Stream of Steeg

Lost amidst the deserved lambasting of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for her ‘reopen no matter the consequences’ attitude towards schools is the pernicious effect on disadvantaged students of the loss of a year of learning. Parents lucky enough to be able to work from home and students whose parents can afford a fast, reliable internet connection may be inconvenienced, but the situation is not particularly dangerous. Only about sixty percent of Americans are able to work remotely; that leaves many parents scrambling to find ways to care for their children while they go into work. We also have evidence that children, particularly young ones, are less susceptible to the disease. However, keeping teachers safe becomes more of an issue, especially when we take into account the fact that teachers skew a bit older. The correct policy response is going to be more nuanced than something you’ll find on a 24-hour news cycle (and orders of magnitude more complex than anything Betsy DeVos is talking about).

Feasibility of any policy has to be the first step. It’s all well and good to talk about ensuring proper education, but we cannot open schools up without specific procedures in place and plans ahead of time for closing upon a certain number of infections. Our Secretary of Education does not appear to have anything in place, so states and municipalities are going to have to come up with their own plans. A plan must have two aspects: prevention and mitigation. Prevention will involve policies such as wearing masks, keeping students distanced, and minimizing contact between adults. Mitigation is a ripcord that will be pulled at a preset moment that closes schools back down at a certain number of infections. That part of the plan must also include virtual learning.

Ideally, we would never have to pull that ripcord. Effective preventative measures will keep that number down. Some measures may be a bit too expensive for lower-income communities to bear the cost, so Federal and State governments must step in to help. Keeping students distanced means reducing the number of kids in classrooms. Air filtration must be included so that central air doesn’t become a vector for transmission. Ideally, Plexiglas or something similar would be placed on desks. A proper set of guidelines would go a long way and funding them would ensure they are undertaken.

Inevitably, though, sometimes this will not be enough. The human element, especially when dealing with children, means compliance will not be 100% and, even if it is, there will still be some infections. When that happens, we need to make sure we know what comes next. If we make sure that students only are interacting in one group (their class) and teachers only go to their own classroom, we can quarantine an entire class if a teacher or student in that class contracts COVID. If it starts to spread among more classes, the entire school would probably have to go virtual again for a while. Clearly defining what that point lets us act quickly if things start to go wrong. Meanwhile, we can prepare for virtual learning when it is necessary. Students will need some sort of computer with access to the internet, video chat, and learning materials. Unfortunately, that will vary wildly in difficulty among students from differing backgrounds.

Virtual learning seems like an obvious route to take for those of us with reliable home internet and a computer. For the thirty-nine percent of students without access to the internet at home, this presents a problem. Some families may have multiple children and one (or no) computer. I know of one young person who had to use her father’s phone as a ‘hot spot’ for data in order to take a coding class. That’s well and good for a little while, but cell phone data can get expensive pretty quickly if you’re not on an unlimited plan. Everyone is going to need internet access if we want to provide equal access to education.

Here is also where we should delineate between young children and teenagers. The data I spoke of in the introduction was for children aged ten or younger. Older children will have an easier time learning online those under ten and we should allow or even encourage older children to go to school virtually, but you need access to the internet to learn on the internet. Instead of earmarking stimulus money towards F-35s, Congress should look towards our future. Children in households unable to afford internet access can ill afford to lose a year of education if they want to be upwardly mobile.

No plan will be perfect and, as the great philosopher Iron Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit.” We are going to get hit, so our plans are going to have to be flexible. We need a plan B, C, and D. We also need to allow states and municipalities to create plans that work best for them. The US is a big, diverse country and should be governed as such. What works in Chicago may not work in West Virginia or Atlanta. The best thing we can do is create an environment that will make succeeding easier for all school districts.

With a new surge in coronavirus cases underway, I want to dive back into the economics of the pandemic. It’s driving home an underrated axiom in the discipline. The expectations we have of the future determine how comfortable we are spending money now. We saw a brief burst of unbridled optimism when states began re-opening, but new Gallup polls show that has given way to extreme pessimism in the wake of exploding case numbers. Expectations have, in fact, reached new lows. This will lead to a downward spiral in economic activity in contrast to the recently improving numbers. Explicitly promising continued consumer support is the only tool we have to keep the fear at bay. Meanwhile, Congress is quibbling over details for extending the benefits package due to expire at the end of July.

Unlike many concepts in economics, the impact of expectations is fairly intuitive. Just to briefly go over it, I’ll use an example. If you have a salaried job with a regular paycheck and you have some job security, you’ll be a lot more willing to get that new dishwasher, buy that new car, or take on a new mortgage than if you rely on sporadic bursts of cash from freelance work. By that same token, if people are worried about losing their jobs or unclear on the duration of their unemployment benefits or reliant on a stimulus check, they will pinch pennies so they won’t find themselves evicted or foreclosed on when it ends. You will want to save as much as possible until you feel like the bad days are behind you. Economists euphemistically call this ‘consumption smoothing’.

With that in mind, the new Gallup polls showing overwhelming pessimism look like the tip of the iceberg for our economic fate. In just a few short weeks, the proportion of people saying that the situation is getting worse went from 30% to 65%. Expectations are a leading indicator, which means that you see the impact before the actual activity happens. In other words, those rosy economic numbers you’ve been seeing are going to turn a much more ugly shade. You can see it in the headlines; corporate bankruptcies have been plastered across the headlines pretty consistently lately. United Airlines is going to be laying off 36,000 people.

The sad thing is that we don’t need to be in this situation. President Trump has been denying the seriousness of the situation and holding indoor rallies with thousands of people. He’s helped spread the virus more quickly with his misinformation campaigns and with his actions. Contrast that to the response of South Korea. They have not been in the news because their situation has not changed; the virus is still under control. The result is that they have avoided a recession. People are confident that the situation is under control and will remain under control, so they are spending money.

There’s no use in crying over spilt milk, though, and that’s not our situation (and there’s no turning Trump into a reasonable human being). We need to find a way to show people that they will be supported until this is all over. The virus will prevent them from doing some activities, but if people are confident that they will be supported by unemployment, they will spend money on other things. The types of purchases may change, but the only way we can ensure our economy will continue to run is to support consumers and explicitly say that we will do so. Congress needs to take action now. Increased unemployment benefits expire at the end of this month.

Chronic underinvestment in poor communities has contributed to high crime rates. Last week, we talked a little bit about the potential for reallocating some of the money in the police budget. This week, I’d like to talk about what that might look like.

Let’s start with how investment flows into communities. Businesses invest to chase money which grows with human capital. Human capital is most easily expanded via education, but education doesn’t work without buy-in. Buy-in, in turn, can only come with some degree of institutional trust. Dizzy yet? It may seem like we’re going in circles, but there’s a point here. If the government wants buy-in from the governed, it must show both good intentions and competence.

It sounds like a simple enough concept, but it turns out that creating trust is incredibly complex. As important as it is, it’s devilishly difficult to measure. As Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” Justice Stewart was referring to porn, but it applies about as well to institutional trust as it does to porn. There’s an aphorism that goes “what gets measured gets managed,” and we just cannot seem to measure it. We likely will not be able to collect any quantitative information on institutional trust, either, but that isn’t what we care most about, anyway. We want buy-in from the community, which can be measured in a number of different ways, and that serves as a good enough proxy as-is.

How, then, does this tie in to police budgets? Police are the primary touchpoint between the government and the communities we are talking about. They are effective at reducing some of the symptoms, but they cannot actually treat the disease. The police are hammers, but only a small portion of the community are nails. We need to buy a Phillips-head for the rest. When we show all of the members of a community that we distrust them (and it certainly must feel that way given the frequency with which they are accosted), they are unlikely to trust that the government cares about them. By placing more trust in individuals, we may miss the occasional petty crime, but we strengthen the relationship between the community and the government, which will reduce crime in the long run.

Let me show you what I mean with a couple examples. The first is Norway. A 1980s change in prison policy away from focusing on punishment and towards rehabilitation halved recidivism rates (rates at which released prisoners are convicted of new crimes). They established trust with prisoners, and the prisoners rewarded them. Another example may seem less relevant, but I promise I’ll get to the point. A recent experiment on Swarthmore minority economics students found a 20% rise in course completion for those sent an email showcasing the diversity of ideas and researchers in the field of economics (One email! That’s it!). The result is stunning for such a small treatment. The point? If we show (not tell) people a path to becoming something more than they thought they could be, they are much more likely to believe themselves capable and thus take that path. Seeing success breeds more success, and that, in turn, will lower the number of people that feel they need to turn to crime to gain agency over their lives. The only thing that makes that possible is trust.

“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas, we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
-David Brown, Chicago Police Superintendent, former Dallas Police Chief

Defund the police? It has been a slogan circulating social media, but it has no consistent platform. The phrase itself calls to mind images of anarchy. Many who have espoused the view say it only means reallocating some of the dollars in police budgets away from there to other methods of promoting public safety. That is not what the message implies, though, and it’s not where it started. A fringe movement to ‘abolish’ police sowed those seeds.

The leaders of the movement seem to mean something completely different than all but the most ardently ‘progressive.’ When Minneapolis’s city council president was interviewed on CNN to talk about the city council’s vote to dismantle their police department (it remains unclear what this will mean in practice), she responded to a question about a hypothetical scenario of a person’s house being burgled by calling the ability to call the police in such a situation a ‘privilege.’ In an opinion piece published to the New York Times, a community organizer makes clear the movement does literally mean abolish the police. She claims that police only make communities more dangerous using a couple anecdotes while failing to city any data.

I’ll fill in that gap for her. Steve Levitt, a University of Chicago economist (and deliverer of my favorite lectures when I was there), conducted a study on the effect more police officers had on crime. If you don’t want to read a paper, I’ll sum it up for you: more police translates to fewer crimes committed. Common sense prevails!

It was unsurprising, then, that Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president and leader of the party, quickly distanced himself from the calls for defunding. The messaging needs more work because it is off-putting to a majority of voters. People calling for defunding the police when they really mean reallocating some of the police budget to new teams of practitioners in social work or the like so that police can focus on crime should find a new slogan. The current one is self-defeating.

Several incidents of blatant racism have been highlighted by continued protests which now engulf cities not only across America, but globally. I cannot pretend to know what racism feels like, so I’m going to focus on what I do know. Looting and vandalism accompanying the protests have subsided and with their fading has faded any impetus for a discussion on ending them; we can focus on something more important. What’s left? We have a problem in the equal dispensation of justice in this country. Our black community members do not even feel safe around law enforcement.

Unfortunately, we cannot flip a switch and turn off racism. There has been progress on the issue, but it is slow. Changing cultural biases takes generations. Generations of black and brown people should not have to wait on being treated the same way as white people. The good news is that there are things we can do right now to mitigate the effects.

The first step should be to eliminate all language in police union contracts that protects officers who behave irresponsibly or with undue aggression. Many contracts build sunsets into reprimands. Chicago’s includes a clause about expunging records after 5-7 years, even in the case of a complaint about use of force. Rather than wait to negotiate new contracts, municipalities and, even better, Congress, should make it illegal to include such things in the contract in the first place. Further, clear guidelines on prioritizing de-escalation and using any force should be enforced with strict penalties for violations. This should be encoded into law.

Creating laws and ordinances that specify what cannot be included in a police contract have the benefit of taking effect immediately. Renegotiating a contract with a union could take months or even years. Passing a law making illegal provisions protecting misbehaving cops invalidates a bad contract. Specifying the proper use of force and consequences for excessive action removes any uncertainty about what will or will not be allowed and creates an environment where a police officer will have to think about safety rather than simply subduing a suspect. It shouldn’t change anything for the majority of police, but those who would use their position to act violently will no longer be able to hide behind their badge.

There are, of course, many other pressing reforms to be made. For instance, I believe prison should be used as a way to create better citizens. I’ve written about that here. However, I believe transparency and accountability by police would lead to incredibly powerful results if implemented and I believe that highly focused messaging will end with success while broad messaging ends in platitudes without actual progress. Accountability, in particular, appears to be an issue gaining bipartisan traction with Senators including both Cory Booker and Lindsey Graham talking about it. If we do this right, we could use this momentum to take important steps forward.