The Social Return of Public Education

Half Sigma does the math:

Here is a quick calculation based on the following assumptions:

• $10,000 per year per student for education
• 14 years of education (Headstart plus K-12)
• 4% discount rate

Thus the poor person graduates from high school with a $183,000 education investment.

Assuming he will work for 47 years after that, he needs to earn [i.e. pay in taxes - Φ] $8,700 per year in order to make up the money invested in his education.

Unfortunately, the social return to educational expenditure is not limited to the paltry tax revenue it generates. The return is also avoiding the negative externalities generated by: (1) under-supervised school-aged children; and (2) uneducated adults. Now, measuring the second of these becomes devilishly difficult given the confounding variables: The people who slog through 14 years of public schooling are almost certainly more intelligent than those who drop out, and would almost certainly do much better than our existing class of dropouts were public education withdrawn. But we can assume that it is non-trivial.

The first externality is even harder to grapple with: what are we to do with children from age 6 to 18, absent education? As many observers have pointed out, the public schools serve as de facto day-care for a larger and larger fraction of their inmates. Recognizing this, however, doesn't really prepare us to repeal child-labor laws.

This is not to say that the tradeoffs we currently make are optimum. Certainly, by high school, many more students should be re-routed into industrial or clerical tracks than we presently do. And in the final analysis, if we really want to escape this trap, we must have a smarter population.

Todd Daly on the Octu-Mom

I subscribe to the email list of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. About once a week, they send out an ethical commentary on some issue in biology or medicine. I found these particular thoughts by Todd Daly on "Octu-Mom" Nadya Suleman to be particularly insightful:

While all of these criticisms [of Suleman] express some degree of moral outrage, one senses a particular level of frustration for a general lack of an established norm from which we might say something more substantial. For instance, pro-life advocates find themselves praising Ms. Suleman for rejecting selective termination of some embryos while at the same time criticizing her for irresponsible behavior. It also appears that some level of frustration may be discerned from what is not being said — that bearing children ought to be subject to familial, emotional, and financial requirements. But this kind of social engineering is too much for us to stomach.

I believe that part of the frustration over Ms. Suleman's actions stems from our lack of a common good, for which we share a portion of the blame. That is, we are inheriting the fruit of a liberal democracy which protects and celebrates individual autonomy and self-realization, coupled with "consumable" technology which allows us to increasingly realize desires that transcend biological limitations, bereft of any metanarrative or defining story which might otherwise call such exercises into question. Actually, we are following a story of sorts, but one which has left just enough ground on which to do little more than stand and point our finger at another. This story is the myth of freedom, the myth that we are autonomous rational subjects free to pursue our own vision of happiness and fulfillment so long as our rights do not infringe upon another's. We're getting what we asked for. And in the absence of any recognized common good, we are left with cost-benefit analyses, discussions over procedural guidelines, and appeals to the very human nature we so eagerly desire to transcend through technology. After all, who are we to call Ms. Suleman's vision of the good into question, so long as the care of her fourteen children do not infringe upon our own pursuit of the good, so long as our tax dollars go elsewhere? Who would be so bold as to say that Ms. Suleman should never have returned to the fertility center in her mental/emotional/familial/financial situation? "Who am I to say that six is the limit?"” asked IVF specialist Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg. Who would be so bold to appeal to religious traditions which might assert that Ms. Suleman should not have pursed children at all as a single woman with no husband?

We can be thankful that those dogmatic, culturally insensitive statements have been banished from the public square, rightly condemned as discriminatory and an affront to both our collective rationality and autonomy. After all, judgments stemming from such religious strictures are unfairly restrictive, and call our unencumbered pursuit of fulfillment into question. Yet, are we not simply inheriting the fruit of an ethic which demands nothing more than we respect the rights of others to pursue their own happiness—in this case eight more newborns—so long as ours is not threatened? Is there no place left to say something tremendously unpopular, to suggest that it was unwise for Ms. Suleman to pursue having any children outside the context of marriage in the first place (as at least one criterion for consideration), confessing that this judgment stems from a particular understanding of the "common good" derived from the Christian (as well as other) Scriptures, which often runs deeply contrary to the metanarrative of the individual pursuit of fulfillment centered around consumption? Though this kind of speech has been largely banished from the public square (and religious communities both celebrate and mourn this), it still exists in some communities of faith. And if indeed, as Stanley Hauerwas has argued, the church is a social ethic, then it would seem that here we might find an environment where assumptions regarding the choice, means and number of children to have are challenged with the same fervency with which such newborns are celebrated—irrespective of the means by which they have come to be (admittedly, Christian Scriptures are often read in ways that actually foreclose such preliminary considerations).

What do AIG and President Karzai have in common?

From the AP wire story on a new law in Afghanistan. Evidently, the Afghans ain't gettin' any, so:

"As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," Article 132 of the [new] law says. "Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

One provision also appears to protect the woman's right to sex inside marriage saying the "man should not avoid having sexual relations with his wife longer than once every four months."

The State Department is not amused.

The U.S. is "very concerned" about the law, said State Department spokesman Robert Wood. "We urge President Karzai to review the law's legal status to correct provisions of the law that limit or restrict women's rights."

So . . . we wrote the Afghan constitution to allow their president to "correct" laws passed by their legislature?

Wood added that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had met with female Afghan lawmakers in The Hague and had assured them that "women's rights are going to be paramount in this administration's foreign policy, not an afterthought."

It occurs to me that the Obama administrations attitude toward other countries is the same as its attitude toward the American economy, and for much the same reason: we bailed you out, so you better dance to our tune. 'Cuz, you know, we totally PWND your ass!

Nuance.

How Big is your Pool?

Via Steve, two controlled studies showing that beautiful women make better musicians:

Both studies were designed similarly: auditions were videotaped and then judged by three groups of people. One group rated the video only, one audio only, and a third group the complete videotape. All the judges were music students or faculty. The studies did find that dressing well and knowing how to behave on stage will get you a better rating than you would receive based on the audio only, and that attractive male singers also benefit from their appearance. However, attractive female singers and attractive violinists did not receive any extra benefit from their good looks. They did receive better ratings on videotape than their uglier competition, but those were not unfair - they also got better ratings on audio only. So, attractive people really do sound better - except, apparently, male singers.

So why would a better-looking violinist sound better? One possible explanation is cross-assortative mating - talented male musicians impregnated attractive women so their children inherited both the looks and the talent.

"What's assortive mating?" my mom, whom I am visiting this week, asked me when I read this to her. (My mom is a musician and an accomplished pianist, which made childhood piano lessons inescapable!)

"Basically the idea that people don't choose their mating partners randomly, but rather that preferences are success are predictable."

"There's more to it than that. What if there are lots of women and only a few men? Here on the island [on which my parents now live], for instance."

"Men do pretty well here, eh?"

"Well, consider the example of X. He's lived on the island his whole life and works as a small charter boat captain. He's not wealthy: his house is small and he bought or inherited here when it was relatively cheap. Plus he has a drug problem. And he shacked up with an attractive twenty-something for ten years. They only broke up when their son reached school age. There are no schools on the island, and no reasonable way of getting to them, but X refused to move. He'd be lost in the outside world.

"Then there's Λ. Her parents live on the island, and she took a summer job waitressing here during college. She wound up marrying the short-order cook. It doesn't (or didn't) matter that as an environmental policy expert she makes ten times what he does. Or that he also has a drug problem. What matters is that when she was only a waitress, he was the cook!"

Φ Takes the Religion Quiz

Via Trumwill, I took Beliefnet's religion quiz, with the following results:

• 1. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (100%)
• 2. Eastern Orthodox (97%)
• 3. Roman Catholic (97%)
• 4. Seventh Day Adventist (89%)
• 5. Orthodox Quaker (85%)
• 6. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (71%)
• 7. Hinduism (69%)
• 8. Orthodox Judaism (62%)
• 9. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (60%)
• 10. Jehovah's Witness (57%)
• 11. Islam (56%)
• 12. Sikhism (45%)
• 13. Baha'i Faith (39%)
• 14. Jainism (38%)
• 15. Liberal Quakers (33%)
• 16. Reform Judaism (31%)
• 17. Unitarian Universalism (28%)
• 18. Mahayana Buddhism (28%)
• 19. Neo-Pagan (25%)
• 20. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (24%)
• 21. Theravada Buddhism (22%)
• 22. Nontheist (21%)
• 23. Scientology (19%)
• 24. New Thought (15%)
• 25. New Age (9%)
• 26. Taoism (9%)
• 27. Secular Humanism (5%)

No surprises in my case. A couple of points. First, the test was of above average difficulty. I can imagine that many of the nominal members of many mainline denominations, people who hadn't really put a lot of study into the specific tenets of their putative creeds but were rather more invested in the experiential/emotional aspects of America's religious culture, would wind up failing the test. Trumwill, for instance, despite being a (latitudinarian) Episcopalian, scored lower on Protestantism than I did on Islam.

The other point is that the options on some of these multiple-choice questions were unsatisfactory. The only Trinitarian option (or so I assume) was "Multiple personal gods (or goddesses) regarded as facets of one God, and/or as separate gods," which encompases a lot of error around a specific truth. There were no less that five questions involving salvation, but not one of the available answers said anything about "the imputed righteousness of Christ", or even faith. And I was only allowed to "agree" or "disagree" with the proposition that "Roles for women and men should be prescribed." (Which is probably how I got such a high Muslim score, come to think of it.)

On Anti-Usury Laws

Steve Sailer posts a couple of excellent pieces reflecting on the interest rate caps of yore:

Traditionally, there were legal or cultural limits on interest rates. Even though anti-usury laws and traditions were often perceived as a populist issue, it actually meant in practice that finance used to be much more elitist. If people in Arkansas got their state legislature to cap interest rates that New York banks could charge them, well, the New York banks would then lend only to the least risky Arkansawyers.

So, if you couldn't qualify for a prime mortgage, you didn't get a mortgage. If your corporation couldn't issue bonds above junk quality, no reputable investment bank would issue bonds for it. If you had a bad credit record, you couldn't get a credit card.

Given the events of the last year, the advantages of this regime are all too apparent. Indeed, most of our countrymen are voluntarily deleveraging their personal finances irrespective of government policy. (Unfortunately, the government itself is undertaking the exact opposite process, doubling the national debt in a single year.)

But the words of Megan McArdle give me pause: the system can be "stable" at different levels of output. A permanent contraction in consumer credit seems likely to lead to permanently lower economic growth, and the kind of policies that would compensate for this are politically radioactive for the usual reasons.

This bit grabbed me though:

[T]he problem is that defaults can have widespread costs to people who weren't parties to the agreement -- another case of privatizing profits and socializing costs.

For example, Joe Cassano of AIG bet Goldman Sachs that Goldman's mortgage-backed subprime securities wouldn't default, and now I and my descendants unto the 7th generation are supposed to pay off the damn things.

More subtly, if a firm lends money to people who have nothing to lose, there can be collateral damage. If the house next door gets bought by deadbeats who don't have a prayer of paying off the mortgage, but are just going to live in it rent-free until the sheriff finally kicks them out, I'm harmed. A foreclosure next door lowers my property value. Moreover, I had to live for two years next to deadbeats who shouldn't have been able to afford to live there.

Welmer on Marriage

The excellent blogger Welmer cogently reviews the purpose of marriage:

First, in all likelihood, to keep the peace. In the animal kingdom, ritualized violence is often an important aspect of sexual competition. Humans, however, are equipped with a far more deadly weapon — reason. The lower mammals may fight hard for female attention, but some genetic imperative prevents them from killing each other, whereas humans (as well as chimps — our closest cousins) discovered that murder is far more conclusive in settling the matter of which male gets the prize. Indeed, women have been taken as booty from the earliest days of tribal skirmishes with spears and clubs.

Old fashioned murder was not particularly different from the modern sort. It was often a group effort, which we know as “war.” Warfare over females is common in hunter gatherer societies, and serves as a check on population growth not only due to the murder of men but the associated killing of their children. Even the most primitive tribesmen must have known that when a man is deprived of female companionship, he becomes inclined to take a female by any practical means. Men with female sexual partners must have felt rather nervous about this, and so developed pacts with other men to protect their status with their women. Thus the concept of marriage developed as a mutual recognition between men of the legitimacy of the male/female reproductive partnership. As long as this recognition existed within a given tribe, peace would be easier to preserve, and both men and children were safer than otherwise.

However, guarantees within a tribe didn’t generally apply to outsiders, and raids for women characterize primitive societies both past and present. The easiest tribes to raid were certainly those that had no concept of marriage, because the males would not be inclined to defend other men who had no respect for their own status with women. Repeated over time, this guaranteed the eclipse of tribes without a clear concept of marriage by those that did.

He also summarizes the problems facing marriage:

Although the government still preserves some legal relics of the previous norm, including the recognition of marriage and certain tax categories, it is an undeniable fact that the family has taken a subordinate role in regards to the desires - however transient - of the individual. No fault divorce, decriminalization of adultery and skyrocketing illegitimacy rates bear this out. The law has changed to reflect the new state of affairs, treating marriage and its dissolution as economic transactions while ignoring the effects they have on social stability. This is justified on the dictate that individual freedoms and rights trump, or are in the interest of, the greater good. This may be true or false. There is no doubt that some highly collectivist societies (such as North Korea) can turn out very badly by a number of measures, but the philosophy of extreme individualism often masks collective efforts by one group to gain leverage over another.

And then . . . he throws it all away!

Whether the West’s extreme individualism is good or bad on the balance is of little concern in an effort to revive an institution that is on life support and in danger of catastrophic failure — there simply isn’t enough time to reevalute our civilization’s shibboleths to revive marriage as it was. Rather, we must work with what we have, which is a strong focus on civil rights and freedoms. From that perspective, it can be argued that the traditional concept of marriage is a fundamentally unjust institution that privileges some people at the expense of others, and in fact unreasonably restricts the rights of those who enter into it. Therefore, the abolition of marriage must be considered to achieve a greater degree of freedom and justice in society. States may retain civil partnerships entered into under contractual agreements, but these must be little different from corporations or partnerships entered into for business purposes.

Would that marriage was "little different from corporations or partnerships entered into for buisness purposes"; these, at least, cannot be unilaterally dissolved, but as in any contract they "restrict the rights of those who enter into it," unreasonably or no. I don't really have a problem with thinking of marriage as a sacralized contract, but Welmer, at least here, seems not to understand that contracts, while voluntarily entered, bind the parties to certain future courses of action. And if the marriage contract means anything, then sexual exclusivity is the fundamental provision of that contract.

More generally, while Welmer correctly apprehends the manner in which communally enforced marital rights and obligations enabled social cooperation, especially among men, he doesn't address the dynamic of conquest that made such cooperation necessary. Does he think that such cooperation is no longer necessary? What happens when we have a conflict with a people who have not discarded it? Sure, we have our technology, but what of the political will to use it? And what of our own internal divisions?

To be fair, Welmer appreciates the importance of monogamy, and specifically denies the intent to discard it. But can it survive legal protection? Roissy is on his blogroll, so I would think he understands what the weakened state of monogamy looks like. I don't see that state improving by abolishing what remains of its legal status.