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6 Comments

• Julian Modugno wrote:

  October 23, 2009 at 9:45 am

  I’m pretty sure there’s already pri­vate options for schools.…
• thisfieldisrequired wrote:

  October 23, 2009 at 9:50 am

  Of course, thanks for men­tion­ing that, Julian. It was a glar­ing over­sight on my part. But the pri­vate schools aren’t really in com­pe­ti­tion with the pub­lic schools because you have to kind of pay twice to send your kid to pri­vate school — both the tuition, and your taxes. That stacks the deck against the pri­vate options. Fur­ther­more, alot of peo­ple (many lower income, and some notably in Wash­ing­ton DC where a school choice pro­gram is con­tro­ver­sially endan­gered), would pre­fer to take the money the gov­ern­ment spends on their kid’s pub­lic school and put it towards a pri­vate school, because the pub­lic school is ter­ri­ble. But most peo­ple can’t do that, because they have no choice where their kid’s edu­ca­tion money goes. That’s not competition.
• Peter Twieg wrote:

  October 23, 2009 at 10:41 am

  I think the caveat that defend­ers of these posi­tions would employ would be to say that com­pe­ti­tion com­modi­tizes imputs and out­puts, and this is bad when we’re talk­ing about actual humans being in these roles. Com­pe­ti­tion for “insur­ance” is okay because there’s no dig­nity of insur­ance poli­cies to defend — but com­pe­ti­tion in pro­duc­ing edu­cated chil­dren reduces them to mere out­puts opti­mized towards some end that goes against their inter­ests qua humans.

  I think there’s also a worry that a really effi­cient mar­ket for edu­ca­tion would result in super-dedicated cap­i­tal­ist drone labor­ers crowd­ing Lit­tle Johnny out of the labor mar­ket. That’s why we need immi­gra­tion quo­tas on Chi­nese migrants too.

  There’s also a huge amount of sta­tus quo bias here, I think. Point out to these peo­ple that a lot of north­ern Euro­pean coun­tries have very com­pet­i­tive voucher sys­tems and.… well, I don’t know, I’m curi­ous what they’d come up with.
• thisfieldisrequired wrote:

  October 23, 2009 at 12:22 pm

  Rich’s com­ment from Facebook:

  I’d say two things about this. First, the pub­lic option in health care does not involve tax­payer fund­ing of reli­gion, while school choice, as I under­stand it, does. Sec­ondly, as a con­se­quen­tial­ist, I would object to the pre­sump­tion that one needs to have a uni­form posi­tion on com­pe­ti­tion sim­pliciter. Rather, why not ask whether, in this par­tic­u­lar … Read More­sphere of activ­ity, com­pe­ti­tion bet­ter serves our pur­poses. If it does, groovy. If not–and espe­cially if it hin­ders or defeats our pur­poses, then what­ever col­lec­tive fetish we may have about com­pe­ti­tion ought to be set aside so that changes can be made that get the job done.

  OK one more thing: If any­thing, adding a pub­lic option would make health care more closely anal­o­gous to the schools now, with­out school choice. If you’ve got the funds to send your kid to pri­vate school, you have that right; if you can’t afford it, the pub­lic schools are avail­able to every­one as a mat­ter of right. Adding a pub­lic health care option… Read More would still per­mit folks who can afford it to go the pri­vate route, while mak­ing it pos­si­ble for every­one else to have insur­ance. School choice, then, would dis­rupt the anal­ogy, because, unlike a pub­lic option in health care, the gov­ern­ment would sub­si­dize your choice of pri­vate providers of the ser­vice in question.
• thisfieldisrequired wrote:

  October 23, 2009 at 12:22 pm

  Thanks so much, Rich. You’ve really got­ten me thinking.

  Reli­gion: School choice some­times does end up get­ting entan­gled with reli­gion (and I share your worry over this), but there can cer­tainly be require­ments imposed on where you can use your voucher or which schools’ tuitions are tax deductible. I could say alot more about this, maybe I will make a sep­a­rate post in the future.

  Con­se­quen­tial­ism: I can respect that posi­tion, but there are good rea­sons to think that robust com­pe­ti­tion (even if not *totally* free-market) does pro­mote good out­comes in both areas. So this just shifts the debate, although it’s still inter­est­ing and worth­while to debate on con­se­quen­tial­ist grounds. … Read More

  Finally, I do see the respect in which the pub­lic option makes health care more anal­o­gous to the school sys­tem now. But I *object* to the school sys­tem now, and would actu­ally favor a sys­tem in which the gov­ern­ment sub­si­dizes lower income peo­ple buy­ing health insur­ance or health ser­vices (or edu­ca­tion) pri­vately and of their own choos­ing over a pub­lic option. The big­ger issue is: what is the default assump­tion for pro­vi­sion of these essen­tial ser­vices, the pub­lic or pri­vate sec­tor? I say pri­vate, and maybe let the state inter­fere where nec­es­sary. Oth­ers seem to be say­ing that the state should be the default provider of these and maybe other goods and ser­vices. That makes me very uncom­fort­able on a vari­ety of grounds.
• thisfieldisrequired wrote:

  October 23, 2009 at 12:30 pm

  Peter,

  Def­i­nitely sta­tus quo bias is at work, I agree.

  As for com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion objec­tions, yeah, I’m sure there’s that too. That sort of thing is also often said about organ mar­kets, as I’m sure you know. I guess I just think that even pub­lic schools are guilty of com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of chil­dren of some kind. No Child Left Behind sounded awfully Kantian/deontological, but, at the end of the day, stuff like stan­dard­ized test­ing and rank­ing schools in terms of grad­u­a­tion rates is really all geared towards turn­ing stu­dents into pro­duc­tive work­ers to grow the econ­omy and not really about fully devel­op­ing their human capac­i­ties or whatever.