Taking Note

I’ll Have a Burger With a Side of Lipitor, Please

Want to eat all of the McDonald’s cheeseburgers, fries and shakes you want without increasing your risk of heart attack? Why not pick up a statin capsule when you stop by the condiment bar to put ketchup on that burger?

This may sound like a spoof commercial for Lipitor or a skit on Saturday Night Live, but it’s actually the recommendation made by the authors of a recent study published in The American Journal of Cardiology. The authors, who are from the Imperial College in London and funded by the British Heart Association, write; “Fast food outlets already offer free condiments to supplement meals. A free statin-containing accompaniment would offer cardiovascular benefits, opposite to the effects of equally available salt, sugar, and high-fat condiments.”

The Platform: Thinking Alike in Washington and Hollywood

The National Journal was founded in 1969 as a pricey weekly for inside-the-Beltway news bureaus, bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists who would pay a hefty annual fee to assure that their staffs were fully briefed on big issues (a single copy would circulate with names stapled to the cover to be checked off). Across the continent, the Hollywood Reporter (and its traditional competitor, Daily Variety) served a comparable purpose for the entertainment industry. At a relatively high subscription price, insiders were able to keep track of the minutiae of their respective businesses. Now both enterprises are in the midst of total makeovers with a common goal: providing essential (or irresistible) information to targeted audiences that expect quality material and whose industries are prepared to support substantial advertising rates and expensive subscriptions to sustain them.

Atlantic Media (where this column appears on TheAtlantic.com among the correspondents who write regularly as “expert” commentators) is one of Washington’s media success stories of recent years. David Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media, has invested millions of dollars in Atlantic magazine, upgrading the website so that it now has 4.5 million unique visitors a month and some of the biggest names in the blogosphere. Atlantic Media has developed a strategy for selling print and digital advertising, as well as hosting conferences, often with the enterprising Aspen Institute. But the big news—in the critical scorecard of business—is that Atlantic Media apparently has turned around the magazine and made the website a lucrative destination. According to the New York Times, Bradley believes the magazine will make money this year, in part because of the surge in digital revenues.

Tony Blair's "Special Relationship."

In the Knopf edition of Tony Blair’s A Journey: My Political Life, the opening sentence is “America’s burden is that it wants to be loved, but knows it can’t be.” Presumably, this introduction is an add-on to support publication of the book in the United States, where the book is a bestseller. But as I read A Journey, I was repeatedly reminded of two books about Blair that PublicAffairs published in his tenure as prime minister. The first, by BBC commentator James Naughtie, was called The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency (2004), which like its title makes the case that Blair, by instinct, style, and circumstance, had an association with American presidents that was unlike that of any of his modern predecessors. The second book, by the British writer William Shawcross, was The Allies: The U.S., Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq (also 2004). It was, essentially, a defense of Blair’s support of the American invasion of Iraq, despite growing evidence (finally conclusive) that the British public and even some of his closest advisers thought he was making a serious mistake.

Tax Cuts for the Middle Class Are Good; Tax Cuts for the Rich Are Bad

The Obama administration has proposed letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000 but extending them for those making under that amount. Conservatives in Congress are up in arms about this since keeping the tax cuts for the rich is practically a sacred cause in their eyes.

A sacred cause it may be, but a popular cause it is not. New data from a CBS News/New York Times poll clearly show that the public views tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts for the middle class very differently and no one should be fooled by conservatives’ attempts to conflate them.

Start with letting the tax cuts expire for the rich. The poll simply asked whether such a move is a good idea or a bad idea. By 53-38, the public said this is a good idea.

In vivid contrast the public said letting the tax cuts expire for the middle class was a bad idea by an overwhelming 74-19 margin.

The Legacy Racket: The Problem With College Admission Preferences For Children Of Alumni.

Below are the first paragraphs from my new issue brief, The Legacy Racket: The Problem With College Admission Preferences For Children Of Alumni. The brief relates to the new Century Foundation publication, Affirmative Action for the Rich. Download the full brief here.

The use of race-based affirmative action in higher education has given rise to hundreds of books and law review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice. By contrast, surprisingly little has been said or written or done to challenge a larger, longstanding “affirmative action” program that tends to benefit wealthy whites: legacy preferences for children of alumni. Like racial preferences, preferences for legacies can be criticized for being based on ancestry rather than individual merit, yet they offer none of the countervailing benefits of affirmative action, such as remedying past discrimination or promoting educational diversity. (Nor, it turns out, do they boost college fundraising substantially.) The evidence suggests, in fact, that in the early twentieth century, legacy preferences were born of anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish discriminatory impulses.

Legacy preferences also are widespread. Among elite national institutions, almost three-quarters of research universities and virtually all liberal arts colleges grant legacy preferences. While some colleges and universities try to downplay the impact of legacy preferences, calling them “tie breakers” in very close admissions calls, the research suggests that their weight is significant. Princeton scholar Thomas Espenshade and colleagues find that, among applicants to elite colleges, legacy status was worth the equivalent of scoring 160 points higher on the SAT (on a 400–1600 point scale).

Malpractice Reform Is No Panacea For Rising Health Costs

New findings indicate that putting limits on malpractice awards and enacting similar tort reforms are unlikely to do much to curb the nation’s surging health care costs. In fact a new study, published last week in Health Affairs suggests that costs associated with medical malpractice are far less than the $650 billion figure (26% of all money spent on health care) cited by some Republicans who have made tort reform a cornerstone of their vision for “bending the cost curve” in health care. The newly calculated figure, $55.6 billion, represents just 2.4% of health costs.

According to NPR, “Longtime malpractice and patient safety researcher Michelle Mello of the Harvard School of Public Health [one of Health Affairs authors]” said that “some of the figures used during the recent health overhaul debate were ‘quite imaginative.’”

Who’s to Blame?

The public is dissatisfied with the economy and a lot of this translates into dissatisfaction with the Obama administration. But the public has not lost sight of who is mostly to blame for the country’s current economic troubles. In a just-released ABC News/Washington Postpoll, 60 percent of the public thought the Bush administration deserved a great deal or a good amount of blame for the country’s economic situation, compared to 42 percent who thought the Obama administration deserved that level of blame.

Similarly, in an early September CNN poll, 53 percent of the public thought Bush and the Republicans “are more responsible for the country’s current economic problems,” compared to just 33 percent who thought Obama and the Democrats were more responsible.

Who Are The Real Education “Reformers”?

All sorts of people are interested in education reform – very few are content with the status quo. Yet in the press, only those who embrace a particular type of reform get the label.  To be a “reformer” you have to embrace ideas that teachers and their unions don’t like – ideas such as non-unionized charter schools and teacher pay based on test scores.

Consider, for example, a recent article in the New York Times depicting the battle in three New York state Senate primary races.  On the one hand were hedge fund managers and supporters of non-unionized charter schools who were identified as favoring “education reform” on four occasions, “school reform” on another, and simply “reform” on yet another.  Opponents of charter schools were never given that label, even though teacher unions and others who don’t think the track record of charter schools is very good in fact favor lots of reforms – such as teacher peer review to weed out bad educators; rigorous national standards; expanded pre-K programs; reducing economic and racial isolation in schools, and on and on.

What’s particularly galling in the Times story is that in any other context, it is doubtful that the paper would have employed the good-guy “reformer” label to a group of extremely wealthy hedge fund managers who wrote enormous checks to influence the political process, while withholding any positive label from a grass roots effort by workers to resist change that they thought would be harmful to both them and their clients (schoolchildren.)   (Reality check: research finds only 17% of charter schools outperform regular public schools.)

Fortunately, rank and file voters appear to see through this false labeling.  In New York, all three so-called “reform” candidates lost. 

Learning from the Los Angeles Times

The Los Angles Times ignited a local firestorm by publishing its rankings for six thousand teachers in the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) on August 30. Its reporter team employed the “value-added method” (VAM) on seven years of test results for students in third through fifth grades, connected those results to classroom teachers, and graded teachers on a spectrum from “most” to “least” effective. If a student’s performance on the California fifth grade math test jumped eleven or more percentile points from last year’s fourth grade math test, the teacher was labeled “most” effective; if it fell by eleven or more points, the teacher was on the “least” effective list.

With all the controversy around VAM, there is a growing consensus between hard-core pay-for-performance advocates and teacher union activists:

• the current teacher evaluation system is close to useless, since just about every teacher is judged to be at least “satisfactory” if not “excellent”;
• VAM is a potentially promising method that might improve teacher evaluation and development, but it requires additional research and refinement;
• even when fine-tuned and more reliable, VAM should never be the sole measure of teacher effectiveness (the disagreement focuses on whether VAM should count for 30 percent or 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation); and,
• the other factors that should be incorporated in an improved teacher evaluation system are much squishier as they rely on professional and personal judgments from classroom observations or analysis of student work that are not uniform and quantifiable like standardized tests.

Has The Economist Joined the Tea Party?

Whether one agrees with them or not, the editorials of The Economist magazine normally are grounded in facts.  That is why I was surprised to read in the August 14 issue that “[t]hroughout the rich world, government has simply got too big.”

This is a sweeping statement, and it appears to find support in nothing but ideology.

Whether we take the G7 or the OECD as “the rich world,” here is what data support.  (I used Annex table 25 of the latest OECD Economic Outlook.)