Happy New Year’s Eve!! It’s Monday, so of course, today’s post is by Stephen. I apologize for being so late, but I have the day off so I actually slept in. Woo hoo!
Everyone be safe tonight, no mater what you do to ring in the New Year. Goodbye 2018, hello 2019!!!!
Without further ado……
People often discuss on this site the nation’s educational institutions, often viewed as a political issue or a social issue, however, have you ever paused to consider the question of our educational systems as an economic issue?
For those economists in the readership, the “problem of the commons” ought to be a rather familiar motif, however, for those less economically indoctrinated perhaps it best that I back up and explain this economic game theory problem e’er I proceed.
The “problem of the commons”, like many of the concepts of our laws and economic understanding harken back to those days of yore when our society was of a more feudal nature than that to which we have become accustomed, thus it is less familiar in our everyday parlance than one might suppose.
The “commons” refers to those parcels of land available in every medieval village for the use of everyone, often an overflow area for grazing livestock, but might include gathering wood, fishing, or other common usages. It was naturally called “the commons” because it was legally considered held by the village citizenry as “tenants in common” or in a manner of speaking collectively owned and available for the common use.
Economically speaking however, despite the fact that anyone can benefit from the usage of the commons, there is no economic incentive or benefit for any particular individual in maintaining and improving the property for the later use of their neighbors.
The fact that everyone can make use of the property yet there is a disincentive for any individual to pay for the upkeep and cost of the property often leads those only cursorily versed in economics to associate property like “the commons” with what economists refer to as “public goods”.
Like “the commons”, public goods are available for use and benefit of every citizen yet there is a disincentive for any single individual to pay for the provision of such public goods. The most common examples used by economists being roads and defense.
One might be inclined simply to conceive that it merely becomes the responsibility of the village government to maintain the commons in order that everyone in the village may benefit from the use of the property and thus collectively share in the maintenance of the property through the mechanism of the state.
However, there is another feature of the commons hiding in this scenario which is the very source of the problem in the “problem of the commons”, which is the exhaustible nature of the property in question.
Any true public good is, in essence, inexhaustible, which is to say that one person’s use of the property in no way impinges or limits the use of that property by others.
If I travel down a road built by the state, it does not impair your ability to travel down that same road no matter how often I travel down that road or you travel down the same road. Likewise, the fact that I am protected from the invasion of the Canadians by our military in no fashion diminishes the protection from those frigid invaders you also receive from our national defense.
In a different light, if I graze my sheep upon the commons, then there may remain less or even no suitable grass for you to graze your cattle, being that sheep crop the grass much closer to the ground than cattle. The property of the commons, like any other property diminishes in utility the more that it is used.
Thus, it becomes a race to see who can capture the most value of the free use of that property for their personal benefit before one’s dastardly neighbors exhaust the value of the property before you leaving you with nothing.
So, “what could this possibly have to do with education?” I hear you asking, because unlike the commons, education is not exhaustible as your education in no fashion diminishes the value which I might procure from obtaining an education myself.
Reasonable enough.
However, for this precise reason, many ill educated economists confuse education with an actual public good whereas it does not suffer to the same extent from the limitation of exhaustibility. It is not a public good because of other criteria, namely that the benefits of one’s education is a personal good and only accrues to the individual thus receiving the education, so it is in fact a private good, or rather service, and not public at all.
That does not quite make it inexhaustible, even though the education itself does not diminish with increased uses as the land of the commons does, there are physical limitations to the number of students any one teacher may instruct and the more education provided demands ever increasing resources and increasing marginal costs.
Foolish politicians, being what they are, allow themselves to be convinced that education is a public good so that they can co-opt the education industry into a state ran enterprise, thus 1) expanding the scope and size of government, 2) feigning that the state is providing this benefit, while one’s fellow citizens bear the burden, and 3) trap the workers of said industry into quasi-state jobs which are dependent upon the largess of the government assuring themselves of future political support.
(Unforeseen by said politicians, it also traps them into repeatedly catering to the special interest group which are the teachers’ unions in this employment for votes dance, often blowing up state and local budgets.)
However, public education shares much in common with the ancient “problem of the commons” as the state (public) has taken a private service (education) and through the power of taxing and spending made it readily and cheaply available to some citizens.
Unlike true public goods, only a portion of the public is benefitted from this government entitlement, particularly those youth of an appropriate school age, in which we may include a portion of collegiate aged youth.
Most states provide a “free” public education, that is to say 100% subsidized by the tax payers who are obviously not in school. The politicians naturally justify this inter-generational wealth transfer under the rubric that everyone was once school age, so the tax payer is just paying back what they received. (Even if they moved to this country as an adult and never received, and never will receive, the benefit for which they are taxed.)
When we look advanced to the collegiate arena, the political pandering increases with needs based funding through the federal government in the form of grants and loans which by far favor the poor and low income. Thus, in addition to inter-generational redistribution of wealth, there is overlaid an income level wealth redistribution.
(For those few who follow the IQ statistics and the effects of both the heritability of IQ and the general impact of intelligence upon a person’s earnings, this constructed system also creates an educational redistribution from the smartest to the slowest.)
It is the impact of this public provision and purchase of the educational services on the quality of the education itself which needs to be addressed in light of the “problem of the commons”.
The media periodically highlights, usually in a demand for more financial resources, just how overtaxed the school systems have become and how difficult it is for teachers to maintain discipline and order in addition to the quality of the education itself.
Children in this educational system provided by the state recognize that the fact that they are forced to attend, also means that the system is forced to endure whatever errant behavior they so choose to exhibit. The discipline of a school is as much of a resource used by the students as the education itself.
Likewise, the larger and more anonymous the educational institution, the more inclined such overcrowding will tend to wear and tear, if not outright destruction, of the facilities by the students. It is not that adequate facilities have not provided for inner city schools, but that those schools in those localities simply get worn out and dilapidated faster than less crowded institutions in rural areas.
But, let’s not overlook the obvious that the quality of the education services itself declines as more strain is placed through increasing demands by students, parents, and politicians all demanding their own special interests be addressed, sports venues, sex education, computer facilities, et cetera.
In short, that which is “free” for use by the public will be overused by that same public increasing costs, exhausting the resources, and degrading the quality, all because there is no economic incentive to maintain and improve the property, in this case also the service, so the property held in common degrades, the services provided in common become slack.
While an entire article, or many articles, could be written on the various problems with public education, sometimes it is better to take a step back and look as a broader and more general view of the source of the problem.
When you realize that all of the educational problems in our country could be easily predicted by simply modifying and applying the economic reasoning of “the problem of the commons” to “the education commons”, it becomes painfully obvious that no amount of tinkering with this program or that curriculum, or teacher qualifications will ever address the underlying, fundamental problem of the system.
