Fuzzy left

Now, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason this freeze is still on is our dysfunctional nationalist political equilibrium. But this is another of our little taboos. If it weren’t for the PQ pandering to idealist voters because sovereignty is supposedly worth whatever its cost, this would have been long gone. Sovereigntists who know better, fully aware of how this unsustainable thing would be lifted the very moment Québec would separate, are just letting the fat rhetoric around it swing votes that the Liberals have to compete for as well. This wouldn’t happen if the PQ was a normal political party, but it’s not, so it does. As a Liberal myself, who can’t stand the socially conservative and populist agenda of Mario Dumont, I still have to admit that the ADQ has gotten its platform right on the money, at least in theory, for both healthcare and higher education. At the point we got in this province, with the statist inertia we’re stuck with now, more market freedom in these areas is our best chance for more social justice rather than less. But the tuition freeze I think is even worse than the healthcare problem, if only because finding solutions to the latter means focusing brains on it, brains which the former is sending in all the wrong directions.

In fact, to my knowledge anyway, neither of the two main economic welfare values, whether efficiency or equity that is, can be used to defend this simplistic oversubsidizing policy with any coherence. But it’s the same for every other specific social or political goal I can think of, including getting a grip on our environmental problems, having a better informed citizenry, more social justice, or even for that most fundamental goal of higher education there is: providing as productive a space as possible for free critical thinking and all other creative and inquisitive intellectual endeavors to flourish. None of these valuable objectives can help justify the fundamentally misguided idea that higher education should be a free-for-all. I mean, we speak of a brain drain when we think of our most qualified minds migrating where a better life awaits them, but what about this other brain drain, in the toilet that is, because this is precisely where such price controls are sending a bunch of these brains. Underemployment is just a more polite word for it.

Now, this is a direct consequence of a basic economic intuition about how incentives work. People choose the career they think will bring them the highest net gain, in terms of whatever kind of stuff they find important, including earning a living. Then, if society values biologists or business people more than sociologists, maybe sociologists should defend their case better with society, but in the meantime society will show its preference by making it relatively more interesting to become a biologist, by paying biologists better for example. But people don’t slip into a career on a dime; they need to get trained, and training has a cost. So you can pay biologists better, but you can also have prospective biologists think twice about whether they are the right people for this job, before they make their training investment. In fact, people who are most likely to invest their time, energy and talents into becoming socially productive biologists, will also be those, all else being equal, who will be most willing to bet on themselves and put their money where their mouth is.

Don’t get me wrong. Quite a valid case can be made for subsidizing higher education. Re-distributing wealth, including through a generous enough loan and bursary system, so that financial limitations do not affect willingness to invest one’s talents in a career is also a worthy policy goal. But none of the arguments you can make for either of these types of policies - and I’m a defender of both - can extend to a tuition freeze. The only real argument for it - as far as I understand anyway - is actually a bad one, but before I get to it, a different but related point, which is alluded to by student unions as well as die-hard defenders of the “modèle québécois”, has to be put to rest for good. We could call it an optimal tax argument. In an important paper dating back to 1976, Stiglitz and Atkinson showed formally that, conditional to some assumptions, the social objective of wealth distribution was best attained through progressive income tax. As the authors themselves warned though, these assumptions constitute significant limitations for the applicability of this result. The cost of fighting tax evasion is certainly one of those. Yet this isn’t what’s at stake here.

The problem is that this type of result is somehow being used, very strangely, to counter a valid argument against the freeze, which is based on its being a regressive subsidy. This argument, simply enough, is that society should not accept that richer people get a better deal out of such a policy than poorer people. This is indeed what they get out of a freeze, since they would have been able and willing to pay more in its absence then less affluent kids. Yet some aren’t moved by this argument. They’re actually saying: don’t lift the tuition freeze on distributional grounds, since progressive income tax is the right way to go for proper wealth re-distribution. Surely one must see the blatant logical mistake in this. If lifting the tuition freeze shouldn’t be used for distributional purposes, then how could the freeze itself be defended in the first place as a way to provide relatively more opportunities to lower-income students? Again, the debate is not about whether or not there should be transfers made through subsidizing education for students from low-income families, but whether it makes sense to provide the same subsidy for all kids and leave all transfers to be provided through the income tax structure. In fact, if all transfers should really be provided in this way, not only would there be no distributional argument left to justify a tuition freeze, but social justice couldn’t even provide a valid defense of means-tested loans and bursaries. Great.

Then, if this all reverts back to a simple “public good” type of efficiency argument, there is a lot of work involved in showing that market-based signals have no place where most of the difference is made between individual income levels. Arguing the public good aspect of it can support education subsidies, but it can’t justify attracting the wrong people in the wrong places. I’m talking of the diversity of talents here, not desert, nor overall level of excellence. I’m not an elitist. I believe as every other leftist does that everyone deserves just as much opportunity to do whatever they want as anybody else. But I also think that social utility requires all citizens’ abilities to be put to their best use for society. Training brains for making more toothpick sculptures, however fascinating a hobby, might not be something we would really want to promote. Not when there are so many important things we need brains to deal with. So out with efficiency as well. Shortages of labour supply for technical jobs should be enough of a proof in the pudding anyway.

What’s left after equity and efficiency, then? For an economist, not much. But the only real argument moving people to think this is sound policy has to do with neither. Or rather the value it’s based on has to do with both, but is believed to have intrinsic worth of its own, or at least to be a necessary ingredient of the mix of values that society should promote. That value is solidarity, and the same type of argument is often at work in defense of our wall-to-wall public healthcare system, or of other universal social programs. The case for everyone’s life being equally worth saving appears easier to defend though, than to insist that everybody’s desire to become a nuclear physicist should be equally satisfied.

Basically, the general argument goes, distributing public services on the basis of affluence, providing more services, that is, to those who have less private means, is hurting the people’s sense of reciprocity, which is at the core of productive and voluntary cooperation. Equal treatment is what is seen here as a principle of social cohesion. It is also implied though, that contribution to the public treasury on one side, and distribution of what is produced with it on the other, can be distinguished in a crucial way, since this argument is generally made simultaneously with some fairness argument asking for differential contribution, for example through progressive income tax or taxes on luxury goods. In other words, as a matter of overall fairness we would want people to contribute to government revenue according to their means, but as a matter of equal treatment, they should receive services from the state independently from these same means.

From some abstract societal point of view, maybe this can make sense as a way to apply different principles in an orderly way. But from the real perspective of an individual taxpayer, whose real sense of reciprocity is supposed to need encouraging in the first place, this distinction is completely artificial; it is an accounting distinction, used to classify numbers in different columns. One cares just as much about how much taxes one contributes than about how much services one gets. Therefore, it makes no “moral” difference whether you transfer wealth through letting richer members of society receive less government services or through making them pay more taxes. Certainly, a society may want to distribute other things than wealth with as much fairness, but this would be a further argument, it seems to me, against using only a selected set of monetary contributions in order to right all social wrongs at once.

This I think has two significant consequences. First, paradoxically, the solidarity argument can become a very consistent one for libertarians who are opposed to all state-imposed re-distribution, as this implies a refusal of differential treatment in contribution as well. So they would lift both the freeze and the progressive income tax. Only problem is libertarians don’t need a solidarity argument, because they’d rather have individuals decide for themselves who they want to fraternize with in the first place. Therefore, second, if this argument is not to break down completely, it must rely on some kind of social irrationality or a collective misperception that could remain unchallenged, such that people would actually make themselves believe everybody were treated equally, even if everybody knew, deep down, that they weren’t. The very implausibility of this is more than enough to explain the right-wing backlash that universal social programs have only started to encounter for the past 25 years. And the only reason that I can think of for clinging to these the way we do, apart from what I described in my last post as our Cambronne complex, is a sort of misplaced fear of betraying an imaginary duty to the inheritance of the Quiet revolution. Add to this, where higher education is concerned, a socially overrated academia in the first place - as if diplomas made people better persons - and you have your recipe for pretty powerful rhetorics.

Yet the main argument on the left, it seems to me, should be going the following way. If you want to protect some people from stigmatization and social exclusion, which are the only sort of objectives, as far as I know, which could justify universality of anything as a matter of principle, you should fight this fight openly, you should argue and defend tooth and nail that it is fair and just that people get this unequal treatment. That they will get what society believes is owed to them, and that it will be more for some and less for others. You should certainly not add insult to the injury by denying what is actually going on, thus worsening stigmatization and exclusion, with cynicism to boot. I mean, think about it. If you are going to create a universal program, knowing perfectly well that it will have some negative impact, but you justify that by saying that you don’t want people to think some are getting special treatment, then you are actually compounding the original special treatment that you want to hide in this manner, with the cost of the program you have built so you could hide it. No?

So how is this supposed to enhance solidarity? Apparently, some people would now be SO inferior to others, that society would be needing costly wall-to-wall institutional apparatus just to hide this from public sight. Superb. Very noble. Not only do these poor, poor souls need the oh-so-grand-and-benevolent help of the luckier fellahs, but they also need to be helped into believing they actually don’t. Good grief. Well, I’ll have none of it. I say the most fondamental level of justice and solidarity is that of equal respect for everyone’s intelligence. How about that? Democracy itself is built on this idea, isn’t it? People who weren’t born in rich families do not have to be treated as idiots, and if they get helped more than others, it should be public knowledge that this is what justice requires, period. When a society does not accept how things really stand, it can’t really hope to make them better or preserve them from getting worse.

Then focusing back on the tuition freeze: no efficiency gain, no equity gain, no solidarity gain, and losses on all counts. Anything else? The fundamental right to education? Well. What should be covered by this right again? To learn how to read and write? Pretty obvious. To be provided with enough training to survive in this world, and to become an independent, equal and responsible citizen? I’m all for it. But to get a license in law, an MBA, three PhD’s and a post-doc lifetime appointment? Now I’m not so sure. There are other things to attend to on this planet, for crying outloud. There are other rights also. And if this one is so important, how about we take the money from a tuition hike and use it to fight illiteracy? Would we be denying their fundamental right to education to more people, or to less of them? Have fun with that one. But in the meantime, let’s get the brains where we want them. If we want more philosophers to solve these deep ethical dilemmas, then by all means let’s give them a bigger paycheck. This is how you take care of their student loans. But if we’d rather spend that money on other stuff though, then let’s be honest, let’s be consistent, and let’s stop subsidizing their training. That’s all I’m saying.

Finally, just ask yourself this question. If you had a few millions to invest somewhere, would you rather do it where you will hire people who believed in themselves enough to handle a substantial part of their training costs, or would you rather take a larger risk at hiring people who were handed a college diploma in something, anything, just so they wouldn’t feel stigmatized? Be freakin’ honest please.

And there you have it. Case closed as far as I’m concerned. It’s Québec’s future that this freeze is freezing.