Catholic schools are closing their doors all across America, leaving future generations with nowhere to turn for the high-quality academics and values-based education so many families are seeking. The number of students attending Catholic schools in the US fell from about 5.2 million in 1965 to around two million in 2008.
Pioneer Institute believes these schools are worth preserving. For over a decade, we have raised our voice in support of these excellent academic options, and tools such as tax credit scholarships that would enable more families to attend.
Pioneer has held public forums, published research on the benefits of Catholic education, on successful models such as Cristo Rey, and on policy changes that would stop the Massachusetts education department from depriving religious school students of special needs services and school nurses. The Institute has also convened key stakeholders, appeared in local and national press, filed amicus briefs, produced a feature a documentary film, and much more.
Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with California Policy Center president Will Swaim about how the state’s ambitious policies have combined to stick its residents with the highest cost of living and a tax regime that discourages investment, innovation, and its vital entrepreneurial class.
Related: New Study Highlights Economic Fallout from California’s 2012 Tax Hike
Guest
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. A journalist for nearly three decades, he began by covering international business in 1990. In 1995, the Village Voice and LA Weekly hired him to launch OC Weekly – the first and still only alternative weekly in Orange County. He was more recently editor of Watchdog.org, a national network of state-based investigative reporters, and vice president of journalism at Watchdog’s nonprofit parent, the Washington, D.C.-based Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Will graduated summa cum laude in journalism and with honors in theology from the University of Southern California. He earned an MA in history from UC Irvine where he was a California Regents Fellow. A seventh-generation Californian, Swaim has written extensively about California business, media, politics and religion; is the winner of several print journalism awards and a Southern California Broadcasters Golden Mike award for public affairs commentary. With CPC board member David Bahnsen, he hosts National Review’s weekly Radio Free California Podcast.
WATCH:
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. With more than 40 million residents and an economy larger than that of India California’s public policy choices offer conspicuous case studies to other states, particularly other progressive largely single party states such as Massachusetts. One particularly relevant example was in 2012 when Californian voted to increase income taxes on high earners in much the same way currently considered by Massachusetts in our upcoming ballot question in November, similar to the promises made by its advocates here, California legislators promised the additional revenue generated by the tax would be dedicated to improving education and infrastructure voters were assured that those subject to the higher tax were unlikely due to camp for other states owing to California’s environmental and cultural appeal. Now, as Massachusetts considers a similar fair share tax voters can look to the results of California’s experience as a window, it to its own possible future and consider whether new revenue equates to improved education in infrastructure, and whether such taxes do indeed cause high earners to leave for more competitive states, taking their investments, jobs, and tax revenue with them.
Joe Selvaggi:
My guest today is Will Swam, president of the California Policy Center, a think tank with a state admission to secure a prosperous future for all Californians, Mr. Swaim’s organization has examined the benefits of prop 30 revenue on the state’s education and infrastructure. He’s also documented the responses of the state’s high earners and business leaders to the new higher rate beyond the observation that California is for the first time in its history, losing population. Mr. Swaim’s think tank has taken measure of which firms are leaving and where they’re heading playfully, naming his list. The Book of Exoduses, Mr. Swaim will share with us his view on the current state of California and what he thinks we might learn from their example. When I return, I’ll be joined by California policy center, president Will Swaim. Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by the president of the California Policy Center and host of the Radio Free California podcast Will Swaim. Welcome to Hubwonk, Will.
Will Swaim:
Thank you. Hubwonk Will sounds like my new band name. I like it.
Joe Selvaggi:
<Laugh> Great. Well as I shared with you earlier I am an avid listener of the California Policy Center. I recommend it to our listeners and I think perhaps some of our listeners will wonder why we should have an interest in California. It’s 3,000 miles away. What does that have to do with those here in Massachusetts? But it really fascinates me for its sheer size it’s economy, the population but also not unlike Massachusetts, it’s a deep blue state. It has essentially a one party legislature and governor. So, in some ways it’s a mirror of us and perhaps something that we can use to look into our own future. If we make similar policy choices, if we embrace similar political intuitions, so let’s start there. But before we talk about specific policy issues that you have done in California, give our listeners a sense of how big California and its economy are.
Will Swaim:
Sure. Well thanks. First of all, for having me on, and I do think our states are kind of on parallel paths we’re way down the road in front of you or next adjacent. But yeah, it’s, it, California’s a big state. I was born here. I was raised here. It’s changed a lot, but the fact is right now, it’s about 40, 42 million people, depending on how you count it. That is easily the largest state by population. It’s also very big physically. You know, it takes me probably two hours to drive south and hit the Mexican border and about 12 hours, 10 or 12 hours to hit the Oregon border in the north. It is a big long state. We are the, I think by many calculations, the fifth largest economy in the world that puts us ahead of the great Britain ahead of India.
Will Swaim:
I mean, it is a big, big place where famous for of course tech, the Silicon valley Hollywood of course, you know, generates loads of loads of money. The Disney corporation is based here, there in the news these days. But it’s really a place that is governed primarily and where the politics have changed since the late seventies. And we, you know, if you don’t mind talking about that real quickly, I would just say when I, I, I, I’m going to speak about something I shouldn’t, but I’m 62. I was born in 1960 that used, I used to be the youngest guy in the room and now I’m quite clearly the oldest, but in that time in the seventies, when I was just a teenager our governor then Jerry Brown and his first iteration mandated or signed off on a bill that allowed collective bargaining of all government unions.
Will Swaim:
And that was like the starting gun and the transformation of California politics. California’s always been very kind of libertarian, I would say, you know, and it’s Democrats tended to be quite moderate. Republicans tended to be moderates very pragmatic place. It was free wheeling in the sixties, as you might guess. So by the time the seventies come in this vibrancy on the left and the right begins to disappear and they become very stultified and the Democrats race ahead in cash, the government unions today those are the unions that that represent workers in like teachers and firefighters and cops and the DM, the department of motor vehicles. I do you guys call it the DMV in Massachusetts? Yes. Yes we do. Yep. Okay. We do. But all these government workers from the state down to the local levels, school districts and cities and counties there’s about a about a million employees who are represented by these unions. And tho these unions raised collectively about 2 billion, every election cycle, 2 billion with a B, and there is nobody on any politic on any side of the political spectrum, raising that kind of cash. They outspend everybody. So what they do these government unions do, and you can pause me at any time if I’m motoring to no,
Joe Selvaggi:
No, this is good. I wasn’t anticipating this answer, but it’s great.
Will Swaim:
Yeah. So the thing, the thing to know about us is that, you know, with a, with these unions generating about 2 billion E every election cycle, they’re able to elect candidates who, regardless of their I’ll call it insanity in some cases on social issues or governance or whatever can get into office so long as they promise union leaders a single thing. And that is that the unions will remain in power. They will, will, they will retain their grip on political power and over, over their members and the discipline in the workplace. And so the money continues to just flow even, you know, despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus, which we can come back to later which basically allowed government workers to opt out of their unions. We still have just south of a million government workers in these unions. So California by population is 12% of the nation’s population.
Will Swaim:
We have 24% of the nation’s government union members. So anyway, that’s, that’s how the mechanism works. The creepy little smelly, little corruption, legal corruption at the heart of our system is this government union ownership of public officials who once in office returned the favor, the unions gave them of getting them into office. They returned the favor by rubber stamping, virtually anything the unions want. And in return, the, these public officials do things like we’re pushing for a vaccine authorization down to the age of 12. So that 12 year olds can opt to any kind of vaccination they want without parental authority, same goes for gender transitioning stuff. And then on the other side, it’s take on as much debt as you want at the local level get involved in creative finance. So you can continue to keep the cash moving to the public employees who then pay out to the unions who then elect the candidates who approve further taxes and bond debt. So that’s the, that’s the thumbnail sketch of this lovely and benighted place?
Joe Selvaggi:
Well, well, that answers a, a question I’ve had because our impression here from sunny Boston is that, you know, California, as you say, has a libertarian streak, it’s let your freak flag fly. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> UBU. That to me is what California’s all about. Maybe it’s a a romanticization of the, of the sixties. But I also will, will point out it’s it’s a relatively new state. Well, you know, I’m recording from a, about a block from the Boston common. It says you know, established 1630 and I think California wasn’t even a state until 1850. So you’ve got a lot of newness there and a lot of freshness, a lot, you know, a lot of people from other places you’ve helped me at least at some level understand why such a freedom loving population has somehow been captured by a, a deep blue I dunno what you would call ruling class if, if, if you will.
Joe Selvaggi:
So compare for me, I don’t know how often you make it over to our side of the country, but Boston where I am in San Francisco are often compared, and I’ve been to San Francisco. It’s beautiful like Boston and it’s easily walkable like Boston, but I think that’s about where the similarities lie. I, I, I’ve not been there very recently, certainly not since the pandemic describe for our listeners if you’ve been there recently how it’s been transformed either by politics or, or whatever you attribute to it’s
Will Swaim:
Transformation. San Francisco is a great example. And I have been to Massachusetts a number of times my son went to school out there on a hockey scholarship. And I did my, my master’s thesis on a church in Salem, Massachusetts. We could talk about that another time. So I spent some time in Massachusetts of Massachusetts historical society. And, and just, you know, quick historical note, I would say that our pro part of the problem here is the rootlessness of the place. We do not have a lot of, I would say that it’s conceivable that a Democrat or a liberal and Massachusetts is not the same as a liberal or a Democrat in California and San Francisco is a great example of that. You know, my, my own sense of Boston is, you know, from 3000 miles away, that liberals in Boston tend to be more moderate in their, in their temperament and in San Francisco, that’s simply not the case.
Will Swaim:
I’ll give you a couple of quick examples in San Francisco. You’ve got mayor London breed who came in preaching, fire and brimstone on social justice issues and COVID hits. And she’s caught not once, not twice but at least twice out partying at local clubs without a mask and dancing and drinking while she has supported the complete lockdown of the city. And the response of the residence is, well, you know, shame on you, but at least you’re on our side and you’re, you’re an African American woman, so we’ll catch you some slack. But it gets worse as you get into policy. London breed has been really interesting to watch as a progressive what’s the old saying about a conservative as a liberal mugged by reality. She begins to try to expand home home opportunity, home ownership, and apartment living for this, the city’s massive filthy streets, so they can get to homeless people off the streets and into housing, but she runs immediately into environmentalists than others who say that they don’t want more housing in San Francisco.
Will Swaim:
That’ll gentrify that will transform the character of the city. Well, I can tell you as a guy who walks the streets of San Francisco, occasionally some of them are quite lovely, these streets but a lot of them really are just massive homeless encampments where open air drug use is pretty much the, the norm. And the result of that is that a lot of San Francisco and San FCAN unable to afford housing have fled east into outlying counties or have just left the state entirely. The city of San Francisco has lost population in the last three years. And it was it preceded COVID because the cost of housing is so expensive. So London breed tries to expand housing options is shut down by social justice, activists who say, it’s not good enough, or by environmentalists who say they don’t wanna change the character of the city.
Will Swaim:
And she begins to understand why you got people living on the streets. There’s no first rung of the ladder anymore. So on, on that issue, there was a radical change. Then the city elects, a guy named Che boudin, who is the son of the, of two weather underground activists who are imprison for the execution of a couple of Brinks armored car delivery guys in the sixties. And this poor guy is, you know, handed off to relatives he’s raised by these other friends rather. And he goes on to become a wildly progressive prosecutor in the county of San Francisco. And in San Francisco, you suddenly get this massive spike in crime. I think this is probably national news. I, I would imagine a lot of your listeners have already seen some of the smash and grab robberies that go on there notorious.
Will Swaim:
They didn’t happen only in San Francisco. They happened in LA as well, which has a similarly inclined prosecutor. They happen in Chicago. They may have happened in your neighborhood. But these are groups of people who will walk in under California’s new misdemeanor classification of crime. And they will simply calculate everything they can steal under $1,000, 950 bucks. Really that’s the magic number. If it’s under nine 50, the prosecutors in San Francisco will not charge you. So there’s no reason to report you. So people walk into Walgreens or CVS pharmacies, and they steal $950 worth of things. They smash in the windows of cars and steal everything, get their hands on. They specifically target rental cars, knowing that those are tourists who might leave cameras or laptops or whatever in the backs of their cars. So crime has spiked in San Francisco. Homelessness has spiked in San Francisco. It is one of the filthiest pro environmental cities you’ll ever visit. I think a I think it was a UN declared a couple of years ago that San Francisco was dirtier than Calcutta, which is, you know, really saying something I think. So it, it is a remarkable real world laboratory for very progressive policies on crime and, and punishment on the environment on housing. And I’m, I think that Bostonians would probably recoil in horror at the idea that they are anything like that.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. So I will report from Boston that we are clean, we’re safe. We’ve got our problems but we’ve not gone that path. Thank goodness. At least not yet. I’m I’m puzzled though. Again, you you’ve been really great at helping me understand how we, we got where we are. You’ve got an economy larger more than $3 trillion, right? That’s a lot of money. But also you’ve got among the highest poverty rates in the entire country. I, I, I’m having a difficult time understanding why all that money with the as assume assumption that progressives are sympathetic, particularly sympathetic to the needs of the poor. Why would a progressive state with $3 trillion economy have any poor let alone leading the nation in the, in the poverty rate?
Will Swaim:
That’s such a great question in part it’s, because a lot of the ostensible wealth of California is tied to firms which have become leaders in supporting really progressive initiatives that backfire and have the effect of actually making it more difficult to live here. So just to give you one example of how the cost of living gets really expensive in California, I talked a little bit about housing. We’ve got environmentalists and social justice, activists who want housing to look a certain way and tie up every new housing project so that when the government goes out to try to build subsidized housing for the poor, it ends up costing more than the market rate of constructing a new home. So just to give you an example, it may cost $500,000 to build a home in most of California. But if you, if the government builds it, it costs about $800,000 a door, as they say in that business.
Will Swaim:
The reason is a bunch of regulations, competing claims, lawsuits, et cetera, that Jack up the cost of housing in many of these major cities. So the, so the cost of housing is so expensive in California. The supply is so limited that people cannot afford to move up. You know, once you get into a home, you just kind of tend to stay there in California because there’s no opportunity to move up because there’s no new housing because the only if, if you wanna move up there are incredible regulations around the possibility you’re gonna move up in a more expensive home. Cause there just aren’t a lot of those being built. So people don’t move up. That means there’s no bottom rung of the ladder for people to move into. So they end up on the street. The O another good example is that because of environmental regulations, we’ve decided that we’re going to eliminate oil or any kind of fossil fuels, so that the price of our electricity, our gasoline is the highest in the nation.
Will Swaim:
We play on average, almost a dollar and a half more than everybody else in the country for gasoline. Now the progressives come out and say, well, this is just big oil. And what is this mystery surcharge they’re making on all of us Californians? There’s no mystery. The fact is, is that dollar 50 difference is state taxes and regulations that are designed to price oil out of California. We also sit on one of the largest natural gas deposits on the globe, but we’re not really allowed to, to tap that anymore because it’s dirty and it will cause global warming. So in order to signal our virtue on the climate change issue, we have taxed gasoline electricity, any kind of oil based carbon based sort of fuel. We’ve taxed that at such a high rate that the rich can afford it, but the middle class will struggle with it.
Will Swaim:
I just filled up my truck the other day. It would usually cost me about $80. It cost me 130. And that’s, you know, partly because of recent supply chain things, but those supply chain things in turn footnote are built around government regulation as well. I could talk about ports and highways and, and warehousing and why that’s a problem. But the bottom line is if you’re poor and trying to pay, what’s now about $6 per gallon for gasoline and in many places more than that that hurts you a lot. It makes the costs of getting ahead, starting a business, just getting to your job so that you can work to pay other taxes. It makes it very, very pricey indeed. So VIR, sorry, go ahead.
Joe Selvaggi:
No, no, I was gonna say the I have read that, of course, California has the highest cost of living second, only to Hawaii. So we’re not quite there yet, but you can see how perhaps well intentioned environmental or you know, whatever progressive causes there may be. The end result is a, a crushing burden on the people who can least afford to, to to spend money. You also, you, you mentioned your truck. I have friends who probably drive around in Tesla and say you know, high gas prices don’t affect me, but I say, well, how does everything you buy every tomato in the store? And every, every item on the shelf, how does that get to that store? And it’s either gas or diesel, which is particularly expensive. It, it all flows into perhaps well meaning, but ill, ill targeted taxes.
Will Swaim:
Well, and, and you raised the issue of Tesla’s. And of course, Tesla is built in California by Elon Musks company and Elon Musk no longer lives here. He now lives in Texas, right? Why? Because he was constantly having to go to battle with state regulators over his ability to build a car, build rocket ships or whatever. And the big joke out here is that those of us who know how electricity is generated in California, where we get it from, we don’t get it from, I don’t know, squirrels running in a little hamster wheel. We get it from oil. We get it from natural gas. That’s how we generate electricity. Our governor and our state lawmakers who are on the left, generally love to talk about clean energy. There is no clean energy. The batteries themselves that go into Tesla engines are MI are, are built in part out of lithium.
Will Swaim:
Lithium has to be mined. Now they’re talking about clean energy being mined here in California, cause we have major lithium deposits, but Teslas themselves are really interesting example of a way in which the state subsidized the purchase of Tesla automobiles with the goal of making them affordable nationwide, because California has to be a leader in all things. That’s our arrogance is that we’re telling Bostonians what to drive and we’re signaling to Midwesterners. They too ought to drive electric vehicles because they’re quote unquote clean, but they’re simply not. There is not the electric generating capacity in the United States, certainly not in California that can help harness the energy. We need to power all these Teslas aside from natural gas. So we talk constantly about clean air out here and how we’re a climate leader in, in the world, but it is truly smoke and mirrors. And I, I use smoke advisedly because all these Teslas are being fueled by coal plants in Arizona or Texas. They’re being fueled by hydro from the Northwest in Canada. We are not producing energy in California anymore. We are now a net consumer of electricity from other states.
Joe Selvaggi:
Hey, you, you make a good case. I think a future episode, we’re going to cover the fact that an electric car needs to be driven. It’s Volvo who made these calculations anywhere between 60 and 90,000 miles before it’s equal to its internal combustion counterpart, largely because of the, the greenhouse gases that are produced making the battery for the car. So drive the Tesla, but drive it a long way before you get to break even point which is an interesting thing. And of course, again, the, the, the electricity that goes into the Tesla has to be produced somehow in, in general, as you say, coal and gas are how it’s produced. So you’re just really moving the the externality from the, the, the tailpipe to the, to the coal fired plant. So let’s, let’s move away from how these policies affect the poor.
Joe Selvaggi:
I also wanna talk and I don’t wanna bury the lead here. I really wanna talk about how California has made life very difficult for, as you mentioned, the, the Elon Musks of the world, the innovators, the people that are keeping America growing wealthy employed you not long ago passed something called prop 30. I mentioned it because it was a, a tax on the top earners bringing the marginal tax rate on the top earners to 13.3% that would surprise some of us here, Massachusetts. We’re considering similar ideas in our, we have a ballot question coming up where we tack on an additional 4% above our state’s 5% income tax and 80% premium on high earners. Let’s talk about again, if you are the future and you share our progressive intuition, what has been the effect of this kind of tax on the wealthier residents of the state?
Will Swaim:
Well, the effect is probably internationally known at this point. It’s an Exodus. In fact I kind of, it’s one of those things where some high school friend of yours says he invented a word that’s now in wide use. I swear to you, I did not hear the word Exodus. I was a theologian by training. I was gonna be a priest long story, ended up in a punk band playing you know, and, and in the communist party, but in any case the, the, we, we call a, our, our database of these companies that are leaving the book of Exodus. And and what we find is that a lot of companies, a lot of entrepreneurs simply decide that they are not going to be able to compete nationally, globally, even in California, if they are tied up by the combination of tax tax regulations and just business regulations, environmental regulations.
Will Swaim:
And so they leave this has of course downstream effects as those people leave, the number of jobs begins to shrink you know, jobs that might be actually quite good, good paying jobs. So, you know, I’ve, I’ve said before that there’s almost nothing more heartbreaking in my life than the fact that I’ve had to help. Three, three of my oldest kids. I’ve got four, my three oldest have packed up and moved out of the state to go find cheaper places to live, where there’s more opportunity. So these are kids who are college educated might have expected to go right into work right here in our own neighborhood, but could not because the job market is shrinking and they found they could make more pay less and live elsewhere. And that hacks right at the roots of middle class community, as much as it does, you know, poor communities, because you’re, my social security is really my kids.
Will Swaim:
Like I am like a an 18th century peasant farmer somewhere, right. I, I had as many kids as I could, so they could support me in my old age. And instead they’re off trying to find their futures elsewhere, and I will make an historical moment note here to say that you know, when I was doing my research on new England and the revolution, one of the things I noticed about Massachusetts was that a great source of political destabilization in new England, even in the colonial era was villages growing almost like Maslow’s model here. Now it wasn’t Maslow. I’m blanking, sorry. The economist will come to me. But the idea that you move out to your most marginal lands, eventually population grows in a little village, and then you move out a little farther and a little farther and soon you’re in forests and rocks.
Will Swaim:
And then your kids have to move out to some other place where the land is more fertile, but, and you break down family security, if you will, in that sense, that kind of family, social security network, well, the same thing’s happening here in California, just in modern terms, our kids cannot afford to buy a home here. And most of us are trying just desperately to keep up with our taxes, which as you point out are among the highest in the nation and getting higher you point out that we’re now in the 13%, 13.3% range, there’s a new bill floating through that would Jack that up another 3% on top income earners. The ex the, and the language that that is being used is it’s about fairness. It’s about making sure the rich pay, their fair share 150,000 taxpayers in California, 150,000 taxpayers pay more than 50% of all income tax revenue in California, 150,000 people, that’s it out of 42 million or so people. So we are beginning to chisel away at that group who will either decide to suck it up and stay here. Cause the weather is great and they generally like, I don’t know, Yosemite or the beach or whatever. But for a lot of the rest of us, there’s, there’s a tipping point.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yeah, indeed. We band bandy around the idea of a fair share, no one has ever given me a sense of where that natural limit of fair share ends. It’s always a directional thing. It’s a, a vector going into infinity. Our listeners have heard of, of course the high profile, you mentioned Elon musky packed it in and said, you know, look, I’m, I’m not staying around. Your book of Exodus I think is wonderful. It’s a wonderful title. And it’s it’s reference to the, the Bible and and escape from enslavement. Is it entirely appropriate? Can you name some of the other, let’s say household names that have left California and, and where are they going? Are they just sort of randomly moving somewhere else in the, in the state in the country or do you see a pattern of where they’re moving from and going to,
Will Swaim:
Yeah, there’s a pattern and I would love to have on the, on your show at some point, the guy who compiles the book of Exodus for us, a guy named Brandon Roff. And what Brandon would tell you is that by and large companies seem to prefer to move to really three states. It’s Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Interestingly, a lot of, a lot of Californians find living in Nashville, just sort of ideal or in thereabouts. Texas is the big winner. Texas has signs up here that are, they used to have signs up here. I was talking to a friend of mine at Texas public policy foundation. He says they don’t even need to put up signs anymore. Everybody in California knows how to get to Texas now. But you know, some of the higher, it it’s a lot of the tech firms get the, the big names like talent here.
Will Swaim:
The is a big investment tech tech investment firm. They moved to Denver. A lot of the apparel companies followed suit. I wanna say it was north face that also moved to Denver. So, you know, the, the, and, and then MEA just moved MEA, which is apparent company of Facebook just announced. They’re moving to Austin, they’re building, you know, some massive skyscraper there. You might say that our loss is Austin’s gain, but a lot of these companies are bringing their politics with them. Musk will bring his peculiar idiosyncratic blend of kind of libertarian and progressive policies, I think to Texas more libertarian than, than progressive in the conventional sense. But it’s really a lot of the smaller firms that nobody has ever heard of that have perhaps, you know, 50, a hundred, 200 employees, and they’re really kind of poised for takeoff.
Will Swaim:
You can see the engines firing up. The companies are getting big and they’re starting to look around at the price of expansion here in California, and they either leave their headquarters here, but open up new operations elsewhere, or they just move everything out. I had a couple of examples that I, I haven’t even been able to share with our radio free California listeners here for you. The, this is just a, a recent sampling. Here’s a company that I had not heard of Kraken. It’s a crypto company, cryptocurrency company based in San Francisco. They say they’re moving out. Because San Francisco is no longer safe. They are moving to Texas. They, they took a crack at, I mentioned this guy cha boudin the district attorney in San Francisco. They mentioned him by name on their way out the door saying, look, it’s not safe for our employees here anymore.
Will Swaim:
So Cracken, they’re out a small beverage company here in I’m in orange county, which is halfway between LA and San Diego. It’s more famous perhaps as the home of Disneyland. The other Disney world and this beverage company in Santa Ana with just 50 people, they do flavorings for major beverage producers, and they anticipate huge growth. I was talking to somebody over there and they said like, look, man, we just started looking around at the cost of adding additional employees and where that would put us under certain metrics for healthcare in California for housing, the ability to attract high end technicians to work in this company that does flavors. And they decided not, not possible here in California, they just announced they’re moving to Austin. One of my favorite stories is a Vietnamese car maker that wants to build electric cars naturally settled in LA county thinking, well, you know, California, that’s Tesla, that’s electric cars. They built their headquarters here that looked around and decided they were moving their factory to North Carolina. So they may keep their headquarters here, but they’re moving to North Carolina where they believe they will hire 7,500 people to work in a, an electric car factory.
Joe Selvaggi:
So will I just these are great examples. I, I wanna quote one of my favorite Californians your former governor, Ronald Reagan. He once said that had the pilgrims, I dunno if this is an apocryphal story, an actual quotation, he said, if had the pilgrims landed in California, the east coast would still be a wilderness. In other words, it’s so beautiful that why would anyone leave to go elsewhere? Certainly to the cold new England winters? I, I don’t think they would. Why are these firms leaping beautiful California for places like nothing against Texas and Nevada, but I can’t imagine they offer the same sheer natural beauty that California is. What is, what is the common pattern among those states where they, where they seem to be going
Will Swaim:
Well, this is the, the terrible irony for those companies that are progressive. And let’s just take a look. And I mean, in their politics, take a look at the meta slash Facebook and mark Zuckerberg. They’re moving ironically to go exploit the kinds of opportunities in Texas, the low regulation, the low tax environment, relatively low tax environment, the lower cost, the living they’re moving for all of the things that they themselves have helped destroy here in California, right? They, mark Zuckerberg is a notoriously famous for supporting virtually every tax hike in California. So long as it’s associated with the claim that it will help the poor. When, of course you and I both have already discussed, it does not taxes, you know, the rich don’t pay taxes. They, if they own a business, they simply pass it on to their consumers, right? So we all end up paying more for that. So they’re moving to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada Colorado, even, which is a blue state, but they, you know, primarily to Texas and they’re moving there because they can achieve real competitive advantages in a lower tax better rate. And I would argue a better, generally more business friendly kind of environment.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now I can hear the tension in our say more progressive listeners saying, well, listen, you know, as they like to say, taxes are the price we pay for you know, civilization, right? For better society. So again, we’ve got 42 million people a 3 trillion economy and the highest taxes tax rate in the country. That’s a lot of money slash slash around. And as you say, it’s largely attributable to the power of public unions. Those are the teachers and the, and the policemen and all those people who help keep us educated and safe. So therefore our listeners who are more progressive must be eager to hear if that money is actually having the intended effect. In other words, all the money going to schools and policemen or whatever. Do you have better schools in California? Again, we, that’s important to us here, Massachusetts. We’re all about education here. How do, how is that faring in California?
Will Swaim:
<Laugh> I feel like you’ve just set the softball on thet for me. <Laugh> California’s public education, K12 results are, gosh, the only word that pops into my brain immediately executable terrible Fe equally inclined. We have in our state about 90% of our kids cannot do math at grade level in K12. About 70% cannot do perform English at grade level. Put that another way. 30% of our kids are performing at grade level, 30% K12 kids performing at grade level in English and 10% on math. Parents typically have begun to flee neighborhoods where the schools are no really bad for places where those schools are less bad. But there’s simply not a lot of difference really overall. I mean, you can move into a very rich, rich neighborhood where the schools, because of perhaps family foreign formation and because of family conventions around education, I come from a long line of college educated people.
Will Swaim:
There was never any question. I was gonna go to college, same for my kids. But that doesn’t always exist in poor communities. So when I hear my friends on the left and most of my friends are on the left. If I didn’t have left wing friends in California, have no friends at all that’s not entirely true. But when I hear them say like, gosh, you know, we just have to do more for the kids. I would say, well, look, our schools used to be our public schools used to be among the best in the nation, right there with Massachusetts right there with Iowa. And now they’re among the worst. We are down near Mississippi levels and no offense to my friends in Mississippi. I don’t have any friends in Mississippi. That’s not this. I just haven’t met them yet, but our schools are now among the worst in the nation.
Will Swaim:
A recent report came out from I believe it was a world health organization. I could be wrong about that. It was a, a global report that showed that California is the least literate state in the nation. That is partly owing the fact that we have a school system that isn’t worthy of the name. It’s neither systematic except in producing basically almost producing illiteracy. So the money that goes into these schools is trapped by the government unions, which do not insist on merit pay for teachers, which do not allow for competition. There’s, there’s no choice in California in education. If you’re trapped in a lousy school, in a poor community, you get to go there because that’s the school that’s indicated by your address, you zip code, you are trapped in that school and trying to transfer to a better, better school in a different community is almost impossible.
Will Swaim:
In fact, it’s illegal under most circumstances. So trying to help the poor by pouring more cash into this system is not only ineffective. We already spend more per student in California to educate our kids than any other state in the country. We spend north of $21,000 per year on kids. And that doesn’t even include all the full costs of the bond debt that is required to build the schools and maintain them for these kids. So it’s not a spending problem. It’s an execution problem. And the execution of good education is been in the hands for 40 years. As I mentioned since the late seventies and the teacher’s union and the teacher’s union has as any monopoly, does it has no incentive to produce better education. It gets paid the same. Our teachers do, whether the results are good or bad, there’s no merit pay.
Will Swaim:
There’s no a sense that if we have a financial downturn that we really ought to start grading the teachers, because we’re told by the union, you can’t grade teachers, that’s just insane. Say the people who grade our kids every single day. So you, you mentioned that, you know our, our progressive and liberal friends might say, well, you know, it’s just the cost of, of living in a great state. We, we joke out here, we only pay for the weather. That’s the only thing we’re really paying for because otherwise our public services are not that fantastic. And in fact, they’re, they’re kind of, legendarily bad back in the day when I was traveling in Massachusetts a lot more. I remember you guys had this big controversial, I think it was called the big dig. It was a big project in Boston.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes. It actually turned out quite well. But for a while, I was at 10 years of pain, but I think, but we’re proud of it now that it’s done.
Will Swaim:
That’s my point. You guys suffered through just 10 years of mediocrity and cost overruns and inefficiencies, and then you got a great thing. We just walk away. We just have given up, we haven’t built a reservoir in this state in 40 years and our population is almost doubled in that time. So now we have a drought and taxes that ought go to building new water infrastructure are simply sort of redeployed into other areas that are really about environment and conserving water usage. We just found out the other day that though our water costs are soaring. We’re going to get 5% of the water that we got last year, 5%. My wife and I are now talking about showering out front in underpants so that we can water our modest drought resistant garden and clean ourselves which is great in the spring and summer, but not so good in the winter. So, you know, we, we simply pay a lot of taxes and then we watch this money disappear and it disappears into places like our unfunded retirement programs for the underfunded retirement programs for government workers. We owe in this state all told about 1.7 trillion on borrowed money that has not gone into capital projects. It’s gone into operating expenses and trying to pay forward things like post you know post-employment retirement healthcare and pensions for public employees.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. Well I think yours is an example of how well, in our state we’re, we’re considering ballot measure where we might add another 4% to our, our state’s income tax. And we’ve been promised that money will go to teaching and infrastructure into education. But as you say, it’s a promise to take the money. It may even be a promise to spend the money. It’s no promise that we’re gonna get results. And that’s even a, I, I I’ll, I’ll brag that our our tax revenue here Massachusetts 2 billion over what was estimated, and we have a 4.2 billion surplus. So despite our our prosperity and sloshing in money still some will advocate for yet more taxes. Now we’re running out of time. So I wanna share with our listeners less, they think that you’re a diehard desk pounding, conservative from, from square one.
Joe Selvaggi:
I, I know only through your podcast that you started life as a man of the left. Can you share with us at least a good story of where was that moment and, and perhaps some of our listeners might might be in this exact moment in their, their near future where you say, look, I, I care about other people. I think that should make me a progressive what, what sort of opened your eyes as a man who cares about his fellow American, his fellow Californian who wants to do right by the world? What, what sort of puts you on a different track?
Will Swaim:
The short story is this. I, I became the I, I, I was in, I was on the left because I thought that that was the logical place to go if you wanted to help the poor. And I actually did literally join the communist party USA for a couple of years, found their meetings and terminable and highly theoretical and abstract, and went to work for the Catholic worker for a while. And when I say went to work, I volunteered for the Catholic worker a famously Catholic and an anarchist organization, and started to, you know, I became, then I moved right word, you might say, into the democratic party, but the democratic party as I was, you know, in my early twenties was still a much more moderate kind of party out here, but I got into journalism full time and became an investigative reporter than an editor and a publisher of a paper called O C weekly. That’s a was a sister paper of the LA weekly, the village voice in New York. Very much like your Boston, Phoenix. I don’t know. What’s become of that, how to,
Joe Selvaggi:
But yeah, we we, we actually used the globe if we wanted any progressive perspective instead,
Will Swaim:
Ah, there you go. Yeah, that’s, what’s happened out here as well. So I was the editor of this famously left wing paper, where we had a column called Commie Girl and Ask a Mexican, and that sort of thing. It was a, it was a funny and Ry and hard-hitting investigative newspaper. And in the course of looking at the investigative reporting, it became clear to me that the problem was not a problem of conservatism and business people and, you know, corporate bailouts and that sort of thing. The real problem was that government is simply like trying to use a sledge hammer to perform brain surgery. It’s just really an insufficient tool. And I started to look more skeptically at the kinds of things that you and I have already talked about here that simply pouring more money into a broken education system would make it better.
Will Swaim:
It did not, it was actually not educating the, the poor who I had, you know, really being born and, and reared as a good Catholic boy. I I’m, I’m wired to think this way that, you know, whatever my politics are, they had better be aligned with helping the least among us. And I watched as all these programs that I had, I had really back supported full-heartedly, you know, let’s tax the rich and give the money to the poor, had to filter itself through government. And if the government was run by Republicans or Democrats, it didn’t always seem to matter a lot back then. Now it matters quite a di quite a big, a great deal. But I watched, as my Republican run, orange county board of supervisors landed us in the largest at that time, municipal bankruptcy in America, it was 1994, the county of orange went bankrupt.
Will Swaim:
It was, as I say, the largest in history at that point. And certainly on the left, there is just this constant grab for more money. And if, if that amount of money doesn’t work for you, you simply ask for more, but the poor are not only always among us. They’re growing in number. We have more homeless, more poor as a percentage of our population than at any time. And our tax rates are higher than ever in California. So it was looking at all these stories of how unions really operated. And again, this is in a left wing newspaper. I’m watching, I remember famously I’ll just tell you this very quick story watched famously how friends of mine in the government union movement out here in orange county began to press against some conservatives who I ought to have hated because I was still sort of vestigial left wing.
Will Swaim:
And I watched how these union leaders just really severely misrepresented what was going on in the city, what its finances were. They claimed that, you know, we ought for example, to abandon asphalting the alleyways in the poor part of towns because, you know, that was unnecessary. We didn’t need this place to be the Taj ma hall. What we really needed was to pay our public employees more and, and it started to just fall apart for me at that point. I mean, philosophically, I was beginning to come to grips with the idea that human flourishing really requires a great deal of Liberty. There is no such thing as coerced virtue. You know, if you hold a gun to my head and make me do something virtuous, I haven’t really done a virtuous thing. I’ve tried to keep myself alive. So coercion is the enemy.
Will Swaim:
Liberty is what made America and California. Great. I am not suggesting there’s no room for regulation. I’m not an anarchist. I don’t think Somali is the model we want of war Lords and battling rich people. I do think that California is now like Gulliver and the IANS, you know, we are just tied down by myriad bonds of regulation on how you can start a business and what you need to run that business in California. So that’s, that’s roughly the story about how I was writing Damas to Damascus on a, on a donkey and got knocked on my keister and then heard the voice of God.
Joe Selvaggi:
<Laugh> wonderful. We love those roads to Damascus moment. You know, we’ve all been there. And you’re in good company. I think some of the greatest minds on the, on the right, like come to mind like Thomas, so or Thomas Fri Milton Friedman, or even Ron Reagan was a a committed Democrat a man of the left and had that, that moment where he said, wait a minute if I wanna help the poor this may not be the right path. So you’re, you’re in good company. So before we let you go, we’re at the end of our time where can our listeners find your excellent podcast and the California policy center and its good work?
Will Swaim:
Well, thanks for asking. California policy center is really simple California policy center.org and the podcast is on the national review site. So if you just go to national review magazine, you look up podcasts, it’s Radio Free California. And I do that show every week with my friend, one of our board members here an economist named Dave Bonson, who is a bicoastal guy, but born and raised out here in Southern California with an office in Newport beach and one in New York. So every week Radio Free California.
Joe Selvaggi:
Wonderful. I, I enjoy listening even though I have no connection whatsoever an amusing banter. And also I think insofar as you’ll let me make this comparison. I see California’s perhaps the the the channel Dickens here the ghost of, of Christmas yet to come the foreboding of what we might be if we don’t take the right path. I don’t know if you’ll, you’ll allow this reference to you know, Christmas Carol here. But that’s how I see
Will Swaim:
It. One of our great books and it, and, and it’s either that, or it’s a tale of two cities, right? The best of times, and the worst of times, this is a place that is practicing on us to produce a new and more perfect utopia. And it’s an utter catastrophe.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. All right, well, we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. Well keep up the good work and then thank you for joining Hubwonk.
Will Swaim:
Thanks, Joe.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoy today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcast, catcher, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find hub won, it would be great. If you would offer a five star rating or a favorable review, if you have ideas for me or suggestions comments about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
Recent Episodes
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Artur Sousa, immigrant from Brazil and founder and CEO of Adopets, an online platform that simplifies the work done by shelters and improves the pet adoption experience. Adopets has over 40,000 registered users and maintains more than 300,000 adoption listings. In this week’s JobMakers, Artur describes how opportunity, capitalism, circumstance and a rescue pup successfully aligned to fuel his social entrepreneurship success; though he is keenly aware that not every immigrant shares in the American Dream.
Guest:
Artur Sousa is the Founder and CEO of Adopets, a Techstars-backed company that is transforming the operational efficiency of animal shelters around the world. He has 16+ experience in corporate strategy, technology, and start-ups; has lived in Japan, Sweden, Brazil, and the United States; and is a recipient of a United Nations MDG Award and a member of the Brazil-based Royal Academy of Arts & Music. He earned a Master’s degree from Hult International Business School.
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammed and welcome to Jobmakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
What is social entrepreneurship? According to the us chamber of commerce, social on entrepreneurship is the process by which individuals, startups and entrepreneurs develop and fund solutions that directly address social issues. A social entrepreneur, therefore is a person who explores business opportunities that have a positive impact on their community in society or the world. For Artur Sousa, immigrant from Brazil and founder and CEO of Adopets, a pet adoption platform that simplifies the work done by shelters and improves the pet adoption experience, fixing problems and doing good in the world is his business model. Unnecessary bureaucracy in the adoption process led him to create a platform that today has more than 40,000 registered users and maintains more than 300,000 adoption listings. Artur is a problem solver and his series of businesses and technologies have proven that, but he’s keenly aware of the factors that enabled him to succeed in the United States that not every immigrant experiences, the American dream, as he says, is not always fair to everyone. He shares with us how opportunity capitalism circumstance and a rescue pet successfully aligned in this week’s Jobmakers. Artur Sousa, founder and CEO of Adopets, welcome to Jobmakers. How are you?
Artur Sousa:
I am good. Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed:
So tell me a little bit about your business. It’s very unique, right?
Artur Sousa:
I would like to think so. We chose to begin our journey within the pet adoption space. Basically we started because my wife and I decided to adopt a pet. We saw quite a few bureaucratic pieces of the adoption process that were very manual, very paper heavy at that point and we thought that we could be of help. I’ve always been involved in technology in one way or another and thought that we could maybe help out an organization that we have been working with. And once we did it, it became a little bit more of a thing and was like, well, maybe it can actually be a system that can serve in general, not just a little side project for our organization that we were supporting. And then with that in mind, Adopets was born at that point.
Artur Sousa:
Our focus really is on optimizing the adoption experience. The way we present ourselves is as a shelter animal shelter that is, but shelter efficiency platform. So we are focusing really on the flow of their visitors all the way through meeting animals, through adopting animals, submitting their interests to those animals, signing contracts, paying adoption fees and so on and so on. So it really covers the entire spectrum of the adoption process, whether it is a actual animal shelter with the animals right there in a building or a foster based rescue with animals spread around volunteer houses and so on.
Denzil Mohammed:
I see. So you’ve encountered a problem and you decided to fix it. And out of that, a perfectly beautiful business was born. And this is not your first business either, is it?
Artur Sousa:
No, it isn’t, I’ve been a little obsessed with it, fixing things. <Laugh> tell me more about that. I think if I look back and that’s not an observation that I do often, but when I look back to our business journey it has always been in that same context, what problem that annoyed me and that I thought maybe I could fix and that I had a specific type of passion for the outcome. So if I look at the very, very first one when we were working, I was working with a nonprofit, a very large, no profit in Brazil and the way we were project managing the projects that was very inefficient. We had a really large staff, mostly volunteers to run the operations for the organization. So I decided to optimize that through a series of process-driven platforms.
Artur Sousa:
And that very first project created a whole other universe in my mind and journey and career then because we just reduced their general staffing, 95%, but we doubled the outcome from an impact wise just by being professionally organized. And that kind of triggered me each of the social impact area of things. And I was just wanting to what if we could do something, but we have some money in return. And that makes us do even more. And then it just makes this scalable model. I didn’t know what that was, social entrepreneurship at the time, mind you, but it ended up being what, let me led me to actually, to the us to get a master’s in social entrepreneurship much later than that, but eventually was a cause.
Denzil Mohammed:
So take us back to you’ve mentioned Brazil and that’s where you were born. Paint us a picture. What was life like back in Brazil when you were growing up
Artur Sousa:
Back home? I never really spent more than a year in one place. Right? So from a financial standpoint was always moving to a new place. I had never, until college, I had never spent more than a year in the same school cuz we would move and go to a new place cuz you know mom couldn’t always afford rent and then we had to go into a new place there. You know, there are many struggles in the world and I don’t don’t think mine was the worst there could be. But it had an impact. It had an impact in which, you know, I’ve actually gotten used to never settling and always keep moving and from place to place in, in Brazil, just college, I spent in five different universities across five different states, just transferring when I would get bored and go to a new place. Cause it really gets you used to that movement. You, you get, you know, as a defense mechanism that, oh, got I’m done with this place. I gotta go to a new one. So anyway, I think at Brazil was, it’s still the place that I need to go to recharge my soul when I feel empty.
Denzil Mohammed:
Wow. That’s, that’s quite incredible. And the idea of, of constantly moving, obviously move to the US, which was a huge move. You said you did that to further your education and career. What was the experience like when you first moved here?
Artur Sousa:
It was weird at first I was very excited, but it was well, I, I didn’t have, especially with the, with the foreign exchange coming from Brazil I didn’t have all the funds that would require for comfortable stay during a masters and it was a full-time master’s degree. So it wasn’t like I could be working. I wouldn’t be able to work either away from a visa standpoint if I could. So I came with my suitcase and stayed the, for my master’s at first was really weird to not fully understand the language. I had gotten enough that I had the, the grades for qualification from an English standpoint, but because I studied very, very hard, not because I actually had mastered the language. So at first a lot of the things in classes, I would understand a lot more by context because I had been working for a long time, not by the, the textbookor, or the teachers, but that lasted for a couple months. I had made a hard decision to not actually be with any Brazilian friends while in the US. So would only hang out with English to speaking once, cuz would force me to be more comfortable with the language and that really over time.
Denzil Mohammed:
I can’t imagine going to do a master’s degree without having mastered the language that you were going to do that degree in. I mean, that must have been a really, you said weird, but it must been a struggle those first few months. What motivates you most of all? Is it fixing problems and making, you know, just things easier for people
Artur Sousa:
That is one of the things I think fixing problems is just on, on my personality to point that I’m, I keep doing new things over time. Cuz once my business gets a point of stability and more, you know, bureaucratic arrangement from a corporate standpoint, it’s not for me anymore. So I like to be in the mass and fixing things. That’s one big part of my personality, but the, the other part is one Bo just a funny story. Actually, I had a boss in, in Boston that I loved and he, he was very, very good to me. And his still a good friend and he, one day he told him like that I was fundamentally unmanageable. I really like, and I took that as a, as a one of my biggest compliments in life. Mind you because I, I don’t, I, I like thing, I like things that I can fix. I like going and experimenting and, and getting it wrong and breaking things and I’m fixing them again and seeing the best path for it. And in that sense, I don’t always, or have never, quite frankly, fit to a box in which I would just do the predetermined things that have been assigned to me. I always go beyond and, and entrepreneurship is the best place for that.
Denzil Mohammed:
So as a social entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur, talk us through the start of your current business, you mentioned that it was a bureaucratic problem that you wanted to so all, but get us into the, sort of the nuts and bolts of the Genesis of the business,
Artur Sousa:
The application process to adopt a pet varies from organization to organization, from state to state city to city. It all varies quite a bit. But it’s overall a, a time consuming paper process that relies on a lot of really loving, caring animal people that are behind those organizations, usually underpaid if paid at all helping animals that don’t always have the time to do the process in a, in the most efficient way. When you’re looking at a, an adoption individual, we might be talking about, you know, few hours off time, if you put together what the staff’s time and the adopter’s time to get the adoption concluded doesn’t sound out that much. But when you go to other organizations who have a partner, for instance, in New Zealand, that process is 40,000 adoptions a year. So if you have a couple of hours that you’re taking away from 40,000, you’re thinking 80,000 hours away just by using a system that simplifies it and takes the process to a more automatic approach of triggering communications and so on.
Artur Sousa:
You’re basically saving so much time that gives you the ability to save more animals. So that was the behind the efficiency there. What we had to focus on was like, all right, so how do we make this? From a monetization standpoint and from a scalability standpoint, a practical answer. And it took a while for the majority of the time that I was built, not majority anymore, but for the first two years of APAs, I was building that while having a job. And at that point we already had 70 members in the, in the organization, but I was still with my day job on, on, on, on the side until 2018 when I quit. And then I quit in 2018, we moved up to Maine and then my entire focus at me being on the business. And that’s when we really focused on scale.
Artur Sousa:
And I kept saying on the blessing side, cuz I believe that there’s gotta be some universe plan now there, because, you know, should the tra tragedy that pandemic was for society as a whole. If I can’t put a pin on that side for a minute, the pandemic for the business really propelled it. Because when the pandemic hit, they didn’t have a choice. They needed to go online and nobody had been doing that at all. And we were right there. We were ready to go, we were ready there. Society was not from a using digital tools for the adoption of animals. And then it caught up and then we were right in the, in the right place at the right time. And
Denzil Mohammed:
You were perfectly positioned to, to, to deal with this pandemic and the fact that everyone wanted to have pets, all of a sudden
Artur Sousa:
Fair,
Denzil Mohammed:
Give us the number what’s, what’s the impact that your businesses have has had over the years.
Artur Sousa:
Ooh. So last year alone, we had 70,000 adoptions going through the system. We are serving clients in Australia, in New Zealand, in the, in Canada and the us haven’t gone into Brazil quite yet. Still a goal. We had about at any given time, about 70 to a hundred thousand animals available for adoption through or platform in majority of the us states in there. And I will send you a note after discomplete, cuz it’s still confidential, but we are about to go into a really big change in, in the coming weeks with another partner in the, in the space,
Denzil Mohammed:
The United States is sort of inherently entrepreneurial. I mean, we it’s, it was built on that kind of spirit. And I like to say that immigrants themselves are inherently on, on entrepreneurial because they take a risk. They don’t know if it’s gonna be better or worse. They pack a suitcase, leave everything they know behind and, and start fresh in some place. New. What do you think makes the United States special when it comes to being a business owner, an entrepreneur,
Artur Sousa:
The American dream story, right? That was built as a story first. It actually is a realistic approach that can be taking it is still an unfair approach, you know, depending on your race, depending on your origins, depending on your language is not fair to all how the American dream plays out. I, I say this in a very sad way. I am white in the sense that if I don’t speak, people don’t even know that I’m a foreign. They don’t even guess that I’m a foreigner and it’s a horrible thing, but that plays out in the us plays out positively because of how the society is, why around the us. So I had many opportunities that came because I wasn’t really facing a biased approach prior to it. I had to make some changes. We were just joking before the call about that, but I would never send an email as Artur.
Artur Sousa:
I would always send an email as Arthur, but putting all of that aside, there is an opportunity. There is an opportunity where entrepreneurship is actually highly glorified in the US, that taking risks is actually a mundane thing. It’s not a, this when you’re born in a Catholic country, heavily Catholic country is, you know, we wanna have that little routine and you have the most stable job and the things. And the west is not so much about that as I believe some of the Hispanic countries or Latino countries like my own culturally and we are all about that pursuing the dream and that’s powerful whether or not we get to realize it, whether or not it gets materialized for most people is that source of the debate. And we can talk about that forever, but the pursuit of the dream really drives people.
Artur Sousa:
The idea of coming here and giving her all because of that really well told American dream story actually gets you. Places is very little of, because of the American dream, but a lot more because of your effort, in my opinion, and because you are pursuing it, you’re pursuing the idea of it. So you’re building your dream, not necessarily because the society is built out in a way that helps you get there. Cause let’s be honest, it doesn’t right finding funding depending on your color, depending on your race, depending where you’re from. It is very different now if you are, and I’m sorry if I’m being too direct about this then. So but if you are, you know, a white kid that graduated at MIT, you get funding like this, you get funding with an idea before getting anything. Now, if you are a Latino entrepreneur or an African up origin entrepreneur or a black entrepreneur you actually get, or even middle eastern entrepreneurs too, like you have a lot more hoops to navigate through.
Artur Sousa:
There are many funds that have been popping out. There are more focused on diversity and other things, but that’s still a minority consider compared to other venture capital funds and other things. So the, the, the pursuit has to be what driving you, because it’s not really the, the context that is getting you there is you really not dropping it, not giving up on it. And I think in immigrants in general are very good at that because they already gave up all they knew coming here. So there is no choice. There is no going back at that point, you’re just is either make it or make it
Denzil Mohammed:
There’s, there’s no safety net. There’s nothing to fall back on there. You don’t have your parents house to, to crash in. If, if you enter a bad patch, you just, you have to make it work. What, regardless of, of what you encounter. And I really appreciate the very nuanced and detailed way you painted the pursuit of the American dream and how it’s different for different people. A lot of people like to ignore that these facts, that it is harder for some people based on very superficial things. I wanna pull it back a little a bit. We did some research in the greater Boston area and found that Brazilian immigrants from Brazil had the highest rate of self-employment up to 27% of Brazilians in greater greater Boston said they were self-employed. This is incorporated and not incorporated businesses were what’s. What is with that? What is, what is it about Brazilians and starting businesses?
Artur Sousa:
When I think about Latino entrepreneurs in general, not just Brazilian, we usually are talking about really resourceful people that, that really make things happen, you know, in a McGuyver way before they are there. And you’re just improvising and, and getting it there because of your drive. I think Latinos are very driven people generally on, on being better to their families, to themselves.
Denzil Mohammed:
I am happy that you are here in the us. I’m happy that you are making positive changes. I’m happy that you are creating jobs. You’re currently employed 33 people and to date you’ve hundreds. So you are a job creator. You are an indispensable member of our community, and thank you for creating jobs and, and being innovative.
Artur Sousa:
Very kind of you. And thank you for having me here. Thank you for the work you do on bringing you know, immigrants to the spotlight. So we all are more comfortable with the contributions that immigrants build in this, in the country and how much we are actually a country of immigrants all together, building this together.
Denzil Mohammed:
Artur Sousa, founder, CEO of Adopets thank you so much for joining us on the Jobmakers podcast.
Artur Sousa:
Thank you for having me. And if I can be of any help turn anyone out there, let me know.
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants of voice. Thank you for joining us for this week’s powerful story of immigrant entrepreneurship. Remember, you can subscribe to Jobmakers on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a rating and a review I’m Denzil Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another Jobmakers.
Recent Episodes:
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Dr. Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Dr. Hanushek shares how he first became interested in the economics of education, his plans for the nearly $4 million in funding from the prestigious Yidan Prize, which he received in 2021, and where he sees the greatest need for additional research in education. He shares findings from a recent Hoover Education Summit panel, focusing on educational performance among high- and low-performing countries, and how the U.S. compares on global measures. They explore why U.S. reading and math results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained flat, despite $800 billion spent annually, and the impact of persistent achievement gaps on individual social mobility and global competitiveness. They discuss his February study on some of the ways parents influence the “intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills,” and how this impacts the lifetime outcomes of children and K-12 education policymaking.
Stories of the Week: In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a sweeping change designed to standardize and streamline the funding formula for the state’s K-12 education system. National polling from NPR and Ipsos finds high rates of parent satisfaction with their children’s schooling, despite contentious K-12 culture wars.
The next episode will air on Weds., May 11th, with Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of The New York Times best-selling book, The World According to Star Wars.
Guest:
Dr. Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. In 2021, Dr. Hanushek received the Yidan Prize for Education Research and he is the author of numerous widely-cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. His recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth summarizes his research establishing the close links between countries’ long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. Ongoing research focuses on international variations in student performance and considers what differences in schooling systems lead to country-differences in the skills of people. He has authored or edited twenty-four books along with over 250 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tweet of the Week:
But money won’t start flowing to Catholic and evangelical schools without changes to other state laws. https://t.co/hh5XdZo9HG
— Bangor Daily News (@bangordailynews) May 2, 2022
News Links:
Tennessee Governor Signs New K-12 Funding Formula Into Law
The education culture war is raging. But for most parents, it’s background noise
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
[00:00:00] GR: Listeners. This is Gerard Robinson from beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome to another soon to be wonderful episode of The Learning Curve, you know, that we bring together great guests every week to talk about education, social policy history, the classics, all kinds of subjects. And of course, none of this would be [00:01:00] possible or even fun without my Cara.
[00:01:05] Cara: I’m here and I’m so much fun all the time. Ask my kids every day,
[00:01:12] every single
[00:01:12] Cara: day. No I’m doing well. I know we’ve got a lot of great stories this week and in a great guest and the sun is shining, which it rarely does at this time of year in Boston. So all
[00:01:24] GR: good. All is good. Well, kick us off with.
[00:01:29] Cara: Oh, well, actually my story in my mind falls in the all is good category direct.
[00:01:35] I want to actually, before I get my story, I want to ask you a question just for our listeners direct. Do you think if you and I were chatting, I don’t know, dinner table politics, would we agree on everything?
[00:01:49] GR: No, no,
[00:01:51] just shocking.
[00:01:53] Cara: We did, we had some things, right. But like, I have a difference of opinion.
[00:01:57] Maybe I lean a little bit, one way and you leaned a [00:02:00] little bit the other, but we’re still friends. Yeah, exactly. We still get along. don’t fight. We don’t hate each other. Don’t try and pass me laws to keep me out of your house, stuff like that. Well, okay. So, there’s this NPR Ipsos poll out so the title of the article, it was actually from the NPR website is, parents aren’t really tuned in to the culture wars.
[00:02:26] Headline was just music to my ears, my friend, because let me tell you something. We’ve talked about it on this podcast. We have been thinking about what it means that our country it’s. We seem to be in this place where people can’t talk to each other. If you listen, you read social media. If you listen to the news, it feels like people just can’t figure out how to get along.
[00:02:50] I’ve always felt that in my personal relationships, I happened to be, I know that this goes against the grain, but I happen to be a person [00:03:00] who doesn’t always vote the same way her close friends do. It’s amazing. And I still go out with them and have a beer or a glass of juice they’ll get along in sometimes here’s the most shocking thing.
[00:03:17] Sometimes I learn things and sometimes I even changed my opinion. I learned things from my friends. So I loved hearing that to most parents, these culture wars that we’ve been talking about and thinking about in education are according to this poll, basically background noise. And what I mean by that is parents really don’t care because parents care about what’s going on in their own school.
[00:03:41] Parents care about their kids. And yes, there is some number of points. Who are dissatisfied with some of the things going on in their kid’s school, but it’s certainly not most parents as some would have us to believe. So I want to just run through this really, really quick. And there are [00:04:00] some things that were really surprising to me.
[00:04:02] The first one, this one was not surprising is because this is like a traditional American pastime saying I think there are problems with the education system in this country, but nothing’s wrong in my backyard. My school is okay. Decade after decade. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is I think it doesn’t actually capture some of the parents that no that their schools aren’t.
[00:04:21] Okay. And we can talk about some of the things that are going on here in Boston with a school just recently actually closed because there was a investigation that revealed long-term sexual abuse among other things going on in the school. That’s another. but that, I think what this is reflective of is that when parents answer.
[00:04:40] They’re likely thinking about their school in terms of the people they interface with, such as their teachers and parents generally. might not love every teacher, but they have a lot of empathy for teachers because parents are parents and they know what their kids are like. So let’s just leave that there.
[00:04:54] But the other thing that I found really interesting is that most parents in this poll [00:05:00] say that they actually feel well-informed about the curriculum at their children’s school. And so I think part of what we’ve been hearing from both the right and the left is. parents have no idea what’s going on in the classroom.
[00:05:11] You don’t know what’s being taught in your schools. Well, that might be true to some extent, and you don’t know it. Every utterance teachers say, but this poll shows that most parents think that they have a pretty good grasp on, the basic things that are being taught in their kids’ school.
[00:05:25] And that’s probably because, schools and teachers talk to them for the most part, they could probably do more of that, but also they talk to their children. so I just thought this article. Was really interesting and make big take here. Oh, actually, let me tell you the third thing. There was a striking lack of partisanship in this poll, according to NPR.
[00:05:47] And so what they said was like, there, wasn’t a way in which you could see answers reliably break down among people who identify as red or blue, the only outliers where. Did not identify themselves as [00:06:00] Democrat or Republican, rather, they identified themselves as cultural conservatives. And so I thought that that was really interesting because I think that, you pushed back on me here, Gerard, but I think that a lot of the culture wars are certainly being led by cultural conservatives.
[00:06:16] And the question is. Are they getting disproportionate airtime maybe. Yes. Maybe no, you might tell me no, I don’t know. but my, big take on this is this I’m personally heartened to hear that to most parents, this is background noise. I wish that to most policymakers it would, for the most part, be background noise for this reason in this country.
[00:06:38] If we look at Nathan’s. Most kids still can’t read on grade level in this country. If we look at NAPE results, most kids still can’t be math at grade. Yeah, actually that we can fight all we want about what should be taught in history class. But, I would be surprised if most Americans can even name more than like three presidents including the [00:07:00] sitting.
[00:07:00] Right. I think that we need to be happy. Conversations about teaching and learning. And I think that the other thing we need to do, and nobody will be surprised by this, even if you are surprised by my politics and that I can say this being a person who leans blue, if we had more choice in this country, parents might actually be able to choose schools that are more aligned with their cultural views and values.
[00:07:25] While also I hope teaching a high quality curriculum, right? So if I am a person of a certain. Why shouldn’t I be able to go to a school that is lined with that faith, that mission, that vision, that value, instead of thinking all the time that public schools need to be everything to everyone, which by the way is impossible.
[00:07:46] So, I don’t know, Gerard that’s where I’m at. I might’ve said a lot in there that feels objectionable to you.
[00:07:52] GR: I want to hear. Well, first of all, I’m glad you started off with the culture war perspective, partly because [00:08:00] the founder of the Institute for advanced studies and culture where I’ve been fellow at the university of Virginia is Dr.
[00:08:06] James Hunter. And in 1891, he published a book called culture wars. And part of the subtitle includes the word education, and he talked about families and schools and parents. And so when you think about Paul, you just mentioned, and how families are. He was talking about that, going back to 1991. So I would recommend our listeners to take a look at culture wars and his follow-up book of the death of character.
[00:08:30] you and I both like polls. it gives us insight into the lives of regular people. And so as I hear what you said, I think about five Delta. they’ve been polling families about schools going back to 1969 in a study they published in the last year. the identify some of the same things you mentioned, about families saying, you know what I think my kid’s school is doing well, but I think we need to spend, for example, more money.
[00:08:58] And when you ask families, how [00:09:00] much money do you think they’re spending per student? parents usually are way. What the actual about is when you talk about school achievement at their school, how well students are learning their intellectual acumen, they’ll say they’re doing great. And yet we’ll look at Nate and identify some are doing great.
[00:09:19] Some are not. So I think a lot of it is driven by in my house, in my school with those other people’s problems. So I like that you’ve mentioned that in terms of the red, a blue it’s heartening to hear that there’s a. maybe a few coming from a study like this, where parents are saying some of that is background noise.
[00:09:39] I’m just interested in what’s going on in my school. do think you’re right. That some of the normal. It’s coming from what I call the mouse with the loudest mic. And some of that in fact, is coming from cultural conservatives. we see that in critical race theory, which I’ve addressed as Republican mates recommendations to members of my own party, in a.[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Uh, sometime last year. but I also think it’s the cultural progressive and a cultural liberals who are also doing the same thing on the other side. And I think the leak from the Supreme court of where the court may lean in the upcoming decision about a board sheet is just one example. So I do think there are more parents, , in the middle, both blue and right.
[00:10:24] Just aren’t the ones we’re often hearing from, even in Virginia, where there’s a cultural war right now. And I don’t know CRT, but I’ll tell about certain books that we should look at the role of parents and families. When you look at Northern Virginia and you look at, Thomas Jefferson high school, which in fact, I believe it was last week or the week before where you identified.
[00:10:43] schools in the country, Thomas Jefferson is considered the top public school. It’s a school with diversity, both economic ratio, ethnic, , not as much Hispanic and black as somewhere. But then they changed the rules to try to do what I often say is colored cold classrooms to [00:11:00] make people feel good about racial democracy on the left and the right in the middle.
[00:11:05] Some people are going to get things right or wrong. So in that that’s a great story. I don’t think there’s much that you and I disagree on this. I think, some folks on my side of the fence are getting some things right. But we often don’t give them a chance to be heard. I think there’s some things that 1770.
[00:11:22] Unites. I think there’s some things that they add that are sensible to the debate, but because some of them are not only conservatives with black conservatives, we tend to call them uncle Toms and a Tina’s.
[00:11:33] Cara: Yeah, no, no. I want to, thank you. Because one of the things I should’ve said is that.
[00:11:39] It’s not lost on me that in an NPR piece, they would talk about cultural conservatives and leave out the, really loud, extreme voices on the left that often take the headlines as well. And I think that that. Really really important. And so, yes, cheers to the purple [00:12:00] cheers. Cheers. Cheers to the middle.
[00:12:02] We should all be able to live somewhere in there at least, have a coffee together. Yeah,
[00:12:06] GR: exactly. Well, your story about. what people think about their schools is a great segue into my story. I also think it’s a feel-good story and it’s from the volunteer state, Tennessee, governor, bill Lee had an opportunity to do something that many of his colleagues, whether they’re one or two term governors with exception of Virginia, which one term governor will probably never have a chance to do in his or her time that.
[00:12:32] Just sign legislation to change the funding formula. That’s something that he actually had a chance to do. , his commissioner, penny. Was a part of the announcement. So you and I, and our listeners know that a couple of years ago, we had university of Virginia professor of education and law, Kimberly Robinson on the show to talk about school finance.
[00:12:54] and from that conversation, she talked about the importance of school litigation, seventies, eighties, nineties, and how [00:13:00] they got us to where we are today. Well, I think that’s a good backdrop to talk about. Taking place in Tennessee. So go back to 1992, where as part of an federal, a part of a lawsuit, the state decided to create a new funding formula.
[00:13:15] And in that funding formula, they were 45 components that were put in place that you had to walk through in order to determine how much money schools were going to receive on a per pupil basis. Fast-forward to two years ago, the governor and a group of stakeholders said, listen, we’ve got to do something different because a people on the left said the funding formula is antiquated and we’ve got to change it.
[00:13:43] People on the right said, guess what? Our funding formula is antiquated and we have to change it. So at least there was bipartisan support that we needed to change the system naturally. How much money students should receive per student, how much schools should receive a course was a [00:14:00] debate, but rather than simply rely on lawmakers to do it.
[00:14:03] , the governor will, and his team were part of a much larger discussion where they went throughout the state, brought together a group of people and even participated in a statewide transparency, a consortium conversation, which also has a national roots to say, what should we do? you had people like, one of our colleagues who we know Dr.
[00:14:24] Evans for our 50 candidates to see who, in fact last fall, when I was in Nashville, was talking to me about this issue. So shout out to Victor, for his work, but people said we’ve got to do something different. So after all the things, that go into politics take place, here’s what you have. You had a 26 to five vote in this.
[00:14:43] to move it forward. It was a 63 to 24 vote in the house. It wasn’t strictly on party lines. Although we know that it’s a strong red state, six Republicans that actually voted against it as did five Democrats, with the new law, they’re going to move away. [00:15:00] From the 45 components as we know it today, it was basically called the basic education program.
[00:15:06] The legislation that he signed is called the Tennessee investment in student achievement. I like the fact that he used the word in investment because when you hear investment in at least symbolically means accountability. It also means removing students and schools up from being solely a receiver of.
[00:15:24] But an active player in the investment and articulation of moving forward and a focus on student achievement. , there’s a debate about what schools are for, well, guess what student achievement is part of it. the state’s going to invest $6,860, per student. some people think that it’s too low.
[00:15:41] Some people think it’s about right, but it’s where they’re going to move So with this legislation, Tennessee is going to join at least 33 states and the district of Columbia that use a student based formula, prior to this law, Tennessee was not a part of that.
[00:15:59] [00:16:00] neither is Massachusetts. So they’re moving toward that. Number two is going to add an additional $9 billion in state and local funds to schools. So I think that’s a move in the right direction. And third is going to give lawmakers, parents, teachers, and educators, more insight into exactly how much funding is going into schools.
[00:16:21] Now, naturally, we have legitimate questions. Students of color students in low and under resource areas where students with disabilities? Well, I had a chance to take a look at data from the department of education and the identify that per pupil spending before this law for students with disabilities are range as low as 36.
[00:16:41] So as much as seven. And so even without this law, we know that certain students need money. So I think it’s a step in the right direction. Our congratulations to the commissioner, the governor and the legislature moving away from one system. it’s been in place for 30, 40 years to a new system.[00:17:00]
[00:17:00] Some of those, of course funding models won’t kick in for another year, but it’s a good feel-good story. And according to data for the national association of state budget officers, who’ve identified at least 27 states in fiscal year 21, had a higher percentage of its money going to K-12 and higher education than other categories.
[00:17:20] Second often being in Medicaid, and Tennessee not being one. This is a step in the right direction, but want to get your.
[00:17:27] Cara: say so happy for Tennessee. I think this is huge and I have to get selfish for just a second and say that my great colleague, Matthew, Joseph. spent a lot of time helping things this through and helping folks on the ground understand why student centered funding is so important and how it could work and how it’s going to really benefit the state in the long run.
[00:17:49] Like you said, it is an investment. I think that our upcoming guests, Dr. Eric Hanushek, Very very well-equipped to talk to us about why education is an [00:18:00] investment on which you can see a sizable return if you do it. Right. I think this is game changing for Tennessee. Very proud. I wish that, the Commonwealth would listen.
[00:18:08] I mean, look, the thing is, is that a lot of times states they, the distinguished, Dr. Kimberly Robinson has told us, states will think about a funding formula and then think it’s good for 25 years or 30 years, or, and not, not, use all the tools that they should to assess the extent to which it’s working and for whom it’s working, et cetera.
[00:18:28] I think this is really important. might I also add that a system of student-centered funding it’s good for everyone, and it’s also good for people. Because what it means is that technically, , we should work towards a system where, and I’m not even just talking public versus private, just within public systems alone, where kids should be able to get the money they need for their education.
[00:18:55] in whatever school they choose in a student centered funding [00:19:00] formula is the first big step in that direction. So I love this story. Look at us through our two. Rather feel good stories this week. I think we should just give ourselves, we’re just all sunshine and rainbows
[00:19:11] GR: today. Well, this is an example of the purple people with the.
[00:19:20] Legitimately. I love that. That’s wonderful.
[00:19:22] Cara: All right, you right. As I said, our next guest is going to be with us in just a moment, Dr. Eric Hanushek. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow at the Hoover institution of Stanford university and, most folks who already sort of the go-to person on economic analysis of educational issues.
[00:19:42] we are going to be speaking with him right after this.[00:20:00]
[00:20:29] Learning curve listeners today. We’re very pleased to have with us, Dr. Eric Hanushek. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover institution of Stanford university. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had brought influence on education policy in both developed and developing.
[00:20:49] In 2021, Dr. Hanushek received the Yidan prize for education research, and he is the author of numerous, widely cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, [00:21:00] school, accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics, his recent book, the knowledge capital of nations education and the economics of growth summarizes his research, establishing the closest.
[00:21:12] Between countries, long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. Ongoing research focuses on international variations in student performance and considers what differences in schooling systems lead to country differences in the skills of people he has authored or edited 24 books along with over 250 articles.
[00:21:34] He is a distinguished graduate of the United States air force academy and completed his PhD. At the Massachusetts Institute of technology, Dr. Hanushek, welcome to The Learning Curve. Wow. thanks for being with us. I know I have read a lot of your work, and I think a lot of our listeners have too.
[00:21:53] And one of the things I appreciate so much about it is that it is something that, even those of us who are [00:22:00] not economist can comprehend. So we were talking at the outset of the show about, changes that states can make, , to recognize greater return on investment in education. And we’re just, we’re really excited to have you to talk through these issues with us.
[00:22:16] first of all, congratulations, I should say on winning Yidan prize, which is also known as education’s Nobel prize. and that was for your work on strengthening the bridge between. And education. Can you share with our listeners a little bit about first of all, how did you even come to the study of the economics of education very specifically?
[00:22:39] And what was it like to win this award?
[00:22:42] Eric Hanushek: Well, the first question. how did I come to study education issues? I probably shouldn’t admit as an economist. This was not the, end result of a rational process of planning my future. That it was more accident.[00:23:00] when I was in graduate school at MIT and I finished the coursework and was looking around for a thesis topic, the Coleman report on education came out and that was the first major study of achievement of different kids and underlying factors.
[00:23:19] It was named after its main author, James Coleman. But. the study was called equality of educational opportunity, and it was really designed to look at what differences there were largely by race, but income and regions and so forth in education. And I think is part of the civil rights act of 1964.
[00:23:42] It was designed to beat up a little bit. The states of the old Confederacy and show that things were very good in the old Confederacy. Well, Coleman did something very surprising. , this was 1965 when he was [00:24:00] working on this, Tested 600,000 kids in the country. He found out about what their families looked like from serving the kids.
[00:24:11] And these are kids in different ages and grades. He surveyed, principals and teachers in the schools, and then he did some basic statistical analysis of what explained differences in achievement, the results, Astounded people in two ways. first no study has ever had 700 pages of analysis of variance results printed by the U S government, in the life of the union, I guess.
[00:24:42] but secondly, it seemed to say that the only thing that mattered was the. Or maybe the other kids appears in the schools and schools didn’t really make much difference in terms of achievement of kids. Well, I was sitting there, , at MIT and thought this is really a [00:25:00] crazy result. How could it be that schools aren’t important when we pay so much attention to schools, we put so much money into them.
[00:25:08] If they aren’t important, we gotta be doing something different, I guess. I had a friend who was on the economics faculty at Harvard, John Kane, who snuck me into the back of a faculty seminar, all about 75 faculty members at Harvard that were needing every two weeks. Just to figure out what this report said and how to read this report.
[00:25:35] Nobody in the room quite knew how to do it. Senator pat Moynihan, who was on the faculty at Harvard at the time, and along with Fred, Mosteller a statistician ran the seven. And so I’ve sat in the back of the room and out of that ended up doing a thesis on education and agreed with part of the Coleman report, but not all of it.
[00:25:58] And once [00:26:00] I finished the thesis, well, there were new things to do, and it’s been new things to do ever since that time. And I just keep doing new and different things. , trying to understand a little bit more about how our schooling system fits into society and affects. we can come back to any parts of that that you want, but I will respond to the second thing.
[00:26:24] What’s it like to win the Ugan prize? , I was really thrilled by it because the kind of work I do has not always been well-regarded by those, in the education system. The idea of doing. Quantitative serious analysis of schoolings and how policies affect things. Things that were outside of the classroom, was a NAFA ma to many of the people in the education business.
[00:26:54] And so I take getting this prize is some sort of, , agreement that there might [00:27:00] be something there to look at policies and how they affect our own. Yeah,
[00:27:05] Cara: that’s actually really amazing to hear you say that. Gerard and I were speaking about, , the phenomenon of many Americans just thinking of schooling as the thing that is right in front of them.
[00:27:14] Therefore, they can say that. I think there’s a big problem with education in this country, but boy, I love my kids school and I think the same with, thinking about the impact of sort of the. Amazing research that you do that looks at systems that looks at how what goes on outside of the classroom impacts, influences, our systems and what it means when those systems do or do not produce the outcomes that we need.
[00:27:38] It’s just so critical for us to push forward. so I’m curious, what is it that you plan on doing. With this $3.9 million in funding. I mean, what is it that you can do that you haven’t done already? Dr. Hinshaw? Well,
[00:27:51] Eric Hanushek: , there is a cash award that goes along with this prize and they want to support research and doing other [00:28:00] things.
[00:28:00] My initial reaction is it’s still the one I have. I haven’t quite followed through on it, but my initial reaction was that, it didn’t make sense that. Put that money into what I’d been doing. I had to do something different. What I am proposing to do is to actually try to improve education in Sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Latin America.
[00:28:24] The idea comes from the work I did on economic growth. If we look at the economic growth of countries, That’s what determines the future wellbeing. So the us is richer today than it was a hundred years ago because it’s had basically the fastest rate of economic growth for the last century of any country in the world.
[00:28:48] then you look at, , Africa or you look at Latin America and you see, well, there’s not that much richer than they were a hundred years ago. They’re a little bit richer, but [00:29:00] their economic growth has not been very fast and it hasn’t led to much prosperity. you see a few cities in each of these countries that’s doing okay, but the vast majority of these populations is.
[00:29:15] my answer to what’s going on is very simple. Economic growth depends upon the skills of the population. Countries that have more skilled labor forces grow faster. They develop new products. They figured out how to, invent new things and they end up getting the rewards in terms of increased incomes in economic growth, Africa in Latin America and south Asia also don’t have.
[00:29:48] The schooling systems that support to production of skilled workforce. And without that in simplest terms, I don’t think they’ll ever grow or ever [00:30:00] grow very rapidly. And so , the idea I’ve had is to try to find ways that we could improve the schooling in these countries. And here I have something that, , you and Gerard might agree with.
[00:30:15] I think it’s really hard for so many to come in from outside until a country or a school district or a school, what to. it really requires a lot more knowledge of the capacity of the schools that exist, the demands that are there for them and somebody who can really work to bring good ideas, but in the context of the local area.
[00:30:43] So what I want to do, is very simple. I want to. Find some people that will call fellows that we can sort of improve, add to their human capital, add to their networks internationally post within [00:31:00] the geographic region, but internationally, , so that they can bring. Good ideas about education to these countries in simplest terms.
[00:31:09] I think that we know a lot more about schooling and education than is being put in place in these countries. the answer is trying to find out ways to do.
[00:31:20] Cara: that’s really heartening to hear. I have to say my mentor, Charlie Glenn, who has, I think, as you know, done a lot in international education, he would often say folks from other countries when they would say, like, we want to learn about the American education system and I would hear him.
[00:31:35] Well, don’t take our bad ideas. I love the idea of building, networks of people on the ground who know the culture who are of the culture too, to bring good education ideas. want to really quickly ask you Dr. Henry. you note that these countries, in many cases, won’t be able to grow their economies because they need to improve their schools.
[00:31:58] one of the indicators we [00:32:00] have in school performance is of course, PISA data. So international data from the OACD. And you’ve, talked about this, much throughout your career. You recently led a discussion with Andre Schleicher from OACD. Can you frame for our listeners? just even where the U S sits terms of , how do we compare to both these countries that we know the schools are really not doing what they need to do, and those countries that have excellent systems of education?
[00:32:27] where are we at?
[00:32:28] Eric Hanushek: Well, if I answer that, let me, thank you for bringing up the topic of Piza and international tests. When I was saying, country. We’ll only grow proportionate to the skills in their population. What we found is that the international math and science test that exists of which Piza run by the, OEC D is a good example, are pretty good measures of the skills that are important for a strong economy and for [00:33:00] economic growth.
[00:33:01] Many of the, developing countries of the world don’t participate in these tests. So you have to guess at whether they know anything or have any skills, but when they do participate, you see that they are dramatically different than the more developed countries in the world, in terms of their basic knowledge of math and science.
[00:33:24] should add the footnote. The Piza test is the program for international student assessment. a test given to 15 year olds, and you can think of it as taking a math problem, translating it into the local language and sort of basically marching around the world and seeing how many kids in different countries can answer a set of.
[00:33:47] Basic math problems that turns out to be a pretty good measure of future skills that are demanded by modern economies. Now, the us [00:34:00] unfortunately is slightly below the average of the OEC D or the D is the organization for economic cooperation and development. It’s really the club of rich nations and reforming.
[00:34:14] Behind, a whole series of other, both developed and developing nations in terms of our performance on these tests. This I think is actually a, Canary in the, mine that we should pay attention to this because it says that we might in the future health problems. In the past, we’ve been able to take care of this, right?
[00:34:39] We’ve been able to take care of it by important people who have better educations from abroad and we’re all immigration of skilled labor, skilled people from around the world. live next door to me in silicone valley. As long as we can keep that going. Maybe we can make up for the fact that our schools are not doing so [00:35:00] well, but I think that that’s a real problem in the long run.
[00:35:03] And so the answer to your very simple question in a long winded way is we’re not doing so well that we’re behind a large number of developed and developing countries. it’s time to stop competing with Greece and Spain and start competing with Hong Kong or Finland or, other countries that do much better then redo on these tests.
[00:35:31] GR: And I’m going to follow up on you. Reference to the Canary in the coal mine. Cause you and I have had a chance to sit in rooms, with Dr. Paul Peterson and others. When we took a look at Piza. also there’s, you know, questions about Tims and it was always amazing how well we, as Americans start, we we’re doing, and then we compare ourselves.
[00:35:53] You say to the rich countries, it wasn’t as great. But when we look domestically, you know, we spend approximately 800 [00:36:00] billion annually. And when you look at NAPE scores in reading and math, Things aren’t that great. So with all the money we spent all the legislative changes we’ve made. Why has it been so difficult for us to improve basic student achievement?
[00:36:14] And what’s the impact here at home and on our competitiveness globally?
[00:36:19] Eric Hanushek: Well, I think the impact is huge. we are, , producing. Students that grow up, not to be competitive with those from other countries. you can see it in California, which is one of the lower ranking states. the nation on things like the NAPE test, California students are not able to compete in Silicon valley because they just don’t have the skills to lead on.
[00:36:49] , what’s wrong. Oh, we have an institutional structure that does not really reward. Good performance very much.[00:37:00] there’s some rewards. we have limits on the amount of competition and, you know, there’s fights over, charter schools largely because they offer a competition to the traditional public schools.
[00:37:14] But for the most part, we are a nation of traditional public schools where they have a local monopoly. And they keep doing things the way they always did. so we know, for example, that huge amounts of research has consistently shown that just having more experience of a teacher does not lead to more effectiveness in the class.
[00:37:39] And yet we systematically pay large premium to teachers when they get more experience. So we buy something that doesn’t relate to their effectiveness in the classroom, the same I should say. And this starts to annoy people, but the same is true for graduate education. [00:38:00] There’s a lot of work that suggests that.
[00:38:03] Just having a master’s degree does not mean that somebody is going to be more or less effective than somebody, a teacher with only a bachelor’s degree. So we have this institutional structure that is locked in a system that does not pay attention to the effectiveness of schools. we’ve got to get around that,
[00:38:23] GR: your example about California, To me personally, because I grew up in California.
[00:38:30] and I think about the fact that for the first time, since the founding of California, the population has dropped and thus resulted in the loss of a congressional seat. , another economist, colleague of mine at the American enterprise Institute, Dr. Mark Perry, has got a great article, about the number of people who are leaving California for states like Texas and Tennessee.
[00:38:51] And with that is often. Economic intellectual talent and in a state that’s becoming, or at this point, majority minority who [00:39:00] can’t even get a job, high paying job in Silicon valley, you bring in international workers. I mean, that’s a recipe for disaster, so I’m glad you talked about that. Let’s put that in perspective of the achievement gap.
[00:39:14] Our listeners hear that term a lot. It’s bantered about by governors, presidents, even investing. What is the achievement gap? What’s real. and what should concern us or what even could even give us hope about closing it?
[00:39:28] Eric Hanushek: historically we might trace things back to Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States who declared the war on poverty.
[00:39:39] An underlying strong element of the war on poverty was recognition that. Poorer families tended to produce children who would themselves live in poverty, and then themselves be poor in the future. And LBJ was concerned about. The fact [00:40:00] that there were large achievement gaps, both in a school attainment and the knowledge that kids got and so forth between families in poverty and those who weren’t in poverty and wanted to, , do something about that.
[00:40:16] Well work that, Paul Peterson and I, and some others have done. And. Tried to trace the history of gaps between, poor families and better off families. For the last 50 years, we can’t quite go back 50 years in this, but we’re looking at achievement differences. And what refine an consistent set of different achievement differences is that the achievement gap hasn’t moved maybe a slightly come down in 50 years, but, but not very much.
[00:40:49] And that persistence means that there’s going to be a persistence. Intergenerational poverty that these, [00:41:00] skills and knowledge are passed down from generation to generation. And so we have increasingly a generation of poor people. Some people escape that, but there are many that don’t that just go on from generation to generation.
[00:41:19] That is a huge issue that we can’t, keep going. I mean, that to me is not compatible with my conception of what the United States is. Insurance.
[00:41:31] GR: Absolutely. And I’ve seen both sides of the fence. I’m the first in my family to graduate from college. both of my Southern parents finished high school. I did not earn a college degree.
[00:41:43] I think about the men who were in my wedding, most of them , , , with single mom, not married and all of us now have graduate degrees. And then at the same time, families born in same situations, intergenerational poverty, just moving forward. So it’s unique [00:42:00] and the American mission. And I would say really the idea of the American dream.
[00:42:04] Some people don’t like that term. How about American optimism? there’s something there. And, um, I look forward to reading your research. To help us understand that because when you go back to Lyndon Johnson and the whole idea of the great society, and you’ve mentioned earlier, the Coleman report, there’s also the Moynihan report, uh, that talks about family structure, how much that played and a year after, , president Johnson announced a war on poverty.
[00:42:29] He also announced a year later a war on, criminals or on crime and the correlation between crime, low employment. I mean, it’s just so much of it. Goes to the conversation. Here’s really last question, for you, you’re doing joint research now to look the achievement gap. Is that the work you’re doing with Dr.
[00:42:48] Peterson and others? Or was that
[00:42:49] Eric Hanushek: something else? Oh, is it the work on your achievement gap is with Dr. Peterson?
[00:42:54] GR: Um, so it is that study.
[00:42:57] Eric Hanushek: Yeah. And right. So if you grew up in [00:43:00] California, you must have started reading with whole life. Exactly. That was one of the, examples of what California has done badly for the nation.
[00:43:10] It passes on bad ideas.
[00:43:15] GR: I understand that on many frauds, will it be in with, this question? And it goes to back to a care, asked you about how you got interested in economics now, knowing what you know today, there’s an. On Erica sitting in a PhD program at one of our public private schools across the country may have an interest in education.
[00:43:35] What words of wisdom would you share with Erica or Eric today about their work as an economist and how important it is in influencing how we think. About economic competitiveness, the achievement gap, or just prosperity?
[00:43:51] Eric Hanushek: Well, I, think there are many ways to look at, our education issues, but economics provides us structure [00:44:00] to sort of orderly put data together and try to understand some of the key.
[00:44:07] Policy relationships and key incentives that we can put into place. And so, , I guess we all support what we did think, or we did was good, but I think, getting some economics training, maybe not a PhD, but some economics training helps people to think about. What we could do better. We do know the other side of this is which I’ve also looked at, and that is that what’s the value of a strong education.
[00:44:41] And there’s where much of the work of economist has gone into, looking at the impact. What a timeless, because human capital on economic outcomes for individuals and for the nation. So, , I guess I should, proselytize for, more economists [00:45:00] in education, but I guess I’m not as hung up on that I am on finding ways from whatever.
[00:45:09] We can to improve our schooling system. I think it is the future of the country that we’re talking about. And if we wait till it’s become apparent that we’re in trouble, then it’s too late to correct in some sense. And so we have to begin now to try to put that to the.
[00:45:28] GR: No I’m with you. , it’s important to our country, , opponents of by version of school reform often say where education is nowhere in the constitution, but I have to remind both opponents and proponents that in 1787, at the same time members of our founding generation, where the Philadelphia initially arguing about the articles of Confederation.
[00:45:51] And then ditching that for constitution. There were another generation of founders in New York who passed the 1787 Northwest ordinance. And [00:46:00] in that document, is a following phrase, religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good. Good. And the happiness of mankind schools and the needs of education shall forever be encouraged.
[00:46:13] And so if we want to continue this great experiment schools and the means of education are part of it, the research that you’ve helped us as a nation think about matters. And I thank you so much again for joining us today.
[00:46:25] Eric Hanushek: Sure. You did it again. You did so much better than I did in expressing these views.
[00:46:31] that’s a wonderful way to end. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hanushek. [00:47:00] [00:48:00]
[00:48:36] GR: The tweet of the week comes from Bangor daily news and Maine it’s from may. Second advocates prepare for Supreme court. Turn mains religious school funding ban, and the Bangor daily news says, but money won’t start flowing to Catholic and evangelical schools without changes to other state laws. We’ve , discussed the main case here [00:49:00] on learning.
[00:49:01] And let me give a thank you for Bangor daily news for the tweet of the week.
[00:49:06] Cara: Yeah. Well, we’re all watching and we’ll, I’ll be working to get those other state laws where they need to be so about. So the kids could go to school where they need to, hello, Maine. Happy to come up there anytime. beautiful Gerard.
[00:49:21] We are going to be back together again next week. And we will be with Cass Sunstein. He is the Robert Walmsley university professor at Harvard law school and the author of the New York times bestselling book, the world, according to star wars, did you watch star wars. As
[00:49:36] a kid,
[00:49:37] GR: you’re going to laugh. I am one of the few people on the planet.
[00:49:41] Never seen one. Okay. One will be a
[00:49:45] star wars. All right. So that’s a deal breaker here. We’re okay. We can, get along. Here’s the
[00:49:54] GR: break? Yeah, I’ve never seen one movie.
[00:49:57] w.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] GR: No, no they’ve seen it and watched
[00:50:05] seen it
[00:50:09] GR: will be the first time.
[00:50:13] Cara: All right, until next week, my friend, your homework assignment is at the very least to watch empire strikes back, like, well, I’ll just throw one out there. You don’t even have to start at the beginning or the editor. However, those darn things go. , just pick one of them. Just meet.
[00:50:28] And may the force be with you? Gerard
[00:50:31] GR: Nanu, nanu
[00:50:34] that’s
[00:50:34] GR: mark. Take care.[00:51:00] [00:52:00]
Recent Episodes:
In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothing amendments prevent more than 100,000 urban families with children in chronically underperforming school districts from receiving scholarship vouchers that would allow them access to additional educational alternatives. These legal barriers, also known as Blaine amendments, restrict government funding from flowing to religiously affiliated organizations in nearly 40 states and are a violation of the first and fourteenth amendments.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, that could end these amendments. In 2018, Pioneer produced a 30-minute documentary on the impact of the Blaine amendments on families in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Michigan.
“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
Help families like the Costons in Michigan to end the bigoted Blaine amendments in their state that are blocking tuition scholarships and other types of financial support that would make it possible for families to send their children to high-quality schools that are best suited for their children.
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Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with California Policy Center president Will Swaim about how the state’s ambitious policies have combined to stick its residents with the highest cost of living and a tax regime that discourages investment, innovation, and its vital entrepreneurial class.
Related: New Study Highlights Economic Fallout from California’s 2012 Tax Hike
Guest
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. A journalist for nearly three decades, he began by covering international business in 1990. In 1995, the Village Voice and LA Weekly hired him to launch OC Weekly – the first and still only alternative weekly in Orange County. He was more recently editor of Watchdog.org, a national network of state-based investigative reporters, and vice president of journalism at Watchdog’s nonprofit parent, the Washington, D.C.-based Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Will graduated summa cum laude in journalism and with honors in theology from the University of Southern California. He earned an MA in history from UC Irvine where he was a California Regents Fellow. A seventh-generation Californian, Swaim has written extensively about California business, media, politics and religion; is the winner of several print journalism awards and a Southern California Broadcasters Golden Mike award for public affairs commentary. With CPC board member David Bahnsen, he hosts National Review’s weekly Radio Free California Podcast.
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Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. With more than 40 million residents and an economy larger than that of India California’s public policy choices offer conspicuous case studies to other states, particularly other progressive largely single party states such as Massachusetts. One particularly relevant example was in 2012 when Californian voted to increase income taxes on high earners in much the same way currently considered by Massachusetts in our upcoming ballot question in November, similar to the promises made by its advocates here, California legislators promised the additional revenue generated by the tax would be dedicated to improving education and infrastructure voters were assured that those subject to the higher tax were unlikely due to camp for other states owing to California’s environmental and cultural appeal. Now, as Massachusetts considers a similar fair share tax voters can look to the results of California’s experience as a window, it to its own possible future and consider whether new revenue equates to improved education in infrastructure, and whether such taxes do indeed cause high earners to leave for more competitive states, taking their investments, jobs, and tax revenue with them.
Joe Selvaggi:
My guest today is Will Swam, president of the California Policy Center, a think tank with a state admission to secure a prosperous future for all Californians, Mr. Swaim’s organization has examined the benefits of prop 30 revenue on the state’s education and infrastructure. He’s also documented the responses of the state’s high earners and business leaders to the new higher rate beyond the observation that California is for the first time in its history, losing population. Mr. Swaim’s think tank has taken measure of which firms are leaving and where they’re heading playfully, naming his list. The Book of Exoduses, Mr. Swaim will share with us his view on the current state of California and what he thinks we might learn from their example. When I return, I’ll be joined by California policy center, president Will Swaim. Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by the president of the California Policy Center and host of the Radio Free California podcast Will Swaim. Welcome to Hubwonk, Will.
Will Swaim:
Thank you. Hubwonk Will sounds like my new band name. I like it.
Joe Selvaggi:
<Laugh> Great. Well as I shared with you earlier I am an avid listener of the California Policy Center. I recommend it to our listeners and I think perhaps some of our listeners will wonder why we should have an interest in California. It’s 3,000 miles away. What does that have to do with those here in Massachusetts? But it really fascinates me for its sheer size it’s economy, the population but also not unlike Massachusetts, it’s a deep blue state. It has essentially a one party legislature and governor. So, in some ways it’s a mirror of us and perhaps something that we can use to look into our own future. If we make similar policy choices, if we embrace similar political intuitions, so let’s start there. But before we talk about specific policy issues that you have done in California, give our listeners a sense of how big California and its economy are.
Will Swaim:
Sure. Well thanks. First of all, for having me on, and I do think our states are kind of on parallel paths we’re way down the road in front of you or next adjacent. But yeah, it’s, it, California’s a big state. I was born here. I was raised here. It’s changed a lot, but the fact is right now, it’s about 40, 42 million people, depending on how you count it. That is easily the largest state by population. It’s also very big physically. You know, it takes me probably two hours to drive south and hit the Mexican border and about 12 hours, 10 or 12 hours to hit the Oregon border in the north. It is a big long state. We are the, I think by many calculations, the fifth largest economy in the world that puts us ahead of the great Britain ahead of India.
Will Swaim:
I mean, it is a big, big place where famous for of course tech, the Silicon valley Hollywood of course, you know, generates loads of loads of money. The Disney corporation is based here, there in the news these days. But it’s really a place that is governed primarily and where the politics have changed since the late seventies. And we, you know, if you don’t mind talking about that real quickly, I would just say when I, I, I, I’m going to speak about something I shouldn’t, but I’m 62. I was born in 1960 that used, I used to be the youngest guy in the room and now I’m quite clearly the oldest, but in that time in the seventies, when I was just a teenager our governor then Jerry Brown and his first iteration mandated or signed off on a bill that allowed collective bargaining of all government unions.
Will Swaim:
And that was like the starting gun and the transformation of California politics. California’s always been very kind of libertarian, I would say, you know, and it’s Democrats tended to be quite moderate. Republicans tended to be moderates very pragmatic place. It was free wheeling in the sixties, as you might guess. So by the time the seventies come in this vibrancy on the left and the right begins to disappear and they become very stultified and the Democrats race ahead in cash, the government unions today those are the unions that that represent workers in like teachers and firefighters and cops and the DM, the department of motor vehicles. I do you guys call it the DMV in Massachusetts? Yes. Yes we do. Yep. Okay. We do. But all these government workers from the state down to the local levels, school districts and cities and counties there’s about a about a million employees who are represented by these unions. And tho these unions raised collectively about 2 billion, every election cycle, 2 billion with a B, and there is nobody on any politic on any side of the political spectrum, raising that kind of cash. They outspend everybody. So what they do these government unions do, and you can pause me at any time if I’m motoring to no,
Joe Selvaggi:
No, this is good. I wasn’t anticipating this answer, but it’s great.
Will Swaim:
Yeah. So the thing, the thing to know about us is that, you know, with a, with these unions generating about 2 billion E every election cycle, they’re able to elect candidates who, regardless of their I’ll call it insanity in some cases on social issues or governance or whatever can get into office so long as they promise union leaders a single thing. And that is that the unions will remain in power. They will, will, they will retain their grip on political power and over, over their members and the discipline in the workplace. And so the money continues to just flow even, you know, despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus, which we can come back to later which basically allowed government workers to opt out of their unions. We still have just south of a million government workers in these unions. So California by population is 12% of the nation’s population.
Will Swaim:
We have 24% of the nation’s government union members. So anyway, that’s, that’s how the mechanism works. The creepy little smelly, little corruption, legal corruption at the heart of our system is this government union ownership of public officials who once in office returned the favor, the unions gave them of getting them into office. They returned the favor by rubber stamping, virtually anything the unions want. And in return, the, these public officials do things like we’re pushing for a vaccine authorization down to the age of 12. So that 12 year olds can opt to any kind of vaccination they want without parental authority, same goes for gender transitioning stuff. And then on the other side, it’s take on as much debt as you want at the local level get involved in creative finance. So you can continue to keep the cash moving to the public employees who then pay out to the unions who then elect the candidates who approve further taxes and bond debt. So that’s the, that’s the thumbnail sketch of this lovely and benighted place?
Joe Selvaggi:
Well, well, that answers a, a question I’ve had because our impression here from sunny Boston is that, you know, California, as you say, has a libertarian streak, it’s let your freak flag fly. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> UBU. That to me is what California’s all about. Maybe it’s a a romanticization of the, of the sixties. But I also will, will point out it’s it’s a relatively new state. Well, you know, I’m recording from a, about a block from the Boston common. It says you know, established 1630 and I think California wasn’t even a state until 1850. So you’ve got a lot of newness there and a lot of freshness, a lot, you know, a lot of people from other places you’ve helped me at least at some level understand why such a freedom loving population has somehow been captured by a, a deep blue I dunno what you would call ruling class if, if, if you will.
Joe Selvaggi:
So compare for me, I don’t know how often you make it over to our side of the country, but Boston where I am in San Francisco are often compared, and I’ve been to San Francisco. It’s beautiful like Boston and it’s easily walkable like Boston, but I think that’s about where the similarities lie. I, I, I’ve not been there very recently, certainly not since the pandemic describe for our listeners if you’ve been there recently how it’s been transformed either by politics or, or whatever you attribute to it’s
Will Swaim:
Transformation. San Francisco is a great example. And I have been to Massachusetts a number of times my son went to school out there on a hockey scholarship. And I did my, my master’s thesis on a church in Salem, Massachusetts. We could talk about that another time. So I spent some time in Massachusetts of Massachusetts historical society. And, and just, you know, quick historical note, I would say that our pro part of the problem here is the rootlessness of the place. We do not have a lot of, I would say that it’s conceivable that a Democrat or a liberal and Massachusetts is not the same as a liberal or a Democrat in California and San Francisco is a great example of that. You know, my, my own sense of Boston is, you know, from 3000 miles away, that liberals in Boston tend to be more moderate in their, in their temperament and in San Francisco, that’s simply not the case.
Will Swaim:
I’ll give you a couple of quick examples in San Francisco. You’ve got mayor London breed who came in preaching, fire and brimstone on social justice issues and COVID hits. And she’s caught not once, not twice but at least twice out partying at local clubs without a mask and dancing and drinking while she has supported the complete lockdown of the city. And the response of the residence is, well, you know, shame on you, but at least you’re on our side and you’re, you’re an African American woman, so we’ll catch you some slack. But it gets worse as you get into policy. London breed has been really interesting to watch as a progressive what’s the old saying about a conservative as a liberal mugged by reality. She begins to try to expand home home opportunity, home ownership, and apartment living for this, the city’s massive filthy streets, so they can get to homeless people off the streets and into housing, but she runs immediately into environmentalists than others who say that they don’t want more housing in San Francisco.
Will Swaim:
That’ll gentrify that will transform the character of the city. Well, I can tell you as a guy who walks the streets of San Francisco, occasionally some of them are quite lovely, these streets but a lot of them really are just massive homeless encampments where open air drug use is pretty much the, the norm. And the result of that is that a lot of San Francisco and San FCAN unable to afford housing have fled east into outlying counties or have just left the state entirely. The city of San Francisco has lost population in the last three years. And it was it preceded COVID because the cost of housing is so expensive. So London breed tries to expand housing options is shut down by social justice, activists who say, it’s not good enough, or by environmentalists who say they don’t wanna change the character of the city.
Will Swaim:
And she begins to understand why you got people living on the streets. There’s no first rung of the ladder anymore. So on, on that issue, there was a radical change. Then the city elects, a guy named Che boudin, who is the son of the, of two weather underground activists who are imprison for the execution of a couple of Brinks armored car delivery guys in the sixties. And this poor guy is, you know, handed off to relatives he’s raised by these other friends rather. And he goes on to become a wildly progressive prosecutor in the county of San Francisco. And in San Francisco, you suddenly get this massive spike in crime. I think this is probably national news. I, I would imagine a lot of your listeners have already seen some of the smash and grab robberies that go on there notorious.
Will Swaim:
They didn’t happen only in San Francisco. They happened in LA as well, which has a similarly inclined prosecutor. They happen in Chicago. They may have happened in your neighborhood. But these are groups of people who will walk in under California’s new misdemeanor classification of crime. And they will simply calculate everything they can steal under $1,000, 950 bucks. Really that’s the magic number. If it’s under nine 50, the prosecutors in San Francisco will not charge you. So there’s no reason to report you. So people walk into Walgreens or CVS pharmacies, and they steal $950 worth of things. They smash in the windows of cars and steal everything, get their hands on. They specifically target rental cars, knowing that those are tourists who might leave cameras or laptops or whatever in the backs of their cars. So crime has spiked in San Francisco. Homelessness has spiked in San Francisco. It is one of the filthiest pro environmental cities you’ll ever visit. I think a I think it was a UN declared a couple of years ago that San Francisco was dirtier than Calcutta, which is, you know, really saying something I think. So it, it is a remarkable real world laboratory for very progressive policies on crime and, and punishment on the environment on housing. And I’m, I think that Bostonians would probably recoil in horror at the idea that they are anything like that.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. So I will report from Boston that we are clean, we’re safe. We’ve got our problems but we’ve not gone that path. Thank goodness. At least not yet. I’m I’m puzzled though. Again, you you’ve been really great at helping me understand how we, we got where we are. You’ve got an economy larger more than $3 trillion, right? That’s a lot of money. But also you’ve got among the highest poverty rates in the entire country. I, I, I’m having a difficult time understanding why all that money with the as assume assumption that progressives are sympathetic, particularly sympathetic to the needs of the poor. Why would a progressive state with $3 trillion economy have any poor let alone leading the nation in the, in the poverty rate?
Will Swaim:
That’s such a great question in part it’s, because a lot of the ostensible wealth of California is tied to firms which have become leaders in supporting really progressive initiatives that backfire and have the effect of actually making it more difficult to live here. So just to give you one example of how the cost of living gets really expensive in California, I talked a little bit about housing. We’ve got environmentalists and social justice, activists who want housing to look a certain way and tie up every new housing project so that when the government goes out to try to build subsidized housing for the poor, it ends up costing more than the market rate of constructing a new home. So just to give you an example, it may cost $500,000 to build a home in most of California. But if you, if the government builds it, it costs about $800,000 a door, as they say in that business.
Will Swaim:
The reason is a bunch of regulations, competing claims, lawsuits, et cetera, that Jack up the cost of housing in many of these major cities. So the, so the cost of housing is so expensive in California. The supply is so limited that people cannot afford to move up. You know, once you get into a home, you just kind of tend to stay there in California because there’s no opportunity to move up because there’s no new housing because the only if, if you wanna move up there are incredible regulations around the possibility you’re gonna move up in a more expensive home. Cause there just aren’t a lot of those being built. So people don’t move up. That means there’s no bottom rung of the ladder for people to move into. So they end up on the street. The O another good example is that because of environmental regulations, we’ve decided that we’re going to eliminate oil or any kind of fossil fuels, so that the price of our electricity, our gasoline is the highest in the nation.
Will Swaim:
We play on average, almost a dollar and a half more than everybody else in the country for gasoline. Now the progressives come out and say, well, this is just big oil. And what is this mystery surcharge they’re making on all of us Californians? There’s no mystery. The fact is, is that dollar 50 difference is state taxes and regulations that are designed to price oil out of California. We also sit on one of the largest natural gas deposits on the globe, but we’re not really allowed to, to tap that anymore because it’s dirty and it will cause global warming. So in order to signal our virtue on the climate change issue, we have taxed gasoline electricity, any kind of oil based carbon based sort of fuel. We’ve taxed that at such a high rate that the rich can afford it, but the middle class will struggle with it.
Will Swaim:
I just filled up my truck the other day. It would usually cost me about $80. It cost me 130. And that’s, you know, partly because of recent supply chain things, but those supply chain things in turn footnote are built around government regulation as well. I could talk about ports and highways and, and warehousing and why that’s a problem. But the bottom line is if you’re poor and trying to pay, what’s now about $6 per gallon for gasoline and in many places more than that that hurts you a lot. It makes the costs of getting ahead, starting a business, just getting to your job so that you can work to pay other taxes. It makes it very, very pricey indeed. So VIR, sorry, go ahead.
Joe Selvaggi:
No, no, I was gonna say the I have read that, of course, California has the highest cost of living second, only to Hawaii. So we’re not quite there yet, but you can see how perhaps well intentioned environmental or you know, whatever progressive causes there may be. The end result is a, a crushing burden on the people who can least afford to, to to spend money. You also, you, you mentioned your truck. I have friends who probably drive around in Tesla and say you know, high gas prices don’t affect me, but I say, well, how does everything you buy every tomato in the store? And every, every item on the shelf, how does that get to that store? And it’s either gas or diesel, which is particularly expensive. It, it all flows into perhaps well meaning, but ill, ill targeted taxes.
Will Swaim:
Well, and, and you raised the issue of Tesla’s. And of course, Tesla is built in California by Elon Musks company and Elon Musk no longer lives here. He now lives in Texas, right? Why? Because he was constantly having to go to battle with state regulators over his ability to build a car, build rocket ships or whatever. And the big joke out here is that those of us who know how electricity is generated in California, where we get it from, we don’t get it from, I don’t know, squirrels running in a little hamster wheel. We get it from oil. We get it from natural gas. That’s how we generate electricity. Our governor and our state lawmakers who are on the left, generally love to talk about clean energy. There is no clean energy. The batteries themselves that go into Tesla engines are MI are, are built in part out of lithium.
Will Swaim:
Lithium has to be mined. Now they’re talking about clean energy being mined here in California, cause we have major lithium deposits, but Teslas themselves are really interesting example of a way in which the state subsidized the purchase of Tesla automobiles with the goal of making them affordable nationwide, because California has to be a leader in all things. That’s our arrogance is that we’re telling Bostonians what to drive and we’re signaling to Midwesterners. They too ought to drive electric vehicles because they’re quote unquote clean, but they’re simply not. There is not the electric generating capacity in the United States, certainly not in California that can help harness the energy. We need to power all these Teslas aside from natural gas. So we talk constantly about clean air out here and how we’re a climate leader in, in the world, but it is truly smoke and mirrors. And I, I use smoke advisedly because all these Teslas are being fueled by coal plants in Arizona or Texas. They’re being fueled by hydro from the Northwest in Canada. We are not producing energy in California anymore. We are now a net consumer of electricity from other states.
Joe Selvaggi:
Hey, you, you make a good case. I think a future episode, we’re going to cover the fact that an electric car needs to be driven. It’s Volvo who made these calculations anywhere between 60 and 90,000 miles before it’s equal to its internal combustion counterpart, largely because of the, the greenhouse gases that are produced making the battery for the car. So drive the Tesla, but drive it a long way before you get to break even point which is an interesting thing. And of course, again, the, the, the electricity that goes into the Tesla has to be produced somehow in, in general, as you say, coal and gas are how it’s produced. So you’re just really moving the the externality from the, the, the tailpipe to the, to the coal fired plant. So let’s, let’s move away from how these policies affect the poor.
Joe Selvaggi:
I also wanna talk and I don’t wanna bury the lead here. I really wanna talk about how California has made life very difficult for, as you mentioned, the, the Elon Musks of the world, the innovators, the people that are keeping America growing wealthy employed you not long ago passed something called prop 30. I mentioned it because it was a, a tax on the top earners bringing the marginal tax rate on the top earners to 13.3% that would surprise some of us here, Massachusetts. We’re considering similar ideas in our, we have a ballot question coming up where we tack on an additional 4% above our state’s 5% income tax and 80% premium on high earners. Let’s talk about again, if you are the future and you share our progressive intuition, what has been the effect of this kind of tax on the wealthier residents of the state?
Will Swaim:
Well, the effect is probably internationally known at this point. It’s an Exodus. In fact I kind of, it’s one of those things where some high school friend of yours says he invented a word that’s now in wide use. I swear to you, I did not hear the word Exodus. I was a theologian by training. I was gonna be a priest long story, ended up in a punk band playing you know, and, and in the communist party, but in any case the, the, we, we call a, our, our database of these companies that are leaving the book of Exodus. And and what we find is that a lot of companies, a lot of entrepreneurs simply decide that they are not going to be able to compete nationally, globally, even in California, if they are tied up by the combination of tax tax regulations and just business regulations, environmental regulations.
Will Swaim:
And so they leave this has of course downstream effects as those people leave, the number of jobs begins to shrink you know, jobs that might be actually quite good, good paying jobs. So, you know, I’ve, I’ve said before that there’s almost nothing more heartbreaking in my life than the fact that I’ve had to help. Three, three of my oldest kids. I’ve got four, my three oldest have packed up and moved out of the state to go find cheaper places to live, where there’s more opportunity. So these are kids who are college educated might have expected to go right into work right here in our own neighborhood, but could not because the job market is shrinking and they found they could make more pay less and live elsewhere. And that hacks right at the roots of middle class community, as much as it does, you know, poor communities, because you’re, my social security is really my kids.
Will Swaim:
Like I am like a an 18th century peasant farmer somewhere, right. I, I had as many kids as I could, so they could support me in my old age. And instead they’re off trying to find their futures elsewhere, and I will make an historical moment note here to say that you know, when I was doing my research on new England and the revolution, one of the things I noticed about Massachusetts was that a great source of political destabilization in new England, even in the colonial era was villages growing almost like Maslow’s model here. Now it wasn’t Maslow. I’m blanking, sorry. The economist will come to me. But the idea that you move out to your most marginal lands, eventually population grows in a little village, and then you move out a little farther and a little farther and soon you’re in forests and rocks.
Will Swaim:
And then your kids have to move out to some other place where the land is more fertile, but, and you break down family security, if you will, in that sense, that kind of family, social security network, well, the same thing’s happening here in California, just in modern terms, our kids cannot afford to buy a home here. And most of us are trying just desperately to keep up with our taxes, which as you point out are among the highest in the nation and getting higher you point out that we’re now in the 13%, 13.3% range, there’s a new bill floating through that would Jack that up another 3% on top income earners. The ex the, and the language that that is being used is it’s about fairness. It’s about making sure the rich pay, their fair share 150,000 taxpayers in California, 150,000 taxpayers pay more than 50% of all income tax revenue in California, 150,000 people, that’s it out of 42 million or so people. So we are beginning to chisel away at that group who will either decide to suck it up and stay here. Cause the weather is great and they generally like, I don’t know, Yosemite or the beach or whatever. But for a lot of the rest of us, there’s, there’s a tipping point.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yeah, indeed. We band bandy around the idea of a fair share, no one has ever given me a sense of where that natural limit of fair share ends. It’s always a directional thing. It’s a, a vector going into infinity. Our listeners have heard of, of course the high profile, you mentioned Elon musky packed it in and said, you know, look, I’m, I’m not staying around. Your book of Exodus I think is wonderful. It’s a wonderful title. And it’s it’s reference to the, the Bible and and escape from enslavement. Is it entirely appropriate? Can you name some of the other, let’s say household names that have left California and, and where are they going? Are they just sort of randomly moving somewhere else in the, in the state in the country or do you see a pattern of where they’re moving from and going to,
Will Swaim:
Yeah, there’s a pattern and I would love to have on the, on your show at some point, the guy who compiles the book of Exodus for us, a guy named Brandon Roff. And what Brandon would tell you is that by and large companies seem to prefer to move to really three states. It’s Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Interestingly, a lot of, a lot of Californians find living in Nashville, just sort of ideal or in thereabouts. Texas is the big winner. Texas has signs up here that are, they used to have signs up here. I was talking to a friend of mine at Texas public policy foundation. He says they don’t even need to put up signs anymore. Everybody in California knows how to get to Texas now. But you know, some of the higher, it it’s a lot of the tech firms get the, the big names like talent here.
Will Swaim:
The is a big investment tech tech investment firm. They moved to Denver. A lot of the apparel companies followed suit. I wanna say it was north face that also moved to Denver. So, you know, the, the, and, and then MEA just moved MEA, which is apparent company of Facebook just announced. They’re moving to Austin, they’re building, you know, some massive skyscraper there. You might say that our loss is Austin’s gain, but a lot of these companies are bringing their politics with them. Musk will bring his peculiar idiosyncratic blend of kind of libertarian and progressive policies, I think to Texas more libertarian than, than progressive in the conventional sense. But it’s really a lot of the smaller firms that nobody has ever heard of that have perhaps, you know, 50, a hundred, 200 employees, and they’re really kind of poised for takeoff.
Will Swaim:
You can see the engines firing up. The companies are getting big and they’re starting to look around at the price of expansion here in California, and they either leave their headquarters here, but open up new operations elsewhere, or they just move everything out. I had a couple of examples that I, I haven’t even been able to share with our radio free California listeners here for you. The, this is just a, a recent sampling. Here’s a company that I had not heard of Kraken. It’s a crypto company, cryptocurrency company based in San Francisco. They say they’re moving out. Because San Francisco is no longer safe. They are moving to Texas. They, they took a crack at, I mentioned this guy cha boudin the district attorney in San Francisco. They mentioned him by name on their way out the door saying, look, it’s not safe for our employees here anymore.
Will Swaim:
So Cracken, they’re out a small beverage company here in I’m in orange county, which is halfway between LA and San Diego. It’s more famous perhaps as the home of Disneyland. The other Disney world and this beverage company in Santa Ana with just 50 people, they do flavorings for major beverage producers, and they anticipate huge growth. I was talking to somebody over there and they said like, look, man, we just started looking around at the cost of adding additional employees and where that would put us under certain metrics for healthcare in California for housing, the ability to attract high end technicians to work in this company that does flavors. And they decided not, not possible here in California, they just announced they’re moving to Austin. One of my favorite stories is a Vietnamese car maker that wants to build electric cars naturally settled in LA county thinking, well, you know, California, that’s Tesla, that’s electric cars. They built their headquarters here that looked around and decided they were moving their factory to North Carolina. So they may keep their headquarters here, but they’re moving to North Carolina where they believe they will hire 7,500 people to work in a, an electric car factory.
Joe Selvaggi:
So will I just these are great examples. I, I wanna quote one of my favorite Californians your former governor, Ronald Reagan. He once said that had the pilgrims, I dunno if this is an apocryphal story, an actual quotation, he said, if had the pilgrims landed in California, the east coast would still be a wilderness. In other words, it’s so beautiful that why would anyone leave to go elsewhere? Certainly to the cold new England winters? I, I don’t think they would. Why are these firms leaping beautiful California for places like nothing against Texas and Nevada, but I can’t imagine they offer the same sheer natural beauty that California is. What is, what is the common pattern among those states where they, where they seem to be going
Will Swaim:
Well, this is the, the terrible irony for those companies that are progressive. And let’s just take a look. And I mean, in their politics, take a look at the meta slash Facebook and mark Zuckerberg. They’re moving ironically to go exploit the kinds of opportunities in Texas, the low regulation, the low tax environment, relatively low tax environment, the lower cost, the living they’re moving for all of the things that they themselves have helped destroy here in California, right? They, mark Zuckerberg is a notoriously famous for supporting virtually every tax hike in California. So long as it’s associated with the claim that it will help the poor. When, of course you and I both have already discussed, it does not taxes, you know, the rich don’t pay taxes. They, if they own a business, they simply pass it on to their consumers, right? So we all end up paying more for that. So they’re moving to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada Colorado, even, which is a blue state, but they, you know, primarily to Texas and they’re moving there because they can achieve real competitive advantages in a lower tax better rate. And I would argue a better, generally more business friendly kind of environment.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now I can hear the tension in our say more progressive listeners saying, well, listen, you know, as they like to say, taxes are the price we pay for you know, civilization, right? For better society. So again, we’ve got 42 million people a 3 trillion economy and the highest taxes tax rate in the country. That’s a lot of money slash slash around. And as you say, it’s largely attributable to the power of public unions. Those are the teachers and the, and the policemen and all those people who help keep us educated and safe. So therefore our listeners who are more progressive must be eager to hear if that money is actually having the intended effect. In other words, all the money going to schools and policemen or whatever. Do you have better schools in California? Again, we, that’s important to us here, Massachusetts. We’re all about education here. How do, how is that faring in California?
Will Swaim:
<Laugh> I feel like you’ve just set the softball on thet for me. <Laugh> California’s public education, K12 results are, gosh, the only word that pops into my brain immediately executable terrible Fe equally inclined. We have in our state about 90% of our kids cannot do math at grade level in K12. About 70% cannot do perform English at grade level. Put that another way. 30% of our kids are performing at grade level, 30% K12 kids performing at grade level in English and 10% on math. Parents typically have begun to flee neighborhoods where the schools are no really bad for places where those schools are less bad. But there’s simply not a lot of difference really overall. I mean, you can move into a very rich, rich neighborhood where the schools, because of perhaps family foreign formation and because of family conventions around education, I come from a long line of college educated people.
Will Swaim:
There was never any question. I was gonna go to college, same for my kids. But that doesn’t always exist in poor communities. So when I hear my friends on the left and most of my friends are on the left. If I didn’t have left wing friends in California, have no friends at all that’s not entirely true. But when I hear them say like, gosh, you know, we just have to do more for the kids. I would say, well, look, our schools used to be our public schools used to be among the best in the nation, right there with Massachusetts right there with Iowa. And now they’re among the worst. We are down near Mississippi levels and no offense to my friends in Mississippi. I don’t have any friends in Mississippi. That’s not this. I just haven’t met them yet, but our schools are now among the worst in the nation.
Will Swaim:
A recent report came out from I believe it was a world health organization. I could be wrong about that. It was a, a global report that showed that California is the least literate state in the nation. That is partly owing the fact that we have a school system that isn’t worthy of the name. It’s neither systematic except in producing basically almost producing illiteracy. So the money that goes into these schools is trapped by the government unions, which do not insist on merit pay for teachers, which do not allow for competition. There’s, there’s no choice in California in education. If you’re trapped in a lousy school, in a poor community, you get to go there because that’s the school that’s indicated by your address, you zip code, you are trapped in that school and trying to transfer to a better, better school in a different community is almost impossible.
Will Swaim:
In fact, it’s illegal under most circumstances. So trying to help the poor by pouring more cash into this system is not only ineffective. We already spend more per student in California to educate our kids than any other state in the country. We spend north of $21,000 per year on kids. And that doesn’t even include all the full costs of the bond debt that is required to build the schools and maintain them for these kids. So it’s not a spending problem. It’s an execution problem. And the execution of good education is been in the hands for 40 years. As I mentioned since the late seventies and the teacher’s union and the teacher’s union has as any monopoly, does it has no incentive to produce better education. It gets paid the same. Our teachers do, whether the results are good or bad, there’s no merit pay.
Will Swaim:
There’s no a sense that if we have a financial downturn that we really ought to start grading the teachers, because we’re told by the union, you can’t grade teachers, that’s just insane. Say the people who grade our kids every single day. So you, you mentioned that, you know our, our progressive and liberal friends might say, well, you know, it’s just the cost of, of living in a great state. We, we joke out here, we only pay for the weather. That’s the only thing we’re really paying for because otherwise our public services are not that fantastic. And in fact, they’re, they’re kind of, legendarily bad back in the day when I was traveling in Massachusetts a lot more. I remember you guys had this big controversial, I think it was called the big dig. It was a big project in Boston.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes. It actually turned out quite well. But for a while, I was at 10 years of pain, but I think, but we’re proud of it now that it’s done.
Will Swaim:
That’s my point. You guys suffered through just 10 years of mediocrity and cost overruns and inefficiencies, and then you got a great thing. We just walk away. We just have given up, we haven’t built a reservoir in this state in 40 years and our population is almost doubled in that time. So now we have a drought and taxes that ought go to building new water infrastructure are simply sort of redeployed into other areas that are really about environment and conserving water usage. We just found out the other day that though our water costs are soaring. We’re going to get 5% of the water that we got last year, 5%. My wife and I are now talking about showering out front in underpants so that we can water our modest drought resistant garden and clean ourselves which is great in the spring and summer, but not so good in the winter. So, you know, we, we simply pay a lot of taxes and then we watch this money disappear and it disappears into places like our unfunded retirement programs for the underfunded retirement programs for government workers. We owe in this state all told about 1.7 trillion on borrowed money that has not gone into capital projects. It’s gone into operating expenses and trying to pay forward things like post you know post-employment retirement healthcare and pensions for public employees.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. Well I think yours is an example of how well, in our state we’re, we’re considering ballot measure where we might add another 4% to our, our state’s income tax. And we’ve been promised that money will go to teaching and infrastructure into education. But as you say, it’s a promise to take the money. It may even be a promise to spend the money. It’s no promise that we’re gonna get results. And that’s even a, I, I I’ll, I’ll brag that our our tax revenue here Massachusetts 2 billion over what was estimated, and we have a 4.2 billion surplus. So despite our our prosperity and sloshing in money still some will advocate for yet more taxes. Now we’re running out of time. So I wanna share with our listeners less, they think that you’re a diehard desk pounding, conservative from, from square one.
Joe Selvaggi:
I, I know only through your podcast that you started life as a man of the left. Can you share with us at least a good story of where was that moment and, and perhaps some of our listeners might might be in this exact moment in their, their near future where you say, look, I, I care about other people. I think that should make me a progressive what, what sort of opened your eyes as a man who cares about his fellow American, his fellow Californian who wants to do right by the world? What, what sort of puts you on a different track?
Will Swaim:
The short story is this. I, I became the I, I, I was in, I was on the left because I thought that that was the logical place to go if you wanted to help the poor. And I actually did literally join the communist party USA for a couple of years, found their meetings and terminable and highly theoretical and abstract, and went to work for the Catholic worker for a while. And when I say went to work, I volunteered for the Catholic worker a famously Catholic and an anarchist organization, and started to, you know, I became, then I moved right word, you might say, into the democratic party, but the democratic party as I was, you know, in my early twenties was still a much more moderate kind of party out here, but I got into journalism full time and became an investigative reporter than an editor and a publisher of a paper called O C weekly. That’s a was a sister paper of the LA weekly, the village voice in New York. Very much like your Boston, Phoenix. I don’t know. What’s become of that, how to,
Joe Selvaggi:
But yeah, we we, we actually used the globe if we wanted any progressive perspective instead,
Will Swaim:
Ah, there you go. Yeah, that’s, what’s happened out here as well. So I was the editor of this famously left wing paper, where we had a column called Commie Girl and Ask a Mexican, and that sort of thing. It was a, it was a funny and Ry and hard-hitting investigative newspaper. And in the course of looking at the investigative reporting, it became clear to me that the problem was not a problem of conservatism and business people and, you know, corporate bailouts and that sort of thing. The real problem was that government is simply like trying to use a sledge hammer to perform brain surgery. It’s just really an insufficient tool. And I started to look more skeptically at the kinds of things that you and I have already talked about here that simply pouring more money into a broken education system would make it better.
Will Swaim:
It did not, it was actually not educating the, the poor who I had, you know, really being born and, and reared as a good Catholic boy. I I’m, I’m wired to think this way that, you know, whatever my politics are, they had better be aligned with helping the least among us. And I watched as all these programs that I had, I had really back supported full-heartedly, you know, let’s tax the rich and give the money to the poor, had to filter itself through government. And if the government was run by Republicans or Democrats, it didn’t always seem to matter a lot back then. Now it matters quite a di quite a big, a great deal. But I watched, as my Republican run, orange county board of supervisors landed us in the largest at that time, municipal bankruptcy in America, it was 1994, the county of orange went bankrupt.
Will Swaim:
It was, as I say, the largest in history at that point. And certainly on the left, there is just this constant grab for more money. And if, if that amount of money doesn’t work for you, you simply ask for more, but the poor are not only always among us. They’re growing in number. We have more homeless, more poor as a percentage of our population than at any time. And our tax rates are higher than ever in California. So it was looking at all these stories of how unions really operated. And again, this is in a left wing newspaper. I’m watching, I remember famously I’ll just tell you this very quick story watched famously how friends of mine in the government union movement out here in orange county began to press against some conservatives who I ought to have hated because I was still sort of vestigial left wing.
Will Swaim:
And I watched how these union leaders just really severely misrepresented what was going on in the city, what its finances were. They claimed that, you know, we ought for example, to abandon asphalting the alleyways in the poor part of towns because, you know, that was unnecessary. We didn’t need this place to be the Taj ma hall. What we really needed was to pay our public employees more and, and it started to just fall apart for me at that point. I mean, philosophically, I was beginning to come to grips with the idea that human flourishing really requires a great deal of Liberty. There is no such thing as coerced virtue. You know, if you hold a gun to my head and make me do something virtuous, I haven’t really done a virtuous thing. I’ve tried to keep myself alive. So coercion is the enemy.
Will Swaim:
Liberty is what made America and California. Great. I am not suggesting there’s no room for regulation. I’m not an anarchist. I don’t think Somali is the model we want of war Lords and battling rich people. I do think that California is now like Gulliver and the IANS, you know, we are just tied down by myriad bonds of regulation on how you can start a business and what you need to run that business in California. So that’s, that’s roughly the story about how I was writing Damas to Damascus on a, on a donkey and got knocked on my keister and then heard the voice of God.
Joe Selvaggi:
<Laugh> wonderful. We love those roads to Damascus moment. You know, we’ve all been there. And you’re in good company. I think some of the greatest minds on the, on the right, like come to mind like Thomas, so or Thomas Fri Milton Friedman, or even Ron Reagan was a a committed Democrat a man of the left and had that, that moment where he said, wait a minute if I wanna help the poor this may not be the right path. So you’re, you’re in good company. So before we let you go, we’re at the end of our time where can our listeners find your excellent podcast and the California policy center and its good work?
Will Swaim:
Well, thanks for asking. California policy center is really simple California policy center.org and the podcast is on the national review site. So if you just go to national review magazine, you look up podcasts, it’s Radio Free California. And I do that show every week with my friend, one of our board members here an economist named Dave Bonson, who is a bicoastal guy, but born and raised out here in Southern California with an office in Newport beach and one in New York. So every week Radio Free California.
Joe Selvaggi:
Wonderful. I, I enjoy listening even though I have no connection whatsoever an amusing banter. And also I think insofar as you’ll let me make this comparison. I see California’s perhaps the the the channel Dickens here the ghost of, of Christmas yet to come the foreboding of what we might be if we don’t take the right path. I don’t know if you’ll, you’ll allow this reference to you know, Christmas Carol here. But that’s how I see
Will Swaim:
It. One of our great books and it, and, and it’s either that, or it’s a tale of two cities, right? The best of times, and the worst of times, this is a place that is practicing on us to produce a new and more perfect utopia. And it’s an utter catastrophe.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. All right, well, we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. Well keep up the good work and then thank you for joining Hubwonk.
Will Swaim:
Thanks, Joe.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoy today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcast, catcher, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find hub won, it would be great. If you would offer a five star rating or a favorable review, if you have ideas for me or suggestions comments about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
Recent Episodes
This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Artur Sousa, immigrant from Brazil and founder and CEO of Adopets, an online platform that simplifies the work done by shelters and improves the pet adoption experience. Adopets has over 40,000 registered users and maintains more than 300,000 adoption listings. In this week’s JobMakers, Artur describes how opportunity, capitalism, circumstance and a rescue pup successfully aligned to fuel his social entrepreneurship success; though he is keenly aware that not every immigrant shares in the American Dream.
Guest:
Artur Sousa is the Founder and CEO of Adopets, a Techstars-backed company that is transforming the operational efficiency of animal shelters around the world. He has 16+ experience in corporate strategy, technology, and start-ups; has lived in Japan, Sweden, Brazil, and the United States; and is a recipient of a United Nations MDG Award and a member of the Brazil-based Royal Academy of Arts & Music. He earned a Master’s degree from Hult International Business School.
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammed and welcome to Jobmakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
What is social entrepreneurship? According to the us chamber of commerce, social on entrepreneurship is the process by which individuals, startups and entrepreneurs develop and fund solutions that directly address social issues. A social entrepreneur, therefore is a person who explores business opportunities that have a positive impact on their community in society or the world. For Artur Sousa, immigrant from Brazil and founder and CEO of Adopets, a pet adoption platform that simplifies the work done by shelters and improves the pet adoption experience, fixing problems and doing good in the world is his business model. Unnecessary bureaucracy in the adoption process led him to create a platform that today has more than 40,000 registered users and maintains more than 300,000 adoption listings. Artur is a problem solver and his series of businesses and technologies have proven that, but he’s keenly aware of the factors that enabled him to succeed in the United States that not every immigrant experiences, the American dream, as he says, is not always fair to everyone. He shares with us how opportunity capitalism circumstance and a rescue pet successfully aligned in this week’s Jobmakers. Artur Sousa, founder and CEO of Adopets, welcome to Jobmakers. How are you?
Artur Sousa:
I am good. Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed:
So tell me a little bit about your business. It’s very unique, right?
Artur Sousa:
I would like to think so. We chose to begin our journey within the pet adoption space. Basically we started because my wife and I decided to adopt a pet. We saw quite a few bureaucratic pieces of the adoption process that were very manual, very paper heavy at that point and we thought that we could be of help. I’ve always been involved in technology in one way or another and thought that we could maybe help out an organization that we have been working with. And once we did it, it became a little bit more of a thing and was like, well, maybe it can actually be a system that can serve in general, not just a little side project for our organization that we were supporting. And then with that in mind, Adopets was born at that point.
Artur Sousa:
Our focus really is on optimizing the adoption experience. The way we present ourselves is as a shelter animal shelter that is, but shelter efficiency platform. So we are focusing really on the flow of their visitors all the way through meeting animals, through adopting animals, submitting their interests to those animals, signing contracts, paying adoption fees and so on and so on. So it really covers the entire spectrum of the adoption process, whether it is a actual animal shelter with the animals right there in a building or a foster based rescue with animals spread around volunteer houses and so on.
Denzil Mohammed:
I see. So you’ve encountered a problem and you decided to fix it. And out of that, a perfectly beautiful business was born. And this is not your first business either, is it?
Artur Sousa:
No, it isn’t, I’ve been a little obsessed with it, fixing things. <Laugh> tell me more about that. I think if I look back and that’s not an observation that I do often, but when I look back to our business journey it has always been in that same context, what problem that annoyed me and that I thought maybe I could fix and that I had a specific type of passion for the outcome. So if I look at the very, very first one when we were working, I was working with a nonprofit, a very large, no profit in Brazil and the way we were project managing the projects that was very inefficient. We had a really large staff, mostly volunteers to run the operations for the organization. So I decided to optimize that through a series of process-driven platforms.
Artur Sousa:
And that very first project created a whole other universe in my mind and journey and career then because we just reduced their general staffing, 95%, but we doubled the outcome from an impact wise just by being professionally organized. And that kind of triggered me each of the social impact area of things. And I was just wanting to what if we could do something, but we have some money in return. And that makes us do even more. And then it just makes this scalable model. I didn’t know what that was, social entrepreneurship at the time, mind you, but it ended up being what, let me led me to actually, to the us to get a master’s in social entrepreneurship much later than that, but eventually was a cause.
Denzil Mohammed:
So take us back to you’ve mentioned Brazil and that’s where you were born. Paint us a picture. What was life like back in Brazil when you were growing up
Artur Sousa:
Back home? I never really spent more than a year in one place. Right? So from a financial standpoint was always moving to a new place. I had never, until college, I had never spent more than a year in the same school cuz we would move and go to a new place cuz you know mom couldn’t always afford rent and then we had to go into a new place there. You know, there are many struggles in the world and I don’t don’t think mine was the worst there could be. But it had an impact. It had an impact in which, you know, I’ve actually gotten used to never settling and always keep moving and from place to place in, in Brazil, just college, I spent in five different universities across five different states, just transferring when I would get bored and go to a new place. Cause it really gets you used to that movement. You, you get, you know, as a defense mechanism that, oh, got I’m done with this place. I gotta go to a new one. So anyway, I think at Brazil was, it’s still the place that I need to go to recharge my soul when I feel empty.
Denzil Mohammed:
Wow. That’s, that’s quite incredible. And the idea of, of constantly moving, obviously move to the US, which was a huge move. You said you did that to further your education and career. What was the experience like when you first moved here?
Artur Sousa:
It was weird at first I was very excited, but it was well, I, I didn’t have, especially with the, with the foreign exchange coming from Brazil I didn’t have all the funds that would require for comfortable stay during a masters and it was a full-time master’s degree. So it wasn’t like I could be working. I wouldn’t be able to work either away from a visa standpoint if I could. So I came with my suitcase and stayed the, for my master’s at first was really weird to not fully understand the language. I had gotten enough that I had the, the grades for qualification from an English standpoint, but because I studied very, very hard, not because I actually had mastered the language. So at first a lot of the things in classes, I would understand a lot more by context because I had been working for a long time, not by the, the textbookor, or the teachers, but that lasted for a couple months. I had made a hard decision to not actually be with any Brazilian friends while in the US. So would only hang out with English to speaking once, cuz would force me to be more comfortable with the language and that really over time.
Denzil Mohammed:
I can’t imagine going to do a master’s degree without having mastered the language that you were going to do that degree in. I mean, that must have been a really, you said weird, but it must been a struggle those first few months. What motivates you most of all? Is it fixing problems and making, you know, just things easier for people
Artur Sousa:
That is one of the things I think fixing problems is just on, on my personality to point that I’m, I keep doing new things over time. Cuz once my business gets a point of stability and more, you know, bureaucratic arrangement from a corporate standpoint, it’s not for me anymore. So I like to be in the mass and fixing things. That’s one big part of my personality, but the, the other part is one Bo just a funny story. Actually, I had a boss in, in Boston that I loved and he, he was very, very good to me. And his still a good friend and he, one day he told him like that I was fundamentally unmanageable. I really like, and I took that as a, as a one of my biggest compliments in life. Mind you because I, I don’t, I, I like thing, I like things that I can fix. I like going and experimenting and, and getting it wrong and breaking things and I’m fixing them again and seeing the best path for it. And in that sense, I don’t always, or have never, quite frankly, fit to a box in which I would just do the predetermined things that have been assigned to me. I always go beyond and, and entrepreneurship is the best place for that.
Denzil Mohammed:
So as a social entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur, talk us through the start of your current business, you mentioned that it was a bureaucratic problem that you wanted to so all, but get us into the, sort of the nuts and bolts of the Genesis of the business,
Artur Sousa:
The application process to adopt a pet varies from organization to organization, from state to state city to city. It all varies quite a bit. But it’s overall a, a time consuming paper process that relies on a lot of really loving, caring animal people that are behind those organizations, usually underpaid if paid at all helping animals that don’t always have the time to do the process in a, in the most efficient way. When you’re looking at a, an adoption individual, we might be talking about, you know, few hours off time, if you put together what the staff’s time and the adopter’s time to get the adoption concluded doesn’t sound out that much. But when you go to other organizations who have a partner, for instance, in New Zealand, that process is 40,000 adoptions a year. So if you have a couple of hours that you’re taking away from 40,000, you’re thinking 80,000 hours away just by using a system that simplifies it and takes the process to a more automatic approach of triggering communications and so on.
Artur Sousa:
You’re basically saving so much time that gives you the ability to save more animals. So that was the behind the efficiency there. What we had to focus on was like, all right, so how do we make this? From a monetization standpoint and from a scalability standpoint, a practical answer. And it took a while for the majority of the time that I was built, not majority anymore, but for the first two years of APAs, I was building that while having a job. And at that point we already had 70 members in the, in the organization, but I was still with my day job on, on, on, on the side until 2018 when I quit. And then I quit in 2018, we moved up to Maine and then my entire focus at me being on the business. And that’s when we really focused on scale.
Artur Sousa:
And I kept saying on the blessing side, cuz I believe that there’s gotta be some universe plan now there, because, you know, should the tra tragedy that pandemic was for society as a whole. If I can’t put a pin on that side for a minute, the pandemic for the business really propelled it. Because when the pandemic hit, they didn’t have a choice. They needed to go online and nobody had been doing that at all. And we were right there. We were ready to go, we were ready there. Society was not from a using digital tools for the adoption of animals. And then it caught up and then we were right in the, in the right place at the right time. And
Denzil Mohammed:
You were perfectly positioned to, to, to deal with this pandemic and the fact that everyone wanted to have pets, all of a sudden
Artur Sousa:
Fair,
Denzil Mohammed:
Give us the number what’s, what’s the impact that your businesses have has had over the years.
Artur Sousa:
Ooh. So last year alone, we had 70,000 adoptions going through the system. We are serving clients in Australia, in New Zealand, in the, in Canada and the us haven’t gone into Brazil quite yet. Still a goal. We had about at any given time, about 70 to a hundred thousand animals available for adoption through or platform in majority of the us states in there. And I will send you a note after discomplete, cuz it’s still confidential, but we are about to go into a really big change in, in the coming weeks with another partner in the, in the space,
Denzil Mohammed:
The United States is sort of inherently entrepreneurial. I mean, we it’s, it was built on that kind of spirit. And I like to say that immigrants themselves are inherently on, on entrepreneurial because they take a risk. They don’t know if it’s gonna be better or worse. They pack a suitcase, leave everything they know behind and, and start fresh in some place. New. What do you think makes the United States special when it comes to being a business owner, an entrepreneur,
Artur Sousa:
The American dream story, right? That was built as a story first. It actually is a realistic approach that can be taking it is still an unfair approach, you know, depending on your race, depending on your origins, depending on your language is not fair to all how the American dream plays out. I, I say this in a very sad way. I am white in the sense that if I don’t speak, people don’t even know that I’m a foreign. They don’t even guess that I’m a foreigner and it’s a horrible thing, but that plays out in the us plays out positively because of how the society is, why around the us. So I had many opportunities that came because I wasn’t really facing a biased approach prior to it. I had to make some changes. We were just joking before the call about that, but I would never send an email as Artur.
Artur Sousa:
I would always send an email as Arthur, but putting all of that aside, there is an opportunity. There is an opportunity where entrepreneurship is actually highly glorified in the US, that taking risks is actually a mundane thing. It’s not a, this when you’re born in a Catholic country, heavily Catholic country is, you know, we wanna have that little routine and you have the most stable job and the things. And the west is not so much about that as I believe some of the Hispanic countries or Latino countries like my own culturally and we are all about that pursuing the dream and that’s powerful whether or not we get to realize it, whether or not it gets materialized for most people is that source of the debate. And we can talk about that forever, but the pursuit of the dream really drives people.
Artur Sousa:
The idea of coming here and giving her all because of that really well told American dream story actually gets you. Places is very little of, because of the American dream, but a lot more because of your effort, in my opinion, and because you are pursuing it, you’re pursuing the idea of it. So you’re building your dream, not necessarily because the society is built out in a way that helps you get there. Cause let’s be honest, it doesn’t right finding funding depending on your color, depending on your race, depending where you’re from. It is very different now if you are, and I’m sorry if I’m being too direct about this then. So but if you are, you know, a white kid that graduated at MIT, you get funding like this, you get funding with an idea before getting anything. Now, if you are a Latino entrepreneur or an African up origin entrepreneur or a black entrepreneur you actually get, or even middle eastern entrepreneurs too, like you have a lot more hoops to navigate through.
Artur Sousa:
There are many funds that have been popping out. There are more focused on diversity and other things, but that’s still a minority consider compared to other venture capital funds and other things. So the, the, the pursuit has to be what driving you, because it’s not really the, the context that is getting you there is you really not dropping it, not giving up on it. And I think in immigrants in general are very good at that because they already gave up all they knew coming here. So there is no choice. There is no going back at that point, you’re just is either make it or make it
Denzil Mohammed:
There’s, there’s no safety net. There’s nothing to fall back on there. You don’t have your parents house to, to crash in. If, if you enter a bad patch, you just, you have to make it work. What, regardless of, of what you encounter. And I really appreciate the very nuanced and detailed way you painted the pursuit of the American dream and how it’s different for different people. A lot of people like to ignore that these facts, that it is harder for some people based on very superficial things. I wanna pull it back a little a bit. We did some research in the greater Boston area and found that Brazilian immigrants from Brazil had the highest rate of self-employment up to 27% of Brazilians in greater greater Boston said they were self-employed. This is incorporated and not incorporated businesses were what’s. What is with that? What is, what is it about Brazilians and starting businesses?
Artur Sousa:
When I think about Latino entrepreneurs in general, not just Brazilian, we usually are talking about really resourceful people that, that really make things happen, you know, in a McGuyver way before they are there. And you’re just improvising and, and getting it there because of your drive. I think Latinos are very driven people generally on, on being better to their families, to themselves.
Denzil Mohammed:
I am happy that you are here in the us. I’m happy that you are making positive changes. I’m happy that you are creating jobs. You’re currently employed 33 people and to date you’ve hundreds. So you are a job creator. You are an indispensable member of our community, and thank you for creating jobs and, and being innovative.
Artur Sousa:
Very kind of you. And thank you for having me here. Thank you for the work you do on bringing you know, immigrants to the spotlight. So we all are more comfortable with the contributions that immigrants build in this, in the country and how much we are actually a country of immigrants all together, building this together.
Denzil Mohammed:
Artur Sousa, founder, CEO of Adopets thank you so much for joining us on the Jobmakers podcast.
Artur Sousa:
Thank you for having me. And if I can be of any help turn anyone out there, let me know.
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants of voice. Thank you for joining us for this week’s powerful story of immigrant entrepreneurship. Remember, you can subscribe to Jobmakers on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a rating and a review I’m Denzil Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another Jobmakers.
Recent Episodes:
This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Dr. Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Dr. Hanushek shares how he first became interested in the economics of education, his plans for the nearly $4 million in funding from the prestigious Yidan Prize, which he received in 2021, and where he sees the greatest need for additional research in education. He shares findings from a recent Hoover Education Summit panel, focusing on educational performance among high- and low-performing countries, and how the U.S. compares on global measures. They explore why U.S. reading and math results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained flat, despite $800 billion spent annually, and the impact of persistent achievement gaps on individual social mobility and global competitiveness. They discuss his February study on some of the ways parents influence the “intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills,” and how this impacts the lifetime outcomes of children and K-12 education policymaking.
Stories of the Week: In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a sweeping change designed to standardize and streamline the funding formula for the state’s K-12 education system. National polling from NPR and Ipsos finds high rates of parent satisfaction with their children’s schooling, despite contentious K-12 culture wars.
The next episode will air on Weds., May 11th, with Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of The New York Times best-selling book, The World According to Star Wars.
Guest:
Dr. Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. In 2021, Dr. Hanushek received the Yidan Prize for Education Research and he is the author of numerous widely-cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. His recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth summarizes his research establishing the close links between countries’ long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. Ongoing research focuses on international variations in student performance and considers what differences in schooling systems lead to country-differences in the skills of people. He has authored or edited twenty-four books along with over 250 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tweet of the Week:
But money won’t start flowing to Catholic and evangelical schools without changes to other state laws. https://t.co/hh5XdZo9HG
— Bangor Daily News (@bangordailynews) May 2, 2022
News Links:
Tennessee Governor Signs New K-12 Funding Formula Into Law
The education culture war is raging. But for most parents, it’s background noise
Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
[00:00:00] GR: Listeners. This is Gerard Robinson from beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome to another soon to be wonderful episode of The Learning Curve, you know, that we bring together great guests every week to talk about education, social policy history, the classics, all kinds of subjects. And of course, none of this would be [00:01:00] possible or even fun without my Cara.
[00:01:05] Cara: I’m here and I’m so much fun all the time. Ask my kids every day,
[00:01:12] every single
[00:01:12] Cara: day. No I’m doing well. I know we’ve got a lot of great stories this week and in a great guest and the sun is shining, which it rarely does at this time of year in Boston. So all
[00:01:24] GR: good. All is good. Well, kick us off with.
[00:01:29] Cara: Oh, well, actually my story in my mind falls in the all is good category direct.
[00:01:35] I want to actually, before I get my story, I want to ask you a question just for our listeners direct. Do you think if you and I were chatting, I don’t know, dinner table politics, would we agree on everything?
[00:01:49] GR: No, no,
[00:01:51] just shocking.
[00:01:53] Cara: We did, we had some things, right. But like, I have a difference of opinion.
[00:01:57] Maybe I lean a little bit, one way and you leaned a [00:02:00] little bit the other, but we’re still friends. Yeah, exactly. We still get along. don’t fight. We don’t hate each other. Don’t try and pass me laws to keep me out of your house, stuff like that. Well, okay. So, there’s this NPR Ipsos poll out so the title of the article, it was actually from the NPR website is, parents aren’t really tuned in to the culture wars.
[00:02:26] Headline was just music to my ears, my friend, because let me tell you something. We’ve talked about it on this podcast. We have been thinking about what it means that our country it’s. We seem to be in this place where people can’t talk to each other. If you listen, you read social media. If you listen to the news, it feels like people just can’t figure out how to get along.
[00:02:50] I’ve always felt that in my personal relationships, I happened to be, I know that this goes against the grain, but I happen to be a person [00:03:00] who doesn’t always vote the same way her close friends do. It’s amazing. And I still go out with them and have a beer or a glass of juice they’ll get along in sometimes here’s the most shocking thing.
[00:03:17] Sometimes I learn things and sometimes I even changed my opinion. I learned things from my friends. So I loved hearing that to most parents, these culture wars that we’ve been talking about and thinking about in education are according to this poll, basically background noise. And what I mean by that is parents really don’t care because parents care about what’s going on in their own school.
[00:03:41] Parents care about their kids. And yes, there is some number of points. Who are dissatisfied with some of the things going on in their kid’s school, but it’s certainly not most parents as some would have us to believe. So I want to just run through this really, really quick. And there are [00:04:00] some things that were really surprising to me.
[00:04:02] The first one, this one was not surprising is because this is like a traditional American pastime saying I think there are problems with the education system in this country, but nothing’s wrong in my backyard. My school is okay. Decade after decade. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is I think it doesn’t actually capture some of the parents that no that their schools aren’t.
[00:04:21] Okay. And we can talk about some of the things that are going on here in Boston with a school just recently actually closed because there was a investigation that revealed long-term sexual abuse among other things going on in the school. That’s another. but that, I think what this is reflective of is that when parents answer.
[00:04:40] They’re likely thinking about their school in terms of the people they interface with, such as their teachers and parents generally. might not love every teacher, but they have a lot of empathy for teachers because parents are parents and they know what their kids are like. So let’s just leave that there.
[00:04:54] But the other thing that I found really interesting is that most parents in this poll [00:05:00] say that they actually feel well-informed about the curriculum at their children’s school. And so I think part of what we’ve been hearing from both the right and the left is. parents have no idea what’s going on in the classroom.
[00:05:11] You don’t know what’s being taught in your schools. Well, that might be true to some extent, and you don’t know it. Every utterance teachers say, but this poll shows that most parents think that they have a pretty good grasp on, the basic things that are being taught in their kids’ school.
[00:05:25] And that’s probably because, schools and teachers talk to them for the most part, they could probably do more of that, but also they talk to their children. so I just thought this article. Was really interesting and make big take here. Oh, actually, let me tell you the third thing. There was a striking lack of partisanship in this poll, according to NPR.
[00:05:47] And so what they said was like, there, wasn’t a way in which you could see answers reliably break down among people who identify as red or blue, the only outliers where. Did not identify themselves as [00:06:00] Democrat or Republican, rather, they identified themselves as cultural conservatives. And so I thought that that was really interesting because I think that, you pushed back on me here, Gerard, but I think that a lot of the culture wars are certainly being led by cultural conservatives.
[00:06:16] And the question is. Are they getting disproportionate airtime maybe. Yes. Maybe no, you might tell me no, I don’t know. but my, big take on this is this I’m personally heartened to hear that to most parents, this is background noise. I wish that to most policymakers it would, for the most part, be background noise for this reason in this country.
[00:06:38] If we look at Nathan’s. Most kids still can’t read on grade level in this country. If we look at NAPE results, most kids still can’t be math at grade. Yeah, actually that we can fight all we want about what should be taught in history class. But, I would be surprised if most Americans can even name more than like three presidents including the [00:07:00] sitting.
[00:07:00] Right. I think that we need to be happy. Conversations about teaching and learning. And I think that the other thing we need to do, and nobody will be surprised by this, even if you are surprised by my politics and that I can say this being a person who leans blue, if we had more choice in this country, parents might actually be able to choose schools that are more aligned with their cultural views and values.
[00:07:25] While also I hope teaching a high quality curriculum, right? So if I am a person of a certain. Why shouldn’t I be able to go to a school that is lined with that faith, that mission, that vision, that value, instead of thinking all the time that public schools need to be everything to everyone, which by the way is impossible.
[00:07:46] So, I don’t know, Gerard that’s where I’m at. I might’ve said a lot in there that feels objectionable to you.
[00:07:52] GR: I want to hear. Well, first of all, I’m glad you started off with the culture war perspective, partly because [00:08:00] the founder of the Institute for advanced studies and culture where I’ve been fellow at the university of Virginia is Dr.
[00:08:06] James Hunter. And in 1891, he published a book called culture wars. And part of the subtitle includes the word education, and he talked about families and schools and parents. And so when you think about Paul, you just mentioned, and how families are. He was talking about that, going back to 1991. So I would recommend our listeners to take a look at culture wars and his follow-up book of the death of character.
[00:08:30] you and I both like polls. it gives us insight into the lives of regular people. And so as I hear what you said, I think about five Delta. they’ve been polling families about schools going back to 1969 in a study they published in the last year. the identify some of the same things you mentioned, about families saying, you know what I think my kid’s school is doing well, but I think we need to spend, for example, more money.
[00:08:58] And when you ask families, how [00:09:00] much money do you think they’re spending per student? parents usually are way. What the actual about is when you talk about school achievement at their school, how well students are learning their intellectual acumen, they’ll say they’re doing great. And yet we’ll look at Nate and identify some are doing great.
[00:09:19] Some are not. So I think a lot of it is driven by in my house, in my school with those other people’s problems. So I like that you’ve mentioned that in terms of the red, a blue it’s heartening to hear that there’s a. maybe a few coming from a study like this, where parents are saying some of that is background noise.
[00:09:39] I’m just interested in what’s going on in my school. do think you’re right. That some of the normal. It’s coming from what I call the mouse with the loudest mic. And some of that in fact, is coming from cultural conservatives. we see that in critical race theory, which I’ve addressed as Republican mates recommendations to members of my own party, in a.[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Uh, sometime last year. but I also think it’s the cultural progressive and a cultural liberals who are also doing the same thing on the other side. And I think the leak from the Supreme court of where the court may lean in the upcoming decision about a board sheet is just one example. So I do think there are more parents, , in the middle, both blue and right.
[00:10:24] Just aren’t the ones we’re often hearing from, even in Virginia, where there’s a cultural war right now. And I don’t know CRT, but I’ll tell about certain books that we should look at the role of parents and families. When you look at Northern Virginia and you look at, Thomas Jefferson high school, which in fact, I believe it was last week or the week before where you identified.
[00:10:43] schools in the country, Thomas Jefferson is considered the top public school. It’s a school with diversity, both economic ratio, ethnic, , not as much Hispanic and black as somewhere. But then they changed the rules to try to do what I often say is colored cold classrooms to [00:11:00] make people feel good about racial democracy on the left and the right in the middle.
[00:11:05] Some people are going to get things right or wrong. So in that that’s a great story. I don’t think there’s much that you and I disagree on this. I think, some folks on my side of the fence are getting some things right. But we often don’t give them a chance to be heard. I think there’s some things that 1770.
[00:11:22] Unites. I think there’s some things that they add that are sensible to the debate, but because some of them are not only conservatives with black conservatives, we tend to call them uncle Toms and a Tina’s.
[00:11:33] Cara: Yeah, no, no. I want to, thank you. Because one of the things I should’ve said is that.
[00:11:39] It’s not lost on me that in an NPR piece, they would talk about cultural conservatives and leave out the, really loud, extreme voices on the left that often take the headlines as well. And I think that that. Really really important. And so, yes, cheers to the purple [00:12:00] cheers. Cheers. Cheers to the middle.
[00:12:02] We should all be able to live somewhere in there at least, have a coffee together. Yeah,
[00:12:06] GR: exactly. Well, your story about. what people think about their schools is a great segue into my story. I also think it’s a feel-good story and it’s from the volunteer state, Tennessee, governor, bill Lee had an opportunity to do something that many of his colleagues, whether they’re one or two term governors with exception of Virginia, which one term governor will probably never have a chance to do in his or her time that.
[00:12:32] Just sign legislation to change the funding formula. That’s something that he actually had a chance to do. , his commissioner, penny. Was a part of the announcement. So you and I, and our listeners know that a couple of years ago, we had university of Virginia professor of education and law, Kimberly Robinson on the show to talk about school finance.
[00:12:54] and from that conversation, she talked about the importance of school litigation, seventies, eighties, nineties, and how [00:13:00] they got us to where we are today. Well, I think that’s a good backdrop to talk about. Taking place in Tennessee. So go back to 1992, where as part of an federal, a part of a lawsuit, the state decided to create a new funding formula.
[00:13:15] And in that funding formula, they were 45 components that were put in place that you had to walk through in order to determine how much money schools were going to receive on a per pupil basis. Fast-forward to two years ago, the governor and a group of stakeholders said, listen, we’ve got to do something different because a people on the left said the funding formula is antiquated and we’ve got to change it.
[00:13:43] People on the right said, guess what? Our funding formula is antiquated and we have to change it. So at least there was bipartisan support that we needed to change the system naturally. How much money students should receive per student, how much schools should receive a course was a [00:14:00] debate, but rather than simply rely on lawmakers to do it.
[00:14:03] , the governor will, and his team were part of a much larger discussion where they went throughout the state, brought together a group of people and even participated in a statewide transparency, a consortium conversation, which also has a national roots to say, what should we do? you had people like, one of our colleagues who we know Dr.
[00:14:24] Evans for our 50 candidates to see who, in fact last fall, when I was in Nashville, was talking to me about this issue. So shout out to Victor, for his work, but people said we’ve got to do something different. So after all the things, that go into politics take place, here’s what you have. You had a 26 to five vote in this.
[00:14:43] to move it forward. It was a 63 to 24 vote in the house. It wasn’t strictly on party lines. Although we know that it’s a strong red state, six Republicans that actually voted against it as did five Democrats, with the new law, they’re going to move away. [00:15:00] From the 45 components as we know it today, it was basically called the basic education program.
[00:15:06] The legislation that he signed is called the Tennessee investment in student achievement. I like the fact that he used the word in investment because when you hear investment in at least symbolically means accountability. It also means removing students and schools up from being solely a receiver of.
[00:15:24] But an active player in the investment and articulation of moving forward and a focus on student achievement. , there’s a debate about what schools are for, well, guess what student achievement is part of it. the state’s going to invest $6,860, per student. some people think that it’s too low.
[00:15:41] Some people think it’s about right, but it’s where they’re going to move So with this legislation, Tennessee is going to join at least 33 states and the district of Columbia that use a student based formula, prior to this law, Tennessee was not a part of that.
[00:15:59] [00:16:00] neither is Massachusetts. So they’re moving toward that. Number two is going to add an additional $9 billion in state and local funds to schools. So I think that’s a move in the right direction. And third is going to give lawmakers, parents, teachers, and educators, more insight into exactly how much funding is going into schools.
[00:16:21] Now, naturally, we have legitimate questions. Students of color students in low and under resource areas where students with disabilities? Well, I had a chance to take a look at data from the department of education and the identify that per pupil spending before this law for students with disabilities are range as low as 36.
[00:16:41] So as much as seven. And so even without this law, we know that certain students need money. So I think it’s a step in the right direction. Our congratulations to the commissioner, the governor and the legislature moving away from one system. it’s been in place for 30, 40 years to a new system.[00:17:00]
[00:17:00] Some of those, of course funding models won’t kick in for another year, but it’s a good feel-good story. And according to data for the national association of state budget officers, who’ve identified at least 27 states in fiscal year 21, had a higher percentage of its money going to K-12 and higher education than other categories.
[00:17:20] Second often being in Medicaid, and Tennessee not being one. This is a step in the right direction, but want to get your.
[00:17:27] Cara: say so happy for Tennessee. I think this is huge and I have to get selfish for just a second and say that my great colleague, Matthew, Joseph. spent a lot of time helping things this through and helping folks on the ground understand why student centered funding is so important and how it could work and how it’s going to really benefit the state in the long run.
[00:17:49] Like you said, it is an investment. I think that our upcoming guests, Dr. Eric Hanushek, Very very well-equipped to talk to us about why education is an [00:18:00] investment on which you can see a sizable return if you do it. Right. I think this is game changing for Tennessee. Very proud. I wish that, the Commonwealth would listen.
[00:18:08] I mean, look, the thing is, is that a lot of times states they, the distinguished, Dr. Kimberly Robinson has told us, states will think about a funding formula and then think it’s good for 25 years or 30 years, or, and not, not, use all the tools that they should to assess the extent to which it’s working and for whom it’s working, et cetera.
[00:18:28] I think this is really important. might I also add that a system of student-centered funding it’s good for everyone, and it’s also good for people. Because what it means is that technically, , we should work towards a system where, and I’m not even just talking public versus private, just within public systems alone, where kids should be able to get the money they need for their education.
[00:18:55] in whatever school they choose in a student centered funding [00:19:00] formula is the first big step in that direction. So I love this story. Look at us through our two. Rather feel good stories this week. I think we should just give ourselves, we’re just all sunshine and rainbows
[00:19:11] GR: today. Well, this is an example of the purple people with the.
[00:19:20] Legitimately. I love that. That’s wonderful.
[00:19:22] Cara: All right, you right. As I said, our next guest is going to be with us in just a moment, Dr. Eric Hanushek. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow at the Hoover institution of Stanford university and, most folks who already sort of the go-to person on economic analysis of educational issues.
[00:19:42] we are going to be speaking with him right after this.[00:20:00]
[00:20:29] Learning curve listeners today. We’re very pleased to have with us, Dr. Eric Hanushek. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover institution of Stanford university. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had brought influence on education policy in both developed and developing.
[00:20:49] In 2021, Dr. Hanushek received the Yidan prize for education research, and he is the author of numerous, widely cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, [00:21:00] school, accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics, his recent book, the knowledge capital of nations education and the economics of growth summarizes his research, establishing the closest.
[00:21:12] Between countries, long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. Ongoing research focuses on international variations in student performance and considers what differences in schooling systems lead to country differences in the skills of people he has authored or edited 24 books along with over 250 articles.
[00:21:34] He is a distinguished graduate of the United States air force academy and completed his PhD. At the Massachusetts Institute of technology, Dr. Hanushek, welcome to The Learning Curve. Wow. thanks for being with us. I know I have read a lot of your work, and I think a lot of our listeners have too.
[00:21:53] And one of the things I appreciate so much about it is that it is something that, even those of us who are [00:22:00] not economist can comprehend. So we were talking at the outset of the show about, changes that states can make, , to recognize greater return on investment in education. And we’re just, we’re really excited to have you to talk through these issues with us.
[00:22:16] first of all, congratulations, I should say on winning Yidan prize, which is also known as education’s Nobel prize. and that was for your work on strengthening the bridge between. And education. Can you share with our listeners a little bit about first of all, how did you even come to the study of the economics of education very specifically?
[00:22:39] And what was it like to win this award?
[00:22:42] Eric Hanushek: Well, the first question. how did I come to study education issues? I probably shouldn’t admit as an economist. This was not the, end result of a rational process of planning my future. That it was more accident.[00:23:00] when I was in graduate school at MIT and I finished the coursework and was looking around for a thesis topic, the Coleman report on education came out and that was the first major study of achievement of different kids and underlying factors.
[00:23:19] It was named after its main author, James Coleman. But. the study was called equality of educational opportunity, and it was really designed to look at what differences there were largely by race, but income and regions and so forth in education. And I think is part of the civil rights act of 1964.
[00:23:42] It was designed to beat up a little bit. The states of the old Confederacy and show that things were very good in the old Confederacy. Well, Coleman did something very surprising. , this was 1965 when he was [00:24:00] working on this, Tested 600,000 kids in the country. He found out about what their families looked like from serving the kids.
[00:24:11] And these are kids in different ages and grades. He surveyed, principals and teachers in the schools, and then he did some basic statistical analysis of what explained differences in achievement, the results, Astounded people in two ways. first no study has ever had 700 pages of analysis of variance results printed by the U S government, in the life of the union, I guess.
[00:24:42] but secondly, it seemed to say that the only thing that mattered was the. Or maybe the other kids appears in the schools and schools didn’t really make much difference in terms of achievement of kids. Well, I was sitting there, , at MIT and thought this is really a [00:25:00] crazy result. How could it be that schools aren’t important when we pay so much attention to schools, we put so much money into them.
[00:25:08] If they aren’t important, we gotta be doing something different, I guess. I had a friend who was on the economics faculty at Harvard, John Kane, who snuck me into the back of a faculty seminar, all about 75 faculty members at Harvard that were needing every two weeks. Just to figure out what this report said and how to read this report.
[00:25:35] Nobody in the room quite knew how to do it. Senator pat Moynihan, who was on the faculty at Harvard at the time, and along with Fred, Mosteller a statistician ran the seven. And so I’ve sat in the back of the room and out of that ended up doing a thesis on education and agreed with part of the Coleman report, but not all of it.
[00:25:58] And once [00:26:00] I finished the thesis, well, there were new things to do, and it’s been new things to do ever since that time. And I just keep doing new and different things. , trying to understand a little bit more about how our schooling system fits into society and affects. we can come back to any parts of that that you want, but I will respond to the second thing.
[00:26:24] What’s it like to win the Ugan prize? , I was really thrilled by it because the kind of work I do has not always been well-regarded by those, in the education system. The idea of doing. Quantitative serious analysis of schoolings and how policies affect things. Things that were outside of the classroom, was a NAFA ma to many of the people in the education business.
[00:26:54] And so I take getting this prize is some sort of, , agreement that there might [00:27:00] be something there to look at policies and how they affect our own. Yeah,
[00:27:05] Cara: that’s actually really amazing to hear you say that. Gerard and I were speaking about, , the phenomenon of many Americans just thinking of schooling as the thing that is right in front of them.
[00:27:14] Therefore, they can say that. I think there’s a big problem with education in this country, but boy, I love my kids school and I think the same with, thinking about the impact of sort of the. Amazing research that you do that looks at systems that looks at how what goes on outside of the classroom impacts, influences, our systems and what it means when those systems do or do not produce the outcomes that we need.
[00:27:38] It’s just so critical for us to push forward. so I’m curious, what is it that you plan on doing. With this $3.9 million in funding. I mean, what is it that you can do that you haven’t done already? Dr. Hinshaw? Well,
[00:27:51] Eric Hanushek: , there is a cash award that goes along with this prize and they want to support research and doing other [00:28:00] things.
[00:28:00] My initial reaction is it’s still the one I have. I haven’t quite followed through on it, but my initial reaction was that, it didn’t make sense that. Put that money into what I’d been doing. I had to do something different. What I am proposing to do is to actually try to improve education in Sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Latin America.
[00:28:24] The idea comes from the work I did on economic growth. If we look at the economic growth of countries, That’s what determines the future wellbeing. So the us is richer today than it was a hundred years ago because it’s had basically the fastest rate of economic growth for the last century of any country in the world.
[00:28:48] then you look at, , Africa or you look at Latin America and you see, well, there’s not that much richer than they were a hundred years ago. They’re a little bit richer, but [00:29:00] their economic growth has not been very fast and it hasn’t led to much prosperity. you see a few cities in each of these countries that’s doing okay, but the vast majority of these populations is.
[00:29:15] my answer to what’s going on is very simple. Economic growth depends upon the skills of the population. Countries that have more skilled labor forces grow faster. They develop new products. They figured out how to, invent new things and they end up getting the rewards in terms of increased incomes in economic growth, Africa in Latin America and south Asia also don’t have.
[00:29:48] The schooling systems that support to production of skilled workforce. And without that in simplest terms, I don’t think they’ll ever grow or ever [00:30:00] grow very rapidly. And so , the idea I’ve had is to try to find ways that we could improve the schooling in these countries. And here I have something that, , you and Gerard might agree with.
[00:30:15] I think it’s really hard for so many to come in from outside until a country or a school district or a school, what to. it really requires a lot more knowledge of the capacity of the schools that exist, the demands that are there for them and somebody who can really work to bring good ideas, but in the context of the local area.
[00:30:43] So what I want to do, is very simple. I want to. Find some people that will call fellows that we can sort of improve, add to their human capital, add to their networks internationally post within [00:31:00] the geographic region, but internationally, , so that they can bring. Good ideas about education to these countries in simplest terms.
[00:31:09] I think that we know a lot more about schooling and education than is being put in place in these countries. the answer is trying to find out ways to do.
[00:31:20] Cara: that’s really heartening to hear. I have to say my mentor, Charlie Glenn, who has, I think, as you know, done a lot in international education, he would often say folks from other countries when they would say, like, we want to learn about the American education system and I would hear him.
[00:31:35] Well, don’t take our bad ideas. I love the idea of building, networks of people on the ground who know the culture who are of the culture too, to bring good education ideas. want to really quickly ask you Dr. Henry. you note that these countries, in many cases, won’t be able to grow their economies because they need to improve their schools.
[00:31:58] one of the indicators we [00:32:00] have in school performance is of course, PISA data. So international data from the OACD. And you’ve, talked about this, much throughout your career. You recently led a discussion with Andre Schleicher from OACD. Can you frame for our listeners? just even where the U S sits terms of , how do we compare to both these countries that we know the schools are really not doing what they need to do, and those countries that have excellent systems of education?
[00:32:27] where are we at?
[00:32:28] Eric Hanushek: Well, if I answer that, let me, thank you for bringing up the topic of Piza and international tests. When I was saying, country. We’ll only grow proportionate to the skills in their population. What we found is that the international math and science test that exists of which Piza run by the, OEC D is a good example, are pretty good measures of the skills that are important for a strong economy and for [00:33:00] economic growth.
[00:33:01] Many of the, developing countries of the world don’t participate in these tests. So you have to guess at whether they know anything or have any skills, but when they do participate, you see that they are dramatically different than the more developed countries in the world, in terms of their basic knowledge of math and science.
[00:33:24] should add the footnote. The Piza test is the program for international student assessment. a test given to 15 year olds, and you can think of it as taking a math problem, translating it into the local language and sort of basically marching around the world and seeing how many kids in different countries can answer a set of.
[00:33:47] Basic math problems that turns out to be a pretty good measure of future skills that are demanded by modern economies. Now, the us [00:34:00] unfortunately is slightly below the average of the OEC D or the D is the organization for economic cooperation and development. It’s really the club of rich nations and reforming.
[00:34:14] Behind, a whole series of other, both developed and developing nations in terms of our performance on these tests. This I think is actually a, Canary in the, mine that we should pay attention to this because it says that we might in the future health problems. In the past, we’ve been able to take care of this, right?
[00:34:39] We’ve been able to take care of it by important people who have better educations from abroad and we’re all immigration of skilled labor, skilled people from around the world. live next door to me in silicone valley. As long as we can keep that going. Maybe we can make up for the fact that our schools are not doing so [00:35:00] well, but I think that that’s a real problem in the long run.
[00:35:03] And so the answer to your very simple question in a long winded way is we’re not doing so well that we’re behind a large number of developed and developing countries. it’s time to stop competing with Greece and Spain and start competing with Hong Kong or Finland or, other countries that do much better then redo on these tests.
[00:35:31] GR: And I’m going to follow up on you. Reference to the Canary in the coal mine. Cause you and I have had a chance to sit in rooms, with Dr. Paul Peterson and others. When we took a look at Piza. also there’s, you know, questions about Tims and it was always amazing how well we, as Americans start, we we’re doing, and then we compare ourselves.
[00:35:53] You say to the rich countries, it wasn’t as great. But when we look domestically, you know, we spend approximately 800 [00:36:00] billion annually. And when you look at NAPE scores in reading and math, Things aren’t that great. So with all the money we spent all the legislative changes we’ve made. Why has it been so difficult for us to improve basic student achievement?
[00:36:14] And what’s the impact here at home and on our competitiveness globally?
[00:36:19] Eric Hanushek: Well, I think the impact is huge. we are, , producing. Students that grow up, not to be competitive with those from other countries. you can see it in California, which is one of the lower ranking states. the nation on things like the NAPE test, California students are not able to compete in Silicon valley because they just don’t have the skills to lead on.
[00:36:49] , what’s wrong. Oh, we have an institutional structure that does not really reward. Good performance very much.[00:37:00] there’s some rewards. we have limits on the amount of competition and, you know, there’s fights over, charter schools largely because they offer a competition to the traditional public schools.
[00:37:14] But for the most part, we are a nation of traditional public schools where they have a local monopoly. And they keep doing things the way they always did. so we know, for example, that huge amounts of research has consistently shown that just having more experience of a teacher does not lead to more effectiveness in the class.
[00:37:39] And yet we systematically pay large premium to teachers when they get more experience. So we buy something that doesn’t relate to their effectiveness in the classroom, the same I should say. And this starts to annoy people, but the same is true for graduate education. [00:38:00] There’s a lot of work that suggests that.
[00:38:03] Just having a master’s degree does not mean that somebody is going to be more or less effective than somebody, a teacher with only a bachelor’s degree. So we have this institutional structure that is locked in a system that does not pay attention to the effectiveness of schools. we’ve got to get around that,
[00:38:23] GR: your example about California, To me personally, because I grew up in California.
[00:38:30] and I think about the fact that for the first time, since the founding of California, the population has dropped and thus resulted in the loss of a congressional seat. , another economist, colleague of mine at the American enterprise Institute, Dr. Mark Perry, has got a great article, about the number of people who are leaving California for states like Texas and Tennessee.
[00:38:51] And with that is often. Economic intellectual talent and in a state that’s becoming, or at this point, majority minority who [00:39:00] can’t even get a job, high paying job in Silicon valley, you bring in international workers. I mean, that’s a recipe for disaster, so I’m glad you talked about that. Let’s put that in perspective of the achievement gap.
[00:39:14] Our listeners hear that term a lot. It’s bantered about by governors, presidents, even investing. What is the achievement gap? What’s real. and what should concern us or what even could even give us hope about closing it?
[00:39:28] Eric Hanushek: historically we might trace things back to Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States who declared the war on poverty.
[00:39:39] An underlying strong element of the war on poverty was recognition that. Poorer families tended to produce children who would themselves live in poverty, and then themselves be poor in the future. And LBJ was concerned about. The fact [00:40:00] that there were large achievement gaps, both in a school attainment and the knowledge that kids got and so forth between families in poverty and those who weren’t in poverty and wanted to, , do something about that.
[00:40:16] Well work that, Paul Peterson and I, and some others have done. And. Tried to trace the history of gaps between, poor families and better off families. For the last 50 years, we can’t quite go back 50 years in this, but we’re looking at achievement differences. And what refine an consistent set of different achievement differences is that the achievement gap hasn’t moved maybe a slightly come down in 50 years, but, but not very much.
[00:40:49] And that persistence means that there’s going to be a persistence. Intergenerational poverty that these, [00:41:00] skills and knowledge are passed down from generation to generation. And so we have increasingly a generation of poor people. Some people escape that, but there are many that don’t that just go on from generation to generation.
[00:41:19] That is a huge issue that we can’t, keep going. I mean, that to me is not compatible with my conception of what the United States is. Insurance.
[00:41:31] GR: Absolutely. And I’ve seen both sides of the fence. I’m the first in my family to graduate from college. both of my Southern parents finished high school. I did not earn a college degree.
[00:41:43] I think about the men who were in my wedding, most of them , , , with single mom, not married and all of us now have graduate degrees. And then at the same time, families born in same situations, intergenerational poverty, just moving forward. So it’s unique [00:42:00] and the American mission. And I would say really the idea of the American dream.
[00:42:04] Some people don’t like that term. How about American optimism? there’s something there. And, um, I look forward to reading your research. To help us understand that because when you go back to Lyndon Johnson and the whole idea of the great society, and you’ve mentioned earlier, the Coleman report, there’s also the Moynihan report, uh, that talks about family structure, how much that played and a year after, , president Johnson announced a war on poverty.
[00:42:29] He also announced a year later a war on, criminals or on crime and the correlation between crime, low employment. I mean, it’s just so much of it. Goes to the conversation. Here’s really last question, for you, you’re doing joint research now to look the achievement gap. Is that the work you’re doing with Dr.
[00:42:48] Peterson and others? Or was that
[00:42:49] Eric Hanushek: something else? Oh, is it the work on your achievement gap is with Dr. Peterson?
[00:42:54] GR: Um, so it is that study.
[00:42:57] Eric Hanushek: Yeah. And right. So if you grew up in [00:43:00] California, you must have started reading with whole life. Exactly. That was one of the, examples of what California has done badly for the nation.
[00:43:10] It passes on bad ideas.
[00:43:15] GR: I understand that on many frauds, will it be in with, this question? And it goes to back to a care, asked you about how you got interested in economics now, knowing what you know today, there’s an. On Erica sitting in a PhD program at one of our public private schools across the country may have an interest in education.
[00:43:35] What words of wisdom would you share with Erica or Eric today about their work as an economist and how important it is in influencing how we think. About economic competitiveness, the achievement gap, or just prosperity?
[00:43:51] Eric Hanushek: Well, I, think there are many ways to look at, our education issues, but economics provides us structure [00:44:00] to sort of orderly put data together and try to understand some of the key.
[00:44:07] Policy relationships and key incentives that we can put into place. And so, , I guess we all support what we did think, or we did was good, but I think, getting some economics training, maybe not a PhD, but some economics training helps people to think about. What we could do better. We do know the other side of this is which I’ve also looked at, and that is that what’s the value of a strong education.
[00:44:41] And there’s where much of the work of economist has gone into, looking at the impact. What a timeless, because human capital on economic outcomes for individuals and for the nation. So, , I guess I should, proselytize for, more economists [00:45:00] in education, but I guess I’m not as hung up on that I am on finding ways from whatever.
[00:45:09] We can to improve our schooling system. I think it is the future of the country that we’re talking about. And if we wait till it’s become apparent that we’re in trouble, then it’s too late to correct in some sense. And so we have to begin now to try to put that to the.
[00:45:28] GR: No I’m with you. , it’s important to our country, , opponents of by version of school reform often say where education is nowhere in the constitution, but I have to remind both opponents and proponents that in 1787, at the same time members of our founding generation, where the Philadelphia initially arguing about the articles of Confederation.
[00:45:51] And then ditching that for constitution. There were another generation of founders in New York who passed the 1787 Northwest ordinance. And [00:46:00] in that document, is a following phrase, religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good. Good. And the happiness of mankind schools and the needs of education shall forever be encouraged.
[00:46:13] And so if we want to continue this great experiment schools and the means of education are part of it, the research that you’ve helped us as a nation think about matters. And I thank you so much again for joining us today.
[00:46:25] Eric Hanushek: Sure. You did it again. You did so much better than I did in expressing these views.
[00:46:31] that’s a wonderful way to end. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hanushek. [00:47:00] [00:48:00]
[00:48:36] GR: The tweet of the week comes from Bangor daily news and Maine it’s from may. Second advocates prepare for Supreme court. Turn mains religious school funding ban, and the Bangor daily news says, but money won’t start flowing to Catholic and evangelical schools without changes to other state laws. We’ve , discussed the main case here [00:49:00] on learning.
[00:49:01] And let me give a thank you for Bangor daily news for the tweet of the week.
[00:49:06] Cara: Yeah. Well, we’re all watching and we’ll, I’ll be working to get those other state laws where they need to be so about. So the kids could go to school where they need to, hello, Maine. Happy to come up there anytime. beautiful Gerard.
[00:49:21] We are going to be back together again next week. And we will be with Cass Sunstein. He is the Robert Walmsley university professor at Harvard law school and the author of the New York times bestselling book, the world, according to star wars, did you watch star wars. As
[00:49:36] a kid,
[00:49:37] GR: you’re going to laugh. I am one of the few people on the planet.
[00:49:41] Never seen one. Okay. One will be a
[00:49:45] star wars. All right. So that’s a deal breaker here. We’re okay. We can, get along. Here’s the
[00:49:54] GR: break? Yeah, I’ve never seen one movie.
[00:49:57] w.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] GR: No, no they’ve seen it and watched
[00:50:05] seen it
[00:50:09] GR: will be the first time.
[00:50:13] Cara: All right, until next week, my friend, your homework assignment is at the very least to watch empire strikes back, like, well, I’ll just throw one out there. You don’t even have to start at the beginning or the editor. However, those darn things go. , just pick one of them. Just meet.
[00:50:28] And may the force be with you? Gerard
[00:50:31] GR: Nanu, nanu
[00:50:34] that’s
[00:50:34] GR: mark. Take care.[00:51:00] [00:52:00]
Recent Episodes:
Progressive Policy Study: Californians Dreamin’ While Jobs and People Leavin’
/in Economic Opportunity, Featured, Podcast Hubwonk /by Editorial StaffHubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with California Policy Center president Will Swaim about how the state’s ambitious policies have combined to stick its residents with the highest cost of living and a tax regime that discourages investment, innovation, and its vital entrepreneurial class.
Related: New Study Highlights Economic Fallout from California’s 2012 Tax Hike
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Please excuse typos.
Joe Selvaggi:
This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi.
Joe Selvaggi:
Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. With more than 40 million residents and an economy larger than that of India California’s public policy choices offer conspicuous case studies to other states, particularly other progressive largely single party states such as Massachusetts. One particularly relevant example was in 2012 when Californian voted to increase income taxes on high earners in much the same way currently considered by Massachusetts in our upcoming ballot question in November, similar to the promises made by its advocates here, California legislators promised the additional revenue generated by the tax would be dedicated to improving education and infrastructure voters were assured that those subject to the higher tax were unlikely due to camp for other states owing to California’s environmental and cultural appeal. Now, as Massachusetts considers a similar fair share tax voters can look to the results of California’s experience as a window, it to its own possible future and consider whether new revenue equates to improved education in infrastructure, and whether such taxes do indeed cause high earners to leave for more competitive states, taking their investments, jobs, and tax revenue with them.
Joe Selvaggi:
My guest today is Will Swam, president of the California Policy Center, a think tank with a state admission to secure a prosperous future for all Californians, Mr. Swaim’s organization has examined the benefits of prop 30 revenue on the state’s education and infrastructure. He’s also documented the responses of the state’s high earners and business leaders to the new higher rate beyond the observation that California is for the first time in its history, losing population. Mr. Swaim’s think tank has taken measure of which firms are leaving and where they’re heading playfully, naming his list. The Book of Exoduses, Mr. Swaim will share with us his view on the current state of California and what he thinks we might learn from their example. When I return, I’ll be joined by California policy center, president Will Swaim. Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by the president of the California Policy Center and host of the Radio Free California podcast Will Swaim. Welcome to Hubwonk, Will.
Will Swaim:
Thank you. Hubwonk Will sounds like my new band name. I like it.
Joe Selvaggi:
<Laugh> Great. Well as I shared with you earlier I am an avid listener of the California Policy Center. I recommend it to our listeners and I think perhaps some of our listeners will wonder why we should have an interest in California. It’s 3,000 miles away. What does that have to do with those here in Massachusetts? But it really fascinates me for its sheer size it’s economy, the population but also not unlike Massachusetts, it’s a deep blue state. It has essentially a one party legislature and governor. So, in some ways it’s a mirror of us and perhaps something that we can use to look into our own future. If we make similar policy choices, if we embrace similar political intuitions, so let’s start there. But before we talk about specific policy issues that you have done in California, give our listeners a sense of how big California and its economy are.
Will Swaim:
Sure. Well thanks. First of all, for having me on, and I do think our states are kind of on parallel paths we’re way down the road in front of you or next adjacent. But yeah, it’s, it, California’s a big state. I was born here. I was raised here. It’s changed a lot, but the fact is right now, it’s about 40, 42 million people, depending on how you count it. That is easily the largest state by population. It’s also very big physically. You know, it takes me probably two hours to drive south and hit the Mexican border and about 12 hours, 10 or 12 hours to hit the Oregon border in the north. It is a big long state. We are the, I think by many calculations, the fifth largest economy in the world that puts us ahead of the great Britain ahead of India.
Will Swaim:
I mean, it is a big, big place where famous for of course tech, the Silicon valley Hollywood of course, you know, generates loads of loads of money. The Disney corporation is based here, there in the news these days. But it’s really a place that is governed primarily and where the politics have changed since the late seventies. And we, you know, if you don’t mind talking about that real quickly, I would just say when I, I, I, I’m going to speak about something I shouldn’t, but I’m 62. I was born in 1960 that used, I used to be the youngest guy in the room and now I’m quite clearly the oldest, but in that time in the seventies, when I was just a teenager our governor then Jerry Brown and his first iteration mandated or signed off on a bill that allowed collective bargaining of all government unions.
Will Swaim:
And that was like the starting gun and the transformation of California politics. California’s always been very kind of libertarian, I would say, you know, and it’s Democrats tended to be quite moderate. Republicans tended to be moderates very pragmatic place. It was free wheeling in the sixties, as you might guess. So by the time the seventies come in this vibrancy on the left and the right begins to disappear and they become very stultified and the Democrats race ahead in cash, the government unions today those are the unions that that represent workers in like teachers and firefighters and cops and the DM, the department of motor vehicles. I do you guys call it the DMV in Massachusetts? Yes. Yes we do. Yep. Okay. We do. But all these government workers from the state down to the local levels, school districts and cities and counties there’s about a about a million employees who are represented by these unions. And tho these unions raised collectively about 2 billion, every election cycle, 2 billion with a B, and there is nobody on any politic on any side of the political spectrum, raising that kind of cash. They outspend everybody. So what they do these government unions do, and you can pause me at any time if I’m motoring to no,
Joe Selvaggi:
No, this is good. I wasn’t anticipating this answer, but it’s great.
Will Swaim:
Yeah. So the thing, the thing to know about us is that, you know, with a, with these unions generating about 2 billion E every election cycle, they’re able to elect candidates who, regardless of their I’ll call it insanity in some cases on social issues or governance or whatever can get into office so long as they promise union leaders a single thing. And that is that the unions will remain in power. They will, will, they will retain their grip on political power and over, over their members and the discipline in the workplace. And so the money continues to just flow even, you know, despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus, which we can come back to later which basically allowed government workers to opt out of their unions. We still have just south of a million government workers in these unions. So California by population is 12% of the nation’s population.
Will Swaim:
We have 24% of the nation’s government union members. So anyway, that’s, that’s how the mechanism works. The creepy little smelly, little corruption, legal corruption at the heart of our system is this government union ownership of public officials who once in office returned the favor, the unions gave them of getting them into office. They returned the favor by rubber stamping, virtually anything the unions want. And in return, the, these public officials do things like we’re pushing for a vaccine authorization down to the age of 12. So that 12 year olds can opt to any kind of vaccination they want without parental authority, same goes for gender transitioning stuff. And then on the other side, it’s take on as much debt as you want at the local level get involved in creative finance. So you can continue to keep the cash moving to the public employees who then pay out to the unions who then elect the candidates who approve further taxes and bond debt. So that’s the, that’s the thumbnail sketch of this lovely and benighted place?
Joe Selvaggi:
Well, well, that answers a, a question I’ve had because our impression here from sunny Boston is that, you know, California, as you say, has a libertarian streak, it’s let your freak flag fly. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> UBU. That to me is what California’s all about. Maybe it’s a a romanticization of the, of the sixties. But I also will, will point out it’s it’s a relatively new state. Well, you know, I’m recording from a, about a block from the Boston common. It says you know, established 1630 and I think California wasn’t even a state until 1850. So you’ve got a lot of newness there and a lot of freshness, a lot, you know, a lot of people from other places you’ve helped me at least at some level understand why such a freedom loving population has somehow been captured by a, a deep blue I dunno what you would call ruling class if, if, if you will.
Joe Selvaggi:
So compare for me, I don’t know how often you make it over to our side of the country, but Boston where I am in San Francisco are often compared, and I’ve been to San Francisco. It’s beautiful like Boston and it’s easily walkable like Boston, but I think that’s about where the similarities lie. I, I, I’ve not been there very recently, certainly not since the pandemic describe for our listeners if you’ve been there recently how it’s been transformed either by politics or, or whatever you attribute to it’s
Will Swaim:
Transformation. San Francisco is a great example. And I have been to Massachusetts a number of times my son went to school out there on a hockey scholarship. And I did my, my master’s thesis on a church in Salem, Massachusetts. We could talk about that another time. So I spent some time in Massachusetts of Massachusetts historical society. And, and just, you know, quick historical note, I would say that our pro part of the problem here is the rootlessness of the place. We do not have a lot of, I would say that it’s conceivable that a Democrat or a liberal and Massachusetts is not the same as a liberal or a Democrat in California and San Francisco is a great example of that. You know, my, my own sense of Boston is, you know, from 3000 miles away, that liberals in Boston tend to be more moderate in their, in their temperament and in San Francisco, that’s simply not the case.
Will Swaim:
I’ll give you a couple of quick examples in San Francisco. You’ve got mayor London breed who came in preaching, fire and brimstone on social justice issues and COVID hits. And she’s caught not once, not twice but at least twice out partying at local clubs without a mask and dancing and drinking while she has supported the complete lockdown of the city. And the response of the residence is, well, you know, shame on you, but at least you’re on our side and you’re, you’re an African American woman, so we’ll catch you some slack. But it gets worse as you get into policy. London breed has been really interesting to watch as a progressive what’s the old saying about a conservative as a liberal mugged by reality. She begins to try to expand home home opportunity, home ownership, and apartment living for this, the city’s massive filthy streets, so they can get to homeless people off the streets and into housing, but she runs immediately into environmentalists than others who say that they don’t want more housing in San Francisco.
Will Swaim:
That’ll gentrify that will transform the character of the city. Well, I can tell you as a guy who walks the streets of San Francisco, occasionally some of them are quite lovely, these streets but a lot of them really are just massive homeless encampments where open air drug use is pretty much the, the norm. And the result of that is that a lot of San Francisco and San FCAN unable to afford housing have fled east into outlying counties or have just left the state entirely. The city of San Francisco has lost population in the last three years. And it was it preceded COVID because the cost of housing is so expensive. So London breed tries to expand housing options is shut down by social justice, activists who say, it’s not good enough, or by environmentalists who say they don’t wanna change the character of the city.
Will Swaim:
And she begins to understand why you got people living on the streets. There’s no first rung of the ladder anymore. So on, on that issue, there was a radical change. Then the city elects, a guy named Che boudin, who is the son of the, of two weather underground activists who are imprison for the execution of a couple of Brinks armored car delivery guys in the sixties. And this poor guy is, you know, handed off to relatives he’s raised by these other friends rather. And he goes on to become a wildly progressive prosecutor in the county of San Francisco. And in San Francisco, you suddenly get this massive spike in crime. I think this is probably national news. I, I would imagine a lot of your listeners have already seen some of the smash and grab robberies that go on there notorious.
Will Swaim:
They didn’t happen only in San Francisco. They happened in LA as well, which has a similarly inclined prosecutor. They happen in Chicago. They may have happened in your neighborhood. But these are groups of people who will walk in under California’s new misdemeanor classification of crime. And they will simply calculate everything they can steal under $1,000, 950 bucks. Really that’s the magic number. If it’s under nine 50, the prosecutors in San Francisco will not charge you. So there’s no reason to report you. So people walk into Walgreens or CVS pharmacies, and they steal $950 worth of things. They smash in the windows of cars and steal everything, get their hands on. They specifically target rental cars, knowing that those are tourists who might leave cameras or laptops or whatever in the backs of their cars. So crime has spiked in San Francisco. Homelessness has spiked in San Francisco. It is one of the filthiest pro environmental cities you’ll ever visit. I think a I think it was a UN declared a couple of years ago that San Francisco was dirtier than Calcutta, which is, you know, really saying something I think. So it, it is a remarkable real world laboratory for very progressive policies on crime and, and punishment on the environment on housing. And I’m, I think that Bostonians would probably recoil in horror at the idea that they are anything like that.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. So I will report from Boston that we are clean, we’re safe. We’ve got our problems but we’ve not gone that path. Thank goodness. At least not yet. I’m I’m puzzled though. Again, you you’ve been really great at helping me understand how we, we got where we are. You’ve got an economy larger more than $3 trillion, right? That’s a lot of money. But also you’ve got among the highest poverty rates in the entire country. I, I, I’m having a difficult time understanding why all that money with the as assume assumption that progressives are sympathetic, particularly sympathetic to the needs of the poor. Why would a progressive state with $3 trillion economy have any poor let alone leading the nation in the, in the poverty rate?
Will Swaim:
That’s such a great question in part it’s, because a lot of the ostensible wealth of California is tied to firms which have become leaders in supporting really progressive initiatives that backfire and have the effect of actually making it more difficult to live here. So just to give you one example of how the cost of living gets really expensive in California, I talked a little bit about housing. We’ve got environmentalists and social justice, activists who want housing to look a certain way and tie up every new housing project so that when the government goes out to try to build subsidized housing for the poor, it ends up costing more than the market rate of constructing a new home. So just to give you an example, it may cost $500,000 to build a home in most of California. But if you, if the government builds it, it costs about $800,000 a door, as they say in that business.
Will Swaim:
The reason is a bunch of regulations, competing claims, lawsuits, et cetera, that Jack up the cost of housing in many of these major cities. So the, so the cost of housing is so expensive in California. The supply is so limited that people cannot afford to move up. You know, once you get into a home, you just kind of tend to stay there in California because there’s no opportunity to move up because there’s no new housing because the only if, if you wanna move up there are incredible regulations around the possibility you’re gonna move up in a more expensive home. Cause there just aren’t a lot of those being built. So people don’t move up. That means there’s no bottom rung of the ladder for people to move into. So they end up on the street. The O another good example is that because of environmental regulations, we’ve decided that we’re going to eliminate oil or any kind of fossil fuels, so that the price of our electricity, our gasoline is the highest in the nation.
Will Swaim:
We play on average, almost a dollar and a half more than everybody else in the country for gasoline. Now the progressives come out and say, well, this is just big oil. And what is this mystery surcharge they’re making on all of us Californians? There’s no mystery. The fact is, is that dollar 50 difference is state taxes and regulations that are designed to price oil out of California. We also sit on one of the largest natural gas deposits on the globe, but we’re not really allowed to, to tap that anymore because it’s dirty and it will cause global warming. So in order to signal our virtue on the climate change issue, we have taxed gasoline electricity, any kind of oil based carbon based sort of fuel. We’ve taxed that at such a high rate that the rich can afford it, but the middle class will struggle with it.
Will Swaim:
I just filled up my truck the other day. It would usually cost me about $80. It cost me 130. And that’s, you know, partly because of recent supply chain things, but those supply chain things in turn footnote are built around government regulation as well. I could talk about ports and highways and, and warehousing and why that’s a problem. But the bottom line is if you’re poor and trying to pay, what’s now about $6 per gallon for gasoline and in many places more than that that hurts you a lot. It makes the costs of getting ahead, starting a business, just getting to your job so that you can work to pay other taxes. It makes it very, very pricey indeed. So VIR, sorry, go ahead.
Joe Selvaggi:
No, no, I was gonna say the I have read that, of course, California has the highest cost of living second, only to Hawaii. So we’re not quite there yet, but you can see how perhaps well intentioned environmental or you know, whatever progressive causes there may be. The end result is a, a crushing burden on the people who can least afford to, to to spend money. You also, you, you mentioned your truck. I have friends who probably drive around in Tesla and say you know, high gas prices don’t affect me, but I say, well, how does everything you buy every tomato in the store? And every, every item on the shelf, how does that get to that store? And it’s either gas or diesel, which is particularly expensive. It, it all flows into perhaps well meaning, but ill, ill targeted taxes.
Will Swaim:
Well, and, and you raised the issue of Tesla’s. And of course, Tesla is built in California by Elon Musks company and Elon Musk no longer lives here. He now lives in Texas, right? Why? Because he was constantly having to go to battle with state regulators over his ability to build a car, build rocket ships or whatever. And the big joke out here is that those of us who know how electricity is generated in California, where we get it from, we don’t get it from, I don’t know, squirrels running in a little hamster wheel. We get it from oil. We get it from natural gas. That’s how we generate electricity. Our governor and our state lawmakers who are on the left, generally love to talk about clean energy. There is no clean energy. The batteries themselves that go into Tesla engines are MI are, are built in part out of lithium.
Will Swaim:
Lithium has to be mined. Now they’re talking about clean energy being mined here in California, cause we have major lithium deposits, but Teslas themselves are really interesting example of a way in which the state subsidized the purchase of Tesla automobiles with the goal of making them affordable nationwide, because California has to be a leader in all things. That’s our arrogance is that we’re telling Bostonians what to drive and we’re signaling to Midwesterners. They too ought to drive electric vehicles because they’re quote unquote clean, but they’re simply not. There is not the electric generating capacity in the United States, certainly not in California that can help harness the energy. We need to power all these Teslas aside from natural gas. So we talk constantly about clean air out here and how we’re a climate leader in, in the world, but it is truly smoke and mirrors. And I, I use smoke advisedly because all these Teslas are being fueled by coal plants in Arizona or Texas. They’re being fueled by hydro from the Northwest in Canada. We are not producing energy in California anymore. We are now a net consumer of electricity from other states.
Joe Selvaggi:
Hey, you, you make a good case. I think a future episode, we’re going to cover the fact that an electric car needs to be driven. It’s Volvo who made these calculations anywhere between 60 and 90,000 miles before it’s equal to its internal combustion counterpart, largely because of the, the greenhouse gases that are produced making the battery for the car. So drive the Tesla, but drive it a long way before you get to break even point which is an interesting thing. And of course, again, the, the, the electricity that goes into the Tesla has to be produced somehow in, in general, as you say, coal and gas are how it’s produced. So you’re just really moving the the externality from the, the, the tailpipe to the, to the coal fired plant. So let’s, let’s move away from how these policies affect the poor.
Joe Selvaggi:
I also wanna talk and I don’t wanna bury the lead here. I really wanna talk about how California has made life very difficult for, as you mentioned, the, the Elon Musks of the world, the innovators, the people that are keeping America growing wealthy employed you not long ago passed something called prop 30. I mentioned it because it was a, a tax on the top earners bringing the marginal tax rate on the top earners to 13.3% that would surprise some of us here, Massachusetts. We’re considering similar ideas in our, we have a ballot question coming up where we tack on an additional 4% above our state’s 5% income tax and 80% premium on high earners. Let’s talk about again, if you are the future and you share our progressive intuition, what has been the effect of this kind of tax on the wealthier residents of the state?
Will Swaim:
Well, the effect is probably internationally known at this point. It’s an Exodus. In fact I kind of, it’s one of those things where some high school friend of yours says he invented a word that’s now in wide use. I swear to you, I did not hear the word Exodus. I was a theologian by training. I was gonna be a priest long story, ended up in a punk band playing you know, and, and in the communist party, but in any case the, the, we, we call a, our, our database of these companies that are leaving the book of Exodus. And and what we find is that a lot of companies, a lot of entrepreneurs simply decide that they are not going to be able to compete nationally, globally, even in California, if they are tied up by the combination of tax tax regulations and just business regulations, environmental regulations.
Will Swaim:
And so they leave this has of course downstream effects as those people leave, the number of jobs begins to shrink you know, jobs that might be actually quite good, good paying jobs. So, you know, I’ve, I’ve said before that there’s almost nothing more heartbreaking in my life than the fact that I’ve had to help. Three, three of my oldest kids. I’ve got four, my three oldest have packed up and moved out of the state to go find cheaper places to live, where there’s more opportunity. So these are kids who are college educated might have expected to go right into work right here in our own neighborhood, but could not because the job market is shrinking and they found they could make more pay less and live elsewhere. And that hacks right at the roots of middle class community, as much as it does, you know, poor communities, because you’re, my social security is really my kids.
Will Swaim:
Like I am like a an 18th century peasant farmer somewhere, right. I, I had as many kids as I could, so they could support me in my old age. And instead they’re off trying to find their futures elsewhere, and I will make an historical moment note here to say that you know, when I was doing my research on new England and the revolution, one of the things I noticed about Massachusetts was that a great source of political destabilization in new England, even in the colonial era was villages growing almost like Maslow’s model here. Now it wasn’t Maslow. I’m blanking, sorry. The economist will come to me. But the idea that you move out to your most marginal lands, eventually population grows in a little village, and then you move out a little farther and a little farther and soon you’re in forests and rocks.
Will Swaim:
And then your kids have to move out to some other place where the land is more fertile, but, and you break down family security, if you will, in that sense, that kind of family, social security network, well, the same thing’s happening here in California, just in modern terms, our kids cannot afford to buy a home here. And most of us are trying just desperately to keep up with our taxes, which as you point out are among the highest in the nation and getting higher you point out that we’re now in the 13%, 13.3% range, there’s a new bill floating through that would Jack that up another 3% on top income earners. The ex the, and the language that that is being used is it’s about fairness. It’s about making sure the rich pay, their fair share 150,000 taxpayers in California, 150,000 taxpayers pay more than 50% of all income tax revenue in California, 150,000 people, that’s it out of 42 million or so people. So we are beginning to chisel away at that group who will either decide to suck it up and stay here. Cause the weather is great and they generally like, I don’t know, Yosemite or the beach or whatever. But for a lot of the rest of us, there’s, there’s a tipping point.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yeah, indeed. We band bandy around the idea of a fair share, no one has ever given me a sense of where that natural limit of fair share ends. It’s always a directional thing. It’s a, a vector going into infinity. Our listeners have heard of, of course the high profile, you mentioned Elon musky packed it in and said, you know, look, I’m, I’m not staying around. Your book of Exodus I think is wonderful. It’s a wonderful title. And it’s it’s reference to the, the Bible and and escape from enslavement. Is it entirely appropriate? Can you name some of the other, let’s say household names that have left California and, and where are they going? Are they just sort of randomly moving somewhere else in the, in the state in the country or do you see a pattern of where they’re moving from and going to,
Will Swaim:
Yeah, there’s a pattern and I would love to have on the, on your show at some point, the guy who compiles the book of Exodus for us, a guy named Brandon Roff. And what Brandon would tell you is that by and large companies seem to prefer to move to really three states. It’s Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Interestingly, a lot of, a lot of Californians find living in Nashville, just sort of ideal or in thereabouts. Texas is the big winner. Texas has signs up here that are, they used to have signs up here. I was talking to a friend of mine at Texas public policy foundation. He says they don’t even need to put up signs anymore. Everybody in California knows how to get to Texas now. But you know, some of the higher, it it’s a lot of the tech firms get the, the big names like talent here.
Will Swaim:
The is a big investment tech tech investment firm. They moved to Denver. A lot of the apparel companies followed suit. I wanna say it was north face that also moved to Denver. So, you know, the, the, and, and then MEA just moved MEA, which is apparent company of Facebook just announced. They’re moving to Austin, they’re building, you know, some massive skyscraper there. You might say that our loss is Austin’s gain, but a lot of these companies are bringing their politics with them. Musk will bring his peculiar idiosyncratic blend of kind of libertarian and progressive policies, I think to Texas more libertarian than, than progressive in the conventional sense. But it’s really a lot of the smaller firms that nobody has ever heard of that have perhaps, you know, 50, a hundred, 200 employees, and they’re really kind of poised for takeoff.
Will Swaim:
You can see the engines firing up. The companies are getting big and they’re starting to look around at the price of expansion here in California, and they either leave their headquarters here, but open up new operations elsewhere, or they just move everything out. I had a couple of examples that I, I haven’t even been able to share with our radio free California listeners here for you. The, this is just a, a recent sampling. Here’s a company that I had not heard of Kraken. It’s a crypto company, cryptocurrency company based in San Francisco. They say they’re moving out. Because San Francisco is no longer safe. They are moving to Texas. They, they took a crack at, I mentioned this guy cha boudin the district attorney in San Francisco. They mentioned him by name on their way out the door saying, look, it’s not safe for our employees here anymore.
Will Swaim:
So Cracken, they’re out a small beverage company here in I’m in orange county, which is halfway between LA and San Diego. It’s more famous perhaps as the home of Disneyland. The other Disney world and this beverage company in Santa Ana with just 50 people, they do flavorings for major beverage producers, and they anticipate huge growth. I was talking to somebody over there and they said like, look, man, we just started looking around at the cost of adding additional employees and where that would put us under certain metrics for healthcare in California for housing, the ability to attract high end technicians to work in this company that does flavors. And they decided not, not possible here in California, they just announced they’re moving to Austin. One of my favorite stories is a Vietnamese car maker that wants to build electric cars naturally settled in LA county thinking, well, you know, California, that’s Tesla, that’s electric cars. They built their headquarters here that looked around and decided they were moving their factory to North Carolina. So they may keep their headquarters here, but they’re moving to North Carolina where they believe they will hire 7,500 people to work in a, an electric car factory.
Joe Selvaggi:
So will I just these are great examples. I, I wanna quote one of my favorite Californians your former governor, Ronald Reagan. He once said that had the pilgrims, I dunno if this is an apocryphal story, an actual quotation, he said, if had the pilgrims landed in California, the east coast would still be a wilderness. In other words, it’s so beautiful that why would anyone leave to go elsewhere? Certainly to the cold new England winters? I, I don’t think they would. Why are these firms leaping beautiful California for places like nothing against Texas and Nevada, but I can’t imagine they offer the same sheer natural beauty that California is. What is, what is the common pattern among those states where they, where they seem to be going
Will Swaim:
Well, this is the, the terrible irony for those companies that are progressive. And let’s just take a look. And I mean, in their politics, take a look at the meta slash Facebook and mark Zuckerberg. They’re moving ironically to go exploit the kinds of opportunities in Texas, the low regulation, the low tax environment, relatively low tax environment, the lower cost, the living they’re moving for all of the things that they themselves have helped destroy here in California, right? They, mark Zuckerberg is a notoriously famous for supporting virtually every tax hike in California. So long as it’s associated with the claim that it will help the poor. When, of course you and I both have already discussed, it does not taxes, you know, the rich don’t pay taxes. They, if they own a business, they simply pass it on to their consumers, right? So we all end up paying more for that. So they’re moving to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada Colorado, even, which is a blue state, but they, you know, primarily to Texas and they’re moving there because they can achieve real competitive advantages in a lower tax better rate. And I would argue a better, generally more business friendly kind of environment.
Joe Selvaggi:
Now I can hear the tension in our say more progressive listeners saying, well, listen, you know, as they like to say, taxes are the price we pay for you know, civilization, right? For better society. So again, we’ve got 42 million people a 3 trillion economy and the highest taxes tax rate in the country. That’s a lot of money slash slash around. And as you say, it’s largely attributable to the power of public unions. Those are the teachers and the, and the policemen and all those people who help keep us educated and safe. So therefore our listeners who are more progressive must be eager to hear if that money is actually having the intended effect. In other words, all the money going to schools and policemen or whatever. Do you have better schools in California? Again, we, that’s important to us here, Massachusetts. We’re all about education here. How do, how is that faring in California?
Will Swaim:
<Laugh> I feel like you’ve just set the softball on thet for me. <Laugh> California’s public education, K12 results are, gosh, the only word that pops into my brain immediately executable terrible Fe equally inclined. We have in our state about 90% of our kids cannot do math at grade level in K12. About 70% cannot do perform English at grade level. Put that another way. 30% of our kids are performing at grade level, 30% K12 kids performing at grade level in English and 10% on math. Parents typically have begun to flee neighborhoods where the schools are no really bad for places where those schools are less bad. But there’s simply not a lot of difference really overall. I mean, you can move into a very rich, rich neighborhood where the schools, because of perhaps family foreign formation and because of family conventions around education, I come from a long line of college educated people.
Will Swaim:
There was never any question. I was gonna go to college, same for my kids. But that doesn’t always exist in poor communities. So when I hear my friends on the left and most of my friends are on the left. If I didn’t have left wing friends in California, have no friends at all that’s not entirely true. But when I hear them say like, gosh, you know, we just have to do more for the kids. I would say, well, look, our schools used to be our public schools used to be among the best in the nation, right there with Massachusetts right there with Iowa. And now they’re among the worst. We are down near Mississippi levels and no offense to my friends in Mississippi. I don’t have any friends in Mississippi. That’s not this. I just haven’t met them yet, but our schools are now among the worst in the nation.
Will Swaim:
A recent report came out from I believe it was a world health organization. I could be wrong about that. It was a, a global report that showed that California is the least literate state in the nation. That is partly owing the fact that we have a school system that isn’t worthy of the name. It’s neither systematic except in producing basically almost producing illiteracy. So the money that goes into these schools is trapped by the government unions, which do not insist on merit pay for teachers, which do not allow for competition. There’s, there’s no choice in California in education. If you’re trapped in a lousy school, in a poor community, you get to go there because that’s the school that’s indicated by your address, you zip code, you are trapped in that school and trying to transfer to a better, better school in a different community is almost impossible.
Will Swaim:
In fact, it’s illegal under most circumstances. So trying to help the poor by pouring more cash into this system is not only ineffective. We already spend more per student in California to educate our kids than any other state in the country. We spend north of $21,000 per year on kids. And that doesn’t even include all the full costs of the bond debt that is required to build the schools and maintain them for these kids. So it’s not a spending problem. It’s an execution problem. And the execution of good education is been in the hands for 40 years. As I mentioned since the late seventies and the teacher’s union and the teacher’s union has as any monopoly, does it has no incentive to produce better education. It gets paid the same. Our teachers do, whether the results are good or bad, there’s no merit pay.
Will Swaim:
There’s no a sense that if we have a financial downturn that we really ought to start grading the teachers, because we’re told by the union, you can’t grade teachers, that’s just insane. Say the people who grade our kids every single day. So you, you mentioned that, you know our, our progressive and liberal friends might say, well, you know, it’s just the cost of, of living in a great state. We, we joke out here, we only pay for the weather. That’s the only thing we’re really paying for because otherwise our public services are not that fantastic. And in fact, they’re, they’re kind of, legendarily bad back in the day when I was traveling in Massachusetts a lot more. I remember you guys had this big controversial, I think it was called the big dig. It was a big project in Boston.
Joe Selvaggi:
Yes. It actually turned out quite well. But for a while, I was at 10 years of pain, but I think, but we’re proud of it now that it’s done.
Will Swaim:
That’s my point. You guys suffered through just 10 years of mediocrity and cost overruns and inefficiencies, and then you got a great thing. We just walk away. We just have given up, we haven’t built a reservoir in this state in 40 years and our population is almost doubled in that time. So now we have a drought and taxes that ought go to building new water infrastructure are simply sort of redeployed into other areas that are really about environment and conserving water usage. We just found out the other day that though our water costs are soaring. We’re going to get 5% of the water that we got last year, 5%. My wife and I are now talking about showering out front in underpants so that we can water our modest drought resistant garden and clean ourselves which is great in the spring and summer, but not so good in the winter. So, you know, we, we simply pay a lot of taxes and then we watch this money disappear and it disappears into places like our unfunded retirement programs for the underfunded retirement programs for government workers. We owe in this state all told about 1.7 trillion on borrowed money that has not gone into capital projects. It’s gone into operating expenses and trying to pay forward things like post you know post-employment retirement healthcare and pensions for public employees.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. Well I think yours is an example of how well, in our state we’re, we’re considering ballot measure where we might add another 4% to our, our state’s income tax. And we’ve been promised that money will go to teaching and infrastructure into education. But as you say, it’s a promise to take the money. It may even be a promise to spend the money. It’s no promise that we’re gonna get results. And that’s even a, I, I I’ll, I’ll brag that our our tax revenue here Massachusetts 2 billion over what was estimated, and we have a 4.2 billion surplus. So despite our our prosperity and sloshing in money still some will advocate for yet more taxes. Now we’re running out of time. So I wanna share with our listeners less, they think that you’re a diehard desk pounding, conservative from, from square one.
Joe Selvaggi:
I, I know only through your podcast that you started life as a man of the left. Can you share with us at least a good story of where was that moment and, and perhaps some of our listeners might might be in this exact moment in their, their near future where you say, look, I, I care about other people. I think that should make me a progressive what, what sort of opened your eyes as a man who cares about his fellow American, his fellow Californian who wants to do right by the world? What, what sort of puts you on a different track?
Will Swaim:
The short story is this. I, I became the I, I, I was in, I was on the left because I thought that that was the logical place to go if you wanted to help the poor. And I actually did literally join the communist party USA for a couple of years, found their meetings and terminable and highly theoretical and abstract, and went to work for the Catholic worker for a while. And when I say went to work, I volunteered for the Catholic worker a famously Catholic and an anarchist organization, and started to, you know, I became, then I moved right word, you might say, into the democratic party, but the democratic party as I was, you know, in my early twenties was still a much more moderate kind of party out here, but I got into journalism full time and became an investigative reporter than an editor and a publisher of a paper called O C weekly. That’s a was a sister paper of the LA weekly, the village voice in New York. Very much like your Boston, Phoenix. I don’t know. What’s become of that, how to,
Joe Selvaggi:
But yeah, we we, we actually used the globe if we wanted any progressive perspective instead,
Will Swaim:
Ah, there you go. Yeah, that’s, what’s happened out here as well. So I was the editor of this famously left wing paper, where we had a column called Commie Girl and Ask a Mexican, and that sort of thing. It was a, it was a funny and Ry and hard-hitting investigative newspaper. And in the course of looking at the investigative reporting, it became clear to me that the problem was not a problem of conservatism and business people and, you know, corporate bailouts and that sort of thing. The real problem was that government is simply like trying to use a sledge hammer to perform brain surgery. It’s just really an insufficient tool. And I started to look more skeptically at the kinds of things that you and I have already talked about here that simply pouring more money into a broken education system would make it better.
Will Swaim:
It did not, it was actually not educating the, the poor who I had, you know, really being born and, and reared as a good Catholic boy. I I’m, I’m wired to think this way that, you know, whatever my politics are, they had better be aligned with helping the least among us. And I watched as all these programs that I had, I had really back supported full-heartedly, you know, let’s tax the rich and give the money to the poor, had to filter itself through government. And if the government was run by Republicans or Democrats, it didn’t always seem to matter a lot back then. Now it matters quite a di quite a big, a great deal. But I watched, as my Republican run, orange county board of supervisors landed us in the largest at that time, municipal bankruptcy in America, it was 1994, the county of orange went bankrupt.
Will Swaim:
It was, as I say, the largest in history at that point. And certainly on the left, there is just this constant grab for more money. And if, if that amount of money doesn’t work for you, you simply ask for more, but the poor are not only always among us. They’re growing in number. We have more homeless, more poor as a percentage of our population than at any time. And our tax rates are higher than ever in California. So it was looking at all these stories of how unions really operated. And again, this is in a left wing newspaper. I’m watching, I remember famously I’ll just tell you this very quick story watched famously how friends of mine in the government union movement out here in orange county began to press against some conservatives who I ought to have hated because I was still sort of vestigial left wing.
Will Swaim:
And I watched how these union leaders just really severely misrepresented what was going on in the city, what its finances were. They claimed that, you know, we ought for example, to abandon asphalting the alleyways in the poor part of towns because, you know, that was unnecessary. We didn’t need this place to be the Taj ma hall. What we really needed was to pay our public employees more and, and it started to just fall apart for me at that point. I mean, philosophically, I was beginning to come to grips with the idea that human flourishing really requires a great deal of Liberty. There is no such thing as coerced virtue. You know, if you hold a gun to my head and make me do something virtuous, I haven’t really done a virtuous thing. I’ve tried to keep myself alive. So coercion is the enemy.
Will Swaim:
Liberty is what made America and California. Great. I am not suggesting there’s no room for regulation. I’m not an anarchist. I don’t think Somali is the model we want of war Lords and battling rich people. I do think that California is now like Gulliver and the IANS, you know, we are just tied down by myriad bonds of regulation on how you can start a business and what you need to run that business in California. So that’s, that’s roughly the story about how I was writing Damas to Damascus on a, on a donkey and got knocked on my keister and then heard the voice of God.
Joe Selvaggi:
<Laugh> wonderful. We love those roads to Damascus moment. You know, we’ve all been there. And you’re in good company. I think some of the greatest minds on the, on the right, like come to mind like Thomas, so or Thomas Fri Milton Friedman, or even Ron Reagan was a a committed Democrat a man of the left and had that, that moment where he said, wait a minute if I wanna help the poor this may not be the right path. So you’re, you’re in good company. So before we let you go, we’re at the end of our time where can our listeners find your excellent podcast and the California policy center and its good work?
Will Swaim:
Well, thanks for asking. California policy center is really simple California policy center.org and the podcast is on the national review site. So if you just go to national review magazine, you look up podcasts, it’s Radio Free California. And I do that show every week with my friend, one of our board members here an economist named Dave Bonson, who is a bicoastal guy, but born and raised out here in Southern California with an office in Newport beach and one in New York. So every week Radio Free California.
Joe Selvaggi:
Wonderful. I, I enjoy listening even though I have no connection whatsoever an amusing banter. And also I think insofar as you’ll let me make this comparison. I see California’s perhaps the the the channel Dickens here the ghost of, of Christmas yet to come the foreboding of what we might be if we don’t take the right path. I don’t know if you’ll, you’ll allow this reference to you know, Christmas Carol here. But that’s how I see
Will Swaim:
It. One of our great books and it, and, and it’s either that, or it’s a tale of two cities, right? The best of times, and the worst of times, this is a place that is practicing on us to produce a new and more perfect utopia. And it’s an utter catastrophe.
Joe Selvaggi:
Indeed. All right, well, we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. Well keep up the good work and then thank you for joining Hubwonk.
Will Swaim:
Thanks, Joe.
Joe Selvaggi:
This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoy today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us. If you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcast, catcher, if you’d like to make it easier for others to find hub won, it would be great. If you would offer a five star rating or a favorable review, if you have ideas for me or suggestions comments about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
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Artur Sousa’s Social Entrepreneurship Pays Off
/in Economic Opportunity, Featured, JobMakers /by Editorial StaffThis week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Artur Sousa, immigrant from Brazil and founder and CEO of Adopets, an online platform that simplifies the work done by shelters and improves the pet adoption experience. Adopets has over 40,000 registered users and maintains more than 300,000 adoption listings. In this week’s JobMakers, Artur describes how opportunity, capitalism, circumstance and a rescue pup successfully aligned to fuel his social entrepreneurship success; though he is keenly aware that not every immigrant shares in the American Dream.
Guest:
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Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
Denzil Mohammed:
I’m Denzil Mohammed and welcome to Jobmakers.
Denzil Mohammed:
What is social entrepreneurship? According to the us chamber of commerce, social on entrepreneurship is the process by which individuals, startups and entrepreneurs develop and fund solutions that directly address social issues. A social entrepreneur, therefore is a person who explores business opportunities that have a positive impact on their community in society or the world. For Artur Sousa, immigrant from Brazil and founder and CEO of Adopets, a pet adoption platform that simplifies the work done by shelters and improves the pet adoption experience, fixing problems and doing good in the world is his business model. Unnecessary bureaucracy in the adoption process led him to create a platform that today has more than 40,000 registered users and maintains more than 300,000 adoption listings. Artur is a problem solver and his series of businesses and technologies have proven that, but he’s keenly aware of the factors that enabled him to succeed in the United States that not every immigrant experiences, the American dream, as he says, is not always fair to everyone. He shares with us how opportunity capitalism circumstance and a rescue pet successfully aligned in this week’s Jobmakers. Artur Sousa, founder and CEO of Adopets, welcome to Jobmakers. How are you?
Artur Sousa:
I am good. Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed:
So tell me a little bit about your business. It’s very unique, right?
Artur Sousa:
I would like to think so. We chose to begin our journey within the pet adoption space. Basically we started because my wife and I decided to adopt a pet. We saw quite a few bureaucratic pieces of the adoption process that were very manual, very paper heavy at that point and we thought that we could be of help. I’ve always been involved in technology in one way or another and thought that we could maybe help out an organization that we have been working with. And once we did it, it became a little bit more of a thing and was like, well, maybe it can actually be a system that can serve in general, not just a little side project for our organization that we were supporting. And then with that in mind, Adopets was born at that point.
Artur Sousa:
Our focus really is on optimizing the adoption experience. The way we present ourselves is as a shelter animal shelter that is, but shelter efficiency platform. So we are focusing really on the flow of their visitors all the way through meeting animals, through adopting animals, submitting their interests to those animals, signing contracts, paying adoption fees and so on and so on. So it really covers the entire spectrum of the adoption process, whether it is a actual animal shelter with the animals right there in a building or a foster based rescue with animals spread around volunteer houses and so on.
Denzil Mohammed:
I see. So you’ve encountered a problem and you decided to fix it. And out of that, a perfectly beautiful business was born. And this is not your first business either, is it?
Artur Sousa:
No, it isn’t, I’ve been a little obsessed with it, fixing things. <Laugh> tell me more about that. I think if I look back and that’s not an observation that I do often, but when I look back to our business journey it has always been in that same context, what problem that annoyed me and that I thought maybe I could fix and that I had a specific type of passion for the outcome. So if I look at the very, very first one when we were working, I was working with a nonprofit, a very large, no profit in Brazil and the way we were project managing the projects that was very inefficient. We had a really large staff, mostly volunteers to run the operations for the organization. So I decided to optimize that through a series of process-driven platforms.
Artur Sousa:
And that very first project created a whole other universe in my mind and journey and career then because we just reduced their general staffing, 95%, but we doubled the outcome from an impact wise just by being professionally organized. And that kind of triggered me each of the social impact area of things. And I was just wanting to what if we could do something, but we have some money in return. And that makes us do even more. And then it just makes this scalable model. I didn’t know what that was, social entrepreneurship at the time, mind you, but it ended up being what, let me led me to actually, to the us to get a master’s in social entrepreneurship much later than that, but eventually was a cause.
Denzil Mohammed:
So take us back to you’ve mentioned Brazil and that’s where you were born. Paint us a picture. What was life like back in Brazil when you were growing up
Artur Sousa:
Back home? I never really spent more than a year in one place. Right? So from a financial standpoint was always moving to a new place. I had never, until college, I had never spent more than a year in the same school cuz we would move and go to a new place cuz you know mom couldn’t always afford rent and then we had to go into a new place there. You know, there are many struggles in the world and I don’t don’t think mine was the worst there could be. But it had an impact. It had an impact in which, you know, I’ve actually gotten used to never settling and always keep moving and from place to place in, in Brazil, just college, I spent in five different universities across five different states, just transferring when I would get bored and go to a new place. Cause it really gets you used to that movement. You, you get, you know, as a defense mechanism that, oh, got I’m done with this place. I gotta go to a new one. So anyway, I think at Brazil was, it’s still the place that I need to go to recharge my soul when I feel empty.
Denzil Mohammed:
Wow. That’s, that’s quite incredible. And the idea of, of constantly moving, obviously move to the US, which was a huge move. You said you did that to further your education and career. What was the experience like when you first moved here?
Artur Sousa:
It was weird at first I was very excited, but it was well, I, I didn’t have, especially with the, with the foreign exchange coming from Brazil I didn’t have all the funds that would require for comfortable stay during a masters and it was a full-time master’s degree. So it wasn’t like I could be working. I wouldn’t be able to work either away from a visa standpoint if I could. So I came with my suitcase and stayed the, for my master’s at first was really weird to not fully understand the language. I had gotten enough that I had the, the grades for qualification from an English standpoint, but because I studied very, very hard, not because I actually had mastered the language. So at first a lot of the things in classes, I would understand a lot more by context because I had been working for a long time, not by the, the textbookor, or the teachers, but that lasted for a couple months. I had made a hard decision to not actually be with any Brazilian friends while in the US. So would only hang out with English to speaking once, cuz would force me to be more comfortable with the language and that really over time.
Denzil Mohammed:
I can’t imagine going to do a master’s degree without having mastered the language that you were going to do that degree in. I mean, that must have been a really, you said weird, but it must been a struggle those first few months. What motivates you most of all? Is it fixing problems and making, you know, just things easier for people
Artur Sousa:
That is one of the things I think fixing problems is just on, on my personality to point that I’m, I keep doing new things over time. Cuz once my business gets a point of stability and more, you know, bureaucratic arrangement from a corporate standpoint, it’s not for me anymore. So I like to be in the mass and fixing things. That’s one big part of my personality, but the, the other part is one Bo just a funny story. Actually, I had a boss in, in Boston that I loved and he, he was very, very good to me. And his still a good friend and he, one day he told him like that I was fundamentally unmanageable. I really like, and I took that as a, as a one of my biggest compliments in life. Mind you because I, I don’t, I, I like thing, I like things that I can fix. I like going and experimenting and, and getting it wrong and breaking things and I’m fixing them again and seeing the best path for it. And in that sense, I don’t always, or have never, quite frankly, fit to a box in which I would just do the predetermined things that have been assigned to me. I always go beyond and, and entrepreneurship is the best place for that.
Denzil Mohammed:
So as a social entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur, talk us through the start of your current business, you mentioned that it was a bureaucratic problem that you wanted to so all, but get us into the, sort of the nuts and bolts of the Genesis of the business,
Artur Sousa:
The application process to adopt a pet varies from organization to organization, from state to state city to city. It all varies quite a bit. But it’s overall a, a time consuming paper process that relies on a lot of really loving, caring animal people that are behind those organizations, usually underpaid if paid at all helping animals that don’t always have the time to do the process in a, in the most efficient way. When you’re looking at a, an adoption individual, we might be talking about, you know, few hours off time, if you put together what the staff’s time and the adopter’s time to get the adoption concluded doesn’t sound out that much. But when you go to other organizations who have a partner, for instance, in New Zealand, that process is 40,000 adoptions a year. So if you have a couple of hours that you’re taking away from 40,000, you’re thinking 80,000 hours away just by using a system that simplifies it and takes the process to a more automatic approach of triggering communications and so on.
Artur Sousa:
You’re basically saving so much time that gives you the ability to save more animals. So that was the behind the efficiency there. What we had to focus on was like, all right, so how do we make this? From a monetization standpoint and from a scalability standpoint, a practical answer. And it took a while for the majority of the time that I was built, not majority anymore, but for the first two years of APAs, I was building that while having a job. And at that point we already had 70 members in the, in the organization, but I was still with my day job on, on, on, on the side until 2018 when I quit. And then I quit in 2018, we moved up to Maine and then my entire focus at me being on the business. And that’s when we really focused on scale.
Artur Sousa:
And I kept saying on the blessing side, cuz I believe that there’s gotta be some universe plan now there, because, you know, should the tra tragedy that pandemic was for society as a whole. If I can’t put a pin on that side for a minute, the pandemic for the business really propelled it. Because when the pandemic hit, they didn’t have a choice. They needed to go online and nobody had been doing that at all. And we were right there. We were ready to go, we were ready there. Society was not from a using digital tools for the adoption of animals. And then it caught up and then we were right in the, in the right place at the right time. And
Denzil Mohammed:
You were perfectly positioned to, to, to deal with this pandemic and the fact that everyone wanted to have pets, all of a sudden
Artur Sousa:
Fair,
Denzil Mohammed:
Give us the number what’s, what’s the impact that your businesses have has had over the years.
Artur Sousa:
Ooh. So last year alone, we had 70,000 adoptions going through the system. We are serving clients in Australia, in New Zealand, in the, in Canada and the us haven’t gone into Brazil quite yet. Still a goal. We had about at any given time, about 70 to a hundred thousand animals available for adoption through or platform in majority of the us states in there. And I will send you a note after discomplete, cuz it’s still confidential, but we are about to go into a really big change in, in the coming weeks with another partner in the, in the space,
Denzil Mohammed:
The United States is sort of inherently entrepreneurial. I mean, we it’s, it was built on that kind of spirit. And I like to say that immigrants themselves are inherently on, on entrepreneurial because they take a risk. They don’t know if it’s gonna be better or worse. They pack a suitcase, leave everything they know behind and, and start fresh in some place. New. What do you think makes the United States special when it comes to being a business owner, an entrepreneur,
Artur Sousa:
The American dream story, right? That was built as a story first. It actually is a realistic approach that can be taking it is still an unfair approach, you know, depending on your race, depending on your origins, depending on your language is not fair to all how the American dream plays out. I, I say this in a very sad way. I am white in the sense that if I don’t speak, people don’t even know that I’m a foreign. They don’t even guess that I’m a foreigner and it’s a horrible thing, but that plays out in the us plays out positively because of how the society is, why around the us. So I had many opportunities that came because I wasn’t really facing a biased approach prior to it. I had to make some changes. We were just joking before the call about that, but I would never send an email as Artur.
Artur Sousa:
I would always send an email as Arthur, but putting all of that aside, there is an opportunity. There is an opportunity where entrepreneurship is actually highly glorified in the US, that taking risks is actually a mundane thing. It’s not a, this when you’re born in a Catholic country, heavily Catholic country is, you know, we wanna have that little routine and you have the most stable job and the things. And the west is not so much about that as I believe some of the Hispanic countries or Latino countries like my own culturally and we are all about that pursuing the dream and that’s powerful whether or not we get to realize it, whether or not it gets materialized for most people is that source of the debate. And we can talk about that forever, but the pursuit of the dream really drives people.
Artur Sousa:
The idea of coming here and giving her all because of that really well told American dream story actually gets you. Places is very little of, because of the American dream, but a lot more because of your effort, in my opinion, and because you are pursuing it, you’re pursuing the idea of it. So you’re building your dream, not necessarily because the society is built out in a way that helps you get there. Cause let’s be honest, it doesn’t right finding funding depending on your color, depending on your race, depending where you’re from. It is very different now if you are, and I’m sorry if I’m being too direct about this then. So but if you are, you know, a white kid that graduated at MIT, you get funding like this, you get funding with an idea before getting anything. Now, if you are a Latino entrepreneur or an African up origin entrepreneur or a black entrepreneur you actually get, or even middle eastern entrepreneurs too, like you have a lot more hoops to navigate through.
Artur Sousa:
There are many funds that have been popping out. There are more focused on diversity and other things, but that’s still a minority consider compared to other venture capital funds and other things. So the, the, the pursuit has to be what driving you, because it’s not really the, the context that is getting you there is you really not dropping it, not giving up on it. And I think in immigrants in general are very good at that because they already gave up all they knew coming here. So there is no choice. There is no going back at that point, you’re just is either make it or make it
Denzil Mohammed:
There’s, there’s no safety net. There’s nothing to fall back on there. You don’t have your parents house to, to crash in. If, if you enter a bad patch, you just, you have to make it work. What, regardless of, of what you encounter. And I really appreciate the very nuanced and detailed way you painted the pursuit of the American dream and how it’s different for different people. A lot of people like to ignore that these facts, that it is harder for some people based on very superficial things. I wanna pull it back a little a bit. We did some research in the greater Boston area and found that Brazilian immigrants from Brazil had the highest rate of self-employment up to 27% of Brazilians in greater greater Boston said they were self-employed. This is incorporated and not incorporated businesses were what’s. What is with that? What is, what is it about Brazilians and starting businesses?
Artur Sousa:
When I think about Latino entrepreneurs in general, not just Brazilian, we usually are talking about really resourceful people that, that really make things happen, you know, in a McGuyver way before they are there. And you’re just improvising and, and getting it there because of your drive. I think Latinos are very driven people generally on, on being better to their families, to themselves.
Denzil Mohammed:
I am happy that you are here in the us. I’m happy that you are making positive changes. I’m happy that you are creating jobs. You’re currently employed 33 people and to date you’ve hundreds. So you are a job creator. You are an indispensable member of our community, and thank you for creating jobs and, and being innovative.
Artur Sousa:
Very kind of you. And thank you for having me here. Thank you for the work you do on bringing you know, immigrants to the spotlight. So we all are more comfortable with the contributions that immigrants build in this, in the country and how much we are actually a country of immigrants all together, building this together.
Denzil Mohammed:
Artur Sousa, founder, CEO of Adopets thank you so much for joining us on the Jobmakers podcast.
Artur Sousa:
Thank you for having me. And if I can be of any help turn anyone out there, let me know.
Denzil Mohammed:
Jobmakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants of voice. Thank you for joining us for this week’s powerful story of immigrant entrepreneurship. Remember, you can subscribe to Jobmakers on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a rating and a review I’m Denzil Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another Jobmakers.
Recent Episodes:
Hoover at Stanford’s Dr. Eric Hanushek on NAEP, PISA, International Comparisons in Education
/in Academic Standards, Featured, Podcast /by Editorial StaffThis week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Dr. Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Dr. Hanushek shares how he first became interested in the economics of education, his plans for the nearly $4 million in funding from the prestigious Yidan Prize, which he received in 2021, and where he sees the greatest need for additional research in education. He shares findings from a recent Hoover Education Summit panel, focusing on educational performance among high- and low-performing countries, and how the U.S. compares on global measures. They explore why U.S. reading and math results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained flat, despite $800 billion spent annually, and the impact of persistent achievement gaps on individual social mobility and global competitiveness. They discuss his February study on some of the ways parents influence the “intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills,” and how this impacts the lifetime outcomes of children and K-12 education policymaking.
Stories of the Week: In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a sweeping change designed to standardize and streamline the funding formula for the state’s K-12 education system. National polling from NPR and Ipsos finds high rates of parent satisfaction with their children’s schooling, despite contentious K-12 culture wars.
The next episode will air on Weds., May 11th, with Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of The New York Times best-selling book, The World According to Star Wars.
Guest:
Dr. Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. In 2021, Dr. Hanushek received the Yidan Prize for Education Research and he is the author of numerous widely-cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. His recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth summarizes his research establishing the close links between countries’ long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. Ongoing research focuses on international variations in student performance and considers what differences in schooling systems lead to country-differences in the skills of people. He has authored or edited twenty-four books along with over 250 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tweet of the Week:
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Tennessee Governor Signs New K-12 Funding Formula Into Law
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/tennessee/articles/2022-05-02/tennessee-governor-signs-new-k-12-funding-formula-into-law
The education culture war is raging. But for most parents, it’s background noise
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/29/1094782769/parent-poll-school-culture-wars?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews
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Read a Transcript of This Episode
Please excuse typos.
[00:00:00] GR: Listeners. This is Gerard Robinson from beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome to another soon to be wonderful episode of The Learning Curve, you know, that we bring together great guests every week to talk about education, social policy history, the classics, all kinds of subjects. And of course, none of this would be [00:01:00] possible or even fun without my Cara.
[00:01:05] Cara: I’m here and I’m so much fun all the time. Ask my kids every day,
[00:01:12] every single
[00:01:12] Cara: day. No I’m doing well. I know we’ve got a lot of great stories this week and in a great guest and the sun is shining, which it rarely does at this time of year in Boston. So all
[00:01:24] GR: good. All is good. Well, kick us off with.
[00:01:29] Cara: Oh, well, actually my story in my mind falls in the all is good category direct.
[00:01:35] I want to actually, before I get my story, I want to ask you a question just for our listeners direct. Do you think if you and I were chatting, I don’t know, dinner table politics, would we agree on everything?
[00:01:49] GR: No, no,
[00:01:51] just shocking.
[00:01:53] Cara: We did, we had some things, right. But like, I have a difference of opinion.
[00:01:57] Maybe I lean a little bit, one way and you leaned a [00:02:00] little bit the other, but we’re still friends. Yeah, exactly. We still get along. don’t fight. We don’t hate each other. Don’t try and pass me laws to keep me out of your house, stuff like that. Well, okay. So, there’s this NPR Ipsos poll out so the title of the article, it was actually from the NPR website is, parents aren’t really tuned in to the culture wars.
[00:02:26] Headline was just music to my ears, my friend, because let me tell you something. We’ve talked about it on this podcast. We have been thinking about what it means that our country it’s. We seem to be in this place where people can’t talk to each other. If you listen, you read social media. If you listen to the news, it feels like people just can’t figure out how to get along.
[00:02:50] I’ve always felt that in my personal relationships, I happened to be, I know that this goes against the grain, but I happen to be a person [00:03:00] who doesn’t always vote the same way her close friends do. It’s amazing. And I still go out with them and have a beer or a glass of juice they’ll get along in sometimes here’s the most shocking thing.
[00:03:17] Sometimes I learn things and sometimes I even changed my opinion. I learned things from my friends. So I loved hearing that to most parents, these culture wars that we’ve been talking about and thinking about in education are according to this poll, basically background noise. And what I mean by that is parents really don’t care because parents care about what’s going on in their own school.
[00:03:41] Parents care about their kids. And yes, there is some number of points. Who are dissatisfied with some of the things going on in their kid’s school, but it’s certainly not most parents as some would have us to believe. So I want to just run through this really, really quick. And there are [00:04:00] some things that were really surprising to me.
[00:04:02] The first one, this one was not surprising is because this is like a traditional American pastime saying I think there are problems with the education system in this country, but nothing’s wrong in my backyard. My school is okay. Decade after decade. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is I think it doesn’t actually capture some of the parents that no that their schools aren’t.
[00:04:21] Okay. And we can talk about some of the things that are going on here in Boston with a school just recently actually closed because there was a investigation that revealed long-term sexual abuse among other things going on in the school. That’s another. but that, I think what this is reflective of is that when parents answer.
[00:04:40] They’re likely thinking about their school in terms of the people they interface with, such as their teachers and parents generally. might not love every teacher, but they have a lot of empathy for teachers because parents are parents and they know what their kids are like. So let’s just leave that there.
[00:04:54] But the other thing that I found really interesting is that most parents in this poll [00:05:00] say that they actually feel well-informed about the curriculum at their children’s school. And so I think part of what we’ve been hearing from both the right and the left is. parents have no idea what’s going on in the classroom.
[00:05:11] You don’t know what’s being taught in your schools. Well, that might be true to some extent, and you don’t know it. Every utterance teachers say, but this poll shows that most parents think that they have a pretty good grasp on, the basic things that are being taught in their kids’ school.
[00:05:25] And that’s probably because, schools and teachers talk to them for the most part, they could probably do more of that, but also they talk to their children. so I just thought this article. Was really interesting and make big take here. Oh, actually, let me tell you the third thing. There was a striking lack of partisanship in this poll, according to NPR.
[00:05:47] And so what they said was like, there, wasn’t a way in which you could see answers reliably break down among people who identify as red or blue, the only outliers where. Did not identify themselves as [00:06:00] Democrat or Republican, rather, they identified themselves as cultural conservatives. And so I thought that that was really interesting because I think that, you pushed back on me here, Gerard, but I think that a lot of the culture wars are certainly being led by cultural conservatives.
[00:06:16] And the question is. Are they getting disproportionate airtime maybe. Yes. Maybe no, you might tell me no, I don’t know. but my, big take on this is this I’m personally heartened to hear that to most parents, this is background noise. I wish that to most policymakers it would, for the most part, be background noise for this reason in this country.
[00:06:38] If we look at Nathan’s. Most kids still can’t read on grade level in this country. If we look at NAPE results, most kids still can’t be math at grade. Yeah, actually that we can fight all we want about what should be taught in history class. But, I would be surprised if most Americans can even name more than like three presidents including the [00:07:00] sitting.
[00:07:00] Right. I think that we need to be happy. Conversations about teaching and learning. And I think that the other thing we need to do, and nobody will be surprised by this, even if you are surprised by my politics and that I can say this being a person who leans blue, if we had more choice in this country, parents might actually be able to choose schools that are more aligned with their cultural views and values.
[00:07:25] While also I hope teaching a high quality curriculum, right? So if I am a person of a certain. Why shouldn’t I be able to go to a school that is lined with that faith, that mission, that vision, that value, instead of thinking all the time that public schools need to be everything to everyone, which by the way is impossible.
[00:07:46] So, I don’t know, Gerard that’s where I’m at. I might’ve said a lot in there that feels objectionable to you.
[00:07:52] GR: I want to hear. Well, first of all, I’m glad you started off with the culture war perspective, partly because [00:08:00] the founder of the Institute for advanced studies and culture where I’ve been fellow at the university of Virginia is Dr.
[00:08:06] James Hunter. And in 1891, he published a book called culture wars. And part of the subtitle includes the word education, and he talked about families and schools and parents. And so when you think about Paul, you just mentioned, and how families are. He was talking about that, going back to 1991. So I would recommend our listeners to take a look at culture wars and his follow-up book of the death of character.
[00:08:30] you and I both like polls. it gives us insight into the lives of regular people. And so as I hear what you said, I think about five Delta. they’ve been polling families about schools going back to 1969 in a study they published in the last year. the identify some of the same things you mentioned, about families saying, you know what I think my kid’s school is doing well, but I think we need to spend, for example, more money.
[00:08:58] And when you ask families, how [00:09:00] much money do you think they’re spending per student? parents usually are way. What the actual about is when you talk about school achievement at their school, how well students are learning their intellectual acumen, they’ll say they’re doing great. And yet we’ll look at Nate and identify some are doing great.
[00:09:19] Some are not. So I think a lot of it is driven by in my house, in my school with those other people’s problems. So I like that you’ve mentioned that in terms of the red, a blue it’s heartening to hear that there’s a. maybe a few coming from a study like this, where parents are saying some of that is background noise.
[00:09:39] I’m just interested in what’s going on in my school. do think you’re right. That some of the normal. It’s coming from what I call the mouse with the loudest mic. And some of that in fact, is coming from cultural conservatives. we see that in critical race theory, which I’ve addressed as Republican mates recommendations to members of my own party, in a.[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Uh, sometime last year. but I also think it’s the cultural progressive and a cultural liberals who are also doing the same thing on the other side. And I think the leak from the Supreme court of where the court may lean in the upcoming decision about a board sheet is just one example. So I do think there are more parents, , in the middle, both blue and right.
[00:10:24] Just aren’t the ones we’re often hearing from, even in Virginia, where there’s a cultural war right now. And I don’t know CRT, but I’ll tell about certain books that we should look at the role of parents and families. When you look at Northern Virginia and you look at, Thomas Jefferson high school, which in fact, I believe it was last week or the week before where you identified.
[00:10:43] schools in the country, Thomas Jefferson is considered the top public school. It’s a school with diversity, both economic ratio, ethnic, , not as much Hispanic and black as somewhere. But then they changed the rules to try to do what I often say is colored cold classrooms to [00:11:00] make people feel good about racial democracy on the left and the right in the middle.
[00:11:05] Some people are going to get things right or wrong. So in that that’s a great story. I don’t think there’s much that you and I disagree on this. I think, some folks on my side of the fence are getting some things right. But we often don’t give them a chance to be heard. I think there’s some things that 1770.
[00:11:22] Unites. I think there’s some things that they add that are sensible to the debate, but because some of them are not only conservatives with black conservatives, we tend to call them uncle Toms and a Tina’s.
[00:11:33] Cara: Yeah, no, no. I want to, thank you. Because one of the things I should’ve said is that.
[00:11:39] It’s not lost on me that in an NPR piece, they would talk about cultural conservatives and leave out the, really loud, extreme voices on the left that often take the headlines as well. And I think that that. Really really important. And so, yes, cheers to the purple [00:12:00] cheers. Cheers. Cheers to the middle.
[00:12:02] We should all be able to live somewhere in there at least, have a coffee together. Yeah,
[00:12:06] GR: exactly. Well, your story about. what people think about their schools is a great segue into my story. I also think it’s a feel-good story and it’s from the volunteer state, Tennessee, governor, bill Lee had an opportunity to do something that many of his colleagues, whether they’re one or two term governors with exception of Virginia, which one term governor will probably never have a chance to do in his or her time that.
[00:12:32] Just sign legislation to change the funding formula. That’s something that he actually had a chance to do. , his commissioner, penny. Was a part of the announcement. So you and I, and our listeners know that a couple of years ago, we had university of Virginia professor of education and law, Kimberly Robinson on the show to talk about school finance.
[00:12:54] and from that conversation, she talked about the importance of school litigation, seventies, eighties, nineties, and how [00:13:00] they got us to where we are today. Well, I think that’s a good backdrop to talk about. Taking place in Tennessee. So go back to 1992, where as part of an federal, a part of a lawsuit, the state decided to create a new funding formula.
[00:13:15] And in that funding formula, they were 45 components that were put in place that you had to walk through in order to determine how much money schools were going to receive on a per pupil basis. Fast-forward to two years ago, the governor and a group of stakeholders said, listen, we’ve got to do something different because a people on the left said the funding formula is antiquated and we’ve got to change it.
[00:13:43] People on the right said, guess what? Our funding formula is antiquated and we have to change it. So at least there was bipartisan support that we needed to change the system naturally. How much money students should receive per student, how much schools should receive a course was a [00:14:00] debate, but rather than simply rely on lawmakers to do it.
[00:14:03] , the governor will, and his team were part of a much larger discussion where they went throughout the state, brought together a group of people and even participated in a statewide transparency, a consortium conversation, which also has a national roots to say, what should we do? you had people like, one of our colleagues who we know Dr.
[00:14:24] Evans for our 50 candidates to see who, in fact last fall, when I was in Nashville, was talking to me about this issue. So shout out to Victor, for his work, but people said we’ve got to do something different. So after all the things, that go into politics take place, here’s what you have. You had a 26 to five vote in this.
[00:14:43] to move it forward. It was a 63 to 24 vote in the house. It wasn’t strictly on party lines. Although we know that it’s a strong red state, six Republicans that actually voted against it as did five Democrats, with the new law, they’re going to move away. [00:15:00] From the 45 components as we know it today, it was basically called the basic education program.
[00:15:06] The legislation that he signed is called the Tennessee investment in student achievement. I like the fact that he used the word in investment because when you hear investment in at least symbolically means accountability. It also means removing students and schools up from being solely a receiver of.
[00:15:24] But an active player in the investment and articulation of moving forward and a focus on student achievement. , there’s a debate about what schools are for, well, guess what student achievement is part of it. the state’s going to invest $6,860, per student. some people think that it’s too low.
[00:15:41] Some people think it’s about right, but it’s where they’re going to move So with this legislation, Tennessee is going to join at least 33 states and the district of Columbia that use a student based formula, prior to this law, Tennessee was not a part of that.
[00:15:59] [00:16:00] neither is Massachusetts. So they’re moving toward that. Number two is going to add an additional $9 billion in state and local funds to schools. So I think that’s a move in the right direction. And third is going to give lawmakers, parents, teachers, and educators, more insight into exactly how much funding is going into schools.
[00:16:21] Now, naturally, we have legitimate questions. Students of color students in low and under resource areas where students with disabilities? Well, I had a chance to take a look at data from the department of education and the identify that per pupil spending before this law for students with disabilities are range as low as 36.
[00:16:41] So as much as seven. And so even without this law, we know that certain students need money. So I think it’s a step in the right direction. Our congratulations to the commissioner, the governor and the legislature moving away from one system. it’s been in place for 30, 40 years to a new system.[00:17:00]
[00:17:00] Some of those, of course funding models won’t kick in for another year, but it’s a good feel-good story. And according to data for the national association of state budget officers, who’ve identified at least 27 states in fiscal year 21, had a higher percentage of its money going to K-12 and higher education than other categories.
[00:17:20] Second often being in Medicaid, and Tennessee not being one. This is a step in the right direction, but want to get your.
[00:17:27] Cara: say so happy for Tennessee. I think this is huge and I have to get selfish for just a second and say that my great colleague, Matthew, Joseph. spent a lot of time helping things this through and helping folks on the ground understand why student centered funding is so important and how it could work and how it’s going to really benefit the state in the long run.
[00:17:49] Like you said, it is an investment. I think that our upcoming guests, Dr. Eric Hanushek, Very very well-equipped to talk to us about why education is an [00:18:00] investment on which you can see a sizable return if you do it. Right. I think this is game changing for Tennessee. Very proud. I wish that, the Commonwealth would listen.
[00:18:08] I mean, look, the thing is, is that a lot of times states they, the distinguished, Dr. Kimberly Robinson has told us, states will think about a funding formula and then think it’s good for 25 years or 30 years, or, and not, not, use all the tools that they should to assess the extent to which it’s working and for whom it’s working, et cetera.
[00:18:28] I think this is really important. might I also add that a system of student-centered funding it’s good for everyone, and it’s also good for people. Because what it means is that technically, , we should work towards a system where, and I’m not even just talking public versus private, just within public systems alone, where kids should be able to get the money they need for their education.
[00:18:55] in whatever school they choose in a student centered funding [00:19:00] formula is the first big step in that direction. So I love this story. Look at us through our two. Rather feel good stories this week. I think we should just give ourselves, we’re just all sunshine and rainbows
[00:19:11] GR: today. Well, this is an example of the purple people with the.
[00:19:20] Legitimately. I love that. That’s wonderful.
[00:19:22] Cara: All right, you right. As I said, our next guest is going to be with us in just a moment, Dr. Eric Hanushek. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow at the Hoover institution of Stanford university and, most folks who already sort of the go-to person on economic analysis of educational issues.
[00:19:42] we are going to be speaking with him right after this.[00:20:00]
[00:20:29] Learning curve listeners today. We’re very pleased to have with us, Dr. Eric Hanushek. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover institution of Stanford university. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had brought influence on education policy in both developed and developing.
[00:20:49] In 2021, Dr. Hanushek received the Yidan prize for education research, and he is the author of numerous, widely cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, [00:21:00] school, accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics, his recent book, the knowledge capital of nations education and the economics of growth summarizes his research, establishing the closest.
[00:21:12] Between countries, long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. Ongoing research focuses on international variations in student performance and considers what differences in schooling systems lead to country differences in the skills of people he has authored or edited 24 books along with over 250 articles.
[00:21:34] He is a distinguished graduate of the United States air force academy and completed his PhD. At the Massachusetts Institute of technology, Dr. Hanushek, welcome to The Learning Curve. Wow. thanks for being with us. I know I have read a lot of your work, and I think a lot of our listeners have too.
[00:21:53] And one of the things I appreciate so much about it is that it is something that, even those of us who are [00:22:00] not economist can comprehend. So we were talking at the outset of the show about, changes that states can make, , to recognize greater return on investment in education. And we’re just, we’re really excited to have you to talk through these issues with us.
[00:22:16] first of all, congratulations, I should say on winning Yidan prize, which is also known as education’s Nobel prize. and that was for your work on strengthening the bridge between. And education. Can you share with our listeners a little bit about first of all, how did you even come to the study of the economics of education very specifically?
[00:22:39] And what was it like to win this award?
[00:22:42] Eric Hanushek: Well, the first question. how did I come to study education issues? I probably shouldn’t admit as an economist. This was not the, end result of a rational process of planning my future. That it was more accident.[00:23:00] when I was in graduate school at MIT and I finished the coursework and was looking around for a thesis topic, the Coleman report on education came out and that was the first major study of achievement of different kids and underlying factors.
[00:23:19] It was named after its main author, James Coleman. But. the study was called equality of educational opportunity, and it was really designed to look at what differences there were largely by race, but income and regions and so forth in education. And I think is part of the civil rights act of 1964.
[00:23:42] It was designed to beat up a little bit. The states of the old Confederacy and show that things were very good in the old Confederacy. Well, Coleman did something very surprising. , this was 1965 when he was [00:24:00] working on this, Tested 600,000 kids in the country. He found out about what their families looked like from serving the kids.
[00:24:11] And these are kids in different ages and grades. He surveyed, principals and teachers in the schools, and then he did some basic statistical analysis of what explained differences in achievement, the results, Astounded people in two ways. first no study has ever had 700 pages of analysis of variance results printed by the U S government, in the life of the union, I guess.
[00:24:42] but secondly, it seemed to say that the only thing that mattered was the. Or maybe the other kids appears in the schools and schools didn’t really make much difference in terms of achievement of kids. Well, I was sitting there, , at MIT and thought this is really a [00:25:00] crazy result. How could it be that schools aren’t important when we pay so much attention to schools, we put so much money into them.
[00:25:08] If they aren’t important, we gotta be doing something different, I guess. I had a friend who was on the economics faculty at Harvard, John Kane, who snuck me into the back of a faculty seminar, all about 75 faculty members at Harvard that were needing every two weeks. Just to figure out what this report said and how to read this report.
[00:25:35] Nobody in the room quite knew how to do it. Senator pat Moynihan, who was on the faculty at Harvard at the time, and along with Fred, Mosteller a statistician ran the seven. And so I’ve sat in the back of the room and out of that ended up doing a thesis on education and agreed with part of the Coleman report, but not all of it.
[00:25:58] And once [00:26:00] I finished the thesis, well, there were new things to do, and it’s been new things to do ever since that time. And I just keep doing new and different things. , trying to understand a little bit more about how our schooling system fits into society and affects. we can come back to any parts of that that you want, but I will respond to the second thing.
[00:26:24] What’s it like to win the Ugan prize? , I was really thrilled by it because the kind of work I do has not always been well-regarded by those, in the education system. The idea of doing. Quantitative serious analysis of schoolings and how policies affect things. Things that were outside of the classroom, was a NAFA ma to many of the people in the education business.
[00:26:54] And so I take getting this prize is some sort of, , agreement that there might [00:27:00] be something there to look at policies and how they affect our own. Yeah,
[00:27:05] Cara: that’s actually really amazing to hear you say that. Gerard and I were speaking about, , the phenomenon of many Americans just thinking of schooling as the thing that is right in front of them.
[00:27:14] Therefore, they can say that. I think there’s a big problem with education in this country, but boy, I love my kids school and I think the same with, thinking about the impact of sort of the. Amazing research that you do that looks at systems that looks at how what goes on outside of the classroom impacts, influences, our systems and what it means when those systems do or do not produce the outcomes that we need.
[00:27:38] It’s just so critical for us to push forward. so I’m curious, what is it that you plan on doing. With this $3.9 million in funding. I mean, what is it that you can do that you haven’t done already? Dr. Hinshaw? Well,
[00:27:51] Eric Hanushek: , there is a cash award that goes along with this prize and they want to support research and doing other [00:28:00] things.
[00:28:00] My initial reaction is it’s still the one I have. I haven’t quite followed through on it, but my initial reaction was that, it didn’t make sense that. Put that money into what I’d been doing. I had to do something different. What I am proposing to do is to actually try to improve education in Sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Latin America.
[00:28:24] The idea comes from the work I did on economic growth. If we look at the economic growth of countries, That’s what determines the future wellbeing. So the us is richer today than it was a hundred years ago because it’s had basically the fastest rate of economic growth for the last century of any country in the world.
[00:28:48] then you look at, , Africa or you look at Latin America and you see, well, there’s not that much richer than they were a hundred years ago. They’re a little bit richer, but [00:29:00] their economic growth has not been very fast and it hasn’t led to much prosperity. you see a few cities in each of these countries that’s doing okay, but the vast majority of these populations is.
[00:29:15] my answer to what’s going on is very simple. Economic growth depends upon the skills of the population. Countries that have more skilled labor forces grow faster. They develop new products. They figured out how to, invent new things and they end up getting the rewards in terms of increased incomes in economic growth, Africa in Latin America and south Asia also don’t have.
[00:29:48] The schooling systems that support to production of skilled workforce. And without that in simplest terms, I don’t think they’ll ever grow or ever [00:30:00] grow very rapidly. And so , the idea I’ve had is to try to find ways that we could improve the schooling in these countries. And here I have something that, , you and Gerard might agree with.
[00:30:15] I think it’s really hard for so many to come in from outside until a country or a school district or a school, what to. it really requires a lot more knowledge of the capacity of the schools that exist, the demands that are there for them and somebody who can really work to bring good ideas, but in the context of the local area.
[00:30:43] So what I want to do, is very simple. I want to. Find some people that will call fellows that we can sort of improve, add to their human capital, add to their networks internationally post within [00:31:00] the geographic region, but internationally, , so that they can bring. Good ideas about education to these countries in simplest terms.
[00:31:09] I think that we know a lot more about schooling and education than is being put in place in these countries. the answer is trying to find out ways to do.
[00:31:20] Cara: that’s really heartening to hear. I have to say my mentor, Charlie Glenn, who has, I think, as you know, done a lot in international education, he would often say folks from other countries when they would say, like, we want to learn about the American education system and I would hear him.
[00:31:35] Well, don’t take our bad ideas. I love the idea of building, networks of people on the ground who know the culture who are of the culture too, to bring good education ideas. want to really quickly ask you Dr. Henry. you note that these countries, in many cases, won’t be able to grow their economies because they need to improve their schools.
[00:31:58] one of the indicators we [00:32:00] have in school performance is of course, PISA data. So international data from the OACD. And you’ve, talked about this, much throughout your career. You recently led a discussion with Andre Schleicher from OACD. Can you frame for our listeners? just even where the U S sits terms of , how do we compare to both these countries that we know the schools are really not doing what they need to do, and those countries that have excellent systems of education?
[00:32:27] where are we at?
[00:32:28] Eric Hanushek: Well, if I answer that, let me, thank you for bringing up the topic of Piza and international tests. When I was saying, country. We’ll only grow proportionate to the skills in their population. What we found is that the international math and science test that exists of which Piza run by the, OEC D is a good example, are pretty good measures of the skills that are important for a strong economy and for [00:33:00] economic growth.
[00:33:01] Many of the, developing countries of the world don’t participate in these tests. So you have to guess at whether they know anything or have any skills, but when they do participate, you see that they are dramatically different than the more developed countries in the world, in terms of their basic knowledge of math and science.
[00:33:24] should add the footnote. The Piza test is the program for international student assessment. a test given to 15 year olds, and you can think of it as taking a math problem, translating it into the local language and sort of basically marching around the world and seeing how many kids in different countries can answer a set of.
[00:33:47] Basic math problems that turns out to be a pretty good measure of future skills that are demanded by modern economies. Now, the us [00:34:00] unfortunately is slightly below the average of the OEC D or the D is the organization for economic cooperation and development. It’s really the club of rich nations and reforming.
[00:34:14] Behind, a whole series of other, both developed and developing nations in terms of our performance on these tests. This I think is actually a, Canary in the, mine that we should pay attention to this because it says that we might in the future health problems. In the past, we’ve been able to take care of this, right?
[00:34:39] We’ve been able to take care of it by important people who have better educations from abroad and we’re all immigration of skilled labor, skilled people from around the world. live next door to me in silicone valley. As long as we can keep that going. Maybe we can make up for the fact that our schools are not doing so [00:35:00] well, but I think that that’s a real problem in the long run.
[00:35:03] And so the answer to your very simple question in a long winded way is we’re not doing so well that we’re behind a large number of developed and developing countries. it’s time to stop competing with Greece and Spain and start competing with Hong Kong or Finland or, other countries that do much better then redo on these tests.
[00:35:31] GR: And I’m going to follow up on you. Reference to the Canary in the coal mine. Cause you and I have had a chance to sit in rooms, with Dr. Paul Peterson and others. When we took a look at Piza. also there’s, you know, questions about Tims and it was always amazing how well we, as Americans start, we we’re doing, and then we compare ourselves.
[00:35:53] You say to the rich countries, it wasn’t as great. But when we look domestically, you know, we spend approximately 800 [00:36:00] billion annually. And when you look at NAPE scores in reading and math, Things aren’t that great. So with all the money we spent all the legislative changes we’ve made. Why has it been so difficult for us to improve basic student achievement?
[00:36:14] And what’s the impact here at home and on our competitiveness globally?
[00:36:19] Eric Hanushek: Well, I think the impact is huge. we are, , producing. Students that grow up, not to be competitive with those from other countries. you can see it in California, which is one of the lower ranking states. the nation on things like the NAPE test, California students are not able to compete in Silicon valley because they just don’t have the skills to lead on.
[00:36:49] , what’s wrong. Oh, we have an institutional structure that does not really reward. Good performance very much.[00:37:00] there’s some rewards. we have limits on the amount of competition and, you know, there’s fights over, charter schools largely because they offer a competition to the traditional public schools.
[00:37:14] But for the most part, we are a nation of traditional public schools where they have a local monopoly. And they keep doing things the way they always did. so we know, for example, that huge amounts of research has consistently shown that just having more experience of a teacher does not lead to more effectiveness in the class.
[00:37:39] And yet we systematically pay large premium to teachers when they get more experience. So we buy something that doesn’t relate to their effectiveness in the classroom, the same I should say. And this starts to annoy people, but the same is true for graduate education. [00:38:00] There’s a lot of work that suggests that.
[00:38:03] Just having a master’s degree does not mean that somebody is going to be more or less effective than somebody, a teacher with only a bachelor’s degree. So we have this institutional structure that is locked in a system that does not pay attention to the effectiveness of schools. we’ve got to get around that,
[00:38:23] GR: your example about California, To me personally, because I grew up in California.
[00:38:30] and I think about the fact that for the first time, since the founding of California, the population has dropped and thus resulted in the loss of a congressional seat. , another economist, colleague of mine at the American enterprise Institute, Dr. Mark Perry, has got a great article, about the number of people who are leaving California for states like Texas and Tennessee.
[00:38:51] And with that is often. Economic intellectual talent and in a state that’s becoming, or at this point, majority minority who [00:39:00] can’t even get a job, high paying job in Silicon valley, you bring in international workers. I mean, that’s a recipe for disaster, so I’m glad you talked about that. Let’s put that in perspective of the achievement gap.
[00:39:14] Our listeners hear that term a lot. It’s bantered about by governors, presidents, even investing. What is the achievement gap? What’s real. and what should concern us or what even could even give us hope about closing it?
[00:39:28] Eric Hanushek: historically we might trace things back to Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States who declared the war on poverty.
[00:39:39] An underlying strong element of the war on poverty was recognition that. Poorer families tended to produce children who would themselves live in poverty, and then themselves be poor in the future. And LBJ was concerned about. The fact [00:40:00] that there were large achievement gaps, both in a school attainment and the knowledge that kids got and so forth between families in poverty and those who weren’t in poverty and wanted to, , do something about that.
[00:40:16] Well work that, Paul Peterson and I, and some others have done. And. Tried to trace the history of gaps between, poor families and better off families. For the last 50 years, we can’t quite go back 50 years in this, but we’re looking at achievement differences. And what refine an consistent set of different achievement differences is that the achievement gap hasn’t moved maybe a slightly come down in 50 years, but, but not very much.
[00:40:49] And that persistence means that there’s going to be a persistence. Intergenerational poverty that these, [00:41:00] skills and knowledge are passed down from generation to generation. And so we have increasingly a generation of poor people. Some people escape that, but there are many that don’t that just go on from generation to generation.
[00:41:19] That is a huge issue that we can’t, keep going. I mean, that to me is not compatible with my conception of what the United States is. Insurance.
[00:41:31] GR: Absolutely. And I’ve seen both sides of the fence. I’m the first in my family to graduate from college. both of my Southern parents finished high school. I did not earn a college degree.
[00:41:43] I think about the men who were in my wedding, most of them , , , with single mom, not married and all of us now have graduate degrees. And then at the same time, families born in same situations, intergenerational poverty, just moving forward. So it’s unique [00:42:00] and the American mission. And I would say really the idea of the American dream.
[00:42:04] Some people don’t like that term. How about American optimism? there’s something there. And, um, I look forward to reading your research. To help us understand that because when you go back to Lyndon Johnson and the whole idea of the great society, and you’ve mentioned earlier, the Coleman report, there’s also the Moynihan report, uh, that talks about family structure, how much that played and a year after, , president Johnson announced a war on poverty.
[00:42:29] He also announced a year later a war on, criminals or on crime and the correlation between crime, low employment. I mean, it’s just so much of it. Goes to the conversation. Here’s really last question, for you, you’re doing joint research now to look the achievement gap. Is that the work you’re doing with Dr.
[00:42:48] Peterson and others? Or was that
[00:42:49] Eric Hanushek: something else? Oh, is it the work on your achievement gap is with Dr. Peterson?
[00:42:54] GR: Um, so it is that study.
[00:42:57] Eric Hanushek: Yeah. And right. So if you grew up in [00:43:00] California, you must have started reading with whole life. Exactly. That was one of the, examples of what California has done badly for the nation.
[00:43:10] It passes on bad ideas.
[00:43:15] GR: I understand that on many frauds, will it be in with, this question? And it goes to back to a care, asked you about how you got interested in economics now, knowing what you know today, there’s an. On Erica sitting in a PhD program at one of our public private schools across the country may have an interest in education.
[00:43:35] What words of wisdom would you share with Erica or Eric today about their work as an economist and how important it is in influencing how we think. About economic competitiveness, the achievement gap, or just prosperity?
[00:43:51] Eric Hanushek: Well, I, think there are many ways to look at, our education issues, but economics provides us structure [00:44:00] to sort of orderly put data together and try to understand some of the key.
[00:44:07] Policy relationships and key incentives that we can put into place. And so, , I guess we all support what we did think, or we did was good, but I think, getting some economics training, maybe not a PhD, but some economics training helps people to think about. What we could do better. We do know the other side of this is which I’ve also looked at, and that is that what’s the value of a strong education.
[00:44:41] And there’s where much of the work of economist has gone into, looking at the impact. What a timeless, because human capital on economic outcomes for individuals and for the nation. So, , I guess I should, proselytize for, more economists [00:45:00] in education, but I guess I’m not as hung up on that I am on finding ways from whatever.
[00:45:09] We can to improve our schooling system. I think it is the future of the country that we’re talking about. And if we wait till it’s become apparent that we’re in trouble, then it’s too late to correct in some sense. And so we have to begin now to try to put that to the.
[00:45:28] GR: No I’m with you. , it’s important to our country, , opponents of by version of school reform often say where education is nowhere in the constitution, but I have to remind both opponents and proponents that in 1787, at the same time members of our founding generation, where the Philadelphia initially arguing about the articles of Confederation.
[00:45:51] And then ditching that for constitution. There were another generation of founders in New York who passed the 1787 Northwest ordinance. And [00:46:00] in that document, is a following phrase, religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good. Good. And the happiness of mankind schools and the needs of education shall forever be encouraged.
[00:46:13] And so if we want to continue this great experiment schools and the means of education are part of it, the research that you’ve helped us as a nation think about matters. And I thank you so much again for joining us today.
[00:46:25] Eric Hanushek: Sure. You did it again. You did so much better than I did in expressing these views.
[00:46:31] that’s a wonderful way to end. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hanushek. [00:47:00] [00:48:00]
[00:48:36] GR: The tweet of the week comes from Bangor daily news and Maine it’s from may. Second advocates prepare for Supreme court. Turn mains religious school funding ban, and the Bangor daily news says, but money won’t start flowing to Catholic and evangelical schools without changes to other state laws. We’ve , discussed the main case here [00:49:00] on learning.
[00:49:01] And let me give a thank you for Bangor daily news for the tweet of the week.
[00:49:06] Cara: Yeah. Well, we’re all watching and we’ll, I’ll be working to get those other state laws where they need to be so about. So the kids could go to school where they need to, hello, Maine. Happy to come up there anytime. beautiful Gerard.
[00:49:21] We are going to be back together again next week. And we will be with Cass Sunstein. He is the Robert Walmsley university professor at Harvard law school and the author of the New York times bestselling book, the world, according to star wars, did you watch star wars. As
[00:49:36] a kid,
[00:49:37] GR: you’re going to laugh. I am one of the few people on the planet.
[00:49:41] Never seen one. Okay. One will be a
[00:49:45] star wars. All right. So that’s a deal breaker here. We’re okay. We can, get along. Here’s the
[00:49:54] GR: break? Yeah, I’ve never seen one movie.
[00:49:57] w.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] GR: No, no they’ve seen it and watched
[00:50:05] seen it
[00:50:09] GR: will be the first time.
[00:50:13] Cara: All right, until next week, my friend, your homework assignment is at the very least to watch empire strikes back, like, well, I’ll just throw one out there. You don’t even have to start at the beginning or the editor. However, those darn things go. , just pick one of them. Just meet.
[00:50:28] And may the force be with you? Gerard
[00:50:31] GR: Nanu, nanu
[00:50:34] that’s
[00:50:34] GR: mark. Take care.[00:51:00] [00:52:00]
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