I recently canvassed several interns who are working on preventative health measures in D.C. and asked if there was any new ideas being tossed about. They said “No”. This got me thinking – with all the talk about preventing future illness, why are so few ideas tossed about in public? In order to get this ball rolling, I have two such ideas.
1) Free Sunblock at public beaches, pools, etc. If sunblock is indeed effective at blocking cancer, offering sunblock free might be a good idea. It would displace a large amount of private purchase, but it might also encourage people who forget or are otherwise uninterested to put some on. It could be held in despensers by snack stands where people could not freely refill there bottle, but could freely put it on. If the quantity of money saved from prevented cancer is in the ballpark of the cost of the program (minus the cost savings of people who would otherwise use sunblock), it would be a success.
2) Free earplugs at concerts, clubs, etc. Many studies demonstrate that young adults today have worse hearing than an average fifty year old had only a few decades ago. The accepted reason for this is excessively loud music. In particular, concerts and clubs are both very loud, and very practical venues for free earplug distribution. The idea is that bad hearing can be costly for a number of reasons – increased accidents (not hearing a car coming, etc), hearing aids later in life, etc. While earplugs are currently ‘uncool’ to wear to most outings, providing them free would increase the quantity of people wearing them, which would decrease their ‘uncoolness’. Consequently, a large number of people might protect their hearing, and the message of auditory protection would be heard. Most importantly, earplugs are very cheap to make and could be distributed at a low cost – making this idea much more viable than free sunblock.
I hope to start a dialog about potential preventative health measures. Surely a detailed cost benefit study of these ideeas is needed, but having ideas to study is an important step.
N.B. I am not suggesting an all encompassing nanny state, but rather that when the public bears the costs but not the benefits of an individuals risky behavior (failing to apply suntan lotion and subsequently contract cancer), there should be room for policy improvement.
Many European countries offer free education to those who want it. The idea is that education is good, and the more educated people get, the better. Since education is costly however, this is not necessarily true.
The main problem with education is that it is a partially zero-sum pursuit.
While classes in computer science and engineering may teach skills applicable in the job market, most classes don’t. Instead, they claim to ‘teach you how to think’. I am a little dubious. Not only have studies showed no increase in intelligence from college, having been through the experience myself I can say that the majority of time is spent learning specific facts that are quickly forgotten. My point is that while college may offer some true benefits to a person’s future productivity, the real purpose of schools is to credential a candidates drive and aptitude. For a certification, 160,000 dollars is a lot of money. Consequently, by simply educating more people two things are likely to happen:
- Top students may have to get higher degrees than previously to distinguish themselves. Since college is mostly about people jostling for post-college job positions, if more people go to college it will be hard to distinguish the good job candidates from the bad ones. This might force the best to move up a notch in educational attainment to prove there worth. Since the reason for additional education is better credentials, this will be costly in money in time but not provide a sufficient (if any) productivity boost.
- There will be more people who spend four years learning nothing at a great cost. Since college is mostly a case of zero-sum competition, additional people attending college costs money without increasing the true productivity of these students. This is a net loss.
If we think about it, the root problem with trying to educate everyone is that the students remain the same. Education does not make people smarter, and many jobs require aptitude rather than knowledge (you learn what you need to know on the job). Consequently, having more educated people does not necessarily lead to a better workforce. Education becomes an unproductive arms race.
I used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine how IQ affects income. The survey takes a set of young people in 1979 (late teens to early twenties) and interviews them on a broad range of issues every few years. While surveys have continued beyond 1996, I only have data up to that year.
In the simple linear regression of Income vs. IQ a clear trend emerges – income diverges by IQ as we age*. This may seem counterintuitive – doesn’t raw intellect matter less and less as we get older? Apparently the answer is no. Perhaps this is because the smartest people continue learning at a faster rate as they age, or perhaps this is because it takes a while for there salary to catch up to the value of work produced. E.G., A McDonalds employee is unlikely to be paid below the value of their production. However, many financial companies use strongly hierarchal structures that effectually underpay recent college graduates. Adoption studies confirm a similar trend: Adopted children’s financial outcome decreasingly correlates with their adoptive parents and increasingly correlates with tested aptitude.
What about education? The problem with controlling for education in the data is that smart people tend to get educated more. Anyone with an IQ over 130 who fails to graduate college likely has other uncontrolled variables that decrease their income outlook. Consequently, we would expect a systematic downward bias in our results. Running the regressions shows just this – IQ decreases in importance but continues to be important.
The unfortunate aspect of the above analysis is that education matters less than many people think. Spending more and more on education meets decreasing returns because the raw material – the people who are being educated – stays the same.
*Note that IQ only explains about 15 percent of all variation in income – other factors continue to be very important.
