Yesterday Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart, offered some suggestions for bridging the divide between the top 20% and everyone else in America. Here is Tyler Cowen’s summary:

1. Apply the minimum wage to internships for the young, so privileged children cannot so easily receive this training.

2. Replace the SAT with specific subject tests.

3. Replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action.

4. Sue to challenge the constitutionality of a B.A. degree as a job requirement.

Cowen disagrees with all of them; I disagree with all of them except number 3.

The point is that employers want to hire smart, hard-working job applicants. However, we’ve made it hard for them to find such applicants (e.g., by banning IQ tests, civil service exams, etc.). It’s to the point where job-seekers have to take out huge student loans to attend college for four plus years. At college, they’ll most likely study a host of subjects that probably won’t make them more productive at their jobs. Then they have to spend their summers doing menial work for free at internships.

This system is convoluted and inefficient, but Murray’s suggestions (number 3 notwithstanding) would make it even harder for employers to find the applicants they want. We’d end up with an even more convoluted system.

Here’s what Rick Santorum (BA, Penn State; MBA, University of Pittsburgh; JD, Penn State) thinks about telling people to go to college:

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.

He’s actually got a point. I don’t think Obama is consciously thinking: “let’s send everyone to college so they’ll become liberal Democrats,” but politicians—not just Obama and not just Democrats—who push college as the main solution to the disappearance of blue-collar jobs are pretty snobbish.

Politicians love to tell people to go college, since it’s so easy for the politicians; all they have to do is provide student loans (to most people) and grants (to a few). However, the burden of paying for most of the training and finding the job falls on the people, not the politicians.

In addition, a lot of what you study in college doesn’t help you become a more productive worker. Reading D.H. Lawrence, studying psychosexual development and learning about mitochondrial DNA might make you a more knowledgeable, well-rounded person in the eyes of other highly-educated people. But I think it’s unfair to insist that people—especially kids from poorer families and single parents who got laid off from blue-collar jobs—take out huge student loans to learn this stuff as a condition of getting a decent-paying job.

ericmortensen:

Jonathan Schmock

Katie Roiphe criticizes the New York Times for subtly judging the women in its stories about out-of-wedlock births. Roiphe says:

Of course, one of the reasons children born outside of marriage suffer is the culturally ubiquitous idea that there is something wrong or abnormal about their situation. …

It’d be nice to see some evidence to back this up—besides the implication that “of course” it’s true—but anyway. She goes on:

… Once it becomes clear that there is, at least, nothing abnormal about their situation, i.e. when this 53 percent of babies born to women under 30 come of age in the majority, the psychological landscape, at least, will be vastly transformed. 

Using the same logic, you could argue that because obesity is becoming more and more common among Americans, soon we will cease considering it “abnormal” and thus obese people will be better off.

The evidence is pretty clear that kids do best when they’re raised in a household with their married, biological parents. Sometimes this isn’t possible, but all other arrangements are inferior—not necessarily bad, but second-best at the very least.

Roiphe thinks that raising kids in married households is “only one way to raise children,” but that’s misleading; it is, based on empirical evidence, the best way to raise them, all things being equal. Sometimes all things aren’t equal, obviously, but liberals like Roiphe aren’t doing poor women (or their future children) any favors by suggesting that it’s perfectly OK to have children outside of marriage. 

From David Frum’s lengthy review of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart in the Daily Beast:

What has declined is [the upper-class’] spirit of civic responsibility, our acceptance that privilege carries obligations, our willingness to shoulder the economic costs of social leadership.

Let me propose an alternative list of cliches that truly would command less assent today from upper-class Americans than they would have done in 1962:

To be an employer means that you pay a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. If your firm goes broke, you go broke too. You don’t take advantage of clients or customers. As a voter and citizen, you try to think about what is best for everyone, not just you. You eschew ostentation when times are good, and you pay your fair share of the cost when times are bad. Your good name matters more than money. Your contributions to your community define your good name. Whenever you are inclined to criticize anyone, just remember that not everybody was born with the advantages you had.

Barry Schwartz, writing in the New York Times:

So the real criticism embodied by current attacks on Bain Capital is not a criticism of capitalism. It is a criticism of unbridled, single-minded capitalism. Capitalism needn’t be either of those things. It isn’t in other societies with high standards of living, and it wasn’t historically in the United States.

Pearlstein thinks we should legalize vote-buying, which is clearly constitutional according to an originalist interpretation:

As you know, bribing voters is an honored tradition in this country, dating to the early days of the Republic. From the Federalist Papers it’s clear that the practice was known to the Framers; if they had found it incompatible with democracy they surely would have banned it in the constitution. Significantly, they did not — nor did they include the regulation of vote-buying in their enumeration of the powers vested in Congress. Therefore, we would be on solid constitutional grounds in trying to establish a property right of all citizens to vote in federal elections — a right that, like all other property rights, can be sold on the free market.

And if freedom-hating liberals try to mount a legal challenge against vote-buying:

… you can be sure that Ken Cuccinelli and other attorneys general will weigh in with briefs arguing that if the government is allowed to prevent people from selling votes, what’s to stop it from preventing people from selling used pickups, those old issues of National Geographic sitting in the basement or even automatic weapons?

tpmmedia:

For your Friday afternoon enjoyment - a slideshow of Mitt Romney confusing children.

Someone needs to make a meme out of this kid.

Why does Mitt Romney’s economic growth plan (PDF) have 59 points? Could he not come up with one more point to make it an even 60?

Perhaps Romney knew about this marketing insight:

Consumers are more likely to believe that a company or product will deliver on its promise when the promise is conveyed in fine-grained rather than coarse units, the researchers say.