antidepressant interventions into the brain with government intervention into the economy:

A column written by David Wessel on December 17, 2009 was published in the Wall Street Journal with the title, “A Prozac Economy Has Its Costs.” Wessel warns against the potentially stultifying effects of economic control. He makes some good points that can be sharpened by a more precise comparison between the impact of Prozac on the brain and the impact of government regulation and stimulation on the economy.

Initially, antidepressants have the potential to cause an artificial euphoria that makes an individual feel temporarily elated. But the sense of wellness is unrealistic and can lead to poor judgments. The brief sense of euphoria too often drives the individual to try one drug after another in the hope of repeating or prolonging that evanescent glimpse of happiness. Worse, the euphoria can escalate into outright mania, a bubble that is bound to burst with ruinous consequences for the individual, his or her family, and even society. In the long run, drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft impair brain function and tend to produce emotional apathy and indifference.

Now consider the similar impact of artificial interventions thrust onto the economy. Initially, government stimulus packages engender an unfounded sense of confidence. Inevitably, this is mistaken for genuine economic growth and improvement, and thus the stimulation is increased in a compulsive attempt to make it last. Once again, we risk creating a manic-like bubble that will eventually burst. In the long run, the economy will become mired down in varying degrees of inflation and stagnation. Growth will be suppressed by distortions that were caused by the initial stimulations and by the government regulation that come along with them.

…

There is a basic principle that applies equally to interventions into the brain/mind system and into the economy: They always result in unintended harmful consequences.

Why is this true of both the brain/mind system and the economic system? To begin with, both are far too complex to be “helped” by artificial interventions. The human brain is the most complex system that we know of in the entire universe. Because of the subtle and elaborate complexities created by life, each individual brain is more intricate and complicated than the entire physical universe. Produced by a combination of the brain, environmental factors and individual decisions, the mind is even more complicated than the brain. The probability of an artificially introduced chemical improving this system approaches zero; the likelihood of that same alien chemical causing disruption and harm is nearly 100%.

That last sentence is where I really start to worry.  Is Breggin oversimplifying just to make a point?  What defines an “artificially introduced chemical”?

The economy is even more complicated than the brain and mind of individual human beings, because the economy is the product of the activity of billions of human beings with their busy brains and minds.

Right now I can’t tell if the comparison Breggin drawns between the economy and the human brain is profound or borderline meaningless.  At any rate, I’m sure it beats David Brooks’ rather asinine “awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.”  (I’m waiting breathlessly for an installment on Tiger Woods’ infidelities, with chestnuts like “Relationships are often troubled.”)

Bummer

I posted this at the new and improved STR, and it’s continuing to gnaw at me.  It’s about the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, founded by Malika Saada Saar, random emphases mine:

The story of a prisoner’s death in Arizona over the summer popped up in the national media for a single news cycle and disappeared without provoking much outrage. Marcia Powell died after being left in an outdoor holding cell in triple-digit heat for more than four hours. She had a history of mental problems and was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution—a crime for which we can assume none of her clients were prosecuted.

Women are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, and sexual violence is often at the root of the events that put them behind bars.

According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), as many as 88 percent of female inmates have experienced sexual or physical abuse before coming to prison. And by and large the mothers behind bars are not gang-bangers, murderers, or drug kingpins. They are first-time, nonviolent offenders, arrested for untreated addiction. With the drug wars and the passage of mandatory minimum sentences, the incarceration of mothers has skyrocketed.

When the Victim Is Jailed – Page 1 – The Daily Beast.

It is fashionable to get worked up about the shackling of pregnant mothers giving birth in prison, or to advocate reform of “the system” ad nauseum.  These are topics to get worked up about, but the proposed solutions are usually little better than bandaids.  If people focused on ending the prosecution of victimless crimes–prostitution, drug use–a lot of nonviolent women (and men) would be free to deal only with our screwed-up society, not our screwed-up society plus the horrors of prison.  But it’s far more fashionable to dither about what Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or whoever means for women in our “national moment” or whatever.  You know, Bible Spice and something about rape kits, while actual women are actually raped inside and outside of prison.