Ask how to solve problems, not why they happened

Identifying causation isn't the same as doing policy analysis

Little kids, journalists, and academics all love to ask “why?”

Why did this happen? Why are things this way? X happened because Y happened first, but why did Y happen?

These instincts can serve us well in finding interesting stories or research topics, but I think in a way they can also derail us when we’re trying to solve problems in public policy.

A few weeks ago, for example, I found myself in an argument with a think tanker about why school absenteeism exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic. My antagonist was saying that this was part of the downside of prolonged school closures. I argued that if you look at the numbers, absenteeism soared by almost as much in the places that kept schools open — a nine percent increase in the districts with the most in-person schooling versus a 12 percent increase in the districts with the least. That three percentage point gap isn’t nothing, but it’s smaller than the gap between the poorest and the richest districts and the whitest and the least-white districts. What’s more, we know that poorer and less white districts had less in-person schooling. So it seems to me that:

• Absenteeism rose sharply even in districts that didn’t close for the pandemic.

• There was a larger rise in the districts that closed longer, but this is accounted for by the differential demographics.

• Therefore, closures per se did not have a significant causal impact on absenteeism.

Note that I say this as someone who was against school closures all along and would be happy to claim vindication on this point. I just truly don’t think they have a lot of explanatory power on the absenteeism point.

What I think is that the pandemic itself eroded the attendance norm. After all, even if you kept schools open, you had to shift norms around sick days. You had some parents who were afraid of their kids catching the virus. And you were in the midst of a national movement that was making everyone more skeptical of tough enforcement measures. The attendance norm, I think, was a casualty of the pandemic and, to an extent, post-Floyd concerns about enforcement, not of school closures.

At any rate, causal inference is fun to argue about. I bet that clever academics using more advanced math than me eyeballing charts will be able to shed more light on this topic over the years and maybe even resolve it conclusively.

But even though I enjoy this sort of thing, it’s also pretty plainly irrelevant to the question at hand, which is “what, if anything, can we or should we do about absenteeism right now?”

Problems need solutions, not explanations

The United States is a very rich country, yet our life expectancy is closer to that of Poland or Panama than Germany, Japan, or Italy. And that’s striking because we are actually a lot richer than Germany, Japan, or Italy at this point.

It’s common when people are writing about this to frame the question around “why is American life expectancy so short?”