“One does not have to go abroad to experience alien cultures.”
If you live in Los Angeles you can drive 15 minutes in any direction and reliably experience a very different culture from where you started. Within Hollywood alone you have Thai Town, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, and Korean, Pilipino, and many Latin American neighborhoods. Also Hollywood Hills where the celebrities live and West Hollywood where many LGBT people live.
One of Jonathan Haidt’s recommendations in The Coddling is that students take a gap year after high school to do work or service in another place before college.
I would say going to a different country is still better for that purpose. Yes, rural West Virginia would be very different from the culture an Oregonian is used to, but it's still fairly familiar; the key laws are similar, the customs largely are too (e.g., they know the traffic laws, that they're supposed to tip in restaurants, how to greet people, etc.), they know how/when to deal with the authorities. Living in another country (except Canada) is much more of a genuine 'shock' that forces one to deal with a totally new set of rules and customs. I've travelled pretty extensively in the US and never felt anywhere near as challenged as being in another country.
A hearty cheer for your proposal to do semesters "abroad" within the U.S. Among much else, this country is so full of treasures that many within it never so much as hear about let alone experience in person.
I grew up in the Northeast and spent summers and holidays in the Mountain West, and what I took from those experiences matters more in many ways than what I've learned from significant international experience. I also got to live for a year as an adult in the South and now look for opportunities to travel to and discover more about the South as much as I can. Your idea is a wonderful one and I hope it catches on.
Redistributing income to support low earning workers has been a long standing, virtually defining element of progressivism, not some new development. As for the populist right, we'll see if they are interested in down-ward redistribution or only want to use the rhetoric to justify trade and tax policies that redistribute income upward. When I see them supporting immigration, free trade and higher taxes on high income groups to achieve lower deficits, I'll believe they are pro-poor.
Re: "I can think of a lot of targets for such a commission [a Congressional commission for smart deregulation]. Occupational licensing. College degree requirements for government jobs. Restrictions on residential construction."
Compare Casey Mulligan, "Trump’s Vast Deregulatory Landscape Goes Unnoticed by the Experts" (13 January 2020)":
Did the Philipson/Mulligan CEA focus on low-hanging fruit (political feasibility)?
Would a Congressional commission willy-nilly favor excessive centralization of regulation?
I would emphasize a default presumption of exit options, competition, decentralization, private governance, and experimentation in regulation. Government regulation should have to provide clear and convincing evidence to overcome this default bundle.
A key political-economy conundrum arises in deregulation of residential housing construction and in deregulation of occupational licensing:
Homeowners and licensed professionals, who consider themselves legal stakeholders in extant regulations (zoning, occupational licensing), will fear that deregulation would constitute 'takings without compensation'. The scale and scope of these political-economy issues will be orders of magnitude greater than, say, clashes between NYC owners of taxi medallions and Uber.
Libertarians should reckon with political-economy of concerns about deregulatory takings. Will exhortations about dynamism suffice to persuade homeowners to accept major zoning changes, and licensed professionals to accept much more open occupational licensing? Where are the creative, entrepreneurial keyhole solutions to this political-economy issue? How might stakeholders in the legal status quo receive clear-cut compensation and/or new stakes in new rules?
I think the benefit of living in other countries is not just to experience other cultures (which you can do to some extent within the US) but to appreciate the US by contrast. Noah Smith had a relevant post about this: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/love-it-and-leave-it
“ would like to see high school students in America have semesters living in different environments within the United State”
Puritans in the New England colonies routinely exchanged adolescents so families raised each other’s kids for that last mile. I agree that a little further away would be good, but as we grow more and more local (people living all there lives in one place to a yet greater degree) and more siloed, not likely to catch on. I wonder how foreign exchange programs are doing?
“One does not have to go abroad to experience alien cultures.”
If you live in Los Angeles you can drive 15 minutes in any direction and reliably experience a very different culture from where you started. Within Hollywood alone you have Thai Town, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, and Korean, Pilipino, and many Latin American neighborhoods. Also Hollywood Hills where the celebrities live and West Hollywood where many LGBT people live.
One of Jonathan Haidt’s recommendations in The Coddling is that students take a gap year after high school to do work or service in another place before college.
I would say going to a different country is still better for that purpose. Yes, rural West Virginia would be very different from the culture an Oregonian is used to, but it's still fairly familiar; the key laws are similar, the customs largely are too (e.g., they know the traffic laws, that they're supposed to tip in restaurants, how to greet people, etc.), they know how/when to deal with the authorities. Living in another country (except Canada) is much more of a genuine 'shock' that forces one to deal with a totally new set of rules and customs. I've travelled pretty extensively in the US and never felt anywhere near as challenged as being in another country.
A hearty cheer for your proposal to do semesters "abroad" within the U.S. Among much else, this country is so full of treasures that many within it never so much as hear about let alone experience in person.
I grew up in the Northeast and spent summers and holidays in the Mountain West, and what I took from those experiences matters more in many ways than what I've learned from significant international experience. I also got to live for a year as an adult in the South and now look for opportunities to travel to and discover more about the South as much as I can. Your idea is a wonderful one and I hope it catches on.
Redistributing income to support low earning workers has been a long standing, virtually defining element of progressivism, not some new development. As for the populist right, we'll see if they are interested in down-ward redistribution or only want to use the rhetoric to justify trade and tax policies that redistribute income upward. When I see them supporting immigration, free trade and higher taxes on high income groups to achieve lower deficits, I'll believe they are pro-poor.
Re: "I can think of a lot of targets for such a commission [a Congressional commission for smart deregulation]. Occupational licensing. College degree requirements for government jobs. Restrictions on residential construction."
Compare Casey Mulligan, "Trump’s Vast Deregulatory Landscape Goes Unnoticed by the Experts" (13 January 2020)":
https://economics21.org/trump-deregulation-unnoticed-experts
Questions arise:
Did the Philipson/Mulligan CEA focus on low-hanging fruit (political feasibility)?
Would a Congressional commission willy-nilly favor excessive centralization of regulation?
I would emphasize a default presumption of exit options, competition, decentralization, private governance, and experimentation in regulation. Government regulation should have to provide clear and convincing evidence to overcome this default bundle.
A key political-economy conundrum arises in deregulation of residential housing construction and in deregulation of occupational licensing:
Homeowners and licensed professionals, who consider themselves legal stakeholders in extant regulations (zoning, occupational licensing), will fear that deregulation would constitute 'takings without compensation'. The scale and scope of these political-economy issues will be orders of magnitude greater than, say, clashes between NYC owners of taxi medallions and Uber.
Libertarians should reckon with political-economy of concerns about deregulatory takings. Will exhortations about dynamism suffice to persuade homeowners to accept major zoning changes, and licensed professionals to accept much more open occupational licensing? Where are the creative, entrepreneurial keyhole solutions to this political-economy issue? How might stakeholders in the legal status quo receive clear-cut compensation and/or new stakes in new rules?
I think the benefit of living in other countries is not just to experience other cultures (which you can do to some extent within the US) but to appreciate the US by contrast. Noah Smith had a relevant post about this: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/love-it-and-leave-it
“ would like to see high school students in America have semesters living in different environments within the United State”
Puritans in the New England colonies routinely exchanged adolescents so families raised each other’s kids for that last mile. I agree that a little further away would be good, but as we grow more and more local (people living all there lives in one place to a yet greater degree) and more siloed, not likely to catch on. I wonder how foreign exchange programs are doing?