Whitman and Rizzo on paternalism

Glen Whitman and Mario Rizzo have published a nice piece, "Little Brother is Watching You: New Paternalism and Slippery Slopes". Whitman will be blogging the article in the days to come; worth watching for. Money quote

Our thesis is that the new paternalism’s claim to moderation is not sustainable. A recent body of literature, to which we have contributed, has rehabilitated slippery-slope reasoning by examining the specific processes by which slippery slopes occur, as well as the circumstances under which slippage is most likely. The insights of the slippery-slope literature suggest that new paternalist policies are particularly subject to expansion. We argue that this is true even if policymakers are rational. But perhaps more importantly, we argue that the slippery-slope threat is especially great if policymakers are not fully rational, but instead share the behavioral and cognitive biases attributed to the people their policies are supposed to help. Consequently, accepting new paternalist policies creates a risk of accepting, in the long run, greater restrictions on individual autonomy than have heretofore been acknowledged. Inasmuch as new paternalists claim to be interested in preserving autonomy, this surely must be taken into account as an unrecognized or unacknowledged cost to be balanced against any possible gains from their policies.

Questioning education

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Mario Rizzo asks some pertinent questions about the push to have ever-increasing proportions of the population pass through universities.

At the risk of being accused of taking away the party punch bowl, readers should know that I stand to benefit a great deal if more Americans partook in the college experience since I teach large numbers of introductory and intermediate economics students for a living.

Despite this, he argues against President Obama's call for increased higher education. Worth noting:

• There are diminishing returns to aggregate educational attainment
• Education is costly
• The more low quality students are pushed through low quality schools, the greater the returns from attending prestigious schools to differentiate yourself
• A good portion of college is consumption for the students
• Richer countries have higher rates of tertiary completion, but causality is difficult to prove; there are notable counterexamples to received wisdom
• Education is a good, but so are other things: there are opportunity costs. As Rizzo asks,

  Does it make sense to sacrifice more and better carpenters or professional baseball players just to lead the world in college completions? Perhaps I am overplaying that hand. But there are many ways for individuals and societies to improve their human capital and productivity without relying on political forces to put more people through college.

Human capital is important, but higher education is only one way of getting it.