Whitcomb: Who to Run the Schools? Gambling on a 20-Year Deal; Close Earlier, Please; Quit Now!

Sunday, July 14, 2019

“Some clear night like this,

when the stars are all out and shining,

our old dogs come back to us,

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out of the woods, and lead us

along the stone wall to the cove.’’

From “Some Clear Night,’’ by Gary Lawless, a poet and co-owner with his wife, Beth Jackson, of Gulf of Maine Books, in Brunswick, Maine

 

 

“Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them.’’

-- Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), Austrian-born economist

 

 

Not all Providence public schools are disasters. Consider, especially, Classical High School, which draws students from a wide range of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds and has graduated many people who have gone on to have distinguished lives around America. That’s in part because this school, which requires an entrance exam for admission, arouses a kind of family pride that helps push students to work hard. (My two daughters went to Classical.)

 

Providence schools’ challenges include a wider one in New England in general:  More than in much of America, many middle- and upper-income people have always sent their kids to private schools in our region. This reduces some of the potential political pressure to improve the public schools. Look at the area around Hope High School, on Providence’s East Side. Across the street is Moses Brown School, with students’ fancy cars – Volvos, BMWs Mercedes, etc.  The American caste system on display.

 

What is clear is that the state must step in and tear up contracts.  Should the state try giving management of most of the schools to a single charter-school company, such as Achievement First (which reportedly has performed well in improving test scores and other education indices)? Everything should be considered. Meanwhile, the number of people with varying power to control the schools needs to be reduced.  There must be clear responsibility, which there isn’t now.

 

The Providence schools’ crisis, which has received embarrassing national attention, ought to compel the state’s political and other leaders to build a new road to much better schools. Massachusetts’s success in the 1990s in transforming its public schools into what many observers see as the best in America offers a least a partial model. (Of course, the Bay State is much richer than Rhode Island.) The $20 million that the city will spend this summer to repair some of the city’s dilapidated schools is a start.

 

 

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The springing on Rhode Island of a $1 billion, 20-year, no-bid state contract extension for IGT without the opportunity for adequate consideration by the General Assembly in the just-completed session, and by the public, was obviously inappropriate.  The agreement would maintain the company’s continued control over much of the state’s gambling operations.

 

The legislature will apparently consider the extraordinary deal in September.

 

The agreement apparently revolves around IGT’s promise to keep a big office in Providence. But companies are well known for going back on their promises remarkably fast, as industry conditions change, along with the opinions and plans of their senior executives. The idea of a contract like this surviving for 20 years is comical. Most such contracts are only for several years.

 

Adding bad optics to the affair is the political connection between Gov. Gina Raimondo and national Democratic Party poo-bah Donald Sweitzer, a retired IGT chairman. Mr. Schweitzer has been an IGT lobbyist at the Rhode Island State House for the past six months.

 

The whole thing is a reminder of how states and localities become far too obsessed with getting deals with individual big companies, which can go elsewhere with little warning.  It’s economic development by deal instead of by programs spanning the regional economy. The crucial thing is to attract and keep a diversified mix of enterprises by providing good public services, especially schools, and improving physical infrastructure.

 

Rhode Island government’s too-close links with two gambling companies, IGT and Twin River (which is fighting the IGT deal), are particularly problematic given how crime of various sorts – including the white-collar kind -- tends to fester in that suckers’ sector. Twin River has its own issues.

 

 

Earlier Closing Times, Please

All too often we read about Providence nightclubs drawing criminals, including psychopaths, from around the region. Thus it was with two crooks with a history of violence, Jaquontee Reels, 24, and his brother Sequoya Reels, 27, are charged with the  fatal stabbing and beating, following a verbal exchange, of Stephen Cabral, 28, after Mr. Cabral left Club Seven, on Federal Hill, at around 2 a.m. on June 30. The brothers are from Ledyard, Conn.

 

What would help block such violence, besides a more visible police presence? Move back bar and nightclub closing times to 1 a.m., or even 12:30, from 2 a.m. Yes, it will hurt the finances of some establishments, but not as much as Providence worsening its reputation (however fair when compared to other cities) as a dangerous place at night. The later the closing time of places with liquor licenses, the more likelihood of violent crime in and around them.

 

From GE to Affordable Housing

Kudos to Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker for planning to set aside a $86 million windfall for housing for middle-income earners. The money, reports The Boston Globe’s Jon Chesto, will come from General Electric’s sale of property on which it had planned to build its new headquarters building in Boston’s Seaport District (aka Atlantis). But last winter, it announced it would sell the property and simply lease two old brick buildings on the site for its headquarters. Since “the state had helped subsidize the project, it was owed some of the proceeds from the sale,’’ Mr. Chesto reported.

The dearth of “affordable housing” (a rather plastic term) in prosperous but expensive Massachusetts presents some serious long-term social and economic challenges to the state, among them staffing certain key industries. The governor is wise to treat them very seriously. Of course, the $86 million is a drop in the bucket in addressing housing costs. What is especially needed is changes in zoning and other regulations to allow more density, including many more apartments and duplexes, and mixed commercial/residential use. “Snob zoning’’ has played no small role in Greater Boston’s sky-high housing costs.

To read Mr. Chesto’s piece, please hit this link:

 

Knowing When to Quit

I admire California Congressman Eric Swawell, who announced that he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in April, for dropping out of the race soon after the recent candidates’ debate in which he usefully brought up the issue of 76-year-old former Vice President Joe Biden’s age. Congressman Swawell is only 38!

 

After the debate, Mr. Swawell realized that his chances of winning the nomination hovered around zero. But it’s usually tough for people to bail out after making such a public commitment. It can be awkward to quit a job, to close a failing company or other organization or to abandon a failing project that lots of people know about and may have been employed by. But I’ve found that we generally hang on too long, out of embarrassment or just plain stubbornness, making things worse.

 

A 2015 article by Peg Streep in Psychology Today had some good perspective on the need to be decisive about quitting. Among the observations:

 

“All those adages, like ‘Winners never quit, and quitters never win’—aren’t really necessary. What’s hard for human beings is letting go. We are, as the Nobel Prize-winning work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously showed, a conservative and loss-aversive bunch.’’

“Many of our habits of mind derive from a time in human history when the challenges of life were largely physical and perseverance tended to pay off. Even though that was then and this is now, our brains simply haven’t caught up.’’

“Once you’ve focused on the fact that you’re much more likely to stay long past the expiration date than you are to leave the party too early, you need to take a close look at the habits of mind that are blurring your vision and making you think you should wait just a little bit longer and see how things turn out.’’ A couple of the things holding you back:

“You’re focused on the time and energy you’ve already invested.

“Its fancy name is the sunk cost fallacy, and it’s universal. You start thinking about leaving a relationship or a job, and all you can think of is the time you’ve already put into it. Of course, this isn’t rational thinking: if the relationship no longer makes you happy, or going to work fills you with dread, staying even longer won’t help you cope with the time you now consider wasted or lost.’’

“A combination of biases—being overly optimistic and loss averse—make for a heady cocktail which, combined with intermittent reinforcement, act as the granddaddy of all super-glues. If the words ‘intermittent reinforcement’ vaguely remind you of Psych 101, you’re spot on; B.F. Skinner discovered that when rats, pushing a lever for food, were rewarded some of the time (as opposed to on all occasions or none), they would try even harder for longer,’’ to their harm.

To read the whole article, please hit this link:

 

 

Eminent Domain Promotes Pipelines

Peter Orszag, in a Bloomberg News piece, reminded me of how renewable energy still lacks some of the special legal and regulatory advantages of fossil fuels. Consider, he writes, that natural-gas pipeline companies can use governmental eminent-domain powers to force property owners to let the companies lay pipelines across their land. But those seeking to string electricity lines from, say, a bunch of wind turbines lack such an option. There was discussion back in 2008 to extend federal eminent-domain authority to electricity lines but the idea was dropped because of fear of political opposition. It should be reconsidered.

 

By the way, Mr. Orszag, an investment banker, says that “since 2009, the unsubsidized average cost of onshore wind-energy production has fallen to 4.2 cents per kilowatt hour, from 13.5 cents in 2018, according to an analysis by Lazard, the company I work for. After including U.S. tax subsidies, the cost of building wind capacity is often lower than the marginal cost of generating electricity with existing coal-powered plants.’’

To read his essay, please hit this link:

 

 

Fracking

Then there’s over-rated fracked gas, which has long been presented as far nicer than coal on the global-warming front. Well, at least with fracking you don’t have to blow off the tops of mountains, and poison the streams below, in Appalachia to get at the gas, unlike with coal. Still, fracked gas, though we’ll need it for years to come, is also bad stuff. Among other issues (including that gas is explosively flammable) is that fracking releases massive quantities of methane, which is much more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere.

 

Back in 2014,  Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon, a company heavily into fracking for oil, who served later as secretary of state, was a plaintiff in a lawsuit by a bunch of other rich property owners fighting a proposed fracking project near them in Bartonville, Texas. Fracking should be limited to bothering poorer people!

 

Springtime for Mass Murder

David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary and now chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, has coined the phrase “The Age of Impunity’’ for “those engaged in conflicts around the world – and there are many –  {who} believe they can get away with anything, including murder, whatever the rules and norms. And because they can get away with anything, they do everything.’’

He cited “chemical weapons, cluster bombs, land mines, bombing of school buses, besiegement of cities, blocking of humanitarian supplies, targeting of journalists and aid workers. You name it, we are seeing it, and seeing more of it, and seeing less outrage about it and less accountability for it.”

 

This impunity is strengthened by the tolerance – actually, encouragement – of vicious dictators by the corrupt leader of the United States, himself put into office with the assistance of the coldly murderous dictator of Russia.

 

Why is Trump as popular as he is? He’s a highly effective television demagogue appealing to the many millions of people who get most of their “information’’ from the tube, and who have little knowledge of history or concern about the long-term effects of corrupt administration. It’s increasingly a morally squalid time. Another is that the economy is strong by many measures because of the low-interest rates set by the increasingly politically compromised Federal Reserve Board. Eventually, the Fed will run out of tools and things will get ugly.

 

The drunken party may well continue through the next election. Hitler was very popular in Germany in the mid and late ‘30s for the strong economy, whose elements included protectionism,  expanded credit and huge government deficits. Sound familiar?

 

 

In ‘Birthplace of Democracy’
As Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times last week, Greece has become an unexpected exception to the democracy recession of recent years. On July 7 the Greeks elected a pragmatic center-right prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, rejecting the leftist leader Alexis Tsipras and, most significantly, the voters drove the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party out of parliament. The rejection of extremism was particularly gratifying given the corrosive effects of the brutal recession that the Greeks suffered in recent years. Greece has long been known for its harsh political culture, as I discovered in a bunch of interviews there before the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004.

 

Mr. Mitsotakis is a strong proponent of a democratic and unified Europe in the face of the temptations of the simple answers of fascism and he’s well aware of the dangers posed by Russian expansionism and attempts to undermine Western democracy.

 

 

Amongst Party Animals

The former (I assume) friendship of sexually depraved and politically connected financial mogul Jeffrey Epstein and the likes of Bill Clinton and Trump, both sexual predators themselves, is just another reminder of the social and legal privileges that have far too often been accorded some members of today’s money-soaked, materialist,  jet-setting, glitz-and-status-obsessed elites. It also recalls how far too much money has been grabbed by money manipulators like Epstein and far too little by people making things.

Legacy Media

The publicity around the death of former Providence TV investigative reporter Jim Taricani (with whom I had a few pleasant encounters over the years when I was an editor at The Providence Journal) was to some extent nostalgia for when many network-affiliated local TV stations had substantial staffs. Heck, I can remember when some of the major market (e.g., Boston and New York) stations even had the equivalent of editorial-page editors carefully intoning usually bland opinions on assorted public-policy issues.

 

 

There’s also an increasing dependence on nostalgia to sell newspapers. Old photos especially.  And increasingly, their columnists review events that occurred before the memory of a large part of the population. Newspaper readers tend old. The late Jim Wyman, The Providence Journal’s executive editor, used to lament that the people on the obituary page were “our readers.’’ And that was 30 years ago, at the dawn of the World Wide Web and well before social media.

 

 

Summer Job Lessons

Now more of my own ambiguous nostalgia.

 

At rather the last minute, when a promised summer job before my freshman year of college fell through, I took a job as a counselor in the summer of 1966 at a Boys and Girls Club camp in Plymouth, Mass., serving underprivileged kids. It was in a  piney and swampy area best suited for cranberry cultivation, with mosquitos that seemed in my dreams bigger than helicopters. There were two counselors in each hot and musty cabin to oversee 12 kids bunking there. There were, of course, ceaseless rounds of activities, with the aim of limiting the mayhem by the campers, most of whom, I recall, came from Boston’s inner city.

 

The kids were mostly young adolescents, and more than a few were bigger than me and well acquainted with violence.  So I faced a challenge keeping them in line, as I would later as, briefly, a young high-school schoolteacher in a class of 30 kids. I found that the trick was to deepen and make louder my voice, and imply to troublemakers that we’d have them shipped back pronto to the mean streets if they didn’t curb their behavior.  I learned a valuable lesson in the importance of presentation (however weak my actual confidence in that situation). Sort of a variant of the old line that “if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.’’

 

 

Yang’s Warning

Andrew Yang, a former entrepreneur and now candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote a book called The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. While his recommendation that everyone be guaranteed a minimum income is probably a non-starter in a place like America, his warnings that artificial intelligence, robotics and automation software will kill millions of American jobs in the next few years deserve study.

By “normal’’ people, by the way, he means average people. I wish that the very earnest and thoughtful Mr. Yang had gotten more air time in the recent presidential debate.

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