"There was never a moment when the United States of America officially decided to adopt feminism and then explicitly thought through the second-order consequences of that for the public school system. But it’s clearly had a big impact in terms of what it costs to hire and retain great people — perhaps a post for another day."
Sorry if I'm slow on the uptake here, but is this a Warren-esque Two-Income Trap argument? If so, please elaborate in another post!
The version I've always heard is that America spends $3(?) per prisoner for every $1 per public school student. The multiple may have changed, but the idea is almost certainly correct, if perhaps misleading. It ignores that prisoners are there 24 hours a day, & are more, um, unruly than school kids, & so need more 'supervision', etc.
When doing international comparisons, it's not clear at all to me that "percent of GDP" is the right figure. In "real dollars per capita" we'd clearly be most expensive. Teaching and policing are labor-intensive services, so they are more expensive when the "GDP per capita" is higher, which would be the argument for doing "percent of GDP". But its not all labor costs either. So the truth feels like somewhere its in beween "about typical" and "inexplicably expensive".
Or to put it another way, it really underscores how much productivity growth in these sectors haved lagged behind in our otherwise advanced economy.
This is a fun coincidence, I just opened up the annual assessment on my property that just came in, so I took a look at the tax district rates. Can confirm that the ISD here is 2nd highest right behind the total city, the former at just about 80% the size of the latter.
Another piece going in on local municipal budgets and not a whisper about unfunded mandates. Back when I was doing Fairfax County budget community outreach, it was understood that roughly 20% of the budget was covering from stuff the Commonwealth or the Feds required but provided insufficient funding for. This was particularly acute in the school budget(Fairfax BoS gives the school board a check, the school board handles their budget).
Add so every year it was a crap shoot of what the state was going to be able to cough up. But to the actual residents, *nobody* outside of a few of us nerds knew about this. It was simply "Why won't the county spend more on the thing I want." Well, the schools were about 53% of the budget, public safety the next biggest slice at around 15%(IIRC). BUT! There's overlap on things like social services and health initiatives that greatly impact families with school aged kids. And are also kinda/sorta public safety issues!
Lastly, don't sleep on the legal limitations of how your locality can raise revenue! Using Fairfax as an example, it's basically property tax and then some bread crumbs. And because Virginia is a Dillon State(Honestly, Matt, this is a great topic to write about), the county has to go through a lengthy process and ballot initiative to add any new revenue streams. So you end with a population that wants a certain level of service, furious at the volatility of their property tax bill, and absolutely clueless about what levers control each part of the problem.
I think there is a hunger in our society for better public services and a lot of anxiety around that without a firm commitment to raise taxes. Education, police, the dmv, infrastructure, anti poverty programs...
Since this post tangentially sorta stems from the Uvalde tragedy, does anyone have a decent link for a sober postmortem article written by a good journalist on what exactly happened with the police response?
"Some conservatives are very critical of soaring per-student spending on K-12 schools in a way that strikes me as misguided. Both policing and education are labor-intensive activities, and their costs tend to rise over time for Baumol’s Cost Disease reasons"
I believe the data shows though, that the vast majority of the increase has not gone to teacher salaries, which have remained relatively static over the past several decades (adjusting for inflation). Most of it has gone to increasing the size of the administration. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have done much good, as schools aren't really performing measurably better than in the past with less administrators.
The US/Japan comparison piqued my interest and I was struck by the big disparity in societal investments: for combined primary/secondary education, police and defense, the US spends 7.7% of GDP compared to only 4% for Japan.
I was wondering what Japan does with that windfall and still don't know, but I looked up healthcare spending and was awestruck again at the differences: 20% of GDP for the US versus 11% for Japan, dwarfing that other difference.
Now we're talking about a *huge* difference in societal investment. I hope some smart SB person can tell me where Japan makes the disproportionately large GDP investments compared to the US. I couldn't readily find it. (Apparently 22% of total Japanese spending goes for retirees but I couldn't find a comparable aggregate number for the US -- much smaller, I'd assume.)
P.S. Spielberg and Kushner did not "brilliantly" remake West Side Story but instead did a tired, cliched retread much inferior to the original. I'll take that stand to my dying day.
I've been really struck lately about how rhetoric from the left and right on cops and teachers these days is almost a mirror-image. For instance, over the years we've often seen conservatives point to some failing in the public school system and argue "see, this just proves that this is all a waste of money, more parents should move their kids into private and parochial schools instead," while the liberal counterargument is, "no, public schools are necessary and irreplaceable and we need to put more resources into them." But on cops it's the reverse: so many progressives (not even far-left agitators but relatively mainstream voices who don't have two feet on the "defund" wagon but will make anti-anti-defund arguments) have been pointing to Uvalde, or to evidence of cops laying down on the job via "soft strikes", and arguing: "see this just proves that cops add no value at all."
Personally, I say the liberal argument on public schools is *mostly* right, and the exact same logic should apply to cops.
On the story of Kerr County residents not living in any city, we notoriously have a group of these people here, too. They despise even having to write Boise on their address, as they cannot stand Boise and the allegedly outrageous taxes they charge, and prefer to be called the Southwest Ada County Alliance. They have long fought tooth and nail to resist any sort of annexation effort by Boise.
So it was quite ironically funny when they absolutely lost their shit over Boise wanting to turn a piece of farmland the city itself owns nearby this area into housing. They demanded it become a very large park instead, despite the fact that they very blatantly do not want to be Boise citizens.
The American exceptionalism part is interesting. Are there any other first world exceptionalisms that have similar effects? Think there was something with Russia and alcohol.
"There was never a moment when the United States of America officially decided to adopt feminism and then explicitly thought through the second-order consequences of that for the public school system. But it’s clearly had a big impact in terms of what it costs to hire and retain great people — perhaps a post for another day."
Sorry if I'm slow on the uptake here, but is this a Warren-esque Two-Income Trap argument? If so, please elaborate in another post!
The version I've always heard is that America spends $3(?) per prisoner for every $1 per public school student. The multiple may have changed, but the idea is almost certainly correct, if perhaps misleading. It ignores that prisoners are there 24 hours a day, & are more, um, unruly than school kids, & so need more 'supervision', etc.
TL/DR version: progressive politicians don't understand economics. No wonder they are better at rhetoric than policy.
When doing international comparisons, it's not clear at all to me that "percent of GDP" is the right figure. In "real dollars per capita" we'd clearly be most expensive. Teaching and policing are labor-intensive services, so they are more expensive when the "GDP per capita" is higher, which would be the argument for doing "percent of GDP". But its not all labor costs either. So the truth feels like somewhere its in beween "about typical" and "inexplicably expensive".
Or to put it another way, it really underscores how much productivity growth in these sectors haved lagged behind in our otherwise advanced economy.
This is a fun coincidence, I just opened up the annual assessment on my property that just came in, so I took a look at the tax district rates. Can confirm that the ISD here is 2nd highest right behind the total city, the former at just about 80% the size of the latter.
Another piece going in on local municipal budgets and not a whisper about unfunded mandates. Back when I was doing Fairfax County budget community outreach, it was understood that roughly 20% of the budget was covering from stuff the Commonwealth or the Feds required but provided insufficient funding for. This was particularly acute in the school budget(Fairfax BoS gives the school board a check, the school board handles their budget).
Add so every year it was a crap shoot of what the state was going to be able to cough up. But to the actual residents, *nobody* outside of a few of us nerds knew about this. It was simply "Why won't the county spend more on the thing I want." Well, the schools were about 53% of the budget, public safety the next biggest slice at around 15%(IIRC). BUT! There's overlap on things like social services and health initiatives that greatly impact families with school aged kids. And are also kinda/sorta public safety issues!
Lastly, don't sleep on the legal limitations of how your locality can raise revenue! Using Fairfax as an example, it's basically property tax and then some bread crumbs. And because Virginia is a Dillon State(Honestly, Matt, this is a great topic to write about), the county has to go through a lengthy process and ballot initiative to add any new revenue streams. So you end with a population that wants a certain level of service, furious at the volatility of their property tax bill, and absolutely clueless about what levers control each part of the problem.
I think there is a hunger in our society for better public services and a lot of anxiety around that without a firm commitment to raise taxes. Education, police, the dmv, infrastructure, anti poverty programs...
Since this post tangentially sorta stems from the Uvalde tragedy, does anyone have a decent link for a sober postmortem article written by a good journalist on what exactly happened with the police response?
"Some conservatives are very critical of soaring per-student spending on K-12 schools in a way that strikes me as misguided. Both policing and education are labor-intensive activities, and their costs tend to rise over time for Baumol’s Cost Disease reasons"
I believe the data shows though, that the vast majority of the increase has not gone to teacher salaries, which have remained relatively static over the past several decades (adjusting for inflation). Most of it has gone to increasing the size of the administration. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have done much good, as schools aren't really performing measurably better than in the past with less administrators.
The US/Japan comparison piqued my interest and I was struck by the big disparity in societal investments: for combined primary/secondary education, police and defense, the US spends 7.7% of GDP compared to only 4% for Japan.
I was wondering what Japan does with that windfall and still don't know, but I looked up healthcare spending and was awestruck again at the differences: 20% of GDP for the US versus 11% for Japan, dwarfing that other difference.
Now we're talking about a *huge* difference in societal investment. I hope some smart SB person can tell me where Japan makes the disproportionately large GDP investments compared to the US. I couldn't readily find it. (Apparently 22% of total Japanese spending goes for retirees but I couldn't find a comparable aggregate number for the US -- much smaller, I'd assume.)
P.S. Spielberg and Kushner did not "brilliantly" remake West Side Story but instead did a tired, cliched retread much inferior to the original. I'll take that stand to my dying day.
I've been really struck lately about how rhetoric from the left and right on cops and teachers these days is almost a mirror-image. For instance, over the years we've often seen conservatives point to some failing in the public school system and argue "see, this just proves that this is all a waste of money, more parents should move their kids into private and parochial schools instead," while the liberal counterargument is, "no, public schools are necessary and irreplaceable and we need to put more resources into them." But on cops it's the reverse: so many progressives (not even far-left agitators but relatively mainstream voices who don't have two feet on the "defund" wagon but will make anti-anti-defund arguments) have been pointing to Uvalde, or to evidence of cops laying down on the job via "soft strikes", and arguing: "see this just proves that cops add no value at all."
Personally, I say the liberal argument on public schools is *mostly* right, and the exact same logic should apply to cops.
On the story of Kerr County residents not living in any city, we notoriously have a group of these people here, too. They despise even having to write Boise on their address, as they cannot stand Boise and the allegedly outrageous taxes they charge, and prefer to be called the Southwest Ada County Alliance. They have long fought tooth and nail to resist any sort of annexation effort by Boise.
So it was quite ironically funny when they absolutely lost their shit over Boise wanting to turn a piece of farmland the city itself owns nearby this area into housing. They demanded it become a very large park instead, despite the fact that they very blatantly do not want to be Boise citizens.
The American exceptionalism part is interesting. Are there any other first world exceptionalisms that have similar effects? Think there was something with Russia and alcohol.
"inaccurate facts"
What's that, the progressive version of "alternative facts"?
"fights are conducted with guns versus knives and bludgeons."
Never bring a bludgeon to a gun fight.
Relatedly, a new study came out showing increases in police spending are correlated with a drop in homicides.
https://twitter.com/jtrothwell/status/1532039351491866626