A gaping hole in philantropy (2)

A great TED talk given by winners of the 2011 Google Science Fair shows that high school students can perform useful research if given the chance. These students were persistent and lucky enough to find a researcher who could give them access to a lab. Though it is difficult to know the exact number, a multitude of students must have given up before getting access to research facilities.

It is clearly not cost effective for individual researchers to give access to their lab to research savvy high school students on weekends, but society loses a great deal by not sponsoring these students.

Specialized schools in the fields of sports, ballet, music and theater exist already. Why aren't there any high schools which let teenagers do self-directed research in lieu of classes for half the school day?

Many parents already teach their profession to their children, but giving access to equipment and materials in the workplace is usually not possible. Now that the price of equipment has fallen enough for hobbyists to open labs such as Genspace, why can't specialized schools offer such equipment too?

Beyond Vouchers

Charter schools and voucher systems are a good first step towards improving the teaching of a state mandated curriculum. However, many market failures remain in such a system. While competition between a few schools offers students choice, the overhead of changing schools or selecting a school which is farther a field makes the market work poorly. Most importantly, student utility (eg. pain and effort to achieve a grade) has very little weight in the selection of teaching methods.

In reality, the operation of schools has little to do with the success of its students: after all managing a building and administrating personnel is a commodity. What matters is the teachers. So why not have charter teachers, all in the same building, rather than charter schools? If there is some overcapacity of teachers, then the worst ones as chosen by the students would end up out of business. This would give students much more choice in the compromise between attaining the highest grades vs. the effort they have to put in.

Knowing how good a teacher is before taking his class is quite difficult for a student, and repeat business is not really possible given that teachers specialize in one subject and grade level. So charter based teachers suffer from some of the same problems as charter schools: by the time students have enough information to choose a teacher, it's too late -- they are already committed.

A solution to this information problem is to force each student to cancel exactly one class per semester at any time prior to the final exam. The worst teacher as judged by the students will be financially penalized for each student that abandons his class. The very worst teachers would abandon teaching altogether.

Whatever system is chosen to improve education, the student's preference for effort vs. grades should be fully internalized.

Making leisure pay

The Bixi system in Montreal allows users to rent bicycles at stations all around town. It's popular but expensive: maintaining a Bixi bicycle cost around 3000$ per year, which is heavily subsidized by the city. Some opposition politicians suggest that just buying everyone a regular bicycle would be a cheaper alternative to Bixi, and accomplish the same congestion reduction and environmental goals.

There are often one or two broken bicycles at each Bixi station waiting for repair. Such repairs require paid staff to service the bicycles. The alternate solution would have owners of bicycles repair them on their own time. This is an example of how one method makes use of "work hours" to accomplish a task, whereas the other method makes use of "leisure hours".

While increasing the number of officially worked hours is not popular, making small changes could result in heightened productivity by moving tasks from work hours to leisure hours.

For example, the vast majority of state services provided for individuals could be offered outside of regular work hours. Very often, employees must take time off work to go to a clinic, to renew a passport, etc. Only offering these services on week nights and during weekends would increase productivity of those working in non-government service jobs.

Drugs and Drug Policy

I'm currently reading Drugs and Drug Policy. I'm very impressed after two chapters: it's clear, accessible and well balanced. The lesson seems to be that decriminalization of consumption (not production) has little impact on prevalence, whereas retail prices have a huge impact.

I was disappointed to read that the authors do not believe in the legalization of the supply chain while maintaining elevated prices levels. Once the decriminalization of consumption becomes politically feasible, the supply chain of drugs that have a high markup could easily be nationalized.

In Quebec, decent quality alcoholic beverages are distributed exclusively by the government through the SAQ. The SAQ turns a decent profit with markups of two to one, and there is no large scale contraband of wine in Quebec. It should be trivial to run a similar organization for illegal drugs whose markup is significantly greater than two to one.

As an example, cocaine production costs around 1$ per gram; bulk cocaine smuggled across the border costs 20$ per gram, and retail cocaine is sold at 100$ per gram. I'm assuming that given current law enforcement spending, prices are close to as low as they can be to sustain contraband. Nationalized drug prices could be adjusted to prevent the bulk of contraband: in all likelihood that price would in the same order of magnitude as today's retail prices.

Nationalization does not seem to be a compromise at any level.

Unconventionnal tools

Economists agree that increasing consumer spending is the most effective way to stimulate an economy out of recession or stagnation. Conventional tools (such as infrastructure spending) are both slow and inefficient. Letting politicians choose how to apply stimulus in recession years is like giving your child a credit card and sending him to Toys R Us. There must be a better way.

Why not give the Fed the responsibility to coordinate direct stimulus in addition to affecting the markets by buying and selling financial instruments? Specifically, the Fed could be given a stimulus fund worth 1% of GDP per year (from general taxation) to be sent to all citizens in the form of monthly cheques when the economy needs to get back on track. Or it could just be trusted to spend the right amount, and possibly need to be recapitalized using general taxation as is the case currently.

Learning to read

Children watch DVDs over and over again (eg. Cars, The Little Mermaid). These DVDs come with subtitles. A computer program could be used to detect when each word in the subtitle is being spoken to either highlight the subtitle (like a karaoke machine) or place the word in a single frame (like subliminal advertisement).

I did some literature research but could not find anyone who conducted this experiment. It would be interesting to perform such a study with children and perhaps market the program afterward.

A gaping hole in philantropy

It seems that improving K-12 education is a major philanthropic priority. However, much if not all of the effort is directed towards underachieving students. While addressing this issue is a noble objective, increasing the productivity of overachieving students is equally important in the long term, as improving research provides a boon to everyone 20 years down the road. Most important discoveries are made by people under thirty. Should that be restated as in the first fives years of research? If not, this opportunity should be exploited.