Poverty by America: The most interesting education point

There's a lot of idealism in the later chapters of Matthew Desmond's Poverty, By America. "Why don't we just get people to do all these things that will make it better?" I'm not going to tear into it because I'm reading for the stuff I can take away, not the stuff I'll leave behind. I'm going to focus on page 164, where he mentions an absolutely fascinating educational experiment that I need to read more about: Early in this century, Montgomery County, MD randomly assigned poor families to different public housing units, some in poor areas and some in more affluent areas. The county also massively pumped resources into its poorest schools. (One should always be skeptical of claims that resources were showered on the poor. However, Matthew Desmond seems to be at least as skeptical of these claims as anyone else would be, so I am inclined to believe him.)

Desmond notes that poor kids in affluent areas did better than poor kids in poorer areas, even if the schools got more money.

Now, I haven't examined the literature on this yet (but two key articles cited by Desmond are here and here), so I can't say anything about this with certainty, but I'll wager that two things happened, both of which I see evidence of on a daily basis on a campus that is very proudly, vocally dedicated to serving the most disadvantaged, to a degree that would give another Matthew a stroke:

1) All poverty relief and social services are delivered via "leaky buckets." There are lots of people who get their cuts. Yes, some amount of overhead is inevitable, necessary, and even (in small doses) beneficial. That grain of truth is the excuse used by every rent-seeker along the way. They insist that we need various administrators to plan and organize. We need specialized case workers to monitor each kid. The school lunch program needs several layers of planning to determine whether they bought the most nutritious brand of sugary pudding. We need assessment of all these various activities. And of course we need oversight to make sure that none of this money is wasted on pointless bloat!

So much for offering the salaries that will lure the best teachers, or making sure classrooms have roofs that don't leak and enough supplies that teachers don't have to spend their own money. (Though if they want to get reimbursed I'm sure there's a process available, one with 26 different steps to make sure no money is wasted. The Deputy Associate Superintendent for Administrative Efficiency has hired specialized staff to carry out all 26 steps!)

So who knows whether any of that high spending materialized in ways that could even begin to improve the classroom. Pretending to improve education for the poor is basically a massive jobs program for well-meaning college grads.

2) Meanwhile, you know what happens in affluent districts? Well, it probably isn't a showcase of pure efficiency. Affluent suburbs are perfectly capable of hiring paper-pushing grifters, even if they'll never hire as many as the districts trying to Save The World.

Still, in those more affluent classrooms there are kids who have more stable homes, and parents with the bandwidth and know-how to push them. The median kid in the class is ready and able to go farther, and the teacher teaches accordingly. Doesn't mean that all of those kids are geniuses who will actually reach great heights--many of those tokens of achievement that the schools spit out are their own form of grift that affluent college-educated parents push their kids to seek along their road to a cushy job Saving The World. Some of those kids are being prepared to preach the latest bullshit about Equity and Inclusion so they can prove that they are the most deserving applicant for some do-gooder job.

Still, the teacher teaches to the middle. And the middle in that affluent suburb is higher than the middle in a poorer district. And most of the kids below that middle are at least trying to reach that middle. They might not quite get there, but they're mostly aiming for it, and the standard that they might just fall short of is higher than the standard that they might exceed in a different setting. Offering challenges matters. There's no magic or mystery about putting a poor kid next to a more affluent peer. Some will emulate the affluent peer, and others will feel alienated from the peer. All that teachers and school leaders can do is play the odds, and the odds are that calibrating challenges to a higher but still reasonable and attainable median will result in more kids at least getting close to that higher goal. Some will always be left behind (and one can only hope that spoiled Harvard prick Teddy Kennedy is roasting in hell for pretending otherwise), but most will at least come close to a higher but reasonable median if that's what they're presented with.

None of this is nuclear rocket surgery. You don't need a PhD to see it. Two functioning eyes will do. Hell, one of my eyes is pretty mediocre. One and a half working eyes. That's it. That's what you need.

Current Reading: Poverty by America

 I'm reading Poverty by America, a book by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond on the systematic factors that undergird the persistence of poverty in America. I'm not going to summarize everything--some of his economic assertions are a bit optimistic, but he has important observations. In particular:

1) Payday lenders and check-cashing places really do exploit the poor. I'm not convinced that getting more reputable bank to serve low-income/high-risk customers is as easy as he thinks, but by god it is a task worth working on. There must be some regulatory changes that could help here.

2) The money that inmates have to spend on phone calls is insane. It's just one of the many ways that literally captive customers are milked when they can least afford it. Obviously it's not the worst thing done to inmates, but it's a proxy for a bunch of things, and I suspect that an attack on the vested interests around exploitation of prisoners would raise similar issues whether the topic was phone calls or something else.

3) The decline of unions has had utterly predictable consequences for inequality in America.

4) Zoning that favors single-family dwellings is a huge cause of soaring costs of living.

5) America's tax code is full of social engineering, and the vast majority of it is for the benefit of the upper-middle class and above. I'm not optimistic that America would tolerate wholesale abandonment of tax breaks without corresponding across-the-board cuts, but even a more-or-less revenue-neutral change that removed these thumbs on scales would release a lot of economic pressures, and unskew a whole bunch of things. And if the change were even mildly revenue-positive, it would definitely improve the fiscal situation.

Hirschman on party systems

Hirschman makes the point that the Median Voter Theorem (all parties compete for the median voter and hence wind up nearly indistinguishable) breaks down because parties are dominated by people who will stay and exercise their voice option rather than the exit option. And exit doesn't necessarily mean voting differently--it could just mean that you stop volunteering for party work. So the party can stay away from the median if the other party does likewise, because both serve internal constituencies that chose voice over exit.

Hirschman also makes the case that, in some sense, this serves the public good. Two indistinguishable parties mean that there's no choice and the policy outcomes are far from both the left and right flanks. That sounds bad on the surface, but moderates aren't the only people whose interests count. The wings deserve some consideration too. If, say, we line everyone up on a spectrum from 0 to 100, placing the parties at points 25 and 75 means that nobody is more than 25 away from a party. Of course, they might be 50 away from a winner, but if the two parties alternate, you could be no more than 25 away from a common outcome and no more than 25 away from the average effect. That's not so bad.

I'm not prepared to endorse extremism, but it's an interesting point.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Midpoint

A few interesting observations:

1) Hirschman notes that lazy quasi-monopolies with public subsidies might like it when dissatisfied users exit instead of protesting. Public schools are happy if the most demanding parents transfer to private schools instead of going to School Board meetings. The Postal Service might be OK if (some but not all) demanding customers use FedEx instead of calling their congressman.

On one level this is obvious. But it's also economically interesting to note how organizations cushioned against market forces might get worse rather than better in the presence of competitive outlets.

2) He notes that similar things apply in politics. Some poorly-run countries prefer if former politicians move abroad rather than critiquing successors. Some countries are happy if dissidents go into exile, and might even leave them alone to send the message that exile is a great choice.

Next read: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman

 The next read will be Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by economist Albert O. Hirschman, a book on how people can respond to problems in institutions. They can leave, they can use their voices to critique, or they can remain loyal in ways that largely avoid obvious critique. I read it a while ago and don't remember much, so time to reread.

Latest Read: The Education Myth by Jon Shelton

My latest read is The Education Myth by Jon Shelton. It's a very detailed walk through education and economic policy in the US, starting in early US history but mostly focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries. I'm not going to walk through every point, just note two things;

1) His basic critique is one that I echo: US policymakers have focused pretty much exclusively on education as improving workers, rather than focusing on creating more opportunities for work. Yes, teaching a man to fish helps him feed himself, but are there healthy fisheries for him to ply? Good harbor infrastructure? Functioning markets in which to sell his catch? Are there alternative careers if fishing isn't his comparative advantage?

The government cannot do all of this (or arguably most of it) but to the extent that they do play a role, it has to be something broader than just trying to train people without regard for the world they're being trained to move in.

2) Near the end, on page 179 he notes that while research has shown that states with good educational investments tend to have less income inequality, the causality isn't clear. Maybe states that invest in social spending across the board have less income inequality AND more educational spending because those two priorities tend to go together in a lot of Americans' values systems. Or maybe greater economic security leads to more desire to invest in education. An individual can climb relative to others via education, but it's not clear that a society can equalize itself via education. If anything, the conditions that lead to learning require economic development before you can get more kids to spend more time studying.

Latest read: The Captive Mind by Milosz

 I'm reading The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, a book about why intellectuals conformed in communist societies. I have only read one chapter so far, but there's an observation that I have to blog:

The loss of religion means a loss of common axioms and reference points. (Not an original point, but well worth making.) In a society with a common framework, the intellectual can reason from shared axioms to useful conclusions, and hope to be relevant and important. The intellectual is providing a service that people need, a way of assuring them that their actions are consistent with shared values. Communism provides alienated intellectuals a way to be part of the society as a quasi-theologian.

Milosz also tells of a conference where Polish artists and writers were instructed on the newly ascendant ideology of Marxism (Milosz defected in 1951). The audience was obviously unimpressed but mostly quiet. But people got ground down over time anyway. Because everyone wants to fit in.

I am starting to understand why university administrators summon faculty to long meetings.