Give the children the vote?

Chrystia Freeland:

Here's a novel way to address the problems caused by rising income inequality: give children the vote.

One virtue of this iconoclastic idea, recently advanced by the Canadian economist Miles Corak, is that it sidesteps the usual partisan debates. After all, the right and left have profound moral disagreements about economic inequality. But whatever your political stripe, you almost certainly believe in equality of opportunity.

Unfortunately, some of Corak's most celebrated work has been to show that rising income inequality and declining social mobility go together. This relationship, which Alan B. Krueger, the head of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has dubbed the Great Gatsby Curve, is one of the most powerful reasons to care about rising income inequality.

That's where the kids come in. In a policy paper published last month by Canada 2020, a Canadian progressive research group, Corak points out that the group that suffers most from declining social mobility is the young. As it happens, this is also one of the last human constituencies that doesn't have the right to vote. That relationship may not be coincidental.

"Older individuals, and those with more education working in higher-skilled occupations, are more likely to vote," Corak writes in the paper. "But, in addition, there is a broad bias by virtue of the simple fact that children are disenfranchised. Children's rights are not adequately recognized and they have a reduced political voice in setting social priorities."

Corak has a simple and radical solution to that bias: Give children the vote. "When you first hear about it, it sounds like a crazy idea, and that was my first reaction," Corak told me, speaking by phone from Ottawa.

Related: "the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment"

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 10, 2013 2:26 AM
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