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Here’s some surprising news from the wide and wild world of workforce: last week marked the ratification of the first union contract establishing rules for drinking on the job. The employer is Brass Jar Productions, the company behind Drunk Shakespeare, described less than poetically as “one professional actor downs five shots of whiskey and then attempts to perform in a Shakespeare play.” As four sober actors try to keep the show on track, “hilarity and mayhem ensue.”
According to the union, the contract provides actors with health benefits and sick leave. (Sounds like both are imperative.) According to the company, “drinking and performing is a tale as old as time!” (just like Beauty and the Beast, except they’re not drinking tea). “We’re thrilled to receive the Actors’ Equity Association stamp of approval… to bring our brand of drunk, outrageous and professional entertainment to patrons.”
Although most people would say they’re not interested in watching drunk people, the emergence of Drunk Shakespeare – playing tonight in five cities (NY, DC, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix) and described less than truthfully by Slate as “the best thing to ever happen to the theater” – demonstrates they actually do. It’s not only Drunk Shakespeare or the Comedy Central show Drunk History, but also Brass Jar’s Drunk Dracula performed seasonally at Halloween: “One actor takes five shots and attempts an epic retelling of Transylvania’s thirstiest bachelor.”
I’ve been thinking about the gap between stated preference and revealed preference since I attended Apprenticeships for America’s recent Human Potential Summit convening on Making Colorado the Leading State for Apprenticeships. Julie Stone, Director of Family Economic Mobility at Colorado’s Gary Community Ventures – a sunsetting fund for improving economic mobility in Colorado and co-sponsor of the event – opened the meeting by saying:
At Gary, apprenticeship is on our list of big bets that have yet to go big. Can you name any system-level solution more widely endorsed, but so narrowly adopted? An issue where the gap between stated preference and revealed preference has been so great... for so long?
Julie makes a great point about the gap between stated preference and revealed preference. In education and workforce, the phenomenon isn’t limited to apprenticeship, it’s pervasive. In K-12 surveys, parents consistently say they’re satisfied with their child’s public school ( 70% in the latest Gallup poll) – and teachers ( 82%). By large margins, they also claim to support teachers unions. But revealed preference tells a different story. For decades, millions of families have voted with their feet and traipsed off to charter schools, now educating 3.7M students across 8,000 publicly funded schools. And since Covid, Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) have become all the rage. 33 states now offer public funding for private schools, with no restrictions (universal choice) in 12 states. In the eight states with new active universal choice programs, ESAs already represent 6% of publicly funded K-12 enrollment. Meanwhile, even in states without school choice legislation, enrollment in public schools has declined over the past decade, particularly in the largest districts. Enrollment is down in about 85% of the 100 largest districts including:
The gap between stated and revealed preference is also evident in higher education. While strong majorities of adults support public funding of community colleges (82%) and state university systems (69%), they’re not encouraging their children to enroll: over the past decade community college enrollment is down 32% while total enrollment at public four-year institutions declined 9%. Last week we learned that fall 2024 freshman enrollment at public four-years fell 8.5% from a year ago.
The common thread is economic insecurity. Given mindbogglingly rapid changes in good jobs (hybrid or remote), what work gets done in these jobs (digital transformation, especially AI), and hiring processes for these jobs (increasingly automated, especially at the top of the hiring funnel), I don't know any parents who think their children will follow a similar or even recognizable career pathway. Add to this a clearer-than-ever bifurcation between first jobs that pay a living wage and appear to have career pathways and jobs that have one or the other or neither. It all makes parents very nervous.
Due to this anxiety, within public universities we’ve seen a dramatic enrollment shift towards the largest and most dynamic urban areas. While many rural campuses have seen double-digit declines, schools in big cities have held their own. Because that’s where the jobs are. Similarly, applications to the most famous universities have skyrocketed. Because that’s where the best employers recruit. It’s also why students have flooded out of languages, humanities, and social sciences into pre-professional majors like health sciences and pseudo-professional majors like business and marketing. And it explains the ascendence of Northeastern (and its co-op program) from a non-selective commuter school to a 5.2% acceptance rate. It also predicts strong demand for apprenticeships, which will close the gap Julie pointed out as soon as we solve apprenticeship’s supply problem (perhaps starting in Colorado!).
In education, our revealed preferences now vary radically from our stated preferences for one simple reason: most of us think our children will be worse off; we fear for our children’s economic future. Our children are freaked out as well; recall the Harvard survey finding a majority of respondents ages 18-29 no longer support free market capitalism. So while we continue to say one thing, we’re making choices that seem safer. If we had our druthers, we’d smooth things out: have the highs be not be so high as long as the lows aren’t so low. And if that means giving up on the American Dream, so be it. Most parents and young adults would settle for Canada.
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With stated preference in next week’s presidential election effectively tied, pundits are struggling to predict what voting will reveal. Most election years, if there’s a material gap between stated and revealed preference, it’s because voters say they support pro-social policies but end up choosing candidates who’ll benefit them personally e.g., by lowering taxes. We saw this in 2016 and 2020 as polls consistently overstated support for Democratic candidates.
In this election, there are lots of reasons to believe polling bias continues to favor the Democratic Party and prediction markets concur. It’s also logical that after several years of high inflation and tens of millions of Americans living from paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make ends meet, voters would change the party in power. Meanwhile, Democratic Party stalwarts are forecasting the opposite result, perhaps with more emotion than logic.
While conventional wisdom says that education is now the most important factor in predicting how someone will vote – e.g., in 2020 President Biden won 83 of the 100 most educated counties while President Trump won nine of the 10 least educated – degree attainment is already factored in to the deadlocked polls. But could the divergence between stated and revealed education preferences predict what’s about to happen? It’s worth exploring as this election will determine our course on education and more fronts than most of us want to think about.
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If the electorate is about to reveal its preference for a safer choice, everyone knows Donald Trump. He led the country for four years and most Americans view his tenure through rose-colored glasses. Meanwhile, many voters feel they don't know know Vice President Harris. So in this formulation, President Trump is the known commodity, the safer choice.
But keep in mind that the known commodity is renowned for risks and recklessness (a hundred examples come to mind) while the unknown commodity is criticized for being scripted or disciplined and excessively cautious. No one exemplifies the boom and bust – the flash and dalliances with the justice system – of the American Dream more than President Trump. Conversely, few candidates play it safe more than Vice President Harris. The dread of impulsive and cataclysmic decisions in a second Trump term and thousands of federal appointments based on fealty and ideology rather than competence is met on the other side by fears that Vice President Harris won’t make meaningful personnel changes or any new or different decisions.
Because one of these things is not like the other, in this rare case, it’s a fair bet that a majority of voters in the seven swing states won’t view the known commodity as the safe choice or the safer pair of hands. For that, they’ll turn to the unknown commodity. So if our attitudes to education are any indication, if a majority of Americans are willing to settle for the Canadian Dream, they’re about to settle on the candidate who went to high school in Canada.
If this proves out, in a week (or two) we’ll be able to look back past the sturm und drang of the 2024 presidential election and recognize that digital transformation and economic anxiety have not only changed our education preferences, they’ve also made the American electorate somewhat more risk averse, or at least more risk averse in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The catch – and it’s a big one – is that this theory hinges on voters’ level of information and education. Voters need to be able to evaluate risk and safety, if not effectively then at least adequately or even plausibly. If our education system is so broken that low-propensity voters are unable to do this – or if their economic plight, caused by head-spinning economic changes and failure of our education system to keep up, makes them feel (incorrectly) like they have nothing to lose – then we’re in some kind of recursive education doom loop.
Besides information and education, there’s the question of sobriety. There’s always the possibility that millions will vote after downing five shots of whiskey. But while this may be acceptable or amusing for performing Shakespeare, if we want to be able to say All’s Well That Ends Well, it’s not OK to vote drunk.