Bryan Caplan wonders whether any movement towards more liberalized government services will counterintuitively lead to more statism in the long-run. Here is the mechanism he pictures:
1. If anything goes wrong, the market will receive all the blame. The political backlash could easily lead to policies more statist than ever.
2. In practice, the government will never implement a transparent free-market reform. Even an idea as simple as “give people the freedom to invest their own payroll taxes in a private account” will quickly morph into a kilo-page Congressional boondoggle. This further increases the chance that somethingwill go wrong. And when it does, the market will take all the heat.
I find plausible his speculation that privatizing social security could lead to policies intended to prop up the stock market, like TARP x 100. However, I have a hard time imagining how more school choice could backfire in a way that leads to more a more “statist” education system, another example that he gives.
One possibility is that states will be too lenient in the kind of schools are allowed to receive vouchers and students end up signing up for “virtual school” en masse. This in turn could lead to federal involvement in state education policy in an attempt to enforce standards. But these days organizations that oppose education reforms seem to be more powerful at the state and local level than the federal level. This means that, as it did with Race To The Top, more federal involvement seems just as likely to result in education reforms that move away from rather than towards a more “statist” education system.
My challenge for Bryan is this: tell me a conceivable story where more vouchers and charter schools lead to some sort of blowback that results in an education system that is more “statist” than the status quo.
One final interesting point is to note that this theory is a direct challenge to Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, where marginal steps in the right direction -and frequently free market ones- are all we have. I would be interested to see a response from Tyler on this.
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Tuesday ~ September 14th, 2010 at 8:52 am
Rebecca Burlingame
Think about chaos theory for a minute. Most of the time, when the world is behaving in a linear fashion, small steps do the trick. Only when the non-linear storms (events) come and shake everything up are more than small steps needed. In a sense, Bryan is looking at the layers of complexity that surround education and wondering if it has reached the tipping point where it is not possible to gain efficiency from doing things the same way.
Tuesday ~ September 14th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Wonks Anonymous
Bob Murphy gives such an argument here:
http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2010/08/the-problem-with-school-vouchers.html
Thursday ~ September 23rd, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Fred Geisler
It’s not hard for me to envision a backlash in education. The most recent study of test scores and charter schools concluded that, for every charter school doing better (to a statistically significant extent) than the local public school district, there are two that do worse (again, to a statistically significant extent).* Now, if this were to move from being a wonkish statistical correlation to something that most folks saw in their daily lives, this could easily cause a movement to revoke school vouchers. Even from the charter schools that outperform the public schools.
* OK, 17% better and 31% worse, with the remainder doing about as well. That’s close enough for “two-to-one” not being an unreasonable summary.