Withering Competition
Leo Linbeck III
According to the Washington Post (h/t Instapundit), Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools:
“If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing” with charter schools, [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.”
Charter schools have grown quickly in the District during the past 15 years and now enroll more than 40 percent of the city’s public school students, leaving the traditional school system with half-empty buildings in many neighborhoods — and something of an existential crisis.
This is not the first time that a big-city public education system has gone through such a transformation. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans all but shut down its traditional district schools:
NOPS was the New Orleans area’s largest school district before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005, damaging or destroying more than 100 of the district’s 128 school buildings. NOPS served approximately 65,000 students pre-Katrina. For decades prior to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, the New Orleans public school system was widely recognized as the lowest performing school district in Louisiana. According to researchers Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, only 12 of the 103 public schools then in operation within the city limits of New Orleans showed reasonably good performance at the beginning of the 21st century.[6]
In Katrina’s immediate aftermath, an overwhelmed Orleans Parish School Board asserted that the school system would remain closed indefinitely. The Louisiana Legislature took advantage of this abdication of local leadership and acted swiftly. As a result of legislation passed by the state in November 2005, 102 of the city’s worst-performing public schools were transferred to the Recovery School District (RSD…
For the 2009-2010 school year, the Orleans Parish School Board directly administers 4 schools and oversees the 12 it has chartered. The RSD operates 33 schools and has chartered 37.[1] Additionally, two schools were chartered directly by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).[3]
More than 100 schools down to 4? That’s quite a loss of market share. Never let a crisis go to waste, right?
But the subtext here is more important than the top-line. The stories from Washington DC and New Orleans are not about the failure of public education; they’re about the importance of competition in creating a sustainable society.
The great political scientist E. E. Schattschneider, in his seminal book The Semi-Sovereign People, emphasized the importance of conflict (the word he uses for the competitive struggle over a political issue).
The role of people in the political system is determined largely by the conflict system, for it is conflict that involves the people in politics and the nature of conflict determines the nature of public involvement.
The “conflict system.” In other words, the structure of political competition matters.
An underappreciated story of the Progressive Movement and its progeny (The Fair Deal, The New Deal, The Great Society, The New New Deal, and so on) is its emphasis on collaboration over competition. FDR put it this way:
Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.
This has it exactly backwards. It is cooperation that is useful to a certain point, and then we must rely on competition.
Cooperation arises from trust. Robert Axelrod, in his 1984 book The Evolution of Cooperation, used game theory to describe the way in which cooperative behavior arises from competitive game structures:
For cooperation to emerge, the interaction must extend over an indefinite (or at least an unknown) number of moves…
For cooperation to prove stable, the future must have a sufficiently large shadow. This means that the importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy…
In order for cooperation to get started in the first place, one more condition is required. The problem is that in a world of unconditional defection, a single individual who offers cooperation cannot prosper unless some others are around who will reciprocate. On the other hand, cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other.
“Indefinite number of moves,” “shadow of the future,” “small cluster of discriminating individuals” – these are characteristics that break down as the size of a human grouping grows. With your neighbors, you’re likely to interact with them repeatedly in the future, the future interactions are likely to be important, and there aren’t that many of them. But as the scale grows, these conditions erode, and with them the possibility of cooperation.
That’s when competition kicks in. The fact is that human beings compete in groups; there is a significant advantage to be gained by having multiple skill sets and personalities united in a common effort. (Engineers and salespeople are famously different, but rely heavily upon one another for their livelihood.) There is cooperation within these groups, but competition between them.
The genius of the market system is that it allows for an efficient form of stable competition to emerge from a single variable: price. Consumers don’t need to know what it costs to produce a widget, and producers don’t need to know how much a consumer values a widget relative to other goods and services. A staggering amount of information is encapsulated in one number, and it allows for the scale of activity to grow way beyond what would otherwise be possible.
Still, competition has gotten a bad name. I recently had a discussion with a very sophisticated, politically active, and thoughtful friend who was pushing the idea that the state’s role in education was in promoting “best practices.” Experts, working for or with government officials, should scan the horizon, find out what works, and then propagate it across the entire state. This would create progress, and avoid the “wasteful competition” inherent in market systems.
But “best practices” is really a code word for centralization. Who decides what’s best? Inevitably, it’s central planners. How do those practices get propagated? Inevitably, it’s through edicts from the center. “Best practices” is, in reality, a profoundly anti-competitive concept.
As is “intergovernmental cooperation.” This sounds so nice and peaceful, governments working together for the common good. In reality, it replaces competition with a cartel, enforced from the center. And from the resulting concentration of power flows a steady stream of corruption.
Governor Rick Perry has recently garnered headlines for his trip to California in search of businesses he can lure to Texas. The reaction from California’s political elite was predictable in its content, if not in its form:
Earlier this week, Perry launched a week-long radio ad buy in California — dubbed “Texas Wide Open for Business” — to market the Lone Star State’s business-friendly, low-tax environment. In the ad, Perry invites listeners to “come check out Texas.” The 30-second spot has been running on six radio stations throughout California.
On Tuesday, California Gov. Jerry Brown downplayed Perry’s radio promotion, calling it “barely a fart.”
“It’s not a serious story, guys,” the Democratic governor said, as reported by The Sacramento Bee.
But Perry seems to be taking it very seriously. He is amping up his effort to attract employers to Texas by hosting a reception for business leaders who have reached out to his office since the ad was released.
It’s easy for Jerry Brown to laugh this off; after all, his party has dominated the state for decades, and some cowboy-boot-wearing, oops-uttering, coyote-shooting red state rube is not a real threat to his political power.
But regardless of your state of residence, party affiliation, or choice of profession, it is a good thing for state governments to compete for being the best place to live, work, and play. The worst thing that could happen would be for Brown and Perry and their fellow governors to get together and cut a deal over something like tax rates. We’ve seen how that sort of “cooperation” turns out in education and health care: more money paying for more mediocrity.
No monopoly in the history of mankind has reformed itself from within. It has always taken an external threat – a competitor – to drive internal change.
Competition, far from being a bad thing, is the only way to assure our long-term survival. And while we’ve drifted away from competition toward cartelization over the past century (a drift at the federal level that Michael Greve documents so well in his latest book The Upside Down Constitution), it still remains that Americans like to compete. It’s in our DNA.
But we also know that there’s a difference between being a player and a referee. One is there to compete, and the other to make sure that the competition is within the rules. We agree, up front, on the way we will compete, and then let the chips fall where they may. If that means businesses move from California to Texas, or students move from traditional districts to charters, or smartphone users switch from Apple to Samsung, so be it.
There’s a word for what happens when a referee tries to change the outcome of the game rather than letting competition take its course: fixing. Recently it a massive match-fixing scandal was exposed at the highest levels of professional soccer. And then there’s Lance Armstrong and the allegations that he made contributions and payoffs to officials to hide positive test results.
We need more competition, not less. We need competitive governance, competitive organizations, competitive elections.
So the system needs fixing; that’s for sure. But I do not think that word means what they think it means.
Absolutely agree! The individual states should compete with the federal government for the right to govern. That would mean reasserting the sovereignty and negate the federal income tax. If the state is providing the services the federal level COULD NOT, education chiefly among them, why should the citizens pay the fed for failure?
And speaking of competition and quality, why not open schools specializing in math, engineering and sciences with strict qualification guidelines to allow only the brightest to attend? To pay for the school have the top businesses who will benefit from the skilled workforce donate the money and give them first pick of the graduates. It would be great to have a MES Draft Day. “For our first pick in the 2020 MES draft, Dow Pharmacueticals selects, Cindy Jackson!” They could even pose with jersies. No draft order just a large interviewing session at the end of each “season.”
Also,Texas should also court the Vatican to ramp up schools for religiously leaning families. Time to reassert their right to influence, in a positive way, the youth of America. Being private schools, the fed would have NO SAY in whether prayer was a part of the day. But more important than prayer would be values and criticalthinking. I took a class at a local college taught by a minister called, “The Fallacies of Logic.” Great content and delivery and the added benefit of learning to listen and read critically.
While in Iraq in 2006, I read an article on how Idaho was stealing businesses from California. The Shrade knife corporation moved the entire operation, equipment and families of the workers to Idaho Falls (I believe that was the town). They had beendoing business in California for over one hundred years and had obviously been taken for granted. The exodus has been going on for a good while.
“NOPS served approximately 65,000 students pre-Katrina.” If weather is what it takes to ‘deconstruct’ the edifices of corruption then by all means let us embrace global warming and the new world order.
And here we are back to the stresses of distributed versus centralized control.
I would say that FDR hints at the destruction of competition, competition with government that is. It was few decades before that the regulators sought to break up the greatest cooperation of them all, Standard Oil. Competition keeps monopolies from happening and so monopolies must first seek to destroy competition and the ensuing cooperation eventually must be ruled with a concentration of power. Cooperation is useful to the point that controlling interests can decide what’s best for the mean and as we have seen with all public employee unions from congress to the SEIU, time and again the interest falls to self-preservation.
What is to govern power once accumulated?
An entrepreneur seeks the appreciation of its broadest consumer whereas the monopoly of governance seeks to hold the broad consumer in check by distributed infrastructure of an elite union of political power and regulation. Competition inserts compelling cause to take risks because ultimately no dynamic need can be served by a static good.
Best practices can be described by the guild. It may at first offer the assurance of quality but at some point it serves primarily to stifle competition and to enforce what is a monopoly of its own. And it is this emergence of corruption after the apogee of mindful organization that reminds one that there is no static good but from nothingness comes organization and from organization comes efficiency, power, and the ability to exclude others from arriving at the same summit, i.e.; from order comes anarchy. And how best to govern anarchy, and here I use anarchy as a pseudonymn for corruption, but to compete the emerging trends with those cast deeply in law and regulation? That is why the future is high-tech and global warming. Emerging technology will create new islands and the rising seas will wipe out those that serve no more purpose.
Competition between states is the best of market anarchy where corruption is mediated by the need to appeal to the consumer. Wouldn’t it be nice that each US citizen be captured by the state and kept from becoming an economic refugee even as the state invites in more lofo voters and less contributors? Jerry Brown certainly things so. And Governor Perry is right to attract California corporations to Texas; who better to employ the hordes of families fleeing from California?
“… an overwhelmed Orleans Parish School Board asserted that the school system would remain closed indefinitely.”
Fascinating to learn how much more happens in this world than ever gets onto the Alphabet “news” services.
Fascinating also to wonder what happened to all the Unionized teachers when the schools remained closed?
Competition, like the poor, will always be with us. Today, too much competition takes the corrupt form of buying access to the Political Class, with their strangely-sourced ability to make & break players through innocent-sounding regulations. If someone develops a high-cost, mercury-filled light bulb, it is a lot easier to buy off a few politicians & bureaucrats to take the competiton off the table than it is to convince the public to pay extra for an inferior product.
How do we channel competition back into proper productive channels? Mark Steyn has recently taken to saying that politics is only a battle, culture is the war. He may be correct. And we are being out-competed in that war.
LLIII–
I think you are absolutely correct, but in the present day world your kind of approach is both alien and antagonistic to the current power structures. Unless the game is rigged competitions tend to be won by the competent, and competence is no longer a characteristic that is highly prized.
Today more depends upon one’s group identity and social and political connections, both in government and increasingly in the private sector due to government mandated “diversity” and increasing regulation of economic activity.
If you elevate competence as the prime criterion for leadership most of our current crop would be bounced down to the level of flipping burgers for the rest of their lives. And many if not most of them know this at some level.
They will fight tooth and nail to maintain their social and economic status. Whatever else you can say about them, they do tend to band together when the herd of dunces is threatened by potential rivals or predators.
Re the positive effects of competition: it is telling that the Latin root of the English “compete” is competo (competere, competivi, competitus), which can mean (depending on context) “to be sound, sufficient, qualified, competent, or admissible (in a court of law)” as well as “to contend,” “to be a match for,” or “to strive together.” In other words, competition brings people together (the com- prefix)– hence Schattschneider’s observation that conflict draws people into politics– and enables open or public testing of their respective abilities, skills, and skill levels. That assumes, of course, that the system is open and transparent rather than a labyrinth of rules and regulations jerry-built by uncounted and unaccountable bureaucrats.
As for the “best practices” mantra: it’s the application of that questionable concept to medicine that helped smooth the path to Obamacare.
“sustainable”
Kudos to L3 for wrestling back a good word that has been stolen by bad people for bad ends. Another such word is “investment.” Some people believe in magic. They think that if you take the magic words and symbols of the wealth producers then power will drain from your enemies to you. Black Nationalists may be doing something similar by prominently wearing a Star of David.
“Engineers and salespeople are famously different, but rely heavily upon one another for their livelihood. There is cooperation within these groups, but competition between them.”
So what are we “sales engineers”? Schizophreniacs? Or just extremely well balanced personalities, capable of both logical and emotional thinking!
Just the sort of guys to lead a “Well Balanced Approach”!
So how many sales engineers are currently serving in Congress? I don’t know of any and I don’t want to do it. It would be too boooooooooooorrrring!
Plus, sales engineers have a hammer to use on design engineers, without us and our customers, you will starve.
Remember, the customer is always right until he disagrees with the sales engineer, at which time the two shall have a meeting of the minds to discuss their respective viewpoints so that the customer and sales engineer now agree. If no agreement is achievable, the customer becomes a non-customer and balance is once again restored, “The customer is always right.”
I have relatives in New Orleans, and it’s a city I love to visit. When I ask them “if we can speak honestly, doesn’t everyone here think that Katrina was one of the best things to ever happen to this city?” they (and anyone else who still lives there) will look at me with an expression that combines “How Dare you say that?” with “But of course you’re right, and we all know it” and they usually just end up shaking their heads and saying “that’s something we can’t talk about.”
www @ 8 – “that’s something we can’t talk about.”
Not even to say “Thank You”??? Kurt Mix and I, working independently, saved The Big Easy from the National Incident Command! And they can’t even say “Thank You”????
No Mardi Gras for you! Let it RAIN! Then off to church on Ash Wednesday to pray for forgiveness!
Learn to say “Thank God”.
wws – The next time you see one of them, ask them, “What were you doing Labor Day weekend 2010, partying?”
“Why? You didn’t build that!”
Funny you should talk about competition in the context of California. The single unique advantage Silicon Valley and co. have is that by long standing public policy non-competes are unenforceable in California. Therefore the Bay Area has the most liquid high tech talent pool in the nation and probably the world, and companies have to compete for talent.
Ideas don’t have to die when the first set of people who try them out fail at business; I’ve experienced first hand two very nifty ideas die in Route 128 and the D.C. area because the owners had made enough of the staff sign non-competes.
So, while California might be able to kill Silicon Valley, the continued failure of any other high tech center in other states to thrive will almost certainly continue, and few high tech companies will find moving to be a successful option.
A few possibly related points. The DC public school system is imploding.
Then there was Michelle Rhee announcing she would break with the Democratic party line and support vouchers.
Lastly there is the “competence deficit” thread that has been running through recent posts. All bureaucracies are to some extent dysfunctional, but once past a certain point they fall in on themselves. They collapse from sheer chaos. Maybe this is already happening to the worst public school districts, which are being outcompeted by upstarts.
Mr Catania, the best marketing for DC schools would be turning out competent graduates.
I know, not as sexy as printing up a bunch of brochures, but it’s such a crazy idea that it just might work.
“All bureaucracies are to some extent dysfunctional, but once past a certain point they fall in on themselves.”
You fooled me wretchard. For once I thought that we had a thread that wasn’t about the State Department. Each is of course a special case of a general theory. They are linked in that the bureaucracies are staffed with the pretentious but ill educated products of the education system. While the skills and work ethic imparted at an elite pre-collegiate private school may be better than in the public system, are the prejudices and values transmitted better? Just look at the web sites of a dozen very expensive private schools but first schedule a medical appointment to get treatment for Depression. Most of the bureaucrats are from the public schools, either children of the Middle Class, often school teachers, or recruited minorities. A few may still come from the old elite pipeline, Choate or Phillips or Phillips Exeter and Harvard or Yale etc, but they are almost all dedicated to the same vision of the role of government. While some may be personally more competent that is unlikely to result in the system remaining effective over time.
If highly creative and dedicated people can be consistently brought in then even an inherently inefficient system can achieve significant results. Organizations that have succeeded that way, by inspiring superior people to sacrifice and achieve despite the drag of a stifling bureaucracy included the Church, the Armed Forces, and the Diplomatic Service. Each drew in scions of families with outside wealth or people willing to forgo commercial success for social rewards and respect. Those rewards no longer apply and the pool of the elites has shrunk while the size of the system has grown. A system that worked when staffed by a George Kennan or even arguably a Richard Holbrooke, whatever their prejudices and errors they were both personally competent or at least not mere administrative ciphers, fails when staffed by the kind of hacks that Obama attracts.
Perhaps economic contraction will restore the balance that existed before the Great Society bloated the government and dumbed down the system. If the hard school of reality purges the losers from the officer corps, military and foreign service, then the system may be revived to serve as intended. A similar argument could be made for the Law and other Learned Professions.
As the rot began with the education system that is where the solution may begin. If limited economic opportunities drive competent and well educated people, who for the last 60 years have been pursuing commerce, into teaching and research then the Long March of destruction may be reversed. As the pie shrinks the competition will be bitter and the Left will fight to hold onto every sinecure. I expect community colleges to close and State schools to shrink. Gender Studies faculty will have to be pried from their desks. If the talented hard working people who would have gone into teaching 100 years ago, because there were no other jobs, fight for those jobs ten years from now then they may turn the schools and the culture around.
” … non-competes are unenforceable in California.”
Ditto in TX.
Gordon: a few minutes with Google says exactly the opposite, including a number of recent court decisions that narrowed the exceptions to enforceability. The statutory basis is a Covenants Not to Compete Act (scroll down to SUBCHAPTER E. COVENANTS NOT TO COMPETE), which is entirely the opposite of California public policy, which allows non-competes in a few situations, but not for a normal employee.
This matches my general survey of the issue, where California is unique, with Michigan for a period of time due to a drafting error, now corrected, being the only states. Texas is obviously being run for the perceived good of companies (as the history of Silicon Valley shows, that turns out not to be the case), not individuals.
Competition is an idea that shape-shifts because the structure of markets differ according to the behaviour of the sellers and buyers in each market. If both suppliers and demanders believe they have no effect on the market price then the market is perfectly competitive. Each buyer and seller takes the price as given. If either buyers or sellers believe their own actions influence the market price, the market is imperfectly competitive.
In the education market many versions of education are produced but in every case both buyers and sellers believe they can influence the price of education. For those reasons the education market is imperfectly competitive. In addition, government is the main producer of education.
I think this means that education will always be more influenced by lobbyists than by competition.
When states compete, the product they are selling is achievable profit margin by business. States compete with each other only by influencing market price; through tax regimes, regulatory environment, or by direct subsidies. By definition the competition between states is imperfect and because that competition is entirely through political influence on market price it is prone to corruption.
It may work in the short term but in the long term I think politicians and state governments would be captured by the businesses whose profit margin they helped to increase.
15. Harold
Thanks. Both my sons are senior businessmen in their respective corporations and have said what I understood about non-competes; I will pass this on.
What is typical of all federal bureaucracies is that if they don’t spend their budget then the next year, their budget will be lowered. As a result, all of them go into a mad spending spree in the last month of the fiscal year to spend all their budget.
There is no incentive to cut costs in the federal government.
stevesmith @16,
WRT Education:
In the US, there is no market for K-12 education, practically speaking. Around 90% of the kids are education in public schools, and there is virtually no price signal. No price signal => no market. About the only (highly attenuated) signal is residential real estate values; neighborhoods that are zoned to good schools have higher property values, although it’s far from clear which direction the arrow of causality points.
Yes, there is a private school network, and parents (in most states) can homeschool. But these serve such a small fraction of kids that it makes little competitive impact.
In reality, both buyers and sellers have impact on funding for public education, in that they can both lobby for more money. And where they both agree – for instance in the drive for smaller class sizes, one of the worst policy initiatives of the past 50 years – funding can grow at a remarkable clip. But as this graph shows, increases in funding have made no impact on educational outcomes.
If you accept the structure of the industry as given, then you’re right that lobbying will be more important than competition. But that sort of begs the question, doesn’t it? The issue is whether a competitive governance structure – one that provides buyers with multiple suppliers, rather than a monopoly supplier – will improve outcomes.
What is clear from NOLA’s experience is that parents think the charter schools are better:
Choice – the result of competition – is funny that way; when you actively choose something, vs. being a passive recipient, your satisfaction and commitment increase. Whether that leads to better outcomes (the definition of which is, itself, an important and controversial question), remains to be seen.
WRT State competition:
States compete on much more than profit margin. Quality of life, cultural factors, educational system, individual freedom (some of which could fall under regulatory environment) and other factors impact business relocation decisions. And a state’s ability to influence market prices is very low (except for industries like health care and education where it’s the largest buyer of goods and services).
But tax competition is the most potent weapon, mainly because it is transparent and stable, so it is the closest thing to a market price signal. For instance, Texas has never had an income tax, and only has a modest (and very recent) franchise tax on businesses. Florida has no income tax either, part of why it is attractive to retirees. Without tax competition, the states would truly be a cartel and would grab much more surplus than they currently do.
At the margin, any business relocating to Texas will make very little impact on the political environment. There are already 25 million people in the state, and the largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the US. So one more company will not make that much of a difference. Especially when compared to demographic changes…
Cheers,
L3
Harold @10,
That’s a great point. It is one way in which CA is much more competitive. Unfortunately, there are about 99 ways it’s not for every one of those.
The one thing I would point out, however, is that companies in the other states are not required to have non-competes with their employees. We’ve been in business for 75 years, and I’ve been there 25 of those, and I cannot recall a single instance where we had a non-compete with an employee (we’ve never had employment contracts of any kind). I’ve always felt that trust is an essential element of our culture, and it is incumbent on the company to set that tone (since most employees have had bad experiences with untrustworthy employers).
That being said, my observation from watching other companies that do use non-competes is that they seem to be driven by finance types – lenders and equity investors. In many cases, non-competes are required to get investment dollars. That’s one reason why it’s nice to have them unenforceable in CA; it keeps VCs from demanding them from management teams.
Cheers,
L3
In teaching (at college level only) I have found that students ranging from 18yrs to mid 40′s, many ex-military, seem to respond very enthusiastically to opportunities to do TEAM projects. This is especially true in the Media Arts program in which I find myself now, teaching at a local branch of a school preparing students to do graphics and media for the business community. That’s the modern language for ” a commercial art school.”
I still give plenty of assignments and exercises that are for individuals, and folks do about as they always have – a sort of “bell curve” distribution of efforts and scores. But all of them seem to rise to the occasion for the Team Projects. I mean THEY KICK ASS on those team projects – self organizing, intense “brain-storming” and refining of story ideas, testing and re-testing, revising. It is wonderful to see. The team projects are intended to be as close as possible to the sort of experience they will encounter in the alleged REAL business world. (Sorry, I can’t stop being sarcastic.)
I don’t think this indicates anything sinister. It’s at a sort of TRIBAL response, in the sense that they recognize at a very deep level the need for personal discipline, drill and exploration. But they also grasp far better than MY graying generation did, the essential need for cooperation.
I saw this play out dramatically in the 90′s when I was teaching at University of Cincinnati in their art school. It has a century-old cooperative program with long-standing ties to leaders in a number of manufacturing, advertising, publishing, and suchlike industries. Students would return from a paid co-op job having learned some of the latest tricks and procedures with software that was even 20 years ago in use worldwide. Within days of the start of each new quarter, the returning students would have shared these new tricks with others, and in a couple of weeks, the new knowledge would have filtered outward and become part of the common language of the great majority.
Other good examples: the UNIX community and other so-called “open-source” tools that are proliferating: Linux, the sophisticated 3D software “Blender,” and all the thousands of Shareware applications… And, oh, YEAH, the international fora for every known application, in which you can post a query about some problem you have with a software bug, and receive replies from London, Mumbai, Buenos Aires AND Pretoria with references, citations, and links in 24 hours or less!
As a fiddler, I’ve played professionally in Dinner Theater, rock & roll, Celtic and Bluegrass bands and a few professional groups (for instance, the Millennium Orchestra that recorded under Robert Ian Winstin for NAXOS) but I’ve spent far more time playing in volunteer community orchestras, that perform lots of free concerts, especially for convalescent centers and such. And it seems there are hundreds of thousands of musicians that do much more of that volunteer work than I… Keep in mind that for every hour of PERFORMING for the public, the players in such orchestras do some 20 hours of plenary rehearsal, and much more individual practice.
Of course, some of that is just on accounta they LOVE the music!
As much as I post despairing rants calling down evil curses on the Miscreants who are screwing our nation into the earth, I keep remembering that there is a vast community … COMMUNITY… of wholesome people with deep roots, faith in the Creator, and an indomitability that will in time shake the tyrants to their toes. Tyrants in any case are people looking for a mythical EASY Path to personal aggrandizement, always ready to take shortcuts, and construct shoddy structures that rest uneasily on ill-considered or imaginary foundations.
Thanks, Wretchard, for the gift of this place, and for the gift of Mr. Linbeck’s essay.
The British Columbia school system creates competition by block funding per student tied to where the student goes. Bad schools lose students and are forced to change or get closed. Home schoolers and private schools are not funded but schools districts court these students to get funding.
It still is an industrial process, but at least you can move your child from bad teachers.
22. derek I live in British Columbia too. Don’t know if public schools were funded on a per student basis when our kids went to elementary and high school some years ago. Anyhoo we were straight up frightened by the public schools and went over the wall into the private school system.
19. LL3 The market price that I think states influence isn’t the market price of the products that a company produces. State policies affect the cost (price) of companies doing business in that state. They have established a market in the cost of doing business and they directly affect that market price through their political actions.
Texas may be different but in British Columbia and Alberta, I think political kindness to favoured resource sectors has resulted in those sectors capturing government from time to time. At other times, political rudeness to those same resource sectors on behalf of green advocacy groups has resulted in government being captured by the advocacy groups. In both cases government influenced the cost of doing business. Better if government kept their noses out of people’s business but dream on. (shrink government, live free).
Mind you we have less people and less diverse, resource based economies. BC is 1.4 times the size of Texas and has a population of about 4.4 million. Alberta is smaller, being about the same size as Texas with a population of about 3.8 million people.
Yes, choice of several suppliers of any good is better than a single supplier. When the choices and the price are not determined solely by supply and demand then competition will be distorted by influence peddling and by advocacy groups. When you see the phrases “stake holders” or “best practices” then you know the fix is in. But I agree that distorted competition is better than no competition and that choice, even wounded choice, is far better than no choice at all.
MP @ 9 – From my lips to God’s ears.
No Mardi Gras for you! Let it RAIN! Then off to church on Ash Wednesday to pray for forgiveness!
Lundi Gras weather forecast: Bring the rain gear to the parades
http://www.nola.com/weather/index.ssf/2013/02/lundi_gras_forecast_bring_the.html#incart_river
AMEN!
Kurt Mix was criminally indicted by a NOLA grand jury. A bunch of low information voters if there ever was one.
FREE KURT MIX!
#15 Harold–
I heard from one of my sons and he agrees the bar is lower in TX but still nobody does anything. He gave a number of examples including his Fortune 500 employer, 13,000 employees, and in 35 years of existence has never pursued legal action. In fact he’s never heard of such a case in TX (including some of his employees who went to work for a direct competitor) so despite the things you mentioned, effectively in TX they are not enforced.
He did point out that there is usually a provision called ”non-solicitation” which is spelled out separately from the non-compete covenant and this seems to keep everybody happy.
This matches my own experience years ago in a much smaller way.
LLIII:
While I agree with the relative value of competition/cooperation, and the points of population at which each works as you have described, there exists an institutional blockade to applying each appropriately.
Of course there are universal aspects of human nature, but there are also differences among us. Whether you use Myers-Briggs or other means of measurement and nomenclature, you are ultimately faced with certain archetypes which will tend to behave in certain ways differently from other human beings. A large number of human beings are behaviorally predisposed to avoid competition and the anxiety that it produces by pretty much any means at their disposal. It is these same persons who seek out the (largely public sector) bureaucratic apparatus for employment in order to deal with that aspect of their personality. And it is these people who are the ones who are in the position of almost absolute power to block any moves to apply competition. Your friend who reflexively finds competition “wasteful” (and undoubtedly scary, whether he admits it or not) will never be useful in applying the correct remedy.
How, then, to fix the problem?
no mo uro @ 26 – Your friend who reflexively finds competition “wasteful” (and undoubtedly scary, whether he admits it or not) will never be useful in applying the correct remedy.
How, then, to fix the problem?
Leadership and Voodoo will probably work. Just become scarier that what they were afraid of before. They will do what you want because they fear you more. It worked just about a week ago when the office weenies did not want to do what the customer wanted because IT told them setting up a default choice of automatically sending order acknowlegements electronically was impossible, instead I would have to manually enter the request from now until eternity for every new order. I reminded them that I am a computer literate ENGINEER who could replace the IT people with a machine!!!
Worked like a charm, because the threat was real, I could replace the IT people with a machine.
So for today’s musical selection, let’s do a little voodoo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bunNRu4mBbY
MF – “But all of them seem to rise to the occasion for the Team Projects”
Personally I hate team projects in college work. Especially when you are dealing with a bunch of type “A” personalities that you would find in post graduate work. This is not to say that I do not do well in a team environment. A good team environment has a diversity of individuals and subtasks that have different but similar overlapping, interlocking skill sets. The best teams that I was associated with had a project manager, an electronics engineer, a software engineer, a mechanical engineer and representatives from manufacturing, quality, and contracts for example. Get two people of nearly identical skill sets and you need another person to mitigate the minor disparities of the two.
I agree with no mo that the Myer’s-Brig’s personality types could be useful in smoothing out personalities of participants in a team.
“A large number of human beings are behaviorally predisposed to avoid competition…”
Yes and they are predisposed to enforce the will of the big man with tremendous zeal. The Nazi’s were full of these types (sorry Godwin). Get one of these people on your team and they are not shy, they are constantly pointing out some other non-participating bureaucrat may object. This is, in effect, passive aggression. These types hind behind their own meta-team but will viciously attack other members approach that they deem to violate the party line. These people are the enforcers of mediocrity and produce predictably poor results because they are totally risk adverse. In technology, risk adversity produces certain mediocrity.
Competition versus monopoly, order versus chaos, everything has its own ground state at any given moment, which, I suppose, argues for chaos like particals over waves of order. It is a temporal thing.
Another way to look at this is to goes back to the issues of trust and leadership.
If your word is your bond, then things tend to go smoothly. You promise good things will happen and they do (leading from the front) and people will follow. You tell them bad things will happen if the do not listen, and then bad things do happen if they didn’t listen, and they learn to do as you suggest without argument the next time (leading from the front). Even mindless little followers can do a whole bunch of grunt work, in the aggregate. You just need an army of them, like worker bees, pointed in the right direction.
On the other hand, leading from behind does not build trust, so it will ultimately fail.
OT – Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on AQIM hiding in northeast Mali. (behind paywall http://tinyurl.com/a59bdqh). They are travelling by bus.
So use Vietnam era technology (Black Crow) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiofrequency_MASINT#Black_Crow:_truck_detection_on_the_Ho_Chi_Minh_trail to locate their bus. They have to be hiding near a source of fresh water, so plant sensors near every oasis.
Once you’ve found them, kill them.
The worst thing that could happen would be for Brown and Perry and their fellow governors to get together and cut a deal over something like tax rates.
As you know, Leo, that is how the European Union operates, and we are seeing the unfortunate results finally coming to a head. They call it “harmonization,” and would like for the U.S. to “harmonize” right along with them.
After reading the various comments on education, I was surprised when I opened my Email and learned that Blockbuster was sending Waiting for Superman as their next selection. How timely. Any thoughts on the documentary?
L3 @ 20 and Gordon @ 25:
I’m glad to hear that non-competes aren’t universal in Texas (it would seem to violate the perceived Zeitgeist of the state), although I’ll note that every company that does take advantage of them—and there are some, else there wouldn’t be all that case law—withdraws their employees from the talent pool.
Do you know anything about the policies of Texas Instruments, the really big, does real research in Texas high tech company? (E.g. Dell is (in)famous for doing no research and almost no development, other companies’ screwups kept them alive more than anything else, I think.) I couldn’t find any evidence TI does them in 10+ minutes with Google, except for the special case of Directors which is not controversial, although in an application form for Wafer Fabrication Technicians they did ask if you had signed one that might cause issues. And I found and know a fair amount of implicit counter evidence, e.g. they’re getting out of the System on a Chip (SoC) business for mobile phones (but not other mobile stuff) and local companies like Samsung in Austin as well as Apple are snapping up the laid off engineers. Samsung wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole if they’d signed non-competes.
Texas probably has no advantage over California on non-solicitation agreements, “[...] California law does allow for a limited non-solicitation of employees provision to be included in an employment contract. Generally, a California court will uphold a one year non-solicitation of employees provision so long as it is limited to actual solicitation.“, depending on the bit at the end. E.g. the difference between telling a former co-worker you’re working at this great new company vs. explicitly
asking him to join it.
One other curious thing I found about California while researching the above is that non-solicitation of customers is allowed, unless the company can meet the very high threshold of customer lists being real trade secrets. In Virginia, for example, that’s assumed and they’re much more enforceable.
So this all sounds good, but wouldn’t seem to allow the state to make a big deal about it being equivalent with California, so the Bay Area is likely to retain its insurmountable advantage unless and until California manages to kill it off.
“All bureaucracies are to some extent dysfunctional, but once past a certain point they fall in on themselves.”
I’d go further and say: All bureaucracies are stupid; some are more stupid than others; and the largest ones tend to be the stupidest ones.
Also: The first rule of any bureaucracy is to protect and expand the bureaucracy. The second rule of any bureaucracy (generally limited to the stupidest of the stupid) is to mistrust and punish anyone whose performance sets herself/himself apart from others in the bureaucracy.
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Sorry, I know this is jaded, but 50 years in the work world can do that to you.
p.s.: Actually, competition has always existed in NOLA schools, in the form of the Catholic school system, since the city’s founding. It’s always educated a large minority of the city’s (and suburbs’) school children, K-12. Now the question is how well will the charters stack up against the Catholic (and private, non-sectarian) schools and force *them* to get better, to justify paying the tuition they charge. (Post-Katrina, a number of parochial schools have expired, and more may in the years ahead.)
http://web420.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/bus1.jpg
MP @29 …
I should think that just being a bus would be enough of a ‘tell.’
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Today’s ‘attack’ upon Gao is indicative.
A suicide assault triggered hours, upon hours, of poor fire discipline — Malian ‘troops’ firing upon hapless (civilian) motorcyclists slow to realize that the boys with the guns are trigger-happy.
Even hours after the ‘attack’ was over, the dunces were firing on every solitary motorcyclist coming within range.
AQIM has to regard their gambit to be a complete success.
(BTW, most suicide ‘troops’ are coerced. Typically, their kin is taken hostage.
In Iraq, it was common to use the mentally retarded. The rider may not even know that the machine is rigged.
The goal of the gambit is not to kill the Malian troops. Instead, AQIM wants to induce pure chaos via non-existent Malian fire discipline. At some point, the civilians are going to recognize that their own ‘defenders’ are the ones causing all of the fatalities.
It will become too evident that Malian shooting sprees shut down ordinary life for hours on end.
AQIM hopes that the intervention force will, consequently, wear out its welcome — and very quickly, too.)
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The best counter-action is to dog the opfor down — wherever they run to.
In particular, motor fuels have to be strictly controlled. Since the Malian economy is not built around motor transport, ordinary civilian fuel distribution should be shut down.
Walking beats getting shot at — or blown up.
The government should bring in charcoal to replace lost heating(cooking) fuels. In particular, mass (subsidized) introduction of solar cookers ought to be made a part of defense policy. They’re fantastically cheaper than bullets and coffins.
At the very top of the list would be a (solar) rice cooker that can be handed out like Chicklets.
Without ready access to motor fuels, AQIM is out of business.
So, security cameras and troops should be deployed to the few gas stations in the network. Only RFID’d vehicles — with identified owners and drivers — would be allowed to buy fuel.
Fuel in the Sahara is like black powder centuries ago on the frontier. It can still be had.(by the bad guys) It’s just that to get it becomes an all consuming chore.
As the Desert Rats proved in WWII — you can’t conduct desert raids on foot. Even camels don’t cut it.
There are not a whole lot of gas stations in the Sahara. Probably fewer than the number of oasis.
(BTW, expect the AQIM crew to try and blend in during the hot weather directly ahead. Like American gangsters of the 1930s, it has to be their intention to lie low while the heat’s on. Back then, gangsters would even leave the States to hide in Cuba. I’d expect AQIM (top brass) to hole up in a place like Malta. It’s the closest ‘fit’ a gangster can find to Cuba.)
(Malta is so laid back that getting through ‘security’ figures to be a snap. The boys would just sail in on a pleasure boat — and just pretend that they’re on holiday. Shades of “The Jackal” (1997) Of course, getting out of Benghazi would be a breeze.)
Fighting during just one season of the year is as old as dust — doubly so in the Sahara.
blert @34 – The WSJ article also notes that AQIM’s cash comes from cocaine trafficking. So provide kits to detect cocaine residues to those who are issuing the RFID tags. You don’t get an RFID tag if you test positive for cocaine. Africa is home to boy soldiers, so arrest them, don’t kill them.
Both the Soviet Army in WW II and the Iraqi army near Mosul used “penal battalions”, troops who were glad to defect if given the opportunity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtrafbat
If you can ID those who are AQIM with a high degree of accuracy (very few false positives), you will win “hearts and minds”. The locals hate AQIM and want them gone too! Turn the population against the jihadi invaders.
BTW – It seems the LAPD and sister SoCal police departments have awful fire discipline too!
“Even hours after the ‘attack’ was over, the dunces were firing on every solitary motorcyclist coming within range.”
Who’s in charge there, the LAPD???
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578296170934762536.html?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks
“One challenge of the hunt is distinguishing between militants and nomads in the Sahara, said retired Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, a drone specialist with experience working with the French military here. “This could take years.” he said.
On a recent Sunday at France’s air base near Timbuktu, three attack helicopters returned at sunset in a swirl of dust.
Nearby a cook had worked for al-Qaeda-allied rebels at a bombed out guesthouse. He said the fighters had a long planned their escape. “They said there was a base where they would go,” the man said, “where they have every sork of vehilce save an airplane.”
So you need the capability of do night air operations.
And you need to find their safe haven. Destroy their vehicle park and they will be left travelling on camelback.
Sort of reminds me of going “downtown’ from Flight of the Intruder!
http://youtu.be/6IGjSqBMEn4?t=4m20s
Don’t you love those iron tadpoles????
32. Harold -
Silicon Valley also benefits from having turned the most beautiful city in the country into a playground and bedroom for it’s employees.
And it’s the only place to be for many of these ultra-liberal capitalists.
Stanford, Berkeley, et-al are added attractions.
—
How Google’s Buses Are Ruining San Francisco
It’s become common practice for Silicon Valley-based tech firms, like Google, Apple, and Facebook, to shuttle its employees to and from work on Wi-Fi equipped private buses with cushy, leather seats.
There are more than 1,700 tech companies in San Francisco, which employ about 44,000 people.
Not everyone rides these buses, but those that do are making the housing hunt in San Francisco increasingly more difficult.
“At the actual open houses, dozens of people who looked like students would show up with chequebooks and sheaves of resumés and other documents and pack the house, literally: it was like a cross between being at a rock concert without a band and the Hotel Rwanda,” Solnit writes. “There were rumours that these young people were starting bidding wars, offering a year’s rent in advance, offering far more than was being asked. These rumours were confirmed.”
In several neighborhoods throughout San Francisco, rent has gone up between 10 and 135 percent over the past year, Solnit writes.
Here’s A Map To Silicon Valley’s Cushy Private Buses
Amazing that all this exists a short trip away from the increasingly lawless and impoverished central valley.
80 years from now when Brown is 160 years old and again becomes Governor, he will be reduced to lighting a fart in response to Gas Rich Texas.
36. wws -
Under Extreme Duress, could YOU reliably discriminate between a Grey Tundra Pickup and a motorcyclist?
Give those uber-professional LA Cops a break!
…and give the victims multi-million dollar compensation claims.
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Quiz:
Why did Trevon Martin become a national obsession for the MSM, and the Rogue Cop Story is virtually ignored, except in California?
‘The Most Important Document Ever To Come Out Of The Valley’
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is a big fan of a presentation published by Netflix.
She loves it so much, she said it “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.”
The presentation was created by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and it was first published in 2011. It’s an easy-to-skim slideshow called Freedom & Responsibility Culture that explains the company’s management philosophy.
Why does Sandberg feel it is so important?
Hastings mentioned a number of new, controversial ideas in the document. For example, Netflix has a “no vacation policy” for its employees. Its staff is allowed to take off as many days as they want, as long as they do so responsibly.
Other things in the presentation that caused a stir:
“Outstanding” employees only. Netflix doesn’t accept anyone who does an “adequate” job (Hastings says those hires often lead to “generous severance packages”).
“Freedom and responsibility” vs command-and-control: Employees get to make decisions; managers just give them the right context to do so.
No “brilliant jerks.” It doesn’t matter how good you are at the job. If you’re a jerk, you won’t stick around Netflix for long.
The document has been read more than 3 million times on Slideshare and many of Hastings’ controversial ideas have been implemented by other companies, including Business Insider.
“[Perry} is amping up his effort to attract employers to Texas”
Don’t overdo it! They’ll bring their Californication attitudes with them and eventually turn Texas into just another liberal sinkhole, like they’ve done along the Colorado Front Range.