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Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.
Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.
Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.
Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.
(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?
Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:
Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.
Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.
You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.
Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.
Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.
Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.
The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?
This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.
Barring the emergency exits is a plausible framing for deBoer’s strategy. At the least, it fits neatly in with stereotypes about socialists, which I guess makes it good enough for this board. I doubt that it was the motivation for soft-on-crime DAs, and I am confident that it is not, and never has been, the modus operandi for desegregation.
Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority? Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end? Who’s coordinating this gambit, anyway?
Here’s a simpler explanation: people opposed segregation because they thought it was bad. Evil, pernicious, self-perpetuating. And people oppose harsh sentences, or racial profiling, or whatever triggered the campaigns of 2018—they oppose these things because they think they are wrong. Not because they’re playing 5D chess with recidivism. Not because they want their opponents to suffer. Because they expect the benefits outweigh any costs.
Because then the majority has skin in the game and has to deal with the problem. It's naive and usually doesn't work, but if you totally expect it from deBoer, why not from other activists?
I never said or implied that. But you're conflating two very different things: all the stuff that MLK mentioned, let's call it "negative desegregation", meaning that black people are no longer prevented from being in white spaces, and "positive desegregation" that actively tries to mix up communities, such as busing (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing btw, it was an unmitigated disaster opposed by everyone involved expect the actual rich and affluent whites). Can you give me your best pro-busing steelman? Because I'd put making whites have skin in the game wrt education quality on the first place, tolerance through familiarity on the second, and aesthetic preference for de facto desegregation as a sort of a strawman (though no doubt real) justification.
Same for the Soros DAs. I'm not saying that there were devious conspirators planning to have a crime wave, I'm sure that they hoped that there wouldn't be a crime wave! But don't you think that it was very weird to do things in the opposite order to what I proposed? Like, first you figure how to prevent criminals from reoffending, then you go soft on reoffenders because they won't reoffend yet again? If you go soft on reoffenders first, what exactly do you expect? Is "uh I hope someone also figures how to prevent recidivism now that they are forced to" painting my enemies as more stupid and evil than "idk I don't give a fuck lol"?
Then you weren’t very clear when you claimed
You glossed over the part where people thought the segregation itself was bad and had obvious, object-level effects. Is that not a more obvious motivation for desegregation? Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing. It’s not people trying to psyop the oppressors into caring about a problem. It’s people believing their remedy is just.
I said:
And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.
You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.
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