Showing posts with label FOOL & FOOM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FOOL & FOOM. Show all posts

Saturday, February 27, 2021

What Stops School Choice?

We should fund students instead of systems.

That is the ubiquitous and powerful tagline from Corey DeAngelis and the larger pro-school-choice movement. I wholeheartedly agree with it. 

I also strongly agree that the pandemic was a very fortuitous turning point in the long struggle to improve educational opportunities for all and especially underprivileged students. As one of my Big Five low-hanging fruits of public policy, this is an exciting development. Yet we are still a long way from here to there. 

Understanding what stops or prevents immediate realization of the eventual winning idea, that parents should be free to send their children to the schools of their choice, should help us understand what it will take to get there eventually and hopefully sooner and sooner. 

Here is my rough approximation of the obstacles including how much they account for the prevention:
  • FOOL & FOOM*  --  20%
  • Local Xenophobia  --  20%
  • Incumbent Interest Protecting Turf   --  60%
The first one is a shared concern of both progressives and conservatives. The second tends to be more the domain of conservatives--I'm thinking specifically of suburbanites. The last is much more in the domain of progressives. 

*Remember that FOOL (HT: Arnold Kling) and FOOM are Fear Of Others' Liberty and Fear Of Others' Mistakes. These are the only defensible position for the three causes I identify, and only on the surface are they defensible. IF we cannot trust others (other parents, etc.) to make good choices for their children's educational needs, then perhaps this is a justified obstacle. 

But if we cannot trust them for that, what can we trust them for? Feeding and sheltering those same children? Voting for the politicians that will run the school system that is instituted and operated by a government we can trust to do right by those parents and their kids? 

There is an awkward tension between placing blame upon parents for underperformance (disgraceful performance usually) of government schools while at the same time lacking trust that those same parents could or would possibly make good choices for the children in those government schools. Taking it one-step further, those who believe that the problems of government schools lie at home outside of the schools (e.g., lack of a stable home life, help with homework, etc.) should not advocate for greater and greater resources for the schools since they claim the problem isn't in the schools. If they are right, let's put those extra resources into improving things at the point of the problem.

Circling back to advancement of the school-choice cause during the past 12 months, I feel like progress is being made against all three areas of prevention. We can cure FOOL & FOOM by attacking them head on appealing to real-world examples and analogies along with asking those holding the concerns to put themselves in the shoes of those they are concerned with.

Local xenophobia takes a long time to cure. Appeals to morality only go so far. People have a natural, animalistic-like protection instinct for their children. The hypothetical Other disrupting the fragile world of one's child is a salient fear. Experience with counter cases is the best medicine, and it is a slow process.

Fighting incumbent power is like bankruptcy. It comes on slowly and then suddenly. I would like to think we are entering the sudden stage for many communities. Check out Corey's twitter feed for hope in this regard. As more successful examples emerge of funding the kid with a backpack rather than the building with the career administrators, it will be more difficult for the incumbent resistance to hold.




Thursday, January 14, 2021

Yes, Master - 2020 New Year's Resolution fulfillment

You may not remember the before times, but I do. Way back then I had a conviction in a belief, that while I still do hold it, I must admit I was wrong to hold so strongly. I fulfilled my perpetual, annual New Year's Resolution in 2020 by changing my mind on just how easily willing people are to submit to authority when in a state of fear. Let me explain.

Although I am a student of history and well aware of the many cases of a populous submitting to the king, the conqueror, or the soothsayer promising protection for only the price of precious liberty and self-determination, I foolishly and naively did not connect that reality to my view (hope) for the current world. Time and place again throughout 2020 did I find that view shaken and proven faulty. 

There were recent, stark clues that should have told me the line would not hold. 9/11 and the terrorism threat of the early 2000s was but a hint of how quickly and thoroughly people would yield liberty and self determination in the midst of fear. In that case we traded away freedom for security and as the predictive aphorism goes got neither--just theater and blunt rules with unintended consequences and predictable government excess and abuse. 

Likewise in the financial and economic challenges of the last 25 years we saw populist calls for regulation and takings. We got both repeatedly and with greater gusto in each pass. Captured interests worked hard to draft the legislation and interpret the rules to favor vested interest and the status quo. The experts gave us bailouts and promises to never again . . . allow the wealthy and the powerful to face devastating losses. 

And then came a pandemic. I expected tyrannical nations would react harshly. I expected better from the nations of the free. The Higgsian ratchet is a powerful and reliable effect. This is true because FOOL (Fear Of Others' Liberty) and FOOM (Fear Of Others' Mistakes) are dominant forces in times of great stress. 

I believed that people, not just free people but all people, would gradually and eventually strongly resist and rebel against coercive, dictatorial edicts that did not just seem but were proved to be ineffective, unjust, inconsistent, and in many cases counter productive. While resistance occurred, I was and am still shaken with how little was offered. 

Perhaps I am being too harsh on myself. To be clear I am not advocating nor saying I expected violent resistance. That is not required to stop what we have seen. The popular will alone prevents or enables power from corrupting to this degree. So maybe people are making a practical tradeoff that I am not appreciating. To make a small example, masks and mask policies are often just a wink and a nod letting us go about our lives. In this fashion they are akin to Robin Hanson's example of the public drinker's brown paper bag.

Yet my reading of my fellow man does not make me think this the case. I see people truly scared and truly allowing if not endorsing the lockdown of free lives. Acquiescence is all the permission the powerful need to take more from others. 

If I were to put it into a 2x2, it would look something like this:



Fighting for freedom is the degree to which one will actively take actions against oppression. This is offense. Resistance to coercion is the degree to which one will impede oppression. This is defense. Both play a crucial role and are interconnected in an effective and just battle for liberty. 

Coming into 2020 I put Americans in particular and people generally on the blue line. My revised belief is that the typical person is on the red line--a decided shift away from where I once thought we were.