Boston has a lot of historical and natural advantages, e.g., all of the colleges and universities that set up shop over the past 375+ years. This study, however, ranks us 56/78 in terms of public spending efficiency. Typically I would question a study such as this, but Washington, D.C. ranks dead last, which squares with common sense and direct personal experience. California cities buried under pension debt also rank pretty low, which makes sense due to the fact that they’ll soon be spending most of their budget on paying former employees. The authors of the study try to adjust for how challenging it is to run a public school:
To control for major cross-city differences in economic status among cities, we adjusted education spending levels by two key economic factors: poverty rate and median household income. Moreover, given that education spending is further affected by the percentage of children in single-parent families and the percentage of households that do not speak English as their first language, we adjusted expenditures on these two measures as well.
[Note that a Massachusetts resident who sets up what the authors describe as a “single-parent family” by having sex with a dermatologist, dentist, or other higher-income resident or visitor should be able to get $1-3 million tax-free under the Massachusetts child support guidelines and may have wage income on top of child support profits. So a “single-parent family” may well have a spending power that is above the median household income for the state, unlike in some other states where child support revenue is capped (e.g., Minnesota). Thus the authors might need to work with finer-grained data to sort out children with just one parent on food stamps from children with just one parent in a Beacon Hill townhouse next to John Kerry‘s. On the third hand, due to the higher financial stakes and winner-take-all outcomes, Massachusetts has much more intensive custody, and child support litigation than other states, which tends to result in children who are psychologically damaged and harder to educate even if the winner parent becomes fairly rich.]
And also for how tough it is to keep citizens from attacking each other:
To control for major cross-city differences in the economic status of cities, we adjusted police-spending levels by three key economic factors: poverty rate, unemployment rate and median household income. The adjusted “Per-Capita Police Spending” measure assumes all cities have an average for each of the three factors. This allowed us to compare return on investment (ROI) of police spending net of cross-city differences in these key economic indicators.
Under some of these adjustments Boston’s economic success, most of which is probably accounted for by stuff that happened 100+ years ago, works against us.
The same folks ranked Boston 52/65 in 2015’s Best & Worst Run Cities.
Readers: Based on your experience in other cities that are featured in the study, what do you think?
Related:
- Despite high levels of income and wealth, Massachusetts ranks 30/50 for happiness.
- “Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed?” (The Nation), describes Boston as ” the spiritual homeland of the professional class and a place where the ideology of modern liberalism has been permitted to grow and flourish without challenge or restraint” and then notes that Massachusetts “has the eighth-worst rate of income inequality among the states; by another metric it ranks fourth.”
- Now I get to pay some of GE’s bills (Massachusetts and Boston taxpayers fund GE’s new urban lifestyle)
I checked the description of the methodology. It is bovine fertiliser. What exact model did they use? a standard linear model? how did the input the independent variables in? just an additive model? interactions? that description is the typical swindle ‘we will not actually tell you what we did but you gotta trust us, we used all these possible covariates!’.
I’m not sure “efficient” is quite the word. What they are basically ranking is the amount of per capita government spending. I’ll take my home city of Philadelphia as an example. Government spending is constrained by several factors compared to Boston – it’s more of a blue collar city. Property taxes are kept very low compared to nearby suburbs – until recently a small row house might pay only a few hundred dollars in property taxes. The influence of Philadelphia in the state capital is not big enough for it to get whatever it wants. The rest of Pennsylvania (minus Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) resembles West Virginia and they are not eager to send a lot of money to Philadelphia.
The flip side of this is that people in Philadelphia don’t get a lot of government services. The public schools really stink and are largely avoided by whites. The parks are large (thanks to 19th century ancestors) but they are not well maintained. There is public transit but it is largely avoided by whites also. To some extent you get what you pay for and Philadelphians don’t get much. Philadelphia always had a corrupt government but Philadelphians are not big dreamers – when we think corruption we think of slipping the plumbing inspector a few bucks , not spending $15,000,000,000 on the Big Dig. Our calculators don’t even have that many digits.
In terms of actual “efficiency” (and government efficiency is hard to benchmark) I’m not sure its really much better than Boston – there is plenty of pension abuse, etc. It’s just that they have a lot less money to play with. The Federal government can print up however much money it wants to spend, but state and local governments are constrained by their fundraising ability. Except for that, there are really no constraints on things like per pupil spending. You can badly educate your kids for $10,000/head as in Philadelphia or you can educate them just as badly for $20,000/head as in DC. Or you could educate them well for $10,000/head as in Japan – it has more to do with the kids than the educators.
On the first comment, I’ve learned over the years to really distrust these sorts of studies. I can’t figure out the methodology here at all.
One thing about political science, and this is really a political science article, is that the questions the field concerns itself with are really important, but because they are so important, they can never be answered. The relevant data will always turn out to be not recorded, or you won’t be allowed to answer them. In this case the question is “how well run are various city governments.”
At first glance, they seem to use a methodology that way over-adjusts for the percentage of non-whites in a city.
The study can be tossed out immediately because New Orleans and Miami are placed as the #1 and #2 cities. New Orleans is usually viewed as the worst run, most corrupt city in the United States and Miami is competitive in that category. If they come out on the top of a “well run cities” survey, then the survey has to be thrown out. The Twin Cities in Minnesota are at the bottom, which is also really suspicious.
Philly is at #3, and as second comment explained, this is actually defensible. For various reasons they don’t get much revenue to waste (though it should be noted that their revenue collection record is horrible), and do a good job with what they have. Also, historically Philadelphia was known for a being a machine politics city where the political machine actually ran the city competently (this is a side note, but while the commentator is correct about white people avoiding public schools, though this is something that is universal across the US after desegregation, he is incorrect about white people avoiding mass public transportation).
Regarding Ed’s comments, I don’t think Philadelphia’s government is competent or does a very good job at all. The state had to take over the management of the school system a few years ago. The main factor in its “efficiency” is that it doesn’t have as much money (per capita) to waste as wealthier cities.
Regarding mass transit, the bus lines serve a largely black clientele, the subway and trolley system are almost as segregated. The suburban train lines have a largely white ridership. A lot of this has to do with where the lines go and the fact that neighborhoods remain racially segregated as well. Also because many blacks are too poor to own an automobile.
I pretty much discount all studies. I used to do them for a living. Pretty much everything I’ve seen has problems with subjects, data collection, data selection, methodology, analysis AND conclusions. Not to mention if you find out who paid for the study and/or who is trumpeting the ‘results’, you’ll figure out why the study was run and who wanted to have a proof point for what.
Every study I funded said exactly what I wanted it to except for one and that was submarined so deep its measuring the earth’s internal core temperatures.
When I lived in MA we had stuff like guys on the clock sleeping in their trucks and the guy issuing liquor licenses and checking compliance also selling booze to the same bars while he was there. In CA we do incredibly stupid things with the taxpayer money, but there’s less criminality about it. Unless stupid = criminal.
The worst studies are the ones on nutrition and health. About 90% of what you think is good or bad for you is probably wrong and even the opposite of what the data really says. The amount of money involved in food and drugs is amazing…