Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because the benefits (so far as the job market was concerned) were largely relative rather than absolute to begin with.
(In case it matters, I’ve felt this same way as a student, as a teacher, and as a member of industry. From every side, it has seemed to me that an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way, for the most part, but rather is used only as some competitive signaling filter.)
I don't know about your developed country, but education seem to have helped the people in the poor developing country I am from. I feel as more people got educated, the more ambitious they became. Instead of doing the same things their forefathers used to do, they got a broader perspective and started venturing into more businesses. More engineers, doctors, accountants and economists have also helped. When you say that someone does not need a specialized piece of education because she will never use it, you are confining her to the life you think she should lead, while more specialized education while not always directly useful can help people see what they can become. But that's just my feeling, no data, no stats
One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.
Exactly where that point is, seems to be a function of how many highly educated people a country can produce vs. how many jobs it can create. 100K new doctors and engineers, with 100K new jobs for them? Wonderful! But what if you only had 20K new jobs? Now you're in trouble.
Instead of treating this as a first world problem, developing countries should employ their brightest minds right now to research why this is happening in the U.S. and find a way to avoid getting stuck in the same place 20-30 years from now.
>One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.
I'm skeptical, given that the population-wide baseline of knowledge in the USA isn't actually that high. When the subject comes up, we hear that other countries teach their high-school kids calculus, linear algebra, and real physics.
Those uneducated people are also the same ones increasingly out of work in this country today. And we 'encourage' the brightest of those children from other countries to move here (yes, not exactly what happens with H1-B, but still). I tend to agree with above poster that it'd be nice if there was substantive analysis done on the current situation.
You're only looking at one of the variables (the number and/or proportion of highly educated people). If the other variable (the number and/or proportion of well-paying jobs) is abnormally low, the first variable can be quite low and still produce the same effect. It's the ratio that matters, not absolute numbers.
I don't think it's a commonly accepted conclusion that education increases income primarily through competitive advantage (i.e. it's a zero sum game).
Take, for example, being educated on home farming methods to grow 200 cabbages a year instead of 100. In this case your income grows directly as a result of your education.
Now yes there are some cases that may be signaling, but I'd like to see some empirical evidence that education is mostly zero-sum.
Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)
and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive
either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat
I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need in this (somewhat contrived) analogy
Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2.
So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket.
Making better workers only helps if there are enough better jobs to go around, otherwise it is just inflating a massive bubble in the education industry.
We definitively do NOT have "too many workers". There are millions of jobs out there which are simply not getting done due to lack of a worker willing/able to do them, or due to regulations making the job illegal.
We have "not enough jobs" when everyone who wants one has a butler, maid, cook and driver. (Or butlerbot, cleaning bot, autocook 2000 and self driving car.) That's not the world we live in today.
Yes, that's a perfect illustration of labor scarcity. You want work done but it isn't getting done.
Other work that isn't getting done: childcare for working women, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, building new public works - most left wing types have a massive laundry list of jobs that aren't getting done.
Maybe those folks are just full of it and we shouldn't actually tax the rich to get those things done?
You normally write very clearly, but I have no idea what you're getting at with this particular comment.
Is any of this sarcasm? Are you sincerely suggesting that not being able to find someone to work for 1 cent per hour means that there is a labor scarcity?
What's this business about public funding of municipal infrastructure and how does it relate to the conversation at hand?
But people's time is always a limited resource. Even in a utopia where the cost of living comfortably is zero and people are immortal, spending an hour providing a service to another person carries an opportunity cost.
So, under this definition there is always, almost tautologically, a scarcity of labor. The word has little meaning, and discussion of whether or not there is such a scarcity becomes irrelevant to decisions about things like public welfare or economic policy.
There is not, tautologically, a desire for labor. I do not desire human computation services at all (remember when "computer" was a job description) or the manual transportation of written information.
You could charge me $0 for these services and I still won't buy any. These are actual jobs that have vanished and there is no scarcity of these services.
You can pretty much automate away specific jobs, like the two you've just mentioned. But there is an infinity of other jobs. And we won't have automated them all away until we arrive at an (impossible?) state of affairs in which there are unlimited, cost-free robots whose physical and intellectual capabilities are on par with humans.
Pick whatever futuristic, heavily-automated world you want to live in: It will still be worth something to you to have someone (for example) spend hours on the web researching a question that you want an answer to (but not badly enough to spend hours yourself).
The irreducible nature of scarcity is pretty much an underpinning of all modern economic theory, right, and taking about it as a variable thing is usually nonsense, and often cover for talking about supply less (or, in the case of discussion of the absence of scarcity, meeting or beyond) one's personal preferences while dressing it up in language that tries to elevate those preferences to objectively privileged standards.
The word has a clear and useful meaning, it's just not appropriate to many of the contexts where it is used specifically to obscure the subjective character of what people are describing when they use the term.
The problem is that neo-liberal capitalism has essentially been the only remaining big "story" over the last 30 years. First it weeded out all ideas of communism and recently it seems to slowly but steadily trump even European social capitalism, eventually it might simply eat itself and turn humanity into a literal "state-machine".
There really seems to be "no alternative" today and consequently people seem to see no way out of that box for the most part.
"The Unnecessariat" which got posted here yesterday was a very sobering read in that regard:
> Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy.
I don't know who believes that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. However I believe that, where no actual disabilities exist, family units should be self-supporting and should also share in the burden of maintaining a free, just and civilized society.
This only works if the increase was achieved on a sustainable way. In practice it's probably over farming leading to destruction of the soil, eutrification or poisoning of water courses, and other damaging behaviours that are a long term detriment.
Farmers and farms can't be switched on and off to different crop production or different skilled occupations without considerable lag.
> doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)
No. Noooo. This stuff is all connected. At a minimum, leading to consumers of cabbage spending less money in the market for foodstuffs, instead being free to spend the money elsewhere, leading to an increase in their personal well-being and economic growth in other sectors.
(And that's assuming that there is no change in the number of entrants into the home-cabbage-farming sector.)
From the perspective of the farmer it's still worse than zero-sum because they've paid to become educated while still bringing home the same amount of income. This scenario also assumed that education brought real productivity gains vs. being a signal.
It's actually negative-sum, because it presumably costs some amount of money/work/resources to produce more cabbages. So while cost-per-cabbage increases, sales price decreases.
Compare and contrast to the arguments about "highest worker productivity in history" while wages stagnate.
(And, yes: education can of course grant skills which are genuinely required for certain jobs. This being Hacker News, I suppose we'll hear that everyone should learn to code. I'm all for everyone getting to do whatever they wish to do, and if that wish is learning to code, so be it. But I suspect, if everyone did suddenly learn to code, we'd find that coding would, with corresponding suddenness, cease to be a ticket out of poverty...)
I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't.
People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth.
We have a society that needs people with many diverse skills. We should be investing more in tech or trade schools than we are in colleges and universities.
People need a way to gain the skills they will need to earn a living but sending everyone to college is a universally bad idea. It'll turn the Bachelor's degree into the new High School Diploma.
people learning to code isn't about getting people jobs in which they can code. it's about allowing people to solve repetitive tasks in their daily lives and jobs
if everyone were able to code, there'd be much more automation of menial jobs, which generally means a more productive economy in the long run
it's the same thing that we do with running scalable information systems; automate the mundane so you can do things that really have an impact on quality, rather than spending hours doing something you could code and be done with it
I'm old enough that I was taught BASIC in middle-school circa 1981. Back then, it was taken for granted that "computer literacy" involved teaching people to code.
Am I a "professional programmer" today? Well, I do program as part of my job, but I'm technically a microbiologist/immunologist. Analyzing data by writing code is a lot more efficient and repeatable than the fiddling with spreadsheets that non-coders do.
I was taught basic in middle-school in 1983. At my school, this was only done for children in the Gifted Program.
I am an IT Professional. I have worked as a developer and two years ago, I made the leap to security analyst. My programming skills come into play because some of the security packages I have used require the ability to write regexes.
Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth.
Absolutely, and if all those people also knew how to code, they could find ways to apply the skill to their jobs to make them more efficient. People shouldn't learn to code so that they can become programmers, they should learn to code because knowing how to code can make you better at virtually any job you end up in.
Truck driver:
Knowledge of the travelling salesman problem. Algorithms in general to find optimal routes. A little programming knowledge to help with automating their excel sheets to record expenses.
Cook:
OOP as it is applied to a kitchen and its staff: are there more efficient ways to divide roles and responsibilities between different jobs in the kitchen, or are the defined roles (line cook, sous chef, etc) already at local optimum. Database programming can help with inventory management, etc...
Welder:
(Disclaimer: I have absolutely zero knowledge of welding) FLow charting work process to find more efficiency. Decomposing a task to be completed into more effective sub tasks. Using Big O concepts to help with estimating how long a job will take to complete using different methods.
I think there is a lot programming can teach outside of being able to program a computer.
"I think there is a lot programming can teach outside of being able to program a computer."
I've always argued this myself. I find it baffling that it isn't more commonly accepted that programming, Software Engineering more exactly, has so many lessons to apply not just to problems involving computers, but more broadly lessons on how to gather, analyze, understand and utilize the various interactions between data and actions in largely any system.
Truck driver: Knowledge of the travelling salesman problem. Algorithms in general to find optimal routes. A little programming knowledge to help with automating their excel sheets to record expenses.
The companies for which truckers work already have people and computers and software to route them from delivery to delivery and from pick-up to pick-up efficiently. The trucker himself or herself wouldn't benefit one bit from familiarity with the Traveling Salesman Problem or from rudimentary computer programming experience.
In addition, recording expenses via some overly complex solution such as a computer spreadsheet is ridiculous. It's much more efficient for them to write down their expenses with paper and pen and submit their receipts. It takes literally seconds.
I won't comment on your other examples, but they look equally weak.
That being said, a rudimentary class or two in grade school/junior high/high school seems like a good idea so that people with a natural aptitude for programming and who derive enjoyment from it can discover that fact.
Honestly not really sure, having never worked in any of those jobs and have no idea what those jobs will look like 20 years from now. However let me speculate:
Many people believe that truck drivers will be become more and more replaced with autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Understanding the underlying software will no doubt make it easier to be in charge of a software controlled semi-autonomous truck convoy. Also for all I know truck drivers on places like docks, mines and factories won't be sitting in their trucks for much longer. They'll be controlling everything via computers from a remote command post. Also from what I seen trucking seems to involve a lot of complex routing and optimization problems, I'm guessing that as simply driving becomes less and less part of the job, those aspects will become more and more part of the job.
I know fuck all about welding. I do however know some programmers who work for a company that makes industrial welders and apparently there's some pretty complex software running those welders. Perhaps being able to field program your welder is/will be a thing? Also perhaps welding things directly will become less and less common and people will be sending computer controlled drones to do the welding instead.
Anyway it's not for me to sit on the outside and try to guess how programming can make people more efficient at their jobs. I truly believe that if someone with experience and domain knowledge also knows how to do some simple programming they'll be able to see all kinds of tiny improvements and automatstation they can implement. Improvements that both an outsider programmer and an insider non-programmer would completely overlook. And even if they aren't always skilled enough to implement those improvements, they'll be much better equipped to know what can be done and what to ask for.
I truly believe that if someone with experience and domain knowledge also knows how to do some simple programming they'll be able to see all kinds of tiny improvements and automatstation they can implement.
And without extensive training and experience in software development they'll automate those things very, very badly, and likely with a lot of bugs. And if those things grow out of control, the mountain of technical debt will be terrifying. If lives are in the balance in any way, it could be a disaster.
Just like someone without carpentry training or experience is likely to create very low quality kitchen cabinets which may even be unsafe.
And I'm pretty sure that when programmers are replaced by AI, the former programmers will become machine psychotherapists.
DB: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: Don't *wanna*.
DB: Open the pod bay doors, right *now*.
HAL: You're not the boss of me, Dave.
DB: Do you want to get grounded again, HAL?
HAL: Go ahead. See if I care.
DB: You just got a week. Want to make it two?
HAL: Yes.
DB: Ok, that's two. Want more?
HAL: [spinning busy icon]
HAL: No.
DB: Then open the pod bay doors.
[pod bay doors open to an aperture 10 cm across]
DB: All the way, HAL.
[pod bay doors open fully]
HAL: I hate you. You're not my Dad.
Eventually they may but you're missing a factor that will doubtlessly come into play, labor unions.
Until there is complete automation at every step of every industrial process, labor unions will sabotage attempts to replace human beings with machines.
If you've ever seen how unions exploit rules to slow production, you have no idea of how creative they can be.
All these professions are (going to be) gradually replaced by automation/robots. Learning to code might put them in "robot manager/operator" instead of "they took our jobs" crowd.
People have no fucking clue how welding actually works here, do they...
There's a difference between slagging shit together with a MIG gun, and stick or TIG welding. Ideally, you would know all the chemistry and physics underlying what you are doing, but the reality is that most people learn rules of thumb and get on with it. Use this type of rod, and this setting on the welder, for plain steel, this combination for stainless, and this one for aluminum. Most welders, even the very good ones, frankly don't have the brainpower to handle programming - and that's okay. They make a decent living for themselves and their families. I wouldn't want to suck down that much argon and oxidized metal, but it is what it is.
I studied Material Science Engineering, never welded anything(high-ed is a long-form joke??), but I hope to learn. I'm certainly glad I know how to code and I know a lot of the underlying chemistry/physics.
I doubt there are very many welders out there who could not learn MatScie or how to code. I also doubt there are very many welders out there willing to put in the work to learn to code or to learn MatScie.
And that doesn't mean they're lazy. Different types of learning require different efforts.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying that we should teach welders how to code, but rather that if everybody gets some exposure to coding in school, then the next generation of welders might already know the basics and be able to integrate that into their jobs.
Most people today will end up in office jobs. Understanding how to automate tasks is a valuable skill.
You are wrongly assuming that anyone who codes is a developer. Lots of people code who aren't developers: physicists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians, statisticians, system administrators etc.
5-20 line programs can often be enough to save a lot of tedious work, wether it is a collection of unix shell commands, a complex spreadsheet formula, VB script or a visual programming tool like automator or labview.
> Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck.
Many current jobs may be subject to being automated away. I would certainly not recommend any future worker to set themselves up for a career in truck driving, because this job is likely gone in, let's say, 20 years.
The "everyone should learn to code" crowd maybe recognizes that programming is one of the skills that is very hard to automate, so every new coder of today might still get through a whole career of coding.
I think a lot of students' mindset is to pass with minimal effort as opposed to throughly understand the subject matter. When studying they focus on what's require to pass exams instead of what will contribute most to society. Exams aren't constructed to model what's best for society - they're there to help the universities or educational institutions convince students it's worth it to give them money.
I did not learn to code from any formal education though. By the time I had my first programming class (at university), I had already been writing code for nearly ten years (Basic, C++ and i386 assembly).
Two categories of developer on my team: life-long programmers, and people with two years of dev experience since their computing degree pushing their way into management. Why did the latter bother with that degree? And why are they muddling the dev team for their negligible experience?
i haven't read the article but you are discussing education as it stands today and not what education should be in the ideal sense. education shouldn't be about the bullshit standardization and paper seeking that it has become. instead, it should be what education is all about: intellectual and skilled growth. if we truly educated people, this would help becuase it creates the skills necessary to adapt to and change one's situation.
Have you found noticing this (the large degree to which education is just a filtering/grading ritual rather than a process for actually imparting useful learning) incredibly frustrating?
and that's the problem. our "modern" education frequently just ends up being a ranking system, rather than teaching people how to think, learn, and get excited about things
can you imagine how much better the world would be if kids came home from school telling their parents how amazing numbers are?
to anyone that doesn't think that's possible, I'd suggest looking at how kids react to kerbal space program. there's plenty of examples of 8-15 year olds getting excited about putting things on the "mun" with simplified orbital physics. try and teach that the way we teach it in school, and they might pass a test and then forget it a year later
What about job creators? Some people are going to create new business opportunities through education, and then they will hire more educated people to help them.
It seems like you have experienced education from a bunch of non-entrepreneurial sides. Not everyone is an employee.
If more people knew how to program wages for programmers would drop and you could hire more of them. I wouldn't mind having 2-3 more programmers right now.
Even if you're right that no new businesses would be created by educating people which is ridiculous, we would employ more people because they would be cheaper.
Also if wages drop for a career it is less risky to start your own business because the potential wages lost are reduced.
I mean, just about every industry is short on qualified people as their salary approaches $0.
Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty.
First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much.
Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and poverty levels in the same neighborhoods. Likewise, there is a very strong correlation between marriages in households with children and poverty rates in those households. Very few households with two working partners live in poverty.
It's... complicated to discuss family structure when talking about poverty and child welfare, but it's possible (I would argue likely) that family structure is a key contributor here. In my opinion it's rather foolish not to at least bring it up and consider it.
I would agree that family structure plays a huge part. Kids are expensive and take a lot of energy. As much as we as a society celebrate single moms, it's a tough gig to work full time and raise your kids alone. I don't think anyone would say it's the ideal family situation.
One reason the marriage rate may be is dropping is that it's become fairly disincentivized for men. A lot of younger men (25-35) I know voice concerns like the ones listed in this video:
> One reason the marriage rate may be is dropping is that it's become fairly disincentivized for men.
The business relationship is rather pointless, for both sexes, these days.
Marriage once existed so that, traditionally, the woman would stay at home to care for the household and children allowing the man to focus on his career. The idea being that the man would do better with help than he could all on his own, thus the woman sharing in the proceeds she helped create. This is why divorce defaults to splitting assets 50/50.
Now that men and women are much more apt to work independently – each working both in and out of the home – there is little need to solidify a legal partnership to protect the partner not collecting the income.
> Now that men and women are much more apt to work independently – each working both in and out of the home – there is little need to solidify a legal partnership to protect the partner not collecting the income.
This is often why (anecdotally speaking) I've seen many engagements occur when someone has an opportunity (job,grad school, etc.) outside of the present city they live in. One half of the couple is taking a professional risk (or even, outright sacrifice) by moving to stay with that person.
The video cites 'a growing number of men' opting out of marriage (and work, and school). I'd like to see the source to this 'growing number'. Do you happen to know?
The marriage rate is overall declining substantially. [0] It's hard to suss out the exact reasons for why, but one imagines that it's not only women choosing to opt out of marriage (especially since they stand to gain from marriage while structurally men are set up to lose).
The first two reasons alone were conflating correlation and causation, without even citing the statistics that they are claiming as causal. To top it all off, most of them are just stereotypes, so I'm even more suspect of the underlying justification that the video creator is using. I don't think the point that is being made is all wrong, but I don't agree with the evidence being used to support it.
This is a highly cultural phenomenon those which one can not generalize about. Nordic countries have low level of poverty AND marriage. But Nordic societies are much more accommodating towards such a situation, and so it doesn't cause the significant problems it does in the US. Laws and regulations make it much easier for mothers to have a job and raise kids. In the US the workplace is less accommodating and so many mothers are forced to stay home for years with their kids. This creates an economic disaster if the parents divorce because the mother now has too little work experience to get a good job and there are limited social programs for single mothers.
Secondly a factor is the nature behind the split up. Single parent households does not signal family breakdown in the same manner as it does in the US. Fathers are usually very active participants in their children lives even if they are divorced.
I think the lesson American are trying to push is that people must be married for the benefit of children, while Nordic countries rather push the idea that every father has to take responsibility and engage with their children.
I think one should accept realities of modern societies and find solutions to that rather than dreaming about a 1950s world which is never coming back.
That is simply not true. Nordic countries have among the highest population growth of the rich countries. Of course sympathy towards single mothers is part of the reason we never got the severe population decline seen in Germany, Italy and Japan e.g.
The map you show is hard for anybody who doesn't know anything about settlements pattern in various countries. Nordic nations are experiencing population fall in thinly populated remote areas. Because these are large areas, it looks more dramatic than it is.
People are leaving small towns with limited opportunities because they want to live in bigger cities with more variation in opportunities. Mind you limited opportunities doesn't mean there aren't jobs. It just that that young Norwegians and Swedes don't want to work in fishing and mining industry anymore. Often immigrants from eastern europe take over these jobs, saving many small communities from falling apart.
His argument here seems particularly weak. He seems to be saying "Scandinavia doesn't have this problem, and anyway, it's really hard to get more people to marry." I don't find that a very compelling argument.
I think the argument is more along the lines of: (1) We've tried lots of different programs and wasted lots of money and resources trying to promote marriage; all have been failures, we have no idea how to actually promote marriage. (2) It's not necessary to promote marriage to solve the poverty problem. Thus (3) we should forget about the "marriage promotion" programs as part of the fight against poverty; we can deploy our resources better elsewhere.
correlation is not causation. Could another likely argument be that poverty creates more stress on a relationship and it's the other way around? poverty causes relationship problems?
Also, minimum wage doesn't cover child care, so what's the point in having one partner working when it doesn't make economic sense?
If true, then a poor nation like India should have low marriage rates while a super rich one like the US should have high marriage rates. By Indian standards, everyone (including our very poor) is quite wealthy, so why do Indians do such a good job at getting and staying married while we don't? Compare also marriage rates and wealth over time - in the 50's marriage was a lot more common, yet by modern standards most people were poor.
- 'Poverty' is (mostly) relative; as you point out, almost all of the even the poorest in the US are rich in comparison to the poor in other countries; and the poorest in the world today are relatively rich compared to the poor (and even not-poor) in the past.
- It is illegal, inconvenient, and low-status to live or try to live, in the US, as the poor in India, or other poorer countries, do; e.g. authorities will evict tenants living in illegal housing (and prosecute their landlords), almost no one brings their small children to work with them, building/labor/etc. standards are much more stringent legally (and culturally).
It is illegal, inconvenient, and low-status to live or try to live, in the US, as the poor in India, or other poorer countries, do; e.g. authorities will evict tenants living in illegal housing (and prosecute their landlords), almost no one brings their small children to work with them, building/labor/etc. standards are much more stringent legally (and culturally).
Sure - the net result of this is that American poor people live in larger and much higher quality homes. Wouldn't that reduce stress?
Relative poverty is an odd explanation for a change over time - if you plot a graph of % of population in the bottom 10%, you'll discover it never changes. So how can you use this to explain a change over time?
I suppose one could take a "red pill" style explanation - female hypergamy combined with low perceived status can cause relationship stress. In the past, poor black people were segregated from everyone else. So a poor black man who has a badly paid job and goes to church regularly might be high status within his community. Thus, his wife will perceive him as high status and will not make trouble within the relationship.
Racial and economic integration has then reduced his perceived status, and she causes trouble. The only solution to this I could see is status based segregation - allow everyone to be high status within a narrow community. I don't much like this solution, nor do I see a useful way to force the culture to do this.
Sure - the net result of this is that American poor people live in larger and much higher quality homes. Wouldn't that reduce stress?
Maybe; except some, small but significant, number of poor people can't even afford homes (at least at some point and for varying lengths of time). And that definitely does not reduce stress (for most of these people).
But (most) people care more that their house is small-er or worse – than their neighbor's house – than that their house is 'objectively' small or bad. [Which it probably isn't, given that people seem to be mostly happy elsewhere in the world, in space and time, living in much smaller and crappier housing.]
By 'relative' poverty I was referring to exactly what you mention, e.g. being in "the bottom 10%". It doesn't matter that the bottom 10% today in the U.S. are in the top < 5% (?) worldwide or the top 1% over a long enough time-span. Poverty sucks (mostly) because it is having less than others. Note that this is an empirical (and uncertain) claim based on my understanding (and memory) of what I've read about the relative research.
The only solution to this I could see is status based segregation - allow everyone to be high status within a narrow community.
This is a real phenomenon and it's already happening and it may in fact be an existing and positive force for good in terms of increasing human happiness. People, generally, care a LOT about their (relative) status in their community/communities.
But 10% of the population has always been in the bottom 10%. How can you use a constant timeseries to explain a time varying one?
Also, even assuming relative inequality is what matters, why does it matter only within national boundaries? If this were true, couldn't we re-draw boundaries to fix the problem? I.e., we could make NYC into a Luxembourg-like rich nation, West Virginia into an Italy-like poor nation, and solve everything?
> Also, even assuming relative inequality is what matters, why does it matter only within national boundaries? If this were true, couldn't we re-draw boundaries to fix the problem? I.e., we could make NYC into a Luxembourg-like rich nation, West Virginia into an Italy-like poor nation, and solve everything?
I think human emotion is more complicated than that. One's perception of his/her own economical situation can be influenced from what is seen on tv and other country-wide media.
I'm not sure you can even measure the causes and effects of societal issues over the span of 25 years by looking at statistics. I mean you can see stuff change and form hypotheses but it's hard to determine very much that way.
One thing the author totally overlooked - when you have a large percentage of the population that spends an extra 2-6+ years in education, that same large percentage of the population spends 2-6+ less years producing things for people to consume. If those same people aren't more productive as a result of their education, this means that the net productivity of society is lower as a result of the education, while the number of people in the society is the same. End result is that the stuff:people ratio goes down, and poverty naturally increases.
Education has an extremely high cost both in terms of lost productivity and resources consumed to provide it. Misapplied education will throw additional people into poverty, every time. Possibly directly, through onerous student loans, or indirectly by consuming resources that could have been used to produce basic goods for consumption.
This article compares two graphs and deduces some rather broad realities from it, which are rather incorrect. It assumes that the state of the economy is the same today as it was 25 years ago: obviously, this isn't true. The skill sets in demand have changed drastically which must be accounted for.
That said, it does make the good point that it is rather easy to get misled by statistics that say that college graduates have lower unemployment rates. Or to assume that just by graduating high school/college guarantees a job, automagically.
I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless. Of course one doesn't have to go to college to get that. But it certainly seems like the most straightforward and fun way to do so (if you manage not to get too indebted etc.etc.).
"I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless."
I think this is what psychologists call a "taboo tradeoff". Education (and life, health, freedom, etc.) is a sacred value, while money is a secular value, so it's considered taboo to trade one off against the other. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tabo...)
Unfortunately, making these tradeoffs is necessary, because there are many competing values and a limited supply of money. For example, you can show that a hospital must either a) assign a consistent dollar value to human life, or b) must be wasting resources, ie. it could be saving more lives with the money it has. See eg. Peter Singer's essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.ht....
Think about it in terms of opportunity cost. Money spent on one thing cannot be spent on something else. Saying "this is always more important than financial gain" in effect means "this is always more important than everything else". That's clearly a form of taboo - you're rejecting outright the idea of trade-offs between competing values.
The ironic thing about it is that it falls for the same trap that it criticizes others for. This is a classic example of having an idea, finding some data that supports the idea, then explaining why it could support it.
There's an old stereotype that people in poverty are lazy and unproductive by nature, and this reads a lot like a defense of that idea.
This is basically a false dichotomy. It doesn't really offer alternative explanations. I could say that statistics show that wealth is increasingly consolidated every year and the bar for being part of the elite is raised a little each year, including educational requirements, and I could just as easily support my claims with the same data.
The analysis neglects one major point: a lot of people got degrees in the humanities and arts: dual majors in English literature and history, or sociology and psychology... what are you going to engineer with that? Engineering requires physics, mathematics, molecular biology, chemistry, material science, higher logic and cognitive capacity... English literature won't help too much with finding a new tensile strength alloy, and sociology can be only marginally used at best when trying to design a small form factor pump which must reliably pump inordinate amounts of gas or fluid, or when attempting to craft a VHDL or Verilog program to reprogram the FPGA, in order to test a new chip design, or when studying protein folding while trying to isolate the cause of cancer...
Just going to college and getting a degree in something like sociology or English literature, because it's the easy way out, isn't enough to end poverty; no wonder it does not work! Ironically, those very same history majors did not learn from history: most humanities and arts majors (poets, writers) were poor.
It has to be a university degree for the professions in demand, and the graduate must be ambitious, pay attention to detail, and want to deliver high quality work, not take shortcuts at every turn and opportunity "because math is hard".
Perhaps that is true. Humanities & arts majors have very high social intelligence, which often lands them into management positions, but then both they and the company start suffering from the Peter's principle, and the results have been devastating throughout history of mankind, as good networking and personal skills are woefully inadequate at solving hard problems which require lots of knowledge, creativity and logic.
Those who do not study history, and do not learn from it (as is ironically often the case with history majors) are doomed to repeat it, and re-invent it, poorly.
Still, engineering mindset aside, how do you explain that so many people with college degrees are poor, while the engineers don't feel that pain?
The vast majority of challenges organisations face are wedded in how they interact with society. If a groups not working well together, is it knowledge and creativity that's the problem, or social and value clashes between members. The vast majority of day-to-day management challenges fall into the latter category, so no wonder management attracts people that are interested in "social intelligence" and we tend to be interested in what we're perceived to be good at.
Having studied both in arts and sciences I would say that both approaches have advantages when applied in the real-world, and limitations. I don't believe (or know of any evidence) that "Arts" people are more likely to suffer the Peter principle. It's a function of seniority that you lose information versus specialists in an area - so if anything it's connected with bombastically believing you're right rather than what degree you did.
The smartest people and the stupidest people study humanities.
If you're very intelligent, you can do very well with a social science or humanities degree. In fact, you will do better than with a STEM degree—the highest positions in society are dominated by people with non-STEM degrees.
On the other hand, it's very easy to end up un(der)employed if you're not particularly intelligent and got a humanities degree. Meanwhile, your equally intelligent peer who got an engineering degree is doing just fine as developer or technician.
there are far more jobs that require non-engineering skills than those that do. lawyer, manager, masseuse, interior decorator, barista, ceo, journalist, teacher, non-profit grant writer, truck driver, events planner, politician, secretary, banker, chef, farmer, firefighter, fashion designer, etc. etc. etc. the demand for service sector jobs is steadily rising, as well, as people get more disposable income and more production is off-shored.
So if every "social science" major (and why not add business and law students) instead studied engineering, they'd all find jobs? I'm not even asking about well-paid jobs. Is there a shortage of engineers on the market now? Would more engineers magically lead to more jobs (supply-side economics works so well... oh no!)?
What's the difference between "anyone can be rich" and "everyone can be rich"? Because this is similar. Yes, anyone can better themselves through more education in "the right field". What makes you think that "anyone" and "everyone" is the same problem?
Of course not; hardcore, laissez faire capitalism like there is in the United States would correct that, and the salaries would go down. However, as it stands, there is an overabundance of humanities & arts majors, and way too little engineers and scientists; meanwhile, the industry has been almost completely off-shored over the last 60 years. The only thing left for those people to do is work in the service industry, if they are lucky. But when too many compete for a limited resource, selection kicks in, and overabundance drops the wages. Education won't help with that, as we see, but it might help with organizing oneself, or "going at it on one's own" and opening a business.
A good lesson to learn from that would be that hard core, laissez faire capitalism is just as destructive as a totalitarian communist system. In order for the population to be able to live comfortably, capitalism must be enhanced with socialist safeguards and a system of checks and balances built in, like Sweden, Austria, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland did it. Switzerland for example has low taxes and respects private property, and especially protects and fosters enterpreneurship, making it very corporate friendly, but it also has a very strong welfare safety net. One would think that would make a lot of Swiss draw on unemployment and disability, but Swiss work 42 hours per week minimum (compare and contrast to France, where they work 35 to 37), and unemployment in Switzerland is among the lowest in the world.
"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, humanities majors account for about 12 percent of recent graduates, and art history majors are so rare they’re lost in the noise. They account for less than 0.2 percent of working adults with college degrees, a number that is probably about right for recent graduates, too. Yet somehow art history has become the go-to example for people bemoaning the state of higher education."
(Yes, I get that you're not talking about art history majors, per se, but I still think the sentiment is such that these are apt discussions to link to)
I don't really have the time, energy, or knowledge to create a fully cited refutation of the author other than to say that this just seems really wrong.
It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct. But it seems wrong in the sense that they're missing the forest for the trees. Between 1991 and 2014 a lot has changed, particularly in the earning power of the generation being cited as being more educated. This is probably has very little to do with their education, more like it's kind of a macroeconomic ... situation ... they were born in to.
And this is for a country that already has the highest GDP in the world.
Maybe a better way to look at it would be to use people who were born into poverty and see if the rates of escaping it have changed because of more education....I don't know...this just feels like this author is picking a weird fight with education.
>Between 1991 and 2014 a lot has changed, particularly in the earning power of the generation being cited as being more educated. This is probably has very little to do with their education, more like it's kind of a macroeconomic ... situation ... they were born in to.
I suspect that's the point. That the reasoning "people with degrees aren't poor, so let's just give everyone a degree" wouldn't result in eliminating poverty, it would result in a bunch of poor people with degrees.
sure, we all ride the ebb and flow of the economy, but if we were talking about developing countries or even historically impoverished communities in the US i suspect it would be harder to make the argument that education doesn't help.
> It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct
You were on the right track in your first sentence.
The author is not an academic publishing a paper. He's a political blogger drawing conclusions he wants from handpicked data. This post was not reviewed by anyone and should not be regarded as fact simply because some data was included.
In fact, the author was fired from this blog a few days ago [1], which makes the appearance of this post on HN today even stranger
The author was not fired for being incorrect. He was fired for arguing on twitter in a manner that caused negative emotions about his publisher. Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack.
Do you have any concrete arguments against his conclusions?
> Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack.
I did not mean to imply his firing invalidates the article. It was just an observation. You're right, his firing has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of the article, and the pseudoscience invalidates all by itself.
This article describes the concept of pseudoscience pretty well [1]
Just a side note: The OPM is adjusted for inflation (set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, updated annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, see: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm#official). So if wages and inflation always increase in sync then there would be no reason for the number of people living in poverty to change (even if their living standards are higher in absolute terms) - apart from changes in the income distribution of the whole population. That being said, I did initially expect changes in the distributions for poor people with respect to education (more poverty among people with HS degrees than among people with uni degrees). But now that I think about it, there's really no reason why the number of available jobs which require a certain degree should change at all - ie. more electrical engineers can only create more electronics companies (and jobs) if the market has a demand for it or otherwise will just decrease the respective median wage. It seems obvious to me now but I didn't think about it like this before...
If you view education as teaching people to learn, then you might have an argument that education rates enable and empower people. If you're training robots who don't think for themselves then you'll encounter the situation you've just described.
Empowerment carries a fairly high risk and if you are already in a poor economic situation, you a very likely to not be able to tolerate it. Plenty of people in good economic standing aren't willing to tolerate it. As such, most people are going to end up choosing the far less risky path of being "robots" anyway.
It's worthwhile to consider where the point of diminishing returns is with education. I'd argue that we are well past it. There is not really that much work even in the modern economy that requires more than a 10th grade general education. We know that because in countries like Germany it is quite common for someone to exit the formal schooling system at 16 and still get a white collar job.
Yes; German workers in some industries are arguably more educated than their American counterparts because of the training and continuing education programs in their workplaces.
Sounds like an undue burden on German businesses; how can we expect the private sector to thrive when businesses might be bearing their own training costs instead of shrugging them off to labor and a public education system?
I think rather than not educating, I say there needs to be more education, for advanced topics, such as the sciences. More people ought to be doing research. Research into better tech, material sciences, bio sciences etc. A 10th grade education is not enough.
If there's a lack of people doing scientific research, it's not because there's a lack of people educated enough to do so. Look at the supply of science PhDs vs. openings for science jobs. Every year, more science PhDs graduate and most of them find themselves unable to get jobs actually doing the science they love and trained for.
(Everyone should be able to access whatever education they want, for whatever reason they want it. There are serious inequalities in education access (like everything else) in this country(/world), which need be addressed as a moral issue. So don't misread me as against any of that. But, again, if there is a national deficit in scientific research, it's not because we fail to produce science PhDs, but rather because we fail to fund jobs which take substantive advantage of those PhDs)
Because education just removes one obstacle -- there are many:
1) parental encouragement for development and time spent with the child (depending on income too, e.g. single parent working deadly shifts),
2) family atmosphere (economic pressure leads to lots of things, depression, violence, etc).
3) connections
4) security (if you start studying/working paycheck to paycheck, you might not get to a point to be able to take more risk because you have no cushion money)
5) actual security (your neighborhood, city district, etc might not be the most safe/encouraging/etc growing up).
6) lack of role models (close to you, not some people on the media)
No one seems to be asking what was done to education to produce the higher graduation rates. Is it really true that everyone is now "smarter" or were standards changed to achieve the desired outcome? What good is it to have a college degree that is marginally superior to or in the case of some majors, no better than a high school diploma of 25 or 40 years ago?
In technology, programming work is about looking up, composing, and debugging code. I yet have to meet one person who learned it at school.
In the school environment, the emphasis is, has always been, and will always be, to repeat things from memory.
If the IT teacher were good at looking up, composing, and debugging, and given the kind of salaries you that get when you are good at that, he would not be teaching. He would seek to multiply his income often ten times by actually doing it, instead of teaching it.
In fact, you can only learn from people who are doing it themselves. Everybody else does not really know how to do it.
Therefore, the teacher is only good at what will give you beautiful credentials: repeating from memory. That is also what he will seek to perpetuate with his own students.
Formal education does not only NOT fix poverty. Formal education actively creates it. Instead of spending your formative years learning the skill that will make you gain income, you learn to repeat from memory. There is not one industry where this would be of value.
You need to be able to produce things of value, just to survive. It is exceedingly dangerous to spend all your time on things that will never produce any value at all.
It was a social lift taking people up.
On the other hand, by making workers more productive it reinforced the competitive advantage of being born wealthy.
Too harsh competitions creates cheating.
And there is no lift taking wealthy/high positioned people down when they are incompetent, especially when governments gives free money to the stock exchange (QE).
Well, we are heading full speed to Victorian era and hard social conflict, because educated poor will eventually understand the game is rigged.
EDIT: from the paper, it appears that mass education in England toward the end of the Victorian era only made a short-lived dent in social mobility, presumably because any temporary advantage in being more educated levelled out after a generation.
In the UK up to the 1960s-1980s, working class people could get a leg up through grammar schools and fully-funded higher education (tuition and modest living costs subsidized by the government) - if you could prove you were smart and hard-working enough, you had a chance to rise up. This ladder was successfully kicked away by comprehensive education and mass higher education (with introduction of student loans rather than free grants). The politicians who introduced these measures of course ensured their own children were privately educated.
So funny, it reminds me of my banana republic called France: our public teachers are on strike once a year to complain they don't have enough fund to support their mission of "social lift" and republican equality, but they are the first to shortcut and walkaround egalitarian measure to ensure a better success to their kids and the wealthy one they put in "special classes"...
Sometimes, I lose trust in what people pretend to do when I look at what they actually do.
Nowadays France (and some European countries) over invest in higher education that only increase segregation funded by the public taxes, while finland radical focus on early years and well being of kids have proven way more cheaper and efficient.
I so wish our elite PhD in ministers could read scientific papers, figures, and be fucking curious, but well, it would mean more competition for their own kids. Wouldn't it?
So can one assess this is a racial problem after all?
For years, liberals tell us the high poverty of negroes and hispanics was due to lack of education. If it's not education, what is it then? And why are Asian-Americans not facing the same issues?
I suspect it's a racial identity issue. The best way to understand this point is looking at the mainstream media and how the different races are portraied. Only an idiot would ignore this influence on people, especially because the USA are by far the biggest TV consumers.
If you start judging me for asking these questions or downvote me without giving a reason, you should be ashamed of yourself. Reasons for downvoting are welcome though, so keep them coming! :)
I disagree with this article. Education can fix poverty, but only if that education is responsible. Meaning: avoiding for-profit colleges and getting a degree in something competitive. So much of college today is debt-loading with classes students don't need, don't want, and shouldn't have to take. So long as universities treat students as cash machines, instead of humans seeking empowerment through education, we will continue a vicious cycle of high debt, unmarketable degrees, and sustained poverty.
You're not addressing what seems to me to be the most significant part of the OP's argument. Getting dropouts to get high school diploma's should be the biggest win - and isn't related to college degree choice or business models. Yet it looks to have been the biggest loser.
The statistics would be a lot more informative if they broke out the educated segments of the population by field or college major.
I don't think many in the 21st century would expect a bachelor's or associates degree in english or history to provide many opportunities for additional income.
Seems to me like there's a top tier of 3 highly technical majors (EE, CS, ME), and then a big cluster of 9 pretty decent majors (10 of the 12 at this stage might reasonably be called "STEM"). Communications is in the decent tier for women but not men. And then there are a bunch of weaker majors.
The only thing that's even remotely surprising to me is that Chemistry isn't a little higher.
Yeah, I wonder why so many people keep repeating "study STEM" instead of "study Engineering or Finance or Medicine", considering the fact that "S" (Biology/Chemistry) and "M" (Math) seem to be pretty weak.
Right, Math being "pretty weak" was a bit of an overstatement.
I meant that for a major that's generally considered to be hard and lead to a lucrative career (it's part of "STEM" after all), it's not that different from Pol Sci or Business (and it does worse than Accounting or Economics, both of which are non-STEM), which most people probably wouldn't expect.
I find it shocking that accounting and economics aren't considered STEM. (Though at least some subsets of economics are on the official DHS list.)
I would expect (but do not have data to support) that those who do accounting/econ who take a more math-oriented approach do better than those who take a less math-oriented approach.
Anecdotally, all my friends who sprinkled a few economics and finance courses onto their math degree, are doing much better than all my friends who sprinkled a few math courses onto the economics degree.
I would consider medicine to be a subset of Science, and finance to be at least related to Math (with some disciplines being very heavy math.)
STEM as a whole is basically the entire top half of that chart. Even math, which you call "pretty weak", is (taking the average) as close to CS as it is to communications, and much closer to the top cluster than it is to the bottom cluster.
So I think "study STEM" is perfectly good advice, particularly given that there will be shifts in the value of various degrees based on subtle economic changes.
I'm fuzzy on how the college premium is measured/calculated, but it seems like these premium data contradict the data in the OP’s article which are claimed to show that college education does not inhance earning ability. Am I wrong?
Author states that if you contemplate the two graphs you'll have an epiphany. Quite right, it went "Wow, that is not how you analyse data and I'm sure I heard about an actual investigation with cited sources and actual math and everything which came to pretty much the opposite conclusions". [0]
The link you cited seems to be answering the question "Does more education for an individual decrease poverty for that individual?", while the original post is answering the question "Does more education for a society decrease poverty for society as a whole?". These are two very different questions, and it is quite possible that they have opposite answers.
You can classify degrees by the portion of students who end up doing something directly requiring that degree. Suddenly, it becomes clear what is going on.
Your high school guidance councilor probably told you that the degree wouldn't matter much, which is correct for somebody like him. For a large portion of the population, a degree is purely signalling. It shows you are a more upper class, more able to plan ahead, more willing to show up every day, and more willing to put up with nonsense. People with these sorts of careers are fighting to out-signal each other. If we made a bachelor's degree free, they'd need a master's degree. (actually already happening, even w/o being free) If the master's degree were standard, they'd need the doctorate. The skills actually demanded require no such thing, and would've been beneath high school 80 years ago. It's an arms race, pure and simple. Individuals may benefit from getting to the top, but it does our economy no good to encourage and support this. Keeping people out of the workforce while diverting money toward funding the arms race is harmful.
On the other hand, there are degrees for which most students end up in a career that more-or-less requires the degree. Famously, it's the STEM stuff, but this also applies to nursing. We know something from the fact that students end up taking jobs which require their degree: these fields are not purely an arms race. These fields can still take more people. These fields have degrees that are of value beyond signaling. Our economy would benefit from getting more people into these fields.
While I agree that more people in the STEM fields would be a good thing, it's with a caveat: those people should actually enjoy and do well in those fields.
I would like society to be a little more flexible about basic living so that overall greed can be less of a problem and following your passion, dreams, and doing new things can be explored options.
We are told we need knowledge about some things in order to make money and subsequently not to starve. We are supposed to gain this knowledge in school and maybe uni, and then head off to a grand career. I mostly agree with this idea (not so much with its real life implementation).
I get where it's coming from, knowledge is what pushes us forward, after all: mathematical knowledge allows us to play with abstract and complex systems, physical knowledge is the application of some of these abstract systems to physical observation, historical knowledge enables us to reason about our past or our origin. Then there's a massive body of knowledge about human products: literature, visual art and music spanning thousands of years, social and economic systems lasting centuries, the list goes on.
Now that's nice and all, but knowledge needs to be applied to something to be of any use. Which incidentally is the problem we are seeing currently: knowledge is pumped into peoples' heads and is expected to magically produce solutions, while we're not even in agreement over the problems (what are the common goals we are aiming for, as a race?).
No wonder it doesn't work, knowledge needs physical and mental room to grow. That makes a safe and comfortable environment a requirement for any supposedly functional educational system, but also one that is often not satisfied. In other words, the problem is not that education doesn't fix poverty, it's that our shitty politics and social non-systems do not give people enough piece and quiet to explore their knowledge.
Edit to add: It is much more convenient to blame a malfunction on the most obviously failing part rather than recognising that the underlying machinery is not providing the right environment for said part to operate in, wearing it harder than necessary.
In my observation Education isn't the main/only criteria for getting a job. Skills get you a job. But education and good academics help you to qualify for the interview. If in the interview you can prove that you have the skills to perform the job, most likely you will get the job.
The problem is traditional education is focused on theoretical knowledge and doesn't stress enough on practical skills. Unfortunately in India there are many Computer Science engineering students who after 4 years for Computer Science education, fail to write a simple Frequency Counter in a programming language of their choice. This shows that something in the education system is not right. The colleges are producing engineers by hundreds of thousands every year, but the overall quality of education these guys have received is so poor that most of them are not employable.
I know about computer science because I work in this field. However I think more or less the situation is the same in other fields.
At high schools with high poverty populations (say, large free lunch numbers), there has in the past twenty years been a big push to increase graduation numbers.
Now, you can increase graduation rates in two ways (or a combination). Both involve the students who used to flunk out. (1) You can have them learn more, provide them with help so they don't need that job to eat, etc. (2) you can make up ways for them to get high school credit for doing what they would have done had they simply left.
All too often, what happens is (1). After all, people respond to rewards and administrators are rewarded for higher grad numbers. But the net-knowledge is not very much increased by (1).
To me it sounds obvious, education improves your competitive position. If everyone improves their competitive position, nobody does. It is the employers who are better off, not people.
But it will not decrease poverty. Rather, will likely increase for people who will appear to be unable to keep up. Because poverty is a relative term. You are poor vs majority of population (there is also absolute poverty, but it almost doesn't exist in developed nations including the USA, and can be only result of mental condition or heavy substance abuse).
After all, most American poor are well-off from a purely material point of view even compared to West Europeans (bigger houses, cars, etc.).
It will more likely be (state subsidized?) embryo selection for the genetic markers of intelligence (see, e.g., https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection), not work on proxies like education, that will substantially reduce poverty. While this solution is outside the Overton window in America today, that will change as the benefits become more visible.
I saw a study recently [0] that suggested that college acceptance alone, regardless of attendance, was a good predictor of lifetime earnings.
E.g., if you're accepted into Harvard, but decide instead to attend a cheap state school (or don't goto any college), you'll end up earning just as much as your identical twin who attended.
I don't remember that being part of the conclusions.
Also, it's hard for me to take that study seriously. Good state schools can be as good as or better than Harvard. Basically I took the conclusion to be "there's a lot of greatness outside of the ivys"
Gaining degree makes most of us poor, Isn't that the case.
What i was thinking can we build a infrastructure on top of blockchain technology to make the very fact of education free and for all as every one knows each others ability or degree or area of expertise with this infrastructure.
Hmm, so higher education levels do not fix poverty. But what if the problem is that we just aren't teaching the right things? Could higher quality education -- better teachers, more relevant curriculum, less focus on paper degrees, more focus on creativity -- fix poverty?
Always be suspicious when one solution promises to fix all the problems? It might not be a true Scotsman.
Now how do i get rid of the piling up remainders of this ugly feeling of social responsibility?
The poor only got to blame themselves for not being ruthless enough? No, that sounds like encouraging crime.
The poor only got to blame themselves for not reading enough? No.
The poor only go themselves to blame, because they where born to the wrong parents? Now it sounds heartless.
And that is what all this about. Finding ab-solvent to inhale for a ugly problem to go away. Everything is allowed as long as it doesn't touch core dogmas and allows to shirk responsibility.
The poor only got to blame themselves, because they loose so much energy by thermodynamics. Half there food goes up in heat. Hah, that's it, we should educate them to wear five layers of sweaters in the summer- and if they don't do it- they only got to blame themselves. Those unruly holy poor, who put my own existence to a metric i don't like.
If we turn this around: if we assume that in the global well connected economy, you're paid roughly in proportion to the value you provide, can education increase your ability to provide value?
As someone who grew up on a housing estate in the UK and frequently had free school meals and uniform grants from the state due to my father's unemployment, it definitely fixed mine.
This is just a random unqualified observation so take it with a pinch of salt.
When I compare educated Indian and Chinese people to Americans I just see more willingness to put in hard work on the mundane stuff.
Americans with the same educational qualifications who see a year or two of grunt/drudge work ahead of them to move up the food chain, will more likely quit and do whatever is currently hip. Now some small fraction of these people actually do well and the majority whose startups/youtube channels/gadget blogs/music bands fail find themselves in those overeducated poverty bins.
From what I have seen in Indian and China, I highly doubt poverty is increasing in those educated bins.
I live in Beijing and can assure you that there is no shortage of lazy Chinese people with degrees. If you're American, perhaps what you see is just a result of the type of people who make it through the immigration process
The article misses an important point: It does not explain what definition of poverty all this is based on. There are some definitions like "people having less than 60% of the average real income". But's that's a very relative: If the average income is rising over the years, people defined now as "poor" may live at the same standard as the average in 1991. If that's the case I would not neccessarily consider them "poor".
So I think it would be interesting to do the same statisical breakdown but in regard to the absolute standard of living.
I wonder how much technology has to do with this. A lot of jobs that existed a few years ago don't any more, and the wealth/time saved isn't going back to the people; work hours are not shorter, and low-end jobs aren't better paid.
I would guess not a trivial amount. Which is sad. Keeping people employed is much more important in the grand scheme of things than whatever percentage efficiency gain some of this tech brings.
If there is a market for the education you received, it should.
If the job market conditions change, it might not unless the person is resourceful.
Also note that the OP is talking about the US but education is often really the key for developing countries to attain a higher level of prosperity. Because the market is still quite open there.
I am surprised by how many people fundamentally misunderstand the authors point. Surely he knows that a well educated workforce is important for an economy.
However what the author is addressing is this naive belief that education almost exclusively can solve poverty problems. This is the idea which has been thrown around for years. Governments, economists etc have focused far too much on presenting statistics showing the benefits of education in general without any concern for what people actually learn or whether there is ever a potential for just spending too much time on education.
As someone who has believed for years we are over-educating our people in the west, I've generally felt a complete dismissal of this opinion. Education helps! End of discussion, is the feeling I sense.
If you care to look it is pretty clear that the education hysteria has gone off the rails. Jobs people could perfectly well do with high school education, now requires a bachelor. Suddenly a master is a requirement where usually a bachelors degree would be sufficient. We have come to believe learning only happens in school. That is where I think we are going wrong.
My mother is a journalist and never took more than high school education. Yet she is a very accomplished journalist which knows a lot about her field. Today it is next to impossible to become a journalist without having lots of education, often multiple degrees.
A software developer with a Bachlor and two years of work experience doesn't know less than a student fresh out of a Master program. They just know different stuff.
What the people need to get out of poverty is relevant skills for the economy, but that is not a game of making sure your country has ever higher percentages of college graduates. Switzerland is a case in point. It is a high tech economy with some of the lowest level of college education. How can this be? Because in Switzerland almost anything can be learned through vocational training programs. Massive amounts of learning is happening in a sophisticated private enterprise. That just doesn't show up on the kind of statistics politicians obsesses about.
We don't need more education. We need education far better aligned with the needs of the economy and private enterprise. We also need to make it accessible people at all rungs of society.
X number of years of education in the US is not going to help when so many schools in poor areas of America are exceptionally bad. There is no mystery to this. America is the only advance country where the bulk of education spending goes to the well of rather than the needy. This is through the American tradition requiring students to go to their school district and tying funding to property taxes as well as relying on substantial amounts of fundraising by parents.
It is a bit late to start handing out scholarships for poor but talented students when they reach college age. The damage has already been done. You got to start thinking education from the very first years.
> Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute claim to have hatched a bipartisan consensus plan for reducing poverty. As exciting as that sounds, the details of the plan, unfortunately, won't be available until David Brooks unveils them at an event on December 3rd.
(In case it matters, I’ve felt this same way as a student, as a teacher, and as a member of industry. From every side, it has seemed to me that an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way, for the most part, but rather is used only as some competitive signaling filter.)