Policy

Asymmetric Marriage Algorithms: NYC School Placement

Each year, hundreds of thousands of kids apply1 to New York City’s public school system with a ranking of up to twelve schools. The Department of Education then matches all of these students up with a single offer from one of NYC’s 1,800 public schools,2 ensuring maximum satisfaction for the applicants. How does it work? At first glance, my intuition was that this was a really complex problem. After watching this fantastic video, I then sketched out the algorithm in a notebook and came to believe that it was pretty simple.

Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate …

The Baumol effect on higher education

A recent news piece, “The rising cost of education and health care is less troubling than believed”, reacts to Helland and Tabarrok’s short book just released by the Mercatus Center titled, _Why are the Prices so D*mn High_? Helland and Tabarrok say the answer is almost entirely the Baumol effect—i.e., that uneven productivity gains lead to inverse increases in unit price. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.