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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.
Wasn’t the point of charter schools to allow tax money to travel with the children to pay for private(ly owned) schools instead of public(ly owned) schools? Are charter schools now considered places for children of the rich? Did I miss something big?
They were a little too successful and in so being present something of the two-fold problem to people like Freddie and Scott. First is the issue of "cream-skimming"/"brain drain" second, and I suspect the real sticking point, is that "School Choice" in many states means having the option to opt out of the progressive education industrial complex and I suspect that they are starting to recognize just how much of a threat this represents to their business plan.
Do you have any stats/articles on the success of charter schools? I don't know much about them and have usually heard the opposite of your take, but I'm not very well informed.
I recall the literature came out to “probably didn’t increase scores (or decrease them) but were materially cheaper”
This would be a pretty big success if the public school’s actual goal was education instead of ‘justify spending as much money as humanly possible, and then still complain about not having enough’.
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I guess the Libertarians constantly talking (about shuttering the whole public school system eventually, starting with the federal education bureau) didn’t clue them in.
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Unless I'm misunderstanding you - Do you genuinely think Scott objects to people "having the option to opt out of the progressive education industrial complex", given he calls out Freddie's suggestion that we force public schools with
And even for Freddie, who is a longtime critic of the 'progressive education industrial-complex', how do charter schools threaten his 'business plan'?
Your claim seems more like six unexamined grievances thrown into a blender than something real.
Scott is exactly the kind of man to believe something like that and then balk at the perfectly reasonable conclusion it suggests. Scott, if he had his druthers, would want public schools to keep on chugging along with no great disruptions, just delivering better education. He would not dare to risk being seen as someone who wants to abolish public schools, and if he got even the whiff of that stink on him, he'd flinch back in horror and quickly try to disclaim his previous positions.
In short, he's soft.
It's actually reasonable to balk at abolishing public schools with no alternative in place. What do you think will happen to the poor black kids in gang neighborhoods where mandatory public schools are abolished, and parents are free to do whatever they want with their students? Or what about the 40th percentile white parent? Will they really have enough insight into the education-provision process to choose the 'good school' instead of the scam school? I'm actually not sure, and it's worth thinking about that before taking action.
How is this any worse than the existing public school system? How am I supposed to determine a "good school" from a "scam school?" I take it back, that's the easy part: find the school district with the highest home prices.
But I can't simply choose to send my child to one of those schools.
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Kids will work, or go be delinquents, or do whatever it is they want to do. Why force them into school at all? I just don't see the problem.
I'm very sympathetic to that position, but:
Things like basic literacy, numeracy, being able to do addition, basic algebra, understanding the very basics of our economy and political system, are all very valuable for the economic productivity of 85, 90, 100 iq people. Higher-level math and humanities skills are very valuable for the economic productivity of 110 iq people. If you nuke schools - not just 'abolish public school and everyone attends private' but 'everyone stops attending school entirely' - I think a lot of people who aren't in the top 20% will be much less skilled, be less productive, make less money, and that'll also cause them social problems.
My understanding is that truancy problems usually start after all those things are taught in elementary school. I disagree that basic algebra is valuable when, in a few years, someone with an 85 IQ will be able to ask the Large Language Model on their phone to solve the problem for them, and it will get it right. You say teaching numeracy is important, I think by any reasonable measure we have tried and failed to do that. It would be easier to change societies expectations to be "people aren't expected to understand things with numbers", than it would be to rely on an assumption that call center employees can understand what it means when they push buttons on a calculator.
You're right that we shouldn't abolish school entirely, and I apologize for being unclear in my comment. I propose we keep schools but make them optional, at the parent's discretion. We are forcing too much education on people who are too stupid to benefit from it, and in the process we're torturing children who would actually benefit from more schooling.
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Yes I do because guys like Scott will claim they want people to have the option right up until someone actually takes it.
The moment parents start to pick George Washington Carver Elementary over George Floyd Elementary they change their tune. There is a culture war to win after all.
Scott made a big post about how the Summer of Floyd caused crime to increase, he's not a left-wing partisan of that kind. He, again, thinks school is a helltopian torturescape. Also, charter schools and private schools currently exist. There are 3.7 million students in charter schools, 5.7 million students in private schools, and another 3.7 million students homeschooled (at various points within the past few years). Yet at no instance did Scott act like his 'business plan' was 'threatened' or go back on his opinions. The option currently exists, people are taking it, and Scott is still endorsing it.
This is an entirely fictional grievance that you invented. You have these vague ideas about how everyone other than you are racist liberals who hate freedom and minorities, and impose them on whatever circumstances you happen to read about. Why?
And yet he picks sides. Characterizing those who go against the secular academic consensus as "dupes" and "hopelessly misguided"
Edit to add: The difference is I don't believe that there is a "rational" solution to be had here.
It's possible for Scott to have severe partisan biases and loathsome cowardice that together make him your permanent enemy and also for the particular way you claim he's doing that to be false. Maybe the former is true, it's not entirely inconsistent with his behavior, but I'd like to see evidence for it that isn't just ... imagined.
Fair point
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Come on. I have no idea where scott said "dupes" and "hopelessly misguided", I searched it both in this thread and on ACX and SSC and didn't find Scott saying them. How does him insulting someone, somewhere mean you're justified in making up claims about Scott without backing them up at all? Presumably, scott called specific people in specific situations dupes and hopelessly misguided. That doesn't extend to everyone who opposes the 'secular academic consensus'. I think vaccine skeptics are dupes and hopelessly misguided. They go against the consensus. Yet I also despise public schooling and modern schools. No contradiction. It's pure 'waging the culture war' - from a distance, he looks like he's wearing the enemy team's colors! He must be evil!
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I'd be careful here. Charter / private schools are run by the same kind of people that run public schools, in the end you need to go through the same Critical Theory meat grinder to be able to teach. Further, the state can make demands on what is going to be taught and how it's going to be taught for the schools to be able to get that sweet "school choice" money. I've already heard reports of charter schools being more woke than public schools, except this time you have no recourse because it was your "choice".
So at worst the Charters have similar pressures?
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A lot of charters use teach for America kids. I suspect they lean heavily woke.
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Maybe. and maybe some charter/religious schools are run by the sort of person who got into education because they wanted to work with kids have since left the "mainstream" path precisely because there was their vibe.
I'm sure you get a bit of both kinds. Just wanted to point out it's not a cure-all and that it would be wise to remain vigilant.
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