harris.steveharris
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Your suggestions for how to improve things are too simple.

  1. Restructuring our tax system to put more money into poorer districts can’t hurt, but it won’t help. Poor school districts like those in many of our big cities already have large per-pupil budgets, but they are almost uniformly bad. The real problems are cultural and social, and they don’t admit to simple solutions like providing more money.
  2. Anti-discrimination activities also can’t hurt but no longer help much. Most of the racial preferences at elite schools, for example, go to the wealthiest in each group — essentially helping those who have already made it, rather than those left behind. These schools have made a decision to promote racial diversity at the expense of class diversity. (Harvard, my alma mater, is even worse than Stanford.)
  3. Unfortunately, the very groups that promote racial diversity are the ones that are most insistent on occupational licensing (e.g., public school teachers). I don’t see any political way forward here.
  4. Increased taxation of the wealthy makes us all feel good, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to the promotion of progressive policies. The money may end up with the military, it may go to reduce the deficit, or any other more likely places.
  5. Universal health coverage is also a worthy goal. The problem is that a large fraction of the beneficiaries are, perhaps paradoxically, intensely opposed to the idea (Trump voters).

But the statement that I most disagree with is your dispensation from guilt for those born into wealth. Did you know that poorer people give a much larger fraction of their wealth to charity than your elites? Furthermore, most the the “charity” given by those elites are monuments to themselves — a new building at the Stanford Business School carrying their name, for example. The world would be a much better place if the elites felt enough guilt to help people who are poor instead of people who attend the opera.