School-Matching Failures, and Advice From the Man Who Designed the System
The Times reports on New York City kids who fail to get into any of the high schools they apply to. Al Roth, who helped design the school-choice program but has no hand in running it, reports on why this failure occurs. (One big problem, from the Times article: a school like Baruch College Campus H.S. received 7,606 applications for 120 seats, many of them coming from outside of Manhattan; but the school “has not accepted out-of-district students in many years, a fact not mentioned in the Education Department’s school profile.”
Roth’s advice:
For students: use all 12 choices. The system is designed so listing 12 choices won’t hurt your chance of getting one of your top ones. But if you don’t get one of your top choices, having some other schools on your list that you wouldn’t mind going to will save you some heartache.
For schools and guidance counselors: give these kids more useful advice! They should be told if the lists they are submitting include only schools for which they have little or no chance of being accepted.
A Crude Guess About The Future
Though it has an upside for the biosphere that shouldn’t be ignored, $100/barrel oil definitely isn’t much fun for our pocketbooks or the world economy. And could worse times be ahead?
When we see spikes like this, there are inevitably voices predicting stratospheric prices for crude just beyond the horizon. The basic reasoning is that oil supplies are finite (clearly, in the very big picture they are), and that world oil demand is set to skyrocket thanks in large part to the motorization of India and China (it is—see my last post.) “Peak oil” advocates maintain that at some point we are simply bound to run out of the stuff.
I’ve never been a big fan of the peak oil story. First, price signals will encourage conservation as oil gets more dear, reducing demand pressure. We’ve already come a long way on that front; in 1970, the average car on the road got about 14 mpg, and the average van, light truck or SUV about 10. Today, the averages for new cars and trucks sold are considerably more than double those figures, and things continue to move in the right direction thanks to government regulation (rising CAFE mpg standards), new technology (including but not limited to hybrids), and the fact that consumers respond to oil price increases pretty much like economists predict they should, changing purchasing, travel and location decisions in order to conserve when oil prices rise. Read More »
Ed Glaeser Signs Off From Economix Blog…
… with a very good column, including these useful words:
Positive economics attempts to understand the world as it is; normative economics describes how the world should be. Most economists spend most of their time doing positive economics, but most economics columns advocate particular policies, which is implicitly normative economics.
It’s a good bookend to Greg Mankiw‘s column from a couple days ago. Read More »
Four Reasons Why the U.S. Crackdown on Internet Poker Is a Mistake
Yesterday, I described my own personal moral code regarding government prohibitions, which led me to be outraged by recent actions by the U.S. government shutting down the three major internet poker sites for American players.
Forgetting about my own moral standards, which are probably of interest and relevance only to myself, there are four other reasons why the government actions make no sense:
1) Prohibitions that focus on punishing suppliers are largely ineffective. Prohibition of internet poker is no exception.
When there is consumer demand for a good or service, it is extremely difficult to fight the problem through government punishments of suppliers. Illegal drugs are a good case in point. Americans want cocaine. Over the last 40 years of the “War on Drugs,” we have expended enormous amounts of resources locking up drug dealers. (Contrary to public opinion, the punishment of drug users has been relatively limited; by my estimates 95 percent of the prison time served has been by sellers of drugs, as opposed to users.) Especially when the demand for a good is inelastic, squashing supply is ineffective. Making life difficult for incumbent suppliers entices new entrants eager to meet existing demand. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 