Pritzker Bastardizes Economic Research
Adds A New Teacher's Union Controlled Educational Bureaucracy to the Backs of Illinois Taxpayers
Governor Pritzker of Illinois might be one of the biggest doofuses around. He was born on third base and thinks he earned it. He will hide behind any feint he can to avoid people criticizing him, while stabbing other people in the back. For example, if he reads this he will say I am anti-Semitic, then he will propose and put in place policies that discriminate against Jews. People like Pritzker enable the pogrom which took place in Los Angeles last week.
Democrats couldn’t apologize for the pogrom fast enough because they need the votes and more importantly, the money.
Pritzker says he values all people, meanwhile he funds causes that are divisive and racist.
As governor of Illinois, he’s only made it worse. People are leaving and the state is bust. You can’t even get emergency service when you need it in Chicago. He says he balanced the budget, but it is easy to do when you increase spending and increase borrowing. What me worry budgeting. The little people will pay the taxes while Pritzker meets with his estate and tax attorneys to check on his tax free investments in the Bahamas.
Today, he rolled out a new initiative. It’s a Department of Early Childhood Equity. There’s that “equity” word again. Democrats use it so much you would think that the government is the private stock market. If Pritzker is so concerned with equity, why doesn’t he box up all his money into $100k increments and put them into the unusable mansion next to his home on Astor Street? You know, the one with no indoor plumbing to avoid paying property taxes. People could draw numbers and pick up a hundred grand until it runs out.
Unfortunately, there is an academic foundation for what he is doing. James Heckman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago. He didn’t win the prize for his research on early childhood education, but he is very respected in his field and you have to assume when he publishes research, it’s gone through the wringer a few times.
Heckman’s research shows that by targeting children at a young age you can help them more than just marginally.
My colleagues and I have looked at this. We controlled for the effects of early family environments using conventional statistical models. The gaps substantially narrowed. This is consistent with evidence in the Coleman Report (which was published in 1966) that showed family characteristics, not those of schools, explain much of the variability in student test scores across schools.
However, it comes with a caveat.
Direct investment in children is only one possible channel for intervening in the lives of disadvantaged children. Many successful programs also work with mothers to improve parenting skills. The two inputs—direct investment in the child’s cognition and personality, and investment in the mother and the family environment she creates—are distinct, but they complement each other. Improvements in either input improve child outcomes. Improvements in both are the wisest investment.
What Heckman doesn’t say is how we should do it. Setting up a huge state bureaucracy run by the Teacher’s Union is not the way to do it. Figuring out a private way to invest in single mothers and their families, along with a private way to enrich those children academically using public money is a more economically efficient way to do it.
For what it’s worth, 64% of Black children are born to single moms in the US. 42% Hispanic, 24% White, and 39% Mixed race.
Of course, other economists have shown that statistically growing up in a two-parent household is far better than a one-parent household. Maybe the state ought to figure out ways to get fathers to stay with their offspring.
I am going to make a prediction. Pritzker will set up this bureaucracy and it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. No child will benefit from it. But the grifters will.
"I am going to make a prediction. Pritzker will set up this bureaucracy and it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. No child will benefit from it. But the grifters will."
Not a tough prediction to make, unfortunately. The grift is actually the goal.
He's learning from Gavin Newsome. Gavin's created a $9 billion cottage industry out of California's homelessness problem.