I objected to the game and the rules, and did not want to play. After the game, in class, he commented that "Exchange students always object that the rules are unfair, while local students always accept that the rich get to set them."

Without even knowing where people are from, I sense a similar trend in this discussion: Europeans are more willing (trained and socialized) to sacrifice individual preferences in favor of the "greater good".

(Your mileage will vary. Not exact science. Not science at all. Just a feeling.)

(Edit: Spelling)

The American "way" traditionally is that social justice is an individual responsibility. You can see this residually in traditional volunteer fire departments and social clubs like knights and rotary which used to be mutual benefit clubs, providing for members in the event of sickness etc.

Sure, where did Zeus, Promethues, Thor, and countless of other 'gods/titans/demi-gods' heroes come from?

Almost all, either European and non European countries have their Mythological beings, (either gods, super human heros, etc...).

The US is just good at creating commercial versions of them and putting them in film, the but concept of 'an hero' is as old as humanity itself.

That's odd that you would outright deny American culture influence on stories like Thor. Not to mention the countless other Superhero movies which are strictly American. Next,the value we place on our superheroes reflect American culture. I'd be hard pressed to call the classical Greek stories of Zeus or Prometheus "superheroes". Zeus wasn't exactly an upstanding role model.

Characters of the Norse pantheon is a much-much later addition.

Heroes of and for the common man like Paul Bunyan and John Henry are quite American.

Hollywood. They come from Hollywood and bear little resemblance to the originals.

Maybe our definition of "elites" is different? To me Americans seem to distrust the government, while trusting rich people much more.

The rich setting the rules is transparently favor of the rich. And you're expected to also optimize for yourself. This might be accepted by some more easily than rules set "for the greater good" if one is particularly cynical about such claims.

Or how about the current resistance of Eastern Europeans, regarding refugees, after Germany and Merkel volunteered them to sacrifice for certain visions of the greater good?

Or how about Turkey and ... etc etc etc.

America isn't really analogous to individual nations like Finland and Denmark. It's huge - up around 320 or 330 million residents, IIRC.

And a lot of those residents, despite how American mass media tries to frame things, come from very distinct, very fractious subcultures with long histories. See the book Albion's Seed for one version of this argument. And fundamentally, a lot of those groups don't entirely have shared values, nor shared respect for shared experts.

This is kind of my point in highlighting Germany's problems relating to other European countries - the same issue of different local cultures, and different values, comes up.

In America, one of the main ways people dance around these tensions is by letting people express their values via money. If something is important to you, then you'll likely put your resources together to support it. And if you have a lot of other like minded people, you'll maybe find a bunch of other like minded people to support it to, and pool your resources. But won't rise to anything like national technocratic support for whatever it is.

It's one basic way of dealing with actual, serious, difficult pluralism.

And that does mean, in practice, people have a default sense that other people ought to mostly be able to do what they want with their money, which scales up naturally to the wealthy or rich as well.

It's not optimal, but it's not really clear there is any kind of optimal - again, looking at various between-nation destabilizations in Europe when it comes to simply relying on technocratic assumptions about the greater good is probably useful here.

I don't think the rich are sacrificing anything by this lottery. Some middle-class kids might have to go to a worse school to allow some poor kids to go to a better school but the rich are unaffected.

In the Netherlands people value the idea of living in a classless society. It would not be acceptable for certain people to have their own "special" schools where their kids get "special" education.

The way the rich try to get around that is by congregating in the same rich neighbourhoods and sending their kids to the same school. That is why the lottery exists, to distribute the kids evenly in a fair manner.

Yes, The Netherlands has private schools (and international schools) but not many. Here's one example: Luzac [1]. Its an exception though, and its very expensive. I've been to one of these and seen the nephew of lawyer Bram Moszkowicz over there. Also, you can expect other of the higher echelons like monarchy on such a private school. But again, it is very much the exception.

[1] https://www.luzac.nl/

They don't send their kids to boarding schools in the UK/US/Switzerland?

If they're rich, aren't they intentionally selecting schools to try to avoid the perceived "lower quality teachers"? I don't think money would be the limiting factor there (effectiveness in turning money into results is a different matter, but after all, school is as much about networking as anything else, and you're probably buying into a very powerful network).

Most of that group did not make it through college, even for an Associates.

I'm sure this is correct, but do you have a reference? Anecdotally, I have heard that teachers at top tier NYC private schools make less than teachers at NYC public schools. I don't have a source for that so I'm grateful for any information you can share.

I think so. It puts them in touch with other rich children from all around the world.

Educations is way more than what goes on inside a classroom, and there are many ways to get ahead.

Politicians have even convinced people that "entitlement reform" means getting rid of welfare and when someone call social security an "entitlement" people get offended.

I've had to explain on more than one occasion that by definition social security and Medicare are entitlements and that welfare isn't.

When politicians talk about entitlement reform they are referring to social security and Medicare cut backs but they keep getting voted into office because the very people who benefit or will benefit from the "entitlements" think they are referring to welfare.

http://www.bookwormroom.com/2010/05/07/never-underestimate-t...

That source is not good and doesn’t make a point, never mind the nauseating style.

The National Review is definitely not a bastion of liberalism.

I broadly agree with your overall points but I think it's worth examining this point a bit more. Social Security has been presented at various times (IMO dishonestly) as a pay-in pay-out forced saving system. This is why people unironically refer to it as "my money". The government even sends you periodic updates on how much of "your money" will be paid back to you upon retirement based explicitly on how much you've paid in. My sense, based on limited information, is that this was necessary to maintain some willful ignorance on the fiscal conservative side.

In practice US courts have ruled that SS works like an entitlement (government can rescind or modify at any time), and is not a property right in the conventional sense. But a very large portion of the population, especially during the 70s-90s period, was told that it was just a government operated retirement savings scheme where you pay in and you collect later.

So I think that this specific point about people viewing SS as not an entitlement has reasonable historical explanation. I don't view complainants as being openly hypocritical, since they were told it was not an entitlement but merely a government managed pay-in pay-out mandatory savings system.

The definition of entitlement is "the fact of having the right to something". I have a right to social security. I paid into it forcefully money I could have saved for myself.

Welfare is not an entitlement.

Politicians who want to cut social security and Medicare purposefully conflate it with eelfare so they can cut it and still get the approval of voters.

These are the same politicians who have people riled up about Medicaid and saying they need to get a job. Until I try to explain that Medicaid is also used to take care of granny in the old folks home. Are they going to tell thier 90 year old mom to get a job?

I understand what you're saying — and as I said I agree with the thrust of your post — but your use of the word "entitlement" is not universal.

The courts, in particular, disagree with your use, and specifically distinguish the concept of a property right from things the government has promised to give you. SCOTUS has ruled that SS is the latter and not the former.

The fundamental difference, in my lay understanding, is that the government needs to use an argument like eminent domain to deprive you of a property right, but can arbitrarily stop or reduce social security at any time if they so desire (as they can with welfare or medicare).

Additionally, there are some (but very few) private schools which don't take government funding and emphasize small class rooms, etc. Typically only the truly rich kids go to private schools, and only when they have difficulty achieving the standards parents want :)

I studied at a private school in Amsterdam when I lived in the Netherlands in the 70's. Most of my parents professional colleagues sent their children to private schools too. The reasons included quality of education, availability of certain subjects and the relative lack of troubled and disruptive students.

A relative recently married a Dutch man from near Rotterdam. He and his siblings went to private schools.

I recall nearby state run schools were pretty dismal. Perhaps things have changed.

My reflection is more about the general discussion: Is it OK that the court prioritizes "the greater good" over these two individual students? I think I sense different priorities between Europeans and Americans.

But I think it's possible to improve over these systems in a way that increases efficiency without harming fairness.

That may be the general case, but in this specific case a school system and court intentionally chose not to allow two students to voluntarily better their individual positions in a way that wouldn't affect the positions of others. That is some sort of perversion of personal greed into a form that instead limits what others may have.

Except that it does affect the positions of others, by pushing them down the list. If there were another opening at someone's preferred school, that doesn't mean that someone would get it. Others likely want it, and one may be ranked higher. But by voluntarily swapping in this way, the results of each of the schools' lotteries are discarded, and others are disadvantaged as a result. One way to keep it fairer would be to modify the algorithm to rank and swap in such cases. Ranking would be necessary, because it could be that three people in school B want to attend school A, while only two people in school A want to attend school B.

That is exactly what I wrote, "That is some sort of perversion of personal greed into a form that instead limits what others may have." Do you honestly not see the injustice with choosing to disadvantage all five instead of only one in your example?

> So to allow trading would be to enable strategic behavior in future years. This would make the workings of the lottery system less clear. But it could also give an unfair advantage to students that are better at strategizing — and to students that have more resources to make good strategic decisions.

I would argue that there is a "greater good" at play, and that while this particular instance would not change anything, allowing it would open the door for future problems.

I then believe that Europeans are more willing to accept that consequence than Americans are. (YMMV, not science, just a feeling, etc) (edit: formatting the quote)

From the article, "...not all schools are the same. Some schools offer music and dance classes, others offer more sports classes."

How could forcing students to speculate at non-core subjects that don't interest them (and lie beyond their talents) be better for them or for the common good?

Even for those where the deck is stack against them from birth, they still seem to have hopes of becoming one of the elite one day so they accept a system that's unbalanced in favor of the elite.

I would speculate (without exact justification) that this is because Europeans are nowadays heavily indoctrinated in socialism. What you call "greater good" may not be a market-efficient solution or effective altruism.

My comment re: greater good vs. market-efficient is yes, it isn't market-efficient for some values of the words "market efficient," but for the values that these people hold, it is "better" for their definition of "greater good." Btw, I did invoke my own definition of "greater good" above, one which you may disagree with.

I wouldn't disagree with you on this. But I just couldn't see how forbidding students to choose school would imply, quoting the OP of this thread, to "sacrifice individual preferences in favor of the 'greater good'". I guess it is less of a concern for Nordic countries who have genuinely good public school systems. If schools perform equally well, then perhaps people would not be uncomfortable with the fact that an AI rolls the dice to decide who goes to which school. But this is definitely not the case for the US public school system. If the goal is equality > excellence, you'd more often than not get equally bad results than "better averages" + "less disparity". Not to mention that restricting the freedom of choice gives rise to a bureaucratic system that feeds itself and cannot be hold accountable to what it does.

Think about this, if one is not so fortunate to be living in an affluent neighborhood, chances are that the schools are mediocre or bad, teachers teach to the test and don't care if students learn or not, dropout rates high, and college admission rates low, and if one still wants to go to college in this condition, they better get the heck out of there. School choice could potentially give them a chance to study in a better school and go to college.

The danger lies not in this legal case itself, but that it further empowers the government to interfere and exert more control on how an individual live their life and spend their money. On the end of the spectrum, you'll get totalitarian states. I hope that is not what the West is heading to.

Though Europeans are catching up there too.

That algorithm applies to the stable marriage problem: N men and N women need to be paired such that no two members in each set would both prefer to be with each other over their partners.

The algorithm has each person rank every member of the opposite gender in preferential order. Then, one side (let's presume the women) take turns picking from the other in order of their preferences. If the woman A's top choice is man X, but man X is already taken by woman B, then he will swap iff he prefers woman A over woman B. If he prefers woman B over woman A, then woman A moves down to her next choice in the list. If you follow this pattern to conclusion, everyone is paired and there will not exist a man and woman who both want to be with each other more than their current partners.

We could apply this to school selection. Every student ranks all schools from most to least preferred. All schools then 'rank' students via any criteria they want. Want to put students with siblings in the school ahead of all others? Easily done. For any equally-preferred students, sort randomly. The "women" translates to students, and the "men" translates to "spot in this school".

Might not stop strategizing, but it's a great way to handle pairings with preferences involved.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem#Soluti...

[1] https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2312726

Those sort of algorithms (actually refined versions) are starting to be deployed for those problems. It's being used to match kidney donors to recipients, and freshly minted doctors to residencies.

School districts have more problems implementing it due to regional politics.

I would encourage you to look into the research by people like Al Roth, Itai Ashlagi or Atila Abdulkadiroglu.

Humans are greedy, and that’s where these algorithms seem to fall apart in the real world.

The deferred acceptance algorithm always creates a stable matching, which means that it does not contain any blocking pairs. A blocking pair is a pair <student, school> where the student is not assigned to the school, but prefers the school to their current assignment, and the school prefers the student above their worst ranked admitted student.

When executed as described in the article, the algorithm produces a student-optimal solution, which means that for all students, no other stable matching exists where the student is better off.

In the example, where student a preferred school A over B (their current assignment) and student b preferred school B over A (their current assignment), both students would become better off by swapping. Thus, the matching produced after swapping cannot be stable: there must exist some student x who now forms a blocking pair together with either school A or B.

To explain how this happens:

Say that student a is the first to select schools (the iteration order of the students does not matter for the end result, this just makes the steps a bit clearer). Then, at the start, we have this assignment:

A: a

Since a is not assigned to A in the final solution, at some point a has worse rank than all students assigned to A and is pushed out:

A: x, y, z (say that the capacity of A is three)

This means that A ranks x, y and z higher than a. If any subsequent students push out x, y or z, they too will have higher rank than a.

At some point b is then assigned to A. This means that b has higher rank than x, y and z. At least one of them, say x, has been pushed out by now.

If a and b were allowed to swap, then <x, A> would form a blocking pair since x prefers A to their current assignment, and A prefers x to their lowest ranked admitted student (a). Thus the solution would no longer be stable.

One of those things must happen before the other (each step in the algorithm is a currently-unassigned student applying to their next choice). In your case, if a is the most-preferred non-accepted student for A, then b must have been pushed out of B first, so the argument applies to B instead.

The test approach seems the fairest to me, as a grade A student should have a higher priority of getting into a top school than a lower grade student.

Contrast this with having a high achieving student not getting into the school of his choice due to sheer bad luck, and I do not see much benefit from the lottery system.

Second, that it may be contrary to their social engineering goals to place high schoolers into schools based on test taking ability in the first place. They don’t want popular schools to be loaded with the students who achieved the highest test scores. Probably this is exactly not what they want.

If the test is based on the standard middle/high school curriculum (if there is one), then it can be a fairly good predictor.

Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.

I doubt that, humans are capable of overfitting standardized tests extremely easily. Just doing a single practice run will usually give you significant advantage. You would have to "regularize" by changing the test structure/types of questions/whatever every year, which is not really feasible.

> Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.

Sure they do - except now you have got students training for a significant part of their middle school life for an arbitrary test instead of some "real" education.

Not every secondary school is the same. There are a couple of levels:

* VWO ("preparatory scientific education") is the hardest level and prepares students for university.

* HAVO ("higher general education") is the level below that, and prepared students for higher professional education (HBO), or they can choose to do the last two years of VWO in order to qualify for university (though they can also go to university after higher professional education)

* VMBO ("preparatory medium professional education"), used to be called "lower professional education". Teaches students practical skills (trade school?), after which they can get a low-level job, or move on to medium professional education (MBO), or they can do the last two years of HAVO to qualify for HBO or VWO.

In the last year of primary school, students do a "Cito Test", and based on that and the opinion of the teacher and school, they get a recommendation for which level is most appropriate for them. Often it's a mix, like HAVO/VWO, so the student would best go to a school that offers both HAVO and VWO.

I have no idea what happens when a student picks a school that's way outside their recommendation. I expect they'll be refused, but I have no idea at which moment in the process.

The Dutch system also makes clear that it's a scale. HBO graduates are definitely professionals. They include engineers, nurses, managers, teachers, therapists, architects, etc. MBO graduates can become anything from mechanic to lab worker, computer programmer, various construction jobs, and tons of other things.

VMBO is really for lower level jobs. It's not recommended that you stop after VMBO, but it's possible. But many students continue to MBO, and some move on to HBO after that. A cousin of mine took that route, as did my wife. She started with MAVO, which is now the highest track if VMBO, then she did MBO, and HBO, and now she's better paid than I am while working on her MBA.

Why? Attending a school isn't the Stanley Cup trophy.

Why bother pouring resources into students have already achieved educational targets? Comparative advantage implies that lower performing students have more room to gain from better schools.

This is before even getting into what even defines "better", which is too quickly overlooked.

I didn't get into med school on my first try and switched to applied math, never looked back. I'm kind of glad I didn't get in in hindsight.

Location isn't a big role as far as I know, except for proximity to population which might be more dense in some areas. But the ethnic background / socioeconomic class of the student body and staff is a major factor, as well as a preference for teaching method (montessori, dalton, ipad schools, bilingual education etc).

Household culture is a big predictor of outcome. Parental age is another. Asian/Indian kids buck the bigger trend, because those family cultures value education as the way to advance.

Usually these policy discussions get dumbed down into inner-city vs suburbia comparison. But I think we’re starting to see bigger cohorts of white kids from suburban professional backgrounds who are not doing better than their parents.

I'm currently one week away from finishing secondary school here in the UK. My school is pretty mediocre, and better luck in the school ballot would've gotten me into a much better school. But I'm glad I 'lost' the ballot - I like my school in spite of its flaws, and am certain that I would not have achieved any higher in a 'better' school than I have anyway.

...with a strong correlation towards one's familial socioeconomic rank?

Should we have universities take students by lottery, god forbid they will enforce correlation with socioeconomic rank? Should we make companies hire by lotterry? We have to start treating people by their abilities at one point or another.

Rich parents will find a way to get their smart kids proper schooling one way or another. It’s poor-but-smart kids that gets the short end of the stick. I’d rather treat kids by their ability. Than let parents wealth be the deciding factor.

The system has been designed to not allow strategizing, as strategy often backfires on the student, as well as it's argued that students from lower class backgrounds make more strategic mistakes.

A nitpick from me on the article though:

> Designing a lottery system to place students at the different schools is not just a mathematical optimization problem. Different design choices can have far-reaching effects. On whether everyone gets equal opportunities, for example.

It absolutely is. It's called game theory. And 'no strategizing' is a criterion you can optimize for.

This has close relations to the well-known stable marriage problem. The seminal paper on both these problems is Gale and Shapley, College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage.

"The traditional form of the algorithm is optimal for the initiator of the proposals and the stable, suitor-optimal solution may or may not be optimal for the reviewer of the proposals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

Assume a preference function P(s: student, x: school) -> [0,1]. Consider a matching M(s: student) -> x: school. We can define the utility U{M} = sum[s over all students](P(s, M(s)). The function M which maximizes U may not be unique.

Now consider a random weighting function W(s: student) -> [0,1]. For any r >= 0, we can consider the r-biased utility under X to be U(r, W){M} = sum[s over all students]((1 + r W(s))P(s, M(s))). I then define an optimal matching under the weighting X to be the pair (M, r) such that: -U(r, W) has a unique matching which produces a maximal utility, which is M -for all q < r, q >= 0, U(q, W) either does not have such a matching or the matching is equivalent to M

Of course if a matching exists for r = 0 then no weighting is required, but this is not guaranteed even for only two students going to two schools.

Anyway, since M is a global maximum of U(W, r) in the space of matching functions, it is automatically Pareto-optimal, thus solving the swapping question. And because it is not possible to predict r without knowing everyone's preferences and the weighting function, gaming the system should be intractable without supernatural intervention. It is also optimal with respect to W because bias is minimized, although optimizing over possible choices of W is intractable. One way to generate W(s) is to perform a Fisher-Yates shuffle and assign W(s_0) = 1/S, W(s_1) = 2/S, etc, where S is the number of students. In this case an optimal matching is guaranteed to exist in the limit of large r (proof left as an exercise to the reader).

However, I do not have a procedure to calculate (r, M) for minimal r.

... which is politics in a nutshell. That's partly why I support the complete privatisation of education, at all levels.

https://mises.org/library/what-if-public-schools-were-abolis...

If you don't want students to trade because some are better at it than others, you could still do an automated trading round at the end. Start with the students that got their lowest choice (or possibly even no listed choice at all), and check for all of their preferred schools if there are students there that would prefer to be at this student's school.

Every trade would improve efficiency, but because students have no control over it, it wouldn't hurt fairness.

Though listing popular schools high can also be prevented by banning down-trades. But that would still be unfair because skilled traders will still be better at it. Automating it would solve that problem.

Look at figure 4: https://i.imgur.com/TUInR0Q.png

The multiple lottery system, while resulting in less people with their #1 pick, results in a vastly less people not getting in their top 3 picks.

Define a person's unhappiness as one less than the position in their ranking of the person they paired with. If someone is not paired, define their unhappiness as N, where N is the number of men and the number of women being paired.

For example, in a set of 10 men and 10 women, a women paired with her 1st choice man has unhappiness 0. A man in that set not yet paired has unhappiness 10.

The key to understanding Gale-Shapley is female unhappiness (in the version where the men propose to the women...if you do it with women proposing to men, then male unhappiness is the key).

When the algorithm runs a man through the gauntlet and his proposal is tentatively accepted by a women, her unhappiness decreases (and no other woman's happiness changes). Hence total female unhappiness decreases every round. Total female unhappiness is a non-negative integer, and it is bounded by N^2 where N is the number of females. This shows that the algorithm must terminate, and must do so in at most N^2 rounds. It is also easy to see that the algorithm only terminates when all men are paired. Thus, we can conclude that the algorithm will produce a final pairing in which everyone is paired, and it will do this in at most O(N^2).

Consider any man, M1, paired by this algorithm with woman W1. Because men propose in order of their rankings, M1 has already proposed to every woman he prefers over W1. Either they were rejected (meaning those women were already paired with men they prefer over M1) or they were tentatively accepted but then later he was jilted when someone better came along. From this, we see that the pairings produced by the algorithm (including the partial pairings after each round) are such that no man is willing to cheat on his currently assigned partner. Hence, they are stable.

It's not an illustrative example because we have to assume an unrealistic misogynist take before it even starts to make sense.

The flaw is even more fundamental than that. Even if everyone plays without strategic mistakes the results are still poor.

What the system is trying to do is assign students based on what school they want. So they want each student to give an ordered list of their true preferences and the lottery algorithm will do its best to hand them out.

Once you add trading to the system, the optimum strategy appears quite quickly: list the most desirable schools first. If you get lucky you'll have lots of in-game currency for the "trading phase" of the game.

If every student followed this strategy, you'd have lost all preference input to the system: every student would turn in a nearly-identical ranked list of schools by "trading value". Now the algorithm has no chance of working -- instead the system has devolved into a purely random lottery where lucky students will randomly be given more "points" (i.e. a desirable school worth trading for)

Outside of the pure game-theory issues with a trading scheme it also adds risk of other pressures being introduced. For example, suppose you're a parent and your boss suggests letting your child trade schools with their child... are you able to refuse?

This is the meaning of stable in the stable marriage problem. And the Gale-Shapley algorithm does this.

the discrepancy in strategic aptitude is itself a result of chance. Only through this absolute form of randomness, you are actually eliminating the wealth, education and aptitude bonus of upper-class households.

Your comment is a nice signifier of the difference in American and Dutch culture. Dutch people don't buy the idea that individual strategizing is going to advantage the interests of lower-class students, because they recognise that lower class students are already disadvantaged when they enter the system.

True but I think if the optimum becomes “answer honestly which schools you want to go to, in order” then their goal has been reached, no?

For example, "we can’t make every student entirely happy with a lottery system. But we can try to spread the unhappiness as equally as possible."

In my opinion schools should be for teaching, even if only a few students are able to learn. Schools should be about having the same limits on all. That comes from the false metric of wanting all to leave the system with the same qualifications instead of the best qualities that each can individually have.

What isn't justifiable in the name of fairness?

The obvious research question: Is there an assignment system where the best strategy is to list your true preferences, and is Pareto efficient (no win/win trading of assignment is possible)?

What's wrong with simply randomizing the list of students, then walking the randomized list and giving each student his/her highest-ranked school that hasn't yet been filled by the assignment of students higher on the list?

Does some variant of Arrow's impossibility theorem [1] apply to this situation?

It might also shed light on the causes and dynamics of poverty to figure out the exact causal mechanism by which "students from poorer neighborhoods make more strategic mistakes."

Is poor strategic decision-making ability a cause of poverty (the poor are poor because they don't make smart strategic decisions about money and life choices)? Or is it an effect of poverty (having a single parent or parents working multiple jobs means less intellectual stimulation and help with homework, not being able to afford nutritious food or have time to cook it causes poor nutrition which affects brain development, etc., which leads to lower general intelligence and strategic thinking ability)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

It's likely simpler than you guess, and not because poorer people are dumber (I'm not even sure why you assumed that making strategic mistakes in college planning is caused by low intelligence): students in poorer neighborhoods aren't plugged into the privilege networks, that tell them which are the best schools to apply to.

It's thinking of the type "my 1st preference is school A, but I probably won't get in, so I'll say my preference is B so that I get that at least" in cases where they would have got into A if they had stated it as their #1.

Access to SAT test prep for college admissions has the same issues.

"The year after, in 2016, the Amsterdam school boards switched to the single-DA variant of the mechanism. With this variant, striking situations like those where students get a place at each other’s top choice school can only occur when a student has priority at a school."

There are approximately 8,000 students per year entering Amsterdam high schools. According to the article, in 2015 when the new lottery system was introduced, 600 students would be able to attend their top choice school by swapping with someone else after the lottery.

It is, but it needs to be balanced against the percentage of disappointed students in a regular, non-lottery system. The article doesn’t say what that is, unfortunately.

Looking at that graph the decision seems very reasonable.

This creates a strictly worse outcome for that school year, since only students who would mutually benefit from a trade would trade, and students who did nothing or could not trade would remain unchanged.

That's true. My understanding is that they did that for two reasons. The first was that a property of this particular algorithm is that mutually beneficial swaps are only possible if there is a third student placed at a third school who would also prefer one of the two being swapped, but whose school is not desirable, so he doesn't have a choice, which was deemed unfair (I don't know how I feel about this argument). The second was that allowing trades for this school year would encourage strategizing in the following years, which would lead to worse outcomes over time. These two things were addressed when they changed the lottery system once again.

For example, "unconscionable contracts" are unenforceable [1], custody disputes are resolved based on the "best interests of the child" test [2], and a cop's reasonable suspicion is judged by the "totality of the circumstances" [3].

All of these and many more require (some more explicitly than others) the judge to determine what is "fair" so that he or she can fairly apply law and precedent to a specific set of facts. This is much more common than you might think (and than many in the legal community would like to admit).

If you find this topic interesting, I would encourage you to read about the differences between deductive reasoning (like math) and inductive reasoning (like fairness). Some court decisions truly are deductive, but most are not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

[2] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/134/Supplement...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totality_of_the_circumstances

a) All students applying to the school have the same chance to get a spot: 50%

b) The best 10 students (by some definition of 'best', e.g. grades or an entry exam) get in.

c) The 10 students with the richest parents get in.

d) The 10 students that live closest to the school get in.

We could go further: when 15 of the applicants are boys and 5 are girls (or vice versa), wouldn't it be more fair when 5 of each are chosen? How about racial distributions?

Ultimately how you define fairness is subjective. Obviously once you have defined fairness you can attempt to measure it using mathematics / statistics.

In all of optimization theory, the objective function is subjectively chosen.

I don't think that's true, what if in both schools they were ranked last place and last place plus one?

Please give a worked-out example, based on a watertight definition of "better off".

> But because some people would not be better off they don't allow it for anyone.

As far as I understand, the system is now set up so that if they allowed it, and taking human behaviour into account, overall more people would be worse off than better off.

You've proposed a constraint that can't realistically be achieved.

Why not just allow unlimited swapping and let persuasion of any other student in a desired school be possible. Holding some people back when there is a win-win opportunity right there seems unnecessarily punitive to those whom discovered an opportunity... no other people lose anything they didn’t already have because it doesn’t change their situation at all... if they put in some work to persuade a parent/student to swap, so could they. It seems like cutting everyone down to the least savvy, least involved and least creative state in order to prevent additional advantages.

This is like not letting gifted kids use some advanced technology because it’s unfair to the less gifted ones... so let’s hold everyone back and punish those whom have a shot.

What makes you assume that?

The judges are keeping them unhappy in the name of “fairness”, but is it fair that this exchange among willing individuals is forbidden?

This can be reduced to an argument against free trade, because scarcity makes things unfair to those who can’t engage in the trade, which in my opinion is absurd.

I've been to a presentation by the Amsterdam civil servants who set this up, and they have run lots of simulations with several systems, and also compared the actual outcome of the current system with that of the previous ones. While some of the requirements one might want are logically incompatible, the current system does satisfy the requirements that, as far as I can see, most Dutch people would find the most important. Whichever way you decide, it's a policy decision.

Besides, free trade is always regulated in order for the market to function well.

Lets not put Dutch policy in a pedestal: they have a retirement system that is so pervasive, that once you are 60, you earn more money by retiring than by continuing to work, and thus literally push the entire population to retire at the same age.

You don't get paid retirement money unless you are of retirement age. That is 68 at the moment, and increasing.

And then, you get the money regardless of whether you're still working (most people stop).

No, the definition of consensual trade is that they would think they were better off. That people know their exact preferences and calculate with ease whether a transaction brings them closer to those preferences is a charade.

> The judges are keeping them unhappy in the name of “fairness”, but is it fair that this exchange among willing individuals is forbidden?

If you only focus on the individual level, maybe. But it's at least plausible that preventing locally favorable actions can create globally superior conditions for everyone in aggregate. This is obvious and arguments that center on "two individuals engaging in consensual trade" are trying to distract from that fundamental aspect of reality, either knowingly or unknowingly.

How can two people being prevented to perform an exchange make things better globally? I don’t think that obvious at all. In fact allowing the exchange will make things better globally, by definition, because more people will be better off, while no one not engaging in the exchange will be worse off (unless you consider maybe envy).

The same possible dynamic with schools is, according to the article, one reason school trades aren't allowed. Strategizing traders could mimic interest in attending popular school X, but really intend to trade a school X place for their true preference later. Everyone who isn't strategizing that way is worse-off or no-better-off when the strategic behavior is allowed.

Note that more complex rules with more potential for strategizing don't just inconvenience individuals. More complex tax codes or regulatory codes, too, tend to disadvantage e.g. small businesses that can't afford legal teams to strategically take advantage of non-obvious consequences of the rules. The small businesses aren't "envious" that bigger ones have a higher laywer-to-engineer ratio. Small business employees aren't necessarily any more foolish than big-co employees, except in specific matters of legal interpretation and strategizing. They just want less exploitable rules so that facially-optimal and actually-optimal behaviors stay closer to each other.

That's true, but the existence of resellers signals that the band and the venue could have made more money by structuring their prices differently

It being valid in one instance does not justify it at every instance.

> How can two people being prevented to perform an exchange make things better globally? I don’t think that obvious at all.

It is an instance of an optimization problem. It is algorithmically true that there are instances of optimization problems where local strategies, e.g hill climbing or trade between individuals, can only find local optima. Since the real world is far more complicated than any particular optimization problem...

This does not even touch market failures such as externalities where exchange isn't even aware of all the interested parties involved.

Frankly, this whole business about trade being better than any other way of distributing resources is so naive it boggles the mind how it can be such a widespread meme. Except, of course, for the fact that millions of dollars of propaganda are pumped into it by institutions far larger than individuals who have an interest in individuals thinking they're playing the same game and it's the best game in town.

You follow with angry anti-market rethoric but you never explain how a number of people trading places in schools, according to their own interest, makes anything worse for those not involved in an exchange.

Your assertion that trade always implies that both parties are better off is just wrong, that's my only point. That you build an ideology around that premise is none of my business; I didn't propose any normative philosophy about trade.

> You follow with angry anti-market rethoric but you never explain how a number of people trading places in schools, according to their own interest, makes anything worse for those not involved in an exchange.

I just pointed out that the premise to your reasoning did not really hold. If the premise doesn't hold then your position might be justified, but it hasn't been justified. If you can't entertain the possibility that you're wrong, then I don't know what to say; perhaps peruse the other lines of reasoning that were considered in this submission's comments?

P.S. just because i'm dismissive doesn't mean i'm angry

I have never made such an assertion, I've only said that in this specific instance free trade would have made both parties come out better off (which is indisputable -- both students would then be in their preferred school!), and that the judge's rationalization for forbidding students to swap their lottery results can be extrapolated as an anti-free trade argument.

We can discuss whether free trade always leads to better outcomes if you want, but that is not the point I am making in this thread. But in this instance it clearly does.

On the other hand you never explain WHY you think what I'm saying is wrong. You mentioned local optima, but the exchange pushes the end result towards the global optimum! What does exchange have to be "aware of all the interested parties involved"? If it is consensual and mutually beneficial to the parties involved, why do other parties even matter?

You said my premise doesn't hold, but you never explained why do you think so. I can't accept that just because you say so.

Explain to me what is wrong in this reasoning:

1) We got each other's preferred school; 2) We swap schools; 3) Now two students are happier than they were before; the rest remains the same as they were. 4) Repeat this process for more pairs of students and each time two people will emerge happier than they were before the exchange.

How does that not lead to a better global outcome?

If you can trade, then the right strategy is to rank the most popular school first so that you can trade it for the school you actually want.

Not if their swap implicitly makes everyone else worse off though; and this is precisely the claim that judges make, that you cannot simply isolate the effects of the swap without considering the global consequences of the state of the 'game', so to speak.

Not necessarily. Second-order global effects need to be considered as well.

Externalities — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Instrumental rationality — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_and_value_rationa...

Cognitive biases of various flavors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

My situation is exactly the same whether you traded your place or not. How can it possibly be worse?

And the global consequences, which seem to be the main concern here, has clearly improved, as more people are happier in their preferred schools.

Suppose that Alice inherently belongs to some identifiable Group A — based on IQ, artistic- or athletic ability, ethnicity, whatever — but she gets randomly assigned to a school where the majority of students belong to Group B. It's the other way around for Bob, who inherently belongs to Group B but is randomly assigned to a school where the majority of students belong to Group A.

Now suppose that Alice and Bob would each rather be in schools in which the majority consisted of "their own kind." And imagine that there are, say, 50,000 Alices and Bobs in the school district.

In that situation, allowing Alices and Bobs to swap schools at will could easily result in self-sorting that might legitimately be disfavored by the school district, the state government, etc. For example, the school district might well legitimately want students to experience school with a cross-section of students from other groups, not just with "their own kind."

Would you prevent Alice and Bob from experiencing schools that are perfect matches for their abilities? Shouldn’t this be their or their parents’ call?

People who don't engage in strategic ranking will on average be worse off than they were before.

If all people engage in strategic ranking, then it essentially imposes the 'search cost' of gaming the system optimally on all participants; this search cost may be much greater than the local benefit of swaps.

Also, some parents (e.g. the locals, the wealthy and connected) may be much better at doing strategic ranking then other parents, so it may inherently advantages certain groups over others.

I think there is legitimate debate over whether the local benefits to the few are more important than global objectives, but denying that there are shared objectives (e.g. 'fairness' and de-escalating local competition) that sometimes demand local sacrifices is silly.

I would be individually better off if I didn't have to pay taxes and not receive services, and yet we all recognize that if everyone could individually opt out of taxes, then the entire system would probably collapse.

And don't tell me that I had the rational choice to pay taxes: my tax obligation was put on me because of my citizenship and birth, which I did not enter in out of my free will.

You should also consider that if we got each others’ best preference, this is a sign of a broken system, because we could have clearly been assigned to our first choices in the first place. So in my view, the exchange should be allowed, and then the system fixed so that such situations are not possible.

> People who don't engage in strategic ranking will on average be worse off than they were before.

How? They will be in the same school regardless of other students switching or not. And even if you didn’t strategize, you might receive an offer for an exchange, so you could even end up just as well as someone who did strategize.

I don’t get where this idea that globally the students will be better off if exchanging places is forbidden. Some people will be better off by exchanging, others will be in the same position as they were before. It’s clear that globally the system will have gained from more people being at their preferred schools.

Your tax example doesn’t apply, because obviously if I stop paying taxes there will be less government resources available to get things done (although we could discuss whether giving money to the government is actually a good way to get things done). Switching schools is different because it only affects the two people involved.

> You should also consider that if we got each others’ best preference, this is a sign of a broken system, because we could have clearly been assigned to our first choices in the first place. So in my view, the exchange should be allowed, and then the system fixed so that such situations are not possible.

The thing is that matching systems have been studied for a long time and there is a very rich game theoretic literature that studies this both from a pure theory perspective (where we assume people's preferences are given), and also in real life (e.g. the doctor matching system in the US).

What you're demanding here is that the matching system is finds a stable matching, such that there are no trades that any pair of players would be willing to make.

This is an actual goal of most matching systems. The problem is that it conflicts with the goal of relieving participants from making strategizing choices[1] [2].

Not to get into the weeds to much, but you can see that in the classical stable marriage problem, where only men propose and women either accept or reject, the matching is only stable amongst the men: no man would be willing to switch his partner with another man, but there will (in general) be women who are willing to switch her partner with another woman.

The male-proposed stable matching is actually locally man-optimal and woman-pessimal, in the sense that any trade that a pair of women decide on would by definition make their current fiances worse off.

> How? They will be in the same school regardless of other students switching or not. And even if you didn’t strategize, you might receive an offer for an exchange, so you could even end up just as well as someone who did strategize.

In the sense that relative wellbeing matters to people in general. A system that provides half of people $1 and everyone else $10 makes people better in absolute terms, but worse off in relative terms, and that matters to people because access to many desirable goods in society depend on people's relative ranking.

This is a very well-understood effect and has been measured in different contexts, e.g. [3]

You are right that a person that does no strategizing may still receive an exchange offer, but it should be easy to show that in general, effective strategizing increases the probability of an exchange offer and the net quality of the school.

> I don’t get where this idea that globally the students will be better off if exchanging places is forbidden. Some people will be better off by exchanging, others will be in the same position as they were before. It’s clear that globally the system will have gained from more people being at their preferred schools.

I agree with you that exchanges increase welfare locally, and it would be nice to come up with a system that by definition come up with matches that are inherently stable to any pairwise trades, but as far as I'm aware there is no matching system that simultaneously does that and also effectively discourages strategic behavior (e.g. 'lying' about preferences). Game theory is full of proofs of the impossibility of simultaneously reaching 'obviously' desirable goals, e.g. [4].

Note that an equilibrium where consumers are honest about their preferences and then the 'matchmaker' can rely on those preferences is much simpler evaluate and optimize. This is why, for example, auctions are an effective way to find price—bids are generally close to 'honest' reflections of reservation prices.

As soon as broad strategic behavior comes into play, it's becomes much harder to determine whether your system is actually working well since the preferences no longer reflect what people really want.

A system where everyone is essentially masking their true preferences imposes obvious costs: everyone who doesn't strategize will be worse off relatively than those who do. Strategizing costs people time and energy. It also makes the matchmaker's job obviously harder, since the 'first step' would be to try to back out people's true preferences.

We can certainly argue about whether those costs are higher or lower than the cost of not sitting at a local optimum, but it seems unwise to simply deny that there is any tradeoff, or to completely ignore the fact that people care deeply about relative welfare as well as absolute welfare.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.00452.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07575

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game#Explanations

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

I get the "relative well-being" argument, but honestly it doesn't change my mind. It seems to be an argument that puts jealousy in front of objective improvements. Extrapolating again, this is the dispute between those who think inequality is a problem in itself and those who think that as long as poverty is reduced, inequality doesn't matter.

I would be fine with a system that doesn't allow exchange as long as the situation described in the article wasn't allowed to happen (i.e. if there's a spot for me in my first preference, I won't be allocated to my second one).

I'll try to find time to read your references, thanks!

Consider the simple one-to-one matching case, between {A, B} to {1, 2}. A prefers 1, B prefers 2, but 1 prefers B and 2 prefers A.

No matter what assignment we come up with, either A/B will want to trade, or 1/2 will want to trade.

In your world, how do you solve this dynamic cyclicality?

Depends on the case. Sometimes parents are the best judges — but parents, like all of us, focus on local maximization, in this case, "what's best for my kids," and not what's best for all kids. Sometimes it's globally better for Alice not to be able to have the absolute best thing for her, because of the risk that this would produce worse outcomes for Bob, Carol, Dave, etc.

Dr. Atul Gawande wrote in one of his books that obstetricians decided that their job was not to achieve the absolute local-maximum best outcome for every individual mother — and therefore to use forceps for difficult deliveries, vice C-section surgery — but instead their mission was to seek a global maximum, i.e., the safe delivery of millions of babies per year. (Apparently it's difficult to be sure that trainee physicians have the proper "feel" for handling forceps, which if mishandled can result in catastrophic injuries to baby and mother.)

So, the OB community redefined the standard of care for difficult births as the C-section, which is much easier to teach and monitor. This means that some individual mothers will have surgery that they could have avoided through the use of forceps. But that's considered less important than avoiding the risk of the damage that improper use of forceps can cause.

> Would you prevent Alice and Bob from experiencing schools that are perfect matches for their abilities? Shouldn’t this be their or their parents’ call?

Again this focuses too narrowly on the local maximum. Sometimes parents are in the best position to make the call. But sometimes we as a society insist that parental judgments stay within certain guard rails; that's why, for example, we have compulsory-education laws. (And it goes without saying that we don't assume the kids are the best judges.)

If you and I have each other’s first selection, then we should have been assigned them in the first place.

The other was it encourages strategizing in future lotteries as students will select spots that are 'good trading material' rather than their first choices which would undermine the whole system.

Why should the judges artificially devalue the lotteried objects, making everyone worse off on average?

Schools are funded with public money, and getting into a good school should be equally achievable to everyone (regardless of the background of their parents). That's why swapping places was forbidden. It's about the system's integrity and the system's fairness, not about the individual outcomes.

Do tell.

1. All students are sequentially ranked via lottery

2. You walk down the list, and each student gets their pick of schools with remaining spaces open

Side note, but it also seems IMO that "fairness" could improve if your lottery position is impacted by your past academic performance. Then the better student you have been, the more chance you have of being higher in the lottery order to select a school.

And similar in the debate over which voting system is best, there is also something to be said for preferring that the system being used is easily understandable and feeling fair to the individual, even in the case where it is (slightly) less fair in the aggregate.

Then you have the added bonus of fewer annoyed parents suing you, and only the mathematician parents will complain =)

And then if you also add in the idea of academic performance playing a role, parents can rationalize their situation as having been under their control all along - if their child had performed better, they would have had the ability to choose earlier in the list.

Of course, this is all assuming you believe that grades should convey some preferential status. But if you don't believe that, then why have grades at all?

They're giving good education to everyone, and don't reserve the best to the students who are doing well already and will succeed anyway.

An interesting feature of the US charter school system in my area is that because their funding is directly tied to headcount (I believe there is bonus money for special ed students too), they are typically always looking at how to expand. Each school runs its own lottery, and being over-subscribed is looked at as a signal they need to expand their offerings.

The instrumental variables results show that private school attendance is associated with higher test scores. Private school size effects in math, reading and science achievement are 0.19, 0.31 and 0.21"

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/705501468323653171...

Wow. It never occurred to me before that efficiency could create unfairness.

This could be Socialism's new motto!

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fpopul...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fsocia...

We're talking about a fundamental shortage of capacity for popular schools here. i.e. there are 10k spots and 8k students, but the top schools have fewer spots than interested students.

A private system wouldn't solve this problem. It'd only allow profit-seeking schools to admit the richest students only. It's not a recipe for societal success because you're giving children a ticket not based on merit, but based on their parents' riches. This is closer to a plutocracy than a meritocracy. But either way, merit is hard to define because we're talking about 11 year old kids deciding on secondary school in the Netherlands starting around age 12.

So you need some way of ranking students. The first one is student preference. It's not the case that you get enrolled at a school you had no interest in. The vast majority of students are enrolled in their schools of choice, but some of them may need to accept their 2nd or 3rd choice. In any case, the game theoretically driven choice affords students the highest chance of getting into a school closest to their preference.

The Dutch public school system does quite well and has good outcomes, a testament to how few private schools there are despite private schools being given ample room to thrive here.

I beg to differ, there is not ample room for private schools to thrive. This is primarily due to higher social cohesion as compared to other countries, the social acceptance of sending your kid to a private school in the US is generally assumed, whereas one is apt to be looked down on if they choose to have their children go to a less resourced, private school in the Netherlands.

Despite private schools here in the US providing students with a lower quality teacher (here in Seattle, they pay $10k less a year to private school teachers than the school district does on average), while also permitting students to spread disease and not vaccinate, many upper class and middle class families send their kids to these schools. Its a testament to a lack of information and push back against objectively shitty schools.

On the topic of vaccines, its crazy that the Catholic Church allows kids in their private schools to not be vaccinated. They're single handedly bringing back diseases that hadn't been a notable issue in decades.

I'm not sure that's true. Private schools are typically well-resourced in the Netherlands. For example, international schools tend to charge about 20k per academic year whereas public schools make do with 8.5k per year. Quality isn't bad in private schools here, it's quite good actually. But so is the public system which has socialised costs. Most parents are quite content with this system.