Think tankers were challenging the conventional wisdom last week, in ways that I think Corner readers will appreciate.

One example is the latest edition of Cato Unbound, the fine online journal that publishes an essay from a noted scholar on a topical issue, then response papers, then crosstalk among the debate participants. The current topic is the American incarceration rate and its implications for crime control, economic development, and the fate of black males. Glenn Loury leads off the discussion, with an essay that includes this passionate passage:

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these facts do at times leave me inclined to cry out in despair. But my argument is intended to be moral, not existential, and its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made collective decisions on social and incarceration policy questions, and we benefit from those decisions. That is, we benefit from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our behest. Put differently our society — the society we together have made — first tolerates crime-promoting conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then goes on to act out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

John Lott, James Q. Wilson, and Bruce Western respond. A highly recommended exchange.

On another issue, the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga challenges the conventional wisdom when it comes to the wage premium for investing in higher education. Writing at RealClearMarkets, Malanga cites the work of Enrico Moretti to point out something that has long bugged me: the tendency for policy analysts of all stripes to make sweeping generalizations about public policies based on state or local comparisons of data that are not adjusted for state or local variations in cost of living:

Adjusting for cost of living, Moretti estimates that the increase in the wage premium that one earns because of a college degree is about half what it seems to be when wages are simply compared across the entire U.S. without first adjusting for cost of living. As many professionals in New York or San Francisco can tell you, Moretti’s conclusion is hardly shocking.

Once you clean the data up, it becomes a lot more obvious that youngsters on the margin who choose not to go to a university may well be making a rational choice, despite the incessant scolding they get from guidance counselors, the mass media, and some politicians:

Maybe kids (or their parents) who are sitting on the fence about attending college understand better than a lot of policy makers that the return produced by a university diploma isn’t all it seems to be, especially if you are a middle-of-the-road student who will have to borrow heavily to get a college degree and then go snare a job that isn’t at the top of the pay scale in a place where it’s expensive to live.