So it appears we are headed for a situation of genetics making more and more of a difference. This is a disturbing prospect.
Why? What difference does it make to me whether it is my environment or my genes holding me back? The fact that major environmental hindrances have been alleviated seems an unmitigated positive to me.

So it appears we are headed for a situation of genetics making more and more of a difference. This is a disturbing prospect.
Why? What difference does it make to me whether it is my environment or my genes holding me back? The fact that major environmental hindrances have been alleviated seems an unmitigated positive to me.

Also, how in the world is the right of exit considered to be a negative to overall performance? Do your service providers provide better or worse performance when they know you can leave, or when they’re guaranteed that you must stay? Is there really a belief that if only we forced those nasty rich kids to stay, that somehow those schools would improve? Without any incentive to?

Now, to the extent that those affluent people are using policy tools to prevent poor people from moving near them, that’s not so nice, but I think there may be other factors.

Also, how in the world is the right of exit considered to be a negative to overall performance? Do your service providers provide better or worse performance when they know you can leave, or when they’re guaranteed that you must stay? Is there really a belief that if only we forced those nasty rich kids to stay, that somehow those schools would improve? Without any incentive to?

Now, to the extent that those affluent people are using policy tools to prevent poor people from moving near them, that’s not so nice, but I think there may be other factors.

“I think “gaming the system” is a bad way of looking at the structural barriers to the upward mobility of the poor created by the behavior of wealthier people. The problem is that (a) the reasonable motivation of the middle and upper classes to do the best they can for their kids and (b) the structure of our public educational institutions together combine to create a de facto barrier to the opportunity of poorer kids to get a decent education and subsequently a decent wage that really makes work worthwhile.”

Truly, ‘A’ is incomplete: it’s not the motivation but the performance of that motivation that combines with ‘B’ to create the de facto barrier.

That doesn’t mitigate Ygelsias’s idiosyncratic error, of course, but it’s worth noting for this reason: Yglesias can’t argue against parents, of whatever wealth, being motivated to care for their kids, but I’m quite certain he’d have no problem imposing a ban on particular performances of this motivation, if he deemed them to have negative external effects on the thrice disadvantaged. I think that’s a conversation worth having, if only to flush out what Conrad called the “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” that animates much of Yglesias’ politics.

“I think “gaming the system” is a bad way of looking at the structural barriers to the upward mobility of the poor created by the behavior of wealthier people. The problem is that (a) the reasonable motivation of the middle and upper classes to do the best they can for their kids and (b) the structure of our public educational institutions together combine to create a de facto barrier to the opportunity of poorer kids to get a decent education and subsequently a decent wage that really makes work worthwhile.”

Truly, ‘A’ is incomplete: it’s not the motivation but the performance of that motivation that combines with ‘B’ to create the de facto barrier.

That doesn’t mitigate Ygelsias’s idiosyncratic error, of course, but it’s worth noting for this reason: Yglesias can’t argue against parents, of whatever wealth, being motivated to care for their kids, but I’m quite certain he’d have no problem imposing a ban on particular performances of this motivation, if he deemed them to have negative external effects on the thrice disadvantaged. I think that’s a conversation worth having, if only to flush out what Conrad called the “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” that animates much of Yglesias’ politics.

You may be on to something there.

You may be on to something there.