Pie Fight

School choice and lotteries

Yesterday, in a brief intro to the department lecture, Prof Le Grand mentioned that the core problem with school choice is that it can quite quickly end up being the school's choice, rather than choice for parents and pupils. (If a school is very popular and thus oversubscribed, it can have its pick of the large pool of potential applicants.) A potential remedy to this, he said, is to offer significant incentives that would encourage schools to choose "less ideal" students. For example, the govt migh offer a school X funds for a non-problematic kid, 2X for a problematic one, and 3x for someone who's been permanently excluded from another school. This way, you have some sort of a balance between pupils choosing on the one hand and schools choosing on the other - and you could even get schools that specialise in taking harder pupils, 'cause they know they'll get fat funds to do work with.

Over at CT, there's a couple of discussions of a potentially different way of dealing with this problem: lotteries for places. The focus isn't on the above incentive for choosing "bad" pupils, but one of the comments is:

One additional point: in your article you mentioned including incentives for schools to include less ‘desired’ pupils. A similar system is used in Texas and it results in schools classifying students as learning disabled when they are not. When those students are then placed in corresponding programs, their education does suffer. Have you considered these types of problems or possible solutions?

Starving housing

Via Norman Geras, a tale of the SWP et al  trying to save some council estate residents from themselves.

The next day, someone rightly takes issue with the phrase "defending the indefensible" as used to describe those who still support council ownership of housing. It sounds very much like Labour is starving the beast: refusing to give money for improvements unless those improvements are outsourced to the private sector. For all their talk about choice, the only choice labour is offering is go private, or go broke. The choice is being made from the top, by the funding holders, rather than by the consumers (tenants).

I'm not going to defend the way the SWP et al set about talking to tenants in Southwark but I do want to take issue with your reader who thinks that supporting council housing is "defending the indefensible".

The "years of neglect" that council estates have suffered are not the result, necessarily, of the failure of local authorities but of the failure of central government funding going back to the mid 70s when old Labour were in office. Councils have been starved of funds for the work of major repairs for 30 years and forbidden to borrow the money to make good the shortfall. Furthermore, the "right-to-buy" legislation has substantially reduced the amount of housing stock. The properties that are sold are almost always low-maintenance houses, with little needed in the way of management. By selling these properties councils are left with the properties which are hard to maintain, and because the new tenants that move into the few new lets are those with the highest housing needs, there tends to be a concentration of households with severe problems.

Those with severe mental health problems are cheek by jowl with (non) recovering drug addicts, overcrowded families are unable to move to larger properties and their teenage members hang around on the corners of alleyways and get involved in street crime etc.

All this central government knows and chooses to neglect. They refuse to make the money available to tackle the backlog of despair and frustration. However, if a council decides to go down the route of outsourcing, then magically the Housing Associaltions, the PFIs and the Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMOs) will be given the funds to carry out the repairs needed.

Before any such large scale transfer there has to be a ballot of tenants, but even if those who live in council accommodation vote to remain with their elected local authority, central government in effect says, "Fine. That is your democratic choice. But we will ensure that the funds that would have been available to a private contractor or a housing association will not be made available for you."

People really dislike having a gun put to their head in this fashion. And your reader is unduly optimistic to think there can be any resolution of the problems brought about by insecure tenancies and higher rents. There will be participation but it will consist of the tenants participating in higher rents and the executives of HAs etc participating in higher salaries.

So I don't believe this is a case of left-wing ideological blindness getting in the way of pragmatic solutions. The higher rents, and the insecurity of tenure, and the profound (and I would say justified) distrust that many council tenants have for housing associations, are real issues.

"The years of neglect" have been the result either of deliberate policy or of criminal neglect by central government, whether old or new Labour. Local authorities are set up to fail and tenants are punished for ideological reasons.

If you scroll about halfway down this report, note the amounts spent by Sefton Council and by those who opposed them. Now, because the tenants didn't vote the right way, their repairs will not be done. However, if the tenants had voted for accepting the move to housing association property then the £5 million plus would have been refunded to the local authority.

I've no first hand knowledge of Southwark but a cursory trawl of the net shows that campaigners there have faced repeated assaults on the idea of council housing - see this in 2001 and this for 2004.

Your reader may well be right about the behaviour of the SWP et al, and I'm quite willing to provide a few kicks of my own in that direction, but the cause they were defending is a good one and by no means as obviously wrong as she or he was implying. (As you might guess, I'm a housing worker.)

Doin' it and doin' it and doin' it well

At Crooked Timber, a discussion on making a success of graduate school. I particularly like this bit of advice from Jacob Levy:

With respect to

Know what you want to do for your Master’s thesis (or Ph.D. Dissertation) BEFORE you get into grad school

my sense is that it’s very useful to always have a plan for a research agenda—on the first day of grad school it’s helpful to be able to say “this is what I want to write my dissertation on”—but that it can be fatal to good work to be rigidly wedded to your plan. Always be looking forward from your current position, but allow your current position to change as you take courses, read new literatures, discover new methodologies, etc. It’s always only, “at this moment this is what I think I’ll want to write my dissertation on.”

The plan helps keep your attention on research and research skills, on professionalization, and on finishing, as well as helping in the grad-school selection process in the first place. But if you already knew enough on the first day of grad school to write your dissertation, we wouldn’t need to have grad school. If you’re not open to getting excited by new things in your first few years there’s a problem.

Mas casas, por favour

Matthew Turner says the way to solve the housing problem in the UK is to... build more houses. As for the people whinging about greenfield development, they could stand a good slap. Note the stats in paragraph two. That just about says it all.

I should also note just how shrill the ant-housing lobby can be. CPRE, for god's sake, has recently released a report claiming that there will be no rural land left in 30 years. Do they really believe this crap?

Even if they do, the vast majority of the rest of us won't. As for me, I now trust CPRE far less than I used to. Surely that's not the goal of their scaremongering.

From Matthew Turner:

Good Martin Wolf article in the FT arguing that Britain has some of the most rigid and least market-oriented markets in the EU... in land. The consquences are as the textbooks would suggest: that house prices are both very expensive and volatile, and British housing is generally small and poor.

The solution is to free it up and build more houses. Will this cover our green and pleasant land in urban sprawl? Almost certainly not, only 8% of land in the UK is urban, and in the S.East only 17%. The proportion under agricultural use, 78%, is the highest in the EU15. Do we need the farms? Seems unlikely, given their contribution to GDP is less than 2%. Can't we use Brownfield sites? Not enough of them, and most people want to live somewhere better.

So the last argument is it will reduce house prices, and high house prices are what much of the population are, almost literally, banking on. Luckily Wolf has a plan to get more houses and avoid disaster - we have to wait two weeks.

Oh, that feels... not as terrible as that last thing

I dobut this has policy implications, but it's mighty damn interesting. Via Unfogged:

...test subjects are likely to remember more fondly

an n-minute colonoscopy followed by a mildly uncomfortable interval during which the probe is left stationary*

over

an n-minute colonoscopy.

Odd, because the preference is for more pain over less. Hypothesis: memories follow the 'peak-end' rule, such that the retrospective evaluation is a function of the experience's peak (high or low point) and end (the experience of its conclusion). The colonoscopy case is one where representing only peaks and ends** misses relevant information, so the retrospective preferences are counterintuitive.

We're progressives! So let's deny rights to women and gays!

Those crazy kids over at Harry's Place can't help tying themselves up in logical knots over the Iraq war, but they are dead on the money on many aspects of the left's willingness to accept Islamist extremism. Here, they offer some insight on why journalists such as Natasha Walter are so forgiving of Islamists' blatantly regressive social policies.

Five Europes

Via an Yglesias post on the German economy, an interesting comment on the so-called European socioeconomic model, arguing that high taxes don't cause stagnant economies, but too much protection for employees:

Please stop writing about the "European social model" which only exists in the imaginations of Chirac and Schroeder.

See this IHT article on the Nordic model, and this one. Another in last week's Economist suggests that there are at leat five European types: Nordic, with very high social spending and little employment protection; Anglo-Saxon (sic, meaning UK and Ireland) with little employment protection and a cheaper safety net; "Rhineland" (better: Carolingian) , i.e. German/French), with both high employment protection and a good safety net; Mediterranean, with high employment protection and a cheaper safety net; and post-communist, with not much of either. The three groups with low employment protection are all doing well. (I'm not sure about the validity of the Mediterranean group. My impression of Spain, where I live,  is that employment protection ring-fences the jobs of a middle-aged male labour aristocracy, while young workers, immigrants, and women face a Thatcherite insecurity; the economy is growing fast. Italy is more Carolingian and in the doldrums.)
The inference is that the problem is employment protection, not taxation. Danish workers can be fired with little fuss, but with a Rolls-Royce safety net financed by sky-high income taxes, a growing economy, and low unemployment they aren't worried.

To blog or not to blog

If you want a job in academia, says Dan Drezner, you should think long and hard about whether or not you blog under your own name.

Others, including a few at Crooked Timber, say it can be good for your career.

Thinking bad things about think tanks

Virginia Postrel says not nice things about think tanks:

For the most part, think tank donors (especially individuals, as opposed to foundations or corporations) are completely uninterested in original research and unable to evaluate its quality. On the whole, individuals give to think tanks for the same reason they give to religious organizations--to demonstrate commitment to a belief system and to support the people they believe will spread the word. They want to hear the same messages over and over and over again, and they financially reward those who give them what they want. While generally nice, generous people, donors are on the whole indifferent to originality, bored by wonky policy proposals, and annoyed by any think tank employee who challenges their political cathechisms. Boards of trustees tend to reward executives not for doing or supporting important work but for raising money. Since you can't do the work without money anyway, think tankers who want to do good, significant work eventually either flee or give in to the system's preference for superficiality.

...

Think tanks, unlike universities, are supposed to influence public policy, not to produce knowledge for its own sake. Donors and boards want hard evidence that their money is working, that it's influencing the public debate. The easiest, flashiest way to measure that influence--especially since 501(c)3 think tanks aren't allowed to lobby--is to count media appearances. (Most media counts don't even differentiate by the quality of the appearance, except perhaps in raw audience numbers.) Even successful books reach few readers, compared to a TV appearance. And the best way to sell political books is, of course, to get on TV, preferably with an easily digested, highly partisan message.

She gets feedback.

Tyler Cowen adds his two cents.

LSE SPP induction pack

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