“Chicken” is a game where two people, or two groups, want different things, in a context where “I win/you lose.”  That is, there are no gains from exchange or compromise, and the loser is not only worse off, but embarrassed.

Government shutdowns are chicken games. Knowing that gives us a way to understand what is happening.

When I teach “chicken” I tell students to imagine you and James Dean, both in souped up 1967 Mustangs, are facing each other on a narrow road, about 1 mile apart. The game begins, and you both accelerate hard, to show you mean business.

If you both go straight (the road is too narrow to pass each other), there is a huge explosion and everyone dies. If you go straight and James swerves, you win and James is humiliated. And vice versa.

If you both swerve, then you both regret having passed up an opportunity to win. And your partisans, standing by the road and cheering, are embarrassed at your cowardice.

Who will win? Whoever cares more about winning, or cares less about dying. Of course, both of you tell everyone “I’m not afraid to die!”, but those are just words. Each player wants to win, but is in fact afraid to die. So, “I swerve, [you swerve or don’t swerve]” is better than “straight, straight.” I know that, you know I know that, I know you know, and so on.

As you get closer, you can see your opponent’s face, set in grim determination. Suddenly, James Dean does something amazing: he throws his steering wheel out the window! He can’t swerve. My only choice now is to go straight also (he dies, but so do I) or swerve (embarrassing, but I avoid dying). By throwing his steering wheel out the window, James commits to going straight, which means he wins.

Of course, I have played chicken before, so I know what to do. I immediately throw my steering wheel out the window.

(Record scratch…) What?  I want to die?

Wait for it. James throws out another steering wheel, and so do I. We are both throwing steering wheels out the window like crazy. Because each has a stack of them, on the front seat beside us.

Shutdown Background

Government shutdowns are not exactly a fiery crash, but they seem irrational. If you understand chicken, though, it makes more sense.

If a government in a parliamentary system fails to pass its budget, that is likely to collapse the government and trigger a new election. But that’s not true in Washington. In the US, the House and Senate have to agree, and the President has to sign the resulting bill. Partisan control can be divided (as it has been for nearly 90 of the years since 1800), or the minority party in the Senate can filibuster, or the President can veto.

It wasn’t always a chicken game. The famous 1879 rider fights between (Republican) President Hayes and a Democratic Congress were contentious, but there was no shutdown. The dispute involved election-related riders on Army and marshals funding, which the Democrats were using to try to end Reconstruction. The conflict dragged on for months, but partial appropriations were passed and only limited sums were actually withheld. The nonsense was kept in DC, where it belongs.

But the system showed signs of strain in the 1970s: there were six substantial gaps in budget coverage between 1977 and 1980. But agencies continued operation, even if funding expired, because it was assumed that funding would be restored.

That changed in 1980–81, when Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued opinions interpreting the Antideficiency Act (enacted in 1884, amended in 1950 and 1982) to require agencies to cease operations, except for narrow “essential” activities. Those opinions — grounded also in the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause — created the modern “shutdown,” now codified in the Office of Management and Budget Circular A-11.

Since the rules changed in 1981, there have been a number of actual shutdowns, where government workers were sent home, without pay (though at least until now the pay has always been restored retroactively). Counting only funding gaps in which shutdown procedures were followed (i.e., agencies closed and employees were furloughed), the episodes are:

·         Nov 20–23, 1981 — 2 days

·         Sep 30–Oct 2, 1982 — 1 day

·         Oct 3–5, 1984 — 1 day

·         Oct 16–18, 1986 — 1 day

·         Oct 5–9, 1990 — 3 days

·         Nov 13–19, 1995 — 5 days

·         Dec 15, 1995–Jan 6, 1996 — 21 days

·         Sep 30–Oct 17, 2013 — 16 days

·         Jan 19–22, 2018 — 2 days

·         Dec 21, 2018–Jan 25, 2019 — 34 days (or 35, depending on how you count)

The Logic of Chicken

The shutdown seems pointless, from an outside perspective. Everyone would be better off if we simply implement the deal that will be agreed on later, and skip the intervening inconveniences. And, make no mistake, there will be inconveniences: tens of thousands of applications, cases, tax returns, licenses, refunds, and other mandatory paperwork will be delayed for no reason. 

Many of the 2.25 million federal employees will work, but there will be no savings because they will still be paid, and rent on all those empty federal offices will still be due. It seems possible that the Trump administration will use the shutdown as a chance to push through permanent reductions in force, but even if that happens, the cost savings will be negligible.

To understand why all this is happening, despite the costs, and in spite of the fact that there will be a deal, one must think in terms of the payoffs to this peculiar version of “chicken.”

First, the usual payoffs are reversed, in the sense that many — perhaps most — members of Congress prefer “straight, straight” to “swerve, swerve.” Sure, the fiery crash is expensive for the country, but it benefits political leaders and the rank-and-file to appear to stand firm against the enemy. Of course, each side prefers that the other would give in, but there are few costs to being stubborn.

Second, the “steering wheels” are different: you aren’t trying to scare your opponent. The reason to make statements of obdurate resolve is to appeal to “your base.” Instead of being costly, boasting about your toughness is a benefit.

Further, in a federal system the temporary shutdown of the central government is nearly unnoticeable for most people, for several days and perhaps for some weeks. Even if there is a fiery crash, it’s far away for most of us and doesn’t affect our lives much.

What all this means is that government budget shutdowns are rational, the predictable consequence of the strategic setting. The drivers of each party can blame the refusal of the other side to cooperate, and they actually get credit for the shutdown. This could change if voters stopped rewarding politicians for these craven, empty demolition derby shows. But voters actually seem to be interested, and so the parties obligingly get back out on the road to give us the show we say we don’t want, but certainly deserve.   

Zohran Mamdani announced early this month that, should he win the New York City mayoral race, he intends to shut down New York City public schools’ gifted and talented programs for grades K-2.

This proposal was met with national backlash, from parents and pundits far beyond the bounds of New York City’s school system. Mamdani may have questionable policy stances, but he’s very good at getting media attention.

Mamdani specifically targeted early-age GT (gifted and talented) programs, saying they’d be cut at the end of the current school year. GT programs from third grade onward would be left intact, although parents have voiced concern that those would be next (first they came for the kindergarten GT programs, but I said nothing, because I did not have a kindergartener…).

New York’s gifted and talented program has been a point of tension for some time. Bill DeBlasio tried to do the exact thing Mamdani is threatening on his way out of office in 2021. Eric Adams reversed the policy when he took office in 2022 and kept the programs intact.

It’s also not a new conversation on a national scale. Gifted programs are often seen as an extravagance, an unnecessary pull on resources more desperately needed elsewhere. The needs of the bottom 10 percent become so dire that they outweigh the needs of the top 10 percent, who are left cast adrift.  Being ahead of the curve is a luxury. People assume kids progressing ahead of the pack will be “just fine” if they move at the average pace with everyone else.

But they won’t be “just fine” —they’ll be bored out of their minds. And such apathy runs the risk of becoming a life sentence, with kids checking out of learning altogether.

Mamdani said: “Ultimately, my administration would aim to make sure that every child receives a high-quality early education that nurtures their curiosity and learning.”

But he’s making an impossible promise. You can only have one or the other: you can cut gifted programs, or you can nurture every child’s curiosity and learning. “And” simply isn’t possible.

Pamela Hobart (mother of four gifted kids aptly posting on X as GT Mom) posted: 

Kindergarteners are fidgety overgrown toddlers. Transitioning to school is difficult for many – even when they enjoy the social environment and academic activities. How are you supposed to explain to a five year old who can already read chapter books that it’s for the greater good that more interesting work is coming in 3-5 YEARS?!

Forcing a five-year-old to read Hop on Pop when they’re ready for The Hobbit is psychological cruelty. It makes them believe that school is boring, that formalized learning is unpleasant and pointless. 

“I really do think that early years often define whether kids think of school as meaningful or as miserable,” Kelsey Piper, staff writer at The Argument wrote.

Mamdani’s campaign argues that the GT system is imperfect, because five-year-olds “should not be subjected to a singular assessment that unfairly separates them right at the beginning of their public school education.”

The “unfair” verbiage here is important. At the surface, it sounds like it’s referring to the child, but most public criticism of New York’s GT program centers around identity groups. The program has been criticized for contributing to segregation and retrenching biases along racial and socio-economic lines, because wealthier white and Asian students are overrepresented, and black, Hispanic, and poorer households under-represented. 

But on the level of the individual student, focusing on that doesn’t help anyone. A child isn’t a fractional part of their identity group, but a little kid who needs to be supported at their level, to have their curiosity nurtured — regardless of their skin color or race or academic level.

If White and Asian students are overrepresented, the “solution” (if that’s even the government’s problem, which is debatable) isn’t to punish those top-performing students by boring them with backwards-looking instruction in the name of equity.

The real solution is to figure out ways to raise the students who are falling behind. There are known blueprints for this. Former New York City schoolteacher Robert Pondiscio spent a year inside Brooklyn’s controversial Success Academy, a network of charter schools that caters to low-income minority families, with outcomes rivaling (and even exceeding) the city’s most expensive private schools. He wrote a book, How the Other Half Learns, detailing the unorthodox — but effective — practices inside the school, and how it puts students on track, transforming even low performers into academic superstars.

But Mamdani is against expanding the city’s charter options, arguing that it goes against the principle of universal education.

This proposed “universal public education” sounds egalitarian, but really it just strips students of opportunity in the name of equity. It strives to be “fair” but defines fair as “cutting everyone down to the lowest common denominator” — as if the American promise of being “all created equal” means we must force individuals down identical paths instead of giving them equal chance to take the path that fits them best. It’s dystopia in utopia’s clothing.

The first principle of this policy isn’t greatness or success. If Mamdani really wanted students in New York City to thrive, he would organize schools to meet them at their level and help them onto the next rung on the ladder (whatever that “next rung” may be — the basics of phonics or the woes of Atticus Finch). Instead, his stance is to effectively punish students for being ahead, and fully choke off the possibility of a world-class education in a public school.

The proposal follows the collectivist trend of Mamdani’s other proposals: government-run grocery stores, city-owned commune blocks, higher taxes. Each one can be wrapped in sugar and tied with a bow: it’s making the world more fair, it’s lifting up the downtrodden and giving them access to the good things they’ve been denied for too long.

It makes a person feel good to support it. That’s how kind souls get suckered into supporting policies that ultimately stomp down the very people they meant to lift up.

Not everyone who opposes high achievers is motivated by kindness. The rhetoric also plays into something uglier, a deep-seated, nearly subconscious response that seeks to strike down anything “better” or “more good.” Some are nursing a visceral loathing, vile envy that looks at success and greatness and wants to crush it. This is the festering wound on which socialism thrives.

Mamdani’s educational proposals are the mutated offspring of that deeper philosophy: if not everyone can have a nice thing (in this case, a spot in a gifted program), no one should have it.

A rising-tides-lift-all-boats mentality celebrates excellence, in any form and from any corner, with the knowledge an improving world is better for everyone. New York classrooms should be nurturing young minds not just for their own sake, but for all the innovations (electricity, refrigeration, insulation, automobiles, air travel, cell phones, international shipping, the internet) that educated humans can build for each other. The super-wealthy invest, the super-intelligent design, the super-motivated create, and the innovations they produce become accessible to all, raising the global standard of living. In a very real way, investing in the gifted and talented brings up the bottom-ranked classroom’s future prospects, as well.  

If the problem really is “segregation,” then cutting GT programs isn’t going to fix it. There are tens of thousands of applications for New York City’s limited GT spots. If gifted kids don’t have access to the resources they need in public school, parents with means will pull them out and send them elsewhere, gutting the public schools and leading to segregation in a more absolute form — not different classrooms, but different buildings. Gifted kids from families without means will be left to rot inside the system, their love of learning laid out as a sacrifice on the altar of equity.

Demolishing gifted and talented programs doesn’t make the world better. It makes it measurably worse. Even staunch collectivists must acknowledge that the  collective benefits from individual achievements. A world where gifted kids are enabled to excel, are given every chance to succeed, to go forth and build things that are valuable and make the world better – that world becomes progressively better, for everyone.