Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

> Hendren estimates that the lifetime benefit to a newborn child of moving from a low- to high-opportunity neighborhood is about $210,000 in additional income, or an 8.1 percent increase in lifetime earnings. Compare that to the $2,700 cost of counseling, and an additional $2,500 to $3,000 more per year per family that Section 8 paid due to higher rent in their new neighborhoods, and it looks like a pretty exceptional deal. The program doesn’t quite pay for itself by increasing future tax revenue, Hendren says — but it comes pretty close.

This logic assumes that none of this benefit is positional. The family moves to a richer area, the kids do well in the fancy local schools, get into top colleges, make lots of money, etc, yes. But a lot of these opportunities look like "each year we take the best N people we can", so there are probably other (less qualified) kids who do slightly worse than they would without the move.

As an analogy, if being in the tallest 5% of society makes you earn $100k more, we would expect a randomized controlled trial on increasing children's heights to have a large positive effect on income. But if we then rolled that out to the whole society those benefits would turn out to be illusory.

This is still valuable from a perspective of reducing segregation and inequality, but I'm skeptical of its presentation as an extremely good deal economically.

This is an interesting question, but the situation that's being studied here is not the one that you describe. The "Moving to Opportunity" study upon which this new research is based is primarily not concerned with children who "get into top colleges" or "make lots of money". In that study, the mean annual income of subjects is $11.7k and $14.3k at ages 24 and 28 respectively [0]. Fundamentally these interventions are concerned with making extremely poor people slightly less poor.

The question you ask—are these opportunistic moves zero-sum?—is still an interesting one. But the realities of the sub-population studied here change the intuitive answer to that question. There may be a finite number of seats at Harvard, but there is plenty of capacity for upward mobility from lower classes into the middle class.

[0] p864 here for income statistics https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...

This is a very zero-sum take on the project, where it’s very possible that creating more diversity in the neighborhoods these families are moving to raises the level of education and outcomes for everyone involved. Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.

> Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.

On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a requirement to happen. Making some people smarter can actually have a negative effect on the smarter ones.

This can be illustrated with schools, where it benefits the troublemakers to be placed in a group with calm children, but it is on the expense of the calm children who will now be disrupted in their studying. In the scandinavian countries, this is often done to children. Troublemakers, most often boys, are placed together with groups of calm children, often girls. This is such a common practice that there is an expression for such girls - pillow girls, "kuddflickor".

https://translate.google.se/translate?hl=sv&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...

That said, isn't the Chetty proposal (moving from low-opportunity location to higer-opportunity location) basically why there are millions of migrants in Europe right now.

It may not be as straight forward as you seem to think it is.

Girls are generally expected to be better behaved. This can be extremely suffocating and unhealthy.

If they are exposed to "troublemaker" boys and learn to have a little back bone and stand up for themselves (to possibly oppressive adults), it's still less socially acceptable for a girl than for a boy. So then she blames the "troublemaker" boy to cover for herself because he will get in less trouble than her and that's what the adults find plausible anyway.

It's entirely possible that even if she tried to accept the blame, the adults would interpret that as her trying to be kind to him and cover for him.

The post is about Norway.

Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.

If you remove all the smart people from a school I'm pretty sure the outcomes for everybody left behind will be worse.

If, as you suggest, the kids who move in do much better and the kids who are displaced do slightly worse, that does indeed sound like a very good deal economically.

I don't think that was an implication of the parent comment. As an example, Consider the toy zero-sum model where there are ten fixed outcomes. A kid is moved from outcome 10 to outcome 2, doing much better, but every kid from 2-9 is bumped down by one. By construction, there is no change in overall outcomes, but the oversimplified claims in the article that parent is complaining about would chalk that up as a huge +8 gain, by only checking one side of the ledger.

As the parent and other sibling comments point out, the real advantage may come from positive-sum effects: reduxed inequality, a more efficient market from a leveled playing field, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that the math being used is too incomplete to be held up as an economic efficiency argument, the way the article does.

we have seen similar stuff..a VU professor Valparaiso University in the late 1970s moved some black single moms from Chicago to attend VU tuition free..ten years later 95% of that group had better jobs and stable productive lives

It's making the market more liquid. That's usually good.

Dear downvoter, please explain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com