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Comment by opwieurposiu | Hacker News Reader

Did the algorithm assume all persons time was equally valuable? From an economics standpoint this is clearly not the case, the range of salaries of public school parents could vary by a factor of 10x or more. To me it seems obvious that the rich parents should be able to pay the poor parents to take the "worse" time slots. This should be beneficial for both parties, but human pride may preclude this as a solution.

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Meanwhile, rich parents work jobs with flexible hours and poor parents are hourly with potential catastrophic penalties for missing work. Theoretically, you're correct (from a parent preference perspective, at least). In practice, even the rich parents would balk at the dollar amount required to make it worth it.

That also completely ignores the fact that what you propose would deepen the existing structural inequalities for students, and presupposes that schools are and should remain stratified by income. I vehemently disagree with this unstated premise.

Yes it did.

What you are suggesting would be politically very complicated to implement. Also, one need to take into account the characteristics of the district:

https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centr...

66% of the students are economically disadvantaged.

Additionally, a lot of schools have both "rich" and "poor" parents, but still need to have a unique time.

One of the reasons that this would be a terrible idea is that the person who stands to make money by selling their good slot for a terrible one is not necessarily the person who has to wake up at 5:00 AM to bus across town.

Adding money into the mix, when there's a large difference of means between families, adds a level of incentive that shouldn't be there -- one that has nothing to do with the district's goal of providing an equal education to all its students.

When the district looks at the results at the end of the year, and all the poor kids have poor grades/attendance because they were all in the worst time slots, they can't say "well, at least the parents are slightly richer because of this, from the secondary trading market." Rather, based on the objectives they are concerned with, they may have just made inequality even worse.

Ah yes, I'm sure the whole thing would have worked politically if only they'd also tried to set up a system in which rich parents paid poor parents in order to get better start times. Conveniently, this would also mean that the students would be income-segregated so rich students would not have to be mixed in with poor students.

</snark>

... I also took economics in college. To me it seems obvious that calling a fanciful solution like this "obvious" except for "human pride" is woefully inaccurate.

Excellent point, and a good real-world introduction to the idea of Pareto Efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

That sort of arrangement incentives people in many unexpected ways, like people optimizing for the chance to get allocated a slot that can be sold at maximum price, rather than what is the 'best' for them overall. It then turns into a game theory exercise of course.

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