A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

There is a New York Times article about how married couples are better off financially than their single counterparts.

But, while it did a good job of describing the wealth gap between married and single, it didn’t do a good job of describing the reasons behind it – looking at whether, for example, the relationship was causative (and in which direction) or merely correlated. I imagine there’s a little of everything going on.

People who have money are more likely to get married. People who get married are more likely to save money. And the sorts of habits and abilities that make people able to make money also make them able to enter into and sustain a marriage. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of telling poor people to get married and they’ll wind up wealthier. (See, e.g. the proposal for an “Office of Marriage Promotion”) A lot of the dysfunctions that make people poor would also make their marriages a disaster (and still leave them poor) even assuming they were able to find a willing partner.

So, because people had an emotional opposition to Common Core and we have a slavish devotion to standardized tests that don’t do much to educate our kids, the State of Indiana is going to use my kids and their instructional time to vet its new test questions. Super.

Claire McInerny at State Impact Indiana explains that the increased duration of the testing has to do with Indiana’s decision to drop Common Core:

Last year, a third grader spent a total of five hours and nine minutes doing ISTEP+ testing. This year, that amount jumps to 12 hours and 30 minutes. These increases are for every grade that takes the ISTEP+, not counting stress tests if a school has their students sit to complete those.
. . .
A reason for the increased testing lengths is that since the test questions are new, and this test will be used in the future, a lot of the questions have to be piloted.

These tests don’t do a thing to educate my kids, and now they will spend more time doing them. I suspect their time would be better spent playing Minecraft.

A friend shared with me a concept about the timing of standardized tests that I hadn’t appreciated before. If the test is early in the year, it can be used as a tool for the teacher to help the teacher understand a student’s strengths and weaknesses. If the test is late in the year, the state is basically just using my kid as a tool to measure the teacher — based, I might add, on sketchy metrics. (“Don’t worry about what you’re measuring, just give me a number!”)

These tests are a waste of time and money. Finland, one of the world’s best educational systems, takes one externalized, high stakes test at the end of high school. That’s it. It would make some vendors very sad (and much poorer) but we could save my kids a lot of time and our school systems a lot of time if we chucked these tests.

Might even be easier to just ask the teachers how their students are doing — if you trust and respect the teachers as professionals, that is.

The Incidental Economist has a couple of posts about how ridiculing parents who don’t vaccinate their kids is unhelpful:

Aaron Carroll: Could we stop asking politicians gotcha questions about measles please? And anyone else for that matter?

Bill Gardner: Enough hating on anti-vaccination parents, please.

They’re probably right in terms of the narrow question of how best to prevent outbreaks of diseases for which there are vaccinations. The background is a measles outbreak that seems to have been exacerbated by people who believed junk science or ignored science altogether about the relative dangers of vaccines versus real or imagined side effects of the vaccines. Ridicule probably makes such parents entrench themselves and become even more staunchly against vaccination. It’s a form of tribalism.

What gives this debate more juice, in my opinion, is that it’s not just about vaccinations. It’s about the proper role of science in policy making and about the proper limits of individual liberty in policy making. Anti-intellectualism is nothing new in American politics — a politician won’t go broke championing “common sense” over those eggheads in their ivory tower. What seems a little newer – and this might just be my limited knowledge – is a rhetorical commitment to individual liberty that overwhelms any notion that an individual might owe any sort of duty to the community. An anti-intellectual commitment to liberty at all costs generally squares with what we’ve seen out of the Tea Party movement. But with the anti-vaxxers, there seems to be a twist. These are, often enough, suburban, Oprah-watching moms. A sense that “they ought to know better” might add more intensity to the response.

So, I think what you’re seeing in these responses is not frustration limited to the question of how best to stop the spread of measles. It’s frustration with what seems like a selfish, deliberately obtuse world view that persists even where the evidence is clear and even where the benefit to the community so vastly outweighs the actual risk to the individual. “We had these horrible, horrible diseases licked and you people are screwing it up for everybody for almost no reason at all.”

Update: Talking Points Memo has A Brief History of How People Got Duped by the Anti-Vaccination Myth.

Update 2: This column by Chris Mooney about hostility between climate change camps seems somewhat related. It’s tribal:

The new study, by a group of Australian psychologists and social scientists, examines the clash between climate adherents and so-called “skeptics” as an “intergroup conflict” (a psychological buzzword) driven, in significant part, by anger at those on the other side.

Or to put it another way, the debate is a cultural clash between two groups with divergent social identities who define those identities, in part, by criticizing those on the other side.

“Believers and sceptics [sic] are united, but only insofar as they are united in opposition to each other,” notes the paper, whose lead author is Ana-Maria Bliuc of Monash University in Victoria.
. . .
One key aspect of in-group/out-group behavior is called “outgroup derogation” — negativity towards those who are members of the opposing group — and Postmes sees it here. “People tend to talk badly about the outgroup as a way of expressing solidarity with their own side,” writes Postmes.

Amy mentioned a This American Life podcast she had heard about an Internet troll who was particularly vicious to Lindy West, digging up information about her dead father, creating a Twitter account with his picture, and using it to harass her. So, I took notice when a related column by Ms. West in the Guardian came across my news feed. The short version is that she wrote a column telling how much that incident had hurt. The troll wrote her an email saying he was sorry and had made a donation in her dad’s name to a cancer foundation. When GamerGate got rolling, she wondered if she could gain insight from him about why men troll women online, and it turned into the This American Life episode.

In the Guardian column, she says:

We talked for two-and-a-half hours. He was shockingly self-aware. He told me that he didn’t hate me because of rape jokes – the timing was just a coincidence – he hated me because, to put it simply, I don’t hate myself. Hearing him explain his choices in his own words, in his own voice, was heartbreaking and fascinating. He said that, at the time, he felt fat, unloved, “passionless” and purposeless. For some reason, he found it “easy” to take that out on women online.

I asked why. What made women easy targets? Why was it so satisfying to hurt us? Why didn’t he automatically see us as human beings? For all his self-reflection, that’s the one thing he never managed to articulate – how anger at one woman translated into hatred of women in general. Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.

Maybe I’m off base, but I think the dynamic providing an explanation of sorts is described in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The protagonist is a human, Mike, who was raised by Martians. One of the things he doesn’t understand, doesn’t “grok,” is laughter. Then, one day at the zoo, it all becomes clear to him:

When he had first seen a zoo, Mike had been much upset; Jill had been forced to order him to wait and grok, as be had been about to take immediate action to free all the animals. He had conceded presently, under her arguments – that most of these animals could not stay alive free in the climate and environment where he proposed to turn them loose, that a zoo was a nest … of a sort. He had followed this first experience with many hours of withdrawal, after which he never again threatened to remove all the bars and glass and grills. He explained to Jill that the bars were to keep peopIe out at least as much as to keep the animals in, which he had failed to grok at first. After that Mike never missed a zoo wherever they went.

But today even the unmitigated misanthropy of the camels could not shake Mike’s moodiness; he looked at them without smiling. Nor did the monkeys and apes cheer him up. They stood for quite a while in front of a cage containing a large family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom and swarm aimlessly around the cage, while Jill surreptitiously tossed them peanuts despite “No Feeding” signs.

She tossed one to a medium sized monkey; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; be squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knuckles against the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage. Mike watched it solemnly. Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered – after which he seemed quite relaxed. The third monk crawled away, still whimpering, and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back. The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.

Mike threw back his head and laughed – went on laughing, loudly and uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, tears came from his eyes; he started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.
. . .
I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much … because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”

Jill looked puzzled. “Maybe I’m the one who isn’t people. I don’t understand.”

“Ah, but you are people, little she ape. You grok it so automatically that you don’t have to think about it. Because you grew up with people. But I didn’t. I’ve been like a puppy raised apart from other dogs, who couldn’t be like his masters and had never learned how to be a dog. So I had to be taught. Brother Mahmoud taught me, Jubal taught me, lots of people taught me … and you taught me most of all. Today I got my diploma – and I laughed. That poor little monkey.”

“Which one, dear? I thought that big one was just mean … and the one I flipped the peanut to turned out to be just as mean. There certainly wasn’t anything funny.”

“Jill, Jill my darling! Too much Martian has rubbed off on you. Of course it wasn’t funny – it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people, and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.”

I used to subscribe to Heinlein’s theory of laughter — that it was a response to an observed wrongness (e.g. the pratfall). After having kids and watching them, that’s an incomplete observation about humor. There is also laughter that springs from nothing more than joy. But that’s an aside — the troll picking on women looks a lot to me like the smaller male who got robbed and beaten by the bigger male taking out his frustrations on the smaller monkey. There tends to be a pecking order and, to mix my metaphors, shit rolls down hill. That women are generally perceived by these trolls as being lower in the pecking order highlights the structural inequities between the genders. Some of this is biological — the average woman is physically smaller than the average man; but the majority is probably cultural — the average woman is conditioned not to fight back as much as the average man. (After all, humans are tool using apes — humans have been endlessly innovative at developing tools to harm one another, regardless of relative size and strength.)

Maybe it’s more complicated than that – but I’d say the “why” is primarily misdirected anger. From the Simpsons:

Anger is what makes America great. But you must find a proper outlet for your rage. Fire a weapon at your television screen. Pick a fight with someone weaker than you. Or, write a threatening letter to a celebrity. So when you go out for a drive, remember to leave your murderous anger where it belongs — at home.