Hometown Sanity!

As I finished reading the Lebanon paper, I found this oped regarding the recent events in the Lebanon Community School District.

It makes me happy. Someone finally stood up and said something sane:

We all have a tendency to get tunnel vision when our personal interests are involved, and teachers and principals are not immune. Similarly, it seems that board members and some members of the community become so “tunnel-visioned” that they become obsessed with single issues. It may be a dislike of the Superintendent of Schools. It may be an unwillingness to change and accept growth. It may be personal political maneuvering. It may be the philosophy that a winning football team somehow makes for a successful school district and we can ignore behind the scenes issues no matter what they are. Or it may be that a charter school is the “flagship” of the district and warrants all of a person's passions and dedication. While each of these are important to consider and keep in balance, the Lebanon Community School District is much more than any of these single-focus issues standing alone.

Go read. While the author points to a lot of district successes, I should note that he does not rule out the possibility that Jim Robinson is an authoritarian administrator. There's plenty of room for the guy to be both good and bad. If there is such a thing as human nature, that's it.

And I am SO GLAD someone fired back in public, with their name attached, and in the newspaper. I'm also not surprised it's someone with age and experience.

On the other hand, the fact that Tilford, the author, hasn't been an employee that long might be latched onto as a reason to ignore him. You tell me.

Changing Assumptions

I really hope that this signals a shift in orthodox economic thinking:

Poor enough people will accept risk in the downward direction rather than smoothing consumption, so they buy lots of lottery tickets. They also commit more crime, so they can have at least some joyous times, and they take lots of "stupid" chances. Yet the poor are not irrational or necessarily dysfunctional in terms of procedural rationality, but rather they are optimizing given constraints.

It seems to me that for a long time, there's been a very mainstream assumption that poor people are just rich people without the money.

It's a stupid assumption, as the above quote makes clear. They may all be human, but the decisionmaking process is very different based on one's location in the capitalist hierarchy.

There's been a corollary assumption that people without money who do things like gamble or commit crime are behaving irrationally precisely because it's irrational for someone with lots of money to engage in those behaviors. As Cowen is arguing, it's not necessarily irrational at all.

Any good lefty could have would have told you that a long, long time ago for free. I just hope that this shift in thinking becomes more prevalent. It would help a lot.

Seriously. This is part of a big problem with economists and modern universities curriculum. The better understanding of people you have, the better these spacy economic models are going to be. Take more humanities classes, people. They do have some value.

Found via Ezra Klein.