the economist

"HAVE Americans become complacent in the face of terrorism?" asks the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. The answer appears to be a qualified yes:

A Gallup poll released Monday — which was conducted early April — found zero percent of Americans volunteering “terrorism” as the country’s most important problem. Terrorism has ranked at 1 percent or below in six separate priorities polls conducted before the Monday Gallup poll, compared to above 20 percent in the year after the attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon....

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said the fact that Americans have not been on a heightened state of alert recently shows that ”life just normalized after the attacks and following the creation of a rather elaborate counterterrorism program.”

“That is the objective of effective policies,” Zelizer wrote in an e-mail.

Nicely put. The relevant question here seems to be: should Americans become complacent in the face of terrorism? Or, to phrase it less provocatively: is "complacent" really the word we're looking for here? How about "calm", "level-headed", or "judicious"? The bombing in Boston on Tuesday was gruesome, awful and pointless, and it naturally riveted the nation due to its attention-grabbing setting. But that kind of attention-grabbing setting is precisely what terrorists seek out, with the aim of distorting the public's perceptions of the actual threat. Planting two bombs at the Boston Marathon is a sick, twisted act of mass murder, but it doesn't necessarily augur any more widespread campaign of terrorism, and it doesn't imply the need for major behavioural or policy changes.

Unsurprisingly, there are those who would find it politically useful to plunge Americans back into a state of paranoia. Steve King, a conservative congressman from Iowa, is trying to figure out some way to use the bombing to stem the tide of immigration reform. Ms Eilperin interviews Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah, and finds him in vintage 2002 mode: “You’re dealing with evil people who are very hard to control, and frankly there are sleeper agents that we’ve found in the past that have been here for years, and they show up and you had no idea." Sleeper agents? I mean, there were those Russian ones, but frankly if the Kremlin wants to spend millions of rubles launching Anna Chapman's modeling career, that doesn't seem like anything the American people should be overly concerned about.

So far, the response to the bombings has been admirable precisely because it has been rather low-key. Politicians and most news agencies have refrained from speculating on the identity of the bombers. People have been loth to draw far-reaching conclusions in the absence of data. If the American people can maintain that dispassionate attitude, it could go a long way towards reducing the incentive for people to commit acts of terrorism in the first place.

(Photo credit: AFP)

IN JUST under 24 hours, we have learned nothing about the Boston bomber or bombers. Yet our ignorance has not stopped the careful positioning among certain groups who seem to be itching to reveal ready-made opinions as soon as a suspect or "person of interest" is named. Anti-government extremist? You can almost feel some on the partisan left desperately hoping it is so. Muslim fanatic? Ditto on the right. You can already hear the faint, moronic ripples of annoyance that Barack Obama did not say the word "terrorism" yesterday.

Yesterday was an obscure state holiday called Patriots' Day in Massachusetts. It was also the deadline for filing tax returns. And later in the week come the anniversaries of the Oklahoma City bombing and the raiding of the compound in Waco, Texas, a holy day in the anti-government nutjob calendar. This has been carefully trailed as potential evidence that the bomber might be an anti-government nutjob. But I feel confident that anyone with Google and some time could just as easily scare up an important date in Islamic history that falls this week. (There are even two calendars, and a millennium and a half of feuds and wars, to work with.)

And it is exactly that issue of calendars that keeps violent feuds going. One side remembers the other's wrongs as clearly as if they happened yesterday, and even takes a certain pleasure in commemorating them. (Needless to say, we don't commemorate our own side's crimes so religiously.) A constantly replenished well of grievance nourishes militants, keeping them fresh and ready to over-react to an offence or even a slight from the other side. And so conflicts go on.

What a mature, serious and strong society should learn to do is not to overreact, not to trample civil liberties, not to make the wrong arrests through haste. This bombing was vile, but should not occasion a war. The way to stop the cycle of revenge is for one side to have the strength and calm to do right and see justice done, but no more. Justice done properly can be frustratingly slow and boring, as anyone who has actually watched a criminal trial (not a televised drama) can tell you. But justice is done, in the unspectacular fashion that keeps the bad guys from marking up yet another easy grievance. There are, in the end, only so many days in the calendar.

(Photo credit: AFP)

EVERY child in the third through eighth grade in New York’s public schools will be asked to sit this week for three days of testing in the English Language Arts, to be followed by another three days of mathematics assessment next week. This has been the ritual in New York for some time, a sign of spring as sure as the first daffodils. But this year promises greater anxiety than usual: students will encounter much more challenging questions when they open up their test booklets, and some of the items will include material their teachers haven’t covered in class.

New York is one of the first states to revamp its annual exams to match up with the new Common Core Standards, a comprehensive set of academic expectations designed with the goal of better preparing American children for “college and careers”. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have formally adopted the Common Core, but reviews are mixed. Diane Ravitch, an education analyst at New York University, calls the standards a “fundamentally flawed” mandate foisted on the states without “any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools”. Other commentators argue that the standards honour “data, not children”, neglect creativity in the classroom and weave an unholy bond between public education and test-development companies.

But the Common Core is here, like it or not, and today New Yorkers will get a taste of the tests for the first time. State education officials warn that scores are very likely to drop this year. In February Dennis Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, put it bluntly in his letter to parents:

We expect these new tests to be more difficult to pass, at first. But this change is important. It’s going to help our schools broaden students’ options for the future. Students, teachers, and parents need to understand where students are on the path to graduating prepared for college and a good job. With time and hard work, I have full confidence that our students will rise to the challenge.

How much more difficult will the exams be? Only Kentucky has assessed its students based on the new standards, and test scores there dropped by 30 points. New York education officials expect a similar decline. “It’s time to rip the Band-Aid off,” Mr Walcott told the Daily News. “And we have a responsibility to rip that Band-Aid off.”

Making a kid yelp by ripping off his Band-Aid before his wound has healed may be a terrible metaphor for a new, ahem, battery of standardised tests. But then again it may be the perfect metaphor. The overhauled assessments are designed as a “wake-up call” that American children are “scoring far below other countries on international assessments.” It’s all shock and awe. Officials are promising that the plummeting test scores will not translate into a surge of summer-school assignments or increases in other remedial coursework. As the deputy New York City schools chancellor, Shael Polakow-Suransky was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “everyone is in the same boat”. A low score is not the end of the world:

Statistically speaking, city officials said, people should not worry too much about falling marks because everyone is taking the same new tests. Schools, students and teachers will be judged against one another.

There’s a smidgen of comfort. But it’s not terribly reassuring to hear you are all in the same boat if that vessel is the Titanic. So much for the entire concept of a standards-based test, which means assessing all students based on a single, immovable rubric and letting the chips fall where they may. To temper the anticipated blow of the results, New York is effectively grading on a curve.

Which raises the question: why now? Why has New York decided to subject students to these exams well before the standards have been fully implemented in the classrooms? (Most states are holding off until 2015.) My daughter is a strong math student, and loves taking tests, but when she was given a practice test over the winter holiday that contained high-level work with fractions, division with three-digit numbers and even a dab of algebra, her eyes grew wide. Nothing like this had ever appeared in a lesson in her third-grade classroom. Her teacher has been scrambling to teach these concepts over the past few weeks to get the 8-year-olds ready, but it’s bound to be too little, too late. The teachers are not at fault: much of the content on the practice exams was a surprise to them as well. With school ratings and teacher evaluations hinging on the results, everyone has an investment in this perverse and premature exercise.

On the eve of the testing yesterday, my daughter’s teacher invited the students to draw themselves pictures of “test monsters” they could rip up when they were feeling anxious. She sent home a flyer asking parents to write their children “a short message of support and encouragement” that they can read before cracking the test booklets. Here is the note my wife and I tucked into our daughter’s backpack: “We hope you enjoy the exam, sweetheart. We know you’ll do well and we're very proud of you. Keep calm and carry on."

WHEN stung by tragic events we naturally ask some simple questions: who, why, how? In the case of the explosions at today's Boston marathon, it is too early to provide answers. We do not know who is to blame for the multiple blasts that killed three people, including a child of eight, and injured over 100. Nor do we know what motivations they may have had. For now there is no way to explain this tragedy.

The explosions went off in the late afternoon, as runners were still jogging towards the finish line of the race. The blasts knocked some to the ground, but the worst casualties occurred in the crowds of spectators lining the route. Victims were carted from blood-stained sidewalks, some with gruesome injuries. Compounding the horror was talk of possibly more explosions and reports that more devices had been found and dismantled near the marathon area.

Whether or not the blasts turn out to have been a terrorist plot, they had the same immediate effect. Boston officials urged people to stay indoors and avoid crowded places. Train lines were shut down, buildings evacuated and cell service turned off in parts of the city to prevent the detonation of more devices. The FAA even grounded flights into Logan airport for a time. Other cities, including Washington and New York, tightened security.

Anyone watching the news in America will have seen commentators struggle to place the event in context. It is a process that will take time and investigation. We do not yet know if this was the work of a disgruntled hotel employee or an al-Qaeda operative. The answers, when they come, will give the tragedy new meaning. For now, there is only the sight of a frightened city; and for Americans, a sense of discomfort they have not felt in a while.

(Photo credit: AFP)

"I'M NOT sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance," wrote Jamelle Bouie at the Daily Beast. Mr Bouie was discussing a speech given by Rand Paul, Kentucky's junior senator and a possible candidate for president in 2016, at Howard University, America's pre-eminent historically black college. It is no secret that Republicans have a race problem—in 2012 Mr Obama won black, Hispanic and Asian voters by sizable margins—and in an increasingly multi-ethnic country, that sort of race problem translates into a long-term political problem, and Republicans know it. Republican leaders have been vocal about their need to appeal to Latino voters. Reince Preibus, the Republican National Committee chairman, just hired a field director and a communications director to boost outreach among Asian voters. And last month Mr Preibus convened a "listening session" at a black church in East New York, a predominantly black section of Brooklyn.

But those were largely reactive measures, in keeping with many Republicans' belief that their problem in 2012 was the messenger, not the message. Mr Paul took a commendably more active approach. He is the first Republican to speak at Howard since Colin Powell delivered the commencement address almost 20 years ago. Mr Bouie was unimpressed: "Paul showed a complete unwillingness to deal with the actual issues that divide Republicans from the black community... [H]e condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP." Other liberal commentators heaped similar scorn on Mr Paul. It's true that parts of Mr Paul's speech, such as his presumption that students good enough to get into Howard would not know that Abraham Lincoln and the NAACP's founders were Republicans, could be read as condescending. And to his discredit he was a bit too eager to elide Republicans' record on race since mid-1960s, when the party made a successful play for white voters disaffected by Lyndon Johnson's championing of civil-rights legislation.

Part of that is Rand being Rand, as the saying goes: even for a politician Mr Paul is unusually sure of himself and to my ear often comes off as an odd mixture of belligerent and brittle. And his critics need to remember that Mr Paul is an ambitious Republican politician who lives in the real world, not an Aaron Sorkin show. The scales will not fall from his eyes to the swell of a string section and Martin Sheen's approving smirk. Mr Paul will have to compete in Republican primaries, and he cannot do that effectively if he calls those voters bigots. Republican racial rebalancing will be a subtle and lengthy affair, just as Democratic racial rebalancing was. I don't recall John Stennis or Robert Byrd being cast into the outer depths, and I'm willing to bet that Jimmy Carter won the South in 1976 with plenty of help from nostalgic segregationists.

Mr Paul's Democratic critics should be worried; his speech showed that once that rebalancing happens, Republicans—particularly the libertarian wing of the Republican Party from which Mr Paul hails—can make inroads with black voters on civil-liberties grounds. He won applause when he told the audience he opposed unduly harsh sentences for non-violent drug offences. He reminded his listeners that George W. Bush and Barack Obama both admitted to using drugs but "they got extraordinarily lucky". He called mandatory minimum sentences "heavy handed and arbitrary". Of course, these policies do not only appeal to black and Latino voters (said the pasty little man typing this post and cheering inwardly), but blacks and Latinos bear the brunt of America's cruel criminal-justice practices; they stand to gain the most by their reversal. They may not like everything in the Republican platform, but then again, socially conservative black Democrats are probably not the strongest cheerleaders for gay marriage. Such are coalition politics, and it is heartening to see Republicans, however imperfectly at first, begin the process of building a diverse, policy-based coalition.

Read on: Lexington says Mr Paul is running from Goldwater's ghost

(Photo credit: AFP)

“WE HAVE a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” writes Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Insane” would have been a more appropriate adjective to use. By turning away hordes of talented foreigners keen to work in the country—and by turfing out amazingly talented foreign students who want to stay after their studies—America is handicapping itself just as other countries are doing everything they can to woo skilled foreigners to their shores.

Nowhere is the frustration at this dire state of affairs felt more acutely than in Silicon Valley, which has a habit of producing world-beating companies by backing hoodie-clad techies from abroad. Hence Mr Zuckerberg’s op-ed, in which he announces the launch of FWD.us (or “Forward US” in non tech-speak), which has the makings of a big super-PAC, or well-funded political action committee. A host of Valley luminaries—including Marissa Mayer, the boss of Yahoo, Ron Conway, a prominent angel investor, and John Doerr, a leading venture capitalist—are among the new initiative’s backers.

FWD.us will be led by Joe Green, a college friend of Mr Zuckerberg’s who has considerable experience of using online tools to drum up support for causes. Although it is likely to focus on immigration reform initially, the advocacy group will also lobby for change in both the education arena and America's backing of fundamental scientific research.

The new group marks a sea change in thinking amongst Silicon Valley’s leaders. Although they have been big funders of political campaigns, especially those of Democratic candidates, tech types have tended to avoid aggressive lobbying. This reflects a long-standing wariness of government amongst entrepreneurs. But battles over initiatives such as the Stop Online Piracy Act—and ongoing political wrangling over immigration reform—has convinced at least some of Valley’s elite that they need to take a more forceful approach inside the Beltway.

This has created some friction with long-standing tech industry groups, who fear that a more aggressive approach to lobbying by a few billionaires from California could raise the hackles of politicians unnecessarily and give ammunition to opponents who argue that the push to liberalise immigration risks destroying jobs of native born Americans while benefiting fat cats in tech havens like Silicon Valley.

That is why it is important to highlight—as we do in an article in this week’s issue of The Economist, which went to press before the FWD.us launch occurred—that immigrant entrepreneurs in places such as the Bay Area don’t just create jobs locally. Even early on in their development, they often set up new offices and factories in other parts of the country to get closer to customers and to tap fresh talent pools. These jobs, together with those created by local entrepreneurs, also produce many others locally through an impressive multiplier effect, which Mr Zuckerberg refers to in his op-ed. If FWD.us can help get that message across to politicians and voters, it will help ensure that America’s economic motor doesn’t go into reverse.

(Photo credit: AFP)

ACCORDING to the US Elections Project, just 54% of voting-age Americans cast a ballot in the last election. That’s just about the lowest participation rate of any advanced democracy.

Consider that on average 70% of the voting-age population of OECD countries votes in parliamentary elections. In some countries, the rate is over 90%. Part of the reason fewer Americans vote is that fewer Americans are registered to vote. America is unusual in that every state but North Dakota requires voters to register before they vote. In most other advanced democracies, voters are registered automatically using their national identity records. But in America, which doesn’t have a national identification-card system, voters have to take additional steps to register. The result is that a quarter of potential American voters aren’t registered.

Kate Brown, the secretary of state in Oregon, wants to change that. Her state already achieves a higher-than-average turnout with a vote-by-mail system. Now Ms Brown wants to automatically register voters when they apply for a driver’s licence or state ID. Once their names are in the system, they would get postcards allowing them to choose a party affiliation or opt-out of the system altogether. Some states already allow people to register when they apply for identification, but Ms Brown’s proposal would register everyone by default. If her proposal is adopted, some 500,000 eligible voters—about 1/6 of the voting-age population of the state—who are not yet registered, but who are in the state database already, would automatically have their names added to the rolls.

There’s evidence that making it easier to register increases political participation. A recent Nonprofit VOTE study found that voter turnout was 12 percentage points higher in the states that allow same-day registration. Automatic registration particularly benefits people who move frequently or who have less access to civic services. By basing the list of registered voters on state ID records—which are generally well-maintained—Ms Brown’s proposal promises both to eliminate paperwork and to keep voter records more accurate and up-to-date.

Voter registration, of course, is a partisan issue. Making it easier to vote means more young and lower-income voters. That means more Democrats. Naturally, Republicans aren’t enthusiastic about the idea of automatic registration. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a similar bill when he was governor of Minnesota in 2009 on the grounds that it didn’t “reflect bipartisan support”.

Some Oregon Republicans suggest that simply adding people’s names to the list of eligible voters without their consent is coercive. Others object to the plan precisely because it makes it easier for people to vote. Greg Leo, the executive director of the Oregon Republican Party, argues that when people make the effort to register it shows they take the responsibility of voting seriously. “We make it so easy for people to participate,” he says, “that I worry they won’t take the time to be an informed voter and to really study the issues.”

Ms Brown’s spokesman responds that the point of voter registration is—or should be—to keep accurate records, not exclude unqualified voters. Of course, the idea that some people aren’t qualified to vote is not new. Property qualifications, poll taxes and literacy tests were all ostensibly supposed to keep people who weren’t sufficiently qualified or who didn’t have a stake in the system from voting. In practice, of course, these rules had the effect of disenfranchising poor and minority voters.

Today's administrative barriers are not nearly as malicious as past rules, but they still tend to affect some groups more than others. Republicans can’t be expected to go out of their way to register Democratic voters. But neither should they oppose efforts to make it easier for people to vote. Reform that increases participation and reduces paperwork is just good policy.

(Photo credit: AFP)

A BIPARTISAN group of senators has rolled out new gun-control legislation that would expand background-check requirements to include purchases at gun shows, but not private person-to-person sales. There may be enough support for the bill in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, and Republicans are divided in any case on the wisdom of blocking debate on the measure. The debate, as it now stands, is quite strange, and tells us a great deal more about the state of the American mind than the advisability of gun control.

This round of controversy over the regulation of gun ownership was of course provoked by Adam Lanza's murder of 20 school-children in Newtown, Connecticut. Lanza's guns were legally obtained by his mother, and the proposed expansion of background checks would have done nothing to prevent the massacre. Nevertheless, gun-control advocates have argued for these new measures with save-the-children rhetoric, capitalising on the Newtown calamity. "If even one child’s life can be saved," Barack Obama has said, "then we need to act." In remarks delivered Monday, Mr Obama said, "This is about these families and families all across the country who are saying, 'Let's make it a little harder for our kids to get gunned down.'" He continued, as though from a textbook on sophistry, "What's more important to you: our children, or an A-grade from the gun lobby?"

James Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, has objected to politicians invoking the young victims of Newtown. "I think it's so unfair of the administration to hurt these families, to make them think this has something to do with them when, in fact, it doesn't", said Mr Inhofe. When confronted with the fact that a number of said families have lobbied for stricter gun laws, and think it has something to do with them, the senator replied, insultingly, "Well, that's because they've been told that by the president."

As for the gun lobby, it would like to take our attention off guns. In response to the new background-check proposal, the NRA said:

While the overwhelming rejection of President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg’s ‘universal’ background check agenda is a positive development, we have a broken mental health system that is not going to be fixed with more background checks at gun shows. The sad truth is that no background check would have prevented the tragedy in Newtown, Aurora or Tucson.

The NRA is quite right about the dubious relevance of background checks to these shootings. However it's not at all clear that a better "mental health system", whatever that means, would have done anything to prevent them, either. Closing the gun-show loophole probably would make it "a little harder for our kids to get gunned down", as would greater efforts to prevent and/or contain violent derangement. Both proposals have benefits, and also costs. Will attending more carefully to the potential violence of the mentally ill keep some people who need help from seeking it, due to the fear that they might be labeled a danger to public safety and deprived their liberty? Probably, yes. Will expanding background checks keep some people who urgently need a gun for self-defence from acquiring it? Of course it will. Taking everything into account, is either proposal worth it? It's hard to say, even if we agreed on the relative importance of competing values. Still, if we cared, we'd look into it.

If we cared, we'd look into a lot of things. What Americans have agreed not to look into is telling.

Perhaps the best way to prevent mass shootings is censorship. For example, it could be made illegal to publish any information at all about mass shooters. No names. No pictures. No probing stories about their fraught home lives. Nothing. Maybe it wouldn't work, and mass killers would nevertheless go on to achieve through their evil work the glory of infamy. Then again, maybe it would work. Shouldn't we be willing to at least consider a small abridgement of the first amendment, if doing so would save even one child from a horrific death?

The fact is, most of us would rather lose an abstract kid or two than resort to this sort of censorship. We don't like to admit that, so we tend to deny that it would work. But nobody actually knows it wouldn't work.

Less extreme forms of censorship might also help. There is some research that suggests that, on the whole, violent movies and video-games have no effect on levels of violent crime. Shoot-em-up games may even provide a peaceful outlet for some violent urges! Sure. But these general results tell us nothing at all about the forces in play in particular mass shootings.

James Holmes murdered 12 people last year in a Colorado movie theater that was playing a "Batman" film. His hair was died bright red in homage to the Joker, Batman's mass-murdering enemy. He was inspired by the Joker's terrorising carnage to commit a similar act of his own. To insist that extremely violent American entertainments had nothing to do with this is willfully obtuse. Similarly, Adam Lanza spent a huge portion of his waking hours locked in a blacked-out room playing grisly first-person shooter games. There's even some evidence that Lanza approached his attack on Sandy Hook elementary school as though it were a live-action version of one of these games. At his home police reportedly found an enormous spreadsheet documenting the details of previous mass killings. As an anonymous law-enforcement source told Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News:

“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”

I don't know if this is true, but I do know that it's plausible. Suppose it were illegal to sell and buy violent video-games in America. Would Adam Lanza have fixated on something else? Maybe. Would that have saved the 20 children he shot to death. Maybe. Would it have been worth it? Maybe.

If we cared, we'd try to find out. We'd seriously look into the possibility that the gratuitous violence of American popular culture sometimes inspires unstable personalities to re-enact the enormities they've witnessed thousands of times on their screens. We'd debate whether it's worth trading some freedom of expression for a bit more safety. But we won't. We'd rather not think about it.

What about the children? Who cares?

(Photo credit: AFP)

IN THE crowded annals of marital spite, a 2010 divorce in Illinois—involving a Roman Catholic man and a Jewish woman and lavishly covered by the local press—stands out for the irreconcilable nature of its core dispute. The husband converted to Judaism and promised to raise any children as Jewish, but later changed his mind, saying that his unbaptised daughter risked not going to heaven. He had his daughter baptised and e-mailed his wife a photograph of the event—an action that earned him a court order and threats of prison should he take his child to church again. (Joint religious rights were granted in the divorce settlement.)

Yet American rates of inter-faith and inter-denominational marriage are rising, to the point where 45% of marriages in the past decade have involved either two religions or Christian doctrines that clash seriously (that rate includes unions spanning the evangelical and mainstream Protestant traditions—when all Protestants are lumped together, the mixed-marriage rate is 36%). Many are models of tolerance and creativity. Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of a new study of such marriages, records a wedding which featured two New Testament readings, the breaking of a glass (recalling the first-century destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem), the reading of a Jewish marriage contract, a transcendentalist poem and an Apache wedding prayer.

Americans are more likely to marry someone of a different faith than someone who supports a different political party. Jews spotted the trend early, with a 1990 survey triggering alarm when it claimed that more than half of American Jews were marrying out. Inter-faith marriage remains most frequent among Jews (and rarest among Mormons, of all creeds studied). But others have been catching up, with overall rates of such unions more than doubling since the 1960s.

Ms Schaefer Riley—herself Jewish and married to an agnostic Jehovah’s Witness—offers some non-alarming explanations. People are marrying later, often after periods of autonomy as single adults during which family traditions fall away. Americans have long shopped around between faiths—and many who marry across faith lines duly convert. Other factors at work may include Roman Catholicism’s warmer embrace of Judaism after the Second Vatican Council, and the dropping of a rule that non-Catholics marrying Catholics had to vow to raise children in the latter faith.

“’Til Faith Do Us Part”, a book by Ms Schaefer Riley, finds worrying trends too. Inter-faith marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Half of marriages between evangelical Protestants and non-evangelicals fail, and prominent evangelical pastors warn of the “emotional anguish” of marriage to someone who does not share their strict interpretation of faith. Childbirth tends to bring Americans back to religion, and women then tend to take the lead: children in mixed unions are twice as likely to be brought up in their mother’s faith as their father’s, even when that clashes with the paternalist traditions of religions such as Islam. Yet too many inter-faith couples fail to discuss the faith of their future children before marriage, for fear of seeming unromantic or intolerant.

The faithful face a dilemma. With marriage an embattled institution, interfaith weddings are increasingly tolerated, even welcomed. Yet faiths cannot survive too much dilution. America has a talent for solutions based on pragmatism and respect for personal choice: it will be needed.

“WOMEN—no less than other humans, it turns out—can be rational economic actors.” So says Lilian Faulhaber, an associate professor of law at Boston University, in a New York Times op-ed. In light of the high cost of child care, Ms Faulhaber explains, it often makes little economic sense for a middle-class woman to re-enter the job market once she becomes a mother:

Imagine two women on either end of this middle group, each deciding whether to return to work after having their first child. The first woman’s husband makes $25,000, and the job she is considering pays $25,000. The second woman’s husband makes $90,000, and the job she is considering pays $45,000.

If the first woman enters the work force, she and her husband will lose their entire earned-income tax credit of more than $2,500. Because of her husband’s earnings, a portion of her salary will be taxed at 15 percent. After she pays payroll and state taxes, her after-tax income will be close to $17,000. Say she lives in New York State, where the average cost of day care for an infant is just over $14,000—almost every after-tax dollar she brings home will go to her child care provider.

Now consider the second woman. If she were single and without children, her after-tax take-home income would have been around $36,000. But because of her husband’s earnings, almost all of her income will now be taxed at a higher rate, 25 percent. After paying for child care, she will take home only around $16,000. This is not even factoring in the fact that many higher-paying jobs, just the type Ms. Sandberg wants women to lean in to, require longer hours—and the more expensive child care that entails.

Ms Faulhaber admits that her proposals for tweaking the tax code to remove these disincentives are unlikely to “pass in the face of sequestration”. And she is right: expanding the tax credit for child care, permitting parents to claim these costs as a business deduction or offering direct government subsidies for day care are not in the cards in the climate of austerity that has descended on Washington, DC.

Which leads to two questions. What is the rational choice for middle-class women under the present tax structure? And what else might be done to address the inequities mothers face when contemplating a return to their careers?

Parents may choose to take time off to care for a young child regardless of the economic consequences, though this is not a realistic option for many. The calculus facing most middle-class parents today is daunting: it seems pointless to outsource your child’s care in order to take a job with a paycheck that barely covers your day-care provider’s fees. That said, taking a wider view of women’s earning potential shows the myopia of a month-by-month assessment of income versus expenditures. The rational actor’s cost-benefit analysis should consider the impact of opting out of work over a longer time horizon. And as it turns out, the price of exiting the workforce for even a short time is huge.

While many women assume that their skills and professional degrees will be their ticket back into the workforce when they are ready to return, the facts insist otherwise. As Joan Williams, the director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, points out, deciding to delay re-entry until the kids are old enough to fend for themselves entails bigger trade-offs than you might think:

One study found that women who took just one year out of the workforce sacrificed 20% of their lifetime earnings. Women who took two or three years earned 30% less. Another study found that leaving the workforce has a significant negative effect on women’s wages even twenty years after a career interruption. These statistics dramatise the grim fact that women who take a career break are penalised out of proportion to any objective deterioration of their skills.

So if women consult the statistics and really crunch the numbers, they will be more wary of opting out of the workforce when their babies arrive. When mothers attempt to get jobs years later, they have a harder time finding work—Ms Williams cites a study showing that only 74% succeed—and they wind up making less money: only 38% of men’s wages over their prime earning years.

But even if the IRS were friendlier to families with two working parents, mothers would still face considerable hurdles in restarting their careers. It isn’t just tax policy that pushes women out. As Ms Williams notes, the “discriminating and inflexible workplaces” of the American economy are another significant factor:

Of all the triggers of stereotyping in today’s workplace, motherhood triggers the strongest bias... [W]hen researchers gave subjects identical resumes that differed in only one respect—one, but not the other, mentioned membership in the PTA [Parent Teacher Association]—the mothers were 79% less likely to be hired and 100% less likely to be promoted. They were also held to higher performance and punctuality standards if they were hired.

This is the so-called “maternal wall” that makes leaning in such a challenge for working mothers. Overt discrimination by gender may be prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and victims of differential pay may have an easier time proving discrimination in court under the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Act of 2009, but workplaces often remain unwelcoming to mothers, and women continue to earn 23% less than men in comparable positions.

Here are two ideas, on Equal Pay Day (today, symbolically, women’s 2012 salaries catch up with those of men), for improving the status of women in the workforce. First, Congress should pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would prohibit employers from penalising workers who divulge their salaries to colleagues. Free discourse about pay imbalance is a necessary step to exposing—and correcting—it. More quixotically, America needs mandatory paid parental leave. America is one of the few countries to have no legislative provision for fathers or mothers to take paid time off after the arrival of a baby. Some employers would grumble about bearing the cost, but if paid leave became the norm, the family-unfriendly culture in the American workplace may begin to change.

(Photo credit: AFP)

IT IS a bizarre time for women’s health. In March Arkansas passed a law banning abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Then North Dakota went even further, signing a law to ban all abortions after six weeks—six!—the most severe restriction in America. These measures flout legal precedent. Or as Arkansas’s Democratic governor put it (the legislature overrode his veto), his state’s ban is “blatantly unconstitutional”. Even stranger than the current fight over abortion, however, is the current fight over contraception.

Today is the last day for public comment on the contraceptive coverage mandate—Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover contraception without making patients pay an additional fee. It has been the subject of fierce debate for nearly two years. Despite the Obama administration’s attempts at compromise, the fight shows no sign of abating. That is too bad.

One would think that both sides of the abortion debate could rally behind contraception. Young, unmarried women have particularly high rates of unintended pregnancy. In 2008 more than half of these unintended pregnancies ended in abortion. Reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies, reduce the rate of abortion. Expanding access to contraception would seem a reasonable way to advance this goal. But no one can agree on how to do so.

In 2011 the Obama administration proposed that insurers cover contraception for women without a co-pay. The National Academy of Sciences had recommended as much:

Women with unintended pregnancies are more likely to receive delayed or no prenatal care and to smoke, consume alcohol, be depressed, and experience domestic violence during pregnancy. Unintended pregnancy also increases the risk of babies being born preterm or at a low birth weight, both of which raise their chances of health and developmental problems.

Under the health department’s first proposal, insurance plans sponsored by some religious employers would be exempt from the requirement. This did nothing to assuage the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or other conservative groups. So the health department adjusted the proposal in February 2012, then again in February 2013. Under the most recent version, non-profit religious organisations would not have to cover contraception. Female employees would be able to get free contraception through a separate plan, with insurers footing the bill. Those insurers would then pay lower fees on state health-insurance exchanges.

This did not placate the bishops. Thirteen state attorneys general have sent a letter to the health department voicing their own objections. Lawsuits over the mandate continue (Stuart Taylor provides a good overview). The question now is whether the Obama administration will keep trying to find a compromise.

The administration might do well to learn from another recent experiment. In 2011 Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary, took the extraordinary step of rebuffing her own colleague, Margaret Hamburg of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr Hamburg had recommended that emergency contraception be made available to women of all ages without a prescription, as medical societies had urged for years. Mrs Sebelius, mindful of the imminent presidential election, rejected the idea. On April 5th a federal judge scolded her, calling the restriction on emergency contraception “politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.” The judge ordered that emergency contraception be made available over the counter within 30 days.

So, what’s the lesson? There is a limit to how much one should try to please those opposed to contraception. Mrs Sebelius is right to try to accommodate the concerns of religious employers. But at this point, she has to move forward.

THE excitement over the Supreme Court arguments on gay marriage has probably died down until the court comes back with a decision. And what with a majority of senators now in favour, it certainly looks like, whether by judicial or legislative action, gay marriage is on a fairly rapid road to acceptance across America. So this moment, when fewer people are paying attention and it can't do too much harm, seems like a good time for people who support gay marriage to admit that there are a couple of arguments for it which they've always thought were wrong.

Alexander Borinsky's article in N+1 takes up the issue from the perspective of a 20-something gay man who's not entirely comfortable with marriage advocates' campaign to show that gay people's sexual preferences are inborn and involuntary, and to present gay people as non-threateningly monogamous. Sexuality, he feels, is in part something you actively construct as part of the bildungsroman of your life, and that journey for a lot of gay people involves a bunch of sex with strangers. After the dissolution of a relationship led him to a period of screwing around, he writes:

...my promiscuity served a purpose. Abandoning myself to alcohol and flirtation felt like a salvific, if reckless, kind of machismo. Uncommitted sexual encounters meant self-reliance. I vividly remember leaving the house of a waifish, doe-eyed dancer from Devon who grinned and giggled and wore a ripped army jacket. It was around four thirty in the morning. The sex had been terrible, but outside was a lovely, warmish night. As I waited for the night bus I felt disappointed, embarrassed, and a little frightened. I also felt brave, dangerous, and grown...

The urge to prove that I could stand on my own two manly legs came, in part, from the language of helplessness that pervades most messages of gay acceptance: “It’s okay that you’re gay, because you were just born that way. It’s no one’s fault.” Binging and [having sex] made my gayness into, yes, a “lifestyle” choice—not just a hormonal tic I couldn’t help. I was a person making choices, not a sexuality unfolding itself.

Right on. And this kind of sentimental education isn't exclusively or even particularly gay. Who hasn't left the house of a waifish, doe-eyed dancer at 4:30 in the morning? Now, as a heterosexual, I enjoy the privilege of being able to declare that I greatly enjoyed the relatively few such evenings I experienced in my 20s and wish there'd been more of them, without worrying that anyone will then try to deny me the right to get married. But what I was doing, on those evenings, was just as much a volitional construction of my own sexuality and masculinity as what my gay friends were doing at the same age. Mr Borinsky forthrightly notes evidence that gay men are, on average, a lot more promiscuous than straights, which certainly comports with anecdotal experience. And so what? There's no logical or ethical need for proponents of legalising gay marriage to argue that gay men are just as monogamous as straight men, or to imply that being non-monogamous is in itself bad. There may be a political necessity to make that argument, but that's another story.

So there's one aspect of the pro-gay-marriage brief that deserves a mental asterisk. A second argument that has always been a bit weak has been the attempt to minimise the extent to which allowing same-sex marriages will change the definition of marriage for straight married couples. When conservatives have argued that gay marriage would "devalue traditional marriage", the response has often been to ridicule the idea that straight people's marriages will change at all. ("OMG! Marriage is now worthless!") This isn't a serious response. Obviously the legalisation of same-sex marriage represents a major change in the institution and in the meaning of the word, much as the meaning of phrases like "all men are created equal" changed significantly when they began to be understood to include, say, women. For people who have a strongly gendered understanding of their own marriage, this is a paradigm shift. The government is now saying it understands marriage as a long-term legal commitment between two people who are assumed to have a sexually attached relationship to each other. Gender is irrelevant; marriage is simply a paired relationship. It's a big deal when social institutions change this way, and if conservative heterosexuals feel their marriages are affected, they're right, even when the way they phrase their complaints is wrong.

Which brings us to moderately off-the-mark argument number three. One of the assumptions that gay marriage calls into question, for many conservatives, is: why pairs, then? If not man-woman, then why not man-woman-woman, and so forth? Again, the response of gay-marriage proponents is generally ridicule. I don't think this is a ridiculous question. "Why can't you marry your dog, then?" is a ridiculous question; marriage, in our society, is between consenting adult persons. (Though states where girls can marry below the age of legal adulthood violate this premise, and show the traces of a premodern understanding of marriage as a reproductive contract between extended families that few Americans would say they support today.) But "why only two?" isn't a ridiculous question. It's easy enough to show that gay marriage does not empirically lead to pressure to legalise polygamy; that hasn't happened anywhere that gay marriage is legal. But this is different from explaining why opening up the boundaries of the 20th-century understanding of marriage shouldn't raise the possibility of legalising polygamy. Why shouldn't it be legal for more than two consenting adults to marry each other?

There are, obviously, a whole lot of societies in the world where polygamy is legal and normal. In fact the anthropological record suggests that the overwhelming majority of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife simultaneously. I don't want to be taken to be making a creepy dirty-old-man argument in favour of polygamy. But the reflexive belief that polygamous marriages must be evil and oppressive even in societies where they are traditional is basically an expression of cultural prejudice. I would never want to be in a polygamous marriage myself, because I've grown up in the West and it seems freaky and inegalitarian to me; but for people who grew up in Yemen, or in Swaziland, or in Vietnam before the 1950s, that is not necessarily the case. Women in polygamous societies may decide to become a rich man's second wife rather than a poor man's only wife, and do not necessarily feel oppressed by that choice. Their children usually turn out well-adjusted. To take the typical paradigm-upender, if you imagine a Sudanese man with two wives (and children by each of them) who wins the Green Card lottery and is told he has to divorce one of his wives before coming to America, you have to wonder whose interests the government thinks it is defending.

And yet modernisation in almost every country seems to entail a shift from polygamy to monogamy. This is actually something of a puzzle, according to "The puzzle of monogamous marriage", a paper published last year by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia, Robert Boyd of UCLA, and Peter Richerson of the University of California Davis. It's particularly confusing, they note, in that in any polygamous society, the most powerful men are likely to be the ones who benefit from polygamy. How does a society make a shift in norms that greatly disadvantages its most powerful members? Their argument is that in the case of Europe, the dynamic that led pagan, polygamous Germanic tribes to shift to monogamy and Christianity was competition between proto-states at the group level. In polygamous societies, high-status men marry a disproportionate share of the women, leaving low-status men to fight and scramble for the rest. Monogamous European societies outperformed polygamous societies economically and on the battlefield, the argument runs, because low-status males in polygamous societies were more often engaged in debilitating violence against each other. So monogamous Christian societies defeated and converted polygamous heathen ones, and monogamy gradually spread.

Now this argument may well be wrong. But any other plausible explanation is likely to be similar in that it explains the transition in terms of enhancing the economic welfare and institutional reach of monogamous cultures and states. Monogamy thrives in the service of power. Having grown up in a monogamous society, we respond instinctively to its myths: the brilliant state-building legend of Romeo and Juliet, "one girl, one boy"( to quote the Leonard Bernstein version), the might of the sovereign ("the Prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in Verona streets!") decreeing that marriage as a tool of clan alliance or rivalry will make way for marriage as a pairing of two autonomous individuals in a romantic attachment, answerable to no one but the law. This is the way the state will recognise sexual bonding, because this is the codification of sexual bonding that makes for the strongest state. We absorb these norms, we learn to embrace them, we thrill to them from the age when we watch our first Disney film. Today, gay men and women want to have their sexual bonding embraced within the same norms, to achieve equality, and that's their right. But my guess is that the real answer to the conservative question "why not more than two people, then?" is that we will stick to pairs because marriage is a creature of the state and pairs are the form that makes the state strongest. Nobody, though, gays or conservatives, finds this way of thinking about the issue very appealing, so it probably won't get much play.

(Photo credit: AFP)

NEXT week, Barack Obama will release a budget that modifies the government's method of adjusting Social Security benefits to changes in the cost of living. Currently, cost-of-living adjustments are determined by a version of the Consumer Price Index, the CPI-W, that is believed by most economists to overstate inflation by failing to take into account the way consumers respond to price increases in one good by shifting to lower-priced substitutes. For example, if the price of beef rises faster than the price of chicken, consumers will tend to eat more chicken and less beef. If we assume that this shift doesn't deliver a significant blow to consumers' quality of life, a price index oblivious to this change in consumption patterns will deliver a misleading picture of the change in the cost of living. The so-called "chained CPI", the C-CPI-U, which the president's budget will endorse, is sensitive to substitution, and is widely believed a superior metric of inflation.

There are two primary objections to moving to the chained CPI. The first is that the move amounts to a cut in Social Security benefits. The second is that the chained CPI understates increases in the cost of living for Social Security recipients by failing to account for the distinctive consumption habits of older Americans. Paul Krugman sums up the liberal criticism of Mr Obama's proposal:

This is, purely and simply, a benefit cut.

Does it make sense in policy terms? No. First of all, there is no reason to believe that the chained index is a better measure of inflation facing seniors than the standard CPI. It’s true that the standard measure arguably understates inflation for the typical household — but seniors have a different consumption basket from the young, one that includes more medical expenses, and probably face true inflation that’s higher, not lower, than the official measure.

These two objections are related in a subtle way not usually drawn out by commentators. Whether a move to the chained CPI represents a reduction in benefits depends on whether inflation is currently overstated due to substitution bias. If it is, each cost-of-living adjustment, as currently calculated, represents a real increase in the purchasing power of Social Security recipients. It's easy to see why one might wish to avoid continuously raising benefits in a programme already on a precarious fiscal footing. Moreover, only in politics does a decrease in the rate of increase constitute a "cut". That said, Mr Krugman may be right that the substitution bias of the unchained CPI more or less compensates for the fact that seniors face a higher rate of inflation than does the average consumer, due to the rapidly rising cost of health care. Is he?

As it happens, the Bureau of Labour Statistics maintains an experimental CPI for the elderly, the CPI-E. According to the BLS, "From December 1982 through December 2011, the all-items CPI-E rose at an annual average rate of 3.1 percent, compared with increases of 2.9 percent for both the CPI-U and CPI-W." It is the cost of health-care, as well as housing, that accounts for the CPI-E outpacing the CPI-W. (A chained CPI-E might diverge more or less from the chained CPI, depending on the degree of substitution bias in the CPI-E.)

Is Mr Krugman vindicated? It's not so clear.

The BLS goes on to report, "From 2006 to 2011, both the all-items CPI-E and the CPI-U rose at an average annual rate of 2.3 percent, while the CPI-W increased 2.4 percent." That is to say, in recent years, the elderly faced a slightly lower rate of inflation than the average consumer. Why?

This turnaround was caused primarily by changes in the relative inflation rates of medical care and shelter, compared with the overall inflation rate. Specifically, the gap between medical care inflation and overall inflation has generally fallen since 2005, and shelter inflation has been rising slightly more slowly than overall inflation over the 2006–2011 period.

Though seniors spend a larger-than-average portion of their budgets on health care and shelter, they spend a smaller-than-average portion on several other important categories. To simplify slightly, the standard CPI understates inflation for seniors only as long as the rate of health-care inflation outpaces inflation generally. If Obamacare succeeds in "bending the cost curve", and actually brings health-care costs down, as Mr Obama's budget assumes it will, then, other things equal, the CPI-E will trail even further behind CPI-W. If it turns out that the chained CPI also overstates the rate of inflation facing the elderly, then using the chained CPI to calculate cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security benefits will continue to represent an ongoing increase in their real value, albeit at a lower rate of increase than the one recipients currently enjoy. In that case, Mr Krugman is wrong on both counts: the move to the chained CPI would not amount to a cut, nor would it understate changes in costs facing seniors. To put it another way, if Mr Krugman agrees that Obamacare will succeed in containing health-care costs, he's probably wrong about the chained CPI, according to his own assumptions.

In any case, why not just index Social Security to a chained variant of the CPI-E? That seems like the obvious, honest thing to do. Well, the BLS warns that the the CPI-E isn't quite ready for prime-time, and that it isn't calibrated exactly to the class of Americans receiving Social Security benefits. However, if Mr Obama were to ask, no doubt he would receive.

(Photo credit: AFP)

MANY bloggers have taken note of this new poll from Public Policy Polling, which shows that a disturbingly large number of Americans believe in conspiracy theories. But not all conspiracy theories are created equal: some are more fanciful than others. For example, 14% of registered voters believe in Bigfoot, 21% believe a UFO crashed at Roswell and the government covered it up (more Romney voters than Obama voters believe that, for what it's worth) and 28% believe a "secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order".

That last one is interesting. Perhaps over a quarter of American voters believe in some global cabal with authoritarian aspirations. On the other hand, perhaps this is a way for some Americans (a plurality of Romney voters in fact) to express their concerns over international organisations and global financial institutions. Such concerns don't seem nearly as loopy as believing in a "New World Order". Similarly, the poll shows that 37% of voters (and 61% of Romney voters) believe global warming "is a hoax". But many of these folks are probably more accurately described as being sceptical of climate science, which isn't the same thing. (Take that debate here, please.)

In other words, the answers to many of these questions act as proxies for broader opinions, especially when the respondents are uninformed on the specific topic. For example, 28% of voters (36% of Romney voters) believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, while 11% of voters (13% of Obama voters) believe the government knowingly allowed 9/11 to happen. Some of these people are no doubt ill-informed, but others are probably just expressing their opinions about the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush more generally.

Here's another example: 13% of voters, and 22% of Romney voters, think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. While I'm sure some of these folks are thinking in eschatological terms, others probably just think Mr Obama is a big jerk who's ruining America. And what to make of the 5% of Obama voters who think the president is the anti-Christ? Are these people trying to usher in the End Times? We should probably consider the possibility that a few respondents answered randomly or were messing with the pollsters. Or perhaps one in 25 voters really do believe that lizard people control the levers of power in the world.

(Photo credit: AFP)

ON MARCH 29th, a grand jury in Fulton County, in which most of Atlanta lies, returned a 65-count indictment against 35 teachers and administrators in the Atlanta public-school system. Among those charged was Beverly Hall, Atlanta's former superintendent of schools. During her tenure she racked up an impressive array of awards and accolades for the stunning gains in test scores achieved by Atlanta's students. But prosecutors, as well as an investigative team assembled by former-Governor Sonny Perdue allege that those gains rested on neither pedagogy nor diligent study, but on something far simpler and more invidious: cheating.

An 800-page report details how the cheating occurred. Sometimes teachers gave students the right answers during tests; sometimes they gave them out before testing began; most often, though, they simply collected the students' test papers and changed the wrong answers to right ones. The indicted teachers were charged with racketeering, making false statements, tampering with witnesses and, because many of them received bonus checks based on apparently falsified results, theft (not all teachers and administrators face all charges).

Two debates have sprung up around this indictment, one largely Atlanta-centred and one national. Let's do the first one first. Shirley Franklin, who was mayor of Atlanta during most of Ms Hall's tenure atop the school system, wrote on her blog yesterday that "cheating is awful. And so is conviction before a fair trial...[S]ay a prayer for a fair trial for all those charged, say a prayer for every family and child who has been touched by the scandal and say a prayer to calm the public lynching mob mentality that has begun." Ahem. The Atlanta Journal Constitution first uncovered questionable test-score jumps in 2008. Mr Perdue assembled his investigative team in 2010. It released its report in 2011. It is now 2013. "Public lynchings" usually do not take five years.

Undoubtedly, people are angry. If the material contained in the report is true, they have every reason to be angry: their children were cheated. Teachers allegedly manipulated results to make themselves look good and to win accolades and financial rewards that they did not deserve. They did so at the expense of the people they should have been helping. Ms Franklin is absolutely correct that everyone deserves a fair trial. But that does not preclude the public from voicing—civilly and non-violently, of course—outrage that appears to be entirely justified. (There is, by the way, a valid point she could have made about prosecutorial overreach: if convicted on all counts Ms Hall could face 45 years in prison, and prosecutors initially recommended a $7.5m bond, both of which seem unduly harsh. And there is always a valid argument to be made against wanton use of RICO laws. But if there is any reason to doubt that the accused will face as fair a trial as Georgia's courts can afford, Ms Franklin ought to present it.)

The second debate concerns over-reliance on testing as a metric for evaluating teacher quality. Eugene Robinson writes that "the fashionable theory of school reform—requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores—is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket." Also at the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss writes that of the "dozens" of cheating scandals across the country, only Atlanta's was thoroughly investigated, because only Georgia's governor empowered an investigative team. But the other scandals, like Atlanta's, "have been a result of test-obsessed school reform". When the report came out in 2011 Dana Goldstein wrote a nice piece for Slate making a similar point.

Jonathan Chait, proving that the New Republic is less a magazine than a state of mind, makes the counterintuitive argument that teacher incentives ought to remain tied to test scores, even though doing so seems to encourage cheating. "Incentivizing any field," he writes, "encourages people to cheat." Students have long cheated because they have a reason to do it. Given the choice between a system in which teachers' pay is tied to performance, and one in which pay is tied solely to tenure, choose the former, but improve it.

The devil, as always, is in the details. Nobody likes "teaching to the test": not teachers, not students and not parents. As a retiring teacher writes in his valediction, current educational philosophy "strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than the classroom." At those lines I can hear anyone who ever had an inspiring teacher cheer. Teaching to the test restrains those teachers: in trying to bring the bottom up, it also (and that is a generous "also") brings the top down. We must find a way to allow good teachers to flourish. But we need not tolerate those who game whatever system is in place.

“EVERY major policy issue has been resolved,” declared Charles Schumer, one of eight senators seeking to draft a bipartisan bill to reform America’s immigration system. The “Gang of Eight”, he continued, would unveil their proposal in days; it would putter through the Judiciary Committee this month, and reach the Senate floor in May. “We’re on track,” he concluded, in a television interview this week. If he is right, an issue that has dogged American politics for a generation, left 11m people in limbo and steadily undermined the Republican Party’s prospects, is on the verge of resolution.

Not everyone, even within the Gang of Eight, seems quite so confident. Marco Rubio, the group’s most conservative member, says reports of success “are premature”. At least one element of the bill, a scheme to admit agricultural workers on a temporary basis, has proved especially thorny to negotiate. Many Republicans are still averse to any reprieve for America’s 11m illegal immigrants, despite the dreadful showing this stance earned them among Hispanic voters at last year’s elections. But the momentum in favour of reform is clearly building.

Mr Schumer’s crowing was prompted by a deal on visas for low-skilled workers between the two pressure groups to which the gang had delegated the subject: the AFL-CIO, America’s biggest confederation of trade unions, and the United States Chamber of Commerce, which represents business. Bickering on this topic contributed to the collapse of the last big push for immigration reform, in 2007. This time the two sides have agreed on an elaborate formula which would hand out more visas when the economy is strong and fewer when it is weaker. Businesses would benefit from the admission of as many as 200,000 workers a year when times are good (and as few as 20,000 when they are not). The unions, meanwhile, are pleased with wording intended to prevent an influx of new labour from depressing wages or undermining workers’ rights. The main beneficiaries, naturally, would be the visa recipients, who would be allowed to change jobs and apply for permanent residence after a year—as they cannot do now.

The gang’s bill is expected to boost the number of visas for skilled workers too, especially in high-tech fields, and to make it easier for foreign graduates of American universities to settle in America. The senators are also rewriting the rules on the admission of seasonal farm labourers, a job largely filled by illegal immigrants at the moment, thanks in part to the cumbersomeness of the official scheme. They had hoped to win the approval of both growers’ associations and the United Farm Workers (UFW), the biggest agricultural union. But the two sides are at an impasse. The farmers had wanted to adjust the official formula for setting the guest workers’ wages; the union complained that they were trying to suppress wages in general.

Nonetheless, the dispute is unlikely to derail the bill, because the main concern of both sides is not regulating the future flow of new farm workers, but normalising the status of those who are already in America. The country’s 11m “undocumented” immigrants represent a huge pool of recruits for the unions and new hires for business. Although most of them work, their shadowy status exposes employers to legal penalties and the immigrants themselves to exploitation. The Gang of Eight has agreed that their bill will provide these unfortunates not only with some sort of formal legal status, but also with the chance to become citizens eventually.

Just how arduous that process is will be the main point of contention when the bill is unveiled. Republicans have long resisted anything that smacks of amnesty. Democrats, meanwhile, warn against any requirements that are so onerous as to exclude large numbers of the undocumented. The Gang of Eight has already agreed that most illegal immigrants will have to prove that they have worked, pay back taxes and pass both a background check and a test of civics and English, among other requirements, before they can become permanent residents and, eventually, citizens.

The path to citizenship can be long, argues Angela Kelley of the Centre for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, as long as it is wide. Many immigrants would struggle to prove their employment history, she notes, since those who hire them are breaking the law and thus tend to avoid much of a paper trail. By the same token, fees or fines that might seem lenient to a middle-class Republican primary voter would be unaffordable for many illegal immigrants. $10,000, for example, would represent over a third of annual household income for half of those in America illegally, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-immigration think-tank.

Another issue bound to provoke debate in the Senate is the policing of America’s borders. The Gang of Eight has agreed that security must get tighter before any illegals can receive green cards (the document conveying permanent residence), to prevent a wave of new immigrants seeking to exploit the reforms. In fact, security on the Mexican border is already fearsome, and unauthorised crossings are at their lowest levels in decades (although the weak economy on the northern side and declining birth rates on the southern one also play a part). Moreover, it is impossible to seal such a long and rugged frontier completely. That leaves Democrats fearful that Republicans will set an unreasonable standard, and Republicans suspicious of a Democratic fudge. A possible solution, suggests Ms Kelley, is to set objective goals, in terms of miles of fencing built, numbers of border-patrol agents deployed, and so on.

Immigration advocates seem confident that these hurdles will be overcome, because the political logic in favour of a deal is so strong. They point to the many Republicans who have moderated their opposition to immigration reform since the elections. Rand Paul, a libertarian senator with a big tea-party following, recently made positive noises. Eric Cantor, the number two in the Republican hierarchy in the House of Representatives, has dropped his opposition to a scheme to give green cards to certain illegal immigrants brought to America as children. The involvement of Mr Rubio, another darling of the tea party, gives the initiative credibility on the right. It is telling that opponents of reform have taken to complaining less about the substance of the proposals and more about the haste with which they are being pursued.

The overwhelming majority of the Senate’s 53 Democrats and two independents are expected to support the reforms, leaving only a handful of Republican votes needed to reach the 60 vote threshold to overcome a filibuster. At the very least, the four Republican members of the Gang of Eight are likely to support their own bill, along with a few other moderates. The mechanics in the House are more complicated: its Republican majority includes many fierce opponents of any leniency towards illegal immigrants. But the Republican leadership, says Jeff Hauser of the AFL-CIO, will not want to be seen as sabotaging the reforms. In the end, he predicts, they will allow a vote on any bill the Senate produces, in the expectation that it will pass mainly with Democratic support. Shepherding an immigration bill through Congress may be a daunting task, but snuffing one out is beginning to look more daunting still.

HEALTH insurers won a remarkable victory this week. On Monday the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would raise payments to private Medicare plans, rather than cut them as it had suggested in February. Insurers’ stocks jumped. Hopes for sensible health policy sank.

The February proposal, which cut the per-capita growth rate in Medicare payments, was not well crafted. The cuts would have added to existing reductions in Obamacare. But the change is disheartening for two reasons.

First, it shows the immense power wielded by health insurers. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry’s lobby, bought television advertisements and rallied allies in Congress. This trumped calculations by health officials, who said the lower rate reflected a broader slowdown in costs.

Second, the new rate is explicitly calculated to account for congressional dysfunction. It assumes that Congress will continue to postpone Medicare payment cuts to doctors in what has become known as the “doc fix”. This may be a safe prediction, but it is a strange foundation for policy. Medicare’s actuary is miffed: “Although the Office of the Actuary agrees that Congress is very likely to override the physician fee reduction, the assumption conflicts with the Office’s professional judgment that, as in all past years, the determination should be based on current law, not an assumed alternative.”

Other efforts to find savings in health care may be similarly fruitless. Democrats and Republicans agree on few things, but with the medtech lobby they stand united. Last month the Senate voted, 79-20, to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices. The industry has spent more than $90m on lobbying since 2010, when the law was passed.

THE past few years have brought little relief for pinched state finances. But on March 22nd 75 senators, including majorities of both parties, approved an amendment to a proposed federal budget which, if enacted, would allow states to collect taxes on sales by internet retailers based in other states.

It makes no economic sense to tax sales in shops and over the internet differently. The prohibition is constitutional. In 1992 the Supreme Court ruled that states could not force out-of-state retailers to collect tax on sales to residents unless Congress, which oversees interstate commerce, said so. Only retailers with a physical presence—a “nexus”, in the legal jargon—in the state could be taxed.

The economic consequences were relatively minor before Amazon and eBay appeared. Not any more. Since 1994, mail-order and internet sellers have grown from 2% of total retail sales to 7%. In the past five years, while retail sales have risen by 10% and total state and local taxes by 9%, sales-tax revenue is up just 2%. The National Conference of State Legislatures reckons that the court’s prohibition cost states $23 billion in lost taxes last year.

In theory, online customers are required to pay sales tax themselves. Unsurprisingly—since there are no means of enforcement, and no customs stations on state lines—few do. This galls traditional retailers like Best Buy and Target, who must charge tax not only in shops but also online in states where they have stores.

States have tried to find ways round the court’s ruling. Illinois redefined “nexus” to include local third-party affiliates who sell through larger web outfits, such as Amazon. Colorado ordered retailers to send customers a tax bill and report them to the tax collector. New York has defined “nexus’ to include any shop that can be reached by clicking through on a New York-based website. All have faced legal challenges: Illinois and Colorado have lost in court, although New York’s tactic has recently been upheld.

Retailers and state and local governments have long recognised that the ideal solution would be for Congress to allow states to tax the internet. But previous legislative efforts have stirred furious opposition from anti-tax activists and discomfort among many Republicans, who think this sounds like a new tax. Although the activists remain opposed, Republicans are increasingly sympathising with retailers and with local governments that are trying to build public works, such as sewers, while their tax base migrates into cyberspace. “You can’t flush your toilet over the internet,” says Mike Enzi, a Republican senator from Wyoming who spearheaded the amendment with Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois.

The Marketplace Fairness Act, as the proposal is called, allows states that simplify their sales-tax laws to compel online retailers to collect taxes. In preparation for passage, 24 states have joined a coalition that harmonises and simplifies sales-tax collection, for example by using common definitions of goods that are subject to tax. That would soothe e-tailers’ worries about collecting different taxes in thousands of state and local jurisdictions. Amazon, one of the fiercest opponents of state-level efforts to collect internet taxes, backs the federal law, while warning against too high a threshold for exempting small sellers, now set at $1m. EBay, on the other hand, opposes any bill without a “robust” exemption. The law would not overturn the federal prohibition on taxing purely digital goods, such as internet access and e-mail.

Although a similar bill has bipartisan support in the House of Representatives, House leaders have yet to get behind it. Even the Senate must find another way to pass the legislation, since the March budget resolution is non-binding. Advocates believe that the best hope may lie in comprehensive tax reform. Buried in a slew of more sweeping changes, a heavier touch on e-commerce might go unnoticed.

(Photo credit: AFP)

IN 2010 a panel created by the White House estimated that American taxpayers spend 7.6 billion hours and some $140 billion a year keeping the IRS off their backs. According to the Washington Post over 80% of taxpayers use software or pay someone to file their taxes. The national taxpayer advocate, a sort-of in-house IRS watchdog, once said, "If tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States." But of course, it is an industry.

It is an industry made up of accountants and companies like H&R Block and Intuit, which makes the TurboTax software used by many Americans. And it is an industry that, according to ProPublica, has worked hard to keep the IRS from preparing your tax returns for you for free. Intuit, for example, has spent millions lobbying the federal government, opposing bills that would allow the IRS to send you pre-filled-in returns (the agency already has most of your relevant information) and supporting bills that would ban the practice.

A large number of Americans might cringe at the idea of allowing the IRS to prepare their tax returns. The agency would likely err on the side of higher taxes, right? But such a system is already in place in many European countries (where the tax codes are admittedly simpler) and there are few complaints. The system would work something like this: the IRS would use the information it already has to fill in a standard return (a rather effortless process for the government), which would then be sent to you to accept, edit or reject and replace with a new return if you think you can do better.

For those with simple tax returns the system would save enormous amounts of time and a bit of money. Most of us, though, would likely reject the IRS effort and still file our own returns using software or tax preparers. Since that's what we're doing anyway, it's no skin off our backs. It may seem odd for a company like Intuit to lobby against such a system, seeing as it (like many of its competitors) already offers free tax software for filers with easy returns. But on top losing customers who might needlessly pay for the premium goods, it would lose the ability to hook taxpayers on their products before their lives, in the eyes of the IRS, get more complicated. (It's generally easier to stick with one brand of tax software, as opposed to jumping around each year.)

A business protecting its interests in Washington is nothing new. The dynamic here is actually quite familiar to tax analysts. Intuit stands to lose a lot more than any individual taxpayer stands to gain from IRS-prepared returns. It is this same dynamic that keeps America's byzantine tax code, which is the underlying problem, in place. The code is a complicated mess because the gains any individual taxpayer might experience from reform pale in comparison to the losses that would be experienced by certain interest groups. As Jonathan Bernstein puts it, "Revenue-neutral tax reform almost certainly creates marginal winners and solid losers, which means that tax reform legislation produces intense opposition and mild support."

That is why politicians, like Paul Ryan, speak of tax reform in vague (unrealistic) terms. The details would provoke outrage from groups with armies of lobbyists who are willing to storm Washington in order to hang onto their favourable treatment. Just look at the effort put forth by Intuit. The suffering masses, meanwhile, will remain home, quietly cursing each question posed by their TurboTax software.

(Photo credit: AFP)

YESTERDAY in the New York Times, Peter Baker explored the irony of the accelerating acceptance of same-sex marriage in America. “Gay rights advocates,” he wrote, “may become a victim of their own political success.” With nine states and the District of Columbia now permitting same-sex unions, nationwide popular opinion swinging in favour of marriage equality and more and more political figures—even some conservative legislators—withdrawing or muting their opposition, gay-rights lobby groups have achieved more than they could have possibly dreamt in the past decade. Yet this success makes it harder to present gays and lesbians as a politically oppressed class deserving of special judicial protection. Here is how Mr Baker put it:

[M]omentum in the political world for gay rights could actually limit momentum in the legal world. While the court may throw out a federal law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the justices signaled over two days of arguments that they might not feel compelled to intervene further, since the democratic process seems to be playing out on its own, state by state, elected official by elected official.

Forty years ago in Frontiero v Richardson, the Supreme Court considered an episode of gender discrimination in a very similar political context. It was 1973, the height of the second-wave feminist movement, and women’s liberation was in the air. Billie Jean King, the American tennis star, defeated the woman-bashing Bobby Riggs in a challenge match, prompting Howard Cosell to call the event "a cause célèbre, equal rights for women". It was also the era of Roe v Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), one of only six proposed amendments in American history that would garner the required two-thirds vote in Congress but fail to be ratified by the requisite number of states.

In this charged atmosphere, an air-force lieutenant, Sharon Frontiero, sued when the military denied her application for health and housing benefits for her husband. According to the military rule, in order for a servicewoman’s spouse to be granted benefits, she had to prove that he was dependent on her for more than half of his support. Since Sharon’s husband Joseph could not, he did not qualify as a “dependent”. But if Sharon and Joseph’s roles had been switched, the benefits would have flowed without question: the wives of servicemen were automatically assumed to be their husbands’ dependents.

The Supreme Court found the discriminatory policy to violate the constitution, but in their decision, a majority of the justices refused to use “strict scrutiny” as the adjudicative standard. The low-bar “rational basis test”, used by the justices to invalidate unequal treatment of women for the first time two years earlier, was enough to identify the discrimination: the military could not prove any benefit from treating female air-force officers differently from their male counterparts.

This may be just how the Supreme Court will handle the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), argued on Wednesday. This case, like Frontiero, is really about benefits. It concerns the myriad federal rights and protections—from the estate-tax exemption to immigration rights—that legally married same-sex couples lack. What could be the government’s reasonable cause for excluding gays and lesbians from these benefits? As Justice Ginsburg put it in a question to the lawyer defending DOMA, in Reed v Reed, the 1971 case serving as precedent for Frontiero, “the Court said this is rank discrimination and it failed” to pass the minimal scrutiny of the rational basis test. Three years after Frontiero, the court adopted a new standard of heightened scrutiny for gender and sex classifications (ironically, in a case involving discrimination against young men), but it has never used anything but the rational basis test when examining discrimination by sexual orientation. It appears that the Supreme Court need not endorse the view of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that heightened scrutiny be applied in order to nullify DOMA’s federal definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.

The lesson of Frontiero suggests why the justices may demur from announcing a heightened standard of review in the marriage cases, and why gays and lesbians outside of California may not win a univeral right to marry throughout America. Back in 1973, the American Civil Liberties Union laywer arguing Frontiero’s case, a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, came up one vote shy in her effort to get the court to view gender discrimination as worthy of extra judicial scrutiny. Given the surge of interest in addressing women’s rights in the early 1970s, Justice Powell wrote on behalf of two fellow justices, the time was not ripe:

There is another, and I find compelling, reason for deferring a general categorizing of sex classifications as invoking the strictest test of judicial scrutiny. The Equal Rights Amendment, which if adopted will resolve the substance of this precise question, has been approved by the Congress and submitted for ratification by the States. If this Amendment is duly adopted, it will represent the will of the people accomplished in the manner prescribed by the Constitution. By acting prematurely and unnecessarily, as I view it, the Court has assumed a decisional responsibility at the very time when state legislatures, functioning within the traditional democratic process, are debating the proposed Amendment. It seems to me that this reaching out to pre-empt by judicial action a major political decision which is currently in process of resolution does not reflect appropriate respect for duly prescribed legislative processes.

This is exactly the worry many of the justices seemed to voice during Tuesday’s oral argument: it would be unwise to intervene judicially in a nationwide conversation that seems to be heading inexorably toward more widespread legal recognition of same-sex unions. The next paragraph in Justice Powell’s Frontiero concurrence—even if it wasn't to be for the ERA—is entirely apposite to this week’s cases:

There are times when this Court, under our system, cannot avoid a constitutional decision on issues which normally should be resolved by the elected representatives of the people. But democratic institutions are weakened, and confidence in the restraint of the Court is impaired, when we appear unnecessarily to decide sensitive issues of broad social and political importance at the very time they are under consideration within the prescribed constitutional processes.