Tom Ricks: “The latest round of massive corporate layoffs reminds of the financial crisis the Roman Empire suffered in 33 A.D.”

The Emperor Tiberius seems like a man who wouldn’t shy away from nationalizing a bank or two:

Tiberius also raised funds by accusing Sextus Marius, the richest man in Spain, of incest — almost certainly a trumped-up charge — and then having him thrown headlong from the Tarpeian Rock (see below), a cliff at the edge of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. “Tiberius kept his gold mines for himself,” Tacitus notes. It makes me think that Wall Street is getting off easy.

Among other things, we have some real crooks on Wall Street.

We have some very good evidence that teachers vary quite a bit in terms of their effectiveness in improving student achievement. We also have good evidence that the current certification process doesn’t do a good job of tracking effectiveness—certified teachers are no more effective than teachers who’ve come through “alternative certification” tracks. It’s also clear that our policies don’t reward more-effective teachers in a manner that’s consistent with the importance of retaining highly-effective teachers to building a highly effective school. Nor do our policies do anything to try to ensure that highly effective teachers can be found in the schools with the highest-need students. On the contrary, they tend to do the reverse. These basic points—and the idea that we ought to change things—have been penetrating mainstream consciousness of late. But it’s often not clear exactly what policy shifts will make it possible to obtain and use data on teacher effectiveness, especially because education policy gets made at a lot of different levels.

Yesterday, CAP released an excellent report from Robin Chait that recaps what we know and goes step-by-step through the issue of how federal policy could help support the idea of shifting from a system based on qualifications to a system based on effectiveness.

One interesting issue is whether Republicans will show any interest in these kind of things as we move toward re-authorization of NCLB/ESEA. The last version of the bill was really the only significant bipartisan initiative of the Bush years—a meeting of minds between George W. Bush on the one hand, and Ted Kennedy and George Miller on the other. And many conservative intellectuals are interested in this stuff, in no small part because teacher’s unions don’t much care for it. But in recent years, conservative politicians have more-or-more retreated to local control bromides and the current crop of GOP congressmen seems more Limbaughized than ever before.

There’s been some interest in comments regarding how I square my economic determinist accounts of politics with the 1934 congressional elections in which Democrats scored big wins despite the Depression still being sucky. Look at this chart of employment:

The absolute level in 1934 was very bad, but there was sharp improvement at the time, reversing years of collapse and stagnation. By contrast the recession of the early 1990s was followed by a so-called “jobless recovery.”

I wrote in my TAP column last week that dropping the “war on terror” conceptual framework seemed implicit in a lot of President Obama’s actions and was key to his campaign promise to not just end the war in Iraq, but also the mindset that got us into war. Roger Cohen observes that in his al-Arabiya interview, Obama got closer than ever in explicitly doing this. And a good thing, too. I endorse Cohen’s whole column (incidentally, I feel like I used to disagree with Cohen a lot but don’t anymore — not sure who’s changed).