Monkeys and Rice

 Years ago somebody told me how to trap a monkey. The story was put some rice in a jar with an opening big enough for the monkey's open hand to fit in but small enough that when the monkey grabbed the rice it could not get its hand out. Monkeys, the story went, had one track minds and as the monkey hunter approached they would panic and try to run away only to realize that they had a hand full of rice they could extract from the jar. They would then focus on extracting the rice and forget about the hunter only to end up caught. Relatedly Kierkegaard argued that anxiety over choosing one thing over another was proof of free will. If you had no choice, he reasoned, you would have no anxiety. As people had anxiety choice existed.  His preferred solution was to accept Christianity and live by its precepts. In short, short circuit the anxiety of choice by letting go of the ability to choose by letting others choose for you. I would argue that these equally unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of choice structure Matthew Yglesias' thoughts on nearly everything with an added dose of misunderstanding and misdirection.

Like a monkey with a handful of rice, Yglesias continues to  argue that educational reform is an economic category. He suggests that

One of the most important things about the health care and education segments of the economy is that part of what customers want is attention. Parents like the idea of small class sizes, and patients like the reassuring face-to-face presence of a doctor with a good bedside manner. But personal attention has the pretty special characteristic of being immune to productivity enhancements.

Students and patients, he wants us to believe, are identical in being "customers." This is simply wrong. Students and patients are students and patients.  Medical care costs more because it is a for-profit enterprise, education costs more not because of profits but because of population increases that demand more teachers or larger class rooms. And important point is that an economically efficiency has nothing to do with effectiveness, safety, or what have you.

Despite his attempt to dismiss face-to-face teaching as an irrational desire for "attention" the fact of the matter is that smaller classrooms are more effective. Ask any teacher, as opposed to loud-mouthed, hard-charging pundits and other assholes, about classroom size. Smaller is better.

It is also clear here the he has shifted the terms of the debate from effective teaching to efficient teaching. One reason for this might be that all the market-based Neoliberal reforms, choice, testing, teacher bashing, etc, have been shown not to work and the only way to argue for continued Neoliberal reforms is to shift from doing something well to doing it cheaply.

 He claims that the current efficiency crisis

 creates the following trilemma as economy-wide productivity rises:

— One: The wages of teachers and doctors can fall relative to average wages, because teachers and doctors aren’t increasing their productivity as rapidly as the average worker.
— Two: Paying the salaries of teachers and doctors can account for an ever-growing share of national output, because the rest of our output is getting more efficient and teaching and treating isn’t.
— Three: The amount of attention provided by teachers and doctors to students and patients can decline.

Conflating doctors and teachers fundamentally distorts teachers' wages. There is also four: move funds from, say, defense to education. It is not the case that the world of state expenditure cannot be reallocated if the reallocation will create a world better suited to human beings happiness and well being even if profitability and economic efficiency have to take a hit.

Just as importantly, Ygelsias continues to misunderstand his source material. Specifically Baumol:

And if you think we need to increase the relative wages of teachers while further shrinking class sizes and sustain that policy over time, it’ll mean steadily increasing taxes, no one-off increase will undue the Baumol Effect. That’s one possible answer—America is lightly taxed compared to other rich countries—but you owe it to yourself at least to face up to that.

As I've mentioned before, the Baumol Effect, or Disease, isn't a law its an economist's intervention into a policy debate about urban decay and how to stop it. Baumol argued for unions and paying more for teachers. Treating Baumol's argument this way makes policy preference into laws, which isn't true. If you push something hard enough it will fall over, is a law testable both in theory and in fact. Arguing that tax revenue will never increase enough to cover the costs of hiring teachers and paying them a decent wage isn't a law, it's an assertion.

We can, to repeat myself, rejigger state expenditure, less on defense and prisons and more on education, infrastructure, and communication, which wouldn't require tax increases. We can increase taxes or decrease subsidies or close loopholes or we can more create jobs that pay decent wages by strengthening unions which would increase tax revenues without a tax increase.

In other words, Yglesias needs to face up to the fact that his single-minded focus on market-based solutions to non-market problems leads him into all manner of absurdity and he has to face up to the fact that his decision to accept ideologically based solutions to real world problems while ridding him of the anxiety of choice has limited his ability to think creatively.