The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Part 1: Rights, Property, and Markets
• Property Or “property Rights”? *
• “design Faults” In Locke’s Theory of Property Taint Ownership With Guilt *
• Is Ownership a Myth? *
• How to Get a Free Lunch? Just Apply For It *
• The Problem of Contract Enforcement *
• The Public Goods Dilemma *
• Trying the Free Market *
• The Statist Legacy *
• Part 2: The Common Sense of Non-economics
• The Yakoubovich Syndrome, Or Lies, Damn Lies, and Economic Policy *
• Winning Policy Battles But Losing the War Against Economic Realities *
• Paying Ourselves More of Their Money *
• The Doctrine of “unequal Exchange” the Last Refuge of Modern Socialism? *
• Corporate Managers Are They Going to Kill Capitalism? *
• When the Economy Needs Morals *
• The Political Economy of Force-feeding *
• Hostile to Whom? *
• Mannesmann’s Courtesy Could Prove Rare *
• Part 3: French and Russian Tragicomedies
• Can Putin Build a Real Economy From Oil and Rigor? *
• Russia and the New Europe Growing Apart *
• Russia Hopping Along On Clay Feet *
• The French Tragicomedy *
• How the French “social Model” Could Self-destruct *
• A Little Bit of History Repeating *
• There Is No French Exception *
• The Hobbling of Private France *
• Part 4: The Capitalism They Hate
• The Capitalism They Hate *
• Striving to Get Richer and Poorer *
• “bread and Circuses” In the Modern Welfare State *
• Who Minds the Gap? *
• Float Or Sink? the Millstone of the “social Market” In Germany *
• How Germany and France, the Sick Men of Europe, Torture Themselves *
• Shall We Borrow From the Children? *
• Low Pay *
• Freedom to Strike Or Right to Strike? *
• Part 5: Creating Unemployment
• Stamp Your Feet and Demand a Fair Deal *
• Paternalism and Employment *
• The Things Labor Unions Are Up to *
• The Instability of the Welfare State *
• Some Bad News Could Be Good News *
• Built-in Unemployment Social Protection Costs More Than It Is Worth *
• Let ’s Throw This Model Away *
• How to Stifle Employment By “social Protection” *
• Workable Alternatives *
• A Tale of Two Models *
• A Vicious Circle of Social Kindness *
• Part 6: The Future of Europe
• The Economic Consequences of a United States of Europe *
• A Giant Free-trade Area Or a Political Counterweight to America? *
• European Crosscurrents and the Federalist Drift *
• How Confederacy Could Turn Into a Federal Superstate *
• Majority Rule By Any Other Name *
• What Now For “europe”? Why the People Failed Their Masters *
• Free-riding On the Euro *
• Some Democratic Economics *
• The Soviet Legacy *
• A War of Attrition Between Economic Reality and Political Dreams *
• A Brightening of the Economic Skies Over Brussels? *
• Turkey Knocking On Europe’s Door *
• Turkey and the Eu Club *
• Europe More Secular and More Islamist *
• A Bill of Rights Europe Did Not Need *
• Europe’s Social-democratic “government” *
• Power Corrupts, So Let ’s Make It Less Absolute *
• Part 7: Economics, True and False
• On the Economics of Protecting Employment *
• The Costly Mistake of Ignoring Opportunity Costs *
• “globalization” and Its Critics Mutual Gain Vs. Cloud-cuckoo Land *
• Are High Oil Prices a Form of Exploitation? *
• Immigration What Is the Liberal Stand? *
• More Nonsense On Stilts Mr. Bentham Is At It Again *
• Risk, Value, and Externality *

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORCE-FEEDING*

In Mauritania, many parents caring for their girls’ future well-being send them at a tender age to board with women specializing in fattening them up by amiable but relentless force-feeding. Like most African men, Mauritanians prefer them well rounded, and a girl who frankly bulges has a good chance of finding a rich husband, while a slim girl may have to content herself with being found by a poor one. Money may not make the girl happy, but the parents are nevertheless following a kind of economic rationale in having her force-fed. One does not know whether the rich husband will be nicer or on the contrary nastier than a poor one would be. With even chances of either outcome, rational choice must opt for the rich husband, for happy or unhappy, the girl will at least be more comfortable in the rich household.

There is a remote analogy between parents force-feeding their daughters with food and states force-feeding the children of their subjects with compulsory education. In both cases, compulsion is motivated by benevolent paternalism, though one might think that there is more excuse for parents acting paternalistically than the state doing so in loco parentis. However, the analogy stops here anyway. In particular, the results are not analogous at all.

According to statistics compiled by the European Commission, public expenditure on education by the twenty-seven member states amounted to 5.09 percent of the area’s gross national product, with private expenditure by families and nongovernment institutions adding a mere 0.64 percent. The corresponding figures were 8.47 and 0.32 in Denmark, 5.12 and 2.32 in the U.S., 6.43 and 0.13 in Finland, 5.29 and 0.95 in Britain, 4.60 and 0.91 in Germany and 4.25 and 0.61 in Spain. The low proportion of money freely spent on buying education compared to public spending on force-feeding it to captive consumers is striking.

There is a wide enough consensus in Europe that public expenditure on education, on a rising trend in nearly every country, must go on rising and is never high enough. Most people believe that more spending means better education and do not see any clear link between their taxes and more public spending. Nobody feels the marginal cost of more education, and many do not realize that the marginal return, in terms of better-educated young people, may be very little indeed. Except perhaps in the case of Finland where high expenditure goes hand in hand with Europe’s best average scholarly performance, there is no significant correlation between spending and educational results.

The sums involved are huge. Only “ill care” (euphemistically and misleadingly called health care, though its agenda is the treatment of illness rather than the preservation of health) absorbs a greater share of national incomes. The return on this vast outlay is poor and shows little or no improvement with time. Functional illiteracy among school-leavers in the state-run sector runs at around 15 percent. Many countries, with France in the lead, forbid selective admission at secondary and at university entry level as inegalitarian (though some selection is taking place surreptitiously). The result is that in each class, a number of hard cases prevent the rest from learning and the teacher from teaching. British education is good at the top end, thanks in large part to the 160 grammar schools that were spared in the devastating postwar reforms to bring in equality of opportunity, and that practice selection, but below that level standards are abysmal. State schools not only fail to teach their conscripted pupils basic knowledge but also fail to educate them to habits of regular work, discipline, and civilized conduct.

In defense of the schools, it is said that parents no longer do their share of educating children as they used to do. This is undoubtedly true, but then taxpayers did not use to pay five percent of national income to maintain schools in order that compulsory education should accomplish both what parents no longer do and what privately financed schools used to do in the past.

School attendance in most European countries is mandatory and free of charge from between five and seven to fifteen or sixteen years, usually with a further two years that may be mandatory, optional, or a part-time mixture of the two. In a recent speech Britain’s prime minister Gordon Brown announced plans to extend the general school-leaving age to eighteen, though it was not clear whether this would be mandatory. University education is still optional everywhere in Europe, but there is a tendency to transform it into a “right” the young “ought to” exercise and to have the general taxpayer bear most of the cost.

More and more, education is taking the form of a “nonexcludable” public good that has the peculiarity that a certain age group is not only free, but actually compelled, to consume it. Moreover, this age group tends to be extended as the school-leaving age is prolonged. This is done in the firm belief that it will do a deal of good both to the young personally and to the national economy as a whole, making the cost well worth bearing and the force-feeding justified. However, a suspicion is spreading that this belief is illusory and that the material and moral payback may in fact be nil or negative.

Who, or what, is at fault? Everybody, and everything, is probably the right answer. One obvious structural fault springs, paradoxically, from the virtual shutting off of the normal producer-consumer conflict in the state sector. In private schools the producers, namely the teachers, must willy-nilly exert themselves to satisfy the customers, namely the pupils’ parents. In state schools, the customers are captive. They do not pay (or so it seems to them at the level of each particular school) and must either consume what is provided or passively resist it. Whether they do one or the other, the jobs of the teachers are little affected. Teachers’ unions behave accordingly and fight tooth and nail against attempts to inject some producer-consumer conflict and competitive effort into education by the use of school vouchers. In Europe, school vouchers have been and remain out of the question. Some teachers’ unions, especially in France, also combat and seek to restrict apprenticeship for being a form of “child labor” that would reduce school attendance. They just succeeded in reversing a government decision that would permit apprenticeship from the age of fourteen; the age limit is now back at sixteen.

However, the root cause of failure lies deeper than teacher indifference, left-leaning prejudice, and bureaucracy. It lies in universal compulsory enrollment in a system that cannot educate under the same roof both the willing and the unwilling, the hopelessly dumb and the downright hostile. Probably no system can really do so, but if there is one that has a chance, it is one that demands only voluntary effort from the young and guides those unwilling or unable to make it, to channels that call for different kinds of endeavor and aptitudes. In one word, education as an obligation does not work, or at any rate does not work well enough to make it worthwhile. It needs gradually to be turned into a privilege provided only for those willing and able to draw from it all the benefit it offers, but withdrawn from those who abuse it or prove unable to use it.

The late James Coleman, an eminent Chicago sociologist, used to teach that it is good for children to be raised within mixed age groups and dangerous to have them grow up within same-age peer groups. For him, the small farmer family where young and old worked at their different tasks on the same farm, and the community of master and apprentices in the workshop, were the ideal educational environments. Adolescents thrown together in the school and “hanging out” together after school ran a high risk that too much of each other’s company would coarsen them and make them form gangs where outrageous behavior earned them peer admiration.

This is perhaps the right juncture to remember the sinister story of compulsory social regrouping on a wildlife reservation in East Africa. The elephant population was growing too dense. To relieve the pressure, substantial numbers of young elephants were captured and placed several hundred miles away in an area where only a few elephants lived. After a while game wardens in that area began to find corpses of rhinoceros crushed to death by unexplained blows or pressures. The mystery of these deaths was solved when gangs of up to a dozen young elephants were observed chasing rhinos at full gallop. Catching up with one, they overturned and stomped it to death. It was concluded that being forcibly taken out of their family environment and thrown together with their peers had turned them into coarse, wanton hooligans.

I will stop short of insinuating that force-feeding the young with education some of them are unwilling or unfit to assume, and extensions of the school-leaving age that divert many young people from timely apprenticeship and natural transition into working life, are turning them into replicas of rogue hooligan beasts. Things are not as bad as that, but very much worse than the advocates of ever more, ever longer, and ever more expensive compulsory education keep on imagining. Their dream of turning out well-behaved and highly knowledgeable young people destined to have a better life than their parents, while by the same stroke creating a huge positive externality in the form of a “knowledge-based” superproductive economy (such as was set as the medium-term objective for the European Union at its 2003 Lisbon summit) is proving to be just that, a dream. Awake to reality, less paternalistic and less coercive means may be adopted, whose use runs into less resistance.

[* ]First published by Liberty Fund, Inc., at www.econlib.org on November 5, 2007. Reprinted by permission.