On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, joins Mike and David to discuss the incredible progress that humanity has made over millennia, and what schools might do to better teach kids that our past, present, and future is not all doom and gloom. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study investigating if education savings accounts increase tuition costs at private schools.
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Ten global trends every smart person should know: And many others you will find interesting —Marian Tupy and Ronald Bailey
“Progress, rediscovered” —Ron Bailey, Reason Magazine
“School choice need not mean an expensive windfall for the rich” —Michael Petrilli, Fordham Institute
“Name Fordham’s Boy Band!” —Eduwonkette, Education Week
Jason Fontana and Jennifer L. Jennings, “The Effect of Taxpayer-Funded Education Savings Accounts on Private School Tuition: Evidence from Iowa,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (April 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at dbuck@fordhaminstitute.org.
This transcript was created using AI software.
Michael Petrilli:
Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Today Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, joins us to discuss why we should teach kids about the incredible progress that humanity has made over the millennia. Then on the research minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating if education saves accounts, increased tuition costs at private schools. All this on the Education Gadfly Show.
Marian Tupy:
Show, this notion that the life before Industrial Revolution was hunky dory. Everybody had a pet goat.
Michael Petrilli:
Hello. This is your host, Mike Petri of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Marian Tupy. Marian, welcome to the show.
Marian Tupy:
Thank you for having me.
Michael Petrilli:
Marian is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and he is here to talk about a great topic: progress. We'll get to that in a moment. First, my co-host David Griffith.
David Griffith:
Hey, Mike, it's a pleasure.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. Well, gang, this is going to be really fun today. It's a little bit of a different topic than we usually do. We're not walking out just on education policy. We are talking about, I would say, a much bigger issue, a bigger question, and that is about the progress that we humans have made over thousands of years, but also over decades, over recent years, and how we can do a better job making sure that young people are aware about all of that. Let's do that on Ed Reform update.
So I had the notion for this podcast, Marion, when I saw a Reason magazine article about this new movement, the Roots of Progress, I think it's called, or maybe goes by a couple different names. I understand that you're involved in it and basically trying to make sure that when we think about what's happening in our world, it's not all doom and gloom, but we tell the good story and we've had certainly debates in education about how to tell American history, including some of the terrible, despicable parts of our history. This is a little different though. We're talking about economics. We're talking about how our fellow humans live today and how that compares to how much suffering there was in the past. So first of all, we could spend hours on this, days on this, but in terms of the greatest hits, when you're talking to people about this topic, what are some of the key things that you want them to know in terms of the progress that we have made as a species?
Marian Tupy:
Let me first start with a little bit of correction. Jason Crawford is responsible for roots of Progress. I work at HumanProgress.org, but you're absolutely right. There is a movement going on with a lot of people beginning to work on progress. There's a think tank called the Institute for Progress, and many other people including independent scholars such as Stephen Pinker at Harvard University, Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine, Matt Ridley over in Britain, Jonah Norberg and so on. A lot of people are sort of wondering about it now. So what are the biggest hits? I mean, the important thing to understand is that for thousands of years, life was pretty stagnant. It didn't really change. So whether you are looking at 10,000 BC or 1000 ad things like life expectancy remain pretty much the same, which is to say about 25 to 30 years. So life expectancy between 25 to 30 years and between 1800 and today, we have managed to increase life expectancy to about 73 years globally, 76, 77 years in the United States.
So people live twice, sometimes three times as long as they used to, even 200 years ago. I think that's a very important sort of aspect of human wellbeing because it means that you get to enjoy friendships and family and this beautiful planet of ours for much longer than you used to before. Another thing which is very important is that people used to die by their millions due to famines world used to produce much less food, and the food supply was very insecure, which means that even a single failed crop meant that entire villages, towns, countries died because there was no food. Today, we produce enough food for everybody in the world. That doesn't mean that everybody gets enough to eat, but at least notionally we can feed everybody. But sometimes politics intervenes. You have wars and repression like in North Korea and people don't get enough to eat, but the world produces enough.
So food, life expectancy, education, again, whether you are looking at ancient Rome and ancient Greece, we are talking about maximum 10% of population who could read and write. Today, globally, it's about 80%, and it's obviously almost a hundred percent, if not a hundred percent in the advanced nations, we could be talking about even conflict. Conflict is much lesser than it used to be before. Now, I know that a lot of young people when they watch the news, they see the news from Israel, they see the news from Ukraine, and they think the world is on fire. But the reality is that 200, 300 years ago, countries used to be at war. A hundred percent of the time, all the major powers would be at war constantly. War was a constant. Whereas today, peace is really the norm, and when wars appear, everybody freaks out. But in the past when there was a period of peace, that was much more unusual.
And the final point I would make is that human progress is not just technological medical. It's not just that we are much richer than we used to be, moving from two or $3 per person per day, maybe $4 when America becomes independent to today, where our incomes per capita are about $70,000 adjusted for inflation. But also, I would argue that aside from this technological, medical and scientific progress, we are also more moral. Obviously, the most important thing is that slavery was the common practice throughout the world for most of recorded history. And over the last 200 years, all the countries in the world abolished slavery. Now, that doesn't mean, again, that some people aren't enslaved defacto today, but the ju as slavery has abolished everywhere, women didn't have a vote until the late 18 hundreds in New Zealand, I believe becomes the first country to give women vote in 1893 today, there is no country in the world where women don't have a vote. Gays and lesbians, again, who would've thought even 20 years ago that today gays and lesbians could marry all over the world, not all over the world, but in the advanced country. So the point is that there is a lot of progress, a lot of things to be grateful for,
Michael Petrilli:
And yet that message is not something that I sense we share with young people. Very often we hear in the news in fact, that there's a mental health crisis in the United States and in some of those other advanced nations. A lot of debate about why that is. Maybe it's the phones, but some people have said, look, it's also because of the world is on fire because of climate change. We've told our young people that we're facing this existential risk from climate change. I grew up in the eighties. We were certainly worried of the existential threat of nuclear war, which has come back to the headlines in some cases. So the question that I've got for you, Marion, is, and I know K 12 education is not your beat, but is this something our schools could do something about? Could we ask our schools through their curriculum to be less Debbie Downers about the challenges we face and to try to tell kids that, Hey, yeah, there's some real problems. We've got some real challenges, but guess what? We've had big problems and challenges in the past too, and we have overcome them. We need to keep working those problems in the same way we did in the past. I mean, what can our schools do, if anything?
Marian Tupy:
Well, unquestionably you put your finger on it. I mean, basically, I think that we have downgraded the study of history very much. Ultimately, you cannot understand where we are today without understanding where we were a hundred or 200 years ago. It doesn't make, look, there are only two ways to look at the present. You either take the retrospective view or you take the futuristic view or idealistic view. So the idealistic view goes something like this. America today is deeply imperfect. The world is deeply imperfect, and consequently, everything is horrible because we are not an ideal state where we would like to be. So let's feel bad about today because it's not as good as it could be tomorrow if we changed X, Y, and Z. The alternative viewpoint is to look at history and realize that actually America today and the world today are in a much better place than they used to be.
But then the attitude that students have is no longer resentment, but it is one of gratitude. So if you take the futuristic, the idealistic view where everything is working out for everyone everywhere at all times, which by the way will never happen, that's always an idealistic utopian viewpoint. But if you take that view, then all you can have is resentment against the present. But if you take the historical view and realize that even Americans 200 years ago were extremely poor, let alone the rest of the world, then the outcome is gratitude that will live in a country as developed as it is. So I think that focus refocusing on history and hopefully a tiny bit of economic history. I know economic history, it sounds incredibly boring, but just explaining people that until two or 300 years ago, the household may have had one chair and one table, and people have one pair of clothes for six months of the year.
That could be very helpful. I totally understand why American education systems started to emphasize a lot the bad things that the United States has done in the past and other countries, other western countries, be it colonialism, be it racism, exploitation, et cetera. I know why it's necessary to teach that. But if you teach that to the exclusion of everything else, then you end up in a point where everybody feels bad about the present rather than also pointing out that we have penicillin, we have antibiotics, we sent a person to the moon, and we are getting ready to send a person to Mars. Again, people no longer dying. Very young child mortality in Europe was 50% as late as 200 years ago. So let's combine the necessary discussion of all the bad things that are happening in the world and the United States also with an appreciation for all the things that people have done. And I think that the reason why that's important is that if you tell young people only about bad things that happen, it can fill them with resentment and fatalism and depression. Whereas if you can tell them, if you can show them that humanity has overcome huge problems before, maybe it can inspire them to actually do something about the present imperfections and can inspire them to make the world a better place.
Michael Petrilli:
What do you think, David? Is this too rosy? Is this going to fly with people on the left who of course very much want to make changes and to address those imperfections?
David Griffith:
It's not too rosy. I mean, facts can never be too rosy. They're just facts. Everything that Marian has said is a fact, right? And so I agree. The point I liked most was the point about history. I never really thought about it that way before, but if you just ignore history, then you can't really grasp progress. And we tend to think of history as, oh, well, you need to study it so you don't repeat it, but also you need to study it so you understand that we're not repeating it really in any meaningful sense. We're sort of spiraling off into ever better futures. I would admit that along with a lot of other people. I think I sometimes struggle with this, particularly in recent years when it feels like there's a bit of a crisis of confidence in the West. But I think taking the long view almost always helps.
And I don't think it's just a privilege of folks who are doing comparatively well. I think we're all doing comparatively well compared to people 50 or a hundred years ago, and I think that's important to bear in mind. Lemme just say one more thing, Mike, which is I think about the protests and I think about not just about Palestine, but also things like climate change. And I think one thing that we have not done well enough is to help young people understand that politics is a lagging indicator. In other words, if you go looking for inspiration in congressional subcommittees, you're kind of doomed to be disappointed. And that there is a good reason for that, which is that our system is designed to require super majority support, which means that there will be millions of people who have come to a new moral consensus, right? Years, if possibly decades before there's actually legislative action in many cases. And that is almost inherently frustrating. But if you see it a few times, it also I think can help you understand that it's not hopeless, right? And that's the way the system works. And ultimately, I think a little bit of frustration is probably inevitable, but it should not sort of lapse over into cynicism and fatalism, even though it may seem like that's warranted the third or fourth or 50th time that a bill
Michael Petrilli:
Fails. Yeah, no, well said. So Marion, one last question. I mean, I can imagine somebody listening saying, okay, I understand this idea of teaching these young American students about gratitude, but what if you are teaching kids in America who themselves are very disadvantaged within America, these are the lowest income kids, they're living in our pockets of poverty in America. Is it still appropriate to try to teach them a sense of gratitude, to try to say, Hey, I mean, yes, you've got it tough here in America, but compared to people around the world or compared to people in the past, I mean, suddenly that feels, I don't know. I can imagine teachers having a hard time with figuring out what message to send on that front.
Marian Tupy:
I didn't say that we should teach them gratitude. I think that people will come to a sense of gratitude if you show them what history was real and how their ancestors have lived. Because I think that a lot of kids, partly based on movies, will get a sense that, and we get this a little bit from parts of the left, is this notion that, and I don't want to beat up on the left, but this notion that the life before industrial revolution was hunky dory. Everybody had a goat, a pet goat, and they brought in the strawberries in the morning and things like that. No, I mean before the industrial revolution out in the fields was extremely, extremely difficult. And so I think that a lot of young people as a result of movies had this notion of bucolic bucolic past living in one with nature where everything was working out.
Yes, unless you got an infected blister and died because there was no antibiotics. Or alternatively, people get a sense that if I was born 200 years ago, years ago, I would be a princess. No, the chances are 99% that you would be in the fields bent over picking up potatoes. And by the time that you were 35, you looked like a 75-year-old man today, and life was just extremely difficult. Now, when it comes to people, as you said, obviously there are pockets of poverty in the United States. What I would say to that is that the key, of course, is a society that is dynamic that retains a very high degree of social mobility. And again, you can spin it into a positive story that in the United States, this was the first country really that became heavily meritocratic with the exception of course, Jim Crow and the inability of black people who were prevented from participating in the American dream.
But the reality is that this has always been a highly meritocratic and highly mobile country, precisely because you never had aristocracy, you never had different social ranks. And so at least ostensibly it should be possible for a young man or a woman who come from very poor backgrounds in the United States to make it big, to make a lot of money, to have a happy life, or to change the world for the better. So I think that, well, this leads me to another point, is that it is very important from the study of history to identify the reasons why today is as prosperous as it is, and obviously whether you share my ideological proclivities and my biases or not. But my view is that it is the open, free market competitive system that allows people to rise no matter who they are. In other words, it doesn't matter whether you are a black girl or an Asian boy. Doesn't matter whether you are gay or straight, it doesn't matter where you come from money or from poverty. If you have a good idea, you can make a ton of money in the United States and have everything that you always dreamed about. So it's very important not to focus on the facts of the past, but also try to discern from them the reasons why America today is no longer as poor as it was 200 years ago.
Michael Petrilli:
So well said. Really enjoyed talking with you, Marianne. That unfortunately is all the time that we've got, but I'm so glad we did this again. Marion Tupe is the founder and editor of human progress.org and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Marianne, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Marian Tupy:
My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's research minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern:
Thanks, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
So that was like my greatest glass is half full segment ever. I love it.
Amber Northern:
Say more. Sorry, but I happened to miss it. Well,
Michael Petrilli:
As we were telling you, Amber, this is about how can we tell young people that the world has gotten way better over time and therefore we can meet the challenges today rather than to try to give them this impression that the world is on fire and this is a new thing. Woe is them for having to live through the challenges they're living through. I mean, again, I don't mean to be petty, but climate change a big challenge. The war is raging in Ukraine and Israel, these are big challenges, but previous generations have faced big challenges and before that, almost everybody had to toil all day long in fields.
Amber Northern:
And how did out outhouse, as my great grandparents did.
David Griffith:
We talked a lot about fields, Amber.
Michael Petrilli:
I remember a great New Yorker cartoon where it's like a caveman talking to his son and he said, son, back in my day, things were exactly the same as they are today.
David Griffith:
I think what Mike's saying is our next standards review should be world history.
Michael Petrilli:
Ooh, I like that. I like it too. Alright, Amber, so what you got for us today,
Amber Northern:
We have a new report out. Always new analyst at Princeton have addressed a simple question we've asked at Fordham on somebody's now answered it. Do education savings accounts increase tuition prices?
As a reminder, ESAs, as they are known, are voucher like taxpayer funded savings accounts with multiple, but sometimes restricted uses for educational purposes, depending on the state. The state says how you can use the money. In some states they can only be used for private school tuition, but in others they can also be used for things like tutoring, online education programs, therapies for students with special needs textbooks, and so on. 12 states now have ESAs. Alright, so we've got a difference in difference in study design to estimate the causal effect of Iowa's ESA program on private school tuition. Iowa's ESA allows people to receive the per pupil funding already set aside for their child's education, couldn't find that exact amount into an account that must first be used on tuition and fees at an accredited private school before they can begin using it on other things.
Neighboring states, Iowa and Nebraska passed universal ESA legislation in the same 2023 session. So Iowa passed the bill in January and they started implementing the ESAs in 2324. So brand new Nebraska passed its bill in May, and they're set to begin in the 24 25 school year. So they build this original data set. They gathered the tuition data in both states by grade level in the summer of 2023 for non parishioners from private school websites. That's a lot of work. And then they emailed schools that had missing tuition data on their websites, and then they gathered historical tuition data from all these schools from some digital archive that I'd never heard of, but it's there. Apparently they pulled enrollment grade level and other school level data from the Iowa and Nebraska DOE and from NCES. Their final sample includes 51% of Iowa private schools that educate 62% of Iowa private school students.
And then they have 44% of Nebraska private schools that educate 51% of Nebraska private school students. All right. Now they're making use of the grade and state variation and the ESA eligibility. So this is kind of where it gets interesting. So all kindergartners are university universally eligible for the ESA money? No students are eligible in pre-K, and some students are eligible in grades one through 12, and that's based on students and families of four making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, which is about $90,000. So they're comparing how the distribution of changes in tuition prices vary between those three eligibility types in the first year of implementation in Iowa as compared to in Nebraska, which is the comparison state, which had no differences in the pre-treatment years from Iowa, which is important in a diff and D, they wait enrollment data. I mean they weight data by enrollment in grade level such that their results represent tuition changes for the average student in a given grade level.
All right. Key results, ESA implementation had varying effects as we might expect depending on whether a grade level was eligible for the subsidy. So there was no effect on tuition for ineligible grades, but for grades, with this partial eligibility that I had told you about relative to this poverty cutoff, tuition increased and it ranged from 10 to 16% of an increase depending on whether school fixed effects were added. So if you controlled for the school, that 10% equated to about $830. And then the largest effect was on universally eligible grades, which was just kindergarten, and they saw increases of almost 25%. So 21 to 25%, 21% amounts to about $1,300 of an increase. So one of their takeaways is if the tuition and the cost or the tuition increases outpace the amount of the ESA, then you're sort of defeating the purpose of opening access to a wider swath of needy families.
Michael Petrilli:
There we go. First of all, I think we should point out the authors, I'm not sure if you mentioned them, Jason Fontana and Jennifer Jennings at Princeton University. I did. And let's shout out to Jennifer the original edgy Wonka.
Amber Northern:
Yes, she is here. I failed to mention that, but that is she the same
Michael Petrilli:
Princeton? I don't think I had realized she landed at Princeton. That is awesome. So yeah, I think this is pretty compelling and disappointing in that one hope of going the education savings account route rather than just a straight up voucher was that there could be some incentives for the schools to not raise their tuition because the parents could use the education savings accounts for something other than tuition. You could say, well, if you find a bargain, then you could use a couple thousand of that for buying a computer for your kid. So they can do Khan Academy or something like that.
Amber Northern:
But they made it, and I dunno if you caught that, but in Iowa it has to be first applied to tuition before anything else.
Michael Petrilli:
But again, but with the hope that would help to constrain the cost. So the policymakers were trying to think about this problem. They wanted to get the incentives for whatever reason, that was not a strong enough inces.
David Griffith:
Yeah, I'm trying to think about, I guess I'm a little surprised. I'm not surprised by the direction of the facts, but I'm a little surprised by the magnitude. It just that so much is being passed through, I guess, I don't know. Was there a percentage that you needed to apply to this or was it just like it wasn't all of it, right?
Amber Northern:
It wasn't all of it. What do mean, Dave? I'm
David Griffith:
Sorry. Was it the entire ESA that needed to be applied to schooling or
Amber Northern:
Oh, it actually didn't say that. It just said that you had to first use it for that, but it didn't say it had to be the entire amount.
David Griffith:
Yeah, I'm just surprised that, I guess I assume that some of it would not have been passed through to tuition. Right, but you're saying it's basically one-to-one, right?
Michael Petrilli:
The schools decided, hey, we might as well raise our tuition to capture the full amount of the voucher, especially if these were schools that were subsidizing tuition before, if they weren't actually charging what it cost educated kid and now they've decided what the heck, let's do it.
David Griffith:
Right. But the schools, I mean, they didn't do that in a vacuum. People had to be willing to pay and clearly they are. I mean, it seems like it's falling almost entirely on the consumer rather than the producer. I'm out of my depth here. But
Michael Petrilli:
You mean because they're going to use the full voucher or the full ESA on tuition and not get to use any of it on something else?
David Griffith:
Right? I mean, if you are using a hundred percent of it on it, that's essentially saying that schools can charge whatever they want to get. I don't know, to just create a private environment for kids that I don't know it. It's saying that there's no responsiveness to price whatsoever. Sorry, we can cut this, but I mean, am I off base here?
Michael Petrilli:
Right. I mean the hope is that the policymakers, were trying to get these consumers to be price sensitive even though it's not their money by saying that if you could find a low cost school, you get to keep some of this money for yourself for these other educational purposes.
David Griffith:
Yes. Right. But it didn't work, right? It
Michael Petrilli:
Seems like that did not work, at least so far
Amber Northern:
Because, and I did look it up, I mean their ESA is the per pupil state funding, whatever it is already set aside. So they do get the whole amount of whatever's set aside already. So it's not like they're getting a partial amount. So
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. Now, here, let me be a little bit contrarian though, gang. Is that okay? It sounds bad. They raise their tuition. We don't like that. On the other hand, if by raising their tuition it means they can provide a higher quality education, including by paying teachers better and getting higher quality teachers, then look, maybe that's not so bad. I mean, the whole point of this is to get kids into not only schools that their parents have chosen but to get a good education. So maybe this makes it more likely that that's going to be the outcome. Way
Amber Northern:
To turn it on. David, Mike. Yes,
Michael Petrilli:
Exactly. David, what do you want these kids not to learn how to read? David?
Amber Northern:
That's money. I
David Griffith:
Made that point myself. Mike, I'm not sure. Am I supposed to think this is a bad thing? I think I am. If the point is to expand access, but I don't think it's as unambiguously bad as all that if point is to invest in the next generation. So I don't know.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, so there we go. Maybe it's to ette. Ette, come on. Aren't you in favor of spending more money on schools? Here we go. This is a win. I'm just mad because she called us Fordham people a boy band way back in the day.
Amber Northern:
Wow, I forgot about that.
Michael Petrilli:
Look it up. It's pretty funny image. Alright, well we should probably stop there before we get ourselves in further hot water. But that was good. That was interesting and on point and did sound like a lot of work. So way to go out there to our Princeton scholars, but as all the time we've got for this week. And so until next week,
David Griffith:
I'm David Griffith.
Michael Petrilli:
And I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Signing off.
#919: Why we should teach the history of human progress, with Marian Tupy