JayB

Willing to be there was a touch of wistfulness combined with the stoke when Senor Kilo got word of this. TGR Thread: http://www.tetongravity.com/FORUMS/showthread.php?t=168405&page=1

Given that there's nothing in a voucher scheme that would diminish spending per pupil, it's not clear that pay for teachers would necessarily decrease, unless the administrative/overhead costs increased. That's certainly possible, but the balance of incentives would tend to mitigate against that, unless parents evinced an tendency to send there kids to schools where the schools were likely to spend fewer of their resources on teachers than the public school system currently does. Possible - yes. Likely - no. If non-public schools got the same amount of money per-pupil, and couldn't match the compensation offered by public schools, that'd certainly be interesting, and might prompt an interesting dialogue about the manner in which they're accounting for (and intend to finance) future pension and healthcare obligations relative to non-public schools.

SAYS THE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIST!!!! Whew! Ha-Ha! That is a knee-slapper! Thanks for the funny, Jay. You are a riot. Irony quota filled for the day. Ha. Man, that was good. While the two have quite a bit in common, Hayek does not equal Friedman, and there are some subtle differences in their outlook and methodological assumptions that derive from Hayek's arguments concerning "scientism" that I find convincing. The fact that they disagree with one another on certain methodological points no more strengthen's the case for central planning than disagreements between Dawkins and Gould should embolden creationists. There's a concise version of the same argument that Hayek published in 1942. Although I think that you are profoundly wrong, you are a smart guy, and at the very least correctly perceive the intrinsic connection between economic and political power. I'd actually be interested in reading what you have to say about the set of ideas that I mentioned if you can summon the concentration willpower necessary to do so. http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Hayek%20Scientism%201.htm

Funny you should mention that. I've just started reading Hayek's "The Counter Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason." Very tough going so far, but it seems like he's elaborating on point that he's made elsewhere, which is that exporting the modes of examination and analysis that are beneficial and useful when attempting to understand phenomena that are operate independently of cognition and belief (falling rocks, chemical equilibria, etc) isn't always helpful, particularly when oversimplified, idealized, and abstract, statistical-aggregate-laden models of social phenomena are imposed on society by a centralized power. I think I'm reasonably well aware of the limitations of the methods developed in the natural sciences, particularly as they apply to phenomena actuated by belief in things that may or may not exist outside of our imaginations - but I still think they're useful inside their proper domain, like designing planes, understanding a drug's specific mode of action, or demonstrating that homeopathy and magical unicorns are bunk.

yes to the first question as to the second question, i don't like any of the tax exemption bullshit that churches get, though i know the court has upheld it. tax exempt donations to charities is fine, but not charities who wrap it up in buddha/jeebus/mohammed whatever. it's probably just my angry atheism talking i don't know anything of sweden or norway's voucher experiment - enlighten me, if you can in a 1000 words or less - is comparing our giant heterogenous nation to a tiny homogenous one sound? wouldn't the transition to a voucher system dangerously destabilize the current public schools? schools and the infrastructure already built were designed for large populations which could only decline. future planning would be harder w/ potentially giant #'s of students coming in and out of the system. Denying tax exemptions to religious versus secular non-profits would violate both the Establishment and Equal Protection clauses. The problem with many churches is that they are pretty clearly for profit organizations, yet their tax exempt status remains unchallenged for because we enjoy a heavy pro-kristian political bias in this country. Vouchers are a side show, invented by the Right as both a smoke screen issue and a way to defund and dismantle the public school system rather than fix it. Anyone who claims to believe otherwise is either an idiot or a liar. As I understand it from talking with teachers, isn't one of the main problems with the public school system that an inordinate amount of funding goes towards supporting the huge administrative/peripheral personnel (rather than teachers) that have managed to attach their suckers into the system? It's not a matter of gross funding; it's a matter of skimming. Any examples of public school systems where the net take by admin/peripheral staff have been permanently reduced by reforms of the systems that they oversee and control?

I'd argue that the proper analogy is continuing to operate the 60's era Vega factory with outdated production processes, bloated and ineffectual management, etc that only stays in business because the regulations are structured to grant them a monopoly. Everything that's useful in the present system, from teachers to administrators, to buildings, would be available for whomever was running the schools to use, and those who did the best job of it would expand to whatever scale was appropriate. Might not be a place for a five layers worth of HR specialists in that regime, but it's not clear that the kids will be worse off as a result.

i have no idea how the pay system would differ - will i be getting paid by how many students i attract? - if so, then i'm basically just gonna get paid for my services as an entertainer and awarder of easy grades, right? how many kids are gonna want to throw their money in to a hard-driving prick who makes you do homework and what not? Oh, c'mon - let's not pretend that students would be the ones driving this train. Schools that want to attract more students will compete for the best teachers, which would likely translate into any variety of incentives that the best teachers responded to. The teachers would determine what those are through their choices. Seems like total spending on admin and other non-essential staff would offer some low-hanging fruit in terms of resources that could be diverted into teacher compensation, but that could well take many other forms. Not being a teacher, it's not clear to me what people working in the field would value most in an environment where the number of competitors for their services increased dramatically.

i don't see this at all - the price tag for a high-faluting private school is way higher than for a public school - sure, give families the amount they threw into the common pot for education back to them to spend how they will, but it's not gonna get poor kids into anything better than what they left. it might make middle class families just capable of affording a posh school by throwing in extra on top of the voucher, but i doubt it. The utopian vision at work here as with other privatization schemes is that with all of this money sloshing around in parents' pockets, saavy capitalist educators will meet the need by building private schools in the areas where they're needed. It didn't happen. Never mind that the failure rate for private schools approaches those for new restaurants. Hey, if that kid from Compton can't find a school in his area, he can always walk to Beverly Hills or Brentwood and cash in his coupons there. You mean like food stamps? Section 8 housing vouchers? Clearly the people who use these public resources would be better off if they were forced to live in homes, and buy food from, monopolies administered by the government.

i don't see this at all - the price tag for a high-faluting private school is way higher than for a public school - sure, give families the amount they threw into the common pot for education back to them to spend how they will, but it's not gonna get poor kids into anything better than what they left. it might make middle class families just capable of affording a posh school by throwing in extra on top of the voucher, but i doubt it. But we're not necessarily talking about high-falutin' schools here. It's clear that there are schools like Lakeside, Phillips Exeter and there ilk that would never participate in a voucher program because their cost structure and their particular market niche for super-premium educational services sold to super-wealthy parents wouldn't permit it. It's one thing to concede that point, it's another to argue that pedagogy, cost-structure, efficiency, discipline policies, etc are fixed in stone and that no school that only consumes as much money per-pupil as public schools do now could possibly deliver a better education. Somehow the folks operating private schools in Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere have managed to get by with funding that's identical to what public schools get, and there's no reason to suggest that they couldn't do the same here. A separate question is why any group should enjoy a monopoly control over funds that the public provides in a situation where it's impossible to argue that it's a technical monopoly that has to be left in the monopoly's hands. Moroever, if you are against vouchers in K-12, why allow them to persist in tertiary education?

yes to the first question as to the second question, i don't like any of the tax exemption bullshit that churches get, though i know the court has upheld it. tax exempt donations to charities is fine, but not charities who wrap it up in buddha/jeebus/mohammed whatever. it's probably just my angry atheism talking i don't know anything of sweden or norway's voucher experiment - enlighten me, if you can in a 1000 words or less - is comparing our giant heterogenous nation to a tiny homogenous one sound? wouldn't the transition to a voucher system dangerously destabilize the current public schools? schools and the infrastructure already built were designed for large populations which could only decline. future planning would be harder w/ potentially giant #'s of students coming in and out of the system. Other than knowing that Sweden has had a voucher system in place since 1992, that schools that accept vouchers can't charge more than public schools, and that enrollment in private schools has increased from 1% to 10% in general, and to 20% in secondary schools since that time - I don't have much to add but there's plenty to Google. With regards to small/homogenous vs large heterogenous question, I think that the proper question is whether or not there are any logically and/or empirically sound arguments that suggest that letting parents control which school get's their child's tuition money will either be impracticable or make the kids worse off than they are now. IMO vouchers that distribute the burden of examining and evaluating the quality of whatever is being bought with them amongst millions of individual parents and families are inherently more cost effective, scalable, and responsive than centralized bureaucracies that are subject to the limitations imposed by informational and public choice constraints. As far as the infrastructure is concerned, I don't think that we necessarily need to make the well-being of educational infrastructure that may or may not be useful for improving education any more than we need to worry about the well-being of the factory that was cranking out Commodore 64 or ColecoVision consoles at one point. Seems like there's plenty of folks that'd be running schools that'd be interested in using the schools in the event that the government-run schools could no longer afford to occupy or maintain them, but if not I'm sure that someone would find a use for them. Ditto for teachers that no school wanted to hire in a system where the money follows the kids. I generally don't like any tax exemptions, for a variety of reasons (spawning waste and corruption being foremost amongst them), and it's hard for me to find a cause that I like the government subsidizing by any mechanism any less than I do religion. Having said that, the reality is that as things stand now, and are likely to for some time - there are several mechanisms such as tax-deductible tithes, grants and subsidized loans for students attending private colleges, etc that are at least as susceptible to 1st Ammendment arguments as the voucher issue. Until and/or unless those get addressed, it seems like the 1st ammendment argument is a bit of a red herring. I suspect that you're a great teacher that'd probably capture a premium, and take home a greater share of the tuition under a completely voucherized funding regime than you do now. Do you disagree?

That's a curious observation, given that the wealthier your parents are, the fewer constraints that the accident of your birth imposes on the education that you'll receive. The real benefit of vouchers accrues to those who are born into families who are too poor to dream of sending their children to private schools. If you consult the literature on the systems in place in Sweden and the Netherlands, you'll notice that both have mechanisms in place to prevent kids that are dependent on vouchers from being priced out of private schools that accept public tuition money. The status quo that you are defending is actually the principal mechanism that forces poor children into schools that resemble the bottom photo, and keeps them out of anything like the institution pictured above it.

So would you support vouchers on the condition that they couldn't have a specific religious charter to advance as part of their mission? Are you sure that there's still a first amendment problem if the parents, rather than the government, determine who gets their money? What differentiates these from tax deductions for donations to churches, in your mind?

Seems like the problem for teachers is monopsony, which is the opposite of monopoly. Eg, monopsony = one and only one buyer, which distorts prices and suffocates competition just as effectively as having a single seller. It's puzzling to me that so many teachers are vehemently opposed to reforms to vouchers, since competition for children would also foster competition for teachers, and likely foster the development of compensation models that'd allow teachers to capture more of the revenue, have more discretion over curriculum, pedagogy, etc. how is there not already competition in education? you can go to private schools - you can move to another public school district - you can home school. there's a first amendment problem w/ many private schools as they're religious in nature. I'd agree that there's already competition, but the deck is clearly stacked in favor of unionized public schools in a manner that it wouldn't be if the money followed the kids. As things stand now, the kids follow the money, and the people who exercise effective control over the public money have every incentive to structure the balance of the benefits that derive from such control on behalf of their own members, and to advance their own interests, whether or not that happens to coincide with improving education. Seniority rules that favor tenure over merit are only exhibit A in a list that would surely exhaust the capacities of the alphabet. This is hardly some radical wing-nut fantasy, unless you consider the Swedes and the Dutch, for example, to be nations of radical wing-nuts. Just listen to this guy: "Per Unckel, Governor of Stockholm and former Minister of Education, sums up the advantages of Swedish system: "Education is so important that you can’t just leave it to one producer. Because we know from monopoly systems that they do not fulfill all wishes".

It's also worth noting that all of the data I've seen suggests that the tendency to believe in all manner of paranormalisms, bogus health modalities, etc actually *increases* with education. The only exception to this trend that I can recall is amongst people who study the natural sciences, and I think that you only really start to see diminishing credulity once people in these fields hit the senior/graduate level. Short summary: -Highly educated, politically liberal people are more likely to believe supernatural claims made outside the context of traditional religions. -People with limited educations and a conservative political outlook are much more likely to believe supernatural claims made in the context of traditional religions. I don't think either generalization offers much hope if the goal is to diminish the country's aggregate credulity. Are we really better off if the atheist sociology post-doc that giggles at creationists simultaneously believes in reiki, homeopathy, and reincarnation? I think you can make an argument that the answer is, on balance, "yes," but it's hard to see it as an unmitigated triumph of education on behalf of science and reason.

Going to be an increasingly heavy millstone around the Republican party's neck in the future. I'm hoping that they'll escape from this trap somewhat by redefining the scope of "Big Government" to include state interventions to prohibit things that consenting adults do to themselves or others in private, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

Just to get things back on topic. "Cash-short county inks raises for unions." http://www.seattlepi.com/local/410379_county22.html If you're tempted to claim that public employees with equivalent qualifications are undercompensated (wages plus benefits, including the costs of their pensions and health-care in retirement) to their private sector counterparts, I hope that you'll furnish the data that supports that contention.

Seems like the problem for teachers is monopsony, which is the opposite of monopoly. Eg, monopsony = one and only one buyer, which distorts prices and suffocates competition just as effectively as having a single seller. It's puzzling to me that so many teachers are vehemently opposed to reforms to vouchers, since competition for children would also foster competition for teachers, and likely foster the development of compensation models that'd allow teachers to capture more of the revenue, have more discretion over curriculum, pedagogy, etc.

Another factor that confounds international comparisons is that in quite a few countries kids are separated into vocational and academic tracks at a fairly young age. Are all of the kids in those systems subject to the testing that's used a basis for constructing those transnational comparisons? I seem to recall hearing or reading that they aren't, but I can't recall precisely where. If that's true, then that's introducing a bias into the data that's potentially making the performance of US schools worse than they are. I think longitudinal studies of performance in the US would be more revealing, but even there it's difficult since I suspect that the content and format of most standardized tests has changed over time.

1. If another employer is offering a better deal, it's clear that negotiating with their existing employer isn't the only option that they have for securing better pay, wages, etc. If no one else anywhere is offering a better deal, that's a sign that you're being payed the maximal price for what your skillset is worth. If the public sees that people with skillset X aren't making much money, and want to boost their income, a negative income tax like the EIC is a superior mechanism for doing so than collective bargaining, as it neither prices the employee out of a job or his employer out of a market, and you can calibrate the magnitude of the benefit more precisely. The problem for the folks that work building planes for Boeing is that they know that the second they step out the door they're looking at an immediate and substantial pay-cut in virtually all cases since they're being paid above market rates for their skillset, and even if they accept lower wages elsewhere they'll still be at wage levels above which the public is likely to feel moved to cough up tax money to supplement their incomes. 2. See above.

okay fine, but did adam smith really foresee just how far and with what force industrial corporations would thrust their vast thorny cocks up the ass of the working man? how would that oft-raped class be a single bit better had unions been broken in their infancy? Given that he was alive during during an age when the dwindling embers of feudalism were still glowing in pockets here and there, and the hereditary aristocracy played a meaningful role in society, it's difficult to argue that he was unacquainted with what happened to people when they had no mechanism with which to hinder the exercise of arbitrary economic power. Given the proliferation of guilds in Europe at the time, it's reasonable to conclude that he had a fair opportunity to evaluate the extent to which they furthered the public interest as well. I don't think the quote above is indicative of any particular disdain that Smith had for tradesmen who were attempting to increase prices for whatever they were selling by restricting competition and preventing the public from buying similar wares at a lower price from someone else. He was simply pointing out the reality that by doing so they were imposing excess costs on the public with the intention of accruing the benefits of doing so in their own hands. This was part of a larger discussion about the aggregate effects that partitioning the economy into a collection of state sanctioned cartels would invariably have on the overall level of prosperity in a given country. He seemed fundamentally Madisonian in his distrust of any particular group's capacity to use exclusive commercial powers or privileges they'd been granted on another group's behalf, particularly in order to benefit that other group or advance their interest. I think that was in part because he doubted whether or not it was actually possible for them to reliably know what was in another's true interest, much less put their interests on par with their own when the two were in conflict. There are probably other quotes out there that make the point better than these, but it's clear in his work that he didn't think that groups of tradesmen were uniquely flawed in this respect: "It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs." "This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies who would, upon no account, hazard their own fortunes in any private copartnery. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own." With respect to modern-day unions, it's not like they're unique in attempting to forcibly extract wealth from the public by eliminating or restricting competition. Virtually every commercial enterprise large enough to lobby any level of government is engaged in efforts to get the government to rig the game on their behalf, and at the public's expense. It's one thing to recognize that, it's another to acquiesce to it, much less applaud it when you're the one being forced to pay more than you would otherwise. With respect to the role of unions in the past, even if you accept all of the claims about unions and unions alone being responsible for getting various worker rights and protections signed into law, it doesn't follow that the public should be forced to pay royalties in perpetuity to present day union members for whatever services they may have rendered in the past. With commercial unions in the present, most of the time there's are some competitors out there, no matter how hobbled which limits their capacity to forcibly extract wealth from consumers. This is why any union that imposes costs on employers that exceed whatever (hypothetical) increase in output that union members generate relative to their non-union counterparts are doomed to extinction unless they somehow manage to secure legislation that bans competition outright. Even a hobbled competitor is often sufficient to put the likes of GM under, and if not innovation and/or substitution will. In the case of public sector unions, there's are no constraints imposed by competition, and the public is materially worse of for every dollar of excess compensation that the public sector unions, or unions contracts funded with public money, secure over and above what they'd get under competitive conditions. The public could either get the same output with lower taxes, or get more output for the same level of taxes. That's true whether you're talking about bridges or file clerks at the DMV. It's clear how this benefits public sector unions and unions that depend on public sector contracts, or legislation that restricts competition, but it's not clear how it benefits the public.* Before anyone chimes in with the shopworn fallacies about unions, rather than productivity, increasing real wages, or paying workers "enough to buy the product" it's worth noting that somehow the guys making yachts and lear-jets manage to get by with salaries that are far less than necessary to own either, and to observe that there's no shortage of countries in the world where the workers are both dirt poor and heavily unionized.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Yes. The panel of physicians who have spent careers working in the NHS, and specialize in end of life care wrote that letter because they're vehemently opposed to...hospice care. If we use the conventional meaning of each of the words contained in this passage below at face value: "In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn. As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others. “Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong." It's clear that what they are all implacably opposed to the very notion of...hospice care.

Mighty harsh thing to say about Ted Kennedy so shortly after his demise. Without his efforts in the senate, the deregulation of large swaths of the transportation sector might not have ever happened! Anyone that opposes granting the government the power to fix prices, dispense patronage via tarriffs, subsidies, and other impediments to competition that might displace the cartels run by their favorites must be a madman. It's also clear that legislation governing commerce is good - irrespective of its effects. Legislation that created the modern FNMA and GNMA, the mortgage-interest deduction, the capital gains exemption for homeowners, the CLA, etc, etc had no effect on the genesis or magnitude of the housing bubble. 'Kay.

Great! Be sure to listen to the Nassim Taleb podcast while you're doing your background research. Fasinating stuff! http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/taleb_on_black.html

Love the Econtalk podcasts he hosts. Isn't he dead? Like his ideas? Maybe you guys should ban him from school curricula - hell, burn his books. I prefer to use them for TP at bivis, but I guess they coul also work for emergency fire starter. In my experience, the level of loathing one has for Friedman is inversely proportional to the number of pages of his that one has actually read. The rare leftist that actually reads his work will typically find some common ground with his philosophy on issues like his opposition to the draft, his advocacy of the Earned Income Credit (negative income tax) as a poverty fighting tool, his antipathy towards the War on Drugs, etc. "Paige: Let us deal first with the issue of legalization of drugs. How do you see America changing for the better under that system? Friedman: I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there's a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they're sure of the quality. You know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now. Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up."