Matt Yglesias

Oct 27th, 2010 at 6:15 pm

Endgame

It’s a small small world:

— Roger Sterling’s fake memoirs to be actually published.

— Everything you ever wanted to know about the consumer financial protection bureau.

— From the archive: EMH rhetoric.

— Even parking garages have a trade association.

— Haitians fed up with incompetent relief efforts.

Tilly and the Wall, “Pot Kettle Black”.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 5:27 pm

Conservatives Don’t Care About the Deficit, “Cutgo” Edition

As I’ve been at pains to argue for a while now, the modern American conservative movement does not care—even a little bit—about the size of the budget deficit. For example, congressional Democrats have a procedural rule in place called “PAYGO” that makes it difficult to reduce revenue or increase expenditure without offsets. A movement that cared a lot about the deficit would be promising to alter this rule so as to reduce loopholes. A movement that cared some about the deficit would be promising to leave it in place.

But as Jon Chait observes, that’s not what the GOP is doing, instead they want to scrap PAYGO and “replace it with a different rule, Cutgo, which would require that new spending be offset with spending cuts.”

In other words, they want to make it easier to expand the deficit. And note that this doesn’t even particularly make it harder to expand the deficit through spending. It just means that your new spending program needs to be called a “refundable tax credit” and administered by the IRS. That means that new government subsidies for things are likely to be handed out in a relatively inefficient way, via the tax code, and the deficit is likely to get bigger. Now you can make the case for these priorities, but it would be nice if the press would wake up and notice what they are.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 4:29 pm

What Was The Hipster?

Not hipsters, but they live in Williamsburg (cc photo by myshi)

Sometimes it’s worth linking to something just because it’s a piece of flat-out good writing, and I’ll put Mark Grief’s essay “What Was The Hipster?” in that file any day of the week.

My favorite graf:

The most confounding element of the hipster is that, because of the geography of the gentrified city and the demography of youth, this “rebel consumer” hipster culture shares space and frequently steals motifs from truly anti-authoritarian youth countercultures. Thus, baby-boomers and preteens tend to look at everyone between them and say: Isn’t this hipsterism just youth culture? To which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are worse. But there is something in this confusion that suggests a window into the hipster’s possible mortality.

I don’t really have anything to say about this, though I will note in a boring way that what I think is most interesting about the term “hipster” is that it seems to function in a purely relational sense. For any city-dwelling member of my generation, there’s always some other set of people who are the “hipsters” and some other set of people who think you’re one of the hipsters.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 3:30 pm

Institutional Design Matters a Lot

(cc photo by steve snodgrass)

This blog doesn’t endorse candidates for office, but this Greater Greater Washington endorsements post raised an issue of general applicability:

When Five Guys wanted to open a patio on an empty sidewalk in an area with vacant lots across the street, [incumbent Bob] Siegel opposed the idea unless Five Guys would make a donation to other community initiatives.

GGW sees this as an error of policy analysis:

This exemplifies a common problem with ANC 6D as well as some others around the city, which don’t see new retail and sidewalk cafes as a benefit on themselves but demand contributions to other projects in exchange for permission to exist.

I think that’s a misdiagnosis. We’re seeing an error of institutional design. Advisory Neighborhood Commissions don’t have very much power or very much responsibility. But they do have a lot of power over liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. ANC members, however, have views on things other than liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. So the most reasonable way for them to achieve a diverse set of policy goals is to adopt a very stringent attitude toward liquor licenses and sidewalk cafes, and to support very restrictive zoning rules that increase the value of variances, and then to trade permission to do business for other kinds of favors.

If a fixed portion of retail sales taxes raised in a given ANC were put into a neighborhood fund controlled by the commissioners, then I bet commissioners would suddenly be less interested in swaps of these sorts and more interested in attracting businesses to their area. But instead we’ve set up ANCs in a way that encourages them to be systematically biased against just saying “yes” to local retailers. What’s more the districts are so tiny that people don’t think about the systematic consequences of their actions. One itty-bitty neighborhood with 4 eateries instead of five doesn’t seem like a huge difference. But a citywide 20 percent “restaurant gap” encourages high prices, mediocre food, needlessly elevated unemployment, etc.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 2:29 pm

The Banality of Tea

I did a radio interview earlier today about the midterms and something that struck me repeatedly was the totally unwarranted sense many seem to have that a GOP pickup of 55-60 House seats would represent some kind of bold new era of conservatism and/or descent into manic fascism. I’m not very old, and I remember perfectly well life under a House GOP majority in the 1995-2006. They did some good things, they did some bad things, they did some stupid things, and then they lost power. Ta-da. Life goes on.

More generally, over the past 20 years we’ve had unified Democratic control for four years (1993-94 and 2009-10) and unified GOP control for four years (2003-2006) and divided government for the other twelve. In the twenty years before that divided government was even more common. So a big Republican win will take us from an abnormally strong political position for Democrats back to version of the situation that typically prevails in modern America—one that will probably leave them with less influence over policy than they had in 2007-2008.

I don’t want to deny that the change is a big deal. The shift out of the normal situation and into the abnormal one that occurred in November 2008 was a significant event. And it led to, among other things, a sweeping overhaul of the health care sector. So switching back into normal position is also a big deal. But it’s a big deal in the sense that things are going back to normal, not in the sense that we’re entering a new wild era in which Americans will finally repudiate the welfare state.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 2:22 pm

Communications Channel

As I’ve been noting lately, press reports that the Fed is plotting a new round of quantitative easing have been boosting markets and reviving hopes for an economic recovery. Then today the Wall Street Journal published a disturbing story about how Ben Bernanke thinks monetary policy is like golf and he doesn’t want to hit too hard.

Action, reaction: “Stocks slid Wednesday as concerns grew over whether the Federal Reserve’s plans to buy Treasury bonds might be smaller and slower than anticipated.”

This is bad. I think policymakers need to start recognizing the power of communications strategies over the economy under these circumstances. One important reason that changes in nominal interest rates traditionally had a lot of sway over the economy is that they spoke in a well-understood language. Rate cut means “Fed is boosting growth” while rate hike means “Fed is fighting inflation.” With nominal rates at zero, this traditional language has fallen apart. But communication still works. The Fed should say that it’s ready, willing, and able to do what it takes to boost the price level and that its actions—whether gradual or not—should be read in that light.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 1:27 pm

The Road to Additional Stimulus

David Leonhardt says Democrats lost their sense of urgency on economic recovery too soon. Jon Chait responds that ” I just don’t see many ways the political system, with its extreme partisanship and routine filibustering, could have accomodated more fiscal stimulus.”

Fortunately, my TAP Online column today addresses this:

Marketing and public relations are nice, but opinion is fundamentally driven by results. And on this, Obama has it backward. A party whose leaders realized that economic results were the most important driver of public opinion wouldn’t have renominated a conservative Republican to head the Federal Reserve. Even more astoundingly, having given Ben Bernanke a second term in office, the Obama administration didn’t get around to nominating anyone to fill the other vacant posts on the Federal Reserve Board until April 2010. Then, once the nominations were made, Senate Democrats didn’t speed the hearings and confirmation process along. One of Obama’s nominees, Peter Diamond, actually managed to win a Nobel Prize in economics while still languishing in confirmation limbo.

Similarly, the extent of stimulus possible in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was famously limited by the need to gain Republican support. Given that, shouldn’t someone have put reconciliation instructions into the budget resolution that would have allowed for additional stimulus to be undertaken by majority vote? Instead, Senate Democrats wound up spending much of 2010 in painstaking negotiations with a handful of New England Republicans, desperately trying to eke out a few more dollars.

A lot of liberals seem to prefer a quantity-based approach to second-guessing the Obama administration’s decisions. In this telling, the gang in the White House are history’s greatest monsters and they’ve been doing everything wrong. I disagree. I think they’ve mostly been making the right calls. But that’s not to say they haven’t made mistakes. Instead it’s to say that the mistakes they have made were a lot bigger than people generally realize.

Now to be clear, Democrats would be losing huge numbers of House seats under any plausible scenario. But the Harry Reids and Alexei Gianoulises and Russ Feingolds of the world could be in much better shape if a couple of things had been done differently.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

Our Heated Discourse

I’m not all that interested in in the details of John Burns’ response to critics of his somewhat critical profile of war-critic Julian Assange, but I did think this was interesting:

Burns said he doesn’t “recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation” following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used “language that I don’t think they would use at their own dinner table.” Such heated reactions to the profile, Burns said, shows “just how embittered the American discourse on these two wars has become.”

I think this shows less about American discourse on these wars than it does about how isolated from criticism writers at prestigious journalistic outlets have traditionally been. I don’t think American discourse about parking regulation or the definition of insider trading or the wisdom of consumption vs income taxes has become particularly embittered in recent years. Nevertheless, some of the responses I get over email and in comments to my posts on those subjects gets extremely vituperative.

A lot of people just like to be vituperative on the Internet. What’s more, for any given stance you can take on a political issue there’s always going to be someone who disagrees with you. For example, yesterday I found out that someone thinks Robert Greenwald is a huge sellout who recently “revealed himself as the sort of mendacious but quotidian monster who belongs lumped in with [Ezra] Klein, Yglesias, McArdle and Krauthammer. A real embodiment of the Compleat Suck.™ Someone I’d introduce to Guevara with the evidence in hand.” Weird, huh?

Well at least I think it’s weird. But it’s the world we live in and I suspect it’s the world we’ve always been living in, but the advent of modern communications technology makes other people’s reactions to your work much easier to find.




Oct 27th, 2010 at 11:29 am

Vote Less, Judges Edition

Justice

(cc photo by srqpix)

Via Adam Serwer, Radley Balko makes the case that elected judges lead to bad criminal justice policy:

How to reverse or ameliorate the damage already done is a debate we’ll be having for decades. But there is one change that could at least stop the bleeding: less democracy. As New York Times reporter Adam Liptak pointed out in a 2008 article, America’s soaring incarceration rate may be largely due to the fact that we have one of the most politicized criminal justice systems in the developed world. In most states, judges and prosecutors are elected, making them more susceptible to slogan-based crime policy and an electorate driven by often irrational fear. While the crime rate has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, polls consistently show that the public still thinks crime is getting worse.

I agree with that, but as I’ve said before I think there’s a much broader issue of too many elected officials in America. And I don’t think this should be understood as a call for “less democracy.” The United Kingdom is a democracy. But a resident of London votes for a borough councillor, a member of the London Assembly, a mayor of the city, a member of parliament, and a member of the European parliament. A resident of New York City votes for a city council member, a mayor, a public advocate, a city comptroller, a district attorney, a state assembly member, a state senator, a governor, a lieutenant governor, a state comptroller, a state attorney general, a member of the US house, two US Senators, and the President. Then on top of all that he votes for judges!

And you have to ask yourself—is all that voting better described as “more democracy” or as “people voting in a lot of elections they’re not realistically going to know anything about”? I’m going to take what’s behind door number two. There’s no point in holding elections that just consist of ignorance punctuated by the odd burst of demagoguery.

Update I forgot that New Yorkers also need to vote for school board and borough president.
Filed under: Crime, Political Reform



Oct 27th, 2010 at 10:27 am

A Hero of Our Time

Congressman Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, as quoted in ProPublica’s article on the House “New Democrat” Caucus:

At a Saturday session at the retreat, Rep. Kind acknowledged what had brought the lobbyists and lawmakers together. In these busy legislative times, he said, the New Democrats had become a “powerful voice in policy making,” and the business interests in the room were playing a crucial role in informing that voice.

“We’re working hard with you to get the policy right,” Kind told lobbyists for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and others.

Political junkies in the audience will note that Kind seems to be endorsing the Hall/Deardorff “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy” (PDF) model rather than the more populist “pols on the take” model. And it doesn’t really sound much less pernicious this way!




Oct 27th, 2010 at 9:29 am

CEO Pay, What Is To Be Done?

I basically agree with Kevin Drum about CEO pay. My pet evidence would be that entrepreneurial founder-managed firms (think Google) have very different pay structures in which you actually only get rich if the company does well. But where these discussion tend to lose me is at the “what is to be done” phase.

The best possible policy remedy to giant, seemingly undeserved increases in CEO pay, is some kind of sharply progressive consumption tax. But then again that would be the best policy response to well-deserved increases in CEO pay as well. Progressive taxation to finance useful public services and a modicum of cash grants to the poor is welfare-enhancing. The case for progressive taxation as a welfare-enhancing measure is strong when inequality goes up. And a tax base of consumption is more economically efficient than a tax base of income. What’s more, there are a number of policy measures—increased openness to immigrants and to foreign products—that would increase economic growth and decrease global poverty, but might further increase US inequality. All this makes for an extremely compelling case for heavy taxation of lavish consumption by rich people.

I think there are probably measures we could take to strengthen corporate governance, though I don’t know as much about this. But the way to assess a proposal to improve corporate governance is to ask whether the proposal would, in fact, improve corporate governance. Either way, like the tax argument, the case for any specific proposal would stand more-or-less independently of the issue of whether or not all or most CEOs are in some sense overpaid.

Filed under: Inequality, taxes



Oct 27th, 2010 at 8:57 am

The Mighty Talons of the Climate Hawks

I don’t really have much to say about it, but I’ve spent the past few days being taken in by Dave Roberts’ effort to popularize the concept of “climate hawks” so I thought I should do my part.

What’s a climate hawk? Well of course much like a deficit hawk or a national security hawk or an inflation hawk, a climate hawk is tough-minded and awesome and entitled to worshipful media coverage. We’re very serious people who want to confront the major challenges of our time. Are we environmentalists? Perhaps. But many of us aren’t really “nature-lovers,” we just think it would be unfortunate if low-lying areas were flooded, while vast new regions of the earth are stricken with drought. We recognize that the particulate pollution from burning coal and the geopolitical consequences of oil dependence are both dire enough to make a compelling case for energy reform even apart from the greenhouse gas issue.

We think it’s unfortunate congress didn’t pass a comprehensive climate bill, but we’re determined to do the best we can with EPA regulation and hope responsible people recognize that it’ll be better for everyone if congress takes another bite at this. And we’re hoping for a serious bite. After all, we’re climate hawks!

Filed under: climate, Energy



Oct 27th, 2010 at 8:31 am

FA Hayek, Statist

(cc photo by Salim Virji)

Karl Smith observes that, somewhat amusingly, in The Road to Serfdom Hayek ends up committing himself to a view of environmental regulations that’s well tot he left of where today’s center-left politicians are:

Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.

Of course the correct free market riposte to this proposal is that we can create a price mechanism. So instead of having the guys in the EPA building try to tinker with everyone’s factories, we could establish a legislative ceiling on the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions we’re willing to tolerate and then allocate permits to do it. That way the price mechanism—à la “the use of knowledge in society”—will be able to uncover the most economically efficient way of undertaking the reductions. But I guess Big Government Hayek doesn’t think that will work.

At any rate, I do think this is the issue that’s been underplayed in a lot of recent discussions of the institutional right’s funding sources. We’ve reached a point in the history of the world when the regulation of air pollution has become a first-tier political issues. And it’s naturally a controversial one since a lot of money is at stake. But there’s simply no support anywhere in the classical liberal tradition for the idea that an unrestricted right to pollute the air is part of “free markets” or any coherent conception of liberty or property rights. And yet opposition to carbon pricing and emissions regulations has become an article of faith across the American right. Some of that is political opportunism, some of it is ignorance, but a lot of it is the impact of corporate cash, especially from the extractive industries.

Filed under: climate, Ideology



Oct 26th, 2010 at 6:13 pm

Endgame

Make it all seem worthwhile:

“If we could guarantee 5 percent NGDP growth for several years, it would be great.”

— Barack Obama’s not-so-hot plan to beat a GOP congress.

Gas tax.

— Tweaking the area median income formula doesn’t change the fact that you need to increase supply to make housing cheaper.

How elite are you? I got 13 “elite” answers.

Husker Du does “Love Is All Around” (aka the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song).




Oct 26th, 2010 at 5:27 pm

What Price Bananas?

I really want to teach Scott Sumner to write shorter blog posts, because this throwaway paragraph embedded in a larger argument I don’t really agree with is great on its own:

[S]uppose we had been gladly importing Ecuadorean bananas for decades, naively thinking that any country named after the equator must be warm. Then we found out that the weather in Ecuador was actually quite cool (due to high altitude), and that bananas could only be grown there because the government was heavily subsidizing production in greenhouses. Of course most red-blooded Americans would be outraged by this discovery, as it would indicate that we were a bunch of patsies who had been victimized by the Ecuadorean “dumping” of subsidized goods. A few economists might argue, however, that if cheap bananas are good for the US, it doesn’t really matter why they are cheap.

Incidentally, I have in fact seen a government-subsidized greenhouse in Iceland where they were growing tropical flowers and citrus fruit:

greenhouse

I hope—but don’t dare assume—that the Icelandic government is rethinking some of its agricultural policies in the wake of their bubble collapse. The US has some irrational approaches in this regard, but it’s nothing compared to what they were up to.

Filed under: Iceland, Trade



Oct 26th, 2010 at 4:28 pm

NBA Season Preview

First off let me start by thanking Wizards owner Ted Leonsis for correcting my error in an earlier post. I wrote “Pollard family” when it should have been “Pollin.” The Pollins have been pillars of this community since long before I lived here, so I feel unusually bad about this typo.

More broadly, I’m afraid I’m going to have to say that the outlook for the Wizards as the NBA season begins is extremely bleak. Projections for this to be a somewhat below-average squad involve being (a) unduly optimistic about the recovery of Gilbert Arenas’ knees, (b) unduly optimistic about the performance of John Wall, and (c) probably too optimistic about how good Arenas ever was. Last year’s team was bad, and we’ve now lost a lot of players who were solid contributors. Wall would have to do something totally unprecedented to raise this team to anywhere other than awful. I should note that I say this not out of specific John Wall skepticism, but simply to note that now that very talented prospects don’t stay in college for very long rookies tend to be pretty bad. LeBron James and Kevin Durant both lived up to the hype—eventually—but as rookies were just guys who took and missed a ton of shots.

Beyond that, I agree with Arturo Galletti that the injury to Mike Miller is a bigger blow to the Heat than might be clear at first glance. The way this squad is put together there’s very little room for error. I think questions about LBJ, Wade, and Chris Bosh “coexisting” are overblown. The Eastern Conference playoffs will, however, give us a good look at how much matchups matter since I don’t see anyone on this team who’s going to defend Dwight Howard successfully.

The other thing I think people are kind of sleeping on is the Portland Trailblazers. This was a good team last year—fifty wins—and I don’t think their injury situation is going to get worse. What’s more, this is a squad that, if healthy, has the size and depth to match up with the Laker bigs.

Filed under: Basketball, Sports



Oct 26th, 2010 at 3:30 pm

We Are All Pointy-Headed Elites

Via James Downie, it turns out that not only is Charles Murray generally full of it, but elitism is on the rise as NASCAR ratings mysteriously plummet:

“The simple fact is that people just are not tuning in,” said Julie Sobieski, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions. “We’re looking at everything to find out why.”

Top ESPN executives, including president George Bodenheimer, traveled to Charlotte for the fifth race of the Chase, the Bank of America 500, and engaged NASCAR executives during several meetings. A team of ESPN’s top editorial staff, including Rob King, ESPN digital media editor-in-chief, and Glenn Jacobs, senior coordinating producer of SportsCenter, also attended the race and were given a three-day, behind-the-scenes immersion into NASCAR operations.

Obviously, Barack Obama’s sharia socialism is to blame here. Decent people worry that if they watch NASCAR, their parents will be sent off to the death panels.

Meanwhile, David Frum has a good post on Murray and the real American elite.

Filed under: Media, Sports



Oct 26th, 2010 at 2:31 pm

The Reagan Precedent

This is a bit of an aside in a column that’s primarily about legislative strategy, but I think Mark Schmitt is expressing a widespread tendency to take an undue level of comfort from the precedent of Ronald Reagan’s first term:

Many of the White House’s political troubles can be entirely explained by the economy, of course, since they are exactly comparable to Ronald Reagan’s unpopularity with similar levels of unemployment in 1982. But when the economy recovers, as it will, and his presidency regains its footing, Obama — and we — will need a whole new theory about how to make government work without losing the bigger vision.

Check out the level of GDP growth associated with the “morning in America” recovery:

By contrast, the CBO is projecting (PDF) 2.1 percent real GDP growth for 2011. Now it’s true that CBO’s estimate is on the pessimistic side. We might well do better than that. But the point I would make is that there’s nothing inevitable about a robust catch-up recovery. We entered the early 80s recession with high inflation and very high nominal interest rates. When Paul Volcker was satisfied that inflation was whipped, he implemented sharp reductions in nominal interest rates and growth came roaring back. But ever since nominal rates hit zero, the Fed’s been stumbling around, real rates are still pretty high, and nobody seems to have any politically feasible ideas about how to do better.

Filed under: Economy, History



Oct 26th, 2010 at 1:29 pm

Insider Trading

Andrew Ross Sorkin takes a look at some newly expansive definitions of insider trading:

Late last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought an unusual and colorful insider-trading case: It accused two employees who worked in the rail yard of Florida East Coast Industries and their relatives of making more than $1 million by trading on inside information about the takeover of the company.

How did these employees — a mechanical engineer and a trainman — know their company was on the block?

Well, they were very observant.

They noticed “there were an unusual number of daytime tours” of the rail yard, the S.E.C. said in its complaint, with “people dressed in business attire.”

He summarizes the new attitude as “the S.E.C. is no longer just making sure that employees are not abusing their position and breaching their fiduciary duty; it is focused on making sure the markets ‘feel’ fair.”

This doesn’t strike me as change for the better. There are two kinds of functions equity markets serve. One is that they aggregate information and channel capital to useful activities. The other is that they serve as casinos that generate a “take” for various brokers and the like. You can make the case that some kinds of restrictions on insider trading are necessary in order to help equity markets serve their former function. But the latter function isn’t something the government should be getting involved with.

Of course if I were running the stock market I would want small investors to “feel” that the market is fair. But the market is not, in fact, fair. And no quantity of S.E.C. policing is going to make it fair. If you want “fair” you should buy an index or some government bonds. The most valuable role the government could play would probably be to slap a giant “you probably shouldn’t invest here” sticker around the whole thing. Then firms and the stock market itself would face the somewhat challenging problem of inspiring investor confidence in the integrity of their operations, rather than getting the government to do it for them. Something like the observant railroad employees, by contrast, is exactly the kind of aggregation of information that we’re looking for in markets.




Oct 26th, 2010 at 12:28 pm

School Quality is Hard, Even in Early Childhood

(cc photo by familymwr)

I mentioned this once before, but I think that people sometimes exaggerate the contrast between what we know about charter schools and what we know about pre-kindergarden. In both cases, what we have are examples of highly effective intervention alongside other examples of lower-quality intervention and continued debate over what really works.

For a taste, check out Sara Mead on pre-K teacher quality:

These concerns are underscored by developments over the past several years. On the one hand, an important 2007 study found limited correlations between pre-kindergarten teacher’s educational credentials and observed classroom quality or child outcomes, raising questions about the established orthodoxy in the field. At the same time, new models–most notably the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS)–have emerged that offer valid and reliable measures of pre-k instructional quality based on what teachers actually do in the classroom–and are correlated with student learning outcomes. And there is also evidence that certain types of professional development are effective in improving the skills and effectiveness of pre-k teachers, whether or not they have a bachelor’s degree–such as high-quality coaching linked to CLASS and the combination of professional development, coaching, and progress monitoring provided through the Texas Early Education Model.

None of that is to say that pre-K boosters are wrong. On the contrary, they’re completely correct. High quality pre-K programs appear to have large benefits. But the situation is no different from the one facing K-12 education—high quality is both extremely valuable, somewhat hard to come by, and best obtained if we judge providers on their results rather than by assuming we know which inputs are the best.




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