An elderly couple comments on Indiana's new ID check law.

After a long day of helping my daughter move into her apartment in Bloomington, Indiana, before classes start we went for a late bite at Applebee’s.  Apparently Indiana has a new law that EVERYONE gets carded if you order a drink.

Yes, even a shriveled up, hunched back, liver spotted, slow shuffling, thin haired, mismatched clothes wearing, near deaf, AARP card carrying, yet innately wise old person must present ID to get a beer.  I doubt if the reason was the extreme costumes young people were using to buy a beer.  The reason is that they just did not want to leave any possible error to human judgment.

Because legislators and bureaucrats do not trust human judgment we are inundated with thousands of pages of laws and rules to accomplish the simplest of objectives.  These rules often have foolish outcomes.

This same law states that if my 20 year old daughter sits at the bar area she must present ID even if she is not drinking alcohol, and must also be accompanied by a guardian.  Yet sitting at the table next to me which I can reach out and touch, which is deemed outside of the bar area, would require no ID and no guardian.

Such micro management creates contempt for the law.  The young people who work at this restaurant joke about how ridiculous it is.  Is this how we want our laws to be perceived?

Yet this is a long trend which, like the analogy of the frog in the boiling water, we just get used to.  It is a quiet tyranny of a government that sees no area it should just leave to the citizens to resolve because it has become very separate and contemptuous of its own citizens.  It is laws like this that makes more and more citizens feel like the government no longer enjoys the consent of the governed.

In a similar story, New Jersey governor Chris Christie explains how his state was turned down for a 400 million dollar federal education grant because of simple, easily correctable clerical error on a single page of a 1,000 page application.

Personally I am glad to see angry voters; it makes me hopeful that we have not lost all common sense.

Post posting note:  apparently there is a little more to the Christie story as pointed out by a reader. The Education Commissioner was caught in a lie and was fired. Read the story here.

The problem remains, however, that we have grown accustomed to thousand page applications and 3,000 page laws.

In 1940 55% of college educated female workers in their thirties were employed as teachers.  As opportunities  for women broadened the best and the brightest left teaching and went into other higher paying fields.  The school teaching profession experienced a brain drain.

“In 1960, about 40% of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8% at the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom.”

“Between 1967 and 1980 U.S. test scores fell by about 1.25 grade-level equivalents.”

From “Superfreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

HKO comment- unintended consequences, ain’t it a bitch.

I just finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. He has a knack for insights and thinking that most of us miss. The premise is that success is less a matter of IQ and talent and more a matter of culture, opportunity and hard work.

The Chinese advantage in math is more a factor of a rice economy that requires more entrepreneurial skill and continuous hard work than western crops that require large periods of idle time.

Chinese linguistics also make math a much more intuitive discipline.

The Chinese school year is much longer, also reflecting the rice economy. The irrigation used in rice improves the land with use, whereas the western farming actually depletes the soil nutrients requiring periods of non use. Rice farmers work more days per year than wheat farmers.

The value of Gladwell’s analysis is to improve opportunity by understanding the impact of cultures and other factors. Blindly throwing money at problems is often wasteful and counterproductive.

He notes that more laptops, computers, smaller class size, is not the key to improving education. More hours and days is the key. Poor people learn as much DURING SCHOOL as rich kids, but richer kids continue learning during the long vacations that are unique to American schools. It is during the vacations that the opportunities available to the wealthier kids make a difference.

The schools are doing their jobs. They just need to be used more.

It is politically fashionable to predict the demise of America as a global power and I imagine it will happen some day but here are some of the reasons it may not be as soon as many wish or predict:

Contrary to popular myths the U.S. actually trains more engineers per capita than either India or China.

India graduates 35-50 PhDs in computer science each year; the U.S. graduates a thousand.

Government funding of nanotechnology in the U.S. is double that of the second highest developer- Japan. Nanotechnology is a quantum growth change agent.

7 to 8 of the ten top universities in the world are in the U.S. 42-68% of the top 50 universities in the world are in the U.S.

The U.S. invests 2.6% of its GDP in higher education, compared to 1.2% in Europe and 1.1 % in Japan.

Examples from Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American Decade”