… and the test results are in. Utah high school students just received the results of a new test that measures achievement in language, mathematics, and science… and on average, less than half the students met the standards in any of the test areas. Two things about the new test were especially interesting, first that the standards and what was being measured didn’t change and, second, that half of the new test required answers from the student – no guessing from choices provided. While there were schools whose overall student mastery levels reached or exceeded 90% mastery, there were also schools where the mastery levels averaged in the 10%-20% range.

What to me is so obvious, but what has been overlooked for years by both parents and educational bureaucrats, is that multiple choice tests don’t accurately show student subject mastery – they’re far more likely to reward speed readers with moderate subject mastery and great test-taking ability. And multiple choice testing certainly doesn’t measure the ability to reason out a mathematical concept or to write an accurate and grammatically correct paragraph.Those students who excel at multiple-choice testing are generally those who (1) have learned the material and can regurgitate or recall it quickly; (2) those able to read and process the questions quickly, (3) those with a comprehensive understanding of common and standard language and society, and (4) those with higher levels of self-discipline. Not surprisingly, those abilities tend to be associated with families with higher incomes and with students from more demanding schools [most of which are either schools in high income areas or charter schools with extraordinarily dedicated and highly professional staff, as well as generally better resources. There are exceptions, of course, but exceptions, as the saying goes, often prove the rule.

The other long-standing problem with multiple choice tests is that they provide an unrealistic view of the choices in life outside and after schooling. Sometimes, usually very infrequently, life presents you with clear and multiple choices. Most of the time, your choices either aren’t obvious, tend to be between less obnoxious alternatives, or you don’t have a real choice at all. Even when choices seem obvious, they often aren’t, because the most appealing one in the short run may turn into a long-range disaster.

The “advantages” to multiple-choice tests are that (1) they’re theoretically more objective, since whether one adequately written paragraph is better than another can result in subjective grading; (2) theytake far fewer resources and are far easier to grade; (3) they allow theoretically more objective comparisons of teachers, schools, and school systems [except most really don’t measure how much a given teacher has improved the skills of a particular student or set of students].

The fact that Utah test scores dropped drastically across the board when open-ended questions were added underscores dramatically just how limited multiple choice tests are – as almost any veteran classroom teacher can explain.

But then, since multiple choice tests are graded on the immediate answer, and we have two generations in a row raised on multiple choice tests, is it any wonder that we’ve become a society dominated by instant gratification and superficial knowledge, with a continuing decline in true critical thinking?

Last week, just a week before the election, two candidates for an open Utah congressional seat got into a “contest” of sorts in which each claimed to hold the most “Mormon/LDS” views, although the assertions weren’t quite that boldly stated… but enough so that the headline from the Salt Lake Tribune played it that way. The idea of claiming “values superiority” isn’t something unique to Utah, unhappily. I’ve seen more than a few elections over the years in which candidates vied to prove who held the more “Christian values.” And for that matter, isn’t the primary cause of ISIS in the Middle East to create a land governed by the most “Islamic” values? Didn’t England suffer through centuries of internal conflict over which church’s values would be predominant? Not to mention the bloody conflicts that wracked Europe immediately after the Reformation?

Just what do people really mean by such assertions? Let’s see. “Most Christian” — today is that code for right-to-life, anti-feminist, pro-gun rights, anti-minority, and thoroughly patriarchal? If it is, that’s rather at variance with the doctrines of that carpenter on whose name and deeds Christianity is theoretically based. On the other hand, Joseph Smith was a patriarchal polygamist who was definitely a right-to-life type, but is that what those two candidates meant?

Or were they just trying to claim, “I’m just like most of you.” But… if most of their constituents want a supremacy of religious values in government, where does that leave all those who don’t share those values?

Like the Founding Fathers, I’m rather skeptical of putting religious values ahead of everything because one immediate question arises – whose religious values? And the second question is of even greater concern – to what degree will a candidate or incumbent attempt to use government to strengthen or impose those values on those who do not share them? All of which brings up a third question – if a candidate doesn’t intend to strengthen or impose those religious values he or she is trumpeting, exactly why bring them up except to gain an advantage. And if that’s the case, what does that reveal about how far the politician or candidate will go to obtain or maintain power.

As for me, I tend to vote against candidates who trumpet religious values – unless their opponents have even greater flaws, which, these days, is more often the case than I can ever recall… and that’s a sad commentary as well.

Amid all the political posturing and smears and counter-smears, one underlying aspect of American politics that is accepted without question by most Americans is the practice of lobbying, although a great many Americans rage against lobbyists for views they don’t believe in or for government programs they oppose. That is, lobbying for the “right” causes is fine, just not for the “wrong” ones, but lobbying itself tends to be accepted as a necessary evil.

Should it be?

James Madison worried greatly about “factions” marshalling votes and influence to shape government unwisely, but felt that restricting the “petitioning” of government allowed by the Constitution was a remedy worse than the illness, and felt that the competition of interests would restrict the influence of any one faction. In a sense, for most of the history of the United States, he was largely correct.

Except… reported annual expenditures for lobbying the federal government have gone from less than $200 million in 1975 to almost $4 billion last year, and the actual numbers are far higher, as I can personally attest, since I spent time as a “consultant” in Washington. D.C., where my earnings were not counted as lobbying because I was merely “analyzing” the effect of potential laws and regulations on business and the economy. Nor were most of the other consultants with whom I worked then classed as lobbyists.

If Madison were correct, lobbying wouldn’t be the problem it’s become. The problem is that it takes money, big money, to analyze and determine the impact of policy and laws… and to package and present such analyses in easily understandable format to legislators and federal bureaucrats. The result is that close to three quarters of all lobbying expenditures are made by large businesses and business organizations. It also takes a continual presence, which requires more money, and the most effective lobbyists are those who know the system – such as former bureaucrats, former staffers, and former members of Congress, all of whom have greater access.

When I left my position as a Congressional staff director to become Director of Legislation at the U.S. EPA, I was thirty-seven years old, with ten years’ experience in politics, and I was one of the older Congressional staff directors. Legislative aides were usually far younger and paid much less. From what I’ve been able to determine, this situation hasn’t changed, and isn’t likely to, not when staff directors’ pay is statutorily capped at far below that of lobbyists and consultants and when most senior Congressional staffers work 60-80 hour weeks, and sometimes longer, with no overtime, and can be dismissed literally instantly [I saw this happen personally several times].

The Congressional staff workload is incredibly heavy; most staffers are young and with little experience, especially compared to the lobbyists, and they don’t have enough time to research anything in depth, while the lobbyists do and can also rely on long experience.

The result is a foregone conclusion, and exactly what we see today, a legally permitted lobbying system heavily slanted toward those interests with the most resources, predominantly but not exclusively those of business. Unhappily, there’s another aspect that Madison and the Founding Fathers didn’t and probably couldn’t have foreseen. It’s simple enough. Because society has become incredibly more complex since 1789, the federal government has expanded into regulating and influencing almost every aspect of American society, and while “purists” insist much of this is not necessary, in fact much of it is, unhappily.

Before we had food and drug safety laws, buying food and medicines was often the equivalent of Russian roulette, especially in cities. The growth of industry meant that state laws were inadequate to deal with trade and industrial problems, and legal conflicts required resolution. Before there were environmental laws, rivers literally caught fire and swimming in some could literally kill you. Before finance legislation, bank failures were a common occurrence, and borrowers neither had access to information on which to make decisions nor recourse if a bank failed.

The upshot of all this is that there are a multiplicity of individual interests as the result of an expanded government and an economy with international impacts, and each individual interest competes with every other interest for getting the attention of government. Those interests representing the most money or the most votes generally are those pushed most successfully by lobbyists, and the overriding problem is that the sum total of those “noticed” private interests doesn’t equate to the overall public interest.

Over time, while there are times when governments need to run deficits, public revenues, i.e., taxes, need to come close to the level of public expenditures. That’s a definite overall public interest. Breathing clean air and having clean water to drink is an overall public interest. Not having mine wastes spill into drinking water is a public interest. Having a taxation system that doesn’t give special breaks to some industries and not to others might also be considered an overall good. But we’re running massive deficits and have for years; we still have air unfit to breathe in many parts of the country; and we’ve had massive drinking water pollution from failures of mine tailings impoundments and from agricultural impoundments. We have a crumbling transportation infrastructure, an increasingly fragile electric power distribution system, and municipal water systems that leak and waste incredible amounts of water… and those are just a fraction of the real problems out there.

But comparatively few lobbyists are out there pushing the public good, and all too often those “public interest” lobbyists are attacked and ridiculed for being anti-business, or opposed to someone’s “rights” to run an organization or as business as they choose. Even the “go-gooders” apparently pushing for public interests tend to focus on the popular causes, and there’s nothing new about this. Some twenty years ago, the U.S. EPA did a study on funding for environmental causes, and discovered that the environmental problems that caused the most deaths and health problems were far down the list, while high profile problems that actually affected comparatively far fewer people topped both federal appropriations and public concerns.

In the end, lobbying costs money, and businesses have more of it than anyone else, and that means they most often have most of the best hired guns, access to the best information, and the best systems for presenting their cases. That doesn’t even account for the impact of campaign contributions.

The real wonder is that there are as many cases where government actually tries to promote the overall public good as there are, but those instances are becomingly increasingly rarer… because most lobbyists aren’t interested in the public good, only in pushing for favorable treatment for their private good… and as the increasing welter of special interest provisions in law and regulations indicates, private interests are increasingly trumping public good.

Recently, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman published a column critical of Amazon, further fanning the flames over Amazon’s tactics in dealing with its suppliers, including the furor over the current Hachette-Amazon conflict.

Amazon’s actions, however, don’t appear to be confined to just the United States. More than 1,000 authors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland have signed a similar open letter to Amazon which accuses Amazon of improper tactics in setting e‐book prices with Bonnier AB, a German publishing trade group. Last June, Bonnier filed a complaint with German authorities stating Amazon delayed delivery of its books to force Bonnier to accept lower prices for ebooks.

The issue of buyer control of suppliers, i.e., monopsony, isn’t all that new, although the height of the controversy is and there are legal texts on the subject dating back more than twenty years. In a more recent 2008 article in the Utah Law Review [“Predatory Buying and the Antitrust Laws”], Roger D. Blair and John E. Lopatka summarized the issue just raised again by Amazon’s efforts to force Hachette to lower ebook prices below ten dollars:

“The fact that an increase in monopsony power may have little impact on consumers does not mitigate the antitrust concern, because the negative impact on sellers by itself warrants equal antitrust concern, a point oddly unacknowledged by the Supreme Court in its Weyerhauser decision. Just as monopsony and monopoly are economically symmetrical, predatory buying and predatory pricing are legally symmetrical…”

Or as several other legal scholars have pointed out, an illegally obtained monopsony might well violate U.S. antitrust law, but, to date, no U.S. court has ever found a single company guilty of an illegal monopsony. Or put more bluntly, so far, the U.S. legal system and the Department of Justice seem to believe that any action resulting in lower prices for consumers is socially beneficial, regardless of how those prices are obtained, and what economic damage is wreaked on the suppliers and producers.

The problem with the “lower prices are always better” argument is that it focuses solely on one aspect of economic social good. Both Walmart and Amazon exert monopsony power, and both arguably keep total compensation for employees low, while also forcing supplier prices lower. Both do so in markets where profit margins are narrow. This requires cuts in expenses by suppliers, and that means, in turn, that the suppliers can pay their employees and suppliers less.

Overall, despite stories of individual writers and suppliers who benefit from Amazon and/or Walmart, the emphasis on low prices regardless of the consequences translates into lower incomes for millions of people, ranging from minimum wage workers through struggling writers all the way to best-selling authors. Best-selling authors can obviously take a hit in earnings, even if they don’t much care for it, but for every best-selling author there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lower-compensated individuals whose earnings are reduced by this sort of illegal market manipulation. And monopsonies that depress supplier earnings below a free-market level are in fact illegal under U.S. law.

So… what’s the ethical difference between Amazon and Walmart, who use monopoly/monopsony market power to keep prices down, and thus wages and payments to suppliers artificially low, and all those companies who outsource manufacturing to low-paid workers in third world countries?

After all, aren’t low prices and high profits the great American dream?

I guess I’m old-fashioned, or perhaps, an old fogey… or worse, because, when I pay for a good or service, I expect the good to be without defects and the service to be accomplished correctly and in time frame agreed upon.

Last month I had to buy new hoses for my washing machine. I had to take back the first set, and they were the most expensive set, because they leaked… right out of the packaging. Last week, I bought a 13 gallon plastic storage bin, and when I brought it home and set it down, empty, on the floor, the seam split.

We live in a small town with two furniture stores, and when we wanted to replace some furniture that we’d had for more than twenty years, we couldn’t find anything at either store… or in their catalogues… that remotely resembled anything we wanted. Everything was overlarge, overstuffed, and oppressively dark. So, on a business trip to North Carolina, the heartland of American furniture making and outlets, my wife found what we wanted, and the company agreed to ship it, at our expense, of course. The company stated that it would take three to five weeks to arrive. It still hasn’t arrived, and it’s seven weeks and counting. I’ve been talking to the company almost daily, and I finally pried out that the furniture hasn’t even left North Carolina, and the latest estimate is another three weeks before it gets here, and no other freight forwarder can do it in less than three to six weeks. Further investigation revealed that the freight company didn’t even pick up the furniture until two weeks after the date I was told it had shipped. Whether all this is incompetence or indifference, or some combination of both, I really don’t care. What I do care about is that I’ve been lied to and that no one seems able or willing to do anything about it, except say that, in effect, that’s the way it is.

I have a friend who’s a contractor, and a very good one. He has a small team of employees who can do many of the tasks, such as framing, finish carpentry, moderate earth-moving, tiling, etc., and anything his team can do is done well and on time. Anything that he has to subcontract is another story – and about half the subcontractors in the area he won’t use, because they’re even worse. He also admits he’s racist at times, because the only reliable and truly professional drywall firm is Latino, and the best painters are also.

Along those lines, we decided that a pull-down ladder was a better way of getting into the storage space above the garage than standing on a step-ladder. The company sent three wrong ladders with the incorrect dimensions before finally sending the correct size.

After twenty years, we bought a new refrigerator. The new refrigerator arrived right out of the packaging – unpackaged in our kitchen – with a noticeable dent in the front door. The warranty/service covered this, and just this past Wednesday, a month after the refrigerator was first delivered, a new door arrived – except when it came out of the four layers of packaging, it had a bigger dent than the door it was supposed to replace.

I am not making up any of this, and I could have given several more examples, as well. That’s why I’m more than a little concerned about the future of the United States. I certainly don’t recall as much incompetence in as many areas as I’m seeing now, and I don’t think it’s entirely that I’ve become more of a perfectionist as I’ve aged… or a prematurely aged old fogey.