Week of June 24, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

TOXIC RUNOFF: In today's longish article on the North Carolina Senate race, the NYT's David Rosenbaum includes the following passage four paragraphs from the end:

Unlike most states in the North, most Southern states have runoff primaries. If no candidate wins a majority (or in the case of North Carolina 40 percent of the vote) in the first primary, the top two finishers compete in a runoff.

A main reason the practice has prevailed is that it can prevent blacks from winning primaries when the white vote is split among two or more white candidates.

Rosenbaum offers no evidence for this claim. He also doesn't explain how a black candidate, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, won a three-way primary, and subsequent runoff, for the Texas Senate seat being vacated by Phil Gramm. He just safely assumes that his readers, and his editors, know that racism is the only factor in southern politics. [Posted 6/28.]

PROTECTIONIST FAILURE: By backing a primary challenger, archprotectionist Roger Milliken made a well-publicized push to end Rep. Jim DeMint's career as a congressman from South Carolina. DeMint had offended Milliken by voting to give the president "trade promotion authority" (a.k.a. "fast track") to negotiate trade treaties. He was the swing vote on the issue, thanks to the defection of Silicon Valley Democrats to the anti-trade side. In return for his vote, DeMint got a protectionist provision in the fast-track bill, requiring imported fabrics to be dyed, printed, and finished in the U.S. if they get favorable trade treatment.

At the time, I didn't understand why DeMint, who represents the district I grew up in, needed to pander to protectionism. The Greenville-Spartanburg area is full of foreign companies and not all that dependent on textiles any more. It's also a safe Republican district. The Milliken-backed primary challenge answered my question--but it also proved my point that "No Upstate Republican would lose his seat just because he didn't pander to the protectionists." DeMint won an easy victory, with 62 percent of the vote, and faces only token opposition in the general election. [Posted 6/28.]

KILLING MONSTERS CONT'D: Charles Oliver has a great story about professional wrestling as a positive inspiration. [Posted 6/28.]

KILLING MONSTERS: In her September 15 piece (see below), Lisa Snell noted that her son's private school won't let students play Power Rangers or Spider-Man. "Even talking about superheroes is grounds for a 'Time Out'," she wrote. Lisa was making the valid point that schools strive to instill messages about violence that are unnuanced and unrealistic: "The message is that if people are nicer and more tolerant—if kids learn to respect all cultures, then these bad violent things will not happen."

In his excellent new book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, Gerard Jones makes an equally important point: Adults who deprive kids of make-believe violence make the dangers, anxieties, and frustrations of the real world all the harder for kids to come to terms with. Jones draws on a wealth of research, as well as his experiences writing comic books and running school workshops in which kids create comics and other projects that include pictures, narrative, and fantasy action. The book's core argument is:

In focusing so intently on the literal, we overlook the emotional meaning of stories and images. The most peaceful, empathetic, conscientious children are often excited by the most aggressive entertainment. Young people who reject violence, guns, and bigotry in every form can sift through the literal contents of a movie, game, or song and still embrace the emotional power at its heart. Children need to feel strong. They need to feel powerful in the face of a scary, uncontrollable world. Superheroes, video-game warriors, rappers, and movie gunmen are symbols of strength. By pretending to be them, young people are being strong.

I first heard of Jones when I caught the tail end of his interview on NPR's Fresh Air. This Mother Jones article is an excerpt from the book. In it, he explains how the Incredible Hulk helped him deal with teenage anxieties and makes the case that his experience was typical:

One of my mother's students convinced her that Marvel Comics, despite their apparent juvenility and violence, were in fact devoted to lofty messages of pacifism and tolerance. My mother borrowed some, thinking they'd be good for me. And so they were. But not because they preached lofty messages of benevolence. They were good for me because they were juvenile. And violent.

The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk: overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him. Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. I had a fantasy self who was a self: unafraid of his desires and the world's disapproval, unhesitating and effective in action. "Puny boy follow Hulk!" roared my fantasy self, and I followed.

I followed him to new friends -- other sensitive geeks chasing their own inner brutes -- and I followed him to the arrogant, self-exposing, self-assertive, superheroic decision to become a writer. Eventually, I left him behind, followed more sophisticated heroes, and finally my own lead along a twisting path to a career and an identity. In my 30s, I found myself writing action movies and comic books. I wrote some Hulk stories, and met the geek-geniuses who created him. I saw my own creations turned into action figures, cartoons, and computer games. I talked to the kids who read my stories. Across generations, genders, and ethnicities I kept seeing the same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by immersing themselves in violent stories. People integrating the scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into fuller senses of selfhood through fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction.

I highly recommend Killing Monsters, both for its psychological and literary insights and for Jones's many disturbing stories of how powerful adults punish children's imaginative play. [Posted 6/25.]

"NOT FAILING" SCHOOLS: Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews profiles my friend Lisa Snell, a (relatively) recent convert to blogging and education studies director at the Reason Public Policy Institute. If you were reading this site around September 11, you'll remember Lisa's posting on the education establishment's reaction to the attack compared to her son Jake's Spider-Man-inspired instincts. Jake also plays a role in Mathews's column:

I tell the story of Snell's short, aborted encounter with the Corona-Norco Unified School District because I think it illuminates, in ways the usual political debates do not, what irks many Americans about the way we decide where to send our children to school. It also exposes the sloppy way reporters like me have been describing the fight over private management of public schools, as well as potential flaws in the "No Child Left Behind" law just adopted, with great fanfare, by the president and both parties in Congress. Snell, for instance, thinks sustained annual improvement is a noble goal when viewed from the airy heights of Capitol Hill, but does not work so well for schools at the bottom making only minimal gains.

Snell said she went to the Corona-Norco central registration office, a small trailer on the grounds of a local high school, to see if she could transfer incoming kindergartner Jacob to a higher-performing school. She did not like what she had learned about her neighborhood school--El Cerrito Elementary. Snell taught forensics before she went to work for the Reason Foundation and is good at assembling facts to buttress her case. This is what she found out about El Cerrito Elementary by consulting a useful Web site, www.greatschools.net

1. The school's test score performance was below average. In 2001 it ranked 4 on California's Academic Performance Index (API) 1 to 10 scale, 10 being best.

2. Compared to other schools of its rank, El Cerrito also looked bad---2 on a scale of 10.

3. It met its improvement targets in 2001, but not by much, and the pace of improvement was so small that it seemed to Snell it would be a long time before it attained even average achievement levels.

That is important because the new federal law directs much of its resources only to schools said to be not improving. "As far as the No Child Left Behind act is concerned, my school is improving," she said. "This school will never be labeled a failing school and there will never be a right of exit for students who do not want to attend a 'below average' or 'well below average' but not 'failing' school." Because it is not failing, its parents will also be denied access to free tutoring, she said.

The most remarkable thing about Mathews's column is that he accurately conveys Lisa's message. As her proud husband Mike noted when he emailed friends the article, she's not shilling for private contractors like Edison. She's advocating real choice, so that schools get real feedback and kids and parents aren't trapped. From the article:

I have written about privately run charter or contract schools, like the Edison Schools Inc. network, as the alternative to regular neighborhood schools. Snell says that just shows how ignorant I am. She says she admires Edison, but the privatization it represents is "only a poor proxy for competition in education."

"Even when a school is privatized, that school does not face a true market test," she said. "The kids that go to the privatized school in Philadelphia, for example, will be the same kids who went to the public school last year. And if Edison or their counterparts fail, then those same families will send their kids to the next government-selected school the next year. The parents never exercise choice and the schools, whether private or public, are not threatened by the right of exit of the school children they serve."

[Posted 6/25.]

SAUDI P.R.: When I read his Saudi apologetics in today's Dallas Morning News, I did a double-take at Robert Jordan's credit. Are they sure he's the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, not vice versa? Why spend petrodollars on stupid ads when you can get the U.S. taxpayers to pick up your p.r. bill? [Posted 6/25.]

STEM CELLS DOWN UNDER: My Australian friend Jason Soon has been monitoring the stem cell research debate there. It seems American pols aren't the only ones rushing to use adult stem cell research breakthroughs to wipe out competing approaches. Jason's posts are here, here, here, and here. [Posted 6/25.]

CERAMICS AND GROWTH: Blogging from London, Lynne Kiesling visits the Victoria and Albert Museum and offers an interesting post on ceramics and economic growth. [Posted 6/24.]

ANTITRUST WITHOUT NAIVETE: My most recent NYT column looks at the importance of considering "transaction cost economics" before assuming that unusual firm structures or contracts are anticompetitive and launching antitrust crusades against them. Since I explain what TCE is in the column, I won't repeat myself here. Paul Joskow's paper, which inspired the column, can be downloaded from his website. Because there was so much background to explain, I had to give Joskow's article short shrift, and I recommend reading it—particularly if you have an interest in antitrust law. Unlike some of the math-filled articles I write about, it's not technical, and you'll get an interesting overview of how economics and antitrust policy have interacted over the past several decades. [Posted 6/24.]

BAN STALLS: While I was out, the good old American system of checks, balances, and a de facto supermajority requirement for Senate votes seems to have pretty much killed off the Brownback-Landrieu bill to make cell cloning a federal crime. As far as I know, the Boston Globe, which has been all over this story, was the first to report the bill was dead. (Thanks to Xavier Lewis for the link.) Last week, the Senate defeated Sam Brownback's attempts to add the ban to unrelated legislation. There's still talk of a compromise two-year moratorium, to give Republicans a chance to seize the Senate and push through a ban> My guess is that idea is a nonstarter, especially given all the other things on the agenda before the Senate goes home for the summer.

The mere threat of criminalizing science has already done damage, however, and in an unexpected way. Nature published research last week showing that adult stem cells may, in fact, have some of the same abilities to produce different tissues as embryonic stem cells. (The Nature article will be available via the link above for three months. The University of Minnesota's press release is here.) According to a related WSJ piece (article here, for subscribers only), "political wrangling over stem cells has ignited a civil war among biologists, with proponents of cloning and embryo research waging a crusade that has discredited alternatives carrying fewer ethical burdens."

Antonio Regalado's article doesn't entirely justify that topic sentence, since, based on his account, the alternative research hasn't been so much "discredited" as closely scrutinized and held to an especially high standard of proof. But it's clear that by threatening to imprison scientists who clone embryonic cells, Brownback et al. have hurt alternative research, giving perfectly fine work a bad name among scientists by using it as a political club. If you're against prison terms for biologists, good news about adult stem cells hurts your cause. So if you're against prison terms for biologists, you're going to try to stamp out that research. It's not fair. It's not right. It's not the way science is supposed to work. But it's completely understandable—and predictable. If Brownback really cares about advancing research on adult stem cells, he should stop talking about prison terms and stop trying to legislate scientific results. If adult stem cells are as great as he claims they are, he'll have nothing to worry about. [Posted 6/24.]