Modern society requires large amounts of energy. This will be true even if we become far more conservation conscious, far more humble in our appetites, and far more efficient in the production and use of energy resources. In fact, developing nations, aspiring to the same life-style that we have attained, will multiply the global challenges manifold.
But such massive energy consumption produces enormous externalities. Global warming, environmental contamination, and destablizing geopolitical repurcussions are all by-products of our energy consumption. Our reliance on non-renewable resources, consuming them at a rate that will make further extraction astronomically expensive in a matter of decades, compels us to be proactive in our political and economic stance toward energy and the environment.
Environmental contamination, particularly in the forms of carbon (and “black soot”) emissions, and groundwater contamination, combined with rapid economic growth in some developing nations and with an increasing scarcity of water in many regions, are global problems that cannot be ignored indefinitely. In Colorado, water scarcity coupled with population growth, and groundwater contamination through processes such as “fraccing” and uranium mining, pose urgent challenges that require assertive solutions.
Robust, system-sensitive local, state, national, and global responses are called for in response to these challenges.
A state-wide program of subsidization of research and development in the New Energy Economy is one such response. It is good for Colorado, and good for the world. We are currently forerunners in this nascent industry. Few things are predictable in world history, but the near certainty of an impending and sustained rise in the importance and value of “green” energy technologies and industries points the way toward a very important long-term economic strategy for the State of Colorado. Providing increased educational opportunities for New Energy jobs, and increased investment in New Energy technologies and nascent industries, is a wise economic and ecological course for the State of Colorado
Health care reform faces three demands and one constraint:
1) it must increase accessibility,
2) it must reduce costs,
3) it must maintain or improve quality, and
4) it must be politically viable.
By a careful and thorough review of available empirical evidence, comparing those countries that utilize universal single-payer health care to the United States, it is clear that the first three demands are most effectively met by the implementation of single-payer health care. This is the solution that the vast majority of economists, and The Economist magazine, favor. Just comparing Canada and the United States, Canada’s total and per capita costs are lower, coverage is universal, and the health care outcomes, by every statistical measure, are superior. But the fourth constraint makes this option currently difficult to achieve in the United States. Had we tried to pursue the best of all policy courses, the resistance to passing single-payer universal health care would have succeeded, once again, in undermining any effort at health care reform. We can continue to explore the possibility, at both the federal and the state levels, how best to move in the direction of the most efficient, fair, and effective health care system possible.
Given these parameters, I think that the recently enacted Affordable Health Care Act, though woefully imperfect, is a step in the right direction: We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We needed to pass a bill that extends affordable coverage to more people and controls long term growth in health care costs without compromising the quality of care we receive. That is what we did.
Some on the left complain that it is too much of a boon to insurance companies, to which I respond: All successful and enduring historical reforms have acknowledged and negotiated existing distributions of power and influence. While it may be tempting to try to sweep away unjust, dysfunctional, and inefficient relics of the past, reform in complex societies with a huge historical accumulation of social institutional material involves working with what exists, sometimes dramatically altering it in the process. There is a surprising amount of sophistication and functionality in those relics, and a surprising amount of error in human conclusions about what would work better. All of this should be borne in mind when attempting large-scale reforms.
Some on the right complain that it is too much of a government take-over, a drift toward “socialism,” to which I respond: Government is our agent and tool for securing our right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Using it effectively in this endeavor, understanding that complex modern market economies really do require complex regulatory architectures to function, and recognizing that our purpose in life is not to cling to slogans but rather to exercise our liberty in pursuit of sustainable, robust, and fair arrangements by which to co-exist, is no more or less than what reason dictates. Thomas Jefferson himself admonished us to “change with changing circumstances.” Government is not our enemy, and refusing to utilize it to perform functions for which it is uniquely best suited is not sound economic or fiscal policy. It is useful to remember that the exact same outcries were heard when social security, Medicare, and Medicaid were passed, all of which are now taken for granted as useful fixtures in our social institutional firmament.
While, in the absence of universal single-payer health care, I strongly favored inclusion of a public option, I never considered it indispensible to meaningful health care reform: A well-regulated market can conceivably offer enormous advances along all of the above-named dimensions (cost, coverage, quality, and, of course, political viability).
Though I believe we need a national health care policy, Colorado needs to pursue policies that complement and supplement reforms enacted by Congress. One vital role for the state is to improve our integration of existing institutions, such as schools, juvenile courts, and counseling services, to provide effective mental health screening and treatment for children who need it. There is considerable evidence that this would have significant positive impacts over time on educational achievement and crime reduction, as well as being cost effective in the long run.
More generally, I believe that we need to increase attention to preventative health care and to mental health care, making these ordinary rather than extraordinary parts of our lives.
We’re heading into a nasty election, and one of the nastiest issues will be immigration. You’d think that those who yell the loudest would remember that they are the children of immigrants. This is, for the most part, an immigrant nation.
While campaigning for Andrew Romanoff this summer, I heard him tell the story of his family’s immigrant background. It’s a lot like mine.
All four of my grandparents were immigrants. They left the villages (and in one case, a city) of what was then the Pale of Settlement of Russia – now, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania and Belarus – to escape the tyranny and anti-Semitism of Russia and to find new lives in the “Goldeneh Medina” of the United States.
They believed Emma Lazarus’s lines: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” (My grandmother actually taught them to me when I was a very young child – only a little older than when my grandfather taught me the Pledge of Allegiance.) So did millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans who filled the steerage of countless ships that passed Lady Liberty and landed on Ellis Island
The only immigration lines that existed then were the lines waiting for the inspectors at Ellis Island. They were terrifying enough, since anyone who showed signs of disease was sent back – and tuberculosis was endemic in the European slums. But at least the terror was short-lived; the immigrants of the 1890s to the 1920s did not have to wonder for months or years if they would be accepted by the U.S. government.
On the whole, this wave of immigrants did pretty well. They began at the bottom of society – in my family’s case, on the Lower East Side of New York. My grandmother’s story is fairly typical: as a young woman, she worked in the garment industry, in a sweatshop, ironing “waists” 12 hours a day for pennies. She could easily have been one of the young women killed in the Triangle Fire, but by then (1911) she was married and had a child.
Shortly after that, my grandfather bought a delicatessen, also on the Lower East Side. After some success, the newly American family moved out of New York and into the “real” American heartland: Dayton, Ohio. It was there my father went to high school, and had dreams of going to dental school that were cut short by the Depression.
That path – from unskilled labor to small business; from the teeming city streets to smaller communities – was not untypical of that generation of immigrants. Or any: look at the immigration patterns of the Chinese and Japanese in the 20th century. And today you find the Italians, the Bohemians, the Poles and the Jews (and the Chinese and the Japanese) at all levels of American society, and in cities and towns across the continent.
But that easy access to the American way of life ended in 1924, when the right-wingers of the day decided that there were too many Italians, Poles and Jews in their white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America. Congress passed the Immigrations Restriction Act, which restricted immigration to 2% of each of the ethnic groups living in the U.S. in 1890 – before the great immigration wave of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – thus preserving the WASP vision of America. Or so they thought.
That approach to immigration – making it as difficult as possible for most – has held to this day. And it is the fact that the 10 or 12 or 20 million undocumented immigrants are brown that makes the current situation a “crisis” rather than a problem to be dealt with calmly and compassionately. Would the political backlash be different if these immigrants were from Europe? (History tells us that the Irish were treated pretty much the same as “our” undocumented when they arrived in the 19th century, destitute from a destroyed economy. I guess we haven’t changed much in 150 years.)
Not so many years ago, this country absorbed an influx from Southeast Asia, and today these immigrants have found solid niches for themselves in American society. But times were better then, and they were refugees from “Communism,” not just poor folks wanting a better life.
The undocumented – the “illegals” – for the most part are working at the bottom of the employment ladder: the “jobs Americans don’t want.” In this terrible economy, they are doing even more poorly than they had been a couple of years ago – remittances sent “home” to Mexico or Central America are drying up. But meanwhile they are doing the best that they can for themselves and their families, and trying to ensure that their children get a good education so their lives will be better – higher on that ladder. Their children, in hiding from “la migra,” are performing well in school and hoping to be teachers and doctors and lawyers. Their parents’ aims are not unlike those of Andrew’s grandparents. Or mine.
Public education would benefit from improvements on three levels:
1) improving the quality and quantity of encouragement and support that students receive outside of the school,
2) improving the “student culture,” such that kids encourage one another to engage in behaviors that are conducive to learning, and
3) improving the incentive structure that teachers and administrators face, so that educating kids replaces avoiding problems as their top priority.
These can be addressed by
a) reconceptualizing schools as centers from which the educational mission is pursued rather than as locations and hours to which the educational mission is simply relegated,
b) creating opportunities and incentives for parents (particularly of at-risk kids) to receive support and education regarding how most effectively to support their children’s education,
c) using established programs, such as “positive behavioral support,” and other innovative ideas, to give positive reinforcement to kids not just for engaging in educationally conducive behaviors, but, even more importantly, for encouraging other kids to engage in educationally conducive behaviors.
The current emphasis on “accountability” is in reality a passing-of-the-buck down the hierarchy, avoiding a society-wide confrontation of the structural social and cultural problems crippling American public education, and succeeding only in creating new disincentives to the most talented potential new educators, pushing them into other more lucrative careers.
The notion that creating a competitive “market” will improve the quality of education presupposes that parents making those choices will be acting on reliable information about what constitutes higher quality education. In order to facilitate such accountability, there is an increased emphasis on concrete measurements of student achievement. While probably a necessary component of a well-designed complete educational policy, this current over-emphasis on concrete measurements is problematic for a number of reasons: 1) It devalues investment in unquantifiable foundational educational experiences, such as in music and arts, though there is substantial research to indicate that such investments are very conducive to long-term educational achievement; 2) It further encourages already rampant practices such as grade inflation and overly rosy feedback from teachers and schools, since many parents rely on such grades and reports in determining how well their children are performing; 3) It skews education toward emphasizing easily measured “mechanical” skills rather than harder to measure analytical and higher cognitive skills, though the development of such analytical and higher cognitive skills is of critical importance; and 4) It places almost no value on seeds planted by inspirational teachers which might germinate years later, though the planting of such seeds may well be the most important of all educational successes.
While I do not believe that the “school choice” movement addresses the most fundamental problems with our public education system, and am concerned that this movement in some ways undermines our commitment to maintaining high quality neighborhood schools, I oppose any state or national standardization of educational policy on legitimately unresolved issues: Local experimentation is the best way to discover what does and does not work.
A more promising initiative, which I enthusiastically support and would work hard to implement, is to promote and facilitate increased community involvement in neighborhood schools, particularly the utilization of professional and retired volunteers who want to come in, give their time, and help both struggling students to succeed, and highly motivated students to pursue their interests.
Students thrive on positive attention, on the encouragement of engaged parents, charismatic teachers, and a supportive community. If we want to improve the quality of public education, we need to work hard on improving the context within which public education takes place. Nothing short of that, or which attempts to circumvent it, is likely to perform as advertised.
I believe that affordable and flexible higher education options are necessary to a well-developed and productive work force, as well as to the provision of opportunities to our young adults. Investing in our human capital yields remarkable economy-wide returns and mitigates a host of costly problems. Controlling tuition costs, increasing the availability of low-interest student loans, and ensuring a variety of options for students of different abilities and preferences, are necessary components to a complete education policy.
Most importantly, we need to foment a cultural paradigm shift, one in which “education” comes to be perceived as a fundamental aspect of human existence, a life-long endeavor, and the most basic tool at our disposal for improving our individual and collective existence. The greatest tragedy facing humanity today is the underutilization of the human mind, for all other tragedies could be more effectively addressed were it not for that one. And a society that cultivates an appropriately exalted appreciation of the importance of education is a society of people who not only thrive better economically, but also live richer and more meaningful lives
