[extropy-chat] Game theory of common cold

[Technotranscendence]

On Monday, January 19, 2004 6:15 AM Anders Sandberg asa at nada.kth.se
wrote:
> How does homschooling really work? We
> do not have it here in Sweden, so I have
> no intuition of its effect on my model. In
> particular, does parents stay at home
> teaching (full time or partial time)? How
> large are the economic savings?

This depends.  Part of the reason both parents work in many instances in
the US is to pay taxes.  Not that they consciously think this, but the
decrease in funds due to high taxation -- okay, high historically by US
standards -- puts pressure on both parents to work.  No doubt, part of
the high taxation is due to funding public schooling, though I'm not so
sure reducing this cost would lower taxes all that much.  (Even so,
where I live, public schools spend roughly $11,000US per year per
student.  The best private schools in my state are around $7,000US per
year per student.  I think the median private school is around $2,000
per year per student.  I bring this up because the choices in education
in a free market would be myriad.)

> My guess is that keeping children away
> from schools would lower the infection
> risk and hence have a significant effect
> on health. But the utility of parents might
> be lowered since the cost of doing
> homeschooling could be greater than the
> benefit from keeping healthier - and
> others could play free riders by gaining the
> benefit of lowered infections without doing
> anything. Of course, this ignores that
> homeschooling very well could have positive
> utility too.

This is to ignore the free rider problem inherent in public schooling --
at least, in how it is funded in most places.  Others pay -- including
those who don't have children and those whose children are either past
school age or who do not use public schools -- for schools as well, so
this lowers the costs of parenting when the parents use public schools.
Parents who on free market would have had to pay the costs of schooling
children are able to redistribute those costs.  Hence, they are free
riders to a large extent.

Some might say this is not so, but anyone who works in the average
company in the US hears the parents grumble when there's a school
holiday but the parents have to work.  That usually means they have to
find and even pay a babysitter.  The public school baby sitter is
already paid for, in their eyes -- and, as we've seen, it's paid for by
others to some extent.

Cheers!

Dan
  See "The Hills of Rendome" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Rendome.html