Ground Games and Education Credentials

View 776 Monday, June 03, 2013

Beginning to catch up. There is a great deal going on in the world, but much of it is self explanatory.

The Ground Game

It comes as no surprise to anyone who studies such matters that the IRS hounded Tea Party and Patriot get out the vote organizations, and President Obama won re-election largely through the operations of Democratic get out the vote activities. When I was in the campaign management business, I always stressed the importance of what we called the ground game – getting voters willing to vote for your candidate actually to do so.

Of course many managers stressed media campaigns. Most of them were partners in advertising agencies which got 15% of the money put into campaign ads. None of the managers profited from the much harder work of building get out the vote organizations. Republican campaign advisors generally prefer media campaigns, and insist that it’s important to win hearts and minds. I always pointed out that if I have 40% approval and get 60% of my people to the polls, and the other guy has 50% approval but only gets half of his people to the polls, it’s a very close race; and if I manage to get 65% of my people actually to vote, I win. Getting people to change their minds is not easy. Getting them so disgusted with the political process that they adopt the attitude of “I never vote. It only encourages them” can also be effective but it often makes it difficult to govern if you won that way. The Obama election strategy was to attack Romney and discourage Republican voters. Since it was obvious that the 2010 Congressional election was dominated by the Tea Party and Patriot groups, and had been obvious since 2004 that Patriot and Tea Party Get Out the Vote organizations were the shock troops and mainstay of the Republican ground game, it took no Presidential order to get the unionized IRS public employees to understand the stake they had in this game – even if the IRS Acting Commissioner had more recorded official visits to the White House than the Secretaries of State and Defense combined during the year leading up to the 2012 election.

It may be that the IRS scandal will bring back the Tea Party quite literally with a vengeance. If so, the upcoming Congressional election will be a key event in the history of these United States.

One can argue that the entire matter of ‘tax exemption’ for politically oriented organizations needs considerable rethinking if we are to preserve the fundamentals of freedom. Political donations are made from already taxed income. Political deductions should not be deductible – why should they? But those who collect political donations and spend them on political elections shouldn’t be paying taxes on what they collect, either. The devil is in the details.

Then there is the matter of civic good. We have always acted as if we believe that higher voting percentages are a Good Thing, illustrative of the strength of the Republic, but that isn’t entirely obvious. Communist one-party regimes routinely get 90% of the vote to the polls, and approval rates of over 90%, but those weren’t signs of strength and popular approval, they were signs that the Communist Party understood the value of getting those numbers. For some Party managers it was not quite a matter of life or death, but it was a definite matter of career trajectory.

On the non-political level it is time to have a non-political dialogue on campaign financing and party organization in this Republic; alas, it is probably impossible to do that. With academia overwhelmingly liberal Democratic, any convention of political “philosophers” is likely to look like a Democratic Convention with the only dissent and debate being between the ruling politicians and various factions to their left. A “bi-partisan” group would mostly consist of the usual suspects. A national convention with Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner isn’t going to do much for the United States. Still, perhaps it is possible to have some rational discussion of the organization of political financing. As was observed a very long time ago, in a relatively free society it is very difficult to silence the rich no matter what restrictions you put on campaign financing. Those who own a printing press generally enjoy some freedom of the press, and those who and throw bit parties can often get a big audience… But then all this has been known since the days of Cicero (substitute having literate clients and slaves for a printing press).

Enough. This isn’t what I wanted to write about. The bottom line is that the President’s star is not shining as brightly as it used to, and although he was re-elected it was at a fairly high cost. Attacking Romney while building a get out the vote operation as the IRS closed down the opposition ground game was a successful way to win the election, but it left little mandate for governing.

A good summary of the last couple of weeks in Washington is in today’s Wall Street Journal, The Decline of the Obama Presidency, by Fred Barnes. Barnes is a mainstay of the NeoCon Weekly Standard.

The Computer Revolution Continues

I’ve been brooding about the political situation, but “Professors Are About to Get an Online Education” by Andy Kesslar in today’s Wall Street Journal reminds me of hopeful developments that have been building (and we’ve been discussing for a long time). Georgia Tech has announced an on-line master’s degree in computer science for a quarter of the cost of an on-campus degree. Since the course lectures are likely to be better produced and selected from the best available, it is possible that the on-line graduates will have learned more than the on-campus students.

Actually, that latter has been true for a long time. The Kahn Academy Lectures have received increasing support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other major sources, and his series of mathematics “chalk talks” will take students from Algebra and Analytical Geometry through Limits and Differential Calculus to a sufficiently advanced skill in using calculus to make the Feynman Lectures on Physics quite comprehensible. Clearly not everyone can get through them – Feynman’s Three Volume Lectures on Physics are a Cal Tech level introductory experience – but anyone who takes a few months to go through the Kahn Academy lectures on calculus, the Feynman on-line Physics lectures, and then three volume introduction to physics will breeze through the first couple of years almost anywhere but Cal Tech or MIT, and will likely do well there. Now understand that I mean by “go through” algebra and calculus working every darned exercise problem. The trouble with growing up bright, particularly when not in a community of brights, is the temptation to quit working on a subject when you understand it but before you become comfortable with it. This is particularly true when you quickly find that you understand the subject better than the teacher – and alas, in most high schools and community colleges, bright students trying to learn calculus will very quickly understand it better than the teacher (who may well be someone much like themselves, with an ‘understanding’ not based on the familiarity that comes from use.

I have trouble getting that across to bright kids. Watching really good lecturers like Kahn and Feynman tempts you to think you understand what they have said, but generally you won’t, not until you try to use your new tools to work through problems. Using calculus to solve a problem like “Is it possible with existing materials to build a centrifugal arm on the lunar surface that can throw materials into lunar orbit?” is a way of determining whether you really understand the subject. Proving theorems – the classical way calculus was taught for a long time – won’t do that.

Kessler’s WSJ article discusses some of the possible consequences of this credentialed on-line degree. If it is possible to gain credentialed mastery in computer science for $7,000, while in fact almost all the needed lectures and courses are on line for free, just where is the need of the $132,000 a year professor? Now one can make the case that at the Master’s level there is some need for some interaction with the faculty (although how much gets for the standard $25,000 on-campus degree fees isn’t as obvious as it might be), but move down a few notches.

Universities have proved from the days of the GI Bill after WW II to present that if there is more money available in the student pool – whether government subsidies or government backed loans with government enforced payment – the universities will absorb it, and like every other market the more money injected into the market the higher the prices will rise. This is egregiously obvious in the American University system, and every year brings us more confirming incidents. Now some universities may be selling excellent instruction, and thus justify their prices, but surely not all of them. I have seen some community colleges charging more than my undergraduate classes at the University of Iowa cost for instruction that wasn’t a tenth the quality of what we got from the Christian Brothers in Memphis in the 1940’s – and that’s just my personal experience. There’s plenty of data. And modern high schools are no great shakes at college prep, else no university would need to offer bonehead English.

The United States is being divided into the children of those rich enough to get them through college without debt, and those who aren’t. Of those who aren’t the children of the rich, the brightest will probably manage scholarships. Even they will have to find ways around the national minimum wage laws that forbid students to take the traditional student jobs like waiting on tables for a hour for a meal and tips – “board jobs” were a life saver for me at the University of Iowa because the GI Bill paid tuition with a little left over for rent, but nothing for food. Alas, the vast majority of students who go to college will graduate with a lifetime of debt owed to the unremitting Federal bureaucracy. I can’t think that a middle class of bondsmen was the intent of the Framers.

But there is hope so long as there is freedom. What modern academic institutions have to offer is no longer superior education – you can generally find better education on line for all but a few laboratory intense subjects – but credentials. One doesn’t go to most universities for an education but for a degree. It is that credential that you pay for.

The unionized faculties of the universities will try to keep the price of a credential high, but I think we out-number them, and a rational case can be made that all anyone needs now is a credential. Make the credentialing fair. You can’t make it too fair – make the credentialing exam tough enough and too many will fail, as witness high schools that try actually to enforce standards. Public high schools rarely manage that and crumble. Some private high schools continue to market excellent education. In between are a number of institutions that can, by giving every student an iPad and supervising their use, raise their credentialing standards and build reputations…

Meanwhile it can only get better. Moore’s Law will see to that. The cost of the iPad or Droid needed to access the already available lectures is dropping fast. Tablets that let you interact with an AI that dispenses exercise problems are cheap and getting cheaper. Building servers that host the AI who dispenses and corrects the exercises are getting cheaper. As I predicted forty years ago, easily learned high level computer languages have been developed with more to come which make creating those AI tutors a much easier job. Modern desktops eclipse what were thought of as supercomputers back in BYTE’s early days.

We’re just seeing the beginning of the effects of the computer revolution on modern education.

There is now talk of the economic advantage of amnesty: it will bring in new workers. Social Security is broke in the sense that it is obligated to pay out a great deal of money, and has none whatever in its “Trust Fund”. That is, the Trust Fund contains IOU’s, mostly Treasury Bonds.

The problem is that in 1950 there were 16 workers paying into Social Security for each worker drawing out of it. Money flowed into the Trust Fund – and was sent to the general treasury in exchange for IOU’s. That money was spent to expand the government’s size and raise its worker’s pay. Meanwhile more Social Security entitlements were created, such as various disability payments to people who never worked and never put money into the system. Very soon now the number of workers paying into the Social Security System will be two for each drawing out of it. Every American worker must support himself and family and pay half the support for another worker. Less cash comes in. The Social Security obligations began to mount up. The system inevitably fails.

One solution is to import workers, and to legalize undocumented workers and put them in the system. The math looks fairly good: most illegals are working age and didn’t bring their parents, and many have children who are already legal and will add to the work force. More workers paying into Social Security means less deficit. It’s all good.

We’ll defer comment on that. What I want to point out is that Moore’s Law is inexorable. Even in bad economic times – perhaps it’s a big cause of bad economic times? – productivity of each worker goes up. In some manufacturing industries each worker (and some robots) actually does produce more than 8 workers used to – and we are still on the rapidly rising part of the big S curve that really graphs Moore’s Law.

It’s pretty hard to see how we can much improve productivity in traditional agriculture , but there are amazing developments in unconventional food production. The same is true in many other fields. Perhaps the Social Security problem isn’t as severe as we think.

Of course there are many jobs where productivity can’t improve much. Those are often the ones filled by undocumented workers. It isn’t likely that making the gardener crew legal and collecting Self Employment tax from them will solve the problems…

I’ll try to catch up with Mail. We have a lot of it, much of it very good.