The enemies of the ACA are failing

A couple of days ago, I noted that while the state-run Affordable Care Act exchanges were collectively outperforming HealthCare.gov, that apparent performance gap had been exaggerated by the lag in reporting by states relying on the Federal exchange. Since HealthCare.gov was barely functioning until early December, and some health exchanges were working well much earlier, I noted that the gap should continue to close as new numbers came in.

Today, HHS released state-by-state exchange signup numbers through 12/28. HealthCare.gov states are indeed catching up.  The fourteen states running their own exchanges, along with Washington D.C. (also running its own), encompass just about about one third of the U.S. population (slightly over 100 million people). Their 956,000 signups as of 12/28 comprised about 44% of the total of 2,152,000 signed up on the exchanges.(Honestly, I should have noted a ratio close to this in the prior post, as HHS has for some time claimed about a million signups on HealthCare.gov that it hadn't yet ascribed to specific states.)

"Should we redistribute grades like we do income?" Response to Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle does not think much of my response to Robin Hanson's implied argument that redistributing income is no more rational or right than redistributing students' GDP would be.  Let's take her rebuttals one by one (leaving out the final one, "hand-waving," which is mainly a repetition). The italics are hers, generally followed by a quote from my original post, shaded blue. My responses are below each indented excerpt from McArdle.

a) Comparing apples to oranges:  "GPA is more tightly tied to individual performance than earnings are. Granting that a) grading is an imperfect measure of the quality of student input, and b) earnings bear some relationship to performance, it's still true that student performance bears a closer relationship to grade than the social utility of the average person's work does to that person's earnings"  So the correct metric by which we assess grades is accuracy (does it correlate with performance) while the correct measure of income is whether it serves some larger social purpose.  Obviously, comparisons should be of like to like: either how accurately income/GPA are tied to performance, or how accurately they are tied to social utility.  It's not clear that GPA would win on either score.

Income is a measure of a performance that's valued by social means. Pay is generally awarded by a collective entity or a community of customers, which gets the ability to pay by its relationship to the larger community; the value pay confers is by definition social. We collectively pay athletes, mainly by watching commercials with which broadcasts of their games are interspersed and buying branded gear; we collectively pay Goldman Sachs investment bankers by buying stuff from the companies that see fit to pay their M&A fees; we collectively pay teachers by allocating tax money for education. We may pay contractors individually, but their value is determined by how large a subset of the community decides to hire them. Money gets its value by being equally valued by others; every "distribution" is a redistribution; and taxes are simply part of the mix.  Grades, in contrast, we at least attempt to tie to only one factor: the student's work.  Money is meant to be redistributed, student performance assessments are not.

About those free range little Krugmans and Manzis

There's an irony in Jim Manzi's moment of communion with Paul Krugman over Krugman's nostalgia for early-60s suburbia:

The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark.

Here's the thing: leaving aside demographic changes in Krugman's native Merrick, NY, most American suburbs today are very safe places. The murder rate nationally in 2009 was 5.4 per 100,000 people, vs. 5.1 in 1960. Violent crime rates nationally were at lower in 2009 than at any point since 1973. It's true that the 2009 violent crime rate remained  two and a half times that of 1960, but most of that crime was concentrated in poor inner city neighborhoods (and increased reporting of rape probably accounts for some of the difference over time). I doubt that most little Manzis or Krugmans living on suburban streets today are at significantly more risk of being crime victims than their grandparents were in 1960.

What's changed is parents' perception of risk -- and tolerance for it. Perhaps the crime-ridden 1980s changed the culture, or perhaps increased affluence (we'll get to that...) inevitably makes parents more risk averse, or perhaps we're just all made permanently jittery by too much information, or maybe our dual-action superparenting ethic renders us incapable of leaving them kids alone. As Megan McArdle points out, too, back then, neighborhoods full of stay-at-home moms increased the sense of on-the block safety.   In any case, as parents we've gone collectively insane. As Lenore Skenazy has documented, parents in many suburbs won't let their kids walk two blocks to school: