Brent Nyitray
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Let the mutherfuker burn!
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Kevin S. Willis
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ScottC
yellojktOur recent discussion about education, how it should be provided, and what kind of choices parents should be allowed to make with regard to the public provision of education has raised what to me is an interesting question. What is the ultimate purpose of having the government provide education, and more generally what is the purpose having the government provide any kind of social services at all? Is this done so as to benefit the individuals to whom the service is provided, or is it done so as to provide some kind of “social” benefit to the wider public?
Obviously the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. An individual benefit may, of course, provide ancillary benefits to a wider group of people, just as a “public good” such as a road obviously benefits people individually. But I have always assumed that the primary motivation for those who advocate for the government provision of things such as education , health care, and other so-called social safety-net programs was out of a sense of compassion or duty towards the <i>individuals</i> who would derive an individual benefit from them. One of the reasons I have thought this is that those who oppose or want to limit the public provision of such things are so often accused of not caring about people and lacking in compassion.
However, recent discussions have suggested to me that at least some of you think these types of things should be provided by government primarily because of a “public good” aspect, ie that they are seen as somehow providing benefits to society at large, and that is why they should be pursued. If that is the case, then I think further questions are warranted. For example, how do we measure the “public good” provided by a particular program so as to judge whether or not the provision of the good is cost effective? Do the individuals who are clearly receiving an individual good as part of this effort then have an obligation to ensure that the desired “public good” comes to pass? If so, how do we enforce this obligation?
So I am curious who here agrees that education, health care, and other social services should be provided by the government primarily to promote some benefit to the public rather than the individual, and how do you answer the questions that arise from such an approach to the provision of these things?
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All Things in Moderation 
Scott,
I saw this article from
the Daily Mail lamenting the condition of the UK’s welfare state. It was an interesting discussion on abuse of the system, but what really fascinated me was the language used.
For example, sentences like: “Sir William Beveridge set out to slay the ‘five giants’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.” sound stupifying to me. None of those things has ever been, nor can they ever be “slain.” The hubris it takes to think that can only lead, it seems to me, to utter disaster.
Quotes like “For years the welfare state was one of the glories of Britain’s democratic landscape, a monument to the generosity and decency of human nature, offering a hand up to those unlucky enough to be born at the bottom.” have me wondering why uisng the power of government to redistribute money from one group to another is any indicator or generosity? Isn’t it really an example of brute political force?
Further we read “And the abuse of the system should never blind us to our moral responsibility to help those in genuine need.” But it does exactly that by having “the government” take care of it, many no longer feel a need to participate in helping those in need, or no longer have the extra money to do so.
I’m facsinated by the congratulatory tone the article takes on the “generosity” of the UK. How generous is it to take by force from one to give to another?
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McWing:
How generous is it to take by force from one to give to another?
Not very. I definitely agree that government wealth redistribution efforts, either via direct transfer payments or services provided, cannot be accurately characterized as “compassion” or “generosity”. But I think it is clear that many people are driven to advocate for such efforts by the notion that they are just that. I wonder how many people here are in this camp, and how many people are in the “public good” camp, which raises its own interesting questions.
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My view on health care is economic as much as anything. I believe a country is better off in terms of defending itself, governing itself, and remaining economically competitive when its citizens possess a minimum level of health. Other countries providing this at a per-capita cost that is less than ours seem to have some form of government involvement.
While we’re on the subject of public good, let’s also discuss what public good is provided by our giving government subsidies to some of the most profitable corporations on the planet. If we’re going to discuss social programs, why not corporate programs as well?
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msjs:
I believe a country is better off in terms of defending itself, governing itself, and remaining economically competitive when its citizens possess a minimum level of health. Other countries providing this at a per-capita cost that is less than ours seem to have some form of government involvement.
Perhaps, but in terms of defending themselves, governing themselves, and remaining economically competitive they all, for the most part, seem to me to lag behind the US.
If we’re going to discuss social programs, why not corporate programs as well?
Corporate subsidies is certainly a worthy topic of discussion, but not in the context of this discussion. I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that any corporation be subsidized for its own sake, ie out of compassion or generosity. Again, the question I am raising is whether these “social” goods and services should be provided for the sake of the direct beneficiaries themselves, or for the sake of “the public”. Or, as my headline suggested, out of compassion or selfishness?
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Scott, I don’t have time for more than a drive-by.
I pose that the rationale for public payment for a service might not always be the same one – but it must be a public rationale, not a private one. I react negatively to describing the UK as “a monument to…decency”; I do think self congratulatory morality for taxing and spending is irrelevant posturing.
I have given George a short laundry list of public rationales for various programs, in a previous comment on another thread, that made sense to me, and we were at some point going to discuss whether we had common ground on any of them. I will try to find that and use it here sometime this weekend when I get a breather from an incredibly long honeydo list.
I find the difficult decisions are prospective. Looking back, I would argue that some decisions, like having a Public Health Service, public sanitation, and disease control, paid for by taxes, have been truly great ideas. Saved society from the Black Plague, cholera, TB, polio, and TB. Saves us on the flu every year. Did it when no private service would step up to do so, I think because the cost of entering that “market” was so great that if anyone could have done it privately the expectation of profit over investment just did not exist.
If I could distill the essence of what has worked for the public good that was paid for by the public, and if I understood why it required a public financing pattern to work rather than the more prevalent and usually more efficient competitive mechanism, I would be able to draw lines more artfully than I actually am able to do.
I hope I made some sense. And I hope anyone can help me see the lines to draw rather than the broadest of outlines of policy matters.
As for “decency”, IMHO it should apply to whether some action should be taken, rather than to whether the government at any level should take it. I wonder if most folks here would agree with that.
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mark:
As for “decency”, IMHO it should apply to whether some action should be taken, rather than to whether the government at any level should take it. I wonder if most folks here would agree with that.
If you are saying what I think you are saying, then I agree with that.
And now I will also be out for a while.
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“What is the ultimate purpose of having the government provide education, and more generally what is the purpose having the government provide any kind of social services at all?”
Establishing a baseline equality of opportunity. Ideally adults are self-sufficient & not an economic drain on society. If we maximize individual productivity across the population, we all benefit.
To put it selfishly, I am approximately halfway through my productive working life. When I reach retirement, I want the economy to be running smoothly, which I think requires a well-trained / well-educated / healthy workforce. If we maximize individual productivity, we also minimize demand for social services like unemployment, prisons and the like.
Providing a basic education & ensuring childhood health – which has a significant impact on success in school, is a cheap way of setting up kids for future success as adults. Successful adults contribute to a sound economy. A sound economy is good for me.
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ms, I couldn’t agree more vis a vis crony capitalism and “corporate welfare.” A simple solution is to eliminate federal business taxation. Also, eliminate Commerce department. With those simple moves a HUGE chunk of lobbying money in Washington goes away.
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Having said that, I would not argue there is only one reason for such programs. There is certainly an element of compassion in the argument for why we should look out for the health & education of a child born to a teenage parent who might not have the resources or ability to provide for that child’s needs.
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ScottC,
the question I am raising is whether these “social” goods and services should be provided for the sake of the direct beneficiaries themselves, or for the sake of “the public”.
I personally don’t find the distinction between “social” and “corporate” meaningful within the context of this discussion.
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msjs:
I personally don’t find the distinction between “social” and “corporate” meaningful within the context of this discussion.
That surprises me. Like I said, I’ve never heard anyone defend “corporate” welfare on generosity/compassion grounds. But I have definitely seen traditional, “social” welfare defended on such grounds. Even I see a distinction, and I am almost as opposed to spending on social programs as I to spending on corporate subsidies.
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ScottC: regarding a country’s competitiveness:
I took a look at the wealthiest nations list, based on purchasing power parity per capita as reported by the CIA. I would say countries with a PPP above or near the US level wouldn’t be considered lagging. The vast majority of the countries in this group have some government involvement in health care. Others, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, have private insurers but require mandatory coverage and subsidies are available to help insurers and providers deal with high-risk patients. They also have cost transparency the likes of which this country doesn’t possess.
And they do it more cheaply.
So I’m pretty comfortable with my original statement.
I’m leaning with bsimon in that there need not be one reason for a ‘social’ program to exist. Heck, some programs come into existence because a charismatic leader got enough support to make it happen (JFK’s ‘put a man on the moon by the end of the decade’ is a non-social program that comes to mind–must have been a lot of public good for it cuz not many directly benefited).
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I think Mark’s look at what the essential and beneficial necessities are that only government can provide is a very useful approach. That said, I agree with both of bisimon’s comments–that publicly supported education (underline that one) and various social services contribute both to the public good and a more compassionate society. My dad worked in rehabilitation in corrections, and I’ve never understood how people can feel society isn’t stronger if it doesn’t offer sound opportunities for children to learn and be healthy so they can become productive citizens no matter what their background is. To me, that’s what American does when it’s being itself. And all those children still have to do the work in school. Nobody hands that to them.
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I can’t really hang around more, but I wanted to add this to the discussion. Because I think it’s a fairly typical American story, I want to reconstruct a bit of the educational history on my father’s side of the family, which was less educated than my mother’s. His father was an Irish-American, a direct descendant of two Irish immigrants who had little or no education, and he married a woman of English descent. This paternal grandfather had an eighth-grade education and his wife went only to sixth grade. Of their six children, only my father went beyond high school, putting himself through a small private college during the Depression. He had a loan of $250 from his oldest sister, which helped him start when he was twenty, and he lived with his parents, who gave him board and room. He later earned a master’s degree from a small public college. After serving in the navy in World War II, he earned a PhD from a large state university with the aid of the G.I. bill. He had married a college graduate, and their children–my brother and I–both graduated from college. Because of my grades and other activities and what I offered in the way of “geographical diversity,” I was able to go to an Ivy League school, and also earned a couple of graduate degrees.
In my generation of cousins, none of whose parents had gone to college, one became a Jesuit priest, another a librarian and archivist, and others held various responsible jobs, many of them managerial, or worked primarily as homemakers. Four of the nine of them went to college. In the next generation, all four of my father’s grandchildren (my kids and my brother’s) went to well-ranked colleges or universities, including one Ivy League university. Two became lawyers, one works for the State Department, and one in public relations. Of their second cousins, and I’m a little sketchy on most of the details for them, one went from NROTC at a top-ranked school to service as a naval officer to a top-ranked law school (both of her parents were college grads), one became an FBI agent, two run a medical business begun by their father, one became a pilot and nurse-practitioner, one a physician’s assistant, and many of the others had at least some college and have held good, middle-class jobs or been at-home mothers.
As with all families, interests and aptitudes have varied in this large group of descendants. But it’s easy to see a common pattern. My father’s pursuit of higher education provided an example for some of his nieces and nephews and, in some cases, a bit of financial help. In each instance where two parents had college educations, their children also went on to college, building on what you might call the family educational capital.
My father has seven great-grandchildren. One is my brother’s granddaughter and she’ll soon have a sibling and a first cousin. Since all the parents of this part of the new generation have college educations, it’s likely their children will at least aspire to college or beyond themselves. But here is the point this mini-history has been leading to. Six of my father’s grandchildren are my grandsons. When they enter the college sweepstakes, they will all be competing as white males. I’ve gathered from comments by some on this blog and elsewhere, that they would consider these boys not only disadvantaged when it comes to competing for entrance to top schools but discriminated against because the pool of applicants has grown to include so many minorities and women.
I, of course, recognize that things will be more competitive for them. But I hardly see that as a form of discrimination. Rather, I feel that America has been at work yet again to broaden its idea of what opportunities are available to its citizens, and that other families, like my grandparents’ family, will find their own chance to excel. (And I know my boys are going to do really well in any case. They have everything working for them that’s already been put in place.)
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Interesting family history, abc.
I wasn’t sure where it was going, but I have to strongly disagree with your conclusion that it isn’t discrimination. I don’t know where current gender statistics fall, but it is well documented and beyond dispute that there are huge race disparlities in higher education opportunities. There is plenty of information out there from litigated cases and otherwise. It’s not only in admission and financial opportunties in higher education but in job opportunities.
I’ve seen it up close and personal as well. I was the first in my family to go to collge. My parents were only able to go through 8th grade, and the schools they attended for that long taught no more than the three Rs, and not much of those. We grew up with no exposure to higher education, and not much of a concept of it. The only people we knew who were college graduates were teachers and probably our church pastor, although I probably wasn’t even aware of that as a kid. When some vague notion occurred to me in high school that I would need to do something afterward, and I mentioned college, my father told me I wasn’t going to college and would be disowned if I tried to. He didn’t believe in education and thought it was only for losers and the lazy.
When, some years later, I nevertheless found myself married and in a good college, I received academic scholarships that helped a lot. (Not because I was a good student in high school; I was smart but barely graduated on time. I got scholarships after one semester of college.) It was remarkable to me throughout college to hear from my privileged, mainly East Coast professors, how privileged I was, with all the advantages I had undoubtedly grown up with. Lol. When I applied to law schools, the admission statistics were startling. They were published at that time. Based on my GPA and LSAT scores, my odds of admission at Harvard and Yale law schools were less than 10%. While one might think my stats must not have been very good, they in fact both were the highest possible. I probably don’t need to tell you that, even with materially lower stats, I would have been and automatic admit if I had been a minority. Moreover, at law school, the law review operated on a strict quota system. No one was supposed to know that, but it was and is known.
What I witnessed when my college department went to hire professors was also one of the main reasons I went to law school rather than grad school. Whether or not it was a good decision or a good basis for a decision, it was very real and stark and forced me to consider: if I know that the same professors who urge me to go to grad school would not even consider hiring me as a white male, wouldn’t I be crazy to take that path? And I can also say without the slightest doubt that being a minority is a huge advantage in my profession and field. I think many people would be a bit astonished if they saw just how huge and how overt that advantage is. Of course, one person’s advantage is another’s disadvantage.
My children will likely face worse odds. My son is a white male. With his stats and other qualifications, he would likely be an automatic admit at every college and university in the country as a minority. But his odds are much lower than that. My daughter is Asian. We rescued her from an orphanage. She will likely face even more disadvantage when she someday applies to colleges, if they learn her ethnicity, because her ethnicity is strongly discriminated against at many schools; they are too academically successfully. Will they both do great in life? No doubt they will. But they will have to overcome higher odds to have various opportunities, and that is just a fact.
You might think all of this is perfectly fine, and I am familiar with all the arguments for it, but I think it has to be recognized that this absolutely is discrimination. Justified or not, that is what it is, not because “the pool of applicants has grown to include so many minorities and women,” but because dramatically different standards are applied to different groups. I personally think this is wrong and pernicious. But, whether it is wrong or justified, it very clearly is discrimination.
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I agree with you, qb. It is discrimination. But it’s discrimination in only the narrowest sense: if you assume that college admissions decisions should be based only on board scores and grades (with those somehow weighed on a scale that adjusts for the very large disparities between how grades are parceled out in different schools and districts). I don’t know of any college that makes decisions on that basis alone. As we’re all aware, there are other factors that are considered including diversity. For instance, when we made the college tour with our son, the Harvard admissions officer told us that their pool of applicants was so strong that the only sure-fire indicator of success for an applicant was being a genius they were assured would do the very highest summa work. After that, it was a matter of balancing the class so that it wasn’t all chess players or all violinists or all anything. They wanted diversity of interests and talents as well as of race and ethnicity. They wanted a school, in essence, that would mean students could learn from each other both in and out of the classroom.
To me, that sounds like a far more sensible approach than just going with the stats you talk about. But whether it is is or not, let’s jump over to the issue of racial minorities and what you perceive as discrimination in their favor, or at least in favor of African Americans, since I assume that’s the minority you’re talking about. We don’t need to discuss the bleeding heart liberal theory. What I think we can look at is the effects of discrimination in the past and what the society would mean in terms of discrimination now and in the future if we had not had affirmative action or did not have it now.
There’s a book I want to read (and a PBS show based on it) called Slavery by Another Name. I can only do a rough job of summarizing its point as I understand it, but the main idea is that, due to sharecropping and rampant false imprisonment that sent overwhelming numbers of black men into prison and then into harsh labor conditions when they were, in effect, sold to people like mine owners to be worked as they saw fit, true slavery did not end in the country until well into the 1940’s and opportunities for advancement did not really appear until the 1970’s when civil rights legislation began to take effect. I believe it’s a secondary thesis of the book that, though there’s still a huge economic gap between the races, advancement has been extraordinary for AAs since that time and is an indicator of how much human capital was wasted earlier. (And while affirmative action became part of the reason for that achievement, it has been only one factor and has been used to try to make up for the inequities of family educational capital I referred to in the earlier post and the educational disparity that came from a segregated school system.)
My grandfather, the patriarch in the history I put together, was born around 1877 (and, yes, when my dad wanted to go to college, my grandfather, like your father, had nothing but contempt for the idea, though he didn’t kick him out, probably due to my grandmother’s insistence). For my grandfather’s youngest son, there was an opportunity to go to college and lay down a path for others in the family. While a handful of African Americans did achieve that goal at the same time (one of my dad’s classmates became the first AA U.S. district judge), most of my grandfather’s contemporaries would have had to see a hundred years pass after their birth before their children would have had a similar opportunity. The layers of discrimination for a whole class of people are built that deeply into society.
Without civil rights legislation, none of that discrimination would have been removed; without affirmative action, very little of it would have been redressed without glacial slowness, its own form of continued discrimination. SCOTUS will be looking at the whole question of affirmative action again very soon. Sandra Day O’Connor, the missing court centrist, determined in the last major case that affirmative action couldn’t go on forever but that it was still needed for a longer period. If an issue like this one weren’t so often demagogued in politics, we could have people talking about it sensibly, weighing all sorts of statistical facts and differences in national demographics, and everything else that’s relevant to help find a national consensus on how best to go forward. Instead the conversation is too often driven by fear and resentment.
The bottom line for me is that if a lack of affirmative action actually will mean that the old status quo of white male authority settles comfortably into place again, we will have shrunk the public good, denied a significant part of the population a chance to see needed new leaders and role models rise from their own ranks, and diminished the society as a whole. In effect, it will mean discrimination against us all. But I would like to see arguments made with the kind of statistical information Mark likes to talk about. It’s my hope that, somehow, the conversation could advance that far.
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“I agree with you, qb. It is discrimination. But it’s discrimination in only the narrowest sense: if you assume that college admissions decisions should be based only on board scores and grades (with those somehow weighed on a scale that adjusts for the very large disparities between how grades are parceled out in different schools and districts).”
No, it’s discrimination in the sense that race based discrimination is considered to be wrong.
Chief Justice John Roberts put it best:
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Involved_in_Community_Schools_v._Seattle_School_District_No._1
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In the broader context, I’ll go with public goods purely in terms of efficiency.
I am quite open to any description of a modern state with a purely private educational system. When it comes to post-secondary education, the private for profit schools (Strayer, DeVry) feed at the public trough. I think there’s consensus that educational benefits provided following the end of WWII fueled the subsequent expansion.
Our quasi-private system of health care is from all appearances, one of the least efficient in the world. Midrange developing countries have life expectancies similar to the U.S. at half the cost relative to GDP. We’re stuck with something that arose as a consequence of wage and price controls during WWII.
With regards to corporate welfare, it seems like I can hear the violins playing whenever I hear a politician talk about family farms or small businesses.
BB
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” I think there’s consensus that educational benefits provided following the end of WWII fueled the subsequent expansion.”
This is worth singling out. Is there?
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Funny, but no one seemed to answer the question. Schools are supposed to to teach lessons to provide the next generation with a past and also to prepare them for the future. So I guess I agree with James Axtall (historian) in his studies of education in this country. The past is to teach the up-and-comers a heritage and thus giving them them knowledgte about who we are and what we would like the next generation to carry on with. The future is provided by teaching them how to survive in this world as well as provide them with a skill.
Now, were we ever good at this? Maybe. It used to be that children were loaned outb to other families to learn a trade as well as to read and do figures. This was the first form of private education. However, the colonists learned that in many cases their children were not being taught and then complained to the magistrate. Schools were then built and they were attended by those who could pay. Complaints from parents who could not afford it. So taxes came into being and poorer children were then taught with the wealthier. SWo here is a transition from private to public.
This would continue to move in a more public direction where the city and eventually the state mandated education. (Street gangs in New York City were solved by mandating attendence. This got the riff-raff off the streets.) The short answer is that we would like children of all walks of life to have vthose boot-straps and in many cases the government on our dime provides it. The argument then comes to busing and ghetto schools that would result. White migrations into suburbs changed the dynamic and the quality of schools as well as teachers. Taxation fights with the right battling over vouchers and other things have made costs difficult to deal with outside of politics.
There is a LOT wrong with the United States and its education system and all you folks need to do is look in the mirror at yourselves.
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There is a LOT wrong with the United States and its education system and all you folks need to do is look in the mirror at yourselves.
That seems to be a bit inflammatory, without a more expansive discussion of what you mean. In what way are “we” to blame for the current education system (as opposed to “you”, presumably), and who are the “yourselves” that need to be looking in the mirror?
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I would disagree that we didn’t answer the question, mcurtis. It would appear we didn’t address it in the fashion(s) you anticipated.
Am I reading you correctly that you are questioning our education as a result of how we chose to respond? If so, that may not be in keeping with the goals of the blog. If not could you perhaps clarify so I may better understand your point?
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That’s a strange accusation, curtis. I’m a successful product of mostly public schools. I went to a private, liberal arts college. I’m also a parent of two boys just starting out in public schools. I make sure to be involved in their education. I was the lone male parent participating in the science day program last month.
Exactly what navel gazing are you demanding that I do?
BB
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abc,
I guess I understood you to be saying it isn’t discrimination.
Of course it is true that colleges and universities consider all kinds of factors, especially at the top, where they have the pick of the best. But after all that, it remains a fact that race and ethnicity are determining factors between many candidates.
I don’t think it is possible to get the conversation away from fear and resentment when racial and ethnic discrimination are openly practiced, notwithstanding that affirmative action justifications are given for it. People aren’t statistics. Young people aren’t demographics, and I don’t think that you can tell one of them that his disfavored treatment is necessary for a larger societal purpose and expect not to engender ill feelings and elicit judgments that are rightfully negative.
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qb – Last word on this for me, I think. In the later comment I was
distinguishing between small picture and bigger picture discrimination,
so conceding that much of your point. I can also see that a potential
student could feel discriminated against if he thought only two factors
were in play–the stats we’ve been talking about and race. I personally
think that’s way too simplistic a view of the process, however. And if it
were one of my grandkids, I’d make the same case to him that I’ve tried
to make to you, that he benefits ultimately when he lives in a more
equitable society, that he’s already living an advantaged life, and that
there are a ton of great schools out there and he’ll be at one of them.
And then I’d tell him to move on, maybe borrowing that useful saying
about resentment being a poison pill you swallow expecting the other
person to die.
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abc,
Of course we would all tell our children and grandchildren not to dwell on negatives or resentment. But I don’t think it is fair or realistic to expect that them to accept the treatment as a necessary sacrifice for a greater good. The explanation that there are many good schools is in tension with the fact that the whole premise of the debate is that discrimination against A is justified by the importance of letting B attend the school they both would like to attend. There are many good schools out there for B, too.
The consideration of many factors in overall admission decisions — who plays violin, who is from Wyoming? –does not change the fact that different standards are in fact applied to racial and ethnic groups. I just don’t think it is being honest with people to try to say that it is just one factor among others. That obscures the truth.
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