Age segregation

Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) has a good article about age segregation.

Putting kids together and sorting by age also created that dysfunctional modern creature, the “teenager.” Once, teen-agers weren’t so much a demographic as adults in training. They worked, did farm chores, watched children, and generally functioned in the real world. They got status and recognition for doing these things well, and they got shame and disapproval for doing them badly.

But once they were segregated by age in public schools, teens looked to their peers for status and recognition instead of to society at large. As Thomas Hine writes in American Heritage, “Young people became teenagers because we had nothing better for them to do. We began seeing them not as productive but as gullible consumers.”  Not surprisingly, the kinds of behaviors that gain teenagers status from other teenagers differ from the kinds of things that gain teenagers status from adults: early sex, drinking, and a variety of other “cool” but dysfunctional characteristics—once frowned upon—now become the keys to popularity. When teenagers are herded together and separated by from adults, those behaviors gain in salience, and at considerable cost.

I decided a few years back that High School was probably a bad idea, and that child labor laws should probably not apply, or at least be significantly weakened, for kids starting around 14. Young people should have opportunities to be economically productive, and not just consumers. They’d be happier and would learn more from any additional schooling they took after having a real job.

Scandal

This is kind of old news, but I saw a blog post about it yesterday, so I guess it’s not too late to comment.

In case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago the Church, with its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors (EPA), agreed to pay the SEC a $5 million fine related to how EPA had been filing its mandatory investment reports to the SEC. For privacy reasons, EPA is structured as a group of sub-funds; each sub-fund was filing the required quarterly Form 13F. It had been doing it this way since 2000, and the Church’s lawyers and accountants believed this made them in full compliance with the law and appropriate regulations. In 2019, someone at the SEC decided that this was wrong, that EPA should have filed consolidated Forms 13F showing all the sub-funds instead of having each sub-fund file its own. EPA immediately switched to filing the consolidated forms, but after negotiation agree to pay this fine for all the years it was doing it the other way.

Some people have tried to make this into some kind of a scandal. If there is any scandal here, though, it is in the way the government conducts things, not in the Church’s behavior.

To put it bluntly: a government agency promulgates a set of very complicated and occasionally ambiguous regulations. Trained lawyers and accountants study these regulations and determine that a certain procedure is in compliance with those regulations. Then years later (19 years, in this case) someone at the agency decides those trained lawyers and accountants got it wrong. Instead of simply clarify the regulations, though, you now have to pay a fine for not having correctly guessed what they’ve now decided the regulations mean.

Just to be clear, the SEC hasn’t singled out the Church for this kind of thing. It rakes in somewhere around $1 billion a year from these sorts of fines. (As far as I’ve been able to tell, none of the people regularly involved in investment funds see this as reflecting poorly on the Church.) Note that because of this the SEC has zero motivation to make its regulations simple and unambiguous: the more complicated and confusing they are, the more opportunities they have to collect protection money engage in these “enforcement actions”.

There’s a fine line between legitimate government and organized crime. I think the SEC has drifted a little too close to that line.