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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.
I imagine he'll tell you that there's a much simpler, cheaper and literally infallible way of preventing black recidivism and that he's happy to pay for it and implement it personally.
Presenting a binary choice narrows the range of options tremendously.
How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals? From a quick glance at their name, the 'Open Society Foundation' is more focused on the latter. What they'd do is the same inept 'rehabilitation' that works to undermine law enforcement already and a media/decisionmaker campaign against your harsh recidivism laws so it looks like you're causing the problem, not them.
They were very successful at electing people like Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin and George Gascón who kept and keep doing exactly what was expected of them, so if that part were somehow removed and they were forced to select for people who are good at overseeing rehabilitation initiatives because that's the only way recidivists don't get back to prison, the people the Soros Foundation would choose for that would be pretty good at it.
It's, like, I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.
The Waffen SS was pretty good at fighting. But their combat abilities are localized, not general. They would not want to fight to defend Israel for instance - quite the opposite. Some of them went to help the Egyptians and Syrians attack Israel.
People have their own innate ideological goals and they want to advance them. You can't remove their core, motivating goals.
The Open Society Foundation wants their own goals and they'll advance them. If your goals are opposed to Open Society, then they're your enemy. They don't want to imprison anyone, they want to be nicer to criminals as part of their broad plans to transform society. Boudin wants to release criminals, to reduce imprisonment, to let repeat offenders out on 'community supervision'. You want to reduce crime, by rehabilitation if possible but otherwise by imprisonment. You're in conflict with his goals and he's in conflict with yours. Your foundational worldviews are dissimilar.
There's a time and a place for mistake theory and compromising but there's also a time for directly combating opponents. Trying to work with these people given differing goals and worldview wouldn't end well. Far better just to appoint prosecutors and officials that are aligned with your vision and suppress opponents.
They'd absolutely do the same to you, these are the kind of people who brought down the Tsar because he left them alone rather than suppressing them!
I don't disagree, that's why I said, specifically:
I'm not sure that the Open Society Foundation and the DAs it champions would prefer a world where unrehabilitated rapists are let free with a slap on the wrist and continue raping. Maybe they do but understandably never say it aloud, maybe they do but never even admit it to themselves. Maybe they don't believe that about rapists at all, but do believe that shoplifters are just collecting involuntary reparations. Anyway they end up promoting lawlessness, in effect valuing well being of criminals above that of law abiding citizens' while I strongly value them in the opposite direction, so I and other likeminded people should realize that this is an irreconcilable value difference that allows no compromise and we should fight to win.
What I was saying however is that a well-designed system doesn't need to be run on impeccably loyal people totalitarianly selected to have the same worldview (and in fact any system that has that as a requirement will fall to sociopaths). In case of Soros and friends we only need to ensure that they have no say on when to release repeat offenders, then their interests are aligned with ours: without an option of prematurely releasing unreformed criminals they sure prefer reforming criminals (so that they don't get imprisoned again for twice as long) to not reforming them, and can be relied to do as good job at it as they can.
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