This article in the Post-Dispatch describes a proposal for the state to offer scholarships to stay-at-home moms. Here’s what Rep. Cynthia Davis (the bill’s sponsor) says in justification for the idea:

“Every rule we pass in this building either encourages or discourages a behavior,” Davis said, and added that this rule encouraged women to stay at home with their children. “When your child falls down and gets a boo-boo, you’re there to kiss it better.”

Davis said the bill would also help women re-enter the work force after their children were grown.

The thinking that federal or state government needs to pick winners and promote some economic choices at the expense of others has tremendous currency right now. Compared to all the other “stimulus” expenditures that are in the air, a scholarship of a few hundred dollars for some women isn’t going to be all that damaging. Still, we should consider whether this is really an equitable use of tax dollars. What about moms who don’t have the resources to stay at home? Or who can’t conceive? (Laws like this do “encourage” behaviors — like trying to have octuplets!) What about dads who stay at home? And then there are moms who already have Ph.D.s and are making sacrifices to stay home with their children, but have no use for further scholarships.

The $1,000 limit on mom’s earnings in order for her to qualify seems like it was pulled out of a hat. Maybe a woman who works for a couple hours a day while her children are in school earns $2,000 or $3,000 a year. There’s no big difference between her and someone who earns $999, but under this bill, she would be penalized.

The $600 scholarship amount is small, and it won’t change many people’s life decisions one way or another. It would basically give free money to people who have already done what Rep. Davis wants them to do. Not the worst possible use of resources, but not the best either.

The Parkway School District’s foray into single-sex education is steadily gaining popularity. What began as a tentative experiment with first-graders is now an established program at Carmen Trails Elementary School, set to include third-graders next year in response to parents’ demand.

This sentence caught my eye:

And even though the school doesn’t have test data to prove its success, the program is growing.

Critics of successful initiatives in education repeatedly make that charge — there’s no “research” or “data” to prove that a program is the best. A great example is the SLPS math teacher who developed an amazing new approach to teaching math, but was told that his work couldn’t be expanded because it wasn’t backed up by research.

Everyone would love to have vast stores of high-quality data on educational practices. But in our less-than perfect world, schools need to make decisions without it. One way to do that is to follow Parkway’s lead, expanding programs that parents want. Giving parents a choice between single-sex and coed classrooms lets people vote with their feet. And it makes it less likely that any child will be assigned to the wrong room. If some children do better in a single-sex environment and others fair poorly, you don’t want them all arbitrarily forced into one of the options.

Since children are different, more research might not even help much. A study that shows the average student improves in a single-sex classroom doesn’t guarantee that individual children will thrive under that policy. And while it’s true any particular program might not succeed if applied generally, working top-down from studies to practice has drawbacks too. A general trend identified in research might not be evident in the local public school.

Gov. Jay Nixon intends to increase funding to the Access Missouri grant program by $2.5 million. In addition to the funding increase, the governor wants to significantly decrease the amount of grant money that students attending private colleges are eligible to receive (by as much as $1,750 per student per year). Currently, private college students are eligible for grants up to $4,600 each, while public college students may receive a maximum of $2,150 each.

While Gov. Nixon’s plan to redistribute the grants more evenly between private and public institutions seems logical, economic implications tell another story. Generally, private colleges tend to be more expensive than public schools, so the higher grant money available to private school students is in actuality the same amount (or at least similar) offered to public school students in relative terms. If grants for both are relatively the same, then reducing the private school grant money would cause a disparity in competitiveness between public and private colleges, tipping the scale in favor of public colleges.

Furthermore, private colleges tend to provide more specialized degrees than the typical public college, so reducing grant money to private school students would have a negative effect on the diversity of the labor force.

I greatly enjoyed the discussion a short time ago on KMOX’s Mark Reardon Show about red light cameras. The host had Senator Jim Lembke on to talk about his bill before the legislature to outlaw red light cameras in Missouri. I attended a rally a few months back protesting these cameras that was sponsored by a new group dedicated to outlawing them in Missouri. (Intern Phil recently posted a nice summary of our writings on this subject.)

Red light cameras are a violation of our constitutional rights. They violate the 4th, 6th, and — most importantly — the 9th amendments. The 9th amendment involves your right not to be videotaped by a camera every moment of your life. They are nothing more than a scam to get more money for municipalities. I hope Sen. Lembke’s bill passes unanimously as part of a statement by Missouri legislators that they’re willing to defend liberty. (I know, however, that will not actually happen.)

I have written about this before, and I look forward to a regional jail shared by the cities and Jackson County becoming reality. The Star has the update.

This is an excellent example of the type of regional cooperation that will save taxpayers money. The only thing I can add to this discussion is the perspective of history, and to remind people still undecided on this in the western part of the state that St. Louis County did this in the 1990s. The St. Louis county jail, which is used by all of the municipalities, has worked out great for everyone. I am sure it will work for KC, too, especially if they build it art deco–style right by city hall and the courthouse.

Thank you, Missouri State Teachers Association, for linking to this article about a new route to teacher certification through the Denver Public Schools. Prospective teachers can spend 10 months in the classroom working under a mentor teacher, complete coursework for a master’s degree, and receive certification — provided they agree to work for the district for five years.

This doesn’t look that far removed from traditional certification, because of the coursework requirement, but I do think it’s a step in the right direction. Working in a classroom from the very start of the certification process will give people a better idea of whether teaching is the right job for them. And it will add a practical dimension to the training process, providing balance to the theoretical education courses. It may even introduce some competition into the profession, if more people are attracted to the apprenticeship than to traditional routes.

The Post-Dispatch has a quick-hitter about a rebuilt gas station in Brentwood that is now offering E-85 gasoline. (I used to fill up at this station all the time when I lived in Brentwood Forest.) Because there is no mandate to sell E-85, the station owners have to include the reduced energy output of ethanol gas in their pricing. According to the story, they are selling it for 20 cents less per gallon.

This is how markets are supposed to work. Our new SUV (just doing my part to get the economy moving) is a flex fuel vehicle. I honestly didn’t think much about that when we bought it, I was much more concerned with making sure my wife and I had the ultimate set of rims. But if a station gives me enough of a price reduction on the E-85 gas, I will certainly consider buying it. This is the nature of capitalism: The government does not tell me what I have to buy; businesses give me a choice. Recent events have probably made people forget about that.

Whether or not you like the stimulus package — and if you are hanging out at this blog, it is probably the latter — MoDOT certainly moved very quickly in putting the money to use:

I believe there is general agreement that spending money on infrastructure like this is probably the best use of the stimulus money. Sort of a best-of-the-worst / least-bad sort of thing. …

The Kansas City Public Library, with the assistance of the Show-Me Institute and several other organizations, is currently hosting a fantastic series of lectures on the challenges facing urban education. The first lecture in the series brought Dr. Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and one of the nation’s leading education scholars, to discuss what could be done to improve urban schools.  The event drew about 250 interested attendees, who were treated to Dr. Hanushek’s excellent assessment of some of the most pressing problems facing urban education — and some potential solutions. (Hint: More money is not the answer!) Video of that event, as well as Dr. Hanushek’s Kansas City Star op-ed on the same topic, is now available on the Show-Me Institute website.

This Thursday evening, the library’s series will continue, as Jay Matthews, an education reporter from the Washington Post, will discuss his new book, Work Hard, Be Nice. The book offers readers a look at how the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) network of charter schools has become a poster child for helping children from the most challenged socioeconomic groups prepare for academic success and college. This topic is extremely relevant for Kansas City, which saw a KIPP school open in recent years, as well as Saint Louis, which will greet a new KIPP school this fall.

And, last, but not least, I wanted to take this opportunity to plug yet another exciting event on the calendar. On May 5, the Show-Me Institute and Saint Louis University will be hosting Dr. Caroline Hoxby, yet another celebrated education expert with the Hoover Institution at Stanford, for a discussion titled, “The Promise and Performance of Charter Schools: Drivers of Educational Improvement in the U.S.?” This lecture will be a great opportunity for anyone interested in learning what research is telling us about the impact of charter schools nationwide.

This entry is about wealth. I highly recommend this article (which covers similar topics to this entry, perhaps better).

The term “wealth” gets thrown around a lot. Like “public good,” however, economists mean something specific when they talk about wealth. It is not just money; it is anything that people want. When a person has more of what they want than they did a year ago, we can say that they are wealthier. If they have more of what someone else wants, we can also say that they are wealthier if they are then able to trade with the person who desires their things and thus get more of what they want.
The question of what people want is somewhat normative (econ jargon meaning “opinion-based”), but some examples will help here. Fishing, farming, and hunting are all ways of obtaining very simple forms of wealth: food, or the stuffs to make it. Besides food, people want clothing and shelter almost universally. Thus, making or trading those things can create wealth.

This point requires some explanation. The term “create wealth” is by no means a misnomer. Any time a person exerts effort to make some materials a little bit more useful or desirable to others, they are creating wealth. As an example, oranges on a tree in Florida aren’t of much use to us in Missouri. When someone makes the effort of picking, packing and trucking them here, they have created wealth.

Trade is another way to create wealth. Any time a person trades something they have for something else, economists tend to assume that they gave up one thing for another thing that they valued more. Because trade usually happens between two people (or two families, businesses, etc.) we can assume that they each feel like they got more out of the trade than they put in, or else they wouldn’t have traded.

Adam Smith more or less invented the modern study of economics when he published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. It’s safe to say that no economist today disagrees with his fundamental assertions that societies are made wealthier through specialization and trade (I thought about linking to eBay and Craigslist here, but the fact is that most people do their trading face to face, at the store, etc.).

Today, and for many years now, human civilization has been able to support a standard of living well above subsistence for many people. Specialization and trade, coupled with the concomitant improvements in technology made possible through the application of science to business, have made our current level of total wealth possible. It is also possible to destroy wealth, however. When willing traders are forbidden to trade by force or by law, wealth is destroyed. Property destruction is by far the most obvious form of wealth destruction (not counting campfires or other destructive acts where the destruction itself has value).

I have tried to explicitly avoid mentioning money so far. Though it is essential to our current degree of specialization, money is not truly necessary for specialization and trade — it’s just very convenient, and uneclipsed in efficiency as a medium of exchange.

Try thinking about wealth in the terms I’ve laid out here. Imagine the wealth you create for yourself, your friends and family, your employer. See whether you can think of any forms of wealth destruction that I didn’t mention. I look forward to any and all comments pertaining to this important free-market concept: wealth.

I’ve finished reading another chapter in Outliers, about education: “Marita’s Bargain.” This chapter describes a typical day in the life of Marita, a 12-year-old girl attending a KIPP charter school in New York.

I highly recommend reading this chapter. You’ll be inspired by Marita’s determination and by the many examples of how KIPP has changed people’s lives for the better.

Here are some thoughts on “Marita’s Bargain”:

1. I was annoyed that Gladwell doesn’t identify KIPP as a charter school, instead calling it an “experimental public school.” KIPP is indeed innovative, but not because it’s been given some license to experiment that other public schools are denied. KIPP’s policies and curricular choices would be legal for other schools to adopt; it’s just that traditional public schools usually don’t go out of their way to find best practices. I would expect a book like Outliers, which is premised on systematic generalization, to point out the different incentives that charters and traditional schools face, as well as the divergent outcomes for students that result.
2. Gladwell seems to imply that KIPP’s success stems entirely from the extra time its students spend on schoolwork. The omission is understandable, because there isn’t space in a short chapter to analyze all the causes of school achievement, but readers should keep in mind that dedicated principals, well-qualified teachers, and sound instructional methods enter the mix. Which adds to my frustration with Gladwell — why doesn’t he ask what brought these factors to the “experimental” school? Was it a stroke of luck?
3. I love the quotes from Marita, especially her comments on how hard she’s working at KIPP, and how her friends and family respond to her efforts. This middle-school student is making great sacrifices to get the best education she can, and I’m sure she’ll go far. Maybe she’ll appear in another Gladwell book some day, for her own scholarship or research.

The Kansas City Star has a detailed article about the upcoming cigarette tax hike, while today’s Post-Dispatch has a profile of Bill Hannegan, St. Louis’ most vocal opponent of smoking bans.

The Star story quotes a couple of statists wgo think that the cigarette tax hike is a win-win-win situation because it will provide more kids with government health insurance, encourage adults to quit smoking, and prevent future children from taking up smoking in the first place. I think it is more of a lose-lose situation, because it expands the welfare state while targeting a certain group of people (smokers) to fund the political goals of those who salivate at the idea of getting young children on the dole early, so they can spend the rest of their lives thinking it is perfectly fine and normal to be dependent on the government. From the story:

But raising taxes unfairly penalizes low-income people, who are more likely to smoke, said John Nothdurft of the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago think tank.

“You’re making the bottom portion of society, who can least afford to pay taxes, pay more taxes,” he said. “They’re going to subsidize middle-class families getting SCHIP.”

To think that welfare used to just be for the poor. Now, it’s for everyone!