A few days ago, I wrote a piece on the American healthcare and higher education systems, noting that they both suffer from rising costs because the consequences of failing to obtain these services are very dire. I argued that while it is quite unfair to deny healthcare or education to people on the basis of their economic background, there are limits to the supply of these services available–limited numbers of hospital beds, doctors, professors, and university places. Consequently, I claimed it made sense for the state to ration access to these services, ensuring that poor people who can make splendid use of them have access by denying access to those who cannot derive the same benefits. It makes little sense to give a university place to a 95-year old over a poor 20-year old, or to attempt to prolong the poor-quality life of a 95-year old at the expense of saving a poor 5-year old. However, it was suggested to me that this argument might rest on a false assumption–namely, that the supply of college education and healthcare might not be supply constrained, or, at the very least, might soon cease to be. I’d like to consider this objection in further detail.
Tag: Education
The US Health and Education Systems Have the Same Problem
There are two parts of the US economy that have spiraling out of control costs–the health and higher education systems. I propose that these systems experience runaway costs for the same fundamental reason, that they are “high demand markets”. High demand markets differ from other kinds of markets in an important way, and once we understand that health and education are markets of this variety, it becomes much easier to devise and understand the potential efficacy of policy solutions in both areas.
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Do We Treat College Students like Indentured Servants?
I recently heard someone compare the modern student experience in the United States to indentured service. This comparison seems hyperbolic on first analysis, but I want to take it seriously. To what extent, if any, is the process of taking out student loans or working unpaid internships similar to the experience of poor 18th century opportunity-seekers in the United States?
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Is Chris Christie a Moderate?
In the aftermath of republican Chris Christie’s recent re-election as governor of New Jersey, many in the press have been quick to make sweeping claims about what this means for the republicans nationally. Chief among these claims is the notion that Christie is a moderate–consequently, Christie’s victory is an indication that the republicans should or will become more moderate in the future. But while Christie has attempted to cultivate an image nationally as a centrist, reasonable republican who chills with Barack Obama and disses Rand Paul, I have not seen many in the press taking any kind of serious look at what Christie has done policy-wise in New Jersey. So let’s do that today.
Education Ex Machina
As regular readers know, I’m a frequent critic of political systems. One of my recurrent observations is that the average voter is often ignorant in the extreme, not merely of trivial facts (“who is your local congressman?”) but of important political facts and ideas fall into two broad categories:
- Policy Ignorance–ignorance of what a given law or policy does or would do if enacted. Lack of understanding of how policies and laws operate (e.g. Obamacare, immigration reform, austerity, stimulus, default, etc.)
- Theory Ignorance–a lack of awareness of how one’s political beliefs fit together, being unaware of contradictions or deliberately ignoring them, critically analyzing one’s own views insufficiently to be epistemically justified in holding them, failing to consider alternatives or resolve the challenges alternative theories pose, etc.
I typically claim that because citizens are ignorant in these ways, they have a tendency to vote counter-productively. They use the vote to pursue mistaken objectives or pursue good objectives in misguided ways. I argue from there that our political system expects more from the average voter than the average voter can give, and is consequently mismatched to the nature of real people–it is too demanding. Among the most frequent responses to this argument is that it’s not the political system that is the problem, but the education system. If we educated people better so that they were not ignorant in these ways, they would vote better and the system would work as designed. Today, I aim to answer this argument.
Benjamin Studebaker 
