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Privatization shifts the signaling game theory from pandering to government funding to pandering to consumers. Given that consumers don’t have nearly as much ti

Privatization shifts the signaling game theory from pandering to government funding to pandering to consumers. Given that consumers don’t have nearly as much time to research options individually as governments do collectively, this can and likely will create far worse outcomes on average. edit: This comment has gone from 8 points to 4 points in about 10 minutes, so I can only assume this thread has become the target of a downvote brigade from some other web site. The joys of discussing politics in the age of 4chan!

cobbzilla 7y ago
By this logic, shouldn’t we nationalize most major industries? oil/energy, motor vehicles, the list is endless.
- toiletfuneral 7y ago
  Absolutely.
- danharaj 7y ago
  There might be a better way now than what was practical in 1900.
- swivelmaster 7y ago
  At an abstract level, one of the major goals of regulation is to stop companies from doing things that consumers can only figure out are bad on a timescale long enough for them to have already done damage and made enormous profits. There are a ton of regulations around motor vehicles, like disclosing MPG, maintaining safety standards, and consistent odometer readings - things that consumers wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out on their own until it was too late. If a car just plain doesn't work, or craps out in less than a thousand miles, that's easy to remedy. The problem with applying these standards to education is that the timeframe to assess damage is very long, and it's more or less irreversible. If you spend a week driving a car and the engine dies, you can take it back and get a refund and then go get a new one. If you put your kid in a charter school and they fail to learn math for a year, you can't get that time back. It's gone forever, and your child will be behind for anywhere from months to years to forever. This is why we need to treat certain specific sectors differently. Consumer goods, sure, whatever, the government can make sure that toys don't contain lead and that our TVs wont randomly explode, and after that it's up to us to decide. But education, healthcare, etc., the consequences of giving consumers "choice" and allowing those sectors to advertise freely and self-regulate are severe and often irreversible.
  - ultrarunner 7y ago
    My middle school and high school career was upended by an experimental math program that wasted an enormous amount of time forcing children to answer questions like "What is 2+3?" with a minimum of three sentences. The head of the department was later demoted for injuring a child when he sat on him as a form of punishment. He was later acquitted of assault charges. Did regulation work there? Could it have? Do government schools not need to be regulated by virtue of the fact that they're already promulgated by the government? As an aside, while looking this up I found news stories that demonstrated the rumors about sex abuse were true and a few coaches-turned-principals got nailed. While your theory about regulation seems well-intentioned, I'm just not sure it is worth anything in practice. Lots of governmental theory seems revolutionary until it ends in failure (and, at worst, bloodshed).
    - swivelmaster 7y ago
      The plural of anecdote is not data. And taking the furthest logical conclusion ("Government regulation ends in violence!") is utterly ridiculous and unnecessary in this context. To be clear, the United States' public education system is BAD. It is sometimes VERY BAD. But it's not consistently bad; there are public schools that are quite good. There are other countries with heavily regulated public education systems that are so much better than the United States - read up on Finland's remarkable public education system if you don't believe me. (And don't get tripped up on inconsistent usage of "public" and "private" to mean opposites in different countries!) So logically, the problem isn't that government regulation of education is inherently bad; Rather, the problem is that we (in the United States) are doing a bad job of it. Splitting public education funding between public schools and charter schools and forcing public schools to compete with test scores and other proxy metrics is demonstrably making things worse, not better.
      - ultrarunner 7y ago
        "We" are not doing a very good job of it. I agree with you there. Both my parents (and their parents) are or were educators in public schools, from teachers to instructors to principals and coaches. By all accounts it is getting worse, not better. Anecdotes are not data, but it would be foolish to throw them away blindly. Anecdotes become data when they can be used to answer questions that can inform future decision making processes. For example, we could ask, "is more politics and political process positively impacting education?" If the answer is that no, one hundred years of American politics hasn't improved the situation [0] despite it costing far more than it used to per-student [1], then we should probably conclude that said process is a dead end and look elsewhere. I never claimed that the anecdote I provided was data; I would rather like to know the answers to the questions I asked. Handwaving them away seems closer to arguing in bad faith than what you accused me of doing elsewhere. Further, I would suggest that the increased presence of School Resource Officers in schools, the increased usage of courts for school-related punishment, and the continued emotional and physical violence experienced by students from their peers show that, indeed, forced participation in government schools does indeed involve violence. That your experts have been unable to solve this problem (and that you hand wave it away) does not generate confidence in your position. [0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/summary.aspx https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/summary.aspx [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-char...
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  The role of private industry is to efficiently produce commodities for individuals or other companies - minus externalities, autos, chips or airplanes are great in private hands. The role of the state is to regulate positive and negative externalities. And students learning something is actually a (positive) externality. Neither the student nor the parent or even the district directly care about everyone learning basic skills - that provides no relative advantage for them. Signals of being superior are worthwhile to the individual. Those might actually result in the individual being smarter but if an individual is "selfish" or thinking in pure "homo-economicus" terms, they are just happy being able to always seem competent rather than being competent. So the state (or whatever institution can represent "all of society") is what is needed to increase the base competency of a society.
- emilfihlman 7y ago
  Of course. It's a lie perpetuated by capitalists that the government can't do things efficiently. The government can absolutely do things efficiently, the costs are usually by having more protections for the employees, which is good. Additionally, we remove the need for a profit layer that would go to owners (the nation is the owner in this case) so to achieve the same results as nation owned companies Not to mention that there is no exit to look for, nation owned companies cannot be stripped of assets and they cannot claw and scrape the consumer, which is how for-profit-private companies would operate. Now am I saying that all things should be nation owned? Of course not. I'm saying that monopolies, infrastructure and huge old government companies should be and should stay as nation owned. Private companies will work with providing for these companies resources that they don't have and would pay more to develop themselves.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    While I will conceptually agree, that optimizing some things via the government can work better. In practice, however, it often leads to cronyism, corruption, bureaucracy and/or stagnation. On the flip side, I'm also against certain things being incentivized by the government. I'm against private prisons on pure premise. In the end, I'm pragmatic and prefer to optimize for those solutions which require the least oversight and ensure for the best competition practical. I'd also like to see an "open body" of course content made more widely available, so that districts and teachers may pull in said content for individualized courses. Educational publishing is about as corrupt as it gets IMHO. I do think that for most things, there are ways to incentivize appropriate outcome from private businesses and initiatives with the government. This includes more appropriate provisioning and budgeting practices.
syrrim 7y ago
consumers have skin in the game
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  If consumers having skin in the game were a sufficient condition for them to make good choices, we wouldn't have needed the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic act to ban radium water in order to get people to stop buying it.
  - syrrim 7y ago
    Radium water has a tendency to infect the water supply, so that even people who don't buy it are affected by it. The principle of intolerance applies the other way for schools: people who are picky about schools will do lots of research, whereas people who aren't picky will just go where their friends go.
    - swivelmaster 7y ago
      What you're suggesting is building a system that actively punishes parents who are too busy to a ton of research because they're working multiple jobs, taking care of sick family members, etc. Characterizing people who don't have time to do this as merely "not picky" is ignoring and punishing a huge segment of the population.
      - syrrim 7y ago
        The principle of skin in the game doesn't merely improve the situation for picky people, it brings up the average improving the situation for everyone. If picky people at large boycott a particular school, everyone who is friends with these people will boycott it by association, and it will lose too many students to remain solvent. If picky people prefer giving their business to certain proprietors, those proprietors will open more schools, increasing the likelihood that a person choosing schools using a dart board will strike such a school. Your characterization of the difficulty of choosing a school is overdramatic. A person could devote fifteen minutes to googling "best schools in {area}", maybe even turning up a government sponsored list. If they ever notice the chosen school is bad, say from complaints of their ward or from bad grades, they would switch schools, improving the situation via negativa.
ultrarunner 7y ago
Why would mere time to research options lead to better research being done? My five year old has effectively infinite time to research, say, efficacy of cancer treatments compared to an overworked researcher in a clinical setting. In fact, let's just shift all science to people in nursing homes who need to fill their time anyway. Utopia awaits?
- swivelmaster 7y ago
  This sounds like a complete nonsense argument. Can you explain what your point is? Are you saying that it's impossible to accurately research anything? Or that, given infinite time, parents would be so bad at researching charter schools that they would never be able to divine the best choice anyway? What do you think MY argument was? I suspect you misread.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    I believe the gp is engaged in the bad-faith approach of taking your comment about the state having more time as being literally the only argument you're making, where it's of course obvious the state has more advantages than simple time (including trained personnel, institutional practices, etc, etc).
    - swivelmaster 7y ago
      Sounds like it. I really miss the good old days of Hacker News when there was literally none of that kind of nonsense.
    - ultrarunner 7y ago
      Why is that a bad-faith approach to response? That's the argument being presented, and there are myriad reasons it's entirely without merit. If the argument is that the state has more advantages, they can also be presented one-by-one and weighed. Politics often fails precisely because it smashes far too many decisions into one do-or-die package. Why should we repeat that unproductive pattern here?
stale2002 7y ago
Consumers are the ones paying for it. So I see nothing wrong with providing what they want.

cobbzilla 7y ago

By this logic, shouldn’t we nationalize most major industries? oil/energy, motor vehicles, the list is endless.

toiletfuneral 7y ago
Absolutely.
danharaj 7y ago
There might be a better way now than what was practical in 1900.
swivelmaster 7y ago
At an abstract level, one of the major goals of regulation is to stop companies from doing things that consumers can only figure out are bad on a timescale long enough for them to have already done damage and made enormous profits. There are a ton of regulations around motor vehicles, like disclosing MPG, maintaining safety standards, and consistent odometer readings - things that consumers wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out on their own until it was too late. If a car just plain doesn't work, or craps out in less than a thousand miles, that's easy to remedy. The problem with applying these standards to education is that the timeframe to assess damage is very long, and it's more or less irreversible. If you spend a week driving a car and the engine dies, you can take it back and get a refund and then go get a new one. If you put your kid in a charter school and they fail to learn math for a year, you can't get that time back. It's gone forever, and your child will be behind for anywhere from months to years to forever. This is why we need to treat certain specific sectors differently. Consumer goods, sure, whatever, the government can make sure that toys don't contain lead and that our TVs wont randomly explode, and after that it's up to us to decide. But education, healthcare, etc., the consequences of giving consumers "choice" and allowing those sectors to advertise freely and self-regulate are severe and often irreversible.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  My middle school and high school career was upended by an experimental math program that wasted an enormous amount of time forcing children to answer questions like "What is 2+3?" with a minimum of three sentences. The head of the department was later demoted for injuring a child when he sat on him as a form of punishment. He was later acquitted of assault charges. Did regulation work there? Could it have? Do government schools not need to be regulated by virtue of the fact that they're already promulgated by the government? As an aside, while looking this up I found news stories that demonstrated the rumors about sex abuse were true and a few coaches-turned-principals got nailed. While your theory about regulation seems well-intentioned, I'm just not sure it is worth anything in practice. Lots of governmental theory seems revolutionary until it ends in failure (and, at worst, bloodshed).
  - swivelmaster 7y ago
    The plural of anecdote is not data. And taking the furthest logical conclusion ("Government regulation ends in violence!") is utterly ridiculous and unnecessary in this context. To be clear, the United States' public education system is BAD. It is sometimes VERY BAD. But it's not consistently bad; there are public schools that are quite good. There are other countries with heavily regulated public education systems that are so much better than the United States - read up on Finland's remarkable public education system if you don't believe me. (And don't get tripped up on inconsistent usage of "public" and "private" to mean opposites in different countries!) So logically, the problem isn't that government regulation of education is inherently bad; Rather, the problem is that we (in the United States) are doing a bad job of it. Splitting public education funding between public schools and charter schools and forcing public schools to compete with test scores and other proxy metrics is demonstrably making things worse, not better.
    - ultrarunner 7y ago
      "We" are not doing a very good job of it. I agree with you there. Both my parents (and their parents) are or were educators in public schools, from teachers to instructors to principals and coaches. By all accounts it is getting worse, not better. Anecdotes are not data, but it would be foolish to throw them away blindly. Anecdotes become data when they can be used to answer questions that can inform future decision making processes. For example, we could ask, "is more politics and political process positively impacting education?" If the answer is that no, one hundred years of American politics hasn't improved the situation [0] despite it costing far more than it used to per-student [1], then we should probably conclude that said process is a dead end and look elsewhere. I never claimed that the anecdote I provided was data; I would rather like to know the answers to the questions I asked. Handwaving them away seems closer to arguing in bad faith than what you accused me of doing elsewhere. Further, I would suggest that the increased presence of School Resource Officers in schools, the increased usage of courts for school-related punishment, and the continued emotional and physical violence experienced by students from their peers show that, indeed, forced participation in government schools does indeed involve violence. That your experts have been unable to solve this problem (and that you hand wave it away) does not generate confidence in your position. [0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/summary.aspx https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/summary.aspx [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-char...
joe_the_user 7y ago
The role of private industry is to efficiently produce commodities for individuals or other companies - minus externalities, autos, chips or airplanes are great in private hands. The role of the state is to regulate positive and negative externalities. And students learning something is actually a (positive) externality. Neither the student nor the parent or even the district directly care about everyone learning basic skills - that provides no relative advantage for them. Signals of being superior are worthwhile to the individual. Those might actually result in the individual being smarter but if an individual is "selfish" or thinking in pure "homo-economicus" terms, they are just happy being able to always seem competent rather than being competent. So the state (or whatever institution can represent "all of society") is what is needed to increase the base competency of a society.
emilfihlman 7y ago
Of course. It's a lie perpetuated by capitalists that the government can't do things efficiently. The government can absolutely do things efficiently, the costs are usually by having more protections for the employees, which is good. Additionally, we remove the need for a profit layer that would go to owners (the nation is the owner in this case) so to achieve the same results as nation owned companies Not to mention that there is no exit to look for, nation owned companies cannot be stripped of assets and they cannot claw and scrape the consumer, which is how for-profit-private companies would operate. Now am I saying that all things should be nation owned? Of course not. I'm saying that monopolies, infrastructure and huge old government companies should be and should stay as nation owned. Private companies will work with providing for these companies resources that they don't have and would pay more to develop themselves.
- tracker1 7y ago
  While I will conceptually agree, that optimizing some things via the government can work better. In practice, however, it often leads to cronyism, corruption, bureaucracy and/or stagnation. On the flip side, I'm also against certain things being incentivized by the government. I'm against private prisons on pure premise. In the end, I'm pragmatic and prefer to optimize for those solutions which require the least oversight and ensure for the best competition practical. I'd also like to see an "open body" of course content made more widely available, so that districts and teachers may pull in said content for individualized courses. Educational publishing is about as corrupt as it gets IMHO. I do think that for most things, there are ways to incentivize appropriate outcome from private businesses and initiatives with the government. This includes more appropriate provisioning and budgeting practices.

syrrim 7y ago

consumers have skin in the game

bunderbunder 7y ago
If consumers having skin in the game were a sufficient condition for them to make good choices, we wouldn't have needed the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic act to ban radium water in order to get people to stop buying it.
- syrrim 7y ago
  Radium water has a tendency to infect the water supply, so that even people who don't buy it are affected by it. The principle of intolerance applies the other way for schools: people who are picky about schools will do lots of research, whereas people who aren't picky will just go where their friends go.
  - swivelmaster 7y ago
    What you're suggesting is building a system that actively punishes parents who are too busy to a ton of research because they're working multiple jobs, taking care of sick family members, etc. Characterizing people who don't have time to do this as merely "not picky" is ignoring and punishing a huge segment of the population.
    - syrrim 7y ago
      The principle of skin in the game doesn't merely improve the situation for picky people, it brings up the average improving the situation for everyone. If picky people at large boycott a particular school, everyone who is friends with these people will boycott it by association, and it will lose too many students to remain solvent. If picky people prefer giving their business to certain proprietors, those proprietors will open more schools, increasing the likelihood that a person choosing schools using a dart board will strike such a school. Your characterization of the difficulty of choosing a school is overdramatic. A person could devote fifteen minutes to googling "best schools in {area}", maybe even turning up a government sponsored list. If they ever notice the chosen school is bad, say from complaints of their ward or from bad grades, they would switch schools, improving the situation via negativa.

ultrarunner 7y ago

Why would mere time to research options lead to better research being done? My five year old has effectively infinite time to research, say, efficacy of cancer treatments compared to an overworked researcher in a clinical setting. In fact, let's just shift all science to people in nursing homes who need to fill their time anyway. Utopia awaits?

swivelmaster 7y ago
This sounds like a complete nonsense argument. Can you explain what your point is? Are you saying that it's impossible to accurately research anything? Or that, given infinite time, parents would be so bad at researching charter schools that they would never be able to divine the best choice anyway? What do you think MY argument was? I suspect you misread.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I believe the gp is engaged in the bad-faith approach of taking your comment about the state having more time as being literally the only argument you're making, where it's of course obvious the state has more advantages than simple time (including trained personnel, institutional practices, etc, etc).
  - swivelmaster 7y ago
    Sounds like it. I really miss the good old days of Hacker News when there was literally none of that kind of nonsense.
  - ultrarunner 7y ago
    Why is that a bad-faith approach to response? That's the argument being presented, and there are myriad reasons it's entirely without merit. If the argument is that the state has more advantages, they can also be presented one-by-one and weighed. Politics often fails precisely because it smashes far too many decisions into one do-or-die package. Why should we repeat that unproductive pattern here?

stale2002 7y ago

Consumers are the ones paying for it. So I see nothing wrong with providing what they want.