By Ali Frick

On behalf of those horrified — or at least mystified (“the Atlantic triangular trade“? Really?) — by the Texas Board of Education’s assault on, well, education, a California state legislator recently introduced a bill seeking to prevent these changes from reaching California students. The bill requires the California Education Board to “look out for any of the Texas content” in its own textbooks and “then report any findings to the legislature and the secretary of education.”

Since California is the largest school textbook market (with Texas in at second), I had a moment of hope that such a measure could prevent textbook companies from going through with Texas-mandated distortions. Until I read this part:

California education officials say they aren’t worried about any spillover. Tom Adams, director of the state Education Department’s standards and curriculum division, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the Texas standards could make their way into national editions of textbooks, but that California uses its own.

Thus the only state with enough clout to actually counter the Texas changes already has cocooned itself with its own separate textbook standards. That other states could coordinate sufficiently to outweigh the Texas megamarket seems an unrealistic hope. Which means that one state can effectively mandate changes that will reach the entire non-California nation.

So where is the conservative outrage on this? Cato tells us that the federal government has no place in education because the “Founders wanted most aspects of life managed by those who were closest to them, either by state or local government or by families, businesses, and other elements of civil society.” The 2008 GOP platform lamented the diminishing local control over education; its nominee had once publicly called for the elimination of the Department of Education. The current darling of the right rejects federal education assistance because “competition breeds excellence.”

But so far, silence form the Right on this usurpation of local control. And it’s hard for me to think of really anything so antithetical to the Founding principles than for one state to mandate radical changes that all the other states are forced to swallow. Indeed, avoiding such an outcome was in large part the purpose of the Senate, not to mention the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution — really, the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation altogether.

By Matt Zeitlin

Arthur Brooks, the president of AEI, has a big think piece in today’s Outlook section of the Post arguing that, contrary to what one might think, the naive materialists who think that income is all that matters to people are egalitarian liberals and it’s conservatives — especially tea partiers — who realize that happiness and fulfillment come from honestly earning the money you make. Or, in his words:

Earned success involves the ability to create value honestly — not by inheriting a fortune, not by picking up a welfare check. It doesn’t mean making money in and of itself. Earned success is the creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others. Earned success is the stuff of entrepreneurs who seek value through innovation, hard work and passion. Earned success is what parents feel when their children do wonderful things, what social innovators feel when they change lives, what artists feel when they create something of beauty.

Even though this isn’t the regular justification you see for conservative economic policy, that’s exactly what Brooks’ piece calls for. But we always talk about why conservative economic policy is bad, so let’s talk about this new justification! Basically, where Brooks’ argument totally goes off the rails is in accounting for the real existing structure of America’s income distribution. Here’s a graph we’ve all seen before from Emmanuel Saez:

It’s very hard to make a serious argument that the top 1%’s skyrocketing income has been due to the “creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others” and that they have been creating so much more value in the 00s than they were 30 years ago. This point becomes stronger when you realize that many of the top 1% or the top .1% are in finance, a field whose exploding profits seem to be closely linked to the subsequent destruction of so much value in the national and world economy. And, to lay it on a bit thicker, there’s interesting research from Robert Gordon — who, full disclosure, was my intro macroeconomics professor earlier this year — that a good portion of increasing income inequality within the top decile has been due to increases in CEO pay which have very little relationship to the creation of value in the sense Brooks is talking about:

The most contentious question regards the third category, top executives in public corporations. The core distinction is that CEO compensation is chosen by their peers in a system that gives CEOs and their hand-picked boards of directors, rather than the market, control over top incomes. The idea that managers, rather than stockholders, control directors goes back to Berle and Means (1932). This idea that the principal-agent control of stockholders should be reversed has been applied fruitfully by such authors as Bebchuk and Fried (2004). They argue that managerial power lies behind some of the outsized gains in CEO pay.

Sure, it’s probably true that money doesn’t buy happiness and that the best way to make it so people are not immiserated  and have a meaningful amount of pride in their life is to try to increase employment as much as possible, especially for the poor. But if you really thought that was true, you would probably promote an agenda that called for more inflation to bring down unemployment and higher taxes on the rich in order to, at the very least, decrease the deficit. Oh yeah, and punitive estate taxes to better fund early childhood education. Needless to say, I don’t think that’s what Brooks supports.

By Ryan Powers

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Virgnia Heffernan laments the “death of the open web” which she thinks is being ushered in by the widescale adoption of the iPhone. She writes:

The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web. Apple rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store.

I think this is mistaken. First, every computer ever made — mobile or otherwise — has only really come to life after being “tricked out” with third party applications (the most useful applications on my MacBook are not made by Apple). That said, it is pretty clear that the App Store does change the way iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users exeperience the web. If anything, however, it seems to me that it makes these users interactions with the web more intimate. Indeed, most of the Apps that serve as website wrappers (eg: the Washington Post iPhone app) seem to bring users closer to the information they are trying to consume and give them new and interesting ways to interact with that information.

That aside, I think Heffernan is overlooking one of the most significant innovations of the iPhone: the Mobile Safari web browser. Before Mobile Safari’s release in 2007, no mobile phone platform allowed users to browser websites in true desktop-fidility. Even the BlackBerry’s browser only presented the user with poor approximation of how a given website was meant to be experienced. Simply put, browsing the web on an iPhone is like browsing the web on a computer. If anything, I think that has allowed iPhone owners to more readily experience the open web — on demand and wherever they are (or at least wherever AT&T has service, which incidentally is not in Williamsburg, VA).

By Matthew Yglesias

Well, I got to my hotel at about 2 PM Chinese time so with 6 hours or so of Shanghai living under my belt I doubt there’s anything I can say about the country that you don’t already know. That said, I do note that it’s interesting how subjectively witnessing a place can make you see certain well-known facts in a more stark and clear manner than before. For example, obviously everyone knows that Shanghai is a very big city and that China has an enormous population. But you really need to walk around Shanghai a bit to witness quite how giant and full of people it is. I grew up in Manhattan so it’s not as if I’ve never seen a big urban crowd before, but man oh man are there a lot of folks milling around this city.

The other thing that slightly weirded me out is that where I was walking seemed pretty clearly to be a super-obvious and touristy part of town. Lots of chain stores, lots of folks trying to sell me random crap, lots of Expo 2010 volunteer pavilions, etc. And yet virtually everyone around was Chinese, whereas if you go someplace touristy in a major European city you’ll find it full of foreign visitors. Once I shook the jetlag cobwebs out of my brain I was able to remind myself that there are over a billion people in China (plus plenty of Han individuals living outside the PRC’s boundaries) so of course it’s perfectly possible to fill a Shanghai street with Chinese tourists. For the western tourist, this is sort of a bonus because it means that even if you’re doing something touristy it still has some of that authentic vibe—nothing ruins a nice Italian church quite like realizing that everyone in it is an American.

Nanjing Street Pedestrian Mall, Shanghai, China (cc photo by Let Ideas Compete)

Meanwhile, even though I brought a camera to China I forgot to pack the mini-USB cable that lets me move the photos to my computer and thence onwards and upwards to the internet. So no photos until I get back and/or someone stops me on the street offering to sell mini-USB cables instead of knockoff designer apparel. That said, there are plenty of creative commons photos of Shanghai in the world already without me.