7 ms·

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.
        • swivelmaster 7y ago
          Googling it? The whole point of this thread is that that can be gamed. Do you want to reward schools for having the best SEO? Or for doing a better job of incentivizing people to review their school on whatever web site?
          • syrrim 7y ago
            Google "best restaurants" and you'll find a list of decent restaurants. They may not be the best restaurants, but they also won't suck. That brings us par with the status quo, from 15 minutes of work.
            • deleted 7y ago
              [deleted]
            • swivelmaster 7y ago
              It only takes one meal to know if a restaurant is good. It takes a lot more than that to know if a school is good.
      • tracker1 7y ago
        I've often thought it would be a great idea to allow for parents to work one day a month at their child's school. This would put more parents in the circle. I think it would take time and some training to get to a good place on this, but would allow for a lot more insight and probably increase interaction dramatically. One or two more sets of eyes in most classrooms each day, more people to help answer questions, etc. Far fewer WTF moments with some schools.
• swivelmaster 7y ago
  This is a very obvious argument for privatization of any industry, but check out my response in this same comment thread. Consumers OBVIOUSLY have skin in the game, but asking a consumer to figure out which charter schools are great and which are frauds and which are merely mediocre requires far more research than the average parent has time to do. The incentive for a charter school to misrepresent its achievements is very high, and once a parent has committed to putting their child in that school, the cost of moving them to another if/when they discover problems is very high. By that point, the charter school will have already taken the voucher funding and can use it to advertise to the next sucker.
  • coredog64 7y ago
    AFAICT, a public school has the same incentives and has even higher switching costs (approximately 6% of the value of your house, whatever transaction fees your local government tacks on, plus whatever it costs to pack up and move).
    • swivelmaster 7y ago
      Charter schools can be for-profit enterprises, or can be structured in such a way that executives can make a lot of money (even if they are technically non-profits). This is what skews the incentives for charter schools versus public schools.
• JamesBarney 7y ago
  There a phds in education who are trying to figure out which schools do the best job teaching using more information and statistical information than a parent will have in their entire lives. And they have trouble figuring this out, how the hell is some random parent supposed to figure this out?
  • swivelmaster 7y ago
    Because “consumer choice” is one of those libertarian ideas that’s fueled entirely by theory and ideology and not by data.
  • syrrim 7y ago
    An individual parent doesn't figure this out on their own. The market, composed of all parents, determines it. The market has access to more information than any phd will ever be privy, because it knows the individual feelings of every parent, child, teacher, and administrator. The market is unique in being able to perform randomized, controlled, double-blinded studies on the whole population, whereas phds are stuck looking at correlational data of small samples. The market performs continuous replication of every result ever identified, such that subgroups can be made arbitrarily small while maintaining significant p-values (and has no publication bias). And the market has access to the intellect of every phd, bachelors degree, or idiot that read a book once who ever had children or who wants to make a quick buck, conspiring in the greatest peer-review in history.
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  Skin in the game doesn't make complex and often temporally distant utilities from sui generis non-repeated transactions any less opaque.