Excellent point about how the Left's indifference to concentration of power vitiates their supposed concern with equality. The Left's worship of unconstrained power is based on their unrealistic view of the perfectibility of human nature, and their eschatological naïve belief in the possibility of a collective rational or technocratic management of human affairs so as to ward off tragedy and contingency from life. Those who are not blind to human fallibility instead want to see institutions that limit the exercise of power so as to prevent tyranny, which is always the end result of Leftist power. The Left's supposed disdain for hierarchy is hypocritical; they are only opposed to hierarchies which they do not control and which limit their power. And since this post is talking about power without knowledge, it would be well to mention the late Jeffrey Friedman's book of exactly that title, which demonstrates the futility of technocratic rule.
While it's true that the Left’s faith in technocratic central planning often overlooks the dangers of concentrating power, there exists a third viewpoint that recognizes the perils of both public sector and private sector power consolidation. For nearly the first 150 years of the United States' existence, this balanced perspective dominated, advocating for institutions that prevent tyranny while promoting genuine competition. This approach remained influential until the late 1970s but eroded in the 1980s when central planning, particularly by private entities, became more widely accepted. John R. Munkirs' The Transformation of American Capitalism: From Competitive Market Structures to Centralized Private Sector Planning details this paradigm shift, showing how the nation moved away from competitive market structures toward centralized private sector planning, showing the need to take a critical eye towards both public and private sector control.
"One approach is to arrange government by function, rather than by territorial monopoly."
Huh. To me this seems like the perfect way to give special interests even more power. Aren't schools pretty much entirely a separate entity governed by function? How is that working out? What am I missing?
"I also propose that neighborhoods be allowed to obtain charters to purchase services, such as garbage collection or fire protection."
Again, I'm a little perplexed. Sticking with education, you want to tell me how my kids are better off in one of the smaller of the ~850 school districts in Illinois versus the 25 school districts in Maryland?
"I propose that government provision of services be replaced by vouchers."
I have no clue how this would work. Or help.
"I also propose that neighborhoods be allowed to obtain charters to purchase services, such as garbage collection or fire protection. Shifting decisions from a city or county level to a neighborhood level would reduce concentration of power."
This seems a different direction than vouchers but ok. Getting back to schools, we have rich school districts next to poor school districts. It's a problem. And you want to make more government services like this? How do you propose to divide up the large businesses that pay lots of taxes?
I generally like the way you think and agree with you A LOT but I really don't think you've thought this through. It seems to me you are only looking at the benefits of your preferred approaches and (especially) none of the pitfalls while looking at the status quo with exactly the opposite blinders.
"Getting back to schools, we have rich school districts next to poor school districts. It's a problem."
I'm going to assume you mean it's a problem because students in rich districts do better (on average) than students in poor districts. There was once a time when the differences in school spending were stark. But court decisions and legislation have substantially raised the floor on spending.
Surprise! It didn't do much for achievement. Because, where certain minimal standards are met (which they are almost everywhere in America), 90% of student achievement depends on what student bring to school. Shockingly (!), kids in rich districts tend to be smarter and more motivated than kids in poor districts.
The lack of correlation between spending on schools and achievement is astounding. States like Utah spend little and achieve much. Big cities tend to spend a lot and achieve much less. A lot of money will buy you a lot: better facilities, student-teacher ratio, etc. What it won't buy you is student achievement.
The following is from the libertarian Cato Institute, so it's hardly unbiased, but as far as I can tell, is factually correct:
"In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
"It didn't work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students' achievement hadn't improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged. The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district's desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, "No one's ever tried."
"In Kansas City, they did try. A sympathetic federal judge invited district educators literally to "dream"--forget about cost, let their imaginations soar, put together a list of everything they could possibly need to increase the achievement of inner-city blacks--and he, using the extraordinarily broad powers granted to judges in school desegregation cases, would find a way to pay for it. By the time the judge took himself off the case in the spring of 1997, it was clear to nearly everyone, including the judge, that the experiment hadn't worked."
If you decentralize and multiply governmental units, but continue to have them governed by representative democracy, the danger is that you end up with many low information voters in low turnout elections because it is infeasible for most people to keep track of candidate quality for so many different offices. That in turn means that nominally democratically accountable bodies just become insider captured, even if they are quite decentralized. California has this problem today already, so it's not just a hypothetical.
I'm not at all knowledgeable of how governing juries would work. Seems it might have some advantages but also A LOT of pitfalls.
Someone has to manage and guide each jury. Seems like a lot of power there that might be no better than what we have.
Seems it would be easy to end up with a non-representative jury. Of course politicians aren't either but I could see juries being even worse and even less accountable.
It seems like there would need to be some minimum standard to serve on a jury, maybe not unlike court juries, maybe something that would in effect be more discriminatory. Either way, it seems a random jury wouldn't work and a non-random jury would create many concerns.
Court juries create hardship for many. It seems governing juries would have far more issues of this type and the consequences of the alternatives for sealing with that would also be far greater.
I can't read Yglesias but my take would be different. I wouldn't try to "save" equality for the right as I consider hierarchy to be pretty natural.
Since I can only ever think of the last thing I thought of - let me connect it to something I was reading about last night, local news on the internet: the deaths of so far nine people, amid dozens of EMS calls, over a "bad batch" of drugs, opioid in nature but otherwise unnamed.
A video showed one of the private, armed security guards - [whom the city forum posters typically deride as "fascists" or the henchmen of rich people (fascists) - hired to maintain order along the sidewalk and entryways of certain downtown buildings, to keep people from being deterred from making use of this very high-dollar real estate whether as hotel or office space or condos] - administering Narcan to someone lying on the pavement. In all this security force said it administered the antidote to 23 people.
I mention this as to say, I think I'm not going out on a limb to assume that the people who took these drugs, were homeless people who got them from the open-air market next to the homeless resource center/shelter. My impression is that sellers drive up from the megalopolis to the southeast, dump these drugs, and drive away. Naturally, I suppose, the authorities don't want to be too clear about this, not wishing people to let their guard down about street drugs generally.
About 90% of the people discussing this situation, took as a given that the drugs themselves are an unadulterated good, however adulterated; purported to be opioid or coke users themselves, blamed the governor for "banning the sale of testing strips" at head shops (not from the internet); urged one another to "test your s**t"; indicated that this could all be avoided if you make sure to source your drugs from reputable dealers; urged that drugs be legalized and regulated (like the USDA with a safe food supply?), though I suppose in practice this would mean distributing drugs directly so as to undermine the black market, &etc.
Pointing out to these folks that people who are performing their bodily functions in plain view, who are so damaged they cannot necessarily form a coherent thought - are probably not going to "test their drugs" - is met with anger.
In fact, even daring to mention that the victims were overwhelmingly likely to be homeless, would make them ballistic.
Suggesting that *their* normalization of drug use, must necessarily have downstream consequences for society - would puzzle and enrage them. (Don't be a fascist.) I expect many on this blog would agree with them.
Because: don't you know that we are all the same? The guy who manages his drug use just fine - for now - and the street zombies - are all the same? How dare you suggest otherwise?
Impossible to understate how much this permeates all our thinking, all our policy.
This is equality. It's their only god. When that is the case, it liberates you to overlook reality. It liberates you from responsibility. I think much of the time people default to thinking of this as relating to what you get or are given in this life. But it is just as much about what you must give, or give up, for others.
Quantifying power is a great / underrated idea that captures something real and important about the world. However, I'm not sure about this approach --
(a) Discretionary % - A large municipal budget that can't run a deficit and is 99% allotted to a static set of services is not comparable to a personal fortune which can be spent at the person's discretion. In that municipal scenario, their power would be related to the changes they can make.
(b) Commercial budgets - Companies have budgets too and individuals at those companies have varying control over how those budgets are deployed. You would want to combine one's personal income with other sources of resource control to compare to the civil servant, correct? On the other hand, I suppose it could be ignored since even total control of a typical company's budget would not affect other citizens to an extent that government does. Control over FAANG budgets, University budgets, etc on the other hand could have some impact, though.
I tend to think of power as the ability of one's decisions to affect others. Managers have power in an organization to the extent that they direct the organization's activities and can affect the employment of others.
In that line of thought - having discretionary budget is one avenue to exercising power, but it would also encompass School Boards with little budget control making decisions that affect all the kids in their county.
Maybe it wasn't always this way, but if you consider the modern progressive left's emphasis on educational credentials, expertise, managerialism, and institutional prestige, it's not obvious to me that Yglesias' hierarchy vs egalitarian framing is correct. People on the left love hierarchies, from what I can tell; they just emphasis different ones from what people on the right might prefer.
Or consider the concept of intersectionality. Whatever its intellectual merits, in practice it creates a hierarchy of victimhood and oppression from which people inevitably whine, rant and harangue about why they should be entitled to various privileges. I don't see much pushback or dissent about this on the left; it seems to be largely accepted as normal/natural.
I see this in the way that women, ascendant in offices, love to hire more and more women to surround themselves with, in order to have lots of minions, none of whom is willing to be the one to make the coffee; or even be the one to order it.
I recall reading of the research that indicated that supporters of "the left" are more intelligent than conservatives. That thought has much in common with the claim that women only make 78% of what men make.
Somebody looked a little deeper into the data and found that breaking down the categories revealed that those who identified as fiscal conservatives (as opposed to social conservatives) were more intelligent than liberals.
I find it odd that you are arguing for smaller spending districts that need larger taxing districts to "equalize" spending. Might the larger taxing district also be a source of concentrated power which is the original concern Kling brought up?
It is true that Illinois (and other states) have increased state funding in order to reduce funding discrepancies. They still exist. I had difficulty interpreting the data but it looks like Winnetka spends more than double per student what some other districts spend.
Even with lower expenditures and redistribution to poorer districts, I'd bet the costs of public education are still a larger burden on the average taxpayer in poorer districts.
It is true that spending is at best weakly correlated to outcome. Show me your best argument that above some minimum expenditure it is uncorrelated. Don't forget to remove obvious confounding factors such as poor urban districts with high spending (remove confounding factors other than expenditure). While you are at it, show me your best argument we know what that minimum is.
Yes, KC misspent much of the largess they were given and got little or no improvement in outcome. How does that prove that additional spending is ineffective?
Why do you say "KC misspent much of the largess they were given"? At the time, everyone in the business thought they were doing exactly the right things, new buildings, more staff, higher pay, more interesting programs. And, of course, that is where increased spending goes in richer districts.
Thank you for agreeing that "spending is at best weakly correlated to outcome." To really know if it is totally uncorrelated, you would have to control for IQ (and optimally "conscientiousness", ability to defer gratification, executive function, etc.). But most school systems make it a point not to test for IQ, and I don't know if there are any good instruments for getting measurements of the rest. I feel fairly such impossible studies would bring the correlation down, though I don't know if it would go to zero. And for practical purposes that doesn't matter. We Americans like to assume that spending more will get you more. But in schooling, the gain seems to be very slight. If you care about improvement, you just aren't going to get much even if you spend a lot more.
I said, "where certain minimal standards are met (which they are almost everywhere in America), 90% of student achievement depends on what student bring to school." I was not talking about a certain dollar amount of spending. I was talking about, "teacher knows the material, teacher shows up most days, teacher at least goes through the motions, the school is heated in the winter and the roof doesn't leak." And "students show up most days." Most American schools (at least pre-pandemic) met those standards. Lots of non-American schools don't. Lant Pritchett's The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning, on international systems, has a lot of depressing information.
"teacher knows the material, teacher shows up most days, teacher at least goes through the motions,"
Like me, did you have classes where you learned lots and others you learned almost nothing? Are you familiar with high school mathematics teacher, Jaime Escalante portrayed in the movie Stand and Deliver?
Would you agree that the best teachers within a community tend to migrate towards the higher achieving schools and that the best teachers also tend to locate in communities where student achievement is higher?
At the beginning of the school year we met my son's middle school history teacher who was supposed to teach about the period from after the civil war to WWII and she had no clue when the holocaust was. In elementary, he had a teacher who did little but hand out worksheets and collect them. Ironically, to your point, this elementary school had the highest test scores in the state most or all years he attended. Then again, he also had an outstanding teacher and his sister had a teacher who taught her Latin in second grade. In college I was placed in second semester German with a dynamic teacher who got students involved. I felt I had to keep up or I'd be embarrassed to be there. Because the class was too full, I was moved to another where the teacher was entirely competent but provided zero motivation. I did enough to pass but learned nothing.
If you are the least bit familiar with Doug Lemov, you know there is an immense amount that can be done to help teachers and for teachers to help themselves be more effective. This takes time and money, at least for it to happen broadly. How much increased spending is budgeted towards these types of improvements? I'd say almost zero and what is spent isn't carried through the entire process to successful completion.
I'm going to be real mean here and say Doug Lemov is full of shit. There is damn little that can be done that will make teachers more effective. Nobody in the business really knows how to move the needle much. Which is a major reason the needle hasn't moved much over the decades. It's also one reason there are fads in the business. "Nothing has worked so far, but we know something must (the alternative is too awful to contemplate) so this might be it."
Anyone who tells you they have the magic beans that will make teachers immensely more effective is lying. They are selling hope to people who are desperate for it. They may believe it, like some people believed laetrile cured cancer or that beets will give you amazing amounts of energy. But they are selling you an untruth.
There are teachers who are more interesting, who know more about the subject. Sometimes it makes a difference with some students in what they learn. Alas, usually, it doesn't.
I think you are new here so you may not have encountered Arnold's Null Hypothesis: there is no educational innovation that is scalable and sustainable that leads to significant and lasting improved achievement. Jaime Esalante, for example, is not scalable. In fact, he was bounced from his school and the calculus program fell apart. Head Start kids aren't any better than non-Head Start kids by third grade.
To a large extent, teaching is seeing what your kids don't get, comparing notes with other teachers, trying something different, and failing again and again to get them to get it. You keep rolling the boulder up the hill.
You are really close to a central issue but not quite there.
- "To a large extent, teaching is seeing what your kids don't get, comparing notes with other teachers, trying something different," To a large extent, this is what Lemov promotes. Does it happen?
- "there is no educational innovation that is scalable and sustainable that leads to significant and lasting improved achievement."
- Why did Escalante get bounced?
- Is Escalante really not scalable? Did anyone study what and how he did it and try to apply it more broadly?
So you don't see a problem with teacher unions more focused on protecting marginal teachers and avoiding systems that reward teaching excellence than they are about implementing changes that might help the students but be to the teachers' disadvantage?
Of course, there's a problem. But it's not a big problem. Because in most cases, there isn't much difference between teachers when it comes to student achievement. One of the in-jokes in teaching is, "I wonder which of us is going to be the best teacher this year." When a number of people teach the same course every year, some classes will do better than others. Some teachers, on the whole, will do better than others. But it will change from year to year. Because in different years, different teachers get better or worse students. Teacher rankings change not because teachers change but because students do.
No one has seriously tried to measure "teaching excellence". It would have to be, as economists say, a marginal thing. Who does better or worse than would be expected given the students' past performance and general smarts? A teacher whose students gain 1.1 grade levels in reading seems like a better teacher than one whose students gain 0.9. But if the first teacher had students with an average IQ of 115 and the second had students with an average of 85, the second has almost worked miracles and the first is coasting. Alas, educational researchers are allergic to ideas of inborn intelligence.
Yes, Escalante was not scalable. He had a unique personality and put in amazing amounts of time and effort.
Yes, collaboration and trying new things happens. It just doesn't make much difference. That's why I say Lemov is full of shit.
A budget with lots of line items pretty much always includes some sub-optimal choices but you are correct that I don't know whether a significant portion of the funds were misspent. What I should have said was that I have a strong belief that a large portion of the funds were spent in ways unlikely to make any significant difference in measurable education outcomes.
If true, my belief helps explain why increased spending shows a weak correlation to educational outcome measures. The money is frequently purposely spent for reasons other than improving those outcome measures. That leaves an open question, if money were effectively spent specifically to increase those educational outcome measures, would it? I suspect so, at least WAY more than most or all spending increase examples we can point to.
"allocated by a nine-member County Council…almost $500 million per legislator, every year…
…in 2007, only four executives were paid as much as $100 million. "
Comparing executive pay to legislator allocation is as bad as the leftest comparison of the hourly salary of a worker to the wealth of some rich owner. There were more 4 executives who allocated more than $500 million in expenditures.
For better or worse, Elon Musk has more influence over twitter than any individual in government
"the power wielded by government officials far exceeds their intelligence."
This does not contradict Yglesias's point that liberals are smarter than conservatives. As Hanania has documented, liberals *are* smarter than conservatives (at least in the US).
He gives opinions on why liberals might be smarter backed up with statements of fact for which he in no way even attempts to show he has the facts correct. Even if they were, it still wouldn't prove who is smarter.
Personally, my guess is that no matter who is smarter, the differences are insignificant. A significant difference in intelligence would be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to prove than a simple difference.
I've never understood the left's lack of concern regarding giving more power to governments. You'd think their dislike/concern/fear/etc. of Trump would have made them rethink it but even that seems to have made no difference whatsoever.
Good post! I didn't know about your book "Unchecked and Unbalanced", so I went to the link to buy it. Yikes! The Kindle version is $45. It seems that the publishers are trying not to sell it. :-(
Can I get on board with decentralizing power? Absolutely. Will those who benefit from holding the concentration of power willingly let it be more decentralized? Absolutely not. Unfortunately, this realization is what drives some of the "burn the government down" position of the left and right loonies. I defer to the Dan Williams essay you linked about persuasion versus pressure, and in this case regarding decentralizing power would like to think that persuasion could work, but highly doubt it.
And yet ... we've arrived at a point where the job of politics is so disreputable that we are principally attracting nutters and porn stars and other such exhibitionists.
Excellent point about how the Left's indifference to concentration of power vitiates their supposed concern with equality. The Left's worship of unconstrained power is based on their unrealistic view of the perfectibility of human nature, and their eschatological naïve belief in the possibility of a collective rational or technocratic management of human affairs so as to ward off tragedy and contingency from life. Those who are not blind to human fallibility instead want to see institutions that limit the exercise of power so as to prevent tyranny, which is always the end result of Leftist power. The Left's supposed disdain for hierarchy is hypocritical; they are only opposed to hierarchies which they do not control and which limit their power. And since this post is talking about power without knowledge, it would be well to mention the late Jeffrey Friedman's book of exactly that title, which demonstrates the futility of technocratic rule.
While it's true that the Left’s faith in technocratic central planning often overlooks the dangers of concentrating power, there exists a third viewpoint that recognizes the perils of both public sector and private sector power consolidation. For nearly the first 150 years of the United States' existence, this balanced perspective dominated, advocating for institutions that prevent tyranny while promoting genuine competition. This approach remained influential until the late 1970s but eroded in the 1980s when central planning, particularly by private entities, became more widely accepted. John R. Munkirs' The Transformation of American Capitalism: From Competitive Market Structures to Centralized Private Sector Planning details this paradigm shift, showing how the nation moved away from competitive market structures toward centralized private sector planning, showing the need to take a critical eye towards both public and private sector control.
"One approach is to arrange government by function, rather than by territorial monopoly."
Huh. To me this seems like the perfect way to give special interests even more power. Aren't schools pretty much entirely a separate entity governed by function? How is that working out? What am I missing?
"I also propose that neighborhoods be allowed to obtain charters to purchase services, such as garbage collection or fire protection."
Again, I'm a little perplexed. Sticking with education, you want to tell me how my kids are better off in one of the smaller of the ~850 school districts in Illinois versus the 25 school districts in Maryland?
"I propose that government provision of services be replaced by vouchers."
I have no clue how this would work. Or help.
"I also propose that neighborhoods be allowed to obtain charters to purchase services, such as garbage collection or fire protection. Shifting decisions from a city or county level to a neighborhood level would reduce concentration of power."
This seems a different direction than vouchers but ok. Getting back to schools, we have rich school districts next to poor school districts. It's a problem. And you want to make more government services like this? How do you propose to divide up the large businesses that pay lots of taxes?
I generally like the way you think and agree with you A LOT but I really don't think you've thought this through. It seems to me you are only looking at the benefits of your preferred approaches and (especially) none of the pitfalls while looking at the status quo with exactly the opposite blinders.
"Getting back to schools, we have rich school districts next to poor school districts. It's a problem."
I'm going to assume you mean it's a problem because students in rich districts do better (on average) than students in poor districts. There was once a time when the differences in school spending were stark. But court decisions and legislation have substantially raised the floor on spending.
Surprise! It didn't do much for achievement. Because, where certain minimal standards are met (which they are almost everywhere in America), 90% of student achievement depends on what student bring to school. Shockingly (!), kids in rich districts tend to be smarter and more motivated than kids in poor districts.
The lack of correlation between spending on schools and achievement is astounding. States like Utah spend little and achieve much. Big cities tend to spend a lot and achieve much less. A lot of money will buy you a lot: better facilities, student-teacher ratio, etc. What it won't buy you is student achievement.
The following is from the libertarian Cato Institute, so it's hardly unbiased, but as far as I can tell, is factually correct:
"In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
"It didn't work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students' achievement hadn't improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged. The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district's desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, "No one's ever tried."
"In Kansas City, they did try. A sympathetic federal judge invited district educators literally to "dream"--forget about cost, let their imaginations soar, put together a list of everything they could possibly need to increase the achievement of inner-city blacks--and he, using the extraordinarily broad powers granted to judges in school desegregation cases, would find a way to pay for it. By the time the judge took himself off the case in the spring of 1997, it was clear to nearly everyone, including the judge, that the experiment hadn't worked."
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-298.pdf
If you decentralize and multiply governmental units, but continue to have them governed by representative democracy, the danger is that you end up with many low information voters in low turnout elections because it is infeasible for most people to keep track of candidate quality for so many different offices. That in turn means that nominally democratically accountable bodies just become insider captured, even if they are quite decentralized. California has this problem today already, so it's not just a hypothetical.
An underexplored solution is to use juries instead. You'd get much more role for ordinary people in governance and avoid a lot of the emergent pathologies of the election process. I wrote about that here: https://futuremoreperfect.substack.com/p/lets-elect-not-to-have-elections
but there are probably better treatments of the idea out there.
I'm not at all knowledgeable of how governing juries would work. Seems it might have some advantages but also A LOT of pitfalls.
Someone has to manage and guide each jury. Seems like a lot of power there that might be no better than what we have.
Seems it would be easy to end up with a non-representative jury. Of course politicians aren't either but I could see juries being even worse and even less accountable.
It seems like there would need to be some minimum standard to serve on a jury, maybe not unlike court juries, maybe something that would in effect be more discriminatory. Either way, it seems a random jury wouldn't work and a non-random jury would create many concerns.
Court juries create hardship for many. It seems governing juries would have far more issues of this type and the consequences of the alternatives for sealing with that would also be far greater.
I can't read Yglesias but my take would be different. I wouldn't try to "save" equality for the right as I consider hierarchy to be pretty natural.
Since I can only ever think of the last thing I thought of - let me connect it to something I was reading about last night, local news on the internet: the deaths of so far nine people, amid dozens of EMS calls, over a "bad batch" of drugs, opioid in nature but otherwise unnamed.
A video showed one of the private, armed security guards - [whom the city forum posters typically deride as "fascists" or the henchmen of rich people (fascists) - hired to maintain order along the sidewalk and entryways of certain downtown buildings, to keep people from being deterred from making use of this very high-dollar real estate whether as hotel or office space or condos] - administering Narcan to someone lying on the pavement. In all this security force said it administered the antidote to 23 people.
I mention this as to say, I think I'm not going out on a limb to assume that the people who took these drugs, were homeless people who got them from the open-air market next to the homeless resource center/shelter. My impression is that sellers drive up from the megalopolis to the southeast, dump these drugs, and drive away. Naturally, I suppose, the authorities don't want to be too clear about this, not wishing people to let their guard down about street drugs generally.
About 90% of the people discussing this situation, took as a given that the drugs themselves are an unadulterated good, however adulterated; purported to be opioid or coke users themselves, blamed the governor for "banning the sale of testing strips" at head shops (not from the internet); urged one another to "test your s**t"; indicated that this could all be avoided if you make sure to source your drugs from reputable dealers; urged that drugs be legalized and regulated (like the USDA with a safe food supply?), though I suppose in practice this would mean distributing drugs directly so as to undermine the black market, &etc.
Pointing out to these folks that people who are performing their bodily functions in plain view, who are so damaged they cannot necessarily form a coherent thought - are probably not going to "test their drugs" - is met with anger.
In fact, even daring to mention that the victims were overwhelmingly likely to be homeless, would make them ballistic.
Suggesting that *their* normalization of drug use, must necessarily have downstream consequences for society - would puzzle and enrage them. (Don't be a fascist.) I expect many on this blog would agree with them.
Because: don't you know that we are all the same? The guy who manages his drug use just fine - for now - and the street zombies - are all the same? How dare you suggest otherwise?
Impossible to understate how much this permeates all our thinking, all our policy.
This is equality. It's their only god. When that is the case, it liberates you to overlook reality. It liberates you from responsibility. I think much of the time people default to thinking of this as relating to what you get or are given in this life. But it is just as much about what you must give, or give up, for others.
Quantifying power is a great / underrated idea that captures something real and important about the world. However, I'm not sure about this approach --
(a) Discretionary % - A large municipal budget that can't run a deficit and is 99% allotted to a static set of services is not comparable to a personal fortune which can be spent at the person's discretion. In that municipal scenario, their power would be related to the changes they can make.
(b) Commercial budgets - Companies have budgets too and individuals at those companies have varying control over how those budgets are deployed. You would want to combine one's personal income with other sources of resource control to compare to the civil servant, correct? On the other hand, I suppose it could be ignored since even total control of a typical company's budget would not affect other citizens to an extent that government does. Control over FAANG budgets, University budgets, etc on the other hand could have some impact, though.
I tend to think of power as the ability of one's decisions to affect others. Managers have power in an organization to the extent that they direct the organization's activities and can affect the employment of others.
In that line of thought - having discretionary budget is one avenue to exercising power, but it would also encompass School Boards with little budget control making decisions that affect all the kids in their county.
Maybe it wasn't always this way, but if you consider the modern progressive left's emphasis on educational credentials, expertise, managerialism, and institutional prestige, it's not obvious to me that Yglesias' hierarchy vs egalitarian framing is correct. People on the left love hierarchies, from what I can tell; they just emphasis different ones from what people on the right might prefer.
Or consider the concept of intersectionality. Whatever its intellectual merits, in practice it creates a hierarchy of victimhood and oppression from which people inevitably whine, rant and harangue about why they should be entitled to various privileges. I don't see much pushback or dissent about this on the left; it seems to be largely accepted as normal/natural.
I see this in the way that women, ascendant in offices, love to hire more and more women to surround themselves with, in order to have lots of minions, none of whom is willing to be the one to make the coffee; or even be the one to order it.
That Matty Y thinks he's a better human being then Elon Musk because he's a nicer guy pretty much sums it up.
I recall reading of the research that indicated that supporters of "the left" are more intelligent than conservatives. That thought has much in common with the claim that women only make 78% of what men make.
Somebody looked a little deeper into the data and found that breaking down the categories revealed that those who identified as fiscal conservatives (as opposed to social conservatives) were more intelligent than liberals.
don't assume.
I find it odd that you are arguing for smaller spending districts that need larger taxing districts to "equalize" spending. Might the larger taxing district also be a source of concentrated power which is the original concern Kling brought up?
It is true that Illinois (and other states) have increased state funding in order to reduce funding discrepancies. They still exist. I had difficulty interpreting the data but it looks like Winnetka spends more than double per student what some other districts spend.
Even with lower expenditures and redistribution to poorer districts, I'd bet the costs of public education are still a larger burden on the average taxpayer in poorer districts.
It is true that spending is at best weakly correlated to outcome. Show me your best argument that above some minimum expenditure it is uncorrelated. Don't forget to remove obvious confounding factors such as poor urban districts with high spending (remove confounding factors other than expenditure). While you are at it, show me your best argument we know what that minimum is.
Yes, KC misspent much of the largess they were given and got little or no improvement in outcome. How does that prove that additional spending is ineffective?
Why do you say "KC misspent much of the largess they were given"? At the time, everyone in the business thought they were doing exactly the right things, new buildings, more staff, higher pay, more interesting programs. And, of course, that is where increased spending goes in richer districts.
Thank you for agreeing that "spending is at best weakly correlated to outcome." To really know if it is totally uncorrelated, you would have to control for IQ (and optimally "conscientiousness", ability to defer gratification, executive function, etc.). But most school systems make it a point not to test for IQ, and I don't know if there are any good instruments for getting measurements of the rest. I feel fairly such impossible studies would bring the correlation down, though I don't know if it would go to zero. And for practical purposes that doesn't matter. We Americans like to assume that spending more will get you more. But in schooling, the gain seems to be very slight. If you care about improvement, you just aren't going to get much even if you spend a lot more.
I said, "where certain minimal standards are met (which they are almost everywhere in America), 90% of student achievement depends on what student bring to school." I was not talking about a certain dollar amount of spending. I was talking about, "teacher knows the material, teacher shows up most days, teacher at least goes through the motions, the school is heated in the winter and the roof doesn't leak." And "students show up most days." Most American schools (at least pre-pandemic) met those standards. Lots of non-American schools don't. Lant Pritchett's The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning, on international systems, has a lot of depressing information.
"teacher knows the material, teacher shows up most days, teacher at least goes through the motions,"
Like me, did you have classes where you learned lots and others you learned almost nothing? Are you familiar with high school mathematics teacher, Jaime Escalante portrayed in the movie Stand and Deliver?
Would you agree that the best teachers within a community tend to migrate towards the higher achieving schools and that the best teachers also tend to locate in communities where student achievement is higher?
At the beginning of the school year we met my son's middle school history teacher who was supposed to teach about the period from after the civil war to WWII and she had no clue when the holocaust was. In elementary, he had a teacher who did little but hand out worksheets and collect them. Ironically, to your point, this elementary school had the highest test scores in the state most or all years he attended. Then again, he also had an outstanding teacher and his sister had a teacher who taught her Latin in second grade. In college I was placed in second semester German with a dynamic teacher who got students involved. I felt I had to keep up or I'd be embarrassed to be there. Because the class was too full, I was moved to another where the teacher was entirely competent but provided zero motivation. I did enough to pass but learned nothing.
If you are the least bit familiar with Doug Lemov, you know there is an immense amount that can be done to help teachers and for teachers to help themselves be more effective. This takes time and money, at least for it to happen broadly. How much increased spending is budgeted towards these types of improvements? I'd say almost zero and what is spent isn't carried through the entire process to successful completion.
I'm going to be real mean here and say Doug Lemov is full of shit. There is damn little that can be done that will make teachers more effective. Nobody in the business really knows how to move the needle much. Which is a major reason the needle hasn't moved much over the decades. It's also one reason there are fads in the business. "Nothing has worked so far, but we know something must (the alternative is too awful to contemplate) so this might be it."
Anyone who tells you they have the magic beans that will make teachers immensely more effective is lying. They are selling hope to people who are desperate for it. They may believe it, like some people believed laetrile cured cancer or that beets will give you amazing amounts of energy. But they are selling you an untruth.
There are teachers who are more interesting, who know more about the subject. Sometimes it makes a difference with some students in what they learn. Alas, usually, it doesn't.
I think you are new here so you may not have encountered Arnold's Null Hypothesis: there is no educational innovation that is scalable and sustainable that leads to significant and lasting improved achievement. Jaime Esalante, for example, is not scalable. In fact, he was bounced from his school and the calculus program fell apart. Head Start kids aren't any better than non-Head Start kids by third grade.
To a large extent, teaching is seeing what your kids don't get, comparing notes with other teachers, trying something different, and failing again and again to get them to get it. You keep rolling the boulder up the hill.
You are really close to a central issue but not quite there.
- "To a large extent, teaching is seeing what your kids don't get, comparing notes with other teachers, trying something different," To a large extent, this is what Lemov promotes. Does it happen?
- "there is no educational innovation that is scalable and sustainable that leads to significant and lasting improved achievement."
- Why did Escalante get bounced?
- Is Escalante really not scalable? Did anyone study what and how he did it and try to apply it more broadly?
So you don't see a problem with teacher unions more focused on protecting marginal teachers and avoiding systems that reward teaching excellence than they are about implementing changes that might help the students but be to the teachers' disadvantage?
Of course, there's a problem. But it's not a big problem. Because in most cases, there isn't much difference between teachers when it comes to student achievement. One of the in-jokes in teaching is, "I wonder which of us is going to be the best teacher this year." When a number of people teach the same course every year, some classes will do better than others. Some teachers, on the whole, will do better than others. But it will change from year to year. Because in different years, different teachers get better or worse students. Teacher rankings change not because teachers change but because students do.
No one has seriously tried to measure "teaching excellence". It would have to be, as economists say, a marginal thing. Who does better or worse than would be expected given the students' past performance and general smarts? A teacher whose students gain 1.1 grade levels in reading seems like a better teacher than one whose students gain 0.9. But if the first teacher had students with an average IQ of 115 and the second had students with an average of 85, the second has almost worked miracles and the first is coasting. Alas, educational researchers are allergic to ideas of inborn intelligence.
Yes, Escalante was not scalable. He had a unique personality and put in amazing amounts of time and effort.
Yes, collaboration and trying new things happens. It just doesn't make much difference. That's why I say Lemov is full of shit.
Your response makes a lot of status quo assumptions.
The following statement seems to ignore Escalante. It seems to ignore how the current system tends not to reward exceptionalism and often punishes it.
"Teacher rankings change not because teachers change but because students do."
"Some teachers, on the whole, will do better than others. But it will change from year to year. "
But what happens when the same teachers do better EVERY year?
If one compared the teachers without factoring this in, that would be a mistake:
"But if the first teacher had students with an average IQ of 115 and the second had students with an average of 85,"
A budget with lots of line items pretty much always includes some sub-optimal choices but you are correct that I don't know whether a significant portion of the funds were misspent. What I should have said was that I have a strong belief that a large portion of the funds were spent in ways unlikely to make any significant difference in measurable education outcomes.
If true, my belief helps explain why increased spending shows a weak correlation to educational outcome measures. The money is frequently purposely spent for reasons other than improving those outcome measures. That leaves an open question, if money were effectively spent specifically to increase those educational outcome measures, would it? I suspect so, at least WAY more than most or all spending increase examples we can point to.
"For example, instead of having a county or city issue restaurant licenses, there could be private licensing agencies. "
lol. Sure let's have competing private agencies for professional licenses too - doctors, engineers, ....
And don't forget pharma approvals.
"allocated by a nine-member County Council…almost $500 million per legislator, every year…
…in 2007, only four executives were paid as much as $100 million. "
Comparing executive pay to legislator allocation is as bad as the leftest comparison of the hourly salary of a worker to the wealth of some rich owner. There were more 4 executives who allocated more than $500 million in expenditures.
For better or worse, Elon Musk has more influence over twitter than any individual in government
"the power wielded by government officials far exceeds their intelligence."
This does not contradict Yglesias's point that liberals are smarter than conservatives. As Hanania has documented, liberals *are* smarter than conservatives (at least in the US).
Who will be more adept at pulling your car out of a ditch though.
Smarter or have more degrees?
Remember that even on the most negative view of education it functions as a proxy for intelligence.
Is smarter the same as intelligence? For example, I'd argue old people are "smarter" than young. I probably wouldn't agree they are more intelligent.
Actually, there is a more compelling point here. People are more likely to move to the right as they age than to the left. What does that tell us?
Both. Read Hanania.
You didn't include a link so I googled and found this.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-read-conservatives-watch
He gives opinions on why liberals might be smarter backed up with statements of fact for which he in no way even attempts to show he has the facts correct. Even if they were, it still wouldn't prove who is smarter.
Personally, my guess is that no matter who is smarter, the differences are insignificant. A significant difference in intelligence would be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to prove than a simple difference.
I've never understood the left's lack of concern regarding giving more power to governments. You'd think their dislike/concern/fear/etc. of Trump would have made them rethink it but even that seems to have made no difference whatsoever.
Good post! I didn't know about your book "Unchecked and Unbalanced", so I went to the link to buy it. Yikes! The Kindle version is $45. It seems that the publishers are trying not to sell it. :-(
Can I get on board with decentralizing power? Absolutely. Will those who benefit from holding the concentration of power willingly let it be more decentralized? Absolutely not. Unfortunately, this realization is what drives some of the "burn the government down" position of the left and right loonies. I defer to the Dan Williams essay you linked about persuasion versus pressure, and in this case regarding decentralizing power would like to think that persuasion could work, but highly doubt it.
And yet ... we've arrived at a point where the job of politics is so disreputable that we are principally attracting nutters and porn stars and other such exhibitionists.
The best are sitting it out.