Liberating The Economy's New Commanding Heights
For conservatives, health care and education aren’t “sexy” policy issues, at least compared to defense and taxes. But Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz argue persuasively in the current issue of National Affairs that conservatives need to immerse themselves in the details of health care and education spending if they want to control the future growth of government.
They start with a simple observation: If you want to know what the “commanding heights” of the U.S. economy are today, take a look at consumer spending. By this measure, education and health care are “our foremost growth sectors � the ones most central to employment and consumption.” They are also most subject to government intervention and planning � both on the demand side (through enormous tax expenditures that encourage consumption) and the supply side (through extensive state and federal regulations that limit competition).
Kling and Schulz note that health care alone produced 25% of new jobs over the last two decades. Government was second, with 15% of new jobs, nearly three-quarters of which were in education. Over the last 10 years, government, education and health care jobs increased by 16%, while employment outside these sectors decreased.
Increased health and education spending isn’t inherently bad. The problem is that it is extraordinarily difficult to measure productivity in health care and education, and both sectors have been highly resistant to technology-driven efficiency gains that have transformed almost every other sector of the economy.
This is because education and health care involve individual judgment and decision-making that “are not as easily handed over to machines or outsourced to low-skilled workers abroad.” As a result, not only are firms in the health and education sectors less efficient, it’s difficult even to measure their efficiency.
Data suggest that both sectors suffer from massive efficiency problems. Studies from RAND and Dartmouth suggest that much of U.S. medical spending does not result in improved patient health. As for education, the U.S. spends 40% more per student than other OECD countries but ranks far below the average in reading, science and math skills.
Government policy both encourages consumer spending in health and education and protects providers in those industries through licensing requirements that reduce competition from lower-cost or higher-quality providers (charter schools, retail clinics, etc.).
And since the stakeholders � hospitals, nursing homes and teachers’ unions � in these sectors are critically dependent on government protection for their survival, they are also powerfully motivated to fight off market-oriented reforms.
What to do about it? Kling and Schulz don’t spend much time talking about reforms, other than to advocate for more market-based options and paring back licensing requirements that would encourage “on-the-job learning” in lieu of expensive diplomas.
Still, it’s possible to draw two main lessons from their article.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Caller
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Caller