New data challenges the cultural consensus on public housing | Hacker News Reader

New data challenges the cultural consensus on public housing

washingtonpost.com

93 pointse15ctr0n220 comments

There's a significant difference between what happens when you give an intervention to part of a population and all of it. Specifically, the overall system they're a part of will respond differently.

Take education, for example. It's pretty obvious that getting a college degree will help any one individual out - everyone applies for jobs, and employers will look favorably on those with a college degree. The calculus changes when you make it way easier for everyone to get a college degree, since employers can't prefer everyone.

I have a similar worry about UBI and other anti-poverty interventions. If the system is set up to squeeze the poor until they are inches away from starving or rioting, then an extra $500/yr will help any individual stuck there out by quite a lot. If you give everyone in that situation an extra $500/yr, I'm worried that what'll happen is that it gets sucked up by various landlords and rentiers. There's historical precedent for it, too - the lives of the American poor were not substantially improved by the vast amounts of excess wealth and productivity that let almost everyone off the farms.

Very well said - agree completely. It's all supply and demand. Giving everyone more of something will drive up demand. Prices will rise until equilibrium is reached again.

UBIs are presumably funded by taxes though, which take at least as much money out of circulation as it puts back in. Given the prevailing climate of weak consumption and overinvestment/savings glut that's likely to continue as long as the process of automation and outsource to low-labor-cost countries does, increasing demand isn't a bad thing at all.

That's an interesting thought. If automation and outsourcing keep happening, that should decrease the tax base as fewer people have work. That means less money to go to UBI. That sounds like a completely separate problem.

That's because taxing "work" is a silly idea when most work is done by machines and/or cheap foreigners. In the former case you tax wealth/production, and in the latter you tax imports.

Note that this is not necessarily an equilibrium where the welfare recipients are no better off. It depends on the negotiation position of the direct recipients compared to those that can extort wealth from them. If they've got no choice but to stay in a jurisdiction that has a police force that writes extortionate tickets backed up by a modern-day debtor's prison, the police system is going to squeeze that out of them. If it's straightforward to just pack up and leave to Montana or something, the police system won't push most people to that point. (Or they will, and it won't matter, because the people they're squeezing will be better off and in Montana.)

But shouldn't that already be happening now? The poor today are already making a whole lot more than they were 100 years ago. The problem is inflation kept up (or passed) their increased income. I think the same will happen with UBI. It's kind of like the new Monopoly money in the modern version of the game -- they added a bunch of 0's to the end of the bill's value, but it didn't change anything.

It's not inflation that I'm talking about. It's how much money goes to rent, or payday loans, or parking tickets, or court fees, or overdraft fees, or any other nickel-and-diming that claws wealth from the poor. There's a class of economic actors that can make life miserable for the poor unless they're given money, and if the poor have more money, the profit-maximizing price goes up and these rentiers wind up with the windfall.

I'm not convinced that UBI would be canceled out by inflation (although I agree with GP that it would likely be captured by landlords). This is all extremely speculative, but my intuition is that in the population where UBI would have the most impact on spending power, the money would mostly replace or pay down debt rather than become new demand. Meanwhile you’re replacing almost all need-based aid, so for many people actual incomes aren’t rising as much as it seems.

Then further up the scale, the smaller a portion of your income UBI represents the more of it will be invested/saved rather than spent. Maybe you take a vacation you otherwise wouldn’t, or replace your car a little sooner, but most of it is going towards the mortgage, retirement account or the kids college fund.

So I obviously don’t have any numbers for this, and I’m not saying UBI is the answer or necessarily even a good idea. But I see no reason to believe the outcomes wouldn’t be way more complex than just pushing up a demand curve.

But if UBI is the new norm, sooner or later all of the debt is paid off. Then what? Similarly with savings - after a few years of savings, people feel comfortable and want to live a little, and start spending. It might take a while, but I don't believe that the supply and demand effect will not occur.

The point isn't just that debt would be paid off. It’s that consumption would remain at a similar level, except instead of being funded by a combination of debt and aid it’s funded by UBI. For sure there'd be some inflation, I just wouldn't expect it to erase gains. After all, UBI would have to be funded by taxes in some form, so it’s not really “new” money entering the economy. On the other hand wouldn’t be surprised by a quick spike in rent, home prices and private college tuition.

I have no idea whether UBI would actually be a good move, but it’s a lot of fun to game this stuff out.

For example I wouldn’t be surprised if it led to better wages & conditions for unskilled labor, and maybe suppressed wages for higher earners. If you’re in a minimum wage job, UBI gives you a lot of leverage - you can quit without facing starvation. Companies would have to do more to attract and retain unskilled labor. On the other hand when you’ve got a mortgage, payments on the lexus and kids in private school, leaving your job to live on UBI alone isn’t really an option. Could also be that UBI lets you eliminate the minimum wage entirely and let the market sort it out.

No, debt won't be paid off, because the only realistic way of financing UBI is generating more debt through government bonds. And that, just like Quantitive Easing, will only create another market bubble followed by another financial crisis.

Maybe yes maybe no, but that's unrelated to people paying off their credit cards.

Funding an expense like that with bonds really only makes sense to me if you expect it to result in growth (in which case its not necessarily a problem), but even in that case it sounds very inflationary. More so than UBI itself. I'm no good at macro though, and will happily say that at this point I'm arguing out of my depth, along with anyone who makes an argument without numbers behind it.

> the lives of the American poor were not substantially improved by the vast amounts of excess wealth and productivity that let almost everyone off the farms.

While it's likely that the opportunity to escape poverty is lower today than in the past, objectively things are far better today for the poor than at the turn of the 20th century when the U.S. economy was transitioning away from being heavily agrarian [1]. At that time, the poor had far less leisure, food security, and sanitation.

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment; I am highly skeptical of UBI and assert that its extreme expense is not practical. Likewise, countries that offer free or low-cost college don't enjoy increased enrollment by students of low-income families [2].

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/a-r...

2. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-education-oecd-idUSKBN0H41...

I think we have a roughly equivalent picture of what changed for the poor, just different words to describe it. The actual work necessary to keep everyone fed and clothed fell by a factor of at least twenty, while the lot of the poor improved by something like a factor of two to five. They're far better off, sure, but far below the 1:1 ratio that non-systematic analysis will often assume for anti-poverty interventions.

Sorry, where does article [2] show a lack of correlation between low-cost college and low-income enrollment? The only comment that seemed relevant was the following, which implied the opposite:

"In addition to less educational mobility, the United States, along with Japan, Germany, Austria and Estonia, has "less equitable access" to higher education, meaning that it's harder for people with lower socioeconomic status to attend college, the OECD's Schleicher said. That contrasts with countries such as Finland, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands, which have both more equitable access to education and higher educational mobility, he said."

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. The graduation rate for US students is 8 percent higher than Germany. The original article that talked about it was pretty opinionated so I opted for an unbiased source. However, that omitted the analysis.

Thanks for the clarification. 5 minutes of internetting points out that that the 8 percent difference (39us, 31ger) is at 4 years while the 6 year us number is 59 and the ?8? year ger number is 77. The relationship between cost of college and low income graduates seems pretty unclear to me still.

http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/01/07/america-losing-gradua... (and i make no claims to the authenticity of this source - 5 minutes of internetting...)

I would never expect even 5 minutes of internetting to fact-check my comment :) . I guess it's not especially clear and my point is more or less invalidated.

Thank you for commenting.

Poverty has more to do with a lack of rights, lack of knowledge, lack of connections, lack of opportunity, etc. Those things lead to a lack of money. Giving people money does not tend to resolve those issues, but resolving those issues leads to more money.

I think the UBI is a terrible idea. It is a theoretically easy answer. In reality, it would do more harm than good, for a great many reasons.

Giving people money does not tend to resolve those issues

Didn't the study in this article hint at the exact opposite though?

Housing assistance is not the same thing as cash. Also, assisting poor families so they can raise their kids with more stability is not the same thing as just handing out money.

The US needs to be doing a lot more for families than it currently does. We also need to actively work to solve the extreme lack of affordable housing generally.

I don't understand how you are confusing housing assistance for poor families with minor children with just giving people money. These are very different things.

Edit: I will add that we need to be doing more for families simply because they have minor children, completely unrelated to their income level. One of the problems in the US is that so much assistance is tied to being poor. This creates the nightmare situation we have where you have to continue to fail so you can continue to qualify for assistance. Assistsnce should be based on having human needs -- like a medical crisis or a dependent child or a handicap -- not on your income or lack thereof. This approach is generally more common in Europe and it is a more effective social safety net than one defined mostly by income level.

You are correct in that UBI alone won't magically solve the problem.

I've thought that the primary goal for UBI is an attempt to solve wealth distribution inequality.

Other things that also help with that issue are providing basic subsistence at a rate that the market is free to undercut; ideally also affordable with UBI.

That would allow for competition, but provides a price cap for the market as well. If you say X cannot go above Y, or else the government will find a way to address this social need that society is not, then you can encourage competition while limiting predatory impacts.

I think the UBI is a really short ride to hell for society. Time and energy put into discussing or developing the idea take away from a more vital, less popular and harder to solve problem: The lack of decent affordable housing, which is a huge and growing crisis in the US and has been for literally decades.

I have written multiple pieces as to why I think UBI is a terrible idea. Here are two that I think are particularly pertinent to your remarks:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol...

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...

> I've thought that the primary goal for UBI is an attempt to solve wealth distribution inequality.

I disagree; I think the primary goal for UBI is to remove perverse incentives. For example, removing welfare traps (where you end up worse off if you start working), or expanding the reach of price discovery (social tenants have no incentive to move somewhere cheaper if the govt covers your rent either way, and landlords have no incentive to charge less than the HB ceiling because tenants on HB don't care).

I think it's well worth doing even if it doesn't reduce inequality (though obviously it'd be nice if it did that too).

Absolutely - poverty is a far more complex system than "not having enough money", and while UBI may (or may not) improve the standard of living for the very poor, alone it certainly wouldn't lift people out of poverty (or help them very much to lift themselves).

But I believe the long term concern is different - what the hell do we do with an economy that no longer requires human labor to be productive? We're not there yet, but it doesn't look like the automation train is jumping the tracks any time soon. Truck and cab drivers have what, 15 or 20 years left? How long until factory labor is completely obsolete? Technological change eliminating jobs is nothing new, but this isn't farm workers moving to the city. This is jobs disappearing forever to be replaced by nothing.

We need to start thinking about how we're going to divide up the stuff we produce when no one gets paid to produce it. Automation looks like the end of capitalism, and its up to us and our children how painful that's going to be.

So no, UBI probably isnt the right answer, and anyway there won't be the political will for something like that until things get seriously worse. But as long as we continue to address our immediate problems it's an issue worth thinking about if we want to avoid much greater pain down the road.

Winston Churchill gave the example of the time some do-gooders wanted to help the poor by buying out a bridge and eliminating the tolls. Afterward, rents went up by about the exact cost of daily use of the bridge.

http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-...

This is the old "raising everyone's income creates inflation" argument that is unfounded.

Yes, there is the supply and demand curve that shows prices increasing with increasing wages. But those graphs don't show the percentage increase wrt incomes, which must be less than 100% because wages are less than 100% of the cost of a good or service (think about it). So rising incomes benefit buyers more than sellers. Since the wealthy control the means of production, it's easy to see where this notion came from.

Inflation comes from printing money. Please stop conflating it with increases in demand or production (which is deflationary anyway under a constant money supply). I'm no economist and I'm not arguing the long-term monkey business that rent seekers will inflict on the poor, but that's a separate issue from simply giving people more money or a UBI.

EDIT: Upon further thought I realized that increasing supply causing deflation is as untrue as increasing demand causing inflation.

I'm not making the inflation argument, perhaps I should have been more clear on that. I'm arguing against looking like you're helping the poor when the entire net result is giving rent-seekers more fat to squeeze.

Ah ok that's definitely an issue also, didn't mean to make assumptions.

degrees aren't education. More education for all is better and not a zero some game. Everyone knowing how to read and write and program is better than only some knowing. Everyone having some basic understanding of physiology enough to know when to seek medical care is better than some not knowing.

There is a shortage of education in the world.

Same with money and wealth. Computers have been getting cheaper making everyone wealthy. I don't care that google still has more computing power than me. I care that I have a 1000x more computing power for the price I had to pay 10 years ago.

More wealth for everyone is good. Imagine if some fairy gave everyone 1gigawatt of power. It would be a net benefit to everyone.

Landlords provide a service. The state also collects property tax which is similar to rent in exchange for some services.

Lives of american poor are absolutely better than their farming ancestors.

"Remarkable" things happen when kids grow up in projects, such as earning 500 bucks more ANNUALLY. Maybe the authors managed to p-hack their way to some statistical significance with this number, but I would think that the life significance of an extra 500$ a year in the U.S. is not something astounding.

They also found decreased rates of incarceration, which is pretty significant.

Well, considering that median household income for the US is $52k/yr, $500/yr is ~1% increase in household income per person, so a ~1-2% effect per household, which isn't nothing, even if not astounding.

Of course, that's if it were households which earned a median income that received the benefit. Given the correlation between poverty growing up and poverty later in life, it's likely more like a 5% increase per household on the low end of the spectrum, which I would call a fairly strong effect.

So, you discount the research because your intuition says otherwise. I personally find that remarkable.

I don't think it's discounting the research because of intuition. It's discounting the research because, while there is a statistically significant difference, the commenter above is arguing that it is not practically significant.

The poverty level in United States is $11,880. At the top end, $500 is 4.2% and plenty of people are making less than $10,000 a year. At that rate, I think $500 is starting to look statistically significant.

https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines

Let's not conflate the very different concepts of "statistical significance" and magnitude of the effect.

An effect with a small magnitude can be highly statistically significant, and vice versa.

If you don't understand the very important difference, then you probably flunked out of freshman stats.

Sadly, I suspect a significant number of people who didn't flunk freshman stats have trouble with this. The terminology is simply poor.

No need to throw shade, BTW.

Thinking that an extra $500 a year in America couldn't significantly impact someone's life says more about you than the study.

I was more so going for the point that it doesn't propel you into a different socio-economic class. 500$ is not necessarily a higher education or a better job, it's more like an extra few overtime shifts.

There is no "p-hacking", you can see the original study here [1].

And $500 seems like allot to privileged people but even shopping at a bottom level chain such as Ross, you could get 50 pairs of pants for that price. Or a loaf of cheap bread almost every day.

Even for someone just above the poverty line it represents a 5% raise and for the 40 million below that, even more.

If data don't match ideology, it is not the data that is wrong.

[1]http://www.nber.org/papers/w22721?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...

Statistical significance is a measure of certainty that the effect exists, not about how big it is.

It's good that you used "remarkable" as a bridge for your analysis, but can we also edit this title to be less click-baity (I'm sad to see Washington Post start steeping as low as Buzzfeed here too)?

Suggested edit:

"The remarkable thing that happens to poor kids when you help parents with rent"

"Children of parents who receive public housing assistance associated with having better life outcomes"

To add to this -- whenever one does analysis based on very broad correlations, and where there is much potential for confounding variables that can never be perfectly controlled for, it is very easy to cut the data in a way that results in a 5-20% effect either way. That is why there are studies that show pretty much everything from broccoli to butter both causes and prevents cancer -- http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype. So when looking at correlations, you need to ask, is this a "broccoli causes cancer result" (a small effect, easily caused by confounding variables and/or p-value hacking) or is this a "cigarettes cause lung cancer result" (a giant effect that cannot be explained any other way). The study in this article is a "broccoli prevents cancer" type of result. It is possible there is a small effect from the intervention, it is also possible there is no effect. The only information we can actually take away from the study is that there is not an obvious large effect.

The article says the earnings are $500 more future yearly income _per one incremental year in public housing_. For someone in public housing for a number of years, this is significant.

...but I would think that the life significance of an extra 500$ a year in the U.S. is not something astounding.

Based on what data?

Everyone here is focusing on the $500/yr, which I agree sounds like nothing although is actually substantial to many of these families. But the incarceration figures in the article are pretty interesting: an 11% smaller chance of ending up in jail sounds pretty good to me.

Yeah and it was 500 per year per year of public housing. You might easily spend five or ten years there, for a very significant increase in income. (treating this as linear is reasonable since the number comes from comparing siblings and so should be an average of the effects per year over a wide range of years. Compared to a study that just investigated the first year they were there.)

On the other hand, that was only for girls. Which makes me worried that they were picking out outcomes that matched their end goal.

Even if it only helped out the girls it shows SOME correlation and a need for more family stability assistance.

>"earn hundreds of dollars more each year " ...

Uh, not worth spending millions on public housing then..

IMO the "Section 8" (housing vouchers) seems to be a market solution to housing issues and helps fight segregation (when landlords arent doing illegal things). One of the solutions to classism is to have people mix more. Live together, school together, work together, marry together.

IMO the "Section 8" (housing vouchers) seems to be a market solution

In theory that's true, but in practice many U.S. municipalities have restricted the development of any new housing to the point that Section 8 vouchers are impractical due to costs and simple apartment availability (http://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/supply...). Without doing something about NIMBYs and local zoning processes, Section 8 vouchers will not be effective.

Matthew Desmond's book Evicted is pretty good on this point (http://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/d...). I've written or worked on Section 8 proposals, as well HUD 811, 202, HOPE VI, and related programs (see http://seliger.com/2008/07/27/reformers-come-and-go-but-hud-... if you're curious); the people who run them, especially in high-cost cities like LA, SF, NYC, and Seattle are well aware of the problems that local zoning imposes on affordable housing.

> IMO the "Section 8" (housing vouchers) seems to be a market solution to housing issues

Once any kind of government vouchers or subsidies are involved, you don't have a market solution anymore. Market solutions are solutions that the market provides all by itself.

I agree that vouchers are a better solution than public housing or rent control, and probably introduce fewer distortions in the market than those policies, but it is incorrect to call vouchers a market solution.

In particular, voucher programs generally require landlords to work with local housing authorities to accept rent payments, additional inspections, etc. As a result of this, many landlords don't want to accept tenants who use the vouchers.

Agreed but for rather different reasons.

I've travelled through the US and stumbled into public housing projects on a few occasions. I found them simply repugnant. Public policy that clumps the poor together is beyond stupid. It's made even worse when you factor in how schools in the US get their budget (property taxes). So, this housing policy further guarantees that the poor stay poor because they end up in crappy schools.

It's like America doesn't actually want to fix any of their social problems.

While you're right about property taxes going to schools, the reality is that urban schools tend to have higher expenditures per pupil than many upscale suburban schools.

For example, in Massachusetts, Boston has per-pupil expenditures about $1,000 more (~5%) than Concord, one of the tonier western suburbs. Sure, Boston has many upscale areas but it also includes neighborhoods like Dorchester and Roxbury.

Yes, you can look through the data and find especially old industry cities that have lower spending than many suburban towns but expenditure/pupil doesn't really follow clear patterns based on the income of the community.

If you're comparing dollar value, then you'll need to compare relevant quantities there though. "hundreds of dollars more per year" over several decades is tens of thousands of dollars.

What is the relative expense of "section 8" than public housing, since it doesn't produce better economic outcomes than public housing?

But like you mention, there are other axes of evaluation, such as fighting segregation, classism, etc., in addition to basic social justice. "Market soultions" are quite (most?) often the best solutions along these axes, but being a market solution is not an end within itself, IMHO.

This study is just one tiny aspect of the big picture. But its still worthy of publicizing because it's not what I, or many others, expected.

"have people mix more" seems on its face a good idea, but people don't do it naturally. It'd be interesting to know if it actually works or not. I'm not sure how to classify the impulses people have surrounding "they're not like me." I also recall actual violence when forced busing was in play to remix the balance of who went to what school.

I think the problem in America is the overwhelming use of techniques of sub-linguistic persuasion in media. Think of Alex Baldwin's character in "Glengarry/Glen Ross." Or, if you prefer, an actual practitioner who is running for President right now.

Could you offer an explanation of what you mean by "sub-linguistic persuasion"? Honestly curious what you mean by this.

I mean the use of symbols that are not quite at the level of language to persuade others.

The scene with Alec Baldwin in "Glengarry Glen Ross" is an example - "third prize is you're fired" isn't quite a language construct - it's purely trading on fear. You don't parse it, understand it, then critique or agree.

If you try to treat these things as language, they fall apart. This leads to this massive disconnect in interpretation.

Over the last year, Scott Adams has gone over this quite a bit in explaining the current USAian Republican POTUS candidate. Other source include ( to a lesser extent ) Marshall Macluhan's various work and "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

"One of the solutions to classism is to have people mix more. Live together, school together, work together, marry together."

There are two problems with this. One, mixing people together often results in the two groups fighting over scarce resources (whether that be spots on the football team, dates to the prom, playing rights at the local basketball court, or well-paying union or government jobs). The battle for scarce resources actually greatly increases class or race based animosity. Second, there are very real differences in behavioral patterns between groups. If you bring in a low class population that is playing loud music until 12AM and letting their kids make mischief around the neighborhood, again, that is going to greatly increase classism.

See for instance the books "Boston Against Busing" or "Philly War Zone: Growing Up in a Racial Battleground" which describes the conflicts that happened when integration was a big thing in the late 60s and early 1970s.

I also wrote a blog post myself on how I changed my mind about the usefulness of Section 8 vouchers and using integration as a solution to class and racial divides: http://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html

I agree completely with the sentiment, but I don't think that the current Section 8 program is doing a very good job accomplishing those goals. At least some landlords cater specifically to Section 8 tenants, resulting in buildings full of poor people that might as well be traditional public housing, and many other landlords refuse to accept Section 8 tenants altogether. If you really want integration you either need to give cash directly to the tenants (so that the landlords don't and can't know they are receiving a subsidy), or you need to build Singapore-style (high quality, non-means-tested) public housing. Or both. And we need to make sure that affordable housing, whether public or private, is built in places where people actually want to live and can find work, not a 45 minute drive into the suburbs where land is cheap.

In NYC, the problem is a severe shortage of low to middle income housing units, whether that be market-rate or public housing. Every new building that pops up is a luxury building - serving as an investment or pied-a-terre for rich foreigners or front for money laundering. Our mayor's plan to expand affordable housing is to have these luxury building developers set aside a percentage of these luxury units to house low income people in their luxury buildings, which obviously is an extraordinarily inefficient way to provide affordable housing and doesn't even come close to meeting the demand.

Since private developers aren't building apartments catering to low income people, the government needs to step in and develop them themselves. High-rises with barebones utilitarian apartments. Get rid of this 150 square feet mandate on living rooms, living rooms are a luxury already as it is since most tenants erect makeshift walls to convert them into additional bedrooms to make the rent affordable.

The units should be market-rate, but governments will prioritize applicants who are U.S. citizens, have children, don't have a criminal record, etc. If they were to sell as condos, then priority would be given to first-time homebuyers and people who actually will live in the place.

A certain percentage can be allocated to low income people, but unlike current public housing, you shouldn't be able to just live there forever, especially if your income increases to a point where you're no longer low income.

The main idea is that we need to increase the supply of non-luxury apartments to compensate for the failure of the private markets to do the same. This would be similar to public housing, except that it would have market-rate apartments.

> earn hundreds of dollars more...

I don't know the exact numbers but if the mean is nearly ten thousand and the standard deviation is nearly one thousand then this is a statistically insignificant p-value

That's not true. If you have a large enough sample, you can be confident that even a small improvement in mean, despite a large stddev is meaningful. Whether it actually matters in the real world and causes positive outcomes for people is an entirely different matter.

"...studied the effects of Section 8 and did not find evidence that vouchers were any better for children than traditional public housing..."

Aside from, presumably, more direct experience with crime? Because housing projects do have higher crime rates, right?

It seems there may be some context missing here. Aside from the clear title, I had difficult teasing out the value in this story.

People like us that used to care just got fatigued out on these issues. We're never given the full story. The right doesn't cover these topics, and the left exaggerates and manipulates them. Leaving a large gap of information about causes and effects both long term and short term. My relatives came to America with little to nothing, they were dirt poor back home, and dirt poor when they moved here. Lived in a poor neighborhood and the first thing they did was get the hell out of there. Reason: the lack of civility of the people living there. Not all poor people are "uncivilized" but not all poor people are "just unfortunately people trying their best" either. Too many of them are where they are for a reason, defective characteristics. And it seems no one wants to be honest about that.

Thats because there is nothing to be honest about. The obvious question become what reason are you talking about. How do you objectively define defective characteristics which cant be referensed to culture, upbringing etc without being able to point to some sort of mental illnes?

You don't think: laziness, anger management problems, party culture, pump & dumping women, being chronically late, not taking care of your kids, beating women and children, being on welfare with 3 kids and having a front yard full of trash, not caring about grades or good behavior. You don't think those things are defective characteristics? If you live a nice neighborhood most of your life you might not get it. When you mix with these people, work with them like I have you start to realize why they are where they are in life.

Any citation on poor people being poor because they have "defective characteristics"? That is a little unsettling, especially if you start to explore the demographics of poverty...

My perspective: I moved to the States from an Eastern European country in the early 90's. We lived in a public housing project for about two years, before my parents saved enough money to move to the suburbs. What I remember: there was constant fighting, drug dealing, and public alcohol consumption; our apartment was broken into twice, my father was mugged once; there was trash and filth everywhere and people blasted music well into the night; very few people, sans my parents and other immigrants like them, had actual wage-paying jobs. There was just a general and very palpable feeling of social and moral decay.

The behaviors that I witnessed, that my parents witnessed, cannot be explained economically, because the immigrant families that lived there (Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, and some Russians) simply didn't exhibit these same "defective characteristics" or behaviors, even though we were just as poor (and learning a new language) - it was almost exclusively from the native population that had lived there before we arrived.

This indicates that the problem is either cultural, or something else. How do you fix the culture? That I don't know.

"Civility" is learned behavior, and an unending history of government-imposed racial and economic segregation is bound to result in a gap in learned behaviors. Maybe we should stop allowing our governments to create exclusive neighborhoods for the wealthy. The market has no power to exclude cheaper homes.

Uh, we're from eastern Europe where everyone in the country is the same ethnicity. We had the extreme rich and the extreme poor and we all behaved. Money and civility are two different things. In fact we had communism which followed and really kept people out of opportunities. We didn't walk around acting like rednecks or gangsters. Same as in the USA 50 years ago. When blacks and whites used different bathrooms, and racial segregation was at its peak, still both black and white communities dressed well to go to church, authority was more respected, the family stayed in tact, sex before marriage was taboo. Now despite "integration and desegregation" culture and morality has rotted out society.

Long story short, I don't agree with "government is the problem, government is the solution". Low culture and standards are the problem. High culture and standards are the solution. Regardless of neighborhood or income.

America is not integrated. I agree culture and standards are the solution. Those do not spread easily in segregated societies.

Culture & standards were higher during segregation, we are more integrated than we were in the past and the culture rot is even worse. Your narrative that race and separation has everything to do with it is incorrect.

I grew up poor. I still am really. This is entirely true. Now that is not to say that it is entirely their fault, if your parents are two minimum wage, alcoholic, chain smokers who had kids at 16 what example do you have to emulate?

I think we do education all wrong. 12 years of education should leave you in a position to feed and house yourself. If it can't do that, why bother with it? I say more trade schools, less focus on college prep.

Example:

I bought a house that is essentially right on the line between the wealthy and poor areas in my town. If you go to the Wallmart on the poor side the carts are just left everywhere but the Wegmans on the wealthy side the patrons bother to put them away.

That's because the words "uncivilized" and "defective characteristics" are words tied to cultural, social, and moral norms that vary from person to person, so it's hard to have a quality discussion along those lines. In my book there are "uncivilized" and "defective characteristic" people among all sorts of income lines (and vice versa), up to and including the very rich.

I will say that I do kind of get what you mean (in that there may be unique problems with concentrated poverty that hinder mobility -- as a theoretical, for instance, if crime was a much bigger problem in impoverished areas, that definitely would be of concern). But too much of the low quality articles written on poverty have a high tendency to fall back on stereotype... we must be careful to be more data oriented.

Personally, I don't think this story was one of those political type stories you often see on this type of subject that fall back on well-worn tropes. This was a study that simply tried to examine whether subsidized housing helps out future household earnings. For many groups, it did. For a few groups, it didn't. In light of the issues with social mobility in America at present, I didn't consider the article that low quality personally.

The original study probably would have been a fair bit more enlightening and hopefully had a much more thorough analysis: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22721?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...

But unfortunately it's behind a paywall. :|

I would guess they mean rule following, being considerate of others, self control, the sorts of things that can help you succeed in society.

But yeah, specific meaning varies from person to person, and culture to culture.

> Because housing projects do have higher crime rates, right?

I'd be surprised if they did. Landlords opt-in to the Sec 8 program, and the ones that do generally do so because it's a profitable course for a "problematic" property. As a non-Sec 8 recipient I will always shy away from Sec 8 friendly housing because it tells me a lot about the landlord, the neighborhood, and the condition of the building.

This depends on local laws. In many places it is illegal for landlords to deny applicants because of their source of income.

In the US? Landlords do not have to accept Sec 8 and as far as I am aware no state has a law against rejecting an applicant for lack of income/credit. On the federal level income status is not protected.

My parents own a couple houses that they rent out. They were looking for a tenant after the previous tenant disappeared without paying several months rent, and one lady that applied had Section 8. She was a single mother, and my mom really felt for her, because she raised me as a single mom herself, and while she'd never had to live in public housing she did get assistance from WIC (or whatever it was called in the 80s). She really thought it was going to be win-win: since the government was paying the rent, they'd always get the check, and this single mom would have a nice place to live and raise her kids.

Well... it was fine, for about six months. Then the lady's old boyfriend starting hanging around the house all the time, bringing his drug dealing friends around, and one day the renter just ditched the place in the middle of the night, leaving the entire place pretty much trashed. My parents had to spend weeks repairing the damage to the house and cleaning it up (my mom said the bathtub was literally black with grime).

So now they are extremely reluctant to rent to a Section 8 holder again. They lost money on the deal, considering the costs of repairs and cleaning, even with all the labor for the repairs/cleaning done by them rather than hiring a service.

> "However, for black boys growing up in the very poorest projects, the benefits of housing assistance when they entered the labor force were also indistinguishable from zero."

So public housing/vouchers slightly raises income and reduces the likelihood of going prison, except when it doesn't.

> Comparing the older children to their younger siblings, who will spend more time living in the project, allows the researchers to focus specifically on the effects of housing assistance as opposed to those of parenting or other factors unique to each family.

That sounds like a very questionable control group...

I'm sure people have suggested this, but what's the thinking about giving people housing stipends instead of making them live in a specific building which is annexed for a housing project? Seems like this could address some of the shortcomings of housing projects such as racial segregation and concentration of crime.

They do this here in the UK, it's called housing benefit. Still get segregation due to affordability of housing, but in part it's there to get around issues suurounding ghettoised sink estates and allow people freedom to live where they need to live.

We effectively already offer this in the US -- it's Section 8 "Housing Choice Voucher", as the article mentions.

http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_choi...

You will find that places accepting Section 8 vouchers are highly concentrated, poorly connected to transit, and highly segregated. Local property owners often vigorously fight zoning that allows any new, better connected, or mixed income development that accepts section 8 payments. So in effect you get privately managed projects. Its pretty tragic really.

Is there a good reason this aid is given as a voucher versus giving out money against proof of a rental contract (e.g. how it works in Finland)? Simplified bureaucracy? This would solve at least some of the discrimination problems since there wouldn't be a class of people recognizable by them holding a special form of money.

What specifically does "against proof of a rental contract" mean? Rental contracts, at least apartment ones here in the states, often require some up front cash. Is this not the case in Finland? If it is the case, is the government provided money given to the render before or after the contract? If given before, how do they prevent people from just stealing it? If given after, how do people without money provide the up-front cash?

These and similar questions are some common reasons behind using vouchers/stamps instead of cash.

Yeah, this is one of many reasons I'm in favor of direct cash grants rather than vouchers and dispensation of services that could be purchased more cheaply on an open market. Don't get me wrong, I'm not free market zealot, but the current housing voucher program is one of the least efficient means of housing individuals I can imagine.

I believe that the government makes deals with landlords to rent below market rate (in exchange for an endless supply of tenants). To give someone market rate to go out and rent a place would likely cost more.

In the US, when given a section 8 housing voucher(which is practically impossible to get unless you just happened to sign up a decade ago.); you can take that voucher wherever you like.

In my county, all a Ladlord needs to do is comply with some sensible regulations, like have running water, and he's a section 8 landlord.

A lot of landlords, rent barely inhabitable units, or run down mobile homes, and make a tremendous amount of money.

I knew a doctor, who bought an old trailer lot, and turned it all section 8 units. He made a killing off the government.

The tenants were just happy to not be homeless.

A much, much bigger problem in the US is that houses have trended larger, fancier, with more amenities, etc. New houses have more than doubled in size since the 1950s, while holding fewer occupants and having more amenities. They are inevitably much more expensive.

Genuinely affordable housing is in very short supply and this fact has gotten steadily worse for decades. If we built more basic, decent housing that was a reasonable size, this would solve a lot of problems for a great many Americans. But we have made it incredibly hard, if not impossible, to do this. Zoning laws, federal regulations, tax incentives and financing mechanisms have helped create a situation where those that can afford to buy a house at all are crazy to not get the largest house they can afford and, at the same time, homelessness is on the rise.

It is madness.

The remarkable thing that happens when the state funds rent like that is increasing rents until the original situation is reached again or the bubble bursts. We already have enough trouble with the low or even negative interest rates that launch house prices into unprecedented heights.

Instead of spending huge amounts of money on inner-city school districts, we should build public housing in good school districts in the suburbs. Integration is the answer to inter-generational poverty, not the highly refined "separate but equal" of our current policies.

Part of the reason the suburban schools in good districts are so good is because they have relatively low population density and relatively high property tax revenue. So they can spend more money per student.

At some point there are probably diminishing returns to the amount of $$ spent per student in a school system. But you can imagine that most suburban parents would have a hard time reducing the $$ spent on their own kids for the benefit of the greater good.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle: High housing cost -> affluent population -> more tax revenue -> better schools -> increased home demand -> higher housing cost -> more affluent population ... ... ...

The other cycle is self-reinforcing too: Low housing cost -> working class population -> less tax revenue -> worse schools -> reduced home demand -> lower housing cost -> even less affluent population ... ... ...

There doesn't seem to be an obvious weakest link, but I'd start with untying school funding from LOCAL taxes and from "school performance" which is code-word for "richer students". Allocate funds state-wide or even nation-wide to those schools with the highest need.

EDIT: Alternatively, let me send my kid to whatever school I want, regardless of which side of some artificial school district line I live.

Sadly the first circle is not self-reinforcing (and, sadly, the second cycle is entirely accurate).

Instead, in the 'good exurban schools' case, the evolution usually goes:

1. Rural, periphery area attracts affluent folks seeking bigger houses on cheaper land. High-end residential subdivisions are developed.

2. Increased tax revenue allows for good schools, nice government amenities.

3. Good schools attract additional residents. Residential population swells, commercial and industrial population remains low.

4. Residential brings fewer tax dollars per infrastructure cost than commercial or industrial. At some point, municipal costs (roads, sewer, fire, schools) begin to approach revenue. Services are cut. Schools decline, making residents eligible to contemplate moving to another area in step #1 or step #3. Those who can't afford to move to a newer area stay; they are thus on average lower-income than those who left. At this point, there is a danger of falling into the second cycle.

Maybe my thinking is clouded by Bay Area particularities, then. Here, when a school gets good, housing prices simply go up. Areas stay ultra-rich, and schools stay ultra-good. Look at Cupertino, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Belmont, Portola Valley. Are these areas ever going to cost more than their taxpayers can fund?

Bay Area towns aren't exurban periphery and aren't low on commercial and industrial jobs. Atherton is obviously buoyed solely by the residents' wealth, but the rest of them are mixed-use areas. Furthermore, the Bay Area concentrates more wealth than your average US metropolitan area.

The evolution I laid out can be most readily observed in places where urban areas are not hemmed-in geographically, and easy access to cheaper undeveloped land exists, so new exurban nodes can be readily created. Right now, Northern Virginia (DC suburbs), Atlanta, Raleigh, Dallas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Kansas City, and Minneapolis are experiencing this in their urban areas. California yet again a special case because exurban areas are usually much, much further away than elsewhere (Santa Clarita, Temecula, Palmdale -> LA; Santa Rosa, Fairfield, Tracy -> SF/SJ).

Then, yea, your examples are outside of those two cycles--to be fair I didn't say the ones I listed were the only two possible chains. When I think of "good schools" though, I don't think of "temporary wealth" exurbs where accountants are buying McMansions. I'm thinking of schools that feed into the Ivy League and fiercely compete with elite private schools that also feed the Ivies.

This is surprisingly not the case - for example, Detroit and DC city schools (generally seen as underperforming) spend 50%+ more per student than the suburban average.

There's more to the story than $ spent per student. Zuckerberg donated 100MM to Newark school district and the results are forgettable

http://www.businessinsider.com/we-now-know-more-about-how-ne...

I would argue that the reason suburban students are better are most likely because their parents are also better, whatever being a 'better' parent means in this case.

Anecdotally, in my experience it's not that the parents are "better" its that the parents have school as an actual priority.

Poorer communities often have a culture so different than the average HN reader that most of us can't possibly understand it. (I learned this as a result of being a foster parent)

> Anecdotally, in my experience it's not that the parents are "better" its that the parents have school as an actual priority.

If you were trying to rank parents wouldn't "prioritizes their children's education" be a factor in determining which parent was better? Just because something is a cultural difference doesn't mean we can't say it is better or worse.

I wouldn't say that, no. Especially since supporting "doing well in school" may not be the same as supporting "getting a proper education". After all, the first may be more about pushing conformity and obedience than the second, depending on the circumstances.

As nice and easy it would be to measure a person's worth as a parent by how well their kids do in school, or how much they make as an adult (like this article), I don't think that's reasonable at all.

I agree that it isn't fair to measure a parent by how well their kids do in school, but I think it is perfectly reasonable to measure a parent by how well they support and encourage their children to get a basic education. For example, I know of two parents who have actively encouraged their kids to drop out of high school just months shy of graduation--and these were students who were going to graduate. So now they are going to be looking at providing for themselves without even having a high school diploma.

I don't believe this is true.

Look at a state like Connecticut, which features very affluent areas and very poor areas within. If you like at the top performing schools, sure the best ones tend to be in affluent areas, and the worst ones are in cities, but that's not at all how much money gets spent per student. For instance, the town in the state with the absolutely lowest spending per student, Wolcott, is one of the top school districts in the state, and even has a school that won the national "Blue Ribbon" aware for excellence last year.

There are also numerous studies (which I'm way too lazy to go find) that indicate the affluence of the parents to be more important than the affluence of the school on a child's school success (this article is about adult income, though).

How do the schools in Connecticut compare to the schools in a state like Nebraska?

I ask because I think it can be hard to generalize from an area like Connecticut that is really quite high population density and quite wealthy to the US in general (in CT a student might be a reasonable distance to 3 or 4 large high schools. In Nebraska, they might be a reasonable distance to 1 tiny school).

I can't truly speak for the whole country, but Connecticut schools seem to be a class above most anywhere else. Every time I've considered moving somewhere cheaper, the school system research is completely depressing. I know parents who tried to move to Florida and found the schools to be 2 years behind CT grade-level-wise (so their 4th grader is learning stuff they learned in 2nd grade in CT). They actually simply moved back, it was that bad.

Keep in mind that CT is a bit of a sinking ship, with companies and jobs leaving, and the population often following it. It's not some place that everyone is flocking to, but it has a long history of being at the forefront of things like education and mental health.

I've also heard, from numerous people, that having a few years experience as a teacher here in CT will make getting a job teaching in most other places completely trivial.

Money is not the defining factor, parents interest in their kids education is much more primary and cost nothing.

It costs time, which is often traded for money with little left over. Free time costs money.

Its cost nothing to ask your kid how their school went and how their grades are. Its litterally the most cost effective tool you have available and its something you should enjoy too even if you have any interest in your kids future.

Time is also traded for entertainment. Parents that care about their children's education make the time even if they have to personally sacrifice something.

I could not agree with this more but I would argue that many parents buy homes in suburbs specifically because the school districts are good -- to put it succinctly, parents buy access to good schools, not good homes.

Exactly, which is why I always find opposition to vouchers entertaining. The only people who have real choices are the people who can afford to buy housing to pick a school. People flip out when vouchers are mentioned as if giving that choice to everyone is some kinda trick.

Such opposition can usually be boiled down to thinly veiled hubris towards the poor and under-advantaged.

As someone not in America I find your reality difficult to understand, it's hard to understand how its citizens see so much unnecessary disparity for a public good like education as being normal.

Are roads in wealthy neighbourhoods repaired on a different schedule than poor neighbourhoods too?

> Are roads in wealthy neighbourhoods repaired on a different schedule than poor neighbourhoods too?

School budgets are a small part of the effect, if any. Typically (at least around here) teachers in good districts are paid substantially less than in bad districts, and per-student spending is often lower in good districts than bad.

As far as I can tell the good-district/bad-district effect is caused by a series of self-reinforcing loops, one of which is that schools full of the kids of parents who both can and will spend more on housing to be in a good school district tend to be better because they're full of those kids.

[EDIT] I took your question about roads to mean whether, broadly, rich areas receive more government spending than poor areas, which is sometimes true for some things but does not seem to be a major driver of school inequality AFAIK

Yes absolutely, as well as snow clearing. Many neighborhoods have the snow shoved to the side of the road to form a wall between sidewalks and roads, whereas other neighborhoods have the snow trucked out.

It basically comes down to local tax bases. Schools are funded by local taxes so rich neighborhoods have better schools.

This was challenged as a 14th Amendment (Equal Protection) violation in a famous supreme court case, San Antonio v. Rodriguez [0].

The court found that, since education is not a constitutional right, the 14th Amendment was not violated.

Put another way, the US Federal (or an individual state) government lacks the authority to dictate how individual municipalities fund their schools systems. That authority would be necessary to enforce the equality you expect.

I don't know where you're from, but perhaps your confusion stems from a more homogenous body politic? In America, there is a massive web of overlapping towns, cities, counties, districts, and states, each with their own political authority, and often with massively different demographic makeups.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...

If you can't afford a car, then in general you're pretty screwed in American suburbs. If buses even go where you want, you're now talking hours spent trying to do basic things like grocery shopping, let alone attempting to find and work a job (of which there are also less).

Further, don't underestimate the power of white flight. It's happened many a time before.

Only 20% of people in public housing in DC have wage income. And many live in food deserts anyway.

So then let's continue to make it even harder to live? I don't understand your point.

I've seen first hand in Boston how hard it is for someone in public housing to get a job. Can't imagine some random suburb.

> Further, don't underestimate the power of white flight. It's happened many a time before.

I think it would be pretty surprising if this hyper-integration plan didn't result in a sudden and substantial drop in the quality of education in the nicer schools (more classroom disruption which is, anecdotally from the several teachers I know, a huge problem in lower-income schools, more teacher time spent catching the new students up, et c.) and I 100% guarantee that any parents, of any color, who could afford to leave those districts to unaffected ones or switch to private schools would do so ASAP. So yeah, white (and/or not-poor) flight, instantly. And probably some fairly intense protest action by any who couldn't afford to get their kids out.

So shame them for being classist and racist. Public education is a public investment.

You're welcome to shame people moving their kids to better schools as classist and racist. It might work!

With that said, I have some doubts that such a policy would accomplish what you might hope for. Most people, even those who wish people wouldn't, understand and sympathize with parents trying to get the best possible education for their kids.

"Better schools?" They'd be the same schools, just with some additional lower income kids.

I am operating in the context of a *parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12694649

I'm open to the possibility that the measured quality of a school does not change if you make significant changes to its constituent populations, but it seems like a large enough question to not be assumed in passing.

Sure going from 1% low income to 10% low income will have the short term effect of changing the overall average test scores. But how will it change the quality of education for the existing students? It'll be the same teachers, same curriculum, same facilities, etc.

The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.

You are coming dangerously close to implying that children in poorly performing school districts are intrinsically unschoolable.

That can't be what you mean to imply, so I think maybe step back and examine how you've ended up in an incoherent position.

I don't think anyone is unschoolable. I do think that changing populations can mean changing how resources are allocated, and this can affect more than just the part of the population that has changed. For example, I've seen schools cut special needs education programs because populations have shifted and resources haven't.

"intrinsically unschoolable" might be going to far, but I think it's generally agreed upon that children in poorly performing school districts are (on average) more difficult to teach. It's also generally agreed upon that students have an impact on their peers. This is the whole rationalization for better integrated schools in the first place.

We can certainly debate how many (as a % or raw number) challenging students a "good school" can import before overall quality begins to degrade. But I don't think that it's especially controversial to say that degradation will happen at some point.

Yes, but it's not agreed upon why that's the case, and that's Rayiner's point. If the problem is that students are forced to compete academically while being raised in broken neighborhoods, moving them out of those neighborhoods might be a better solution than pouring more money into the schools.

I don't know that I agree with the intervention he's recommending, but the underlying point he's making makes sense.

There is considerable evidence showing this is more or less true. "Intrinsically unschoolable" is a strong and incorrect statement, but "less schoolable" yields similar conclusions and is well supported by research.

Consider Raj Chetty's work; he shows that the primary determinant of student performance is intrinsic student qualities, but that teachers also matter a fair bit.

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/w19423.pdf

Why would you consider this factual claim to be an "incoherent position"?

The papers you've cited make essentially the opposite case as your comment does. Chetty's work suggests that a single year of teaching under a high quality teacher raises the lifetime earnings expectation of a student by $50,000.

The papers show large and significant effects from student quality as well, a position you described as "incoherent". The fact that teachers also have an effect doesn't change this.

If you were actually correct, and teacher quality was the primary determinant, then we could skip VAM and just use raw test scores to measure teacher quality.

I.e., if teacher A had a class of underprivileged black students while teacher B had a class of rich Asian students, and teacher B got higher test scores, that would be evidence teacher B was a better teacher. Is this actually your belief?

Can you point out the section of the major Chetty VA study that distinguishes student circumstances from student intrinsic quality?

The context of the thread you've jumped into is what the best intervention to circumstance might be to improve outcomes for students. You appear to be begging the question.

I don't know what you mean by "intrinsic". Kalium said:

The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.

You seemed to disagree with his claim. Due to this apparent disagreement, I interpreted "intrinsic" to mean something other than teachers, curriculum and facilities. The Chetty paper, and the entire need for VAM (as opposed to just measuring raw test scores), shows this to be true. Do you believe this to be false?

Maybe somebody else can restate the point I'm trying to make in a form that will make more sense to you.

Ironically, yummyfajitas definition of "intinsic" to mean "not teachers, curriculum, nor facilities" would thus include life circumstance.

For example, the kid's quality of life outside of school. Which is demonstrably improved by helping poor kids with rent. Which I believe he is trying to argue against.

Is it clear to anyone else that 'yummyfajitas is implying that the kinds of students who attend poorly-performing schools are genetically incapable of academic performance?

I may be misreading. I'd like a second opinion. I'd rather not assume people I'm arguing with hold revolting core beliefs. This would not be, like, the first time I'd jumped the gun on something like this: I myself hold a (probably faulty) core belief that the median HN participant is likely to host retrograde beliefs about race, which is unfair of me too.

I'm genuinely curious why you are asking third parties to put words into my mouth. Why not just ask me?

If you want a summary, I don't share your religious faith that God ensured an identical statistical distribution of genes across all subpopulations when he created man. But Kalium's argument is not dependent on this - there are more things in the world than simply teachers, curriculum, facilities and genetics. For example, poor people might be disproportionately bad parents (perhaps they exhibit many bad behaviors which also make them poor) and this might cause their children to be disruptive in school.

That's a concrete theory that's directly compatible with your secular faith in statistically identical genetic distributions, but still supports Kalium's claim.

My question still stands.

If you do _not_ believe humans possess "identical statistical distribution of [academic performance] genes across all subpopulations" why hide such insight? It'd be interesting to hear where in the gnome the "academic performance gene" sits.

And have you also "discovered" a correlation between this academic performance gene and melanin content? Or gender too? Surely you don't want to deprive us of such important "discoveries".

First let me say that by moving my family with two young kids to Oak Park, I was almost definitionally participating in the phenomenon that turn suburban public schools into de facto private schools. People move to Oak Park because it's on the Green and Blue CTA lines; it's a suburb that feels like living in a particularly nice residential part of Chicago. You move to Oak Park because you want all the perks of Chicago without exposure to its school system.

So with that having been said, and recognizing my own role:

Why exactly should we sympathize with parents who react to problems in their school systems by using their economic leverage both to exempt their own kids from those problems and also, by altering the tax base for their original school system, making those problems worse? Why is that praiseworthy? It doesn't seem praiseworthy to me. It seems to me like just another of those little pragmatic immoralities we all undertake regularly.

We have few problems seeing the problem when it takes the form of kids going to Choate and Bowdoin. But at the smaller scale we all deal with, we seem unable to recognize the same thing happening. We seem to believe can't possibly be a part of the problem. But, of course, we are.

I don't mean to crucify anyone for doing it. After all, I did it too. But I think we can reasonably draw the line at rationalizing or valorizing the de facto privatization of good public education in our country.

I don't know if I'd call it praiseworthy. I do think it's the sort of pragmatic immorality that a great many parents are happy to take on for the perceived benefits gained. As a result, it's easy to oppose for the large-scale effects but difficult to oppose as individual choices.

I think we should be careful about the difference between rationalizing and understanding the decisions parents make. The two are readily confused on the best of days, and political discussions about school quality generally don't happen on the best of days.

We all seem to have an enormous moral blind spot when it comes to our children competing with other children.

This is a tricky topic, but I wouldn't call it a moral blind spot per se. I think that we would have a problem with certain forms of unfair competition. You can't hire a smarter kid to take the SAT for your kid and expect others to feel ok about it. On the other hand, you are welcome to hire a tutor to help your kid score better on his own(1).

I think that most people tend to think that parents have a responsibility to help their kids as much as they can within fairly wide constraints. Parent's loyalty to their children above the children of others is one of the fundamental building blocks of our society like it or not.

1. Though some studies seem to indicate this won't really help.

It's hard to see a bright line where competition becomes unfair, but straightforwardly buying your own children into a better life than will be made available to children without means is problematic.

This is a mountain range of slippery slopes, of course, but the fundamental moral point here seems pretty obvious.

I agree that there is no bright line here. Nor are there bright lines in many other areas of life where inequality rears its head.

Is it fair that I can straightforwardly buy myself a better life than is available to others without means?

Is this more or less unfair than than what I can buy for my child? If anything I would say that the personal luxuries I buy for myself are more unfair than the educational opportunities I can buy for my kid. At least the latter is in pursuit of human capital formation and not just luxury spending.

I think there's a moral difference between what you do with the product of your achievements for yourself and what you do to impact the opportunity of the next generation.

Which is essentially just a long way of saying that the moral weights on inequality and mobility/opportunity aren't the same.

I dunno. I hear what you are saying and I agree that lack of opportunity is a problem. I just have a hard time convincing myself that making sure my kid goes to a good school and gets a good education is morally fraught. Tough subject for sure.

Like I said: I made sure my kids went to a decent school too (I drew the line at private school, but, like I said, my kids go to what is essential a de facto private school based on the neighborhood they live in).

I'm not prepared to crucify people for making these kinds of moral compromises, but I think it's important not to go the other direction and valorize them.

Uh, yes? It is entirely reasonable to prioritize one's own children over the children of others. You're not required to be philanthropic all the time, especially not at the expense of your family.

People tend to be very short-sighted about their children versus everyone else's. Tragedy of the commons readily results.

the fundamental problem seems to be tying public school funding to taxes at a very local level. i was surprised when i found out that was the system in america; it seems like a very blatant rich-get-richer measure.

You're assuming that this results in upscale cities and towns having better outcomes by spending more per pupil. In fact, yes, the outcomes tend to be better; the schools are often better by both objective and subjective measures. But the correlation with spending is very murky.

"Bad" urban schools with often poor student outcomes often have significantly higher spending per pupil than the tony suburban schools. There are lots of reasons why this would be the case of course. But it's not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of relative spending levels.

Not only that but you will find some people in the US go though ridiculous mental gymnastics to claim that money makes no difference to education. While at the same to they put huge effort into moving into a neighbor with high spending on schools.

It is not enough to defend privileged with taxation, institutions and laws but they must use astounding double-think to convince themselves that the result is somehow fair. Part of that self-indoctrination is putting huge effort into convincing everyone around them of these absurd views.

Have a listen to The Problem We All Live With[1] a podcast episode from This American Life. It speaks to this specifically and comes to very different conclusions. Ie. integration works.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

I live in a city-adjacent suburb in Chicago, Oak Park, directly butting up against Austin, the largest high-crime overwhelmingly black neighborhood in the city of Chicago.

Oak Park is tiny and known for its school system.

The western side Austin Ave, which divides Chicago from Oak Park, hosts an unbroken row of multi-family dwellings, many of them large apartment buildings. The occupants of those buildings are people who would otherwise live in Austin, but move to Oak Park to get their kids into Oak Park schools.

This has been going on for decades in Oak Park, and we continue to have excellent schools, and continue to be a high-status magnet for professionals who want to live somewhere connected to the CTA trains but not part of CPS schools.

It doesn't happen in Kennilworth or Wilmette, because those suburbs aren't directly adjacent to troubled neighborhoods in Chicago. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that the carrying capacity for lower-income students of those suburbs --- the majority of Chicago suburbs, which like Wilmette and unlike Oak Park, aren't city-adjacent --- is any less than that of Oak Park.

So, no, I don't think your hypothesis about inner-city kids disrupting suburban schools is accurate, nor do I think "instant white flight" is going to happen.

"White flight" was an irrational, racist reaction to housing integration. It's not a law of nature; it was/is a growing pain of the US getting over centuries of segregation.

Multiple Houston suburban neighborhoods have been ruined by "integrative" public housing developments. The situation you're describing sounds rather different (more organic, in particular). We also can't expect uniform results across the board.

> "White flight" was an irrational

What's irrational about it? The suburbs created as a result of "white flight" are objectively vastly safer than the places the now middle-class suburbanites were fleeing from.

The dominant economic power reacted to de jure segregation by creating a regime of de facto financially-enforced segregation. It's awfully nervy of you to blame the victims of that effort for its effects.

Ah, so the fleeing middle class is to blame for protecting their own interests by choosing to peacefully leave the bad situation they were in?

It's not like the people fleeing the inner cities salted the earth when they left. They simply refused to put up with increasing crime and poverty. I'm not sure how one would rationally consider anyone to be a "victim" of that peaceful outmigration.

Yes. Racist white people who fled an influx of black neighbors after the elimination of redlining are to blame for deliberately trying to recreate segregation.

Not even a difficult call.

> Racist

Why do you think they were motivated by racism? Safety and superior economic environments were far and away the most pressing factors that led the middle class to flee declining urban areas.

> deliberately trying to recreate segregation.

They weren't deliberately trying to create segregation; they were trying to protect themselves and their families, both physically and financially. De facto segregation may have been a consequence of that, but we have no reason to suspect that it was an explicit goal.

Yes: white flight is obviously the product of a cascade, seeded by the belief of a core group of virulently anti-black racists that any incursion of black residents in all-white neighborhoods will bring crime with them, and bolstered by the rational belief by other white residents that the reactions of their racist neighbors will decrease property values, spur an exodus from the neighborhood that harms the tax base, and eventuate the crime that the racists were concerned about.

Like I said: I'm willing to concede that not all of the participants in white flight were wearing Klan hoods. What I'm not willing to do is blame their victims for the systemic, perpetual disadvantage this phenomenon created.

Lots of white flight was caused by the massive urban crime wave that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The main reason we term the situation "white" flight is that the whites could afford to move out of the city, and most blacks could not. If the majority of blacks had as much money as whites, they would have moved away too.

It's telling that when this crime wave ended, whites started to move back to the cities, even though the racial composition of the cities they were moving back to was less white than it was when they left. If they left in the first place because of racial diversity, they would not have moved back -- but they did move back, and are continuing to do so.

I'm not prepared to dignify the argument that white people left neighborhoods that were beginning to integrate, en masse, to form new all-white enclaves --- and then fled again when those enclaves started to integrate --- as a purely rational reaction to crime.

The idea that the arrival of black people in a homogenous white neighborhood is a harbinger of intractable crime problems is itself an example of systemic racism. I don't care if you feel it's justifiable racism.

There are places in the US --- St. Louis is probably the best example --- where you can observe white flight creating strata of suburbs like the rings on a tree. Ferguson was one of those suburbs: 99% white in 1970, majority black now, but (until very recently) with institutions controlled by whites.

If white people are re-colonizing the inner cities of some of these places, I'm not prepared to see that as a purely hopeful sign (or, worse, a sign that white flight was itself benign or justified). Rather, I'd worry that we're progressing towards an outcome that France has seen in its own cities, with vital city centers ringed by poor, disadvantaged suburbs.

> The idea that the arrival of black people in a homogenous white neighborhood is a harbinger of intractable crime problems is itself an example of systemic racism. I don't care if you feel it's justifiable racism.

Actual crime arrived in those neighborhoods. There is no shortage of statistics to prove this.

Of course it did. Wealthier racist white people turned those neighborhoods into ghettos.

Wealthy people do not turn their own neighborhoods into ghettos.

By leaving them en masse and ravaging their tax base, yes, they did.

They did not leave before the crime came to their neighborhoods. They left after the crime came.

You need to get your cause and effect in order.

No, they did not. This is well studied. Crime rose in neighborhoods that were endogenously majority-black, but suburbanization of white residents did not track crime in previously white, then integrating neighborhoods: it was a reaction to the perception that crime in those integrating neighborhoods would track the rates of crime in endogenously black neighborhoods.

People saw high crime in all-black neighborhoods created by the great migration, lost their shit, and moved to escape the black people. In doing so, they fucked up the tax base for their previous cities, and created new ghettos. Predictably, crime followed their exodus, (falsely) confirming the predictions of the fleeing white people, creating a cascade.

(High crime in endogenously black neighborhoods is also not hard to explain: well-integrated neighborhoods in the Chicagoland MSA have low crime rates, but crime rates in places like Englewood are sky-high; this is a legacy of disadvantage and lack of opportunity and mobility that traces directly from virulent racism. Simply put: you systemically disfavor a population, and the areas inhabited primarily by the disfavored population have poorer outcomes. Who'd have thunk it?)

Are you arguing that crime would not have increased in the newly-integrated neighborhoods if the white residents had not moved away?

Could you respond to my comment? It refutes your argument about causality.

Your explanation of crime in endogenously black neighborhoods is reasonable, but it only explains why crime existed in the first place, not why it increased so much in the 1960s through the early 1990s.

The endogenously black neighborhoods did not experience erosion of the tax base due to white flight, because there were few, if any, whites living there in the first place. So, why did crime increase dramatically in the endogenously black neighborhoods during the time period we are talking about? Whatever the reason is, why wouldn't it be the same reason crime increased in the areas subject to white flight?

I find it very unlikely that the endogenously black neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for one reason, and the nearby white flight neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for a totally different reason (such as erosion of the tax base after white people left). Obviously the erosion of the tax base made things worse, but unless that caused all of the increase in crime, something else was going on.

If you are going to argue that crime increases after white flight were a self-fulfilling prophecy and would not have occurred without white flight, that's a pretty extraordinary claim.

I'm sorry, I think I made it sound like I was speculating. No, I was reciting the literature on this question. Your claim, that the causality of crime and white flight were reversed, is false. Can you address that (or just concede it) before moving on to new arguments?

Answer a straight question: was 100% of the increase in crime a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by white flight that would not have happened otherwise?

If you answer in the affirmative, you'll need to bring some proof.

This is how I'm addressing your argument about causality. If any of the crime increases happened before white flight, or if the increases would have happened anyway, then you are wrong about causality. The best you can do is to claim that white flight made a pre-existing increase in crime worse. That is not what you have argued up to now.

You made a straightforward claim earlier in the thread: that white flight was caused by crime, and not a causative agent for crime. That claim turns out to be straightforward to refute, because it's a basic question that social science researchers have been evaluating since the late 1970s.

Your claim was wrong.

Since you appear to be unwilling to even address the rebuttal of your argument, let alone concede the point, I'm not interested in the rest of your arguments.

This thread is deep enough already.

It's pretty telling that you won't give a yes-or-no answer to a simple question that gets to the very heart of your argument.

How is "white flight" irrational?

> It's happened many a time before.

And who can blame them? If you started putting a bunch of high-risk no-income people in section 8 housing in a formerly nice neighborhood, any rational person who could afford it would move away.

"High risk, no-income." Really? Section 8 supports the working poor. You need to check your prejudices against reality.

I guess most of them work from home then? I see you go to Harvard, so you have the privilege of being insulated from the realities of publicly supported destitute poverty. I suspect you've never seen massive fights in a section 8 complex, or people setting trash cans on fire, or people smashing windows, or stealing appliances from their own buildings.

Down the street from Harvard is section 8 housing that I'm sure the GP isn't even aware of, because it looks just like any other building near by. No trash can fires or the like. I used to be a big brother to a kid in that building, so I've been inside many times. None of those things you described were happening.

If only the working poor were "high-risk no-income". That would indicate some free time to get into trouble! That would mean they could simply find a job instead of stretching their current ones.

This is a classist dogwhistle labeling the poor as lazy, violent people.

I have lived near section 8 housing in Texas. They are not, generally speaking, working. It's also not the kind of place you want to be near at night.

"The poor" is not the same as "people who live in public housing". There are a lot of dirt-poor rural areas that are very safe (and generally more employable).

Why are you trying to shame people for making claims that are fundamentally correct?

The poor are lazy: http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... Table 3 on page 21.

They are also disproportionately violent: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf

I have no data on section 8 recipients in particular; do you?

Neither source remotely supports your claims. Laziness is not qualitative. I think people who work desk jobs are lazy; I imagine you believe people on disability to be lazy. The thing you linked doesn't even contain the word. You have to use your words if you want to communicate.

The rich would be violent, too, if they were threatened by losing their wealth. Being able to reject violence wholesale is privileged.

Let's just agree never to interact; I think we'll both be happier.

> Being able to reject violence wholesale is privileged.

Ah, so not beating your wife, as discussed in the paper, is privileged? It's OK for poor people to do it?

> Ah, so not beating your wife, as discussed in the paper, is privileged?

Avoiding conviction certainly is.

I would love to watch the ensuing shitstorm.

If this were to happen, people who qualify for public housing may not have the best job prospects. Suburban usually reads more sparse. So will they have to travel more work, and have less time with their kids?

AKA How to bankrupt a school district in one easy step.

Unfortunately this is one of those failure states with democracy where you can't overcome racism and NIMBY-ism.

You're not old enough to remember bussing in the 80s. Forced integration didn't work then, and it won't work now.

The difference between good schools and bad ones isn't what is taught or even the teachers. It's the community. Bussing doesn't get kids out of failing communities into ones that work.

Sure, but neither does trying to put kids from vastly different socioeconomic strata into the same school and expect that to result in anything but misery for everyone.

The core issue is the idea of mingling "underprivileged" kids with "privileged" ones; with intuitive expected result being some "lifting up" of the underprivileged kids at the expense of some of the education of the privileged kids.

Except there's no evidence this helps the underprivileged kids. There's lot of evidence it completely screws over the privileged kids and the end result is a dumpster fire of social engineering proportions. It's why we don't try to do it anymore, and every new generation needs to be taught the lesson lest they repeat it.

Hm. I live at the edge of a University town with a rural population at the very other end of the socio-economic scale. I went to these schools once upon a time. It was not much different from other experiences I suppose - cliquishness, jocks and nerds and fashionistas and so on.

My siblings, 6 of us brought up on feeding pigs and making hay and fixing fences, all ended up going to college in medicine and engineering. All professionals; all successful. I always credited our going to school with all those 'city kids' with their high expectations.

So it can work.

What evidence are you referring to? I have recently heard and read the opposite. See, for example: http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the... and http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/upshot/why-the-new-researc...

There was a great This American Life about this recently: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

TLDR is massive NIMBY and some pretty ugly stuff. Highly recommend listening to the episode.

That's a great way to destroy property value and slash per-capita school budgets. A number of formerly nice suburbs in TX have been destroyed this way.

This idea seems to be borne of a distinct "If poor inner city people can't have nice towns, no one can!" attitude. How about we try to actually improve poor inner city districts rather than making it someone else's problem?

Apropos, give this a listen - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

I prefer the transcript, as it lets me digest this at my own pace.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

Having said that, the biggest takeaway the podcast that I'm getting (still mid-read) is that it was /integration/, the incubation of children within a target culture and environment designed for success, that had the most profound impact.

It was society working, even if in an odd way, to extract people from a dysfunctional environment and raise them within a working one.

Based mostly on this and some anecdotal data, I feel that fighting 'segregation' the other direction, by trying to add 'non-problem students' to failed environments would have a similar effect on them; mostly in halting their growth and causing their integration within society that works to falter.

This suggests that the war on poverty isn't something that can be won by funding alone, but instead by fighting to spread the culture of 'good' society further.

Yes, I completely agree with your takeaway and what it suggests.

(I normally prefer transcripts too, but the creators of TAL specifically recommend the show be listened to.)

Spreading people out across the landscape is never going to be an efficient solution though, transportation- and infrastructure-wise. Might be better to see what can be done to turn urban school districts into "good school districts" where everybody wants to live. Although then you start driving up the rent again. Ah the hell with it, let's have a war. It can start in New Jersey.

> Integration is the answer to inter-generational poverty

Integration is the "give a man a fish" strategy.

Creating the social conditions for increased social mobility is the "teach (or allow) a man to fish" strategy.

In the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, there is a public housing development. The neighborhood is very nice and otherwise leans towards the affluent side. A lot of the public housing residents have to go over to Jersey to buy groceries and household products because most things in Chelsea are too expensive. The only grocery stores in the area are Whole Foods and the like.

Overall, I think the neighborhood works out for those in public housing, but there are downsides.

Anecdotally, I'm not sure if just dropping public housing in "good" districts is always a viable solution. Definitely, being in a good school district is beneficial and I think integration is helpful, but it's not as simple as just mashing two economic classes together.

Whole Foods is the only large grocery store I know of near what I assume is the biggest public housing development in Cambridge MA. (With a Trader Joe's just a little further.) It's not an affluent neighborhood but a lot of people drive through the immediate area because it's on one of the main feeder roads into the city.

I did look up the test scores for Cambridge Rindge and Latin which is the only public high school in Cambridge (which for those not familiar with the area has a tech/biotech boom in addition to being home to Harvard and MIT). It's in the bottom half for the state in spite of having some of the highest per-student spending in the state (and one of the better student/teacher ratios).

As somebody that grew up in a poor family in the 80s this really resonates with me.

The claim is that Section 8 vouchers aren't better than public housing, I wonder how either would compare to the equivalent benefit granted through e.g. food stamps or cash.

I was also under the impression that vouchers were cheaper to administer and provide, so for equivalent benefit might still be worthwhile.

> because there is no way to know for certain how those families would be doing without the help

Not taking a side here, but this specific problem is why, no matter the research, there will almost certainly be arguments on both sides of the debate.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5SwyTvAHw

It's not a new complaint. But I found that video more informative.

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