WSJ’s Taranto tackles a logical fallacy in the public vs. private school discussion

You’ve read the column about the bad people who send their kids to private schools. Now you should read James Taranto‘s recent response in the Wall Street Journal.

The biggest problem with Benedikt’s argument is the fallacy of composition–of mistaking the part for the whole. We are willing to stipulate that improvements to the public schools are a common good–that all else being equal, better public schools would make everyone better off (although the benefit would be far from equally distributed).

But a common good is not the common good. Benedikt concedes that parents who follow her advice would be consigning their children to “mediocre educations.” If that simply meant that the school experience would be less pleasant or personally fulfilling, then it would be accurate to characterize this as a personal sacrifice that would not diminish the common good. But if that were the case, it wouldn’t enhance the common good either–only the private good of public-school students whose educations would be marginally more pleasant and fulfilling.

The assumption behind treating education as a public good is that in general, educating children makes them more successful adults, and successful people are more valuable to society than unsuccessful ones. If that is true, then consigning your child to a mediocre education is harmful to the common good, because it reduces his likelihood of success–which can mean everything from becoming a gainfully employed taxpayer to discovering a cure for cancer.

Benedikt’s view of what constitutes “the common good” seems to be limited to the institutions of government. It’s the flip side of the Dewey-Konczal theory that any “public” action–any action that affects anyone else–justifies government intervention. And like the Dewey-Konczal theory, the Benedikt argument leads in directions that liberals ought to find discomfiting. …

… Education is not the only governmental function that is affected by the decision to have children or not. By depriving the future United States of taxpayers, we are hastening the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare and increasing their burden on other people’s children. At least most children who go to private schools eventually end up paying taxes.

So childless men are worse people than parents who send their children to private school. But by Benedikt’s logic, childless women are even worse people than childless men.

Individual men are reproductively expendable. While making a baby requires both a mother and a father, maintaining a population requires far more fertile women than fertile men. In his 2010 book, “Is There Anything Good About Men?,” psychologist Roy Baumeister cites DNA studies that have found female ancestors of currently living human beings outnumber male ones by 2 to 1. If you’re puzzled as to how that could be, consider that, as Baumeister notes, Genghis Khan is “said to have [fathered] hundreds of children, probably well over a thousand.” It’s unlikely any woman has come within an order of magnitude of that.

Thus an intelligent, successful woman who chooses to remain childless–or even to have fewer children than she can afford–is almost certainly acting against the “common good” of keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent. Allison Benedikt doesn’t say whether she has any children. It’s possible she’s a bad person herself.