Plumbers vs Waterless Urinals

In many ways, life is better on this side of the Colorado. For example, however crazy we are about immigration--and wasn't that craziness imported from So. Cal?--the pollution in our air doesn't cause the sort of dementia that makes waterless urinals controversial.

Via Wired, we have a report that the plumbers' union in Southern California attempted to ban waterless urinals, and that it made some rather nutty claims to support this:

To buttress their health claims, plumbing unions in California hired Phyllis Fox, an environmental engineer and water quality specialist. She conducted her own analysis, which involved visiting men’s rooms to acquaint herself with the subject matter. Fox didn’t perform any tests, but by examining the designs of the Falcon and other waterless urinals, she concluded that hydrogen sulfide gases in the sewer lines could escape when the cartridges were replaced, resulting in “unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis, and death.” In other words, the waterless urinal could kill.

Yes, janitors in the many Arizona public buildings with flushless urinals die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. All the time. That is, if they survive traffic: our gun laws mean that shootouts over lane changes and parking disputes happen everyday.

But seriously, this dispute shouldn't be happening. Other states can look to Arizona and conclude that flushless urinals are safe and effective.

Read the original article: it has quite a few Arizona connections, including a somewhat humorous account of a plumbing incident at Fort Huachuca, and some interesting facts. I had no idea how much electricity was used for water pumping, and didn't consider that flushing a urinal aerosolized bacteria, either.

On Earth Day, I recommended that more businesses install these urinals, and additionally that people just "lift a leg" from time to time. There's no sense in contaminating clean drinking water with human waste.

Campus carry moving along in Virginia; when can we start calling AZ "Overdue"?

Via Dave Hardy, news that George Mason University's firearms ban is being challenged in Virginia's Supreme Court.

Arizona statutes explicitly delegate authority to regulate firearms at the state universities to the Board of Regents, which means that a VA-style challenge could not be made here, or at least that it would have to be structured differently.

But at issue in the appeal are the question of whether or not a carry ban violates the Second Amendment and whether or not prohibiting carry at a University is truly a compelling government interest, whether, if the government has a compelling interest that would necessitate limitations on RKBA, outright carry bans are narrowly tailored, and whether prohibiting students from keeping arms in their dormitories is, following the holding in Heller, unconstitutional. While Virginia law is not Arizona law and Virginia precedents are not binding here, state courts draw on the reasoning of other states' courts frequently, thus our attention in AZ should be on VA.

Moreover, if the appellants prevail, Virginia will join Utah and Colorado in allowing carry at state Universities; as more colleges, public or private, permit carry, the paranoid fantasies of the ban proponents lose credibility. We will, of course, still hear them, and they will, of course, still receive press coverage, regardless. It's over 20 years after Florida passed concealed carry, and the hoplophobes still repeat the arguments they made there every time liberalization is proposed elsewhere, and they are still taken seriously by the press. But it's much easier to point to examples of success than to take the lead ourselves--"Utah students can carry, and it hasn't been a problem--"no matter how much it'd be better for us to have been the leaders in this.

From the road #2: A partial solution to road shrapnel

Cyclists in the Tucson area, especially in the Mountain Avenue corridor populated by under-mature college brats, encounter much more glass than they should, and throughout Arizona we commonly see roadside beer and pop cans, more glass still, and "urban flotsam" even in Garden Canyon and Oak Creek. It's a hazard to cyclists and an eyesore to everyone else. "There ought to be a law!", the vulgar might say. There already is a law: both the State and municipalities will fine litterers of the public streets and highways.

The law is a "stick"; a "carrot" is also possible. I remember, vaguely, grocery stores taking refillable bottles back and refunding deposits until the mid-1980s, at least in the Chicago area, but this seemed to have stopped when pop stopped being sold primarily in glass bottles. Bottles and cans to this day are stamped with "HI" and "MI" and "CRV" bottle deposit indicators or values--I've noticed these but didn't think too much of the system or directly encounter it until this trip.

One doesn't see bottles along the roads even in poorer or shabbier areas of CA like one does in e.g. South Tucson or the student-populated areas. There are some, but fewer. Perhaps a cultural difference is involved--I cannot say definitively--but I suspect that the State's bottle deposit program has something to do with it. This is what "CRV" indicates on some containers: California "Cash Return Value" of five cents for small bottles and cans and ten cents for those holding more than twenty-four fluid ounces. One pays a deposit at checkout and collects it at service counters or very nifty "reverse vending machines" which scan the bottles and give cash or cash-equivalent coupons in return.

This incentive may seem small, but there's little inconvenience associated with it and it can be a non-insignificant portion of the grocery bill for many. Moreover, it gives bums some other easy means to earn a little cash than "spanging" and gets both them and largely idle kids picking up after less conscientious neighbors and hauling the containers to the grocery store. And it puts recycling, something which some people don't do seemingly out of spite--it's no harder to throw the wine bottle into the blue bin!--into a nicely Sunnsteinian choice architecture. Roughly 78% of bottles are recycled in states with deposit programs, whereas only 23% are recycled elsewhere.

Bottlebill.org keeps track of efforts to pass bottle deposit bills. Their records have a such a bill being introduced in Arizona in 2008, but by such far-left characters as Phil Lopes, Krysten Sinema, and Steve Farley (the public artist responsible for replacing cheap buses with expensive streecars in Tucson, presumably because they're more aesthetically pleasing.) A nonstarter, in other words, given the makeup of the Legislature. People can be prone to oppose ideas simply because they come from people who usually have bad ideas. Don't let that get in your way here. And cyclists: think it over a bit every time you patch a puncture.

Arizona: Eighth most liberal state in the USA.

You wouldn't think so, would you? But when such things are quantified, Arizona looks pretty good.

Indexes and rankings of economic freedom have been around for some time; what has been lacking is a comprehensive study of liberty enjoyed by residents which takes into account not only "regulation" of business but also, more generally, paternalist interference in quotidian life, including restrictions on firearm ownership, the various rules and taxes on alcohol, campaign finance restrictions, actual arrest totals for victimless crimes, and the like. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has put together what, to my knowledge, the first comprehensive freedom index, Freedom in the 50 States.

One quarter of the weight was allocated to fiscal policy, one quarter to regulatory policy, and one half to paternalism. Surprisingly, Michigan came out ahead when considering regulatory policy alone, proof that one very bad regulation, in this case, agency-shop unionization with no "right to work", can do serious damage. Not surprisingly, New Hampshire came out in the lead when considering fiscal policy alone--and nobody will say that New Hampshire has slipped into the third world as left-wingers predict Arizona to whenever a penny is cut from the state budget! And not surprisingly, Alaska came out far ahead, in a category by itself, when considering personal freedom. California came in thirty-seventh place in personal freedom, proof that tolerance talk doesn't imply liberal policy.

On that note, my more leftish readers are probably thinking that Arizona came in the top ten overall on its economic strengths alone. However, Arizona ranked eleventh in economic freedom and twelfth in personal freedom. We're a state full of reactionary types, who consistently re-elect Sheriff Joe and call for blood in the comment sections of newspaper websites, but that doesn't translate into illiberal policy. When it comes to action, we're a fairly live-and-let-live bunch.

As usual, weights given to individual items are questionable. There's no obvious way to add up restrictions on sale of raw milk, blue laws, and mandatory waiting periods for marriage; it's a problem in the same class as interpersonal comparisons of utility. This sort of thing almost cries out for both anthropological and psychological cross-validation. However, that the regression analysis on page 20 turns up a statistically significant correlation between the overall freedom index and net migration into a state indicates at least some utility here--and the effect is stronger for personal freedom than for economic freedom!

Percent vote for Kerry in 2004 correlates negatively with both personal and economic freedom, albeit only slightly negatively for personal freedom. (The authors say it is flat; when I get ahold of the plotted data I will do a ranks test.) It is worth noting that Mercatus is not a "conservative" or right-wing institute and has no Democrat or Republican torch to hold high; the report itself references Nozick and Spencer when discussing the authors' concept of liberty. Economic and personal freedom themselves correlate positively, despite the study authors not finding libertarianism (modern classical-liberalism) as a strong alternative anywhere. They instead account for the trend as being the result of balancing forces.

There are certainly valid gripes to be made, about weightings and even about oversights, but this is a great start, which I hope will spur both intellectual and policy action. Hat tip goes to closet-Arizonan and semi-anonymous "CLS", 'blogging at Classically Liberal.

Given the results, a possible new state motto: We're not bad people, we're just ornery.

Why not Just Fix The Public Schools?

Your humble narrator is in Palo Alto this week, not for a postdoc search quite yet but instead to spend a week with the woman who'll be his wife as soon as he graduates. Such trips have side benefits; I've made several scientific contacts, sat in on concerts and lectures, and even get to see how local politics works elsewhere.

I am an advocate of the separation of school and state, and have been since long before I started this 'blog. Correspondents and left-leaning colleagues have often asked why I support a total change in the way education is provided in most of the U.S. instead of Just Fixing The Public Schools.

It's less dull a question than it seems on its face. That private schools of various sorts outperform traditional government-monopoly schools has gone from a speculation in Capitalism and Freedom to empirically established fact, incontrovertible except by the sort of study that "controls for" all of the private schools' usual advantages. Where I grew up--Cook County, IL, a stone's throw from Chicago--middle-class families in many neighborhoods, and especially middle-class Catholic families sent their children to private high school almost as a matter of course, to the point where attending the legacy public school was a matter of conscious choice. This was good for all: people with alternatives have high expectations. But in most places, most children are educated in the public school, and most of my highly educated colleagues are the products of public schools. (I attended a mediocre public grade school and junior high for eight years, followed by one of the area's more prestigious prep schools, where I had some major catching up to do in my first year.) Many of the legacy public schools are doing "good enough", and since most children are in public schools, the way to improve things for most children right away, without any switchover costs and without any late-adopters being left behind, is to Just Fix The Public Schools.

The problem is that the legacy public schools are tremendously difficult and in ways impossible to fix by their institutional nature. Democracy--a ten-dollar word for "majoritarian voting"--is a fine way to run a club whose members have common interest, a fairly good way to manufacture and maintain consent and legitimacy of a government acting within certain bounds, a somewhat poor way to determine public policy, and relative to how either for-profit or non-profit schools run, a downright wacky way of determining how a service such as education is to be provided.

In both the local Palo Alto paper and one of the area's larger news websites the hot topic for some time has been the mathematics curriculum in the Palo Alto Unified School District. The question raises itself, why not just let teachers teach math, but it's not that simple. The State of California allows districts only nine choices of mathematics textbook, and each district must seemingly choose but one of these. The committee tasked with this in Palo Alto, composed of forty-one teachers, three parents, two school principals, and a few administrators has nearly settled on the University of Chicago's Everyday Mathematics series, provoking strong objection from many parents concerned about the series's use of electronic calculators and de-emphasis of standard algorithms and problem solving in favor of constructivism and possibly confusing early presentation of multiple algorithms. (Arizona schools are not quite as micro-managed but still make curricular decisions by committee. I am participating as a consulting scientist in TUSD science curricular reform; the emphasis on buzzwords and abstraction and fad makes it as pleasant as pulling teeth.) One parent from nearby Menlo Park remarked that Everyday Math is one of the reasons her family moved from its previous place of residence, and quite a few others are sharing similar negative experiences.

The excuse commonly made for Arizona's public schools, especially urban districts like TUSD, is that their problems stem from poverty, parental illiteracy, lack of positive parental engagement, and anti-intellectual family culture. Speaking as someone who's had contact with TUSD teachers as a speaker, I can say that there's some truth to that, but it isn't the whole story. The trouble is in part simply that public schools are public schools. As the people of Silicon Valley are on average considerably more affluent and educated than Arizonans--Silicon Valley is one of the most highly educated areas in the world--the usual excuses don't apply here. Parents are demanding excellence, and there is considerable popular sentiment in favor of the adoption of "Singapore Math" texts based on that small country's rather successful curriculum. The nearby Las Lomitas School District, Palo Alto's private Keys School, and many homeschoolers have successfully adopted this program.

Excellence, however, is not what public schools are about. The public schools do not have as their mission to educate to a very high standard or even to tailor education to the individual child so as to help each one achieve his potential. The governing principle of public schools is, at best, "One Size Fits All" and, at worst, if one takes the radical egalitarian rhetoric of opponents of vouchers and tax credits seriously, "Cut the Tall Trees Down." The committee was apparently hamstrung by its decision early on to require that the text adopted be suited to teaching struggling students and fast learners concurrently. Apparently selecting one text for average and excellent students and an alternative for the strugglers was out of the question, as was bringing the strugglers up to speed by intensive KIPP Academy-style intervention. As a result, unless Palo Alto's school board reverses the committee decision next month, local public school students will be taught mathematics in a way that shortchanges talented and average students and possibly the difficult ones, too.

It's worth emphasizing again, that neither poverty nor parental ignorance are at work here. Opponents of private education like to speak of private school and homeschool parents as failing in civic duty by doing better for their children and therefore not being there to complain at PTA meetings and the like, but presuming for the sake of argument that that's a just complaint, flight is certainly not at work here, either: the parents who are speaking out are highly educated and relatively affluent--engineers, computer programmers, scientists. The trouble is that public schools are public schools. The best parents can do is to complain at meetings. If they pull their kids out, the schools are guaranteed funding by law. They can try to effect change through the democratic process, but school board elections are usually more about party affiliations, loyalties, and slogans than about the issues, and by the time proponents of more sound curricular ideas have a majority, children have already had several years of substandard education and may be permanently behind their peers in prep school or college.

It is simply not just to ask parents to sacrifice their children's education to preserve a clumsy institution. The trouble with public schools--besides their being run by electoral democracy--is that there is no meaningful right of exit. Parents can't say "I'll educate my kid myself" and get their taxes back, meaning parents who want to leave must pay twice for education. The result is that, except in places like Cook County where it is the (sub)cultural norm to send children to private school, most parents, not wanting to pay twice, keep their kids in the public school unless it gets very bad. Many parents can't afford to pay twice. Not only do the kids not leave, if they do, it doesn't matter. The public schools are guaranteed funding, and both school board re-elections and administrator contract renewals are hit-or-miss. Individual teachers--the good ones, anyway--are motivated by their convictions and pride, but structurally, for administrators, school boards, committees, the teachers' union, and everyone else making decisions about how to hire and fire teachers, purchase books, and (often needlessly) constrain what the teachers do in the classroom, the incentives make no sense. On the other hand, both traditional private schools and charter schools, which receive funding from the government but operate as contractors, must succeed or shut their doors.

Do poverty, parental ignorance, and the like negatively affect the performance of the public schools? Probably. Does low funding? Under certain circumstances--we must avoid considering it underfunding every time the dollar amount is too low for the legacy public schools' somewhat ideological supporters. But care must be taken to recognize that much of the trouble with public schools comes from their being public--run by democracy, funded by the State, and not allowing meaningful exit. Some very serious troubles concerning curriculum and exit are invariant, whether one is in Tucson or Silicon Valley. Replacement of the legacy state-run school system with a market driven by parental choice--the development of which can be jumpstarted by a high-cap dollar for dollar individual use tax credit--would provide instant mitigation.