Scarce resources
Via 11d, I read "Jane Galt’s" take on the Mommy Madness articles. As you might guess from her pseudonym, Jane is pretty negative about the idea of government intervention to address any of the problems that Warner mentions. But then she writes:
"The economic pressure affecting middle class families seem to me to come largely from seeking scarce resources for their children: housing in good, safe school districts, and a good college education."
I think that’s basically right — and that’s also what Warren and Tyagi argue in The Two-Income Trap (discussed here). It’s easy to make fun of moms who are so obsessed about their kids that they stay up all night hand-painting paper plates for a preschool party. It’s not so easy to make fun of parents who line up at 4 am for a shot at a charter school to get their kids out of DC’s failing public schools.
Galt argues that no amount of government redistribution is going to change the fact that the people with the most money (and power) are likely to win out when it comes to a bidding war over scarce resources. Fair enough. But she accepts as a given that decent, safe schools are a scarce resource. And I don’t.
February 25th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Interesting to see a totally different perspective on that article.
But I have to comment on this: “But she accepts as a given that decent, safe schools are a scarce resource. And I don’t.”
Horrific inner-city schools get a lot of publicity, and I don’t really know much about the demographics of other schools, or how much of the population that they make up. But I do think that there will always be some schools that are better than others, even if the median (or better yet, the 5th percentile) is “decent and safe.” And so there will always be competition for the better schools. The competition will probably drive local housing prices above rational levels, because people are not rational when it comes to perceived advantages for their kids. (And if the school you can go to is decoupled from the area in which you live, it will just shift the competition and price war to whatever the new criterion is). And our perception of “decent and safe” is also going to be subject to creep as schools get better. So I think that Jane Galt may be right that it’s not going to be possible to eliminate the bidding war, no matter how much intervention we have.
February 25th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
We might not be able to avoid some discrepancies, but in the past they have not been as severe as they are now, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to minimize discrepancies.
Hate to say it, but much of this just gets back to this country’s raw unwillingness to tax its citizens for the public good. Is it because the taxes aren’t used well? Is it because we’re just a selfish bunch? Who knows.