Sunday quick takes. By Matthew Yglesias

Sunday quick takes. By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

February 21

I wanted to do a quick follow up on Thursday’s post about the paucity of kids from poor families at selective colleges. I hadn’t realized this at the time, but a forthcoming paper from Susan Dynarski, CJ Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen reports on a new experiment that seems promising in reducing undermatching.

What they did, basically, was reach out to a bunch of students who would qualify for generous financial aid packages if they were admitted and give them a formal pre-application guarantee of the aid package. And it worked: “The offer substantially increased application (68 percent vs 26 percent) and enrollment rates (27 percent vs 12 percent).”

This is super promising and schools should do it. There is frankly no excuse not to! But I do think it’s worth noting that even here, the actual application and enrollment rates are kind of disturbing low. This great Erica Green article that came out Thursday in the NYT, however, speaks to the breadth of the program. She looks at a program that essentially sets aside the tournament aspect of college admissions and just tries to see if it can support people in doing Ivy League coursework. And it turns out a lot of people can do the work!

Both studies are conveying the same message — there is a lot that elite schools could be doing to advance social justice by putting in the spadework to encourage more poor kids to apply instead of tearing themselves apart over symbolism.

The details matter

Ezra Klein wrote about the child allowance debate eloquently from the perspective that maybe work is overrated and we shouldn’t worry so much about poor parents spending more time with their kids. I agree with this to a point, and specifically that we shouldn’t make work incentives the be-all and end-all of our policymaking.

But I really do think the specifics and magnitudes matter here. We shouldn’t overly romanticize “the dignity of work,” but we also shouldn’t discount the idea that it would be bad for kids to grow up in whole communities where nobody is doing formal work. I don’t see any reason to believe that either the Biden tax credit proposal or the Romney child allowance proposal would have that effect. But what if the benefit was $10,000 a year? Well, then maybe it would. At the same time, if we implement the Romney plan and it turns out to have no drag on unmarried parents’ labor force participation, then we should look at making the benefit even more generous.

The other thing I would say is that we need to look beyond labor force aggregates. From the CBO’s perspective, 100 people going from full-time to part-time work is the same as 50 people going from full-time to no work. But if you’re interested in the cultural impact, those are totally different. Similarly, spending several months out of the labor force after the birth of a newborn (paid leave in other words) is different from not working for several years just randomly while your kid is a teenager. The business cycle also matters here. If there’s a 7% unemployment rate, there’s no sense fussing about labor force participation. And if there’s a 3% unemployment rate and participation is steadily rising, there’s also no sense fussing about it. But if unemployment is low and participation is stagnant, maybe there’s an issue.

“It depends” is not a great thesis for a column, but I really do think it depends. The Biden and Romney plans are both good, but I’m not ready to leap into the post-work future.

I am not a eugenicist

Steven Thrasher, the first-ever Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern’s prestigious school of journalism, decided the other day that I favor eugenics.

Shit happens on the internet, but this is not true and his refusal to back down from the claim does not bode well for journalism education.

What I think is that the United States should do more to take advantage of the fact that lots of people want to immigrate here, and also that we should do more to support families with children. Something I do discuss a little in the book is that there is sometimes a vague media association between pro-natalism and racist politics. But there’s no logical connection. In fact, the white population is substantially older than the U.S. population average, so pro-family policies would disproportionately benefit the younger, non-white population.

Improving construction costs is hard

Sometimes people ask me why we don’t reduce our infrastructure construction costs by just bringing in companies from countries — Spain, Italy, Korea, Sweden — that do a better job.

This Alon Levy post does a good job of explaining why sound project management isn’t really exportable. No matter who you hire to dig a tunnel in D.C., you are ultimately dealing with D.C.’s permitting, D.C.’s politics, D.C.’s politicians, and D.C.’s approach to budgeting and labor relations, all of which are embedded in a larger context of American politics and budgeting.

I’d just add that while Levy likes to throw the word “incompetence” around a lot, a big thing I’ve learned from their work on this subject is how much of it comes down to what politicians actually want. American elected officials largely seem to reject the logic of “if we did X, Y, and Z that would cut costs and let us do more projects, and that would be a win for me.” Their view is that X, Y, and Z would upset various people, and that’s a loss. You could bring in a Spanish guy to tell you that X, Y, and Z are really good, but ultimately, unless you have politicians who think that cost-effectiveness is desirable, you’re not going to get it.