I wouldn’t be so quick to judge headstart. Recent studies have shown that it really has had a success.
So, maybe not use that as your whipping horse.
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/files/long_term_impact_of_head_start_program.pdf
https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/q43pgptmzzm6h3zjcosk93ucnh1k4o9e
https://web.berkeley.edu/socrates-and-scholar-retired
Actually, I’m quite comfortable. from your second link
Today, however, the more pressing question is whether these short-term positive effects of Head Start on school readiness persist or dissipate over time. In general, the evidence on lasting impacts of Head Start suggests that the early benefits of the program dissipate quickly once children enter elementary school. Most of the immediate school readiness effects of HeadStart diminished considerably or disappeared altogether by the end of first grade (USDHHS, 2010). By the end of third grade,the HSIS reported only two significant cognitive impacts: a positive impact on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–KReading assessment for the 4-year-old cohort and a negative impact on parent reports of grade promotion for the 3-year-oldcohort (Puma et al., 2012).Nevertheless, a series of well-crafted, quasi-experimental stud-ies of earlier cohorts of Head Start children by Currie and col-leagues (Currie & Thomas, 1995,2000;Garces, Thomas, & Cur-rie, 2002) and others (Deming, 2009;Ludwig & Miller, 2007;Ludwig & Phillips, 2008) have found longer-term impacts of HeadStart on grade repetition, high school graduation, college attendance, and earnings.Deming (2009), for example, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, reported significant kindergarten test score gains that faded out to less than half of the immediate impacts by 11–14 years of age, but significant impactson a summary score of young adult outcomes that included rates of high school graduation and college attendance
Note the description in the bold “quasi-experimental studies”. Finally, it worth noting that there have been some many head starts studies. That using a 5% confidence level a few studies are going to show some results. To this I’m going to add the implicit basis of Head start researchers. The smartest women, I’ve ever met (Intel’s first non-engineer fellow) told me the time she was most tempted to fudge her research was with HeadStart. She is classic liberal and her post-doc psychology work was doing a program evaluation of Head Start, “I tried every trick I knew to make the data look better, because I really wanted to be effective”, she told me. But at the end she couldn’t show it was.
I completely support running large experiments on it to measure its effectiveness. I’ll withhold final judgement until I see the data. My guess is makes more sense in Africa than in a developed country, so I most interested in Ontario Canada’s result, I see Finland has abandoned their pilot.
On the pro side, I think it is more efficient to have single program responsible for qualifying, monitoring, and distributing aid, than a bunch of siloed programs. Philosophically, I love trusting people to know what’s best for themselves rather than government.
On the con side. Some adults, (and probably more than average number of poor people) make foolish financial decisions. So for instance, Utah and other places have had a great success with housing first, get people a place to live and then get them help for substance abuse, medical issues. Rather than more common reverse, “the rules of this shelter are no booze or drugs”. it seems super unlkely that if you give somebody with substance abuse $X they will spend 40-50% of the money on finding house rather than drugs. At the end of the day I’m in favor of the things that will help the poorest people in society at the lowest cost.
Cheers! I appreciate the answer. I am intrigued by the idea and kind of rolling it around to see it from different angles, so I was interested in your take .
Head Start participants’ test score gains compared to non-participants diminish in the years after leaving the program. This fact has led to criticism that the program is ineffective.
Test score “fade-out” in the Head Start context might be explained by a variety of mechanisms that do not imply it is ineffective. These include imperfect measures of the program’s impacts and spillovers to peers, among others.
Test scores are not the only criteria for judging Head Start’s effectiveness as an early education program. Head Start participants fare better in the long run academically, physically, and socially than similar children who did not attend the program.
As you can see, the benefits are wide, and if you want to base your opinions on only test scores, you really aren’t grasping the whole picture.
As for intelligent people being tempted to be unethical, I don’t believe there is a correlation between the two.
Gentlefolk, this is not a thread for explaining why the non-liberals are wrong (we have 4791 threads for that), but rather a thread to find out / discuss what it is about liberalism that non-liberals disagree with or dislike.
For example, one item is that the QT3 non-liberals perceive many programs as less effective than liberals. That may be due to a reasonable but different interpretation of the data or it may be due to influence from strong priors (or different priors than liberals bring to the table), but it’s still a useful data point IMO.
Two things that have occurred to me while reading the responses from non-liberal QT3ers: they tend to emphasize conservative principals and concepts, and in particular a belief in limited government, which explains both why they are not liberal and also why they are not in the Trump/Limbaugh/2018 GOP camp.
A strong preference for conservative principles and concepts means that the non-liberals here are not going to join the Democratic party b/c, for all it’s occasional DLC-neo-liberalism, the Dems are a party with at least a minimally liberal conceptual underpinning, in aspirations if in nothing else. At the same time, a strong preference for conservative principles means that the QT3 non-liberals are not going to be comfortable participating in the Trumpian Bonfire of the Principles currently whip-lashing the GOP.
Likewise, a belief in limited government as a philosophical matter is conceptually not in tune with US liberalism. Although I don’t feel that US liberals are inherently in favor of “big government” (automatic exception for our Glorious Flowing Haired God Emperor), US liberals don’t have a preference for small government either, so that’s not a good fit. At the same time, the current GOP is no longer a party of limited government: it’s a party with very schizophrenic views about government: in many areas it has gone past “small government” to a full blown “anti-government” POV, except for those areas where it is extremely big government like national security, immigration and trade.
Basically, there is no party for people like Wholly, etc., at least for now. Hopefully in the long run, a principled conservatism that believes in small government will re-assert itself as I do feel that’s a necessary and healthy counter-balance to liberalism.
In the meantime, we have one weakly liberal party and one party, that if it were a person, would be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, narcissism, and sadism. As GW Bush said, it’s a Trifecta!
Re: Universal Basic Income,
I think one of they key contentious points is if this will be a replacement for a majority of existing benefits for low-income earners or a supplement. I think there is a fair bit of conservative support of the idea of a single subsidy replacing the comlpex series of programs that we have right now to make it more efficient and cost effective.
If this on top of all the other programs though, all bets are off.
Oh good, I was going to post something similar but @Sharpe already did, and said it better that I would have anyway.
I agree that the philosophy of limited government is a key conservative position (real conservatives, not the current GOP). I find myself agreeing with the conservative view much of the time, but there tends to be a “limited is always better when it comes to government” attitude that pushes me away at other times. Health care is the obvious example - the private sector is simply not suited to handling an inelastic demand market, but you still hear conservative arguments against government intervention in that market.
Excellent point. Incentive-based approaches, as opposed to hard limits, tend to work much better for exactly this reason. Make it in the person’s best interest to do the right thing, and they’ll find a way to make it work for them.
Tough question since I fundamentally don’t dislike liberalism. I do have a dislike for the American Democratic party and certain aspects of liberalism in its current US meaning (big government progressives) similar to @wahoo.
One point that should perhaps be minor but can become major due to the nature of online communication is that the conservatives tend to say that the liberals are wrong. The liberals tend to say the conservatives are evil. Some of this is probably personal bias. I don’t consume conservative media so I am likely missing some of the more strident anti-liberal rants. Additionally the few people that I discuss politics with (at least in any depth) are mostly socially liberal but more economically conservative with our differences being more of degree then fundamental nature. Of course this labeling has also been muddled more recently because Trump has actually lived up to the wording.
Yet the branding has an influence. As you say there has been no national representation for my views in at least this century. Any vote at the national level is a compromise and one side is making it clear that they don’t value me. Is it petty? Of course, but, it is still present.
Actually this depends on whether you are talking about what I consider “true conservatives” or the self-labelled “conservatives” who follow Trump/Limbaugh/Breitbart etc. The Trump/Limbaugh wing routinely calls liberals, liberal policies, and the Democrats generally evil: they accuse them of promoting violent crime, treason, immorality, murder (abortion), cooperating with Al Qaeda and other enemies of America, and on and on and on. The more civil conservatives who actually believe in conservative principles don’t do this, but if you are a liberal in the US, you are going to be exposed to incessant talk radio calling you evil, murderous and immoral, numerous blog posts calling you an enemy of America who gives aid and comfort to terrorists, and a non-stop Fox barrage talking about how liberal policies enable crime, and increase the existential threat to America and on and on.
I understand what you are saying Madmarcus, but we can’t give the loud and extremist right a pass: they use allegations of evil as a political at least as often, if not more so, than liberals.
I’m going to call foul for violating your own thread rules. You asked why people dislike (US) liberalism and I voiced an opinion. I agree that the current Trump power base might be just as bad. That might be a great reason for you to dislike that version of conservatism.
Partly true, but I’m not saying you are wrong - liberals DO call conservatives evil. What I’m saying is so do the majority of people who call themselves conservatives. But I do deplore whataboutism so you are correct that I violated at least the spirit of my own thread rules. I will give myself 20 demerits. My comments really belong in another thread.
I just wanted to say “thank you” for this.
I have this crazy belief that if we (“we” being the body politic at large) are all trying to do the most good for the most people, we can use data and studies and science and our species’ big damn brains to come to a reasonable outcome. There’s plenty of room for disagreement in how you weight, value, and interpret the data – very few political/social questions are reduced to a nice clean integer – but as long as we can agree on basic facts like “As a developed country, we have a responsibility to promote the public welfare of all our citizens,” we can hash out our disagreements and create workable policy.
Right now, the choices are “Okay, we don’t want to outright murder you or straight-up steal your stuff, but really it’s of primary importance that everything be ordered to serve Capital. But if you wanna get high, sure, you can be a profit center, that’s cool” on the one hand, and “Fuck you” on the other.
The power structures in America have become so ossified that they serve nothing but themselves and their donors. There are no doubt individuals within those power structures who work toward the common good as they see it, and I’m happy to vote for them when I can (god damnit, Al), but hooray for 2018, shitposting here is possibly the only thing that keeps me sane.
That escalated. Sorry bout that.
I think that my dislike for the left is really just a dislike for the extreme left. For those on the far left who are guided solely by ideology with no regard for facts or practicality.
But the problem I’m left with now, is that the far right is exactly the same. And hell, at this point, most of the stuff that Trump supporters get behind isn’t even conservative at all. The support for things like isolationist trade practices is an idea that, until a few years ago, was only held by the far, far left. That’s a Bernie Sanders thing.
But with things like socialized healthcare, I’m open to the idea at this point, despite it being called an idea of the left. The reason is simply because the current system does not work. While I fully support free market economics on virtually everything, there are cases where it simply breaks down. Inelastic demand is one of those cases. Consumers can act efficiently when they depend upon a commodity to survive. So i accept that this is likely a situation where the government is necessary.
I’ve never been a real ideological conservative, in that i never held allegiance to a party. Likewise, i never cared much for the Christian fundamentalists. I was more of a libertarian. I also don’t generally oppose the idea of change itself. I like change. I want to see dickey change and get better.
So at this point, i could probably be better described as a “libertarian progressive”, but i don’t know if that’s a thing. I still oppose the far left on factors where they seek to try and force people to act differently in many cases. I think that people should generally be left to make their own choices, even if those choices are inconvenient to others, or even if they cause self harm. You shouldn’t be allowed to harm others, but you shouldn’t necessarily be obligated to be a moral person and help others. Such an imposition of morality should come from the market of ideas, made up by our interactions in society, not from the muscle of the state.
I do think many liberals view conservatives policies as evil, cutting programs for the poor, pretty much all military action, cutting back regulations.
In the old days conservative just thought liberals were naive, but between the demonization of Democrats by right wing media and the outright evils of this administration. It is pretty much a moot point.
Sharpe: The line of mine about angels/men is a rift from The Federalist 51 “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” I believe the Constitution as written/intended was brilliant but has been diluted/weakend over time. The Federalist is wonderful at explaining how government should work matching ambition vs ambition etc. But that model has been frayed.
I cross over vote more than average voting for Northam when I lived in VA. Character was a hallmark of the classical liberal/conservative position but like everything else it has fallen away.
TIMEX: I’m not sure you were ever conservative. More libertarian and now you’re more liberaltarian. Check out the Niskanen Center (https://niskanencenter.org), Will Wilkinson and others. They were libertarians but have moved left over next ten years and are now center left but with recognitions of problems their policies can start.
I’m very skeptical of technocracy, because it doesn’t seem to work the way proponents think. Programs that have been empirically studied and analyzed keep getting funding and studies keep getting repeated b/c people hope they work this time. And I take a very jaundiced view of academia given the massive problems of replication and likely bias.
I notice that you used the word “dislike” in the thread topic, instead of “disagree with”. Was that an intentional appeal to emotion over rationality?
This is probably true, although libertarians were generally regarded as conservative, even though they traditionally only aligned with the larger movement on economic rather than social issues.
My other big beef about liberalism is the push for Federal, one size fits all. We are a huge country, I’m 6 timezone away from many of you, and my friends in Guam are 14 hours ahead. The values and culture of Wyoming, Hawaii, Alabama, California, Texas, and Alaska, are at least as different as Netherlands and Belgium, even if we, in theory, share a common language.
If folks in Alabama don’t want to treat gays as a protected class, put restrictions on abortions, we should let them. The same thing is true of Californians, if they want to ban sugary drinks and plastic straws, make all bathrooms unisex, legalize marijuana, and allow late-term abortions, that should be their right. Likewise, if Wyoming wants to let 13 year boys own rifles, even AR-15s that should be up to the people of WY to decide.
Except, for abortions, conservatives are generally better about this than liberal. When NYC wanted to ban big gulps, most conservatives just shook their head and rolled their eyes. Wyoming letting 13 year old boys owning AR-15 is horrifying to most liberals. (Of course, there are plenty of folks like Jeff Session, just to prove me wrong)
Now, I can already hear, well that’s so unfair for the gay person or the poor pregnant girl. Yes, it is. They have three choices, they can fight to get the law changed, the can break it and face the consequences, or they can move. If a dirty poor family in Honduras can scrape together several thousands of dollars to pay a coyote,than an American can find a couple hundred for a greyhound ticket to another state.
We have 50 different states to act as great labs for this experiment we call America. We have to be willing to accept inequalities or some will say injustices. What’s the best way to help poor people is it UBI, or encouraging faith-based charities? Is health insurance best provide by a medicare for all, mandating employers provide insurance, or subsidizing health saving accounts. The Federal government should be a laggard in getting involved with these questions not the leader. I’m hoping that one of the few positive that will come from the Trump administration is a renewed appreciation of the value of the 9th amendment by liberals.
Just a quick note. The Netherlands and Belgium are much less similar than any two US states. They barely share a common language (with Belgium have three official langauges and the Netherlands having 2) and they have different histories (one is predominantly Catholic, while the other is Calvinist, one predominantly about mercantilism and the other textiles) shows in holidays and priorities and government.
More than that though, the US states share many common bonds that just don’t exist between EU member states, even thoughs with similar languages. Things like common Television shows or even network television doesn’t exist (there is no CBS equivalent that both people in Belgium and the Netherlands enjoy, unlike in the US, where people in Texas and New Jersey might share). There is no common military, or shared constitution (although their is the EU, that isn’t held to the same esteem by any means, despite what the EU technocrats would hope for).
With the wide range that is food franchises (and oddly enough Chinese Restaurant) even food and food crazes travel faster and spread further in the US than in the EU.
Anyways, it’s my 2 cents, but as some one that grew up near the Dutch, Belgium, German border and lived in both the Netherlands and Belgium, before living in the US, I wanted to throw in my two cents.
Actually, I wish we had some British people, because I think you will find that the difference between the individual Kingdoms or the United Kingdom is also more stark than anything in the US, and that really is the same country.