On the utter fatuity of rational man

If you ask my wife, Matt Damon is a public good.

I think there is an easier way to explain why education is a public good. Try to estimate the economic impact of elementary education. Obviously the economic return of elementary education and for example, being taught reading or basic addition and subtraction. The economic return won’t begin coming until at least 12 years after this is taught and continue for the person’s working life. So the net present value of something that happens from 12 years to 50 years in the future is likely to be relatively small today and to the child involved have little meaning. Complicating that value is dividing the value between what is learned in each step of an education from kindergarten to the final educational step of the individual. My hunch is that a good analysis is that the net present value of each step of an education is relatively modest, and econometric analysis would likely overestimate the value of the last educational step as it would not see the difference between someone who had good prepeation early and could advance the maximum amount at each level and end up at Harvard, and the person who had a poor foundation and never got past what is normaly learned in 8 years even though they completed 12.

The second problem is who makes the decision as to whether the value gained by educational spending is greater than cost as perceived by the person paying. If the person paying is the parent who beliees in the value of education, then they may be willing to pay for tuition or taxes. However, if it involves a non-parent, what is the value to them? If I have no children, what is the value to me of educating someone’s child. I get less benefit today form that expense that the cost of a can of Coke. This is also true among those who send children to private schools.

The easiest way to test this theory is to track voting on school bond and budget referendums by precinct and comparing that to the demographics of the precinct by age and proportion of children in private school. I leaned this lesson back in the 1970’s when working on school board and bond issues in Pennsylvania and am convinced that this difference still holds.

I should add that looking at the perceived net present value of “public goods” would get a similar results. People value what they use and not what others use. Furthermore, investments that have long time horizon’s like education, sewer systems, clean air, etc. are the hardest to sell to voters focused on comparing the value of everyday consumables to long lived public goods.

Finally, it worth looking at insurance markets for two types of insurance that make economic sense but are seldom bought due to their expense. Long-term disability and long-term care. Again, the up front cost is high and the perceived risk is very low.

Wait a second. “Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because” education promotes the “underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace…” I guess the market for journalists may not place any importance on, “socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning…” I have to assume this position is supported purely by anecdote and not empirical data, since the most desirable US colleges are private institutions subject to market forces and they still draw students from around the world.

I presume that this interviewer was reasonably highly educated?

She works for reason.tv. I had assumed she was a libertarian (U.S. sense).

The same people who brought you “smoking is good for you” and “CO2 is good for the planet” also brought you “why johnny can’t read”. They’re just greedy assholes who don’t want to pay for other people’s education, nothing more.

Just as there has never been any science behind the claim that tobacco is good for you (a claim that was actually made) or that global warming is a hoax. So there has also never been a “crisis in education”. It was all bullshit. It’s easy to cherry pick some study or cite some backwater shithole in Alabama as proof that our schools are failing. Those are of course invalid arguments that simply serve the broader purpose of letting the rich keep more of their money.

Actors, like rock musicians, work according to “tournament rules”, where all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas, but a tiny, highly visible minority are rich and famous. If libertarians want most teachers to work hard on a pittance and no guarantee of employment, like Matt Damon wannabes, they’re going to have to pay at least a few teachers $10m a year and put their faces on the cover of TIME magazine.

At the risk of sounding profoundly silly, I’d like to see Matt Damon enter politics. He’s a consistently articulate defender of mainstream liberalism, and he seems grounded enough to take advantage of his celebrity without being defined by it.

Cory’s comment is great, too. Good public schools are part of community in a way that can’t be reduced to a simple exchange of goods and services.

It is hard to see how formal education of plumbers, barbers, and secretaries leads to the production of additional knowledge that they don’t profit from. The knowledge spillovers from the activities of typical workers that are not reflected in the prices of their wages seem minimal. So you have to make an argument from civics.

Or we could argue that, unless we want a caste system where we know from kindergarten who is destined to be a “plumber, barber, or secretary” and who is destined for presumably greater things, then we need to educate everybody.

But plenty of countries had well developed literacy, governments, and civil society before mass education

What are your examples and what were the literacy rates?

@OneEyedMan

Did you not read or just not agree with the excerpt of the Doctorow essay?

“Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education—socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning—are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.”

A well-functioning marketplace and good governance are public goods, right?

@Substance McGravitas
Just check out the Wikipedia page for literacy. France had 80% literacy rate by 1850 and 50% by about 1800. The Kingdom of Sweden ( modern Sweden, Finland, and Estonia) had similarly high rates by 1800.

This cited <a href = "http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=361434&quot;, title="link" discusses British and American literacy in the colonial period . A variety of numbers are quoted, but here is one "…U.S. adult male literacy in the eighteenth century was between 70-100 percent".

Those ‘successful’ societies without mass education had all meaningful civic contributions confined to elites. Within those elites — Rome is a good example — there was generally a strong concept of the education required for civic participation. Formal vocational education, as opposed to apprenticeships, is actually a much more modern concept.

Either (1) those elites were wrong about what was needed or (2) to expand that participation, you needed a similar program for everyone. Which was exactly the project of much educational reform over the past two centuries, thank God.

The degree of social regress being contemplated here is really gross.

@Walt
I agree. A written and spoken language is a network technology, one that only has value if other people are also using it. So in that sense, there have to be some public benefits. My question was about the size of these benefits in comparison with the private benefits. Almost everyone could get by just fine if I didn’t speak and read English but I would suffer a great if I did not. That’s powerful motivation to learn to speak and read English

@Ben
I don’t agree with Doctorow that formal public education causes these things . Formal public education comes after marketplaces and good governance in many countries. I also don’t agree with his assessment of the market returns to education. If socialization means the ability to behave, take directions, and work in a team and rational and systematic reasoning means the ability to break large problems into smaller solvable ones then I definitely think that the market rewards those skills.

#19 — As Zamfir says, this is just bad history. There wasn’t the formal bureaucracy we have today, but there was widespread public education well before the industrial revolution. And what was covered was, again, not the ROI-maximization exercise that seems to be your only method for understanding of the world. I’m brought to mind, more than anything, the title of this thread.

Following up on Zamfir – in the US at least public primary education also had strong federal support and funding, if not funding in the sense that we think of it today. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set aside section 16 of each Township (Six-mile by six-mile blocks of land established by the ordinance) as reserved for the maintenance of public schools – setting aside a full square mile of land out of every 36. That this was one of the first things that the newly formed US government did under the articles of confederation demonstrates how much support there was for publicly supported education in the 18th century.

It’s amazingly how effective the idea that education might be a purely private good gets everybody sucked into a pointless discussion. Education has value for its own sake. Having a society in which education can be assumed has value. Moreover, the content of that education matters: it allows us to transmit those things which are valuable, not just which people pay for.

@OneEye

Isn’t mass public education Pareto optimal compared to any other education scheme?

#24 — does this have a point, besides your feelings of superiority to the rest of the discussion?

I learned the definition of a public good as one which their is non-rivalry and non-excludability. Is that the definition others are working from? Education may produce positive externalities but it is both excludable and rivalrous (at least in part), so it is not a public good. As I said above, there also might be credit frictions that would generate too little education even without externalities. The question of the size of these externalities and credit frictions is empirical. Certainly there are benefits (and also costs) of non-pecuniary value like solidarity and shared culture. They do however have very real costs to produce. The question of if they are worth the price is a political one separate from the size and nature of those benefits.

@Dragon-King Wangchuck
Free universal public education in France didn’t start until the 1880’s. My understanding was that most education post revolution was funded by tuition, again not evidence of severe under-provision in the absence of universal free tuition.

@bh & @zamfir & @Uncle Kvetch
I apologize for the confusing language. I mean universal, mandatory, publicly funded public education. If I’ve gotten some or all of this wrong, I’m happy to be corrected about the historical record. Have a link for me to read? That said, I don’t see how church provided education is evidence in favor of mass literacy requiring the use of tax revenues to provide general education. That looks to me like private provision of educational services.

I once met Julian Lennon, I’d had a few drinks at the time and said I’d always wanted to meet the son of God. His curt reply: “That’s original”

Cringe..

er, @37 (damn public education . . . )

@unkle, no, the 18th. More formal state-sanctioned free primary education started in France in 1833, hence the 80% literacy rate in 1850.

Point taken, zamfir — thanks.

zamfir @ 38 pointed out that primary education was formally mandated in 1833. I didn’t know this or about the Guizot Law until I did some moar reading. It’s not universal since girls weren’t included until 1850.

I don’t know much about History or teh French I took, but the literacy graph cited shows a steady decline in illiteracy post-Revolution. Almost as if instituting a national primary education system was something that may have taken some time in the 1800’s.

Anyways, my point was that the improvement in literacy rate over that time period probably had something to do with mass education. That “free universal public education” as we know it now didn’t all of a sudden appear out of nowhere. That the process by which what we now know as “free universal public education” came to be in the first place occured at the time and place being cited.

Furthermore, what are the thresholds for non-rival and non-excludable?

Is education really more non-rival than public roads? The fact that it’s legally mandatory kinda gives it a leg-up on the non-excludable front too.

BTW, not that anyone cares, but the “#24” I referred to above has somehow become #31 in the meantime. And I swear I was #28, now 35. Do the numbers get reordered as people respond to each other, or did I just mess it up?

Except that the HTML doesn’t work properly either of course…

One eyed men are only kings when everyone else is blind.

yes neon, poster is implying we are all blind.

Education can never be a “private” good, because of the huge amount of redundancy required for communications systems to work. If a society needs a certain amount of lawyers, accountants, engineers, printers, merchants, doctors, nurses, technicians, and leaders of all types, and so on, then it also needs a large reserve pool standing by to support and help those people and to be ready to take their place if necessary. In today’s world, even what used to be blue collar occupations, like building engineers (janitors), sailors, people who manage transportation systems, maintain machines, require substantial amounts (really substantial) of technical and computer training.

Even maintaining (transmitting, refining) our language requires great cultural redundancy.

Harold I never looked at the numbers that way. Very interesting and I have learned something. Thank you.

My general impression of libertarians (the logic-chopping kind that dominates the blogosphere at any rate) is that they are mostly moderately clever kids who haven’t yet got over the discovery that they are smarter than their 10th grade teacher was. When (if) they grow up, they stop being libertarians.

My general impression of libertarians (the logic-chopping kind that dominates the blogosphere at any rate)

Not just logic-chopping, but fact-chopping too. They’re nothing if not versatile.

@62. But they aren’t reserve if they are using their skills in the meantime. I think that threw me for a loop just there. Anyway, I would argue education needs to be defended on its civic basis: that those who know nothing of Bach are worse off for that in a ‘spiritual’ sense. The economics just don’t seem to be there.

… fwiw, I was referring to what’s now his second-to-last post. But they’re both meritless.

@bh. Like I said, the word reserve threw me for a loop. I’m used to the word reserve meaning unused resources ready to redeploy. (Besides, where does this assumption that I am a libertarian come from?)

@Harold: You’ve made economic claims. You argued redundancy shouldn’t be sacrificed for efficiency. I pointed out that this was a bad idea: you should figure out how much redundancy you need. If you make claims about economics be prepared to have economics judge them. (as Kant pointed out in “Conflict of the Faculties”). That doesn’t mean that economics determines politics. As I realize you were arguing that a basic education is required for almost all jobs, and that such an education benefits us all. But that isn’t going to get us money for music classes, or science classes, or even calculus in all schools.

@OneEyedMan: Your understanding is lacking.

This linky gives a resonable summary (with footnotes) of the progression of Public education in France during the Revolution and Napoleonic era.

http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/society/c_education.html

OneEyedMan,

You asked for links about “mandatory, publicly funded public education,” which you erroneously believe started in the late nineteenth century. The reason the USA had such a high literacy was that the Protestant sects who founded it believed that literacy was a requirement for Salvation. There were similarly high literacy rates in Protestant countries such a Switzerland and Scotland. According to wikipedia:

January 1561 John Knox and a small group of clergymen set out a national programme for spiritual reform, including the “virtuous education and godly upbringing of the youth of this Realm” with a schoolmaster to be appointed to every church. “For the poor, if need be, education may be given free; for the rich, it is only necessary to see that education is given under proper supervision”.

MORE from wiki:
In 1616 an act in Privy council commanded every parish to establish a school “where convenient means may be had”, and when the Parliament of Scotland ratified this with the Education Act of 1633, a tax on local landowners was introduced to provide the necessary endowment. A loophole which allowed evasion of this tax was closed in the Education Act of 1646, which established a solid institutional foundation for schools on Covenanter principles. Although the Restoration brought a reversion to the 1633 position, in 1696 new legislation restored the provisions of 1646 together with means of enforcement “more suitable to the age”. An act of the Scottish parliament in 1696 (reinforced in 1801) underlined the aim of having a school in every parish. In rural communities these obliged local landowners (heritors) to provide a schoolhouse and pay a schoolmaster, while ministers and local presbyteries oversaw the quality of the education. In many Scottish towns, burgh schools were operated by local councils.[ENDQUOTE]
***It is no accident that Scotland was in the forefront of eighteenth century enlightenment and philosophy.

The Calvinists also admired the republicanism of Classical Antiquity and stressed a humanistic, liberal arts education (as did the Catholics, by the way).
In the USA:
http://www.city-data.com/states/Massachusetts-Education.html
“The Boston Latin School opened in 1635 as the first public school in the colonies. Harvard College—the first college in the US—was founded the following year. In 1647, for the first time, towns with more than 50 people were required by law to establish taxsupported school systems. More firsts followed: the country’s first board of education, compulsory school attendance law, training school for teachers, state school for the retarded, and school for the blind.” [ENDQUOTE]
Scholarships were often provided by wealthy men for promising pupils to attend Harvard.

My general impression of libertarians (the logic-chopping kind that dominates the blogosphere at any rate) is that they are mostly moderately clever kids who haven’t yet got over the discovery that they are smarter than their 10th grade teacher was. When (if) they grow up, they stop being libertarians.

However, well-off people don’t really ever need to grow up, especially if they’re men. And so many of them never do.

And bearing in mind that their magic solutions apply to other people, not to them, and are rarely put into effect anyway, and hence never tested, they can keep hold of their beliefs for as long as they live.

@Harold: Look at the breakdown of unemployment rates per educational attainment. Those who can do jobs requiring education are much more likely to be employed then those who can’t. Again, I didn’t understand what you meant by reserve apparently. To me that’s reserve as in reserve army of labor.

bh@13:

I’d like to see Matt Damon enter politics

Did you see the Adjustment Bureau? He played a politician in that and was so good I wanted to vote for him by the time the movie was over.

****

My only critique of Corry Doctorow’s (and others) assertion about education as a public good, is that this idea (which I wholeheartedly support as both and educator and the child of educators) is that it presupposes that an open, free democracy is the desired status quo. Despite lip service to that effect, it’s clear that, at least in the US the Tea Party/GOP do not want an open, free democracy, seeing as how they are busy dismantling the infrastructure that supports such a thing. Which of course begs the question of what it is they do want. By all accounts they’re working towards replacing our current system with some form of corporate feudalism, based on the faulty reasoning that a privatized society would naturally be a democratic one.

I am familiar with Albion’s Seed. I think the invention of cheap paper and the rail roads, and especially the postal service which brought newspapers (and later things like Sears Roebuck catalogs) to hitherto isolated places undoubtedly facilitated literacy and the rise of public schooling and spread of universities. Masonic schools for girls used to be common (my great grandfather was the principal of one). According to David Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, self-improvement, in the form of continuing reading and attending lectures was in the nineteenth century a part of the American ideology – and it stemmed from the Puritans (I know I am simplifying horribly.) And the South did not and still does not wish to finance public schools for the indigent (unlike New England). Places like Missouri, where Mark Twain was from, were a meeting place (melting pot) for all the four strains of Albion’s Seed, and thus, according to some, sort of a fulcrum of Americana.
W.J. Cash wrote:
Even at the best and fullest, the idea of social responsibility which grew up in the South remained always a narrow and purely personal one. . . . The Virginians themselves … never got beyond that brutal individualism — and for all the Jeffersonian glorification of the idea, it was brutal as it worked out in the plantation world — which was the heritage of the frontier; that individualism which, while willing enough to ameliorate the specific instance, relentlessly laid down as its basic social postulate the doctrine that every man was completely and wholly responsible for himself. … The individual outlook . . . the whole paternalistic pattern, in fact, the complete otherworldliness of religious feeling . . . all this, combining with their natural unrealism of temperament, bred in [white Southerners] a thoroughgoing satisfaction, the most complete blindness to the true facts of their world.”

He goes on to say:

“hardly any Southerner of the master class every even slightly apprehended that the general shiftlessness and degradation of the masses was a social product. Hardly one, in truth, ever concerned himself about the systematic raising of the economic and social level of these masses. And if occasional men [would sponsor a school here and there, the same men] . . . would take the lead in indignantly rejecting the Yankee idea of universal free schools maintained at the public charge . . .” W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1941).

It is not at all that clear to me that education is a “public good” by a strict, economist’s definition of public goods as “nonrival” and “non-excludable.” Doctorow appears to me to be appealing to a fuzzier intuition, in making his appeal broad, that doesn’t permit so many fine, abstract distinctions.

I’m fine with such fuzzy thinking. In some ways, such intuitions, on a broad base of experience, are less hazardous than theoretical speculations, derived from a narrow, abstract base of fine distinctions.

Experience seems to me to indicate that education is a sunk-cost investment, which cannot be reliably recovered, privately, by the investor. So, even if it is not, strictly speaking a “public good”, the incidence of returns tends to spread throughout the society, and to flow as returns to land and capital, as much or more than as wages. The illusion that education correlates with wage income is partly a confusion of the rents reserved by credentialism and occupational licensing, and partly an artifact of the class system, which prescribes more formal education for those slotted into higher-paid positions in bureaucracies. Much of the higher incomes of the educated, nevertheless, is drawn away as rental income to landlords, as the educated crowd cities, where their education may have its greatest synergistic benefits.

Many of the same features that make investment in education difficult to recover, make both private provision and private financing of education unlikely to be, at the economists would say, optimal.

The record of private for-profit schooling is appalling, and sectarian schooling, as well, has yielded mixed results. Public education in the U.S. is not in a particularly happy state. The demand for bureaucratic performance in controlling the “production process” of education is not misplaced, but since economists refuse to include the 3/4s of our economy, which is bureaucracy, we don’t have a convenient list of “bureaucracy failures” to match our canonical list of “market failures”. Left to their own devices, absent other information, parents will pursue status; “good schools” will be the schools with “good students”, meaning those destined by dint of family ambition, to “succeed”.

Aristocrats will always want the common folk, common and appropriately villainous: grateful, ignorant and unwashed.

derek@11: There are signs that university teaching is going the tournament route: see Alex Tabarrok, here.

Anon, #86, if you have information about countries and programs you think is relevant, then don’t be so coy, why don’t you share it with us instead of telling people to look it up?

Anon, as I understand it, in the European countries that you name, private schools, to be eligible for state support, must meet stringent requirements. For example, they are not allowed to charge admission fees and must follow the state curriculum; in addition they are required to comprehensive (non-selective) like the state schools, that is, to accept all who apply on the same basis that the state schools do, and they must also provide all the social entitlements that the state schools supply. As a result there are few private schools in those counties, other than Steiner Schools and religious schools, which are opposed to selective admission on principle.

I myself would not object to state funding for private schools under those conditions.

No, Harold, in the Netherlands and Belgium, over 50% of students (if I recall) are in private schools, paid for by the government. Nothing small about that. And yes, they’re regulated, but that in itself disproves soru’s claim that regulation somehow is pointless because it might as well be provision. Private schools in those countries are indeed regulated by the goverment, without anyone thinking that government provision is required.

As for Bruce: if soru was relying on a for-profit distinction, then the comment was oddly irrelevant. For-profit K-12 schools are rather uncommon anywhere; most private schools in America are 501(c)(3)’s.

Just a shout-out to Harold@58. You all wouldn’t have me for company, if it were otherwise…

I benefited from all those state resources. I’m hard of hearing.

Almost everyone could get by just fine if I didn’t speak and read English but I would suffer a great if I did not.

New keyboard, please!

if soru was relying on a for-profit distinction, then the comment was oddly irrelevant

Hardly. The point is you can’t rely on a distinction making a difference unless that distinction meaningfully exists. You can organise state-funded schools in a variety of ways, some of which will result in them being nominally counted as part of the private sector. There is nothing particularly systematic about the resulting minor differences. Everyone involved is still making decisions based on the underlying assumption that the goal is to teach kids as well as possible, preferably without going beyond some upper budget limit.

So the only plausible reason anyone might want to lobby to reorganise an existing system in such a way is to introduce religious or profit-seeking elements. The US health care system is the existence proof of the possibility of their success in such lobbying, and an indication of what might result.

The strength and cost of regulation has to be proportional to the power and ferocity of the thing regulated. You can keep a hamster in a hamster cage, but for a bear you need a bear cage. Which is not only expensive, but a bear in a bear cage is not going to behave in a particularly bear-like way.

So any sane goal you might have wanted to achieve by having a bear as a pet is unlikely to be met.

“All school types (public, special [i.e., religious] and private) are under the jurisdiction of a government body called Inspectie van het Onderwijs (Inspection of Education, also known as Onderwijsinspectie) that can demand a school to change its educational policy and quality at the risk of closure.”

The Netherlands and Belgium have pretty confusing educational structures and quality-control mechanisms, some of which are quite new. I wouldn’t use either country as an example of one particular educational structure, since each seems to house many and European education, with integration, is in a state of ongoing change. If the argument is that education is subject to control, it might be more true now, but that control is a patchy thing and might have been very different, say, 15 years ago.