Alex Tabarrok links to some new research further establishing the conclusion that being tall makes people happy:

According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.

Burkhard Bilger’s excellent 2004 New Yorker article persuasively argued that the growing stature gap between Americans and northern Europeans is largely explained by the United States’ high level of inequality and child poverty. Consider it another reason to belief that using a surtax on high earners to finance generous health care for the poor and lower-middle class would be welfare enhancing.

Albuquerque High School (cc photo by cjc4454)

The extent to which American schools perform well is a legitimate topic of national concern. But education policy is largely set at the state level in this country. Which means that in terms of federal policy there’s a premium on finding clever ways to nudge state governments toward dropping misguided policies. Dana Goldstein reports on one such clever initiative:

The complicated dance between Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the national teachers’ unions continued today. On a conference call to officially roll-out the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” education reform competition, Duncan said states are “ineligible” for the grants if they have laws on the books prohibiting student performance from affecting teacher assessment. New York and Wisconsin are two such states, and teachers’ unions have long lobbied for such laws. In an attempt to encourage states to overturn these prohibitions, the Department of Education will be handing out Race to the Top grants in two phases over the next two years, allowing state legislatures time to revisit issues of teacher compensation.

The New York version of this rule, at a minimum, was snuck onto the books with no debate or public awareness and it’s bad news. You certainly could imagine a scheme to use student performance data in compensation or tenure decisions that wasn’t a good idea. But the idea that all such schemes should be categorically prohibited is nuts. The research is pretty unambiguous that some teachers produce much better students achievement than others. Insofar as schools are able to find ways to identify the highly effective teachers and give them incentive to stay, while declining to tenure the ineffective teachers, the quality of school performance should get substantially better over time.

Unfortunately, developing good systems for gathering and analyzing data isn’t all that easy. But we desperately need to be working on ways to do that job better, not throwing new roadblocks in the way.

Washington Post’s “reliable source” blog reports that Karl Rove wants to sell a house:

Five bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, brick-and-stone exterior, built 1968. Real estate photos show sunny kitchen, big entertaining spaces, pleasant yard, lots of bookshelves, one wall-mounted deer head.

I suppose it’s an interesting sign of the times in the United States that Rove believes a house he paid $799,000 for in 2001 ought to fetch $1.585 million in 2009. Here’s the Case-Shiller index for the Washington, DC metro area:

The price increase Rove is looking for is larger than the average one across the metro area. Of course some people’s houses should experience a higher-than-average price increase if, for example, the neighborhood in which it’s located has become objectively more desirable. When I first moved to town I rented a basement apartment in a nice townhouse on Harvard Street between 13th and 14th. That’s a much better place to live in 2009 than it was in 2003, and even in 2003 it was a much better place to live than it was back in 1998 when the owner originally bought it. But I don’t really think you could make that kind of claim for Kent where the Rove house is. That’s a nice upscale neighborhood, but it’s always been a nice upscale neighborhood.

Rep John Larson (D-CT)

The draft health care legislation in the US House of Representatives has majority support on the Education & Labor Committee and it has majority support on the Ways & Means Committee and it’s very close to having majority support in the House as a whole. If you brought the bill to the floor, you could almost certainly round up the needed votes. But thus far, the presence of a small number of Blue Dog holdouts on the House Energy & Commerce Committee are holding it up. Under the circumstances, I’m both thrilled and surprised to see Jared Allen report in The Hill that Democratic leaders are considering the obvious solution to this problem:

House Democrats, still searching for a way to pass their healthcare bill before August, are considering bypassing the Energy and Commerce committee altogether, where the bill has stalled, and proceeding right to the floor.

“The preferable course would be to go through the committee,” Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-Conn.) said Thursday night. “But all options will be on the table.”

Personally, I have absolutely no idea what would be “preferable” about going through the ordinary committee process. My life would be positively impacted by a good health care bill. It would be negatively impacted by a bad health care bill. It would also be negatively impacted by indefinite continuation of the status quo. Congressional procedure matters to me, like to all normal people, only insofar as it impacts the course of legislation. The “preferable” process is the process that results in good legislation.

Something a lot of progressive legislative leaders seem to have forgotten until this Congress actually got under way is that historically congressional procedure is a challenge to be surmounted when you want big change to happen. It’s not actually a fixed feature of the landscape that people “have to” accommodate themselves to. For years you couldn’t get a decent Civil Rights bill because segregationists controlled the Judiciary Committee that had jurisdiction. This problem was “solved” by just deciding to bypass the Judiciary Committee. When you decide you want to get things done, you find a way to get them done. Even the allegedly sacrosanct filibuster rule has been changed repeatedly over the years. The law is the law and the constitution is the constitution, but the rules of congressional procedure are not law. They’re internally made rules, they’re subject to change, and the criteria for a good set of rules is that you want rules that produce good legislation and good governance.