[T]here might be a secret weapon in the fight against addiction: helping people.
While other researchers look for ways to improve prescription drug regimens or talk therapies, Maria Pagano of Case Western University has focused her attention on the addict’s social connections. In studies spanning over a decade, she and her colleagues have shown that having a supportive network, reducing isolation, decreasing social anxiety, and—especially—helping others can increase the chances of staying sober by up to 50 percent. Her findings suggest that addiction should not be characterized solely as a failure of individual willpower, but must be viewed through the lens of positive social connection.
…In one 2012 study, Pagano and her colleagues found that having a network of people who support one’s abstinence can significantly impact an addict’s ability to stay sober up to three years later…But finding a positive social network when you’re an addict is not that easy to do, she says. Many addicts report having social anxiety—a feeling that one is onstage and not approved of by those around them. In fact, social anxiety often leads one to try drugs or alcohol in the first place, since people think intoxicants act as social lubricants. But using drugs for anxiety control can lead to dependence and can easily get out of control, ruining one’s health, relationships, and work life.
…In a recent study in which she tested this theory, she found that many of her participants—adolescents in treatment for addiction, ages 14-18—had a deep fear of being scrutinized in social situations, while 15 percent met the diagnostic criteria for a social anxiety disorder (or SAD). While her results showed that levels of participation in a 12-step program did not differ significantly between those with an SAD diagnosis and those without one, one thing did make a difference: The adolescents with SAD who actively participated in helping had a significantly reduced risk of relapse or incarceration in the six months after their treatment finished.
…In one 2013 study, she and her colleagues recruited 226 recovering alcoholics from nine outpatient treatment programs, and they followed these patients for 10 years while measuring alcohol consumption, AA participation levels, and self-rated thoughtfulness towards other people at different points in time. They also measured whether or not participants helped others by becoming a sponsor or by completing step 12 in AA.
By using statistical analyses, Pagano and colleagues showed that those who’d attended more AA meetings and engaged in helping stayed sober longer and reported higher interest in others up to 10 years later. Helping others had a unique effect on the outcome, suggesting that helping has a special role in recovery—and should receive more attention.
The article continues with even more studies demonstrating the importance of social connections and service in combating addiction. Well worth the read.
A 2016 study finds that while religious belief has a negative correlation with analytic thinking, it has a significantly positive association with moral concern. Interestingly enough, the negative correlation with analytic thinking can in part be explained by the tension between it and moral concerns. “When there’s a question of faith, from the analytic point of view, it may seem absurd,” said Tony Jack, who led the research.
“But, from what we understand about the brain, the leap of faith to belief in the supernatural amounts to pushing aside the critical/analytical way of thinking to help us achieve greater social and emotional insight.”
…”A stream of research in cognitive psychology has shown and claims that people who have faith (i.e., are religious or spiritual) are not as smart as others. They actually might claim they are less intelligent,” said Richard Boyatzis, distinguished university professor and professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve, and a member of Jack’s team.
“Our studies confirmed that statistical relationship, but at the same time showed that people with faith are more prosocial and empathic,” he said. In a series of eight experiments, the researchers found the more empathetic the person, the more likely he or she is religious. That finding offers a new explanation for past research showing women tend to hold more religious or spiritual worldviews than men. The gap may be because women have a stronger tendency toward empathetic concern than men. Atheists, the researchers found, are most closely aligned with psychopaths—not killers, but the vast majority of psychopaths classified as such due to their lack of empathy for others.
…“Because of the tension between networks, pushing aside a naturalistic world view enables you to delve deeper into the social/emotional side,” Jack explained. “And that may be the key to why beliefs in the supernatural exist throughout the history of cultures. It appeals to an essentially nonmaterial way of understanding the world and our place in it.”
…[Jared] Friedman said, “Having empathy doesn’t mean you necessarily have anti-scientific beliefs. Instead, our results suggest that if we only emphasize analytic reasoning and scientific beliefs, as the New Atheist movement suggests, then we are compromising our ability to cultivate a different type of thinking, namely social/moral insight.”
“These findings,” Friedman continued, “are consistent with the philosophical view, espoused by (Immanuel) Kant, according to which there are two distinct types of truth: empirical and moral.”
In short, “taking a carefully considered leap of religious faith appears be an effective route to promoting emotional insight. Theirs and other studies find that, overall, religious belief is associated with greater compassion, greater social inclusiveness and greater motivation to engage in pro-social actions.”
Among high earners, women are no more religious than men. High-earning men are just as likely as high-earning women to be religiously affiliated, to pray daily, to identify as a strong member of their religion, and to attend religious services weekly. This convergence occurs because the relationship between earnings and religiosity operates differently for women and men. High-earning women are consistently less religious than low-earning women, and high-earning men are consistently more religious than low-earning men.
Why is this the case?:
One likely explanation is the gendered norms around work and family in family-centric congregations. Previous research has shown that even progressive congregations still value and provide services around the assumption of a 1950s family with a bread-winning father and a stay-at-home mother. Therefore, high-earning men may receive positive validation from family-centric religious congregations and identities because they are fulfilling their “proper” role as providers for their family (and are seen as important congregation members with leadership potential). High-earning women, however, may receive less validation than women who are perceived as less career oriented and more family oriented. In fact, women with high-powered careers may feel marginalized when many “women’s activities” are centered on homemaking and scheduled during the work day.
Although scholars have come up with complex explanations for why women are more religious than men, the difference may simply be due to social expectations and social benefits. People may expect women, who are also expected to fill caring roles in their family and in society, to be more religious. These expectations could be especially strong in Christian contexts where religion is associated with family-centrism and sympathy (gender gaps in religiosity are usually smaller or non-existent in non-Christian religions). Relatedly, it is possible that the average woman simply gets more out of Christianity than the average man (e.g., opportunities to socialize outside the home, existential security, etc.). Among high earners, however, women may no longer get more out of religion than men.
Regardless of exactly why earning more money means something different depending on whether you’re a man or woman, there are no gender differences in religiosity among high earners, and differences among women and men are just as large as the average differences between them. Therefore, gender differences in religiosity shouldn’t be reduced to sex categories and hormones.
According to a new Harvard working paper, the answer is “yes”. Not only that, it demonstrates the importance of specialization. The paper concludes,
Division of labor allows workers to specialize, but also makes them dependent on one another. That is, specialization often implies co-specialization: coworkers need to acquire different, yet complementary expertise. I have quantified these interdependencies in terms of the match and substitutability among coworkers, using Swedish administrative data that describe workers’ educational attainment in terms of 491 different educational tracks. Coworker match is measured by how often these tracks co-occur in establishments’ workforces, whereas substitutability is measured as the degree to which different educational tracks give access to the same occupations.
The effects of coworker match on wages are positive and substantial. Causal estimates imply that working with well-matching coworkers yields returns of a similar magnitude as having a college degree. Moreover, better coworker matches are associated with lower job-switching rates. In contrast, being easily substituted by coworkers diminishes wages and is associated with elevated job-switching rates. Given the positive wage effects, I have argued that the component of a worker’s coworker match that is orthogonal to coworker substitutability can be thought of as a measure of how complementary a worker is to her coworkers. This coworker complementarity rises over the course of a worker’s career in a way that closely tracks the Mincer curve. Furthermore, I have shown that well-established wage premiums are to some extent contingent on working with complementary coworkers. For instance, college-educated workers who have few complementary coworkers earn about the same as workers who only completed secondary school. Similarly, the urban wage premium is about nine times larger for workers in the top quintile of the complementarity distribution compared to those in the bottom quintile. Finally, for workers with post-secondary degrees or higher, the large-plant premium, i.e., the relatively high wages paid by large establishments, can be wholly attributed to the fact that these establishments employ larger numbers of complementary coworkers.
These findings highlight a salient fact of modern societies: high levels of specialization make skilled workers reliant on coworkers who specialize in areas that are complementary to their own field of expertise. This interdependence of coworkers has consequences for how we should think about returns to schooling at a societal level, for the implied coordination challenges in upgrading education systems, and for the role urban labor markets play as places where workers match to coworkers, not just to employers (pgs. 41-42).
A 2017 article in the St. Louis Fed’s The Regional Economist looks at the impact immigration has on U.S. labor markets. The researchers drew on “state-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010 for wages and immigration figures…For wages, we used inflation-adjusted pretax wages and salary incomes of the employed population between the ages of 18 and 60. Finally, we used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ seasonally adjusted unemployment rate.”
The data “reveals that the relationship between unemployment and immigration is weak to nonexistent, even during this crisis period.”
Furthermore, it “reveals a weak to nonexistent correlation” between wages and immigration, even during economic crises.
But what about the impact on low-skilled workers? “A study by economist David Card addresses this question,” the authors write. “It discusses the consequences of the Mariel boatlift episode, when about 125,000 Cubans emigrated from Cuba’s Mariel port to Miami between May and September 1980. These immigrants had relatively low skills (i.e., less than the average Cuban worker). Card found no evidence that low-skilled wages and the unemployment rate among low-skilled workers changed in Miami.” This is most likely due to the fact that “immigrants and native workers may not be perfect substitutes. It was suggested in one study that immigrants do not so much compete directly with natives as they create conditions for increased specialization by which natives perform more communication-intensive work and immigrants do manual tasks.”
Just more evidence to consider in this controversial debate.
When I shared Jason Brennan’s newest book Against Democracy on my Facebook wall, I got a little push back in both the thread and even in a personal email. How could anyone be against democracy? Isn’t this just elitist snobbery at best and totalitarianism in the making at worst? In short, no. Following the election, I finished off Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance and Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, both of which showed convincingly that our country consists of a politically ignorant and misinformed electorate. Brennan surveys this literature to demonstrate that voters often choose policies that would make us all worse off. He then dives into the political psychology literature and finds that political participation tends to make us mean and dumb (I told him that chs. 2-3 alone were worth the price of the book). Brennan divides the electorate into three categories:
Hobbits: the typical nonvoter; mostly ignorant and apathetic to politics and social science.
Hooligans: pretty much everyone else; consumes political information in a highly-biased way and ignores evidence contrary to their position.
Vulcans: rare; rational and scientific; can articulate opposing views well; interested in, but dispassionate about politics.
When judged from an instrumentalist point of view (i.e., judging institutions and systems based on their performance, not some supposed intrinsic value), the case for democracy seems far weaker than is often assumed. The evidence he presents helps him build his case for epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable. Yet, this isn’t some technocratic bureaucracy, but a way to mitigate the negative outcomes of poor voter knowledge.
The book is packed with tons of information and rigorous arguments. I hardly do it justice with the description above. Even if you’re not convinced to be an epistocrat, the solid social science alone makes the book worth reading. One of the most interesting books I’ve read in some time.
You can see an interview with Jason Brennan discussing the book below.
Some of the most interesting and infuriating things to witness on Facebook are the threads on Daniel Peterson’s wall. Peterson teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at BYU (he’s even authored a biography of Muhammad) and has been a big name in Mormon apologetics for some time. Because of the latter, he tends to be favored among conservative Mormons, both religiously and politically. However, his educated, sympathetic, and often favorable views of Islam tend to bring Islamophobic Church members out of the woodwork. I’ve seen ignorant Internet warriors attempt to lecture him on the “threats” of Sharia law, provide decontextualized readings of the Quran, explain how Islam is an inherently violent religion, and justify Trump’s Muslim ban. In the midst of one of these exchanges, Peterson suggested John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed’s Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think based on the Gallup Poll of the Islamic world.
The book was eye-opening. For example, the authors summarize some of their findings as follows:
Who speaks for the West?: Muslims around the world do not see the West as monolithic. They criticize or celebrate countries based on their politics, not based on their culture or religion.
Dream jobs: When asked to describe their dreams for the future, Muslims don’t mention fighting in a jihad, but rather getting a better job.
Radical rejection: Muslims and Americans are equally likely to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustified.
Religious moderates: Those who condone acts of terrorism are a minority and are no more likely to be religious than the rest of the population.
Admiration of the West: What Muslims around the world say they most admire about the West is its technology and its democracy — the same two top responses given by Americans when asked the same question.
Critique of the West: What Muslims around the world say they least admire about the West is its perceived moral decay and breakdown of traditional values — the same responses given by Americans when posed the same question.
Gender justice: Muslim women want equal rights and religion in their societies.
R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: Muslims around the world say that the one thing the West can do to improve relations with their societies is to moderate their views toward Muslims and respect Islam.
Clerics and constitutions: The majority of those surveyed want religious leaders to have no direct role in crafting a constitution, yet favor religious law as a source of legislation (pg. xii-xiii).
This is just a taste. The hard numbers paint a very different picture than what we typically see in the media. You can see an interview with Mogahed about her research below.
Such is the goal of Jonathan Haidt and Linda Trevino in a recent Nature article. “Imagine a world,” they write,
in which medical researchers did experiments on rats, but never on people. Furthermore, suppose that doctors ignored the rat literature entirely. Instead, they talked to each other and swapped tips, based on their own clinical experience. In such a world medicine would not be the cumulative science that we know today.
That fanciful clinical world is the world of business ethics research. University researchers do experiments, mostly on students who come into the lab for pay or course credit. Experiments are run carefully, social and cognitive processes are elucidated, and articles get published in academic journals. But business leaders do not read these journals, and rarely even read about the studies second-hand. Instead, when they think and talk about ethics, they rely on their own experience, and the experience of their friends. CEOs share their insights on ethical leadership. Ethics and compliance officers meet at conferences to swap ‘best practices’ that haven’t been research-tested. There are fads, but there is no clear progress.
The authors argue that societies “would be vastly better off if we could improve business ethics. Efficiency would improve (http://www.ethicalsystems.org/content/ethics-pays), enlarging the pie, and workers would be treated better, removing some of the animus directed toward capitalism and free trade in recent years.” However, three obstacles stand in the way:
The hyper-complexity of business ethics: Proper business ethics requires understanding of “the individual, the group, and the legal and cultural ecosystem” as well as “the alignment (or misalignment) across levels, and within each level.”
The risk aversion of firms: “Why take unnecessary risks by inviting strangers in to poke around and ask questions, knowing that these strangers will then publish their findings, even if they say they will hide the name of your company? Request denied.”
The siloed data problem: “[W]hen it comes to sharing data, the walls are higher. Data is normally kept private and only shared with other researchers under limited conditions, particularly when it benefits the researchers in some way. When those data are (rarely) gathered from real companies, which are concerned about downside risk, the walls are even higher…Most companies collect little or no data about their ethical culture, and if they do, they most likely would not share it with anyone.”
Haidt and Trevino continue,
What can we do to get the business and research communities together, and to establish the sorts of long-standing trusting relationships that can lead to longitudinal studies in which data is gathered using the same instruments over the course of several years and many companies, while various interventions are tested? This is the holy grail of business ethics research.
In 2014, a group of ethics researchers from many subdisciplines came together to form a research collaborative called Ethical Systems (see EthicalSystems.org). We were formed to address the hyper-complexity problem. We began by summarizing the existing research on topics as varied as accounting, fairness, business law, human rights, conflicts of interest, ethical culture, and whistle-blowing. Our initial goal was to aggregate the vast and varied research literature and make it accessible — always for free — to business leaders and especially to ethics and compliance officers. (Because culture and regulatory frameworks differ by country, we have limited our work to the United States so far, but we plan to expand globally in the future.)
Our second goal was to bring researchers together from multiple subfields and link them to the many business leaders who have begun to realize that they can’t just focus on compliance with regulations; they must invest in improving their ethical cultures. We have found a great deal of interest in working together from all the relevant groups — including federal regulators.
Once again, the supposed link between immigrants and crime was peddled by President Trump with the announcement of VOICE: Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement office. “We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests,” Trump said in his joint address to Congress this past Tuesday.
But the scare over immigrant criminality is, frankly, nothing more than fear-mongering. “Research has shown virtually no support for the enduring assumption that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime,” write sociologist Robert Adelman and criminologist Lesley Reid.
Immigration-crime research over the past 20 years has widely corroborated the conclusions of a number of early 20th-century presidential commissions that found no backing for the immigration-crime connection. Although there are always individual exceptions, the literature demonstrates that immigrants commit fewer crimes, on average, than native-born Americans.
Also, large cities with substantial immigrant populations have lower crime rates, on average, than those with minimal immigrant populations.
Drawing on their recent study that “analyzed census data spanning four decades from 1970 to 2010 for 200 randomly selected metropolitan areas,” Adelman and Reid explain that an increase in immigration led to a decrease in murder, robbery, burglary, and larceny (on average). They conclude, “These associations are strong and stable evidence that immigration does not cause crime to increase in U.S. metropolitan areas, and may even help reduce it.”
Researchers Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey also find that “[c]ities and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have lower rates of crime and violence, all else being equal…In one study, for example, we found that cities with historically high immigration levels are especially likely to enjoy reduced crime rates as a result of their immigrant populations.” One of the more exciting bits of research is their forthcoming article in The Annual Review of Criminology:
We conducted a meta-analysis, meaning we systematically evaluated available research on the immigration-crime relationship in neighborhoods, cities and metropolitan areas across the U.S. We examined findings from more than 50 studies published between 1994 and 2014[.]
Our analysis of the literature reveals that immigration has a weak crime-suppressing effect. In other words, more immigration equals less crime.
There were some individual studies that found that with an increase in immigration, there was an increase in crime. However, there were 2.5 times as many findings that showed immigration was actually correlated with less crime. And, the most common finding was that immigration had no impact on crime.
The upshot? We find no evidence to indicate that immigration leads to more crime and it may, in fact, suppress it.
The heated debate over school choice was sparked again by the nomination and appointment of Betsy DeVos to Secretary of Education. I’m not so much interested in DeVos as I am the evidence regarding school choice. One professor claims that economists are skeptical of school choice, with only 1/3 of economists supporting it. John Oliver has even taken charter schools to task. As Reason summarizes,
Oliver’s segment…was almost unrelieved in its criticism of charters. Echoing the talking points of major teachers unions and liberal interest group such as People for the American Way and the NAACP, the HBO host attacked charters for being unaccountable to local and state authorities (this is not true, as all state charter laws have various types of oversight rules built into them), “draining” resources from traditional public schools (which presumes tax dollars for education belong to existing power structures), and skimming students (in fact, charters teach a higher percentage of racial and ethnic minorities than traditional public schools; they also serve a higher percentage of economically disadvanataged kids). Which is not to say that Oliver is all wrong in his analysis. For instance, he ran through a series of charters that were criminally mismanaged and deserved to be shut down (even as he glossed over the fact that failing charters, unlike failing traditional schools, are more likely to be closed). And he’s right to argue that, on average, charters perform about the same as regular public schools. However, such comparisons tell us very little about whether charters do help those at-risk students better than traditional schools. On this score, there is very little doubt that charters do more with less money and fewer resources.
So what is the evidence? First and foremost, the claim “only a third of economists on the Chicago panel agreed that students would be better off if they all had access to vouchers to use at any private (or public) school of their choice” is misleading if not technically incorrect. Here’s the poll:
As Slate Star Codex responds, “A more accurate way to summarize this graph is “About twice as many economists believe a voucher system would improve education as believe that it wouldn’t.” By leaving it at “only a third of economists support vouchers”, the article implies that there is an economic consensus against the policy. Heck, it more than implies it – its title is “Free Market For Education: Economists Generally Don’t Buy It”. But its own source suggests that, of economists who have an opinion, a large majority are pro-voucher.” This is especially true when you look at a more recent poll:
But what about empirical evidence? Harvard’s Martin West sums up the evidence for school choice as such:
First, the benefits of attending a private school are greatest for outcomes other than test scores—in particular, the likelihood that a student will graduate from high school and enroll in college. Second, attending a school of choice, whether private or charter, is especially beneficial for minority students living in urban areas. These findings support the case for continued expansion of school choice, especially in our major cities. They also raise important questions about the government’s reliance on standardized test results as a guide for regulating the options available to families.
For example, a 2013 study found that private-school vouchers have no significant effects on college enrollment except for African-American and Hispanic students. The impact on the former was substantial, while the latter was small and statistically insignificant. Another study that has been trumpeted as demonstrating that “Detroit’s charter schools performed at about the same dismal level as its traditional public schools” actually supports quite the opposite.
CREDO, 2013, pg. 44.
The study concludes,
Based on the findings presented here, the typical student in Michigan charter schools gains more learning in a year than his TPS counterparts, amounting to about two months of additional gains in reading and math. These positive patterns are even more pronounced in Detroit, where historically student academic performance has been poor. These outcomes are consistent with the result that charter schools have significantly better results than TPS for minority students who are in poverty (pg. 44).
Margaret Raymond, Director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), authored a Huffington Post piece to correct some misperceptions about what the evidence shows regarding charter schools. Referring to a 2013 study, Raymond writes,
The main findings of the report are as follows. Over the course of a school year, charter school students learn more in reading than district public schools — it is as if the charter school students attended about seven more days of school in a typical school year. The learning in math is not statistically different (not worse as she claims).
[But these] results…are the average one-year growth, blending brand new charter school enrollees with students with longer persistence. When the length of time a student attends a charter school is taken into account, the results are striking: In both reading and math, we discovered that students’ annual progress rose strongly the longer they attended charter schools. For students with four or more years in charter schools, their gains equated to an additional 43 days of learning in reading and 50 additional days of learning in math in each year.
Second, the results showed strong improvement for the sector overall — the proportion of charter schools outperforming their local district schools rose and the share that underperformed shrank in both reading and math compared to performance four years earlier. The shift in performance is neither idle drift nor nefarious conduct on the part of charter schools — we found no differences in the demography of students served by charter schools over the period.
…Urban low income and minority students are the ones best advantaged in charter schools. CREDO released “The Urban Charter School Study“ in 2015, a report conveniently overlooked by Weingarten. We found that gains in urban charter schools are dramatic overall (equivalent to 28 days of additional learning in reading and 40 days of additional learning in math every year) but for low income minority students they are nothing short of liberating: as much as 44 extra days of learning in reading and 59 extra days in math.
Jay P. Greene, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, notes,
[W]e have four RCTs on the effects of charter schools that allow us to know something about the effects of charter schools with high confidence. Here is what we know: students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school. These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large. In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found: “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”
The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found: “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district.”
And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education. It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools. They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.
When you have four RCTs – studies meeting the gold standard of research design – and all four of them agree that charters are of enormous benefit to urban students, you would think everyone would agree that charters should be expanded and supported, at least in urban areas. If we found the equivalent of halving the black-white test score gap from RCTs from a new cancer drug, everyone would be jumping for joy – even if the benefits were found only for certain types of cancer.
I find that winning a lottery for admission to a preferred school at the high school level reduces the total number of felony arrests and the social cost of crime. Among middle school students, winning a school-choice lottery reduces the social cost of crime and the number of days incarcerated. Importantly, I find that these overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among students in the highest-risk group. Indeed, I find little impact either positive or negative of winning a school-choice lottery on criminal activity for the 80 percent of students outside of this group.
Consider first the results for high school students in the high-risk group. Among these students, winning admission to a preferred school reduces the average number of felony arrests over the study period from 0.77 to 0.43, a pattern driven largely by a reduction of 0.23 in the average number of arrests for drug felonies (see Figure 2). The average social cost of the crimes committed by high-risk lottery winners (after adjusting the cost of murders downward) is $3,916 lower than for lottery losers, a decrease of more than 35 percent. (Without adjusting for the cost of murder, I estimate the reduction in the social cost of crimes committed by lottery winners at $14,106.) High-risk lottery winners on average commit crimes with a total expected sentence of 35 months, compared to 59 months among lottery losers.
Among high-risk middle-school students, I find no effect of winning a school-choice lottery on the average number of felony arrests. Although the number arrests for violent felonies falls, this is offset by an increase in the number of property arrests. Because violent crimes carry greater social costs, however, winning a school-choice lottery reduces the average social cost of the crimes committed by middle school students by $7,843, or 63 percent. It also reduces the total expected sentence of crimes committed by each student by 31 months (64 percent).
For the nation’s 17-year-olds, there have been no gains in literacy since the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in 1971. Performance is somewhat better on math, but there has still been no progress since 1990. The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. population. Literacy scores for white students peaked in 1975; in math, scores peaked in the early 1990s.
International literacy and numeracy data from the OECD’s assessment of adult skills confirms this troubling picture. The numeracy and literacy skills of those born since 1980 are no more developed than for those born between 1968 and 1977. For the average OECD country, by contrast, people born between 1978 and 1987 score significantly better than all previous generations.
Comparing the oldest—those born from 1947 to 1957—to youngest cohorts—those born from 1988 to 1996, the U.S. gains are especially weak. The United States ranks dead last among 26 countries tested on math gains, and second to last on literacy gains across these generations. The countries which have made the largest math gains include South Korea, Slovenia, France, Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands.
Rothwell in part points to “a decline in bureaucratic efficiency” in primary and secondary education. With declining productivity in schools, it’s worth pointing out that some economic evidence finds that competition in public-school districts boosts school productivity, raises student achievement, and decreases spending. Furthermore, recent evidence shows that “autonomous government schools” (e.g., charters) have higher management quality than regular public or private schools. This higher management quality in turn is strongly linked to better pupil outcomes.
For reading impacts, overall, we find positive effects of about 0.17 standard deviations (null for US programs, 0.24 standard deviations for non-US programs)…For math scores, we report 10 meta-analytic ITT effect sizes (seven in the US and three outside of the US). Overall, vouchers have a positive effect on math of 0.11 standard deviations, 0.07 standard deviations in the US and 0.15 standard deviations outside of the US.
The overall results just described in this section are for the final year of data in each study. It could be that these effects are not representative of the initial effects one might expect from a new program. In fact, our analysis of the effects by year indicates that the effects of private school voucher programs often start out null in the first one or two years and then turn positive. Longer-term achievement effects, of course, are much more salient than immediate achievement effects whenever longer-term effects are available
…Additionally, in terms of policy implications, it is critical to consider the cost-benefit tradeoffs associated with voucher programs. Wolf & McShane (2013) and Muralidharan et al. (2015) found that vouchers are cost effective, since they tend to generate achievement outcomes that are as good as or better than traditional public schools but at a fraction of the cost. The greater efficiency of school choice in general and school vouchers in particular are another fruitful avenue for scholarly inquiry (pgs. 39-41).
Another 2016 study looked at the various empirical studies that have been conducted on school choice. The following chart lists the key findings:
Forster, 2016, pg. 2.
Given these positive findings, it’s little wonder that a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with our education system while a large majority support school choice (especially parents). Granted, there are empirically-tested ways to improve regular public schools and I’m all for it. But with the evidence above, maybe school choice isn’t the bogeyman it has been made out to be.
[T]here might be a secret weapon in the fight against addiction: helping people.
When I shared Jason Brennan’s newest book 
Some of the most interesting and infuriating things to witness on Facebook are the threads on Daniel Peterson’s wall. Peterson teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at 
