I like much of it, but not this:
Get rid of the Department of Education and allocate every child into school by a random lottery. Public education is a bit (but not really) like the individual mandate. It works well if everyone uses it without segregation. There are big externalities in moving a rich kid from his bubble of a rich school to a poorer school…
Maybe Albert Hirschman would like this. I agree that we schools tend to segregate by income class. However, I disagree that public education “works well” as long as you get rid of income segregation.
Overall, he says that his list of points is “clearly progressive,” but “a bit of stuff…should appeal to a libertarian.” More than a bit, actually. I recommend reading his whole post.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Thanks for the nice words!
The sad thing about anything that appeals to both libertarians and liberals is that it has less than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting passed.
On the education, do you not think the “goodwill” of affluent and better informed parents acts like a public good? Or is it an aversion to the kind of illiberalism that’s required in banning private schools to accomplish this?
I am very skeptical that any intervention makes a difference in education. I like to say that the null hypothesis is difficult to disprove. Given that, the illiberalism troubles me. Although it would be almost worth it to watch liberal parents react to a situation in which their own children are not segregated into exclusive schools (probably they would insist on special “gifted and talented” classes in order to preserve segregation).
It seems to me that more accurate than the model that rich kids will lift up the average kids is the model that troublesome kids drag down the average kids. Kids will get out of school what they can get out of school unless the environment is violent or disruptive. There is little anyone can do to improve that fact.
So rather than cruelly make almost everyone go to a school that they don’t want to go to — which is what random placement will get you — it would be far more effective to simply remove the troublesome kids and concentrate them in a school where they are no longer hampering kids who are trying to learn. You can also teach them differently since they clearly are not terribly interested in learning the way you were teaching them before.
School vouchers are doing a great job of illustrating this point
How about just getting rid of school districts entirely? That would seem to solve the problem more effectively than the other approaches mentioned.
There is a “theme” (for lack of a more descriptive term) I recognized that seems to pervade nearly all Rao’s recommendations, or “platform” – that being, that the tax code be increasingly designed to be a system of penalties and rewards, rather than payments for government provided services.
A statement he makes in his point 6, “Most people hate income taxes not because they pay too much, but because they pay at all.” I think is totally wrong. Most people, I would argue, understand there is a cost associated with the provision of government services, and for ongoing maintenance of “public assets”, like roads, parks, defense, etc.. Economic actors understand that taxes cover those costs, and are the price paid for the delivered service, maintenance, etc. And, that absent payment for those services, the services will cease to exist, and that absent maintenance on assets like roads and parks, those will cease to be usable assets. Of course, all economic actors would like to pay less for those things, but all economic actors understand there will always be a cost.
What I find abhorrent in Rao’s “platform” is that it emphasizes use of tax code as a “social engineering tool” – a system of penalties – and increasingly divorces use of taxes as a means for payment of delivered services. I can understand how that concept would appeal to a liberal. If it similarly appeals to “libertarians”, I have no desire to be a “libertarian”.
I don’t know of any coercion that does not disproportionately hurt poor people. The best rules are no rules, with parents free to make their own choices.
We lived in a terrible school district when my kids were young. When they reached school age we moved house. The truly poor (and we are not “rich”) do not have that option, their kids go to crappy schools. This used to really bother me badly, but they vote for it so they can eat it.
You can have any rule you like but if it causes my kids’ school to become crappy we will move or home-school or private-school or whatever it takes. The truly poor have none of those options. Thus, all coercion self-organizes into bad outcomes for the poor.
The amazing lengths the teachers unions go to protect bad teachers means there will always be bad schools, and this will disproportionately affect the poor. The answer, according to my biases, is vouchers, because even a poor man can google-up greatschools.org (or whatever) and in 10 minutes find a good school to send their kid to. I’m am not endorsing government funding but in so far as schools receive public money, it should be strictly proportional to the number of students they have and if they have no students they get no money.
MikeP also makes a very good point about separating disruptive students into a more regimented environment. I disagree with the liberal PoV that “bright” students pull everybody up, but even if this were true it must then be true that disruptive students pull everyone down.
Rao’s school assignment proposal is stupid because kids do best in schools sorted by student IQ to within 1sd or so. It’s hard for 85 IQ and 115 IQ kids to get along, and rubbing against each other damages both sides. Since, to a first approximation, above-median-income kids and smart kids are the same cohort, school assignment by IQ, though it is optimal and both race- and SES-neutral, would reveal SES sorting as a parasitic effect, giving left-wing fools something to whinge about. Sorting students by IQ would benefit both smart kids from poor families and dumb kids from rich ones, though the parents of the latter might object for status reasons.
Single-payer medicine is an astonishingly bad idea and I should hardly have to rehearse the reasons why to anyone claiming to be a free-market economist. Just let me note that Rao’s claim that physicians are greatly overpaid is almost certainly wrong, and we know that because the caliber of medical students (measured by objective admission and exit/licensing tests and post-graduate performance) has fallen rapidly along with physician incomes (relative to other skilled professions) for twenty years now. If physicians were overpaid the medical profession would attract more competitive entrants, but the opposite has occurred indicating that physicians are underpaid. As Bugs Bunny would pronounce, “what a maroon!”
False premises, top to bottom.
“Public education is a bit (but not really) like the individual mandate. It works well if everyone uses it without segregation.”
Public education does not work well if everyone uses it.
Public education does not work well.
Education does not work well.
Education does. not. work.
The entire school paradigm that we use in the modern world is fundamentally flawed and completely unworkable. Every student that succeeds in the world does so DESPITE schooling not BECAUSE of it.
Abolishing the Department of Education is a wonderful first step. The correct next step is abolishing SCHOOL.