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I happened to read this early this morning before listening to this EconTalk at the gym, and I made a new connection. They talk about a variety of situations, vaccines, liver transplants, extreme scenarios on rowboats in the ocean, minimum wages, etc., but the one that really connected here had to do with price controls.
They talked about two examples, one with an explicit gov't price control and one with a paradoxical-seeming private price control. On the former, they mentioned Chinese price controls on rice. The price of rice goes up, people freak out, and so the gov't slaps a price ceiling on rice. Of course, Econ Happens, farmers don't grow as much rice as they would have with higher prices, shortages happen, and then the gov't "has to" figure out how to ration the rice. So, they introduce coupons to ration it. Of course, that means that now the coupons are the new currency that buys rice, and who is the gatekeeper that gets to seek rent and use their power over the currency to their own benefit? Well, the local gov't officials who distribute the coupons, of course. His brother-in-law, great guy, like that guy, he gets coupons. You? He doesn't like your face, you get no coupons, you get no rice. Suddenly, he has the power of distribution and can use it to build his status, favor people who will favor him, and he can screw anyone else for basically zero reason at all; it costs him nothing if he doesn't give you a coupon because he doesn't like your face.
The second example is the question of why tickets to the Rose Bowl are so cheap. Lots of people want those tickets at their face value, way more people than there are tickets. Rather than just let the price rise to be market-clearing, they decide that they "have to" hold some back to make sure that vague Bad Things don't happen, and then they get the status of being in control of distribution. They can give something that is extremely highly valued to their buddies, acting like it's really a little thing, really of little value (the face value), but getting widely outsized personal benefits from gatekeeping/rent seeking.
Now, universities. Lots of universities are actually priced at least in the right ballpark of how much value it provides to the customers. Maybe not really on parity, but they're at least in the same universe. And they do want to make money, so they have great incentives to lobby the government to help them price discriminate as much as they possibly can, so they can wring out every dollar of value possible from every customer.
But Harvard? They're not a regular university in this sort of regular situation. The perceived value by the customer is huge, and they are, like the owners of the Rose Bowl, unwilling to let prices determine distribution, unwilling to let the price rise to the market-clearing price, so they've self-imposed a price cap. What does this mean for their incentives? They now want to gatekeep/rent seek and use their distributional power to self-aggrandize. To give goodies to their buddies, to people who will compete on some other margin, who will support them politically or whatever else. Do they find themselves in that situation and then choose to discriminate against you because they don't like your face and in favor of someone else to self-aggrandize just due to the incentives that have now arisen, or do they choose to self-impose a price cap in part to create that distributional power that individuals in the organization can harvest? I don't know, but it's clear that since they have chosen to self-impose a price cap, these perverse incentives inevitably arise.
Could they adopt an objective measure to be the distributive rule? Sure; basically any measure would interrupt these incentives. Some folks say they could just use test scores as their distributive rule, and sure, that would remove them as the gatekeeper and turn the College Board into the gatekeeper. They could also just let a price system handle the distribution problem, letting the price rise to be market-clearing, and that would completely offload the gatekeeper to the larger market system (then, perhaps rather than competing on some other random margin, customers would just compete by trying to make more money, contributing back into the wealth of the nation). Most objective distribution rules have political problems, so it just happens to be so darn convenient for them that they "have to" personally accrue all of the benefits of being the personal distributional gatekeepers.
There is a simpler explanation --it's fundamentally a tax harvesting operation. In particular, the tax deduction of a donation must be reduced by the FMV of anything received in exchange for that donation, so the scam goes like
In fact, there is a well-known football university that almost went through with a plan to take 5% of tickets and auction them off, with the proceeds in excess of face value going to some charitable cause. A storm erupted, you see, because an auction for the ticket gives the IRS a very clear starting point for fair market value. Suffice it to say, tickets will never be auctioned off.
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I read a good article that I can't find now about this. Around a century ago when schools like Harvard switched over to holistic admissions processes in order to discriminate against Jews, there was one admissions interview report that simply said something like "ears too big". So yes, from the beginning if they don't like your face then you don't need to attend.
What? Is there a source for this. This is the Motte, so I'm not dismissing what you're saying out of hand, I just hand't heard this before.
But instead implemented admissions changes that allowed them to arbitrarily deny Jews without explanation or official quotas.
Starting on page 5 here.
Or on Harvard’s website.
And many other articles on Google. I read a good one years ago, but can't find it now. These other articles make the same claim that the switch from entrance exam to holistic admissions was a scheme to restrict the number of Jews accepted to Harvard. It took a few years, but they achieved <15% Jewish student body without implementing the proposed quota. With an arbitrary entrance policy they didn't need quotas.
Thanks! Amazing that they though it was enough of a "threat" that they created a gameable system to cover their tracks.
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