Answering the multi-request

by  Tyler Cowen in

AO has lots of questions:

What's the newest research and the current state of the literature on
school vouchers? Is there a good economics of education blog you
follow? You teach one part of the PhD I.O. sequence at GMU and have
given us your reading list, who teaches the other part and can we have
their reading list as well? Would decriminalization of drugs make us
worse off (by increasing the black market for drugs without allowing
the creation of legal markets) even though complete legalization would
make us better off? Are there other policies where marginal steps
towards the right direction make us worse off? Debate Nassim Taleb or
Dean Baker on bloggingheads.tv! More bloggingheads.tv with any
economists that you find large disagreement with!

In a nutshell: vouchers are better than the status quo but overrated by many market-oriented economists; evidence from Chile and Colombia and Sweden — the more systematic experiments — does show gains.  In the U.S. the key question is how selectively or universally to apply vouchers; universal application creates a new middle-class entitlement and brings the federalization of education.  In the old days I would read Joanne Jacobs on education.  Alex teaches the other part of IO!  Decriminalization for drugs keeps the rents from turning into profits for drug gangs; marginal steps in the right direction are usually all we have.  Likely I am soon doing a Bloggingheads with Peter Singer; Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling are on the list as well.

Comments

Alex Tabarrok

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You can find the reading list for my IO class here:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/IO1Syllabus.html

happyjuggler0

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universal application creates a new middle-class entitlement and brings the federalization of education

Say what? K-12 is already a so-called "entitlement", but the *only* kids benefiting from it are middle class suburban kids thanks to jurisdictional competition. Poor urban kids are getting royally screwed right now by our current system, and rich kids have an out because their parents can afford to send their kids to private schools just like Obama and Clinton did (hypocrites!).

Any city could make vouchers universal without federal authority, I don't see why the Feds have any say whatsoever. Similarly any state could make state-wide vouchers a reality by legislation if they wanted to. One of the truly wonderful benefits of a federal system is we don't ne, nor should we want, the US government to implement a one size fits all policy. Instead let the local governments try different things, and let others copy them on their own if it succeeds.

Student

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I can't wait for Cowen vs. Singer and Cowen vs. DeLong...the question is which Tyler will show up though?...the one that likes to take "reasonable" positions that irk fellow libertarians...or the one that defends libertarian ideas in an eloquent way...

Neal

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Has there been any comparison of K-12 education across all environments, not just places selected because vouchers worked there? After all, as far as I know, W. European countries, Singapore, Japan, etc. don't use vouchers, but their education system is presumably better than ours.

Personally, my sense is that the US' education problems stem not directly from government intervention or lack thereof, but rather from urban decay. If you compare a rich suburban school, it probably performs as well as (or better than) the rest of the world; the deficiency in average US education comes from poor parts of the country. And if the problem is a slummy urban environment, school vouchers aren't going to do much to fix it.

Stuart Buck

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After all, as far as I know, W. European countries, Singapore, Japan, etc. don't use vouchers, but their education system is presumably better than ours.

Actually, Belgium has had a universal voucher system for several decades, as have the Netherlands; Denmark has had vouchers for even longer than that. Sweden has had universal vouchers since the early 1990s.

Stuart Buck

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Here's a video about the voucher program in Sweden: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/15/opinion/1194838660912/swedens-choice.html

Governor of Stockholm: "Education is so important that you cannot actually leave it to just one producer, because we know from all monopolies that monopoly systems do not fulfill all wishes."

Uncle Milty

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AO, some dude named Milton Friedman started a foundation to promote the use of vouchers and choice in public education. He supposedly into that kind of stuff...

www.friedmanfoundation.org

tower defense

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The government has regulated with minute detail what can be taught by schools, and replaced the university admittance test that used to be focused on aptitude for a test focused on memorization of knowledge. And it has done so for all subject matters, not just the “important ones†.

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