Adam Smith is alive and well.

So all of this talk about health care reform got me thinking about another public "good," education. The debate of late, especially in South Carolina, where successive governors and ed superintendents, have promised to remedy the state's terrible system, has revolved around school choice. Most people would agree that everyone should have access to both health care and education, but probably hesitate in characterizing either as a "right," yet we've applied disparate approaches in public policy.

Education, even before NCLB and the establishment of the Department of Education, has basically always been a government monopoly. Yes, private schools exist, but standards are still regulated to insure that students are taught essentially the same stuff in either place. Homeschooling is even worse. And everyone pays for public schools.

Health care started in the opposite corner. You get sick, you go to a doctor, you pay for his services. Pretty simple. But then technology exploded and costs became so much more volatile, and insurance was needed to minimize the unpredictability of costs, since you can't exactly predict sickness. The injection of insurance brokers between the doctor and the patient wrecked the perfect Adam-Smithian model, and incentives got all tangled up. Then you had medicare and medicaid, and then we have today.

What I've been trying to find out is whether reform in both of these areas is an inevitable and happy meeting in the middle of these public goods, or are they inherently different things? Either way, maybe we can take something to a comparison.

The two movements: let's use public money to pay for health care costs of some or all Americans; let's use public money to send some kids to private schools. You can characterize it from two perspectives: a health care public option will break the health insurance trusts by making them compete, but the public shouldn't be taxed to give money to private schools; the public option will further distort even an imperfect market, but vouchers will force public schools to get serious about results.

The health care debate might describe the difference more acutely: is it better to insert a new actor into the market, or put up more ropes around the market to force the current actors to actually fight?

And so I think in the end, even when we're talking about such an important good as education or health care, it's about competition. I think even in 2009 recessionist America, we are all still "capitalists," if we use that term loosely. The difference goes to exactly what Smith meant by the invisible hand. Is it the state of nature, or is it the way thinks should be? The laissez-faire libertarian would take the state of nature argument, a more rosy view of human nature, and say that we need to just leave well alone: i.e., no public option and no vouchers. But they would also say board up the public schools. The other side would say that human nature isn't so great, but competition theory still makes sense, so it's OK if we interfere so long as the result is to create more competitive markets and free the invisible hand from our natural greed and ignorance. That means creating a public option, and establishing a voucher program.

I'm pretty unsure about which side of this debate I'm on right now, but we're still operating in a world where we believe that choices and the right to choose interact in a way that generally yields good results. And if you take the reasonable view that either there is no such thing as human nature, or that it's mixed, then the door is open to whether we can make the sort of competition that exists "in the wild" more competitive. That's where the core of our debate should lie, and I think Adam Smith would welcome such a debate. I just think he'd want us to treat things like health care and education with a little more consistency of thought.

Jessie Spano Does Drugs!

Just in case y'all forgot about this episode.

Fancy Schmancy

Check out the featured guest in this Economist debate. You're moving up in the world when you're in the Economist.

Economics: The Graphic!

Looking for procrastination fodder? Check out this interactive chart from the New York Times that shows how past recessions looked on a graph. Great fun for fans of economics and the spirograph!

Also, too...

How have we not talked about this mess?

From Nerd to Nursing

It's funny. Prior to law school, I felt that I was very successful in my job. I felt that I was competent and that I was striving for better efficiencies whenever they were available. I never once felt that my being a woman had any bearing on my ability to do that job.

Last summer I was pregnant, and though I went to the bathroom constantly and ate continuously, I never felt like I was treated any differently in my summer internship writing memos on taxpayer fraud. I was called a "nerd" by all who did not understand my passion for tax law. Life was grand. Well, the work was grand. The vomiting? Not so much.

This summer I am once again writing those tax fraud memos, and the work could not be better. It is my dream job. I could not be happier in the work I am doing, but I have a baby now. I need special accommodations now more than I did when I was pregnant. It is easy for a woman working at a desk to use the restroom and snack the entire time she is at work. It is less simple when a woman needs to pump milk and has to get home to relieve her mother-in-law, who is acting as de facto nanny.

I cannot stay late at work, which means I am missing out on all the networking opportunities, known familiarly in the legal world (and every other business) as "happy hour." I spend 40 minutes a day pumping milk, which means that I have only 20 minutes for lunch, which is fine, except when I really need to run an errand, like go to the Post Office. I could take a longer lunch, but then I would have to stay late, which I feel like I cannot do because my mother-in-law is waiting at home with the baby.

The worst part is that I am stationed in a cubicle for this position, which is to be expected, but when I want to pump, I must go into the office of another woman, who is working at another office for a while. Surrounded by pictures of her family and assorted viney plants she seems to collect, I attempt to relax so I can collect enough milk so that my son can get these precious antibodies that doctors keep going on about. On my first day, one of the bags of milk leaked into the refrigerator over someone's lunch. The woman with the destroyed lunch informed me so I could clean it up, calling it "a little gross," and thus creating my reputation as the nursing mother.

Thus, I am not the intern from Richmond. I am not the intern who came to law school because of tax. I am not the intern who knows the names of the tax analysts at various major papers. I am not the intern who worked in the same field last summer and thus has more experience in this world than the other interns. I am the intern who, on her first day, spilled breast milk onto someone's lunch.

It is these moments that make me feel like I have been sold a bill of goods. I have been told I can be anything I want to be. I have been told that I can have it all. I have been told that women and men are equal in the work place. I now know these ideas to be only half-truths. Women and men can often do the same job equally well, but if a person has other priorities in her life, outside of work, then there will be disparities.

Parenthood one of those priorities that can change your ability to do your job, and while mothers and fathers can share many of the responsibilities of raising a child, there are some that will always fall to the mothers (in particular breastfeeding and, you know, giving birth). For the first time, I understand why "feminist" women, with whom never much identified in the past, fight for equal pay. Mothers cannot possibly compete with fathers and non-parents in the workplace.

I know I chose to have a child, and of course, I am glad I did. I just wish I had been a little more prepared for the workplace. I wish I had been prepared for the fact that motherhood would so impact my identity in the workplace. Everyone told me that I would not be able to handle being away from my child, so I was prepared for that change. I was not prepared to become the nursing intern, and for once, I miss being the nerd intern.