RUST COMMENTARY: EXCERPTS FROM VACATION READING

I've been out of town for a couple of weeks and spent many hours focusing on finance, estate planning, physical fitness and long-range planning.

The following are some pass-along excerpts from articles I found interesting:

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Health Tip of the Day: New research suggests that donating blood might reduce your risk for heart attack or stroke. A study of 4,000 non-smoking men found that those who hadn't given blood within the three-year span of the study were almost twice as likely to have had a heart attack, stroke or angina as those who had donated blood. Give it up. -- American Heart Association

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A Forbes article discussing the 400 richest people in the world (measured in dollars) pointed out that: "The Four Hundred group is lucky in several ways: First, because most of its members are blessed with high ability. Second, because ability translates into wealth more readily in America than it does abroad. Third, because wealth is actually popular, or at least not too unpopular, in the U.S. Fourth, because even folks who are gifted, and did it all themselves, cannot possibly end up with a net worth of $475 million (the cutoff on this year's list) without having won some huge crap shoots along the way. We consider these points seriatim.

As to the high ability of The Four Hundred, begin with the grudgingly but now broadly accepted fact that rich people tend to be smarter than poor people. There are endless arguments about whether intelligence is more affected by one's genes or one's environment, but for present purposes it really doesn't matter: Either way, you're lucky to have it, and either way, the rich have more of it.

In "The Bell Curve," Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein describe a "cognitive elite" that is also an economic elite. They elaborate a process in which, as the technological frontiers become more complex, high intelligence is increasingly a requirement for admission to managerial positions. They estimate that something like 5 million Americans with IQs over 120 (meaning they are in the top 10 percent) are now out there in the business world -- the world from which The Four Hundred are drawn...

It seems marvelously symbolic that William H. Gates III, they guy listed as No. 1 on The Four Hundred, has an obviously breathtaking IQ. The figure 170 keeps getting into print, which would make him almost certainly the highest on this list or any other list you're likely to be looking at soon. To be sure, one occasionally sees conjectures that Steven Ballmer, Microsoft's executive vice president, worldwide sales and support, is in the same IQ league as Bill himself. Ballmer is No. 6 among The Four Hundred. It also seems symbolic of the new order that their company has made IQ a public and explicit criterion for hires of senior personnel...

The Four Hundred are clearly lucky to be Americans. Folks who are rich, or capable of becoming rich, have opportunities in this country that seem unimaginable elsewhere. No amount of IQ would have enabled Bill Gates to create a Microsoft in overregulated, overtaxed Western Europe where the French electorate is the latest to vote heavily against modern economics. -- Don Seligman

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Educational funding and the state transition from desegregation funding changes in St. Louis and Kansas City needs a much broader discussion of what's going on elsewhere on this subject ... Such as the two following articles:

The teachers' unions are understandably worried. But in carrying the fight, some union activists are advancing disturbing and even sinister arguments about inner-city children. The most common is that vouchers should be disallowed because they benefit the few while leaving out the many. The unions also argue that data showing improvement among the voucher students has been cooked and can't possibly be real. In essence, these critics are making a claim that no parent would accept: that orderly, well run private schools can't possibly be better than horrendously run public schools. Taken to their logical conclusions, these arguments assert that inner-city schools are doing the best they can with what they are given. What this means is that the teachers' unions have lower expectations for African-American children than for whites. -- Brent Staples, New York Times

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The People's Schools: Having already provoked a few gasps by nipping disability and single parent benefits, Tony Blair (prime minister of England) is about to pain another entrenched group of bureaucrats. The Labor Party has come up with a plan to get private business involved in the running of failing schools...

The plans would put secondary schools in so-called "education action zones" out of the control of the local education boards for three to five years, and the schools would be run by a "forum" of parents, community groups, the local education board and businesses. The forums would manage the budgets of all the schools in the zone and receive up to $2 million over five years. They would raise a similar amount from the private sector themselves, under the assumption that high-quality education and the profit motive may actually be compatible.

The Blair reforms still leave the vast majority of the British education system under the same management as before, but follow on a series of Conservative reforms that permit parents to choose between several state schools within reasonable commuting distance.

The goal now must be to get parents firmly into the picture with a voucher type system, through given the outcry that even this limited program has evoked, Mr. Blair may have to buy himself some earplugs. But if he stops here, he will have proved right those critics who claim that Labor's reformist zeal is more half-measures and theatrics than anything else. -- The Wall Street Journal

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~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.