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.

Latest Read: The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

I haven't had much of a blogging urge for a while, but I want to get a couple of thoughts out there about my latest read, so I can remember them. I'm reading The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz, a book on the damage done to kids by moving school online during COVID. It's a 300 page popular book with a certain font and layout, so I thought I would find it unremarkable. But in chapter 1 I'm hooked. She goes into the history of education in America, even as far back as Colonial times, which is not something I'd expect in this genre.

I like three points in particular:

1) Americans like the idea of education as "fixing" people once and for all, so they never need fixing again. We'll educate them and then poverty is fixed. We'll educate them and then they're virtuous people. We'll educate them and then they're whatever it is that we need them to be so we can believe that some perennial problem is solved. 

It's largely folly, but it's what we believe in this culture. Liberals believe it because it means that a social service (allegedly) fixed some problem. Conservatives believe it because they've taught a man to fish and now he (allegedly) never needs feeding again.

I've heard this critique of the culture before, but I've only heard it from a few people. But Kamenetz is one of those wise few. That makes her stand out among writers on education. I need to pay attention to her.

2) It is hence unsurprising that in a country with far less of a safety net than peer countries of similar wealth and cultural heritage, education would be one of the few universal guarantees. We guarantee public education to rich and poor. We guarantee it to the disabled. We guarantee it to teenagers in jail, apparently. (This was news to me, but she's an NPR reporter focused on education, so I presume she's looked into this.) We might not guarantee everyone a great education, but it's the one service we guarantee in some form.

This is part of why schools are the main anti-hunger program in the country. We feed poor kids...via school. We might not feed them anything terribly healthy, but this is how we feed them.

She makes the interesting point that the commitment runs so deep that even profoundly disabled kids who will never gain the ability to communicate much are still guaranteed special education. I confess that I had often privately thought that this was a bit much, a well-meaning but inefficient way of meeting needs that aren't really amenable to school intervention. I've known a few kids in that situation, I understand why it's done, I even feel good for them. But part of me always wondered if it's really necessary to address their needs this way instead of some other route.

But Kamenetz makes the interesting point that this is a marker of our dedication to this universal guarantee. If we didn't go there, if we eroded the guarantee for them, we could erode it for more people. And soon we'd erode it for people who have needs that really are best met via school. I can respect that point.

It's strange that an anti-intellectual country like ours would be so committed to schools. Indeed, maybe having an anti-intellectual culture value schools in all the wrong ways just exacerbates our educational problems. But value them we do.

3) Until March of 2020. And then we shut them down. And now we see so many problems. Because we shut down something we've never fully backed away from previously. That has a lot of deep implications beyond the immediate, narrow questions of whether Learning Objectives 2b and 2c on Official Checklist B612 were met. There's always a way to check a box and pretend that you did so honestly.

But walking away from one of your few (supposedly) ironclad commitments? That does something to a culture. That sort of thing can shut down a whole bunch of non-obvious circuits. The conservative in me thinks we flipped a switch on things we never understood and don't really know how to reboot. A progressive optimist would say "Oh, just fund these programs that are Recommended By Experts. It's Best Practice." But I don't think societies are that simple.

Recent articles

I have gotten two opinion pieces out this week:

1) A piece in Areo on the doubletalk around diversity and affirmative action.

2) A piece in Real Clear Education on the obstacles to improving graduation rates when students are underprepared and need to work to support themselves.