Susan Pendergrass speaks with Tim Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about why American culture may be making it harder to have and raise children. They discuss the long-term consequences of the declining U.S. birth rate, how intensive parenting culture may be driving childhood anxiety, the “travel team trap” and the arms race of youth sports, what cities and communities can do to become more family-friendly, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Tim Carney. Thank you for joining us. You’re a senior fellow at AEI? I listened to a podcast the other day with a demographer from the University of Pennsylvania, and it was really good. I think they have a pretty strong department. He said that the United States reached peak child in 2012 or 2013, and basically

Tim Carney (00:06): That’s about right.

Susan Pendergrass (00:24): numbers have been going down on babies ever since. We definitely see that in Missouri. That was our biggest kindergarten cohort, and numbers are going down. I have five grandchildren under the age of five, and it seems to me this is going to be the policy conundrum of their generation. What do you think?

Tim Carney (00:44): It is certainly the biggest story of the next thirty years, policy, cultural, economic, everything. Another way of putting it: the number of births in the US peaked in 2007. Those kids born in 2007 either graduated last year or are graduating this week. Colleges know this very well. They’re all bracing for it. What about ten years from now when the workforce starts significantly shrinking?

Susan Pendergrass (01:03): Yeah.

Tim Carney (01:11): What about the towns that are built around a public school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and those start shrinking? Particularly in rural places, they’re seeing consolidation, two different public schools or two different Catholic schools consolidating. Can schools adjust to being small? How much is this a self-reinforcing spiral? When there are fewer kids, people aren’t used to seeing kids around. Yes, absolutely. It’s the biggest story of the next thirty years.

Susan Pendergrass (01:37): In your new book, Family Unfriendly, I think it’s interesting to juxtapose these two things. At the same time, we’re making it so much harder to raise kids in our culture, and we’ve raised the expectations for each and every one of them so high that people who are considering having kids find it daunting. It used to be, when I was young, people had six or seven kids and just hoped for the best. Everyone did okay. But now every child has these insane expectations, and I sympathize. If your child doesn’t roll over by six months old, they need occupational therapy now. That did not used to be the case. Doesn’t that work against it?

Tim Carney (02:12): Yes. A lot of economists have been praising quality over quantity parenting for years. Isabel Sawhill is an economist I’ve worked with for years, but I think she’s dead wrong when she says this is good, that people are choosing fewer kids so they can invest more in each one. That sounds right, but then you realize

Susan Pendergrass (02:33): Okay.

Tim Carney (02:53): the American Pediatrics journal says the number one cause of the epidemic of childhood anxiety we’re facing right now is lack of unsupervised play. So parents who are giving their kids the best of everything, making sure they’re not just wandering around the neighborhood, making sure they’re safe and busy with violin lessons and enrichment activities and a special private pitching coach for softball, that’s supposedly high-quality parenting. But it comes with low-quality results, which is very anxious kids, as well as stressed-out parents. People ask how my wife and I do it with six kids. I like giving answers about the special cool systems I have, but the real answer is a lot of times we just don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41): Yeah. I feel like I’m probably going to say a lot of unpopular opinions on this. I never liked elite sports or travel sports, but I see travel sports going nationwide now. People from Texas are going to Florida, going to California for travel sports, which I always thought was kind of insane because it didn’t work for my family. We would normally have tournaments at Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. I also see kids being absorbed into the adult world more. Craft breweries have children trying to find something to do there, which is not a very normal environment for them. High-end restaurants have little kids in them, and I just feel like that takes away from the time when they’re supposed to just be kids.

Tim Carney (04:28): I actually think mixed-age mingling is something we need more of. Sometimes when I need to get work done, I’ll go to the local craft brewery to get away from my kids, and then somebody else has all their kids there. But those kids aren’t asking me any favors, so I’m fine with it. I think it’s good that we’re building places for parents to bring kids. The way I put it, though, and again

Susan Pendergrass (04:35): Okay. Yeah. That’s right.

Tim Carney (04:58): my local brewpub allows for this, but we need places where parents can bring kids and ignore them. I brought my kids to the brewery on a cold winter day when they couldn’t be outside because it was ten degrees and forty-mile-an-hour winds. I start the book with a story, in contrast to

Susan Pendergrass (05:05): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:27): high-intensity travel sports, of a program that we saw and then emulated in the Catholic parishes when we lived in Maryland, which was called Friday Night on the Field. There was T-ball and coach-pitch baseball, so this was kindergarten, first grade, second graders. Maybe 10 percent of the dads were coaching. The rest of them, if they were there, were hanging out with other dads. And the kids who were older

Susan Pendergrass (05:53): Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:56): were running around or playing wall ball. The kids who were younger were on a playground. When my wife found out what was going on there, she said, you are bringing all six of the kids to this while I stay home and rest. So I brought the kids there. I maybe had a baby in my carrier, ignoring the other four while one of them played T-ball. And that was exactly what suburban parents needed. Not this high-intensity mom and

Susan Pendergrass (06:08): Yeah, sure.

Tim Carney (06:22): child attached at the hip, but the whole family is there, it’s mixed age, and the children have freedom. This is a really important part of it in so many ways. One, that childhood is expansive and not just intensive. Two, that raising kids isn’t this hyper-intensive, constant thing. There was a commercial I cite in the book about Mother’s Day and how we need to honor mothers more. But it goes way overboard. It says they pretend they’re hiring for a job, and the requirements include you’re never allowed to sit down and you don’t get to eat meals until all of your colleagues are out for the evening. Being a mom is exhausting, and there are days where you don’t sit down, but come on. This is just not true.

Susan Pendergrass (07:00): The hardest job in the world. Yeah. I have three kids that are pretty close together. It was rocky there for a while, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a practical matter, how do you change culture? If the prescription is to back off on intensive parenting, it feels more like an arms race where people say, maybe I don’t even agree with it, but if every other kid is going to Kumon Math, my kid has to go to Kumon Math. What do you do?

Tim Carney (07:36): It’s a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. I discuss it particularly in sports. In chapter one I call it the travel team trap. The reason it’s a trap is you get stuck without wanting to. I know lots of people whose kid just wants to play JV baseball, but the coach says they have to play fall baseball too. But I’m a football player. If you’re saying I’ll miss some reps and the other guys might get ahead of me, well

Susan Pendergrass (07:57): Yeah.

Tim Carney (08:05): that’s one thing. But then the coach says you’re shirking if you’re not playing year round. We have sought out schools and programs that explicitly do not do that, but we had to seek them out. It’s harder to be a backup point guard on a varsity basketball team if you’re going to play three sports, so you might get cut from the team. To some extent the parent is just saying, I really just want them to make the team, and that’s why I’m doing this.

With the academics, there’s a similar dynamic. We put our daughter, who was struggling in math, in a remedial program, something like Kumon. When we showed up, we realized, this was in Northern Virginia, specifically McLean, which is a wealthy area. Nobody else there was remedial. Everyone else there was an A student whose parents wanted their third grader

Susan Pendergrass (08:52): I see. Okay.

Tim Carney (09:03): to be at the sixth-grade level so they could get into Thomas Jefferson, the special super-magnet high school.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08): Yeah. If kindergarten is the new second grade and preschool is the new kindergarten, where does it end? I just feel like we’re overwhelming parents. You said it’s raising anxiety in kids. It’s definitely raising anxiety in parents too. It’s making people not want to be parents. It feels very stressful right now. There are books and apps, and there’s even a book on how to be a more free-range parent, which is strange to me. Does somebody need to be told how to do this? You just let them go outside.

Tim Carney (09:46): No, it does take work. And another thing is, to quote what a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. Being free-range is easier when other people are doing it. We used to back up to a big playground, and nine times out of ten my kids were the only ones there unsupervised. I actually got an email from a neighboring parent. It wasn’t criticism. It was saying your kids are great and it’s great that you let them run free, and asking if I could talk to them about letting their own kids run free. If you’re in a neighborhood where there are kids but they don’t come out, you might have to build organized activities. We didn’t do that growing up. We just played stickball. My mom wouldn’t organize it. We did it on our own. But now parents might have to be more involved. It’s a little bit of labor, but you connect the families, connect the kids, build the trust.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (10:44): The community, and we talked about policy. I’m in DC. Everybody wants it to be a federal bill, this or that. The fact is it’s a cultural thing, as I said, and the community is going to have to have these organic, or sometimes deliberate and intentional, structures to help parents raise kids. The more parents who are walking around the neighborhood, the safer the neighborhood is. The more parents making it clear that their kids are going out and should come home when the streetlights turn on, the more that’s known, the safer it is. Remember when you and I were young, other people’s parents would correct us when we were wrong? Now, I have close friends I know I can do that with, but a lot of parents say they’re terrified of correcting someone else’s kid because they’ve been screamed at by the other parents. Your kid was

Susan Pendergrass (11:25): Mad at us. Yes.

Tim Carney (11:41): about to shove gravel down the throat of her two-year-old sister at the playground. And that’s my job too, if I’m right there. That social trust and community takes work. There are people who say it takes a village, and they can’t find their village. You have to build your village. I’m one of those conservatives who really believes that.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54): Are we willing to do the work? Do you see people doing it?

Tim Carney (12:09): We’re too individualistic, and that’s part of all of this. But I’m also one who believes the burden is really on you. You can’t wait for somebody else to do it. You build the community, and then you can sit back and bear the fruits of your labor as a neighbor yells at your kid so you don’t have to.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): You’ve also talked about building family-friendly communities. There’s a conundrum we face in Missouri: no one wants to live in downtown St. Louis. A lot of cities face that, and St. Louis is probably at the forefront. We’re in the top five for cities in decline, and St. Louis and Pittsburgh are going to serve as examples, because

Tim Carney (12:28): Yes. Mm-hmm.

Susan Pendergrass (12:53): we hit that death spiral with more deaths than births a while ago, and all of our demographic trends are going to be out ahead of everyone else. People are going to look to us. But parents don’t want to raise their kids in the city of St. Louis. And if you don’t have children, you just keep getting older. Tell me a little bit about what has happened to make cities unfriendly to families and what they could do to change it.

Tim Carney (13:19): I’m a believer that we need all of the above. I’m very pro-suburbs. That’s where I raised my kids, that’s where I went to high school. But before high school I grew up in Manhattan, and I’m very pro raising kids in cities if you can do it. The number one thing is crime, or crime and disorder. You saw this a lot during the 2020s when people would say, who cares if people are hopping over the turnstile, so what if people are smoking pot, that homeless guy sleeping on the corner isn’t going to do anything. All those little things that adults can, maybe they shouldn’t but can, turn a blind eye to are disturbing to kids and disturbing to parents. Crime and disorder needs to be put in its proper place.

But then also, this is something where liberals tend to be better than conservatives: walkability and public amenities. I don’t mean my ability to walk to work or to my favorite cocktail bar. What I really mean is my ability to walk my baby in a stroller somewhere nice, and my eight-year-old and ten-year-old’s ability to walk together to a cool park, and more importantly to walk together to their friend’s house. Cities can actually do that better than suburbs to some extent, because they can put in those amenities, which are playgrounds, parks, and other things. That means traffic. Cars have to slow down. This is something I’m really studying now at AEI. The federal government has a walkability index, and it’s laughably bad. It’s published by the EPA, so it doesn’t actually show you

Susan Pendergrass (14:45): It’s about car exhaust.

Tim Carney (15:10): whether your kids can walk somewhere without getting run over by a car. We’re trying to see if there’s a way to improve this. That’s part of the built environment. That’s explicitly a government duty. Are the roads too wide? Are the cars too fast? Are there crosswalks? Are there trails? Because once you can let your kids walk around without getting run over by cars and without running into meth heads, their childhood is so much better. And your family life is so much simpler.

Susan Pendergrass (15:41): What about safety? I think it was you mentioning something like setting up safety zones within which families could have some reasonable degree of comfort that police respond and that crime is being attended to.

Tim Carney (15:58): A big part of raising kids, in my view, is you want to give them a sort of walled garden and let them be free in that garden. Every year that garden gets bigger, and at some point you realize the walls are gone and they’re out in the world. For me, this was a back campus at St. Bernadette’s and St. Andrew’s, the parishes where we had these programs. The kids were running free, but unless there was a kid who was going to run into traffic, and there are those kids, and probably some of your viewers and listeners have one who they know is a flight risk, in general they were going to be safe. When I would leave my kids alone in a museum, I tell the story of my son Sean, who three times I’ve totally lost him, but it was always in a botanical garden or a museum or someplace similar,

Susan Pendergrass (16:33): Yeah.

Tim Carney (16:55): where someone would say, hey, who are you with, four-year-old? And then slowly expanding that realm of freedom. You can walk around the neighborhood but can’t cross over Route 50, and then slowly it gets bigger and bigger. Community norms are really what make that possible. That two-year-old shouldn’t be walking down the street alone. That six-year-old is fine.

Susan Pendergrass (16:57): Yeah. Who are you with? But haven’t we kind of ruined that with the twenty-four-hour news cycle where everybody believes their children are at risk of being abducted by a stranger at every moment?

Tim Carney (17:35): Yes, and this is part of the problem I run into. When I say we need to let kids be free to run around like we Gen Xers were, people say it’s so much more dangerous now. It’s not. Statistically, almost the whole country has gotten over the violent crime wave that came with the George Floyd unrest and COVID lockdowns. That caused a spike in all the cities, and every place in the country right now is much, much safer than it was in 1984 when I was six. By a long shot. Every parent’s worst nightmare is their child getting abducted by a stranger. These cases happen, they end up in the news, and so we all think they’re happening all the time and all around us. Evolutionarily, we don’t have a brain that can understand a country of 340 million people.

Susan Pendergrass (18:08): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (18:32): So if there are three major cases a year and people talk about it for a few weeks, it seems like there’s some kid who got kidnapped half the year. It happens fewer than a hundred times a year. If you see numbers saying children are abducted ten thousand or a hundred thousand times, those are bad situations, but they’re not stranger abductions. In almost every case, the boyfriend goes off with the kid without the mom’s permission, or the grandparents have custody and then the mom comes and takes the kid. These are not good situations, but they’re not a kid who was left alone at a playground and then shoved in the back of a white van.

Susan Pendergrass (19:20): To the extent that we could bring any of that back, and this is where I’m a little pessimistic, I think kids learn decision-making in a way that isn’t being taught now, so that we end up working with people who never made an independent decision in their life. I certainly was out and got hurt and had to figure out: am I hurt enough to go home? Am I hurt enough to keep going?

Tim Carney (19:37): Ask a boss who has hired somebody right out of college recently. Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (19:45): Got a flat tire or whatever, we had to make decisions on the fly. I just don’t think we’re building that type of independence and resilience into our kids, and it’s a loss at the global level.

Tim Carney (19:58): Absolutely. Employers should all really be getting behind what you and I are saying right now, because if they want to hire a kid out of high school or college who can make a decision. I always remember the time I used to mow lawns in high school. Once I showed up at a lawn across town, used his mower, and it just didn’t start.

Susan Pendergrass (20:05): Yes.

Tim Carney (20:21): He was not home. He had a number on the fridge. I called and said, Mr. Zellinger, your mower’s not starting. And he said, good news is I don’t come home until Monday. So you have between now and then to get the lawn mowed, and I’m confident you’ll figure out a way to do it. It wasn’t an assignment. It was a responsibility. The best way to give your kids a responsibility that’s not an assignment they can just beg out of is to let them be free. And all of a sudden they’re like, wait a second.

Susan Pendergrass (20:40): Yes. Right.

Tim Carney (20:51): I need to be there in twenty minutes. How do I make that happen? Or I’m lost, how do I get unlost? And again, the children suffer. It’s not just that they go through life happy and dumb. They end up more anxious because life will inevitably bring them these problems. There is an epidemic of childhood and adolescent anxiety, according to

Susan Pendergrass (20:56): Yeah.

Tim Carney (21:19): HHS, and it’s caused by the fact that kids don’t have enough freedom in childhood.

Susan Pendergrass (21:29): I want to circle back to actionable items. What can we do about it, realistically?

Tim Carney (21:33): On the parental freedom side, there’s not that much the government can do except build better sidewalks, crosswalks, and pathways. Housing reform is interesting here. I’m a big believer in suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be more dense. One thing that’s really freeing is when you can buy a house in the neighborhood you want to live in,

Susan Pendergrass (22:01): Yeah.

Tim Carney (22:01): because your mom lives there and you have grandma to babysit. That’s a huge predictor. So many people in Washington think everybody needs universal daycare paid for by the government. Most people want mom to work a little less and grandma and grandpa to chip in, with neighbors to fill the gaps. More housing is what enables that to happen. But for the most part, we need more robust community institutions and more robust community connections. And every parent out there has to think: maybe I’m going to be the one who does this. There’s a field across the street from your house. Start a soccer league, bring food, run a grill. This is exactly what we did with T-ball. Throw in some money to pay for it. Buy the burgers at Sam’s Club or Costco and feed everyone. Bring your six-year-old to play soccer. This is not his or her path to a college scholarship. It’s a fun thing for the families to do. But you have to start it. We started it because we saw somebody else had started it. A lot of this is going to be on an individual level. On the policy side of supporting families, there’s a lot of debate about a child tax credit, a baby bonus, universal child care, and requiring employers to give parents parental leave.

Susan Pendergrass (22:58): Yeah. A lot. Leave.

Tim Carney (23:22): I write about that a lot at AEI. AEI scholars disagree about it. In the book, what I argue is we need a child tax credit, and it needs to be a little bigger. A family of eight making a hundred thousand dollars should not be paying the same taxes as a family of two or three making a hundred thousand dollars. That should be reflected in the tax code, because this isn’t just some consumer thing. It’s not like saying, I bought a Tesla, I deserve a tax credit. It’s saying, we’re eight people, we need to eat eight people’s worth of food, and the tax code should reflect that. But on the other programs, forcing employers to offer certain benefits or creating government-run childcare, I don’t think any of that works.

Susan Pendergrass (24:02): I mean, the Nordic countries do all of it and they have population decline.

Tim Carney (24:05): They have worse population decline than we did. There was a slight uptick, and one of the arguments I make is that subsidized childcare is not really a family subsidy, it’s a work subsidy. Notice who’s lobbying for it as these things bubble up. It’s going to be the Chamber of Commerce. I’m fundamentally a family guy. I think we need work. Part of fulfilling our human dignity is doing work. But that doesn’t always have to be paid work. In the book I defend stay-at-home moms and dads. I really think our society should be oriented around families. Now that’s a little heretical these days because, well, what if you choose not to have a family? Fine. There have always been people who chose not to have families. But that doesn’t mean families can’t be the central organizing principle of our culture.

Susan Pendergrass (25:04): More people now are choosing not to have families. And a lot of cities are pursuing those people, the childless professionals with Top Golfs and loft apartments.

Tim Carney (25:10): I quote a local official in Family Unfriendly saying families are a cost and businesses are an asset. Families come in, they pay income taxes and property taxes, but then they require sewage, they require schools, they complain that the playgrounds and the sidewalks are in bad shape. Businesses are mostly revenue. Washington, DC has explicitly said they don’t just want anyone to move in. They want the college-educated 22-to-28-year-old, meaning a person who gets to spend every dime of disposable income in the restaurants and bars and shops in DC. And if you look at the housing being built in Falls Church, right near me, it’s all studio and one bedroom, because that’s what the local government wants: more singletons who go out and spend their money. Sometimes we do things that are really bad for the economy. My wife makes homemade dinner. We almost never go out. A lot of our activity doesn’t involve paying anyone. The kids are just playing wiffle ball. All of that is horrible for the economy.

Susan Pendergrass (26:19): Yeah. Falls Church used to be such a big attraction for young families because of the schools. I’ve seen the shiny buildings going up recently, and I’m shocked by it. That’s interesting to me.

Tim Carney (26:44): I think it’s good to build more housing. But if it helps boomers sell their single-family homes to move into apartments, then it frees up family housing. This is a really complicated thing. We need more housing, but so many of the YIMBYs just want massive apartment buildings with as many apartments as possible, and that’s family unfriendly. What we really need, in my opinion, is slightly more dense suburbs,

Susan Pendergrass (26:54): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:14): a starter home that somebody can buy. That’s basically impossible to build, especially in a high-cost area like this, or in the nicer suburbs around St. Louis and Kansas City. You’re not going to build them because of the regulatory overhead. If I build a single-family house and sell it for two hundred thousand dollars, that’s not worth it. I’m either going to build a McMansion or an apartment building.

Susan Pendergrass (27:26): They’re not building them. No. They’re doing the six hundreds. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:41): Getting rid of a lot of the regulations that make it impossible to build a starter home is one of the best things that states and counties can do.

Susan Pendergrass (27:49): I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it. It’s a thorny issue. Countries that have really tried their best to encourage people to have more children haven’t been successful. This is going to be one of the biggest policy conundrums of the next few decades. The earlier we start talking about it, the better. I’ve been talking about it for at least five years in Missouri. We just had our smallest high school graduating class two years ago. People ask, where did the people go? They didn’t go anywhere. The babies haven’t been born, and we need to get used to it so that we can start thinking about how to solve it. I love a lot of your ideas. We have to think about solutions to this because if it feels overwhelming to have children, then people won’t have them.

Tim Carney (28:41): That’s exactly right.

Susan Pendergrass (28:42): Family Unfriendly. And your other book was Alienated America.

Tim Carney (28:44): Family Unfriendly. And Alienated America, which is about the collapse of community, which is upstream from this problem.

Susan Pendergrass (28:53): Lack of social capital and all of that. I think these are going to be some of the most important issues we can think about going forward. I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it.

Tim Carney (29:00): Thank you, my pleasure.

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The post Is America Family Unfriendly? with Tim Carney appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Show-Me Institute Director of Municipal Policy David Stokes about his new paper in the Free-Market Guide to Missouri Municipalities series on planning and zoning. They discuss how fragmentation among local governments can limit overly strict zoning, how zoning rules affect housing affordability, and why “last house syndrome” poses risks for Missouri’s future growth. From accessory dwelling units and minimum parking requirements to the debate over multifamily housing, Stokes explains how smart reforms can protect property rights and keep housing costs down.

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Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Planning and Zoning in Missouri
02:35 The Impact of Fragmentation on Zoning
05:24 Housing Affordability and Zoning Regulations
08:22 The Role of Municipalities in Housing Development
11:18 Challenges of NIMBYism and YIMBYism
14:21 Accessory Dwelling Units and Short-Term Rentals
17:00 Planning and Infrastructure in Missouri
19:57 Future Papers and Conclusion

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thank you, David Stokes, so much for being on the podcast this morning. You have a new paper out with the Show Me Institute. Well, it’s actually part three of an existing series on your free market guide to Missouri municipalities. And this one is on planning and zoning. So thanks for joining us to answer some questions about it. Great. I do have one question that I was just saying before we started recording. I’ve seen this paper a few times.

David Stokes (00:19)
Delighted to be here.

Susan Pendergrass (00:26)
And one thing that I noticed up front is that I complain about the number of school districts in St. Louis County and how fragmented it is. And other folks have also said similar things, too many small municipalities. But it seems to be the case that when we’re talking about things like planning and zoning and permitting and regulations, that can be a good thing. Is that right?

David Stokes (00:46)
Absolutely. Because it’s harder to enact comprehensive planning, zoning, major things like urban growth boundaries—the extreme things like an urban growth boundary that we don’t have in Missouri. But it’s harder to enact that the more governments you have to get in line to agree to it in the first place. So it’s definitely—I don’t want to say it’s a causation. I don’t think the data is there to—

Susan Pendergrass (00:47)
What?

David Stokes (01:14)
But it’s definitely a—I would say it’s a truism—that there’s a strong connection between the metropolitan areas that have less strict zoning around the country. And over the past decade, we’ve really changed a lot in American local public policy to realize the harms of overly strict zoning. Until the past decade or so, it was just sort of assumed that strict zoning was a good thing. So now that we recognize the harms of it, we see that the places like St. Louis—and to a lesser extent, Kansas City—that have more fragmentation. St. Louis by any measure nationally has extreme fragmentation, meaning a whole lot of local governments, be they cities or school districts or fire districts or streetlight districts. I mean, we can really get into the obscure ones here in Missouri, but the more you have of that, the less strict zoning you’re going to have. And then that results in lower housing prices.

Susan Pendergrass (02:00)
You—

David Stokes (02:10)
What is the good that comes from that in the end? I think there’s lots of goods that come from it and some harms too. But the real good—the point of this paper, and the good for somebody who doesn’t care about public policy or libertarian thoughts or anything and just wants to be able to buy a nice house at an affordable price—is: the less strict zoning you have, the more fragmentation you have, the more you see that in lower housing costs.

Susan Pendergrass (02:35)
Yeah, and if you were starting a business too and one municipality, let’s say Clayton, has really high restrictions on what you can build, where you can build a health office and be—I don’t know if they do or don’t—but then you could just simply go next door to the next place and pick a different place that has fewer restrictions.

David Stokes (02:52)
You can, and that does happen. One of the ways they’ve solved that dilemma in St. Louis County especially is they do a lot more code enforcement and permitting at the county level than at the municipal level. Because nobody wants to have to get—if I’m going to be a plumber—nobody wants to have a plumbing license in 88 different cities. So they do that at the county level. You get your county license and it’s good throughout all of St. Louis County. Now, there are good aspects of that—mostly that you have to get one license instead of 88, which is an obvious good—but it’s also subject to abuse as well. It’s sort of the counterargument to the benefits of fragmentation in that it’s easier for special interest groups, like in this case, say the plumbers union, to capture licensing in St. Louis County if they only have to dominate one board as opposed to 88 boards. So there are two different ways to go—there’s the good and then the part of it that might not be quite as good.

Susan Pendergrass (03:59)
Yeah, so you make the point in this paper that while St. Louis does not necessarily have a housing affordability issue—or maybe even Missouri—it’s still worthwhile for folks who are working at the municipal level, like if you’re working as a newly elected Board of Aldermen or newly elected county board official, to educate yourself on what is and isn’t possible to make sure that you avoid what you just described as the pitfalls of over-regulating.

David Stokes (04:28)
Absolutely. A lot of this paper is about—in the not very scientific term—sort of low-hanging fruit. Just because zoning in Missouri may be less strict than in other states… there’s actually, I discovered in researching this paper—I’d always understood and known that zoning in Missouri and in St. Louis and Kansas City was less strict than in many other parts of the country—but then I discovered that there is actually an index out of the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania that ranks metropolitan areas by zoning strictness. And St. Louis is the least strict for zoning of any metropolitan area in the country in this ranking. And Kansas City is sort of in the middle. But then you see that Kansas City on the Missouri side is closer to St. Louis, and it’s the Kansas side that is more strict and puts them in the middle. So we really do have not-strict zoning.

Susan Pendergrass (05:05)
That’s hilarious.

David Stokes (05:24)
And that’s a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean that cities shouldn’t make some of these reforms that are coming nationwide that would still benefit Missouri, such as abolishing minimum parking requirements, allowing smaller lot sizes, allowing people to build accessory dwelling units on their own property. It’s a great reform focus—from the Show Me Institute’s perspective—because these are changes that can be made that enhance people’s own property rights and what they can do with their own property, while at the same time giving people more choice. And in the long run, if you do more of these, you’ll help keep housing prices down even more for people. And in a good way—you’re not doing this through mandates or rules; you’re just saying we’re going to allow people to build even more. And I’m not against every limit on every property thing ever. There are some that are reasonable—particularly in Missouri we have floodplain limits on where you build that are very reasonable in many cases—but there’s still a lot of good stuff we can do.

Susan Pendergrass (06:33)
Yeah, I saw recently last week that in the upcoming election cycle, housing affordability is a top issue for folks. This is really bubbling up the list of priorities because it’s gotten so expensive and, you know, I keep reading about why people can’t afford to move, and they can’t afford to sell their home, or they can’t afford to buy a home. And certainly some markets—like you mentioned in the paper, like Portland—and you mentioned this briefly: Portland’s got a brown zone and a green zone, and you can’t build in the green zone. You have to stay in the brown zone, and it makes it very prohibitively expensive to build new housing stock in Portland, and the prices have gone up dramatically. We do not yet have that problem in St. Louis, but I know that it’s on a lot of people’s minds and certainly, statewide, we still have some concerns about having enough affordable housing for everybody. I do think it’s important to make sure that we don’t let regulation creep happen so that we find ourselves raising our prices artificially.

David Stokes (07:36)
And you see this in disputes in our exurban areas now in, say, St. Charles and Jefferson County—surrounding counties of St. Louis—and on the Kansas City side as well. Last year, for example, in St. Charles County, a big new subdivision was rejected in a wooded part of the county—I think it was near Weldon Spring. They’re also allowing some, but—

Susan Pendergrass (07:56)
Was it Weldon Spring, or what was that?

David Stokes (08:02)
And that’s the dilemma that people face: as places like St. Charles and Jefferson County grow and get more full, there’s going to be inevitable pressure from the people there now to stop new building. It’s called last-house syndrome: “Great, my new home here is great. Now don’t build any more because I got the house and it’s perfect.” You see that everywhere, and you understand the concerns. I try not to completely ignore the concerns of the folks, because they’re not always wrong—of course, we’ll go back to the floodplain issue—but you’ll have people worry. It’s the people there now: concerns about traffic and overbuilding and destruction of wooded areas and too dense and all those things. But you want people to realize that other people probably said the same thing before they built your house, and it was a good thing that people in most instances really said no to that, and it allowed that construction to continue. And I really want people to realize that.

Susan Pendergrass (08:34)
Yeah. That’s right. ⁓

David Stokes (09:00)
If we go—it’s not about any one subdivision, because look, there probably are certain instances in certain places where the new zoning is too dense, whatever it may be—it’s not that every rejection is always completely wrong. But if you start in Missouri making a pattern of this in the outer areas of Kansas City and St. Louis, where you start turning down a lot of these new subdivisions to preserve whatever it is that people moved out there for 20 years ago, then housing prices are going to increase in Missouri. They will increase substantially, and it won’t take that long if you really do stop the building. So that’s one of the takeaways from this paper: to the largest extent possible, we need to keep allowing the building of these new homes or apartments. And obviously a big part of the paper is that apartments should be generally allowed in more places too. That’s how we’re going to continue to have low housing costs, and that’s the benefit of it. It’s not about one subdivision in one space, but if it becomes a trend, it’s really going to be a problem—the trend being protecting it.

Susan Pendergrass (10:15)
Yeah, and the multifamily for sure. What are your findings around that? People don’t seem to want to have to look at apartment buildings. Is that right?

David Stokes (10:25)
They don’t—there’s just some natural rejection against it. And it’s frustrating to see. In some spots—I remember in the City of St. Louis; this is one where, when you lived in St. Louis, you lived near there—at the corner of Skinker and Delmar there was a proposal for a large apartment building right there, and it got a lot of opposition, and it has not moved forward. It was stopped. I hope it comes back because it’s a perfect lot for an apartment building. It’s just an empty lot—it was a chicken restaurant for many, many years and a popular one—but it’s been vacant forever. And it’s right near public transit. So it’s the perfect idea where you should be able to build there, and you shouldn’t have generous or extensive—

Susan Pendergrass (10:59)
An abandoned empty lot, right?

David Stokes (11:18)
—parking requirements for those buildings, because one of the projects—

Susan Pendergrass (11:21)
That’s what people were kind of freaking out about though, was the parking. Like, where are all these cars going to go? And there was one across the street and they had only put in like one parking space for every two units or something, and they figured that people would use public transport. Anyway, I remember the pushback on that. And it’s this NIMBYism–YIMBYism thing, right? It’s so hard to push people to YIMBYism—yes in my backyard—because of things they don’t… I don’t… These same people often talk a lot about housing affordability, so I don’t mean to overgeneralize, but there are some of the very same people who are so concerned about it who don’t want to look at apartment buildings.

David Stokes (11:50)
Right, don’t want to—and you understand. That’s a very liberal area that we’re talking about. If you were to define the politics of that area, you’re right: many of the residents of those communities in both the city and in University City right there would, in theory, in the big picture, probably agree, but then, “Oh, we don’t want this development here.” And it was a perfect place for a new apartment. Again, of all the St. Louis area, it’s one of the best areas served by public transit—

Susan Pendergrass (12:06)
Yes.

David Stokes (12:31)
—with buses and MetroLink and the WashU shuttles, because so many people who would be in those apartments would be WashU students. They’ve got that extensive shuttle system. But it was rejected, and I hope it comes back. And that’s just one of many, many examples of it.

Susan Pendergrass (12:31)
Yeah, yeah. What about the—what part of zoning and planning is this push in the City of St. Louis, anyway, to try to get people to move downtown? Is that something that’s coded in? I feel like they’re trying to get people to go downtown.

David Stokes (13:03)
They are. And thankfully, I don’t think zoning is preventing that. Of all the reasons people may or may not be choosing to move downtown—fear of crime and businesses leaving downtown, the jobs—as somebody who lived downtown in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to move down there when many of the jobs have left—fear—it’s a harder thing to convince. But I don’t think there’s— I don’t think it’s difficult or has ever been difficult for the loft developers of the ’90s to get permission to take an empty commercial building and turn it into lofts. There might have been a lot of issues they had to deal with, but zoning—I don’t believe—was one of them. Thankfully that’s a very good thing. But it’s one of the fun parts about this paper, right? We’re talking in the other papers and in the ones to come about the best ways to do public safety and public works and a lot of things. In most of these instances we all agree somebody has to do this service, and it’s just a question of: does the city provide it themselves? Do they contract with a neighboring municipality to do it—such as a small city contracting with a neighboring city to do police service? Should you let the private sector do it in a regulated manner, like utilities? But we can all agree it has to be done. Whereas I started this paper saying: despite the fact that it may be incredibly common, cities don’t actually need planning or zoning—life can exist without it. And that’s where the current HOA options come into play. And the history of HOAs in St. Louis, in the private place model, is such an interesting part of that. So there’s a little bit of the historic discussion of all of this in the paper too.

Susan Pendergrass (14:53)
So where do Missouri municipalities for the most part right now stand on things like—two questions I’m going to ask you—accessory dwelling units and short-term rentals or Airbnbs? Where do they stand on ADUs?

David Stokes (15:06)
Well, slowly but surely, we’re starting to permit ADUs. We haven’t had any sort of statewide, to my knowledge, overarching legislation. And that’s where the fact that we have low housing costs in Missouri matters. I don’t think we’re going to see the California situation that had to go statewide because none of the municipalities would agree to it. I don’t think we’ll see that here because there’s not the tremendous high-cost-of-housing crisis to push that. But slowly but surely, cities are starting to allow more ADUs, and that’s a very good thing. When you get out into rural areas—and in some places that don’t even have zoning in the first place—you can do any ADU you want to, or the zoning is so loose that of course you can build an apartment above your garage if you’d like to. Why are you even asking? But the cities have the rules against it.

Susan Pendergrass (15:52)
That’s where I live.

David Stokes (16:03)
Slowly but surely moving in the right direction there. And then it’s going in the opposite way with short-term rentals. Slowly but surely most cities are instituting short-term rental limitations. I’m not automatically opposed to that in every case. I get it: if you have a neighborhood and all of a sudden there’s a house where big parties are being thrown every weekend because they’re renting it out to different groups of people to throw parties, you’re going to hate that, and that’s going to impact the quality of your life. So I’ve been saying for a few years now that the short-term rental regulations I support would generally be things that don’t go to a blanket prohibition. I think that’s too far—and most cities aren’t doing that—but rather really focus on punishment of the property owner for repeated rule-breaking. One party is maybe one party, but if there’s a trend where you own the property and the people you’re renting to are consistently out of control, then the fines should be increased. I wouldn’t be opposed to them getting fairly steep up to a point too—that if it happens too often, you would lose your business license to operate that short-term rental. Because I do think that if you’re doing it a lot—if you’re routinely renting it out—you should be treated a little more like a hotel. We don’t want to give short-term rentals an advantage over the hotel-motel industry. You want that playing field to be as level as possible, especially for people who are renting their houses or condos or whatever out a lot. So then pull that license if it’s an abuse that’s happening consistently. But let’s try to—

Susan Pendergrass (17:55)
Well, I had that on my street.

David Stokes (17:56)
—go to a method through crackdown on rule-breaking, not blanket prohibitions.

Susan Pendergrass (18:00)
Yeah, we had that on my street in St. Louis, and it was a street of, I don’t know, three- or four-bedroom houses, and they somehow had eight bedrooms and a pool, which was very rare in my neighborhood. So they mostly just rented it out to college students and got called all the time—the police got brought in all the time for noise complaints. And there wasn’t really a good mechanism in place at the time to prevent it from happening. So I agree that there should be some limitations around them, but not to make it so strict that people can’t use it as intended. I mean, I stay in Airbnbs all the time. I like having them, but—

David Stokes (18:36)
Now, that police dilemma—that’s something in St. Louis and probably Kansas City, a few big cities, where the cops just have better things to do than break up parties. I mean, they’ve got violent crimes to address. That’s an issue: how are they going to take it seriously enough? In the average Missouri suburb or mid-sized cities, the police are going to take that a little more seriously, I would think. And a good comparison I like is in Lake of the Ozarks, where some cities have instituted strict rules against short-term rentals, while others, like Osage Beach—at least as of our research—hadn’t instituted anything and took a much more free-market approach: “We’re a tourist area; we want tourists to come here.” So it’ll be a good natural experiment over time to see how it affects property values, how growth is affected, as different comparable cities in the Lake of the Ozarks region choose different paths to move forward. So I definitely look forward to following that.

Susan Pendergrass (19:37)
Well, then I’ll know—another component to this paper is on planning. I think you just said a city doesn’t have to do planning if they don’t choose to, but are Missouri cities or municipalities planners? I mean, is that a planned thing, or are we more like anything goes?

David Stokes (19:56)
Most Missouri cities have plans. Right?

Susan Pendergrass (19:57)
I’ve been to New Town, by the way. I just want to say I have visited New Town, so—before you start talking.

David Stokes (20:03)
Well, that’s the architectural planning—how do we want to design it? Then there’s the legal, defined planning. And luckily, again, I really don’t think Missouri cities need to do any planning outside of general infrastructure planning. So I shouldn’t say they don’t need to do any planning—there’s the general infrastructure planning that pretty much everybody supports, meaning you should have an idea of how growth is going to go in your city and where you’re going to put sewers and sidewalks and streets. You want a general long-term plan for that, even if that plan is—as it should be—thoroughly adjustable and can be changed as growth happens naturally. But then you get into planning like we mentioned with Portland earlier—urban growth boundaries—where the planners really start to say, “You can live here; you cannot live here; you can build here; you cannot build here,” and it gets to be really extreme. We don’t really have that in Missouri. Thankfully, the plans that cities do adopt can be easily amended by any city council. They can be changed. When I worked at St. Louis County, we dealt with the county planning commission for the parts of the council district I worked in that were unincorporated, where the planning commission had a lot to say on that. So elected officials can and should be able to change that plan as they go. And then the biggest—let’s say you permitted a development that’s against your plan, but the elected officials want to do it anyway—I usually don’t have a problem with that. The fact that it’s inconsistent with your plan would generally be something that, if locals want to sue to stop the development, they would cite in the lawsuit—that it was inconsistent with your process and your plan—and then it would be determined by judges and the whole legal process. But planning in Missouri is something that, outside of basic infrastructure planning, cities shouldn’t really do. And to the extent that they do it, it’s easily amended and changed. And that’s a good thing.

Susan Pendergrass (21:55)
Mm-hmm. So the first two papers in your series were taxation, right?

David Stokes (22:20)
Taxation was number two, and the first one was just sort of the structure of municipal government in Missouri. It had a lot to do with city managers. And then the fragmentation issue was addressed as well in the first one that we discussed here, because that’s a part of that, obviously.

Susan Pendergrass (22:23)
Introductory. Okay. And taxation. And this is zoning and planning. Right. And then what’s on deck? What’s the next one?

David Stokes (22:41)
We don’t actually know yet what number four will be—germinating. Most of them are ready to go pretty quickly, so I think the next one will be released within the next two months—certainly this year. And I think it’s going to be on public works. But we have papers coming on public works, public safety, parks and recreation—which is one I’m really going to enjoy. You go to Forest Park and there’s all the great things in St. Louis’s Forest Park, and then you realize that many of the wonderful things there are actually done under contract with the private sector, either for-profit businesses like the Boathouse and the ice rink that pay the city to operate, or nonprofit businesses like the Muni that have been in the park for a long time. So it’s a great option to talk about all the different ways to provide parks and recreation services.

Susan Pendergrass (23:18)
Yeah.

David Stokes (23:35)
But those are at least three of the upcoming ones. And then there’ll be a concluding, summarize-it-all-up section as well.

Susan Pendergrass (23:41)
I look forward to hearing more about those, and thanks for coming on to talk about planning and zoning. It’s going to be a great series when it all gets put together. Thanks.

David Stokes (23:48)
Thank you very much, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post A Free-Market Guide to Zoning with David Stokes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As this pithily-titled piece from the Brookings Institution argues, moving elections on-cycle will both drive up turnout and minimize the effect of organized interest groups. As the author writes:

By exploiting the occasional episode in which a change in state law forced localities to move their elections “on cycle,” [UC Berkeley Political Scientist Sarah] Anzia is able to provide some pretty rigorous causal evidence that off-cycle elections decrease voter turnout and equip organized interests (e.g. teachers unions) to obtain more favorable policy outcomes. Anzia’s findings mesh nicely with other work done by University of Pennsylvania Political Scientist, Marc Meredith, who found that when school boards are given the authority to choose election dates for raising revenue (e.g. bond elections) boards will “manipulate” the timing of elections in predictable ways to ensure an electorate that is most favorable to increased school spending.

That is why I was so surprised when the Missouri School Boards Association announced that it “strongly opposed” the bill. Why would that be? Why would the organization that represents school boards want to drive down turnout in the elections that elect them? I guess they’ll have to answer that one.

A common argument for keeping elections off-cycle is that it somehow keeps politics out of education. That is simply wrong. Schools are a huge state and municipal expenditure and are tasked with imparting skills and knowledge onto the next generation of citizens. Every day, we hand over our state’s most precious resource, its children, to schools. We live in a diverse state where different people have different views about what that education should look like. Any system that we devise to try and manage that will be political.

If education is going to be political, the best thing that we can do is try and make sure that as many of our fellow citizens as possible have the opportunity to make their views known. Moving elections on-cycle allows that to happen.

The post Moving School Board Elections On-Cycle is Good for Democracy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Speakers Series on Economic Policy: The Success Academy Experience and Lessons Learned appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What was farmland near the lake not long ago is now subdivisions teeming with young families.  Over the past 20 years, the Wentzville School District, where Lake St. Louis is located, has grown nearly 200 percent, adding an average of almost 500 students each year. That population growth is the talk of the town today, as it is going to require the school district to build at least one new school in the near future. In doing so, the school board will change the boundaries of the existing schools.  This process will likely uproot hundreds of children from schools they already attend and force them to go somewhere else.

Folks are not happy. Petitions are being circulated. Facebook posts are being shared. The community is in turmoil.

This drama is not unique to Lake St. Louis, to Missouri, or even to 2016. As the American educational system evolved and matured, small schools and small school districts consolidated into larger and larger political units, from more than 170,000 public school districts in 1949 to the 14,000 or so bodies that oversee K-12 education today. This has empowered a smaller and smaller number of school boards to make decisions like where to locate schools, where to demarcate attendance boundaries, with whom to contract for busing and food services, how to compensate teachers, and many, many other decisions. At every point in this journey, as you might imagine, there was controversy.

Still though, it is popular to offer paens to local control, irrespective of political orientation. When education reformers tried to amend the Missouri constitution to change how teachers are evaluated, the Missouri’s NEA affiliate’s headline screamed “local control of public schools takes a hit.” When the NEA’s Michigan affiliate wanted to praise the recent Every Student Succeeds Act, they said that it “puts students ahead of politics; educators ahead of politicians; and local control ahead of federal mandates.” Similarly, Sen. Ted Cruz’s website states that “education decisions should be made on the state and local level, where parents and communities can be more involved and find solutions better suited to their kids’ needs.”

De Tocqueville wrote long ago, “local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations.”  Unfortunately, our local institutions governing education have been weakening in recent decades.  On the other side of the Show-Me State, the recent school board elections in the Kansas City School District didn’t have a single name on the ballot. Only one candidate got the necessary number of signatures to run in the election and was thus automatically elected, and the three other seats had to be filled entirely by write-in candidates.  

To turn a phrase of left wing activists around, is this what democracy looks like? Or, more pointedly for conservatives, what does local control mean in education today? 

Local control is not simply a tyranny of the majority on a small scale. Local control, properly understood, means empowering families, those “little platoons” that another lover of local control, Edmund Burke, so valorized, to make the best educational decisions for their children. It means allowing local community organizations like nonprofits and churches to operate schools where students are free to use their state support to finance their education.  It means interpersonal networks within communities coming together to share information about what schools are doing, which ones are better than others, and where children might thrive.

In short, is has nothing to do with having a school board.

Local educational bureaucracies have unfortunately become 14,000 mini-monopolies. They routinely fight charter school or private school choice programs that would give families more choices as to where they send their children to school. In fact, the National Association of School Boards officially opposes private school choice and makes anti-voucher talking points available on its website.  As the University of Pennsylvania’s Marc Meredith has shown, they purposefully schedule elections to drive down turnout to make it easier to get their desired outcome.  Rather than represent the will of the people, they represent the needs of the bureaucracy.

The people of Lake St. Louis tax themselves to provide for a quality education for the children that live in their community. What if rather than being geographically assigned to schools, students were free to attend whatever school in the district they wanted to? What if they could take the funds levied for their education to schools in neighboring communities or to local private schools because they were the schools that best fit their needs? That would not be incompatible with the purpose of public education or the intent of their neighbors. In fact, it would more tightly align with what the children themselves, not the bureaucracy that has arisen over the years, actually want.

It is long past time that we, in the spirit of Confucius, rectify the name of local control. It does not have to be synonymous with monopoly.  It does not have to fight innovation.  What it needs to do is empower—and reflect the will of—citizens and families. That is the vision of de Tocqueville and Burke, and that is something worth pursuing.

The post Local Control in Education, Properly Understood appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As exciting and heartwarming as that is, the story of who helped her makes it even better. As KCUR reports, University Academy’s guidance counselor, Josh Burdette, had never helped a student get into an Ivy League school before. When he realized he had a student who had a good chance of being accepted, he reached out to David Burke. David is the guidance counselor at Pembroke Hill, one of the city’s most elite private schools, and he jumped at the chance to help. He guided Josh through the process of creating a compelling school profile to give to universities and even set up meetings with contacts at Ivy League schools and other prestigious colleges around the country.  University Academy has already reaped the benefits.

Schools have different ways of doing things, and that’s fine. The relationship that Pembroke Hill and UA have created shows that schools of all shapes and sizes can work together to help students.

What can we learn from all this? Cooperation and shared goals can help our students succeed. Because of Jazmyne’s hard work, Josh’s willingness to look outside his own school for help, and David’s willingness to lend his expertise, doors are being opened to UA students that seemed closed not long ago. The school is looking toward bigger and better things for their students—we won’t be surprised to see more UA graduates accepted into Ivy League schools in the future.

The post From a Kansas City Charter School to the Ivy League appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For years, hospital executives have defended these prices saying it’s about quality, or that they see sicker patients, or lots of folks on Medicare.

“That’s just not true,” said co-author Yale economist Zack Cooper.

Cooper said the team, including John Van Reenen from the London School of Economics and the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Craig, controlled for all those factors. And Cooper said market power matters more than the rest….

Change starts, says Cooper, when people who buy the MRIs and the C-sections can simply see real prices. And change may happen when those same people negotiate next year’s deals knowing what they know now.

You can find the full report here. Its implications are straightforward. For one, a hospital that holds and can maintain monopoly control over a health care in its region can charge higher prices than if it had competition. For another, concealing the prices of health care services serves to fatten providers' wallets. Without readily available prices, it is harder for patients to determine whether they're being overcharged. That was true before Obamacare was passed… and has continued long after Obamacare was implemented. The problem in health care is not the free market. The problem is the lack of a free market in health care.

Market reforms like price transparency are important tools to make health care in this country better, less expensive, and more accessible. Rather than go farther down the hole of failed government-run health care, we need to move toward freeing our health care system to make sure that patients' needs—both their health needs and their financial needs—are in the center of the system. Price transparency would be a step in the right direction after far too many steps in the wrong.

The post Study Finds Health Care Price Transparency Should Be a Top Policy Priority appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Interestingly, a growing body of research is finding that traits like grit might be more important to children’s success in life than traditional academic knowledge.

The Washington Post recently reported:

[Angela] Duckworth, a former middle school teacher [and University of Pennsylvania researcher], is known for helping to popularize the notion that a student’s success is correlated to that student’s level of self-control and “grittiness,” or ability to keep working toward goals.

Her research has shown that grittier students are more likely to graduate from high school, score higher on SAT and ACT exams and be more physically fit. Grittier students also are less likely to get divorced, and they typically experience fewer career changes.

Dr. Thomas Hoerr, head of New City School in Saint Louis, is the author of Fostering Grit: How Do I Prepare My Students for the Real World? Hoerr’s instructional suggestions echo Duckworth’s findings. “Teachers should embrace teaching the whole child, and should consciously seek to foster the intrapersonal and interpersonal qualities which will make a difference in life—such as grit,” Hoerr said in an email.

Given the fact that grit is important, and it appears that teachers can have an effect on the “grittiness” of students, there is a movement around the country to link measures of students’ grit to the evaluation of schools and teachers.

Even though they both feel that fostering grittiness is important, neither Hoerr nor Duckworth are pushing for tying teacher evaluations to student grittiness.

Why? The biggest issue is measurement. Student self-assessments are commonly used to measure social and emotional factors, requiring students to self-evaluate their level of hopefulness about their future and asking questions like, “Did you laugh or smile a lot yesterday?” Duckworth has noted that grittier students, those who tend to have more self-awareness, are more likely to rate themselves lower. The very thing that makes them gritty drives them to hold themselves to a higher standard. If teacher or school evaluations are based on this measure, they will be inaccurate.

While grit is clearly important, the measures for determining teachers’ impact on it are not ready for prime time. It took decades to be able to link simple math and reading scores, and we’re still working out the bugs on those. It will be some time before new measures are available.

The post From Standardized Tests to Standardized Character appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people on Medicaid fared worse health-wise than people with no insurance. This study joins others from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia that found that health outcomes for Medicaid patients are worse than those without health insurance.

Nor will expanding Medicaid clear up congested emergency rooms. A recent study published in Science found that after Medicaid expanded in Oregon, emergency room visits increased 40 percent. The vast majority of these visits were for procedures that could have been taken care of outside a hospital.

If it expanded Medicaid, the legislature would add billions of dollars in expenditures to a state that cannot afford it while doing little to actually improve people’s lives. It should ignore the Star’s appeals and say “no” to expanding Medicaid.

The post No, Kansas City Star, The Legislature Should NOT Expand Medicaid appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Take, for example, the salary schedule for the Pattonville School District in Saint Louis County. A teacher with a master’s degree starts at $42,070. Over the next 10 years, the teacher’s salary will increase by slightly more than 25 percent. This is a modest gain of nearly 2.5 percent a year. From the 11th to the 20th year, however, the teacher will see a dramatic pay increase of 48 percent — from $53,610 to $79,360. This tremendous jump occurs primarily over a two-year period between the teacher’s 16th and 18th years. I doubt a teacher improves so much between his 17th and 18th year to deserve a $10,000, or 14 percent, pay raise.

What explains the tremendous spike in teachers’ salaries toward the end of their careers? One simply does not arrive at a salary schedule of this sort through logic or sound accounting principles. More likely, unions negotiated this schedule in an attempt to get the best retirement benefits for their members. Pattonville is part of the Public School Retirement System of Missouri, which bases teachers’ retirements on their last three years of service, not on their contributions over the life of their career.

Pattonville’s pay schedule is poorly designed if the district wants to recruit and retain young teachers. However, it is expertly designed for those wishing to game the retirement system.

The post Pattonville’s Poorly Designed Pay Scale appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Just yesterday, the Senate voted to put $16 billion toward extending a temporary boost in Medicaid funding contained in the stimulus; the House is expected to follow sometime next week. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s signature achievement—the new health care law—relies on an expansion of Medicaid for fully half of its projected increase in insurance coverage. According to the Congressional Budget Office, thanks to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), 16 million new individuals are projected to enroll in Medicaid by the end of the decade, and many experts believe that those estimates are low.

To add injury to insult, the health care that people get through Medicaid appears to be pretty bad:

Numerous studies show that, on an array of specific maladies, Medicaid’s health outcomes are dismal—and in some cases worse or no better than the outcomes for individuals who lack health insurance entirely. A University of Pennsylvania study, for example, reported that colon cancer patients in Medicaid have a 2.8 percent mortality rate, compared with 2.2 percent for the uninsured. A study of Florida’s Medicaid patients found they were more likely to have late-stages of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma at diagnosis than the uninsured.

It’s also worth noting that poor Americans received medical care before the advent of Medicaid. In his history of 1960s liberalism, The Unraveling of America, Rice University historian Allen J. Matusow wrote that poor patients were typically treated by charitable doctors for free. Matusow concluded that “[a]side from middle-class old persons protected from the financial ravages of long illness, the clearest beneficiaries of Medicare-Medicaid were doctors, who, according to one estimate, enjoyed an average income gain of $3,900 in 1968 as a result of these programs.” I don’t know how the medical treatment that poor patients received before the passage of Medicaid compared to that received by the middle class, but it’s historically inaccurate to argue that the poor would not have health care absent a government program.

Still, given that Medicaid is unlikely to be repealed anytime soon, what is the best solution to its spiraling costs and poor service? Suderman argues that it should become a temporary safety net instead of a permanent entitlement. Unfortunately, most politicians seem determined to keep expanding the program. If continued indefinitely, that will lead to both low-quality health care for all and fiscal catastrophe.

The post Medicaid: The Program that Keeps on Taking appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

[T]hey would like to see more state money directed to counseling and prevention, to help keep more people […] out of foreclosure. But with the tight state budget, they said a good first step would be a task force, to better organize and coordinate anti-foreclosure efforts, and to raise awareness of the problem.

It would be preferable if government stopped intervening in the housing market because then housing prices would return to their equilibrium level. The high foreclosure rate is yet another example of a government-created problem that would be better solved with less government, not more.

Throwing more state money at the problem is more likely to incite people to buy more expensive houses than they can afford than to reduce the rate of foreclosure. Programs that encourage homeownership already exist at practically every level in the government, but despite these programs, the rate of homeownership has remained steady over time. The $8,000 federal first-time home buyer tax incentive was recently extended, and there are additional ways in which Missouri homeowners can obtain financial assistance, such as a $1,250 tax incentive under the Missouri Homeowners Purchase Enhancement Program and additional incentives for energy-efficient home purchases or upgrades.

Is a task force really necessary “to raise awareness of the problem [of foreclosure?]” Last time I checked, everybody was well aware that the housing bubble burst.

When the government nudges individuals and families into homes that they may not want or be able to afford, the consequences are overwhelmingly negative. Missourians and Americans are better off when individuals live within their means, because fewer people will lose their homes, and fewer people will have to pay to keep others in theirs.

Owning a home may be preferable for some, but homeownership is not suited for all. There are financial and lifestyle factors to consider, and the government does not have enough information to know what is best for each individual and family. I know that homeownership is not for me. Although I am missing out on lucrative tax incentives from the state and federal governments, I choose to rent because it suits my lifestyle and budget better than owning. I have no desire to spend my time doing yard work, fixing things that break around the house, or cleaning guest bathrooms. Similarly, I don’t want to pay to repave a driveway, install new rain gutters, or have an insurance umbrella. I get much more utility from a new iPad than a new patio set. These are my preferences, which would be inappropriate to impose on others; similarly, it’s inappropriate for the government to set artificial incentives that encourage homeownership by individuals like me.

Additionally, encouraging homeownership over renting is poor policy. It could negatively affect the economic recovery, because it prevents workers from moving where the jobs are. Owning a home increases the cost of relocation because it ties an individual and his or her family to a geographic location. It is easier for a renter to relocate for a new job than for a homeowner to do so. Renters can relocate at the end of their lease or find a subletter, but homeowners have to sell their homes — a process that can take years.

Real estate is not a risk-free investment. I am reminded of an article that appeared last year in the Washington Post, “5 myths about home sweet homeownership,” in which Joseph Gyourko, chairman of the real estate department at the University of Pennsylvania, argues against the commonly held idea that homeownership is a investment with good returns and no risks.

Between 1975 and 2008, the price for houses of comparable quality and size appreciated an average of about 1 percent per year after inflation. You would have earned well over 2 percent per year after inflation had you invested in Treasury bills over the same period.

When a person invests her money, she assumes risk. Higher returns are supposed to be the payoff for accepting larger amounts of risk. With the possible exception of Treasury bonds, there is no such thing as a riskless investment. Unfortunately, real estate is all too often viewed as one. Buying a house is just like any other investment — there is a possibility that the purchaser will lose money. In some aspects, real estate is riskier than stocks because houses are not diversified (i.e., in the event of a natural disaster, a person’s entire investment is wiped out). Thorough research and cost-benefit analysis are crucial before potential home buyers make what will be one of the largest financial decisions of their lives.

The post Emphasizing Homeownership Is Questionable Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Free-market advocates want to reduce violent crime as much as any other group, perhaps more so. If gun buybacks* reduce crime, I’m officially gung-ho: Let’s do it.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no evidence that gun buybacks actually reduce crime in the slightest measurable way. Here are some links. From the first link:

[A]cademic researchers – often divided by passionate differences over gun control – are in rare agreement in their conclusions.

[…] University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman, who headed a wide-ranging assessment of crime prevention programs, called gun buy-backs “the program that is best known to be ineffective” in reducing firearms violence.

From the fourth link:

“The typical person who hands in a gun is not a criminal,” [research director at the Independent Institute, Alex] Tabarrok says. “If they want to reduce crime, they ought to put more police on the streets, something we know works.”

Show-Me Daily has covered this before — mostly last year, when this unfortunate idea took hold of our police. I don’t particularly blame them; if it were my job to deal face-to-face with criminals every day, I’d want to do whatever I could to reduce the chance that they’d wave a gun my way. Unfortunately, gun buybacks simply are not a useful way to accomplish this, and they may have the opposite of their intended result.

For a tangentially related post to which the Peltzman Effect also applies, read this (if you haven’t already).

*The word “buyback” in this case is a particularly euphemistic misnomer, in my opinion. It subtly reinforces the idea that the police are the source of all guns/protection, thus undermining the notion that individuals have the right/responsibility to defend themselves. This is in no way aimed at the StL PD, who I’m sure did not invent or popularize this term, I mean only to call attention to the subtle psychological damage this term may be inflicting.

The post The Gun Buyback May Not Come Back appeared first on Show-Me Institute.