A news release about a study co-authored by Vanderbilt professor Mark Cohen reminds me of a quote by Franklin Roosevelt:
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”
The authors argue that for every ‘at-risk’ youth we save from a life of crime, society saves between $2.6 million to $5.3 million. I’m eager to read the study to see how he comes to these numbers.
If they are correct, this seems to be compelling evidence for the debates over whether education is a public or private good. A great deal hangs on this debate. For instance, if education is an entirely private good, then it becomes more difficult to build an argument that self-interested yet circumspect parents who opt out of public schools should still pay into the public system. However, if education is to a significant extent a public good (that is, if my own good depends on the education of others), then I these citizens may be wise to help pay for the education of others.
This might be especially relevant to the libertarian/free market enthusiasts who champion rights but are resistant to the notion of responsibility or moral obligation.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
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2 comments:
That's an interesting idea, although it does presume that people who are at-risk will end up in a life of crime. Far more are likely to end up under-employed or struggling in a low-end job.
As far as free market enthusiasts and libertarians, most would argue that even if you show that it is in societies best interest to fund programs to save at-risk youth, the government doesn't have to be the provider. Friedman made the purist form of this argument, that the funding and the provision needed to be seperate.
Rebecca,
Your points are well taken and deserve a response.
We can still conceive of underemployment (or underachievement more generally) as a social cost. Society loses out on the increased tax revenue the person would generate is she or he was more productive.
I think you’ve described a kind of quasi-libertarian, or perhaps more properly, a neo-liberal position. As I understand them, neo-liberals hold that human flourishing is best served by the intelligent and selective application of market-like forces (such as competition and profit motives). I think of blue-dog democrats, Tony Blair, and the World Bank as examples of neo-liberals at work.
Libertarians, such as Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), argue that all redistributive taxation is a form of slavery (in that people are forced to give a portion of their labor under threat of state-sanctioned force). Thus, libertarianism is not an empirical argument about the most efficient provision of public services, but a moral argument that no one ought to be forced to work for the good of another (beyond the demands of their own self-interest).
Libertarian philosophy has been thoroughly refuted, most importantly on the basis of the problematic distinction it requires between negative rights (rights of non-interference) and positive rights (rights to certain goods, such as education, health care, etc.). But as you point out, neo-liberalism, as an empirical claim about how best to guarantee positive rights, is alive and well.
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