Some years ago, during a dinner party, our smoke detector started beeping while we were broiling steaks. I dashed into the hallway and poked at the detector with a broom, which paused, as if surprised, then resumed wailing. My husband came out of the kitchen and had a go. His more muscular attention bought us perhaps 30 seconds of relief, but the machine recovered and more aggressively assaulted our ears. Eventually we pulled the cursed thing out of its frame and ripped the batteries out.
That’s when one of our guests said, “Guys, that’s really a lot of smoke.” It sure was, because as it turned out, our bathroom was on fire (thanks to a candle).
Life is full of these messy signals. Prices are a signal. They tell us how much people want stuff, how much that stuff costs to produce and how much of it we have available. Standardized test scores are signs, telling us whether kids have mastered certain skills. Those warnings are, like my smoke alarm, highly imperfect. (We’ve had many alerts and exactly one fire.) But they contain vital information, and we ignore them at our peril.
Unfortunately, because these signals are messy, we are often tempted to ignore them, especially when the information they contain is bad news, like “your bathroom is on fire,” or “your schools are failing to close persistent racial and income gaps,” or “regulations have made it too hard to build new housing.” Ideally you’d extinguish the fire or fix your failing schools or amend the regulations before the problem worsens. But solving problems is hard, and in politics, it often involves taking on well-organized constituencies that will wave away the smoke and insist that everything is just fine. So institutions often choose to disregard the underlying issues and simply whack the alarm with a hammer until it stops beeping.
There has been a lot of that going on recently, most notably in education. Instead of rectifying disparities in preparation and achievement, people decided it would be simpler to adjust the measurements. Parents opposed standardized testing, got their kids disability diagnoses that allowed them extra time on tests and lobbied teachers to change bad grades. Exhausted teachers responded with grade inflation, which also helped conceal that low-income and minority kids weren’t doing as well as their richer and White peers. Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see — or rectify — pandemic-era learning loss.
The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class.
These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers.
Most astonishingly, in 2024, the majority of kids who needed a refresher on the most basic skills had taken at least one higher-level high school math course, such as calculus or statistics, and had an average grade point average in their math classes of 3.65. More than one-quarter of them had straight A’s in a subject they demonstrably didn’t understand. And this problem is not limited to UC San Diego or California. I’ve heard professors at many institutions, including Harvard, express concerns about the number of unprepared students they were seeing after admissions offices stopped demanding test scores.
That’s what happens when you silence the alarm instead of responding to it: The fire burns out of control. It should be a warning to the growing number of politicians who think they can fix other problems — like soaring rents or rising electricity costs — by simply freezing prices. The prices are telling us that there’s too little supply to meet demand, or that something (such as renewables mandates or too few natural gas pipelines) is driving up supply costs. Freezing prices doesn’t fix that any more than a courtesy A gives students what they actually need to succeed in college.
It does the opposite, because it makes it less profitable to build housing units, transmission lines or generating capacity. You can claim you’re going to pair supply-side reforms with price controls (claims we’ve heard from Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor-elect, and Mikie Sherrill, New Jersey’s next governor). But the reason those reforms haven’t happened is that they require politicians to take on powerful groups such as homeowners or environmental activists opposed to new natural gas pipelines.
A price freeze doesn’t make those fights any easier to win. It temporarily relieves the political pressure to actually do something about rising prices, while creating problems down the road. Addressing educational disparities through grade inflation, or managing a supply shortage by freezing prices, is like trying to cure your lung cancer by smoking more. It undoubtedly feels better in the moment than the drastic therapy that’s actually needed. But in the long run, it can only make things worse.
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