Since reading Paul Tough's Whatever it Takes about the Harlem Children's Zone I've wondered whether it was too good to be true. It's true.

A just published Harvard University study concludes

"At nine months old, there are no detectable cognitive differences between black and white babies . Differences emerge as early as age two, and by the time black children enter kindergarten they are lagging whites  On every subject at every grade level, there are large achievement differences between blacks and whites that continue to grow..

" Harlem Children's Zone is enormously effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value, the effects in middle school are enough to reverse the black-white achievement gap in mathematics and reduce it in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects".

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/hcz%204.15.2009.pdf

Now recall The Shape of the River in which Bowen and Bok demolished the arguments against the educational  effectiveness of Affirmative Action not with high minded reasoning  but by looking at the numbers. 

Taken together  Whatever it Takes - buttressed by this study- and The Shape of the River   demonstrate the circularity  of the poor old Thermstroms'  arguments against educational  Affirmative Action.Having provided Blacks with inferior education because supposedly they weren't  capable of benefitting from a good education, we referenced  their inferior educational achievements  as evidence that......... they weren't capable of benefitting from a good education ..Duh.

The democrats could refute the insurance industry whine about unfair competition by agreeing the the public option operate through a quasi- public corporation a la Fanny Mae. That status would require it to earn a market rate of return which would  prevent predatory pricing as would a statuatory requirement that it actually provide insurance rather than cherry picking the best risks and then stone walling on claims..

It's worth reading Gibbon. The language is fun in itself. The narrative is full of sex and gore. And the tale shows exactly why Rome fell. And we are going to.

The similarities are uncanny. Two productive successful countries. Each large enough and so geographically situated there was no reason they could not feed and clothe themselves forever.

But Rome didn't. Gibbon shows the day it all started to go wrong. Rome was doomed once the Praetorian Guard crossed the river. It was going to take a while. Centuries. But it was going to happen. Decisions have consequences.

In our case Robert Skidelsky does it-by implication- in a current New York Review article:

"The World Financial Crisis & the American Mission".

We were doomed not by one decision but a handful taken between the elections of Ike and Nixon.  Which can be roughly summarized with the words:  Globalization, Taxes, the Pentagon. 

First, remember the country at the middle of the last century. No unemployment. A woman could actually dance in Central Park at midnight-like Fred and Ginger.  Doctors lived down the street and made house calls. The military had shrunk to its pre war size and mostly just paraded on Patriotic occasions. What's not to like?

What happened to zero unemployment? We sent the jobs to Bangalore. In a series of decisions, which will cause future historians to shake their heads in astonishment, we adopted trade policies, which meant that Joe Lunchpail in Detroit or Raleigh was competing with workers paid pennies an hour in Asia.

Apart from causing tremendous personal grief to car and clothing workers this also converted the blue-collar class from a source of government revenue to a drain on our finances. If you don't work you don't pay taxes. You collect Welfare.

Which left us dependent on the income of the white-collar class. As Skidelsky puts it "this enabled financiers and businessmen to earn huge profits". Incredibly we dealt with this dependence on upper income Americans with a series of tax reforms eliminating our progressive tax code. I remember demonstrating to my secretary in 1975 that if I paid her an extra thousand dollars the tax on it would be the same as if the State paid it to Nelson Rockefeller.

So a country which had exported the jobs which were the main stay of a taxable blue collar class."reformed " the tax code so that the white collar class equally ceased to be a source of government revenue.

But nevertheless our response like that of the Caesars was to create a Praetorian Guard. Out of out greatly impaired income we choose to fund a military budget equal to that of the rest of the world put together. And to strengthen our similarity to Augustus, Tiberius, Constantine et al we also provided a circus to divert the no longer fully employed masses: a space program

The path ahead is clear. Those whom the gods will destroy they first encourage to implement Globalization, non-progressive taxation and a consequently unaffordable Praetorian Guard.