So let me get this straight. Lets say we took 100 kids from the same neighborhood that have similar backgrounds, parental income and grades. 50 we send to college/trade school and 50 just straight out into the workforce. The 50 on average wouldn’t have a lower chance of poverty? Now we all know it’s not a one to one situation. College grads can be in poverty, and drop outs can make great careers for themselves. But wouldn’t you say on average it’s the Grads that do better?
Ive always wondered, is it simply the act of going through college and learning those skills that increases these odds or is the person to goes to school more likely to succeed anyways?
I guess I’m thinking about school more practically. School and job training can provide useful skills to increase earning potential, therefore decreasing likelihood of great income and lower poverty?
So I think we're talking about two different scales - individual and aggregate. And we're also talking about the classic correlation-causation dilemma.
Individually, education certainly correlates with success. I mean, duh. But I contend that there's a hidden variable - it's not a causative relationship. And I'm specifically saying we can be pretty damn certain there's no causative relationship because *individual*-focused policies like Affirmative Action have failed to lead to the *aggregate* outcomes we'd expect if it *were* causative.
Now, the hidden variable is a pretty huge debate. It's a mix of structural policies like housing, financialization, transit, poverty traps, and countless more. But I think it's pretty clear from the post-deseg era that education is downstream of this hidden variable, not upstream of success outcomes. And I think that's the only sensible way to explain the stubborn unresponsiveness of those outcomes to endless tinkering in education policy.
I guess this felt a little light compared to what you typically write. For example, did No Child Left Behind significantly raise levels of education while failing to make a dent in poverty? I really don’t know and you didn’t go into it. Are there examples of large groups of educated people staying permanently poor? Again, I don’t know. These were just a few of the first thoughts that occurred to me, and I generally expect you to have anticipated them :-) So, yeah, I hope you will revisit this subject and go into a bit more depth. In any case, I like your work, David.
Fair enough. I'm actually not all that concerned with the details of education policy; precisely because of the argument that I've made here, namely that I believe the prevailing narrative about education being upstream of success is entirely missing the point that it's actually downstream of pretty much everything else in society.
IMO, education, much like, say, housing policy, is a potential limiter, but not driver, of growth.
IOW, take housing policy. We know right now that vast swathes of our developed land are underutilized, because their utilization is overregulated. This puts a massive drain on our economy, but it doesn't alone create growth. Rather, there's a certain "natural rate of economic growth under perfect housing policy", and any policy short of that means we're not capturing all that potential growth. And once you get to the absolutely perfect housing policy, there's nothing left to do to goose growth - contrast with technology, where there's always some new innovation waiting to be discovered and unlock more growth*.
* The exception here is the intersection of housing and tech - if some new tech allows houses to be built 50% cheaper, then of course the "natural rate of economic growth under perfect housing policy" is raised, but that's not really a housing policy outcome, it's a tech policy outcome.
Education is more or less the same. Sure, we're leaving a lot on the table because we're not educating everyone in the country to their fullest potential. But education alone isn't what gets the entire engine up and running. Success in education, for instance, is constrained by failures in housing policy! Like housing, the only thing that failure in education can really do is put a drag on our economy's fullest potential. The only thing that success can do is bring us up to whatever that potential is.
Thus, if the potential is low, then educational success can't fix the entire economy.
And this is EXACTLY what we've seen not just since NCLB, but since *integration*. Housing never truly desegregated; the segregation simply (1) got somewhat more porous - IE, relatively high-achieving black families were not overtly segregated from white neighborhoods anymore - and (2) got coded in non-overt terms that achieved more or less similar outcomes.
Meantime, we attempted several integrative policies intended to improve Black education. Busing and AA actually yielded plenty of *program-level* successes - IE, the Black children who participated had improved outcomes over other Black children who didn't. Wonderful, right? Except for the communities they returned to remained... disinvested and depressed. So they took their improved social capital and bounced. Instead of solving the Black community's disinvestment problems, we just added another problem of human and capital flight on top of them!
My personal critique is that this is par for the course for an American left that has always been myopic, meek, and self-misguided. Hindsight is always 20/20, but come on, the economics of capital flight were pretty damned well understood even 60 years ago, so it's gotta be myopia.
Anyways, even if we entertained an alternate history of perfect program-level performance in AA and Busing, it's pretty clear that this would only have made the capital flight *worse*. Perhaps that flight would have been enough to tip into a new outcome regime where those communities would have almost completely depopulated as a new Black middle and upper class invested in their own suburbs, to later return and revitalize the old ghettoes - essentially, what actually happened with White Flight and Gentrification, but a supercharged version done by Blacks. But given those programs' own ambitions and scales, it's pretty unlikely they'd ever have even come close to meeting the bar for that regime.
So let me get this straight. Lets say we took 100 kids from the same neighborhood that have similar backgrounds, parental income and grades. 50 we send to college/trade school and 50 just straight out into the workforce. The 50 on average wouldn’t have a lower chance of poverty? Now we all know it’s not a one to one situation. College grads can be in poverty, and drop outs can make great careers for themselves. But wouldn’t you say on average it’s the Grads that do better?
Ive always wondered, is it simply the act of going through college and learning those skills that increases these odds or is the person to goes to school more likely to succeed anyways?
I guess I’m thinking about school more practically. School and job training can provide useful skills to increase earning potential, therefore decreasing likelihood of great income and lower poverty?
So I think we're talking about two different scales - individual and aggregate. And we're also talking about the classic correlation-causation dilemma.
Individually, education certainly correlates with success. I mean, duh. But I contend that there's a hidden variable - it's not a causative relationship. And I'm specifically saying we can be pretty damn certain there's no causative relationship because *individual*-focused policies like Affirmative Action have failed to lead to the *aggregate* outcomes we'd expect if it *were* causative.
Now, the hidden variable is a pretty huge debate. It's a mix of structural policies like housing, financialization, transit, poverty traps, and countless more. But I think it's pretty clear from the post-deseg era that education is downstream of this hidden variable, not upstream of success outcomes. And I think that's the only sensible way to explain the stubborn unresponsiveness of those outcomes to endless tinkering in education policy.
Hmmm… If like to see you take another crack at this subject.
How so?
I guess this felt a little light compared to what you typically write. For example, did No Child Left Behind significantly raise levels of education while failing to make a dent in poverty? I really don’t know and you didn’t go into it. Are there examples of large groups of educated people staying permanently poor? Again, I don’t know. These were just a few of the first thoughts that occurred to me, and I generally expect you to have anticipated them :-) So, yeah, I hope you will revisit this subject and go into a bit more depth. In any case, I like your work, David.
Fair enough. I'm actually not all that concerned with the details of education policy; precisely because of the argument that I've made here, namely that I believe the prevailing narrative about education being upstream of success is entirely missing the point that it's actually downstream of pretty much everything else in society.
IMO, education, much like, say, housing policy, is a potential limiter, but not driver, of growth.
IOW, take housing policy. We know right now that vast swathes of our developed land are underutilized, because their utilization is overregulated. This puts a massive drain on our economy, but it doesn't alone create growth. Rather, there's a certain "natural rate of economic growth under perfect housing policy", and any policy short of that means we're not capturing all that potential growth. And once you get to the absolutely perfect housing policy, there's nothing left to do to goose growth - contrast with technology, where there's always some new innovation waiting to be discovered and unlock more growth*.
* The exception here is the intersection of housing and tech - if some new tech allows houses to be built 50% cheaper, then of course the "natural rate of economic growth under perfect housing policy" is raised, but that's not really a housing policy outcome, it's a tech policy outcome.
Education is more or less the same. Sure, we're leaving a lot on the table because we're not educating everyone in the country to their fullest potential. But education alone isn't what gets the entire engine up and running. Success in education, for instance, is constrained by failures in housing policy! Like housing, the only thing that failure in education can really do is put a drag on our economy's fullest potential. The only thing that success can do is bring us up to whatever that potential is.
Thus, if the potential is low, then educational success can't fix the entire economy.
And this is EXACTLY what we've seen not just since NCLB, but since *integration*. Housing never truly desegregated; the segregation simply (1) got somewhat more porous - IE, relatively high-achieving black families were not overtly segregated from white neighborhoods anymore - and (2) got coded in non-overt terms that achieved more or less similar outcomes.
Meantime, we attempted several integrative policies intended to improve Black education. Busing and AA actually yielded plenty of *program-level* successes - IE, the Black children who participated had improved outcomes over other Black children who didn't. Wonderful, right? Except for the communities they returned to remained... disinvested and depressed. So they took their improved social capital and bounced. Instead of solving the Black community's disinvestment problems, we just added another problem of human and capital flight on top of them!
My personal critique is that this is par for the course for an American left that has always been myopic, meek, and self-misguided. Hindsight is always 20/20, but come on, the economics of capital flight were pretty damned well understood even 60 years ago, so it's gotta be myopia.
Anyways, even if we entertained an alternate history of perfect program-level performance in AA and Busing, it's pretty clear that this would only have made the capital flight *worse*. Perhaps that flight would have been enough to tip into a new outcome regime where those communities would have almost completely depopulated as a new Black middle and upper class invested in their own suburbs, to later return and revitalize the old ghettoes - essentially, what actually happened with White Flight and Gentrification, but a supercharged version done by Blacks. But given those programs' own ambitions and scales, it's pretty unlikely they'd ever have even come close to meeting the bar for that regime.