School Choice as Occupational Choice

Many people have noted that the public school model is obviously unattractive when applied to other goods and services. For instance, few would support a shift to residentially-assigned, government-run grocery stores. It's much better to have a choice of grocery stores and to address issues of access with income supplementation.

But here’s another way of getting at the same idea. Think of attending school as a kind of occupation. Suppose that your place of work was dictated by the government based on where your house was located. Your boss might do a bad job. You might have serious conflicts with your co-workers. Your day-to-day work might be tedious and unproductive. But if that's the place of employment assigned to you based on your location, that's where you'll work.

Now suppose there's a much better workplace down the street. You'd prefer to work there. You're permitted to switch jobs, but there's a catch--your former employer will garnish your wages forever even though you no longer work there. You can't afford this loss of income, so you decide to stay.

I assume few would support a shift to this system of employment. Yet this is all too similar to our current system of public schooling. 

Koch Grants and Government Grants: What's the Difference?

Many academics object to Koch grants but not government grants. As far as I can tell, the objections to the former apply with equal or greater force to the latter. Consider two:

1) The Kochs have committed injustices and accepting Koch money makes you complicit in those injustices, even if the funded project is wholly unrelated to them.

 

But of course the government has committed injustices; indeed, injustices far graver than anything the Kochs have been accused of (e.g. murdering people daily).  Furthermore, most of what people find objectionable about the Kochs is their lobbying efforts. Yet the government should also bear some responsibility for seeking and accepting the influence of Koch money in that case. If you accept money as part of your murder for hire business, you are at least as morally blameworthy as the buyer.

 

2) There are allegations of cases where Koch has applied ideologically-motivated pressure to recipients. But the same is true of government funding. Addiction research is an example:

 

“There are ideological constraints tied to what gets funded," says Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York City. An example? The tendency to fund "abstinence only" programs and the war on drugs at the expense of drug prevention research. "There is not a lot of evidence of what works because it does not get studied. Today, kids lose their drug virginity before their sexual virginity. What’s the needle exchange of today?"

 

Here’s a plausible reply that a defender of government funding could make: just because the government applies ideological pressure in one case doesn’t make it wrong to accept government funding in a different case without that pressure. Fair enough, but this reply works just as well for the defender of Koch funding.

 

Furthermore, 56 percent of left-leaning philosophers (who make up the vast majority of the profession) express an explicit willingness to discriminate against right-leaning job candidates. This atmosphere of discrimination creates a tremendous amount of pressure to publicly conform to the dominant political ideology of the field. Consider these statements from anonymous philosophers:

 

“I said that I am left-leaning and sometimes feel pressure to stay quiet about my beliefs. [. . .] I think this pressure is not coming from right-wing members of the profession, but from left-wing members who might believe that I am not left-wing enough.”

 

“If my professional colleagues knew that I am moderately right-wing then half of them would call me a ‘subhuman pig’ and treat me accordingly. The other half would keep silent for fear of being next.”

 

And here’s Robert Nozick—then a tenured professor at Harvard—explaining what a relief it was when his colleagues mistakenly thought he had abandoned libertarianism:

 

“You know, it was a moment of weakness on my part, but it was so nice for people to be slapping me on the back and telling me that they had faith in me and they believed in me. Because they hadn't been saying that for years. And they started welcoming me back into the fold. And you know, God help me, but I just liked to not be vilified for a change. I liked to not be not a pariah in my own department. And so I went along with it. I could have done the snarky thing and said, No, your approval of me is based on a misunderstanding. I could have said that, but I just didn't. I was tired and I just let it go.”

 

This sort of widespread viewpoint discrimination creates vastly more pressure to conform to a political ideology than some Koch money.

In Defense of Lori Loughlin

 If you read this blog, you’ve probably noticed its writers largely agree that the political state does more than its share of unjust things.  But that point is pretty mundane.  I’d venture that a majority of academic folks we associate with across the political spectrum broadly agree about the most egregious examples of political injustice. 

Sometimes, however, there is a case where something seems obviously unjust to me, but for some reason a lot of academics I know see it differently.  This post is about Lori Loughlin, who yesterday was sentenced over her well-publicized ploy to get her children into USC under the guise of a rowing scholarship.  I confess this strikes me as crazy.

Here’s a case to warm you up to my view.  Imagine you want to get into Fancyperson Richclub, an exclusive fraternity for the well-heeled and well-mannered.  One of the rules of admission is that your parents and grandparents must have also met certain criteria of membership among the social elite.  As it happens, your family’s past is checkered with markers of low and middle class heritage.  Your application is turned down.  Indignant, you fabricate a new family history, purging old family pictures of birthdays at Cheesecake Factory and photoshopping in nights at the symphony, etc. etc.  Unused to your plucky ambition, Fancyperson Richclub is duped.  They admit you.

Is your action wrong?  Well, there is some deception, which is often wrong.  But in some cases, deception as a way of parrying unjust background conditions – or what philosophers sometimes call defensive deception – is ok.  I’ll admit mileage may vary on this question.

Is your action unjust?  Here I say no, it’s not unjust.  If they smell you out as a low class striver, they’re free to excommunicate you.  That’s freedom of association.  But nothing more.

Second case.  Over the years, Fancyperson Richclub starts losing members and money.  Sure, they still have their pride, but that doesn’t pay for the ice sculptures.  They decide to take a few members with less distinguished pedigrees, provided they can make a “donation” up front.  You just have to take your "donation" to the Appropriate Office.  As long as you do, you’re in.  But if by chance you take your “donation” to the Inappropriate Office, the attendant there calls the police on you.  As it happens, you bring your briefcase of cash to the Inappropriate Office and get made.  The police arrest you.

Here is what puzzles me.  I don’t know why the state should intervene at all.  And if the state intervenes, why take the side of Fancyperson Richclub?  Doing that looks plain suspicious.  It’s almost as if the state had some interest in defending the old class structure. 

I’m going to introduce a technical term.  I will call something a “scam” whenever some agent or group represents themselves as something they’re not in order to get a positional advantage.  Elite colleges like to represent themselves as not trading admissions for money.  That way they can maintain certain reputational gains that give them a positional edge.  At the same time, elite colleges trade admissions for money.  So elite colleges are engaged in a scam.

Astonishingly, Lori Loughlin got the better of them.  How did a middle class divorcee turned B-list celebrity do it?  The answer to that question is the stuff of what I regret will probably not be first Hallmark true-crime thriller. 

How should an egalitarian minded political society regard people who scam the scammers?  Polite indifference?  Public commendation?  A medal of some kind?  Those are my pre-theoretical intuitions. 

Not so.  Lori Loughlin was sentenced to two months in jail.  I think this is unjust. 

I’ve had this argument with a few people.  Sometimes I’m told that it wasn’t fair for Lori Loughlin’s kids to get admitted to USC because they took some else’s spot.  Three responses.  First, I want to note that most academics tend to think “you took my spot!” reasoning betrays a kind of category mistake.  Second, for spot-taking to be unfair, it must be the case that the person who’s spot was taken was in fact more deserving.  But third, let’s say for the sake of the argument they were more deserving.  Now some star high school rower is slumming it on the crew team at UC Santa Barbara instead of USC.  And we’re going to put Lori Loughlin in a cage used by some humans to physically contain other humans as a form of punishment?  Insanity.  At the worst, we should make her send a note of apology or something. 

But really, why should the state intervene at all?  To me it looks suspicious.  It’s almost as if they had some interest in defending the existing class structure.  Maybe you disagree.  I realize I’m in the minority.  But if you’re on the other side, I am curious who you think the bad guys are in any heist movie you’ve ever watched. 

 

University of Southern Maine's President Wants Faculty to Sign an Anti-Racism Pledge

 See the oath here.

Brian Leiter explains what's wrong with this:

You can't call on members of the community to sign an "anti-racism pledge," just like you can't call on them to sign a loyalty oath to American capitalism.   Of course, this isn't quite as bad as mandating as a condition of employment a profession of loyalty to the ideology of anti-racism (whatever that is:  "I won't join the Klan," "I won't use racial epithets"?, "I won't disagree with Black Lives Matter?"), but it comes to the same thing:  after all, the President has issued a public call for signatures, his staff has duly signed, so who would want to risk being branded a "racist" for failing to be counted?   But there are plenty of non-racist reasons not to sign:  e.g., doubts about what will count as "the conditions and structures" that allegedly support bigotry, doubts about who one is being asked to "stand in solidarity" with and doubts about their conceptions of "justice."   No one, least of all this blowhard President (who sounds more like the former politician he is), knows what it means to be an "antiracist...in all aspects of your life."   That the President goes on to quote the totalitarian wannabe Ibram Kendi certainly does not inspire confidence.

This kind of thing generally cheapens the idea of anti-racism. Universities are rather sad and pathetic places, in general. They're the kinds of places where, when people claim to get worried about racism, rather than using their ample resources to combat serious problems of racism out there in the world, they instead just hire a bunch of diversity officers who then create milquetoast programming for their student bodies, who already tend to be relatively non-racist and anti-racist. It's like getting worried about starvation, so you then distribute extra snacks to your generally well-fed student body rather than trying to feed actual starving people in refugee camps. You have to wonder whether the point is not to combat racism, but instead to be seen as anti-racist.

I mean, consider: If you had $1 million to spend to fight racism, would it make sense to use any of it to do anything at, say, Princeton University, or even the University of Southern Maine? These are some of the least racist places in the US. If you can't come up with a better, more effective use of that money, you aren't trying very hard.

But, beyond that, it's pretty bogus for universities to ask people to take any kind of ideological pledge, even for the correct ideology. If Georgetown asked its faculty to sign a pledge affirming that they agree with everything that I, Jason Brennan, have published, I wouldn't sign it, even though everything I've written is of course correct and of course everyone is morally and epistemically obligated to agree with it. 

Is Micro Schooling Morally Permissible?

As more public schools are opting for an online-only start to the year, families are turning to "micro schools"--hiring a teacher to instruct a few children from several different families--to meet their educational needs. However, the rise of micro schooling has rekindled an old debate about the propriety of permitting educational inequalities that exacerbate economic inequalities. No doubt wealthy parents are better positioned to provide their children with micro schooling just as they are better positioned to provide their children with private schooling in general. But, the argument goes, these educational advantages give children an unfair edge in competitions for spots at prestigious colleges and high-paying, high-status jobs. An article published at Aeon summarizes the worry: "For many parents, enrolling their children in private school is primarily about giving them an edge over their peers. And that, it turns out, is incompatible with the public good  . . . If status is the aim, there must be losers – lots of them. After all, if we are all roughly the same, there is no difference upon which to base unequal distribution of social and economic rewards." 

This is a fair worry but I doubt that it's a decisive objection to micro schooling or private schooling as such. One reason is that even the full equalization of educational opportunities would probably not do much to equalize opportunity in general; instead, it would simply shift parental status-seeking toward other credentials. Yale has to select among applicants somehow--if it cannot use differential educational credentials to do so, it must turn to some other differentiating characteristic. (By analogy, if all NFL prospects run an identical 40 yard dash, teams must turn to some other characteristic to decide who to draft.) 

If wealthy parents are unable to give their children a leg up in Ivy League admissions by buying them better schooling, they have an incentive to buy other opportunities for their children that will distinguish them from other applicants. As I write elsewhere:

New competitions will arise for nonacademic extracurricular goods such as music, chess, sports, and so on. If a credential’s value is due to its unequal distribution, then we should expect partial parents to react to complete educational equalization by investing in unequally distributed private signaling goods. If you can’t get your child into Yale by buying her elite private schooling, then buy her cello lessons instead.

Wealthy parents can, of course, more easily afford to buy their children SAT prep classes, time at golf camp to improve their odds of an athletic scholarship, and so on. Thus, even total educational equalization is unlikely to make much of a difference with respect to overall equality of opportunity.

Lastly, even if you have lingering worries about educational inequalities, it is seems as though the appropriate response is simply to expand the educational opportunities of the disadvantaged. The problem of inadequate access to micro schools could be solved by distributing educational dollars directly to families to spend on a micro school if that is a better option for their children, just as we address the problem of food insecurity by allocating food stamps to families to use as they see fit.

Is Academia a Right-Wing Institution with a Left-Wing Cover?

In this post at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen speculates that Los Angeles is the most "right-wing" city in the US in terms of practice, rather than people's political beliefs. Here, "right-wing" signifies strong inequality in status. 

In LA, there is winner-takes-all kind of tournament, and people are strongly motivated to raise their own status while willing to accept radical inequality in prestige. People are treated differently based on their status and prestige, and in particular, how they look, whom they know, and who's in their network. All of this is tolerated and celebrated, despite the overtly "left-wing" politics people claim to espouse. 

If I recall correctly, in another post, Cowen speculates that often times the political ideology of a place tends to counteract, balance, or cover up the underlying politics. So, for instance, LA and New York are very hierarchical and status-driven, but espouse left-wing politics, while red cities often have much lower income inequality, but espouse conservative ideas.

I similarly wonder if academia is a right-wing institution with a left-wing cover. Below is a partial excerpt, modified in various ways, from a paper forthcoming in an edited anthology:

Given how poorly universities behave and given how much they undermine social justice, it’s strategic for administrators to use social justice talk as much as possible. While academia is supposed to aim at a higher mission and be non-profit, the actual people inside academia are normal, selfish, for-profit people. Egalitarian talk is often a cover or disguise for the pursuit of self-interest, just as talk of salvation in the medieval Catholic church was often a cover for the pursuit of real estate, power, and wealth. 

While academia is filled with people who posit egalitarian ideals, it is not an egalitarian place. In behavior, academia may be the most right-wing institution in the US, even more than the military or the police. (Think of how open the military and police are to accepting and promoting common people. Now think of how open the good colleges and universities are.) Higher ed serves a very right-wing function, namely, to reinforce class hierarchy. Academia is highly hierarchical; everything and everyone gets ranked, and everyone is acutely aware of such rankings. Finally, while nearly all academics pay lip service to left-wing ideals, their actual behavior is predominantly selfish. In short, academics simultaneously promote egalitarianism philosophy and inegalitarian outcomes. Status, not education, is the sine qua non and the essential product it sells; if it stopped providing this, it would quickly go out of business. Higher education strongly contributes to income inequality, especially in the United States.

 

People often use moral language to disguise their pursuit of self-interest. Academics in general are trained to use moral language in a sophisticated way. Perhaps we should regard academic egalitarianism as cheap altruism. If I say I’m an egalitarian, I come across as nice and caring, even though I haven’t thereby done anything to help others or sacrificed my self-interest to help the poor. On the contrary, many egalitarians go out of their way to explain why their egalitarian commitments do not require them to donate their excess income to others.

 

Moral Catastrophes and Progress

The past is full of moral catastrophes. 

The good news is that people seem to be getting better. Moral catastrophes like slavery, mass violence, genocidal war, the use of torture as punishment, and the denial of political equality are way less common today than they were in the past. As Michael Huemer argues, this is a sign of our collective progress toward adopting better, objectively correct values. 

The bad news is that people seem to be getting better, which suggests that we are probably living through moral catastrophes that we cannot recognize because we haven’t made enough progress yet. Evan G. Williams writes about this in “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe”. He argues that even if it’s pretty unlikely that any particular practice is wrong, it’s also pretty plausible that something we’re doing is seriously wrong. Williams then writes,

Our descendants may well view us with the same repugnance as we view our slave-owning forefathers….The fastest way to end this catastrophe, so that our wrongdoing will stop sooner rather than later, is to build a society that makes rapid intellectual progress and is flexible enough to take decisive action when the need is recognized. (981)

 

On his view, this requires the cultivation of a marketplace of ideas that is more effective at enabling good ideas to outcompete bad ideas. Williams emphasizes the importance of investing in education, effectively communicating scientific theories to people, and discouraging social norms that make it hard for good ideas to gain wide currency. 

 

The bad news about Williams's bad news is that there are also barriers to progress within education, science, and culture. For example, it’s often unclear how much education actually promotes learning (see here and here). And it’s unclear that science is set up in a way that really rewards or advances the ideas that have the most merit (see here). And it’s unclear that increasing exposure to different viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas actually makes people better at evaluating claims in a nonpartisan way.

I think Williams is right about our present circumstances, and the value of institutions that foster 'rapid intellectual progress.' So what would an investment in intellectual progress look like? 

Here are two new models that aim to improve our current approach to intellectual investment. First, consider Collinson and Cowen's proposal for a discipline of Progress Studies. And second, there's Minerva's innovative approach to effective education. Avoiding moral catastrophe will not only require that we rethink our institutions, it also requires rethinking how we rethink things.