Dean Baker Has Good Ideas

Allow me to take a moment to reiterate my incredible nerdiness. You see, I have a favourite economist. Some people might have favourite musicians, others fawn over actors. I try to read everything Dean Baker writes.

Take a moment. Comprehend my nerdiness, the magnitude of which sometimes staggers even me.

Ready? Good. Because you should also be reading everything Dean Baker writes. Specifically, his suggestions for what a real "pro-growth" left-wing policy would look like:

...Free-trade starting at the top – all future trade agreements focus on standardizing professional and licensing standards so that it is as easy for a kid born in New Delhi to become a doctor/lawyer/economist in the U.S. as a kid born on Long Island...

Free-market drugs – patent monopolies are an incredibly inefficient way to finance prescription drug research. Patents are a relic of the feudal guild system...

Medicare is far more efficient than the private health care system... Open up the system and let employers and individuals buy-in...This will get us to universal coverage quickly...

Tax stock trading like other gambling...

I could also add open-source software and open source college textbook production, but I wanted to write a post that even a Clintonite could understand.

Baker isn't a socialist - far from it. But he's an honest economist: where the government can provide a service more efficiently than the market, it's simply a waste of resources to do it otherwise. Only a bizarre fetishization of the "free market" keeps us from, for example, public auto insurance in Canada, or public health insurance in the US. On that note, I really like Angelica's anecdote from Taiwan:

People gripe endlessly about their gubmint healthcare in Taiwan. The latest round of grousing concerned a change that will make patients pay cold and flu treatments out of pocket. You can bet they aren't happy about that. Yet if you ask them if they would prefer doing away with Nationalized healthcare, they tend to look at you in a puzzled manner, as if you've just uttered a complete non-sequitor. Then they'd go straight back to where they left off before they were so irrelevantly interrupted.

That seems to me to be the perfect way of dealing with the Conservative party. Every time they advocate "market" solutions to health care (that is, every time they open their mouths), simply look at them like they're speaking Russian at you, feign total incomprehension, and resume a more civilized debate.

There's something else about Baker that I'd like to mention, too - the last thing he mentions is open-source textbooks. This is something near and dear to me for obvious reasons - spending several hundred dollars on textbooks each term usually keeps me pretty close to bouncing rent checks for a few months. If you follow the above link (PDF) you can read an excellent argument that the state should essentially pay authors to write textbooks and then move them immediately to the public domain. These books wouldn't quite be Wikipedia, but would probably go through the same review process all potential textbooks go through. The various publishers would scream bloody murder, but imagine for a moment if Canada, the US and Mexico started doing this.

You'd have textbooks in English, Spanish and French, ready for schools to use all over the world (at least for general material, such as Math, spelling, or world history.) Not only would our own economies benefit from lower educational costs, but we'd be providing a public good to the entire planet. No doubt, in some parts of the US and Canada those textbooks would then be translated for immigrant communities. Textbooks in Mandarin, Hindi and Japanese would follow shortly. Translating them would be a small cost compared to the cost of commissioning them in the first place.

Something Baker explores a bit in the article is the creative possibilities this opens up for teachers. Suddenly, a class doesn't need to be taught according to just one textbook. Like a chapter from one text, but think the rest of the book sucks? Well, you don't need to use the whole textbook - just use what you want and ditch the rest. Teachers can mix their own lesson plans, depending on what they want.

So here we have an idea that would a) save students money, b) save the government money, c) give teachers more freedom, d) potentially lead to a better learning environment for students, and e) help spread education around the planet.

Obviously, it'll never happen.