A lot of people here need to talk to some entrepreneurs.
It doesn't matter how good, or how well funded, the school system is: if the family is poor, you're not going to be able to float rent on the storefront you need, or purchase initial inventory of whatever you're making, much less soak up a few false starts, much less take out a bank loan to do any of these things.
Period.
This does not in ANY WAY mean there shouldn't be good school funding across the board.
It means that anybody who thinks 'the schools are now funded, so the kids from poor families are now equally able to start a business' is high… or disingenuous.
Let's assume these kids are hungrier, more motivated, and just generally better than most people. If you expect them to simply get busy competing with lazier and less capable kids from wealth and privilege, because they ARE better than the lazy rich, you are overlooking the role of generational capital and access to capital. It would not matter if you were in fact significantly better, smarter and more motivated: banks want collateral, and entrepreneurial exploits don't always bootstrap up from zero. I think it's far more common to prime the pump, sometimes to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each time.
By all means educate, but don't con yourself that it will matter, in the absence of any other changes.
>if the family is poor, you're not going to be able to float rent on the storefront you need, or purchase initial inventory of whatever you're making, much less soak up a few false starts, much less take out a bank loan to do any of these things.
Max Stirner made this point in 1844:
"Free competition is not “free,” because I lack the things for competition. Against my person no objection can be made, but because I have not the things my person too must step to the rear. And who has the necessary things? Perhaps that manufacturer? Why, from him I could take them away! No, the State has them as property, the manufacturer only as fief, as possession."
1) He had access to a computer via his prep school in 1968. This is way ahead of the vast majority of people in the world. Money bought him 5-10 years of advance knowledge.
2) Gates' mother had direct access to the IBM CEO
3) Gates' father could cut a sudden check to the tune of $50,000 to back his son's business venture
Kildall was just as smart as Gates, but didn't have the advantages.
I didn’t find a citation for #3, but if it is accurate that would be over $300,000 USD today. We can agree that families who can provide a similar level of investment for their children’s business or educational projects are better positioned than those who have less or near-zero financial support. Whether the beneficiary takes advantage or maximizes their position is a key variable in success.
It's not clear what Gary Kildall has to do with this argument. He had a Ph.D. in computer science and developed one of the first successful operating system for microcomputers. It's really hard to see him as disadvantaged. The legend of course is that he whiffed one of the biggest business opportunities in the history of computing, but lots of people have blown it in business. [1] The IBM story was interesting because Kildall was already successful.
Kildall couldn't "bet the farm" like Gates could because he didn't have the fallback of rich parents. The business was the fallback and he wasn't going to bet it.
Kildall couldn't break the IBM logjam with CP/M because he couldn't call the IBM CEO directly.
And in a (economically) successful country. You make more as a ditch digger in a developed country than a doctor, engineer, etc in a developing country.
Perhaps, but relatively speaking it’s not necessarily a better life. You’d likely rather be a doctor in Belize then a ditch digger in Manhattan, quality of life-wise.
The definition of success is very intricate, from having much money, friends, stable and rewarding jobs to winning novel prizes or just getting married, living for themselves. But at least, I don't think it's successful to be content without having hardships or discipline for their families.
I’m going to need a reference to support that claim. I did some searching and the closest I could find was a 2019 Georgetown study that said it was better to be affluent and in the bottom 25% of test scores than poor and in the top 25%.
People are doubting you but they fail to realize that the more intelligent the person, the more consequential functional applications they can see in everything around them. The difference between a baboon and a human genius is their ability to see tools and techniques by looking at what is around them. We might also consider that money, gold and other non useful items have valuable largely because very smart and influential people convinced everyone they do. The ability to persuade people of what is real and valuable is an aspect of intelligence that is in a class all its own.
side question, why do people who are poor remain in cities and heavily populated areas? Rural areas are much cheaper and the quality of life is much higher generally for the same dollar. Also in the city you and your loved ones are more likely to become the victim of a crime or wrongfully convicted for a crime not committed, addicted to drugs, incarcerated ect ect. It’s also worth noting that most of the US pop lives in city or highly crowded suburban areas, so although not proven its suspectable that most of the leading health related causes of death arise from conditions in those areas.
Moving to a new area is much preferable to an impoverished family trying to fight poverty in a system where the sample size is adequate to predict that they are in essence trying to win against a rigged casino game
People stay in cities because there are more opportunities there and they have a support network.
I have a property in a very small town around (1000 inhabitants, about 130 kms from the city) and I think it's great: kids can play in the street, I can hear and see horses when I go for a run on dirt roads, nice people, slower living with a close contact with nature. But then again I can work from anywhere and name my price, I have an appartmt in the city and a car and can switch between them as I please.
If you are poor and want to move there it would probably be hell: no much opportunities for a formal job and no one to rely on if you are an outsider... Poor people are not stupid
I've lived in the country and I've lived in the city.
If you do anything that requires networks of people living in the country will hurt your chances, this even applies to learning about stuff you're curious about, without a community it's way harder to do, and that community just doesn't exist when there aren't enough people. The internet has alleviated this somewhat but for some things nothing beats in person.
There is also something to be said about regional attitudes. If you grow up as the only kid in town interested in Robotics when everyone else your age is into Football, you're going to have a hard time.
This isn't even touching the fact that jobs are scarce in these small towns, unless you are a remote tech worker, but even then good luck getting a decent internet connection, even more so now that some politicians are trying to outlaw municipal ISPs.
Also the stats for country living aren't nearly as spotless as people want to believe, Meth is a big problem, teen pregnancies too, even suicide is high and rising in Rural America. Calling it safer or even more wholesome is questionable at best.
Simply put: When you are trying to decide whether you should use your last hundred dollars towards food or rent, moving isn't really a choice. You might as well ask why poor people don't just decide to become rich if they don't want to be poor
> Not that I’m a fan, but Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book (Outliers) about how this is not true.
IIRC, that book cited a study by someone who strongly believed that IQ was a strong predictor of great success...and his own study found that wasn't true. IIRC, he followed a bunch of very high IQ kids from childhood to adulthood, and the most successful of them only achieved middling success.
Are you referring to the comparison between Robert Oppenheimer and Christopher Langan in Outliers?
From Christopher Langan’s Wikipedia entry [1], “In comparing the lack of academic and life success of Langan to the successes of Robert Oppenheimer, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2008 book Outliers, points to the background and social skills of the two men.” It seems to argue that intelligence alone isn’t enough to succeed.
I’m not sure how middling success is defined, but results from Vanderbilt’s study of mathematically precocious youth over a 49 year period seems to say, “by mid-life they were extraordinarily accomplished and enjoyed a high level of life satisfaction.”[2]
Here I thought I was underachieving because I was reading HN comments instead of doing anything productive. Now I see that the world, or at least subsets of the population I’m allowed to blame for my problems, has wronged me, which appeals to my petty sense of envy and bitterness and assuages the guilt I had about not actually trying. Perhaps this inequality is actually a grand conspiracy. I wish the press, academia, and the boards of basically every major company were woke to this crisis.
It's not going to wind up making you rich unless your family was rich, and if you're not rich, you're not going to be able to buy your way into mainstream attention, either.
Go ahead and DO stuff.
If you're the kind of person where it doesn't matter unless you can 'scale' and get real competitive with all the other heavy hitters, I guess don't bother?
I would humbly suggest that the best recipe for making it big is having the resources to support your attempt, AND doing something that you would still care about if you were just small time. Just saying.
Is it right to focus so much on entrepreneurship? Of course at the top, it matters a lot, but isn't a lot of mobility also driven by more average careers?
> Of course at the top, it matters a lot, but isn't a lot of mobility also driven by more average careers?
Given wage stagnation across much of the Western world, largely driven by "liberal" economic and monetary policy, there is a lot of downward pressure on the benefits of "average" (Non FAANG) careers.
Until the early 70's the primary method of managing national economies was via the level of spending a country enacted with less regard given to the level of debt a country held. Economies were more tightly regulated, protections were much stronger in many western countries, and union participation was more common than today.
After a round of economic crisis, with each of them seemingly resistant to influence by the economic tools of the day, countries began to move toward managing their economies through a) promoting the freedom of the market (liberalism) and b) managing spending and economic control through the availability of money (monetary policy), with centralisation of national interest rate levels enacted through central banks.
This worked to a greater or lesser degree (economists seemingly cannot agree) and governments became more open to reform of economic institutions to give more power to the market. This has led to a lessening of strength in those areas of the economy which can impact the free-market (i.e. union membership) and has now become a force for removing non-economic impediments to corporations to seek the lowest wages possible (such as immigration reform to reduce labour costs, etc).
Meanwhile monetary policy has led to ever-decreasing interest rates, which has led to previously "non-economic" goods to become commodities. Housing is a great example, with houses now considered by many to be an asset class which should return continual return in capital value, rather than as a right. Bank accounts are returning functionally zero and less than zero percent returns, which impacts the poor most of all. NFT, crypto, etc, are another - these did not exist prior to monetary policy but they are reacting like an asset class whose existence is used as a stop-gap by those borrowers to avoid holding cash. The world is sloshing with free and near-free money, and it is sending asset classes crazy.
So, costs go up for the poor as they are competing for essentials with rich people who see the same good as an asset class to park investment. The poor get higher interest rates on their loans, so their cost of living goes up. Their wages are negatively impacted through increased competition with people not only in their local area, but globally. Their bank accounts - which previously have returned at a rate higher than inflation, are now being eaten away by fees, negative rates AND inflation.
What exceptions? Don't you have any restaurants or dry cleaners or any other small businesses around where you live which were started by poor immigrants?
I hope you don't think only a multi billion dollar companies count as success. The point is: a lot of poor people start businesses all the time and a lot of them end up successful.
I would not count working 12+ hours per day 7 days a week, while barely making each months rent as success. As far as I can tell that's the reality for most non-franchise stores, small restaurants, etc.
I don't know. A lot more than there are companies like Apple or Google. Don't you see how many small businesses are around you when walking down a random street. Anyway why does it even matter? If only 49% of them succeeded which is less than majority, would that mean poor people cannot become successful entrepreneurs?
It's more sinister than that. It's not only poor people who can't start businesses. Or we need to change our definition of poor. Who among the middle class could safely start a new business without putting their livelihood at risk? It's not a large number.
Rich people can not only start businesses, they can start many businesses. They can beat the statistics of business start up failure because there is little risk for them when a business fails.
Do you have any evidence or reasoning that the kids from poor families are 'hungrier, more motivated' and 'ARE better than the lazy rich'? These things should probably be discussed and proven before we make changes based on those assumptions.
It was only a way to move up into and through the middle class. It was never a ticket to any place else. The reason is simple, lack of opportunity. Sometimes opportunity is money, privilege, or luck. Sometimes it's being at the right place at the right time, befriending the right person at a party, or working together on a group project.
Every entrepreneur that I have known has come has some sort of privilege to get them where they are. One, not only had moderately wealthy parents, but those parents raised him inside of a successful store. From a young age he was taught how to make a venture work, he had a fall back if he failed, and he had people to call if he needed advice. Because of the opportunities they had in life, they believe that it was all hard work and intelligence that got them there.
My best friend from grade school was very wealthy. My friend has had more opportunities in life, just because their parents could float them while they took unpaid internships, complete graduate school, and buy them a nice big house so they could settle down and start a family.
If you want a 'great equalizer' you have to provide opportunity to those that don't have it. You have to check your privilege at the door and consider for a moment that some people don't have it as good as you. You have to give people a chance to prove themselves.
Even in the US and in Tech, if you were raised or live outside of a major metro, you are at a significant disadvantage to those who had the luck to living in one. If we want to fix this, we have to prioritize giving more opportunities to those who don't have them.
> It was only a way to move up into and through the middle class.
And failed miserably even at that. Incomes have remained the same – stagnant, to use more common terminology – through the rise of post-secondary education. Nothing has been gained, only lost in direct and opportunity cost.
All post-secondary education has shown is the those who have greater privilege, like not being born with a crippling disability that leaves one to struggle in school, tend to do better in school and have less struggles in the rest of their life because of those privileges.
The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school or even most upper middle class private schools.
Class war is real, the rich are winning, and education is a key part of that war.
You’re making the same exact mistake that education activists have made for the last 60 years.
Education does not significantly improve outcomes. Period.
What people observe is that people who went to top-tier schools end up being very successful, and make the (totally false) inference that top-tier schools make you successful.
In reality, the people who were almost certainly going to be successful anyway get into the top-tier schools, partially on merit and partially because this is the legitimation process for the upper class in the US.
If you stuff a million poor people into the top-tier schools, this won’t actually fix anything, because A) those people are much less likely to succeed no matter what B) you can’t actually have a million people in the upper class.
We’re currently in the throes of dealing with B). Turchin calls this “elite overproduction”. You have millions of people who (think they) went through the process to become upper class (going to college), but it turns out that was just a signifier - a signifier that’s been totally destroyed by the push to send everyone to college.
> Education does not significantly improve outcomes. Period.
Define "significant".
People who don't graduate high school do much worse than people who graduate from college on average.
Even if you only graduate high school, you'll (on average) make half as much over your lifetime as someone who graduated with a Master's Degree [1].
Right now (on average) - people who dropped out of college make nearly 1/3rd as much as people who graduated with a Master's Degree [2].
You're also 36x more likely to be in prison [3]. Only ~10% of the >25 population has not graduated high school. Despite that, 80% of prisoners have not graduated from high school. ~18% of high school drop outs are in prison. Less than 0.5% of the rest of the population is in prison.
You're also almost 50% more likely to be obese (mostly because you're more likely to be poor and live somewhere un-walkable) [4].
You also have a ~13% shorter lifespan (9 less years) [5].
Sure - an education isn't a license to be in the top 1% or have a perfect life - but it certainly helps...
Those data points don't disagree with wyager's point.
Both the the Signalling Theory they are advocating and the Human Capital Development (HCD) that I assume you are advocating would make the same predictions on those life indicators you listed.
The difference between the theories is which causes which:
does consuming education cause people to have more of the traits that cause good life outcomes OR do the traits that cause good life outcomes also cause people to consume more education?
Pure HCD theory says it is only the first. Pure signalling says only the second.
The two can be mixed. What mix people believe in is important as the two theories result in very different policy goals for our education system.
But both agree that people with more education are going to earn more, commit fewer crimes, experience fewer crimes, be healthier, live longer, etc, etc, etc.
When you make a bold claim that "Education does not significantly improve outcomes. Period." and correlations with every positive outcome are very high - the burden is on you to prove a non-causal link, not me.
But of course, proving causation is near impossible. So people love to make bold claims with no data and just say "prove me".
> and correlations with every positive outcome are very high
I explained why in the top-level post. People who were going to get positive outcomes anyway are good at getting into good schools.
> the burden is on you to prove a non-causal link, not me.
This isn’t Reddit - I wouldn’t drop some nonsense about made up “burden of proof” and expect anyone to buy it. It’s also rude to make objections like this when you clearly haven’t either considered the point you’re responding to (of course people who went to college do better in life - think about why that might be, under my model, and refute that if you can) or actually done the research into the presence or absence of a causal link.
There are 30 years of twin studies demonstrating conclusively that education is not an especially strong predictive factor in adult attainment.
I agree about the signifier, but still think education has a real value outside the pure signalling. You need experts and for that you need schools/colleges because in most jobs you will not learn wide enough nor deep enough (exceptions are possible).
Yes, you need experts, but the people who are going to really benefit from expert-level training were probably already going to go to college anyway. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc are part of the upper class in one way or another.
Yes, class mobility exists and is significant. A large fraction of high-intelligence people (which is a massive causal predictor of high class) come from parents of middling intelligence and class, just as a consequence of the ratio of generational intelligence drift to the width of the population intelligence distribution.
How are you defining education and significantly? How does education not provide you with the skills to be on the internet or language? How would you have faired if you were raised in a remote part of the world without structured or familial education?
I mean this in good spirit, is there proof that societal classes are bound by size?
I won't dispute the existence of class war (though I don't think it's about "middle class" and more about "working class" and I don't think this process is deliberate, more systemic)....
But I would quibble about the role education content plays. Canada doesn't have the same kind of tiered education system that the US has. Public schools are funded out of pooled revenue not local taxes for example so poor neighbourhoods don't get poorly funded schools (though that doesn't rule out what happens with "fundraising" but that's another issue). And universities are more affordable and don't generally get 'elite' status and name branding. Universities are generally all of high quality and most sane employers wouldn't sneer based on where your CS degree came from, etc.
But we have similar income inequality issues to the US. Because it's not the curriculum, it's the ongoing class structure, that's the problem.
Now, there's definitely different levels of education quality, but I have yet to see evidence that curriculum content is the problem. I'd argue the chief value of private schools and elite universities is the network of other wealthy people (am I allowed to use the word 'bourgeois?) you'll meet there. It's connecting with people of your own class.
When I worked at a startup here I quickly realized that most founders and investors I met knew each other or knew of each other through the private school circuit. But it was the exclusiveness of the networks they got through there that benefited them, not the quality of the education. They weren't any smarter than me, just better acculturated into the world of investment, finance, etc. by nature of who they knew, what resources they had, and whose kids they were.
I disagree strongly about curriculum. Just to give an example, here is an exerpt about the language curriculum at Eton from a modern (90s) graduate:
"Everyone must learn Latin and French for the first two years. Most boys have studied Latin and French for a couple of years before they arrive at the school. The cleverer boys also do Ancient Greek. There are many more languages offered besides these ones. The additional foreign languages are Russian, Spanish, German. Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Arabic. Those who are not good at languages need do only French and Latin." - Calers (1)
To me this is just one of a myriad of examples that highlight the kind of difference in actual education curriculum between the oligarchs and the rest of us. I would argue much of this is about quality of life instead of "success outcomes", and generally about having a strong liberal arts background being a key component of ANY education worth anything. Which is also why I strongly disagree with those who advocate for sending students straight to vocational schools, and that whole general line of reasoning, for example.
How many of your referenced founders and investors knew Latin and French before the age of 13?
Actually, Mark Zuckerburg went to Phillips Exeter Academy.
"At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won prizes in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and classical studies." [no coding classes, hmm?]
Many other founders went to similar schools. I was not aware of this until I did policy debate and met these types of students. They do live in a bubble and have no idea how to relate to the rest.
In fact, a good thing to do is always check the high school of these "founders." Check their curriculum...
When I see trade school students doing billion dollar startups, I will believe education is no longer a great equalizer. At the same time, I believe if you want to participate in the American oligarchy or compete with them, you need to become familiar with where they get their training.
It's not always the case but most times if you delve into their background you will find this to be the case.
"At the same time, I believe if you want to participate in the American oligarchy or compete with them, you need to become familiar with where they get their training."
Well observed! This has also been my conclusion, but I have to admit a curious line of thinking it spurred. With modern technology, it should be possible to spread this training to the public. If that happened though, what would be the impact? An oversaturated world of elites? Some new faction of elite that would then clash with the old-guard? It's a fun though experiment at least.
The purpose of the small class size discussions and methods similar to Harkness is to teach children how to behave and interact in group discussion. You are taught mental poker with an authority figure and your cohort. I can see the value of this especially for children that will need to supervise their wealth once they become adults. It's a great way to prepare someone to supervise a family office.
I believe learning the short duration decision games and long duration meta game with professor and class inculcates people predisposed to lead and inspire/manipulate.
You need a physical setting to learn this on a daily basis over several years. Even if you are not good at it; if you recognize what is going on you won't waste time in dead end careers or partnerships with elites. That is very valuable...
It's kind of funny. When people ask me which college they should send their kid to, I always reply better to spend their money on one of these types of private high schools or boarding schools. One of these kids and a community college degree will still be better off than most... (most likely they will find a way to continue the credential game, so...)
Will the American oligarchy provide these opportunities to the general public? Never... it's costly and time consuming. They need people that submit to quarterly reviews, 0-5% raises, and tenuous year end bonuses.
"""
No doubt some people will persist in questioning the usefulness of Latin. For these skeptics I have a two-word answer: Mark Zuckerberg. The 26-year-old founder of Facebook studied Classics at Phillips Exeter Academy and listed Latin as one of the languages he spoke on his Harvard application. So keen is he on the subject, he once quoted lines from the Aeneid during a Facebook product conference and now regards Latin as one of the keys to his success. Just how successful is he? According to Forbes magazine, he’s worth $6.9 billion. If that isn’t a useful skill, I don’t know what is.
"""
> Most boys have studied Latin and French for a couple of years before they arrive at the school.
The curriculum at elite schools speaks to the investments made for these children outside school. Not just tutoring, but parental support for homework, etc.
At the end of the day, neither Latin nor French is, per se, likely to matter one iota regarding aggregate success. People don't get wealthy by graduating with a degree in Classics or French Literature. What matters is what these things reflect.
> The oligarchs have been working to destroy the middle class for a long time now
Why would they? The middle class is made of doctors, engineers, artists, craftsmen, chefs,...
If you are rich and powerful, you want doctors to care for you when you are sick, engineers to design your private jet, artists to entertain you, craftsmen to build your mansion, chefs to prepare you the best meals,...
Mindless slaves had some value in the pre-industrial times, but now, we have machines that do the work of thousands of slaves, cheaper and better. The rich want people to serve them, sure, but they want them smart and productive. And people don't become smart and productive when they are struggling with life.
Just look at the rich and powerful during the pandemic, they got hit like the rest of us. Better treatment, and they quarantined in paradise islands, but they still died and had to do all the social distancing stuff. And guess who saved their ass, yep, middle class, and they know it, they are not stupid.
There is no class war, no conspiracy. In fact, if there is war, it is between the member of each class. It is a tragedy of the commons situation, where the common here is the workforce.
I hear this a lot and I have a hard time believing it. What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class?
Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with diminishing public schools and everything to do with their maximizing their own children's education. If we end private schools, do we still allow paid tutors? If so, I don't see how that field gets levelled.
>What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class?
Vigorously target labor unions. Lobby for substantial decreases in state and Federal taxation, reductions that have in turn necessitated major reductions in education spending and substantial tuition increases that hit middle class families [1]. Attempt (so far unsuccessfully) to privatize social security. Strongly oppose healthcare reform proposals that might reduce out-of-pocket spending.
PS The above examples are a very small part of the story. It's honestly shocking to me that the question even gets asked, or has to be answered.
Business tax cuts benefit shareholders, and globally there has been a race to the bottom to pit locations against each other to try to drive profit margins. These things have largely affected manufacturing - manufacturing itself being marginalized in the greater business landscape as other more profitable industries have gained favor. Note that "the rich" are not all that intertwined in the minutiae of manufacturing.
Opposing health care reform is also a niche issue dominated by well-connected insurance companies. Many other industries would like nothing more than the government to take over health care costs and lower their own burden (including tech companies who end up paying exorbitant amounts to fund these benefits against other competitors). The health insurance companies (and related industries which benefit from price gouging in the health care industry) are entrenched in lobbying and congress and have the clout to block these efforts. Insurance companies aren't "the rich" they are simply well connected with government.
Much of the talk about "the rich" trying to "destroy the middle class" really come down to two large buckets:
* Company shareholders benefiting from profit margins (outsourcing, manufacturing, lowering cost without oversight or regulation) - this benefits "the rich" is so far as "the rich" are shareholders of these companies
* Niche industries having disproportionate influence in our political system - such as private prison lobby, health insurance lobby, etc. - these players have in turn disproportionate impact on our legislative process because they are entrenched and intertwined with members of congress
It doesn't benefit "the rich" to have a poor population, if anything it makes the rich more vulnerable. What we are seeing play out is actually unintended consequences of greed and plain as day corruption which continues without oversight and regulation.
> this benefits "the rich" is so far as "the rich" are shareholders of these companies
The rich are the shareholders of companies. According to the Department of Labor's survey of consumer finances, the wealthiest 1% own 38% of stock. The wealthiest 5% own 71% of stock. The bottom half of the country owns 1% of the stock.
> It doesn't benefit "the rich" to have a poor population, if anything it makes the rich more vulnerable.
That means after a company does its capital investments, the rich would prefer money going to wages over profits. The opposite has been the case for past centuries (not that they never lose the battle).
It may be dialectically self-destructive, but so is the arms race with Russia (and China), so is increasing carbon production. Russia's czar in the early 20th century had self-destructive properties as well.
This is mostly true, but it downplays the regulatory capture that has also occurred at the same time. "The Rich" have a lot more access to some very cheaply bought politicians, they have entire organisations dedicated to policy wonkism that is spoon fed to those politicians and they play king maker in the background of our political organisations by pulling support in the shadows.
If you want a concrete example of this in a modern, western country you only need to look to Australia to see the paralysis that has occurred over climate and carbon policies. Every time we get close to making some progress on curbing our coal producers, a political ruction occurs. This happened again just days ago when the rump/conservative/rural voter party (The Nationals) replaced their leader with a coal industry supporter - simply because the leader of the majority conservative party in their coalition publically mooted a potential change to net zero emissions by 2050. It's like clockwork and ordinary people can do exactly zero things about it.
How does this destroy the middle class? Big companies need educated workers but they don't like the wage bill associated with it. Decimating the middle class via automation and flooding the market with educated people ensures a long term supply of poor-but-educated. That's the end goal of this project and the measurable difference in wealth inequality proves that it is working extremely well.
First, the bar you set is probably too high. Intent is notoriously hard to prove, even with deductive evidence, much less inductive evidence.
Also, I never advocated for ending private schools. You are strawmanning that one, and it's a perhipherial point to the topic anyway.
Since you asked though, how about the Fed's endless bailouts of the rich that are still ongoing? Those same bailouts that then get turned around into lobbying dollars to rewrite the laws to favor corporations over people (or stock buybacks, I could go on)? Like I said, intent is hard to prove, but there is a lot of inductive evidence pointing towards it being of a high probability.
"Empires are even sometimes represented as unintentional. That's when it really starts to get cute. This should have been called maybe the funnier myths of empire, this part of it. The product of unconcious circumstance. When I was a youth, ... I used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a fit of absent mindedness. ... In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I think a moments reflection would tell you that empires are products of deliberate contrivance, of deliberate confection, planning, calculation, and manipulation. No social order can maintain itself in the long run, no social order can maintain itself without concious human agency. In fact that's why you have a state, the state is the concious human agency of coercion to maintain that particular set of interests and order, which don't necessarily always look out for our interests." - Michael Parenti
> Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with diminishing public schools and everything to do with their maximizing their own children's education.
Yes, that is exactly how it happens. I agree there is not a specific intent to destroy the middle class. There is an intent by the wealthy to keep their taxes going to only those schools and services that would benefit their children — the rest of the community can just fuck off and get rich if they want good education too.
It's like that in all ways. Not specifically antagonistic toward the working class, just selfish.
Another example: they give money to politicians that will pass legislation that will favor them and theirs. Again, the rest of us can get rich and buy our own politicians if we don't like it.
Human nature? Maybe. And no doubt the working class can behave selfishly as well. But the working class and poor don't have the financial means to bend policy toward their selfishness, only the wealthy can do that.
The US has some of the best-funded public schools in the world and some of the worst outcomes in public schools. “Funding” is a red herring at best and an excuse for extractive politics in reality.
It turns out that life outcomes have approximately nothing whatsoever to do with how much money your childhood schools got.
It also strikes me as quite perverse to blame people who are able to move their children out of schools that have become terrible (through no fault of their own).
Money isn't relevant but reputation is. My primary school was best is county(so like best/2M people). I would bet that without it I wouldn't be where I am now.
I know how drastic difference is because some of my siblings went to local school.
Most difference IMO is in seeding ambition and giving motivation and encouragement early in life.
I was just told I can achieve anything I want and I just know it, while all they got was fear, dumb teachers and punishment for out-of-the-box thinking.
Actually teachers unions are why you can't fire the worst teachers there.
I think you cannot get really rich without knowing such people and easiest way where people mix are extracircullar activities so I recommend sparing some $ for kids on those.
> It also strikes me as quite perverse to blame people who are able to move their children out of schools that have become terrible (through no fault of their own).
People not being involved is a big way schools become terrible.
If the people who would push for quality can simply opt out instead, what's left? If the people who know what it takes to succeed abandon the system, who left is supposed to even know what is required to make the public system succeed? Any loss of funding pales in comparison to lost passion and expertise.
Most public services that the well-off don't have to use are going to suck, because the only victims are by definition the ones without much power to make change!
I live in a median income neighborhood that is next to a low income neighborhood. The school is funded just fine, and we passed a local bond measure to ensure the school could build and grow. The student population is pretty mixed. The only thing holding this school back is the people that run it. I moved my kids to private school so they could actually get an education instead of just a babysitter.
Yes, the problem is not school funding but school segregation. It takes more than money to help high needs students, it takes attention and support. If your child needs attention and support and they go to a school where the majority of their peers have the same needs, none of them will get it.
Hold on… your claim is that students are not having their special needs met, and your solution is to put them in a school that’s even less equipped to handle their special needs? Schools absolutely should be segregated, as much as possible, by things like academic ability. That’s the only way schools can effectively meet students where they’re at. It takes a totally different strategy to help a low-performing student catch up vs helping a high-performing student excel. By forcing those kids into the same classroom, you’re not helping either of them.
My claim is that more of the students that attend schools in impoverished areas need significant support beyond being presented instructional content than students in affluent areas, and that when students with those high needs are concentrated they are less likely to have them met.
My experience as a secondary school teacher in multiple Title 1 schools was that when you are responsible for a classroom of 30 students, once you have more than a few with high needs (3-5 in my experience) you are unable to provide any of them the support they need. When I taught in an affluent school, I saw that students who were in Special Education programs were given a lot more personal attention and support, which provided them the structure they needed to be successful. Students where those needs are concentrated don't get the attention and support and as a result are very, very unlikely to be successful academically.
> and that when students with those high needs are concentrated they are less likely to have them met.
This is totally opposite to my experience in public school through age 11. I never got the advanced instruction I needed, trying to mix like 4-6 stddev of ability in a single classroom never worked, and no one on the low end really benefitted from it.
Your experience is not the issue I was addressing and it's not really the subject of the original article. I, and in my interpretation the article, was talking about the problem of education not providing the opportunity of success for those of lower means that has typically been considered the "American Dream".
Your anecdote does not appear to contradict my statement. I made a statement about students with high needs being concentrated in a class or school overwhelming the system, and you made a statement about being a single student with exceptional ability in what I interpreted to be a typical American classroom setting not getting personalized instruction.
>Only schools where wealthy people live get good funding
This is different state-by-state. For example, where I live, and in the South, in general from what I have seen, local taxes only makes up a small portion of school funds. The rest is Federal and State money. The bulk of it is state money, and that is apportioned by need. So in most cases, for public schools, the poorest areas have the most funds!
Wealthy people choosing to live near each other, and thus their local community having more taxes per child, does not demonstrate to me intent to destroy the middle class.
As per the source, the rich are paid in stock, and they made more because stocks grew in value. You're making it sound like a scheme when it's a paycheck. Everyone in the US is free to convert all of their money into stock whenever they like. The reason the CEOs get paid in stock to to tie their compensation to the value of the company, not to disenfranchise the poor.
Nowhere in that article does it talk about executive compensation coming solely from stock. Mismatched equity grants are one of the levers, but so is regular salary.
Regardless, the fact is executive pay has been rising while worker pay has been stagnant for decades. That’s not even up for debate, it’s a fact.
Duh, the poor have to spend money to live, they can't just buy stock and wait for it to increase in value. And at the volumes they can afford the transaction fees would kill any profit.
So now we have come full circle, back to "the poor are poor because of the rich". I'm open to the possibility, but the comments this far inspire little confidence in the soundness of the argument.
I believe the gap between private schools and public schools, because I've seen it (a good friend of mine had to repeat a grade coming from his rich-area public school to our private school). But is there any evidence of a gap in instructional quality between (eg) Eton and upper-middle-class private schools? I don't know a ton about the topic, but this would be pretty surprising given my current low-confidence understanding.
I believe that there's a success gap, but that's plausibly down to the inescapable networking advantages of concentrating elites, and isn't relevant to the specific claim you're making.
Even here on HN I've seen "looking to hire" posts where they basically come out and say they will only consider people from elite colleges and universities. It's hard to see stuff like that, so blatant, and not conclude there's a signaling-networking phenomenon going on. It comes up in other things I've seen too, where I know some idea has been floated over and over again by various groups, and then some deal is announced in the news where some institution (university or corporation) is given the grant or funding or whatever, for the same thing as all the other proposals, and it's obvious it's a rich get richer phenomenon.
These issues are always so complicated because they don't operate in any of the ways that people assume stereotypically. One person will be hit by circumstance positively or negatively in a way that's idiosyncratic to them, and privilege operates in subtle ways sometimes.
As for your question, a few years ago there was a blog post making the rounds showing that across colleges, students improve across their undergrad years on standardized testing, but it's pretty much uniform across colleges. More selective colleges have higher means (and in some studies lower variance) but the rate of learning isn't any different, and there's huge overlaps in distributions between institutions. I've tried to find it but haven't been able to from where I'm at at the moment.
I don't think you can separate the concept of education as an "equalizer" from the realities of the supply & demand for educated workers. As more educated workers entered the workplace, the minimum education requirements increased.
As an example, my father, without an college degree, moved up from an entry level labor worker in the early 70's to the VP of operations for the entire company, something nearly impossible today with low-level management positions gated by a degree requirement. Because when most candidates have a degree, finding someone both qualified & with a degree is less of an obstacle. All else being equal, two identical resumes except for the "Bachelors Degree" on one of them, the later is more likely to get an interview and the job. Absolutely this might not always be ideal, the signal of having degree does not always actually predict capabilities, but that was the case when HS education was the minimum standard as well, and so long as companies need a low-pass filter to narrow the pool of candidates, this isn't likely to change. Whether or not it's fair or accurate is somewhat irrelevant.
I had a tow truck driver who had a Ph.D in mechanical engineering. He worked for an engineering company for a few years before he decided to move back to the mountains. I learned so much about control theory riding with him in the cab of his truck.
People like that resemble modern day "wise men" or sages to me. Our middle school janitor was a math PhD who left academia, became a farmer for decades, and eventually our janitor.
He rarely told anyone his credentials. Most people thought he was just some old man. I watched parents and teachers be rude to him, but he'd always smile and be polite. Some of us used to help him from time to time. He was very kind and would always listen to our kid-sized problems while we worked.
I looked through your link and apart from a handful of sources linking to random Guardian articles and Wikipedia it didn't actually cite the source it used as it's central claim and then proceeded with rather disjointed points each poorly supported and ended with some sort of vague platitude about how we need to look at data despute never actually making a conclusion.
The conclusion is that there might be a correlation between a country's culture, largely shaped by its majority religion, to its GDP over time. It is too complex to explain so the article is just an inquiry into an overlooked factor, often ignored by economists.
Did you ask these cab drivers why did they pursue a PhD with the associated cost in time and money if they knew in advance there is no opportunity to use it? Most people that I know with a PhD working outside universities did it for status or for spending some more years studying and not working, not because they needed it.
Completely anecdotal data, but in my experience in Argentina people just study what they want just because, in general there isn't an economic reason.
Argentina's public universities are tuition free, backed by the state, so you don't have to spend any money to study anything you may want, which leads to people choosing non economically viable careers (PHD in social sciences and other stuff), I think in part because they don't have any cost to recover from, as well as people not liking math.
The number of people going into STEM is super low, despite paying much better than other careers, and also allowing you to go to other countries to work. As an example, the School of Psychology in the University of Buenos Aires has around 16k students distributed across 4 degrees (Psychology, musical therapy, and 2 more), whereas the School of Exact and natural sciences had around 7k across ~10 degrees (comp sci, math, physics, geology, biology, chemistry, paleontology and some other I'm forgetting).
Comp sci alone probably has 1000 active students.
The school of engineering has around 8.5k across several engineering degrees.
Yup, that's ironic. Argentina was the brainchild of the populist economic left, Chile of the non-populist economic right. Neither of the two, to be fair, caring all that much about freedom for the populace. Finding out which is doing better at present is left as an exercise for the interested reader.
> Don't forget that Argentina's economy was the brainchild of the right wing in the United States, and specifically the Chicago School of economics.
Does the Chicago school of economics promote increased public spending, money printing and giving money away?
I mean, that's been Argentina's model since the 70s up to now, except for a brief period in the 90s
This one seems kind of tough to quickly summarize, since it covers so much. I guess the final paragraph does a decent job:
Education, training in cognitive and noncognitive skills, nutrition, health care and parenting are all among the building blocks of human capital, and evidence suggests that continuing investments that combat economic hardship among whites and minorities — and which help defuse debilitating conflicts over values, culture and race — stand the best chance of reversing the disarray and inequality that plague our political system and our social order.
Part of the conflict over “values and culture,” however, is over things that affect human capital.
As a Bangladeshi immigrant who married into a white American family, it’s really hard for me to not notice the devastation mainstream American culture has racked on the ability to develop human capital. My younger siblings in law, who are in their early 20s live in towns (these are mainly white, working to middle class towns) where everyone’s parents are divorced, drug use doesn’t get you a beating from your dad (who often isn’t there), etc. Kids can’t get their feet under them because their home situations are always changing. For boys this is particularly bad, because their natural inclination is to cause trouble and the only thing that can keep them in control is a network of older men. (My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and remarked that he couldn’t do anything anywhere in the village without word getting back to his father.)
Money can paper over a lot of problems, I’ll give you that. But it seems to me that if Americans were as poor as Bangladeshis, their society would totally collapse. The culture isn’t suited for survival or upward mobility.
I think this is the main con of American individualism. The alternative is the culture in Asian societies and perhaps to some extent in European ones as well - there is always an Uncle or Aunty who is watching out for you. Of course that has cons where you can't do things that are unconventional, but at the very least you have a stop gap to help young people who are lost.
The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form of American individualism than exists today. Europe is quite poor relative to America precisely because its anti-individualism prevents the formation of economic-political environments conducive to wealth creation.
One could argue that this historic wealth creation also coincided with a high degree of Judeo-Christian religiosity. We're yet to see if the same success can be replicated under an equally individualistic culture, but one without a unified moral fabric via religion. And I say this as an Asian who was raised a Hindu and is now an atheist.
And yet that same sort of "village culture" of adults in a neighborhood looking after the kids collectively was very common in America throughout much of its history; co-occurring with individualism.
> The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form of American individualism than exists today.
Do you mean the 1800s? Manifest Destiny? That time when the Americans bought Louisiana for peanuts to double the size of their country, kicked out Mexico to double the size of their country again, bought Alaska to add another 20%, again, for peanuts, and "conveniently" wiped out all the original populations in those territory and provided free land for probably half their population? And also leveraged their common language and culture to steal, pardon me, transfer, industrial technology from Britain?
Gee, I wonder how they got rich, every nation in the world should have been able to reproduce that, right?
I'm not saying that Americans didn't also do amazing things as individuals, but it's REALLY, REALLY hard to be sure that the end result came from those amazing things or from the shady things I listed above.
The idea that America got rich from stealing and oppression is a pernicious myth that keeps other people poor.
Every country has plenty of stealing and oppression in its history—you can always point to that to reject the assertion that something different matters. If India was rich, you could point to all the stealing and oppression of the Mughals, etc. But you’re just pointing to correlation, not causation.
Countries that went from poor to rich in the 20th century, like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, among others, without Manifest Destiny and all that jazz show your model to be overall simplistic. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew systematically made is poor nation into a rich one by copying the parts of Anglo society he thought was responsible for their wealth. And guess what, it worked!
There are a handful of countries who did not benefit from shady dealings and still made it through and the one you pointed out was built by a enlightened and relatively benevolent genius. Hard to scale that.
The point is that if the success of America was due to mainly “shady dealings” and not a successful culture, then Yew copying aspects of the American system to implement in Singapore wouldn’t have worked.
I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Economically, there was less government imposed communitarianism. But American society itself wasn’t all that individualistic at the community level.
I think he says that 70% of kids in one group are fatherless, and 30% of kids in another group are. And then saying that there must be an achievement gap because of this difference.
The oped touches on one thing I noticed during my time at the University of Cambridge. Almost everyone I talked to there had parents who invested heavily in them either monetarily (hiring nannies, intensive pre-school/after-school care/private school) or time wise from a young age. Increasing access to early child education as argued for by the author seems like no-brainer to bridge some of the gap between children of parents who invest more in their kids’ future and children of parents who either can’t or don’t want to.
For example, I grew up extremely poor, and went to a small school. The most my parents knew about college was that I was going to go to one. Now I had the intelligence to get into just about any school I wanted, but I had no idea what/where those schools were. I also was unaware of how scholarships worked, or that I could have afforded most schools because we were poor. So I didn't apply to the few dream schools I knew of (MIT, Harvard, and Yale were the only big schools I knew about).
I applied and was accepted to two state schools in my region and went to one of those. My partner is appalled at the lack of opportunities I had growing up. No amount of money at the time would have fixed the situation, only moving to an area with better opportunities for me would have.
I think you slightly misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about kids who are considering college, or even know about college. I'm talking about children who are in elementary school or even younger, before they can take care of themselves at all. Studies linked in the article show that availability of free preschool likely had a casual impact on high school graduation rates and college attendance at all. IMO improving those rates are more important than the tail-end of the distribution (MIT vs other colleges) as it would lead to markedly less inequality. Elite schools admit such a small number of students that I don't think educating kids about them would make much of an impact on aggregate (it obviously would for specific kids).
I don't know if I'd characterize this as a systemic lack of opportunity because it's a problem that would have been addressed by a simple college counselor. These days the internet would clue you in. (I'm sure someone doesn't have access even to that, and that should be fixed, but that doesn't seem sufficient to end all disparity.)
If you don't have access to a college counselor or someone doing a similar job, that is still an opportunity you don't have.
The internet helps as long as you have something to look for. If you don't know you are lacking knowledge/information, the the internet isn't going to help you find it.
"In reality, the U.S. is an outlier. Educational pluralism—a school system in which the government funds and regulates, but does not necessarily provide, public education—is the democratic norm around the world. The list of educationally plural systems is long, and it includes the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Belgium, Denmark, Indonesia, Israel, Sweden, and France."
Can't speak to other forms of higher education, but my degree in computer science has more than paid for itself and acted as my ladder to the upper-middle class.
The first statistic in the article (high school completion rate) is not an appropriate measure.
There's a growing body of evidence that high school seniors are being graduated whether they're capable or not, so a diploma in 2016 means much less than a diploma from 1976:
one root cause for poor education that does not seem to be discussed in the thread is the absence of fathers - or even the attention spent by parents of the child.
If this is factored out, one could see more uniform outcomes.
My girlfriend's father died when she was 4 and her mother was an alcoholic for many years, she still turned out great and got herself into college at 17. On the other hand, I know many people with tiger or helicopter parents who lack even the most basic life skills, have difficulty socializing, don't know their physical limits, or have strong entitlement complexes. Attention to child is a poor metric for quality of parenting.
thats great for you both, but its' one person's data point, that does not take away from the overall statement.
What I meant by "attention to child" is that children generally push at boundaries, and there needs to be mature people in their life who keep watch and bring them back in.
First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need as much specialized education or tools, and trial and error is free.
Secondly, education's place as the great economic equalizer has weakened because we have weakened the education. In public schools (the most widely used education institutions in the US), kids are just shoveled through. Why? We put an emphasis on standardized testing and graduation rates while also chronically underfunding schools. That leads us to lower quality/quantity of teachers who are told to march to the drum of hitting numbers. The emphasis on "just graduating" pushes teachers to push kids through, event when they have not actually learned anything. That same philosophy then propagates to college, where TA's want to research for their Masters/PHDs, not teach. You then get a "working class" with no real skills/education/ambition... they do not "do", which leads back to my first comment.
I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence.
But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status.
I've known working class people who grew up poor and who had amazing hustle and through a combination of intelligence, luck, and hard work they clawed their way into the lower-middle class and set up their kids for even further success. I know even more rich people who inherited companies that they weren't interested or competent enough to run, or who got positions that didn't really require much DO-ing on their part by leveraging family connections. So when I picture someone with no real skills or ambition ambition I usually imagine a neighbor who grew up in the "owner class" and when I picture a "do-er" I always picture someone who grew up "working class".
Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital- pick any two and you get success on average. That’s about all there is to it. Success could look like making a bunch of money, starting a business, doing research, making interesting art. The point is a smart, hard working person can pretty much choose to do anything and an intelligent person will do fine with an infinite runway regardless of work ethic, etc. To the extent that college used to be a strong signal for those attributes it was also a strong proxy for success. Continually expanding college weakens the signal and the proximate worth of a college degree. In so many words, college for everyone confuses cause for effect - cynically, it’s not universities that make people successful, it’s that people who will succeed in life are overwhelmingly selected by and go to college- moreover, better colleges tend to matriculate people with greater quantities of those attributes. If college ceased to exist, the same cohort would still come out on top. See also, the vast majority of graduates don’t work in their major (education as a signal).
This is painting a bit too broadly - a degree still shows that you can jump through pointless hoops which is valuable to employers and some degrees are valuable in and off themselves because they gate professions that are necessary for society (medicine/engineering). I’d also point out that colleges historically ignored large pools of candidates from certain demographics for political reasons. I suppose there is probably some learning that manages to happen once in a while too, which is worth something if not the cost to society of fueling the higher ed apparatus.
> Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital
Agreed that these are important factors in success, but in practice they don't seem to be equivalent in importance.
An unsuccessful person who lacks intelligence or conscientiousness but was born into affluence in the US is more likely to remain higher on the socioeconomic ladder than a successful person who has both intelligence and conscientiousness but was born poor.
That said, I believe that with hard work and intelligence it is possible for someone to move up no matter their starting point and we should celebrate the famous outliers who lept up the ladder. But it's also responsible to acknowledge that they are famous because they are outliers and that most people seem to end up within a rung or two of their parents.
> An unsuccessful person who lacks intelligence or conscientiousness but was born into affluence in the US is more likely to remain higher on the socioeconomic ladder than a successful person who has both intelligence and conscientiousness but was born poor.
Are you using the same scales here? If the affluent person was 1% you should take a top 1% person in terms of intelligence or grit. If the affluent person was top 25% in intelligence then the other person should be in a top 25% income family. (top 25% intelligence isn't even 110 IQ, so not high at all)
It isn't fair to take a bottom 10% person with top 2% intelligence and compare that to a top 0.1% in terms of wealth and top 25% in terms of intelligence, but that is the kind of argument people usually makes.
It's a bit hard to use a consistent scale given the non-linear utility of money/intelligence/grit and the subjectivity of measuring the latter two.
But another way of thinking about it is to look at the research on economic mobility. [1] For example, someone whose parents were in the top quintile is more likely to end up in the top quintile than anywhere else, followed by the next-highest quintile, etc and is much less likely to end up in the bottom quintile. Whereas someone born in the bottom quintile is more likely to remain in the bottom quintile, followed by the next-lowest, etc and is much less likely to end up in the top quintile.
One way to interpret that data is through the lens of the just-world hypothesis. This assumes that the United States is a meritocracy and that people will eventually end up at the correct quintile based on their personal effort and characteristics. And if there happens to be generational social stratification then it's probably due to intelligence and grit being hereditary.
Another way to interpret it is that the people with resources have instituted rules and systems that increase socioeconomic inertia so that they can pass as much of their status on to their children as they can while still allowing for enough mobility to prevent a revolution.
Having met, worked with, and taught people in the top and bottom quintiles, I do not find the first hypothesis compelling. That's not to say there is no movement, and those people I have met who have climbed the furthest are also some of the most intelligent, hard-working people I know. But telling them fairy-tales about meritocracies is not helpful -- they need to be prepared to fight long odds and work significantly harder to climb up than someone who is basically already there.
>I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status.
Are we talking status relative to others or relative to the starting position?
There will always be the deadbeat child of someone wealthy who's still wealthier than you but all the "doers" I know have climbed the socioeconomic ladder at least a couple rungs in their adult lives.
The quoted statement was referring to absolute socioeconomic status.
I agree that relative movement is possible and I also know a lot of extremely hard-working people (both rich and poor) who have been successful and climbed a rung or two in their lives.
My point was more that the average wealthy person I know doesn't seem to have a particularly greater or lesser "ability to do things" compared to the poor people I know. Whereas if the "ability to do things" was really a substantial socioeconomic equalizer then I would have expected that DO-ers would be over-represented the higher up the socioeconomic ladder you climb instead of evenly distributed at each level. Perhaps it's different at the very top and the very bottom?
(As a contrast, in the military I found a positive correlation between an officer's rank and their ability to do things. Most of the colonels I worked with had an impressive intellect and drive, and even moreso with the generals I met.)
"Equalizer" was probably the wrong word. It's probably more like, you start somewhere, and do-ing is one of the biggest components in the delta between where you start and where you end. That doesn't mean that in one generation you overcome someone else's head start. But it's still a good, beneficial thing to strive after.
I would agree that do-ing is a major component of the delta, along with ability and a fair bit of luck. I guess my mental model would be that someone's socioeconomic status often comes down to:
starting point + (hard work * ability * luck)
(where any one of those may be positive or negative)
The real problem with this line of thinking is this conversation needs to revolve around things we can put on a political agenda, and there's no way to put "make more kids that do things" on a political agenda. We can put access to education on that agenda, and did, back in the 90s.
I don't know what the next societal band-aid will be, but it probably won't get us any closer to actual equality of opportunity. Still doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Access to capital? The small business loan system could be modernized to support a wider variety of businesses, could incorporate grants, could be more generous - especially if we wanted to advantage certain groups - like first time entrepreneurs.
Also - think of what a better place it would be if that Don Lemon who was tired of race bating had survived and had got his wish? How sad we are where we are today - and ironically he's one of the front line contributors to it too!
Maybe you don't trust this source but there are many others like it.
This bizarre push to make everyone think that there's no meritocracy, which I guess goes hand in hand with the fashionableness of being a victim, is cynical poison being driven by people with radical political agendas.
Your example is like saying playing NBA basketball makes you taller.
His point was that there are plenty of people that don’t become wealthy even though they work hard and have hustle. And there are plenty of wealthy people that didn’t need to work hard to get it.
Looking at the self-made wealthy will select for people that “do”, but that does not imply that “do” makes you wealthy.
For any given individual "do" is almost surely better than "not do". That's the choice facing an individual as they contemplate how to live their life.
I completely agree. But I there's a middle ground between "nothing you do matters" and "you can accomplish absolutely anything if you put your mind to it". People at either extreme of the spectrum are more likely to end up disappointed with their lives than someone in the middle.
I have just decided to be four inches taller than I am /s.
I have depressed friends that I believe can’t reasonably be expected to just decide to “do”, and I have other friends that seem to naturally have an abundance of “do”.
Yes, we can learn the skill, or we can be taught the skill, but otherwise your statement seems unrealistic to me.
I think one important thing that we, as a society, need to respect is that the amount of "do" it takes a given person to do a given task is very different from the amount of "do" it takes another person to do that same task.
For example, it may take somebody who's depressed the same amount of "do" to get out of bed and eat a yogurt as it takes a go-getter, "neurotypical" [0] person to get up, cook a healthy breakfast, go to the gym, take a shower, get to work, and get through their first couple tasks of the day.
[0]: I put "neurotypical" in scare quotes because I'm not sure neurotypical is even really a thing, it's just the term we use for people whose mental makeup fits well into our society and work culture.
IMO both you and GP are correct, ultimately whether the decision to "do" helps or not relies on individual circumstance and context plus on chance factors.
>>> His point was that there are plenty of people that don’t become wealthy even though they work hard and have hustle. And there are plenty of wealthy people that didn’t need to work hard to get it.
is a trivially correct, banal point. The parent comment was implying with his "I know even more people who are rich and lazy" comment something that, while it may be true for the people he encounters, is not true for society at large.
You said “it is a myth that most rich people inherited their wealth”, which you introduced as a subject, and I don’t think his comment was trying to say anything about your point exactly, either way. He said he was talking anecdotally, i.e. he was explicitly talking about his experiences which are true by definition, and not generalising to what your experience might be.
> it is a myth that most rich people inherited their wealth.
No one here has said that. More importantly, your link doesn't dispute that either. It simply says that billionaires, who are on the extreme, don't inherit most of their wealth -- despite the fact that 45% of them at least partially did so.
I've long argued that until we send all kids, rich and poor, to academies at birth with no further contact or tracing to their parents, we won't really understand the full impact of advantages bestowed by wealthy parents.
I have only met one of the "world's richest people" on the list you linked and he is very hard working but I think the conclusions drawn from extreme outliers may not be applicable more broadly.
I think perhaps we're talking about different things? I don't think it's fashionable to be a victim or that people have no control over their fate. Hard work (along with intellect and luck) generally helps people move up in life, and the people I know who have moved up the most in their lives are generally also the smartest and hardest working, so it would make logical sense that most people at the very top have worked hard to get there. After all, not many people out there can fall down a couple rungs and still be at the top of the ladder, right?
But beyond those extreme outliers, most people in the US (which ranks 27th in social mobility according to the world economic forum[1]) seem to end up within a rung or two of where they were born. So I suppose how "meritocratic" the US is probably depends on what you mean by the word.
From your link: "“As our society has become more meritocratic, we’ve simply replaced an aristocracy based on title, class, race and gender with a new and equally persistent aristocracy based on genes, education and parenting,” Pearlstein continued. “Unless we are prepared to engage in extensive genetic reengineering, or require that all children be brought up in state-run boarding schools, we must acknowledge that we can never achieve full equality of opportunity.”"
These studies almost always point to a very limited set of the "wealthiest" for their study. And if you think about it, it's obvious that the very top of the pyramid will mostly have people who were able to concentrate wealth somehow, rather than inheritors. Often, inheritance is split between more than one person. That alone would account for a lot of inherited wealth not meeting an arbitrarily "wealthiest" category. So naturally there's going to be a lot of churn at the top.
In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted.
There has been zero improvement in results.
There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all.
Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1].
They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states on average [3]
Citizens of Baltimore even elected a black grassroot mayor who understands needs of the community [4] and Maryland's police brutality is among the lowest in the country [5].
Because no matter how much better the schools / administration of it get, it all falls down if the kids don't have a culture at home of valuing education.
My sister taught in a few different low income school districts and each time it was the same thing. Probably 75% of the parents just don't care if their kid is misbehaving or straight up not attending at all. Discipline of those kids was met with accusations of racism by both the kid and the parent as a tool to stop the conversation all together. Phone calls home about performance were generally met with "its your job to teach them not mine". Almost no one showed up to parent teacher meetings. Kids who did want to learn were made fun of by other kids as "acting white".
All of this leads to administrations and teachers pushing under-qualified students through to get them out of the way. There is little incentive for them to personally invest in kids when there is no investment at home. Something has got to give.
Looks like Baltimore bit big into the charter school idea, where the cost-per-student at the school level is apparently somewhat higher (30%, $10,000 vs $7,900 judging by the first couple of pages of the per-school table). Administration is about 11% of the expenses. Interestingly, the City Schools' "District Offices" average $174,000 per "Full-Time Equivalent" for whatever that's worth.
It's not really clear to me that being a "black grassroot mayor who understands the needs of the community" is a benefit without any kind of experience managing and operating large organizations.
The operating budget of Baltimore is approximately $4B/year. I can't imagine many companies with that kind of budget that would hire a CEO/COO with Scott's resume to run it.
The sky will fall before a greedy fat cat corporate CEO will be elected as a public official - no matter what his track record in managing other people's money is.
Sure - I wasn't saying a corporate CEO would even be the right person to run a large city(though Bloomberg did pretty well relative to the expectations of a NYC mayor), but merely pointing out that businesses with operating budgets of a similar size are much choosier with who they put in charge.
In Baltimore, the democratic mayoral candidate is a shoe-in. So the Democratic mayoral primaries are actually the real election. And Scott bested his opponents in that competition with ~45,000 votes total.
So really only about 7% of the city(pop 620,000) voted for him, but that's just how the system works.
That, not unlike a lot of college misspending, was an administration issue, not a teacher issue. I, like most people don't mind paying taxes, but I want an itemized bill for my purchases and some redress when the money is misspent (I also live in WA... and the Seattle area is notorious for these types of shenanigans).
There are good schools and there are bad schools. Pumping money into bad schools doesn't help, as many urban areas have found out.
Schools are institutions and have all the inertia that any other institution has. Send a good kid to a bad school and they'll perform on that level. Send a good teacher to a bad school and they'll half-ass it long enough to get the experience on their resume and move on.
If you wanna make a bad school good you break it up and sprinkle the students teachers and administrators among schools that are doing alright. Those people mostly then go on to perform at the same level as those around them.
People vote for shoveling money at the schools because it's a feel good measure and doesn't require doing anything difficult.
A couple years back is 2019. I'm not sure you know how schools work but suddenly pumping money in doesn't dramatically increase test scores the next fiscal quarter. I think nearly everyone agrees public schools could use more funding, the debates tend to be about "on what and how much."
I looked it up, it was fully in place by summer 2018.
P.S. I didn't say "dramatically". I said "zero" improvement. Doing better than zero is as low a bar as possible. I fail to see that as unreasonable. There isn't even a plan for success.
But note that 2020/2021 school years where heavily disrupted by covid. Let's take a look back in a few years to see how they're doing, I'm not sure we can make many inferences from the limited data so far.
"The State has failed to meet its duty under article IX, section 1 by consistently providing school districts with a level of resources that falls short of the actual costs of the basic education program. The legislature recently enacted sweeping reforms to remedy the deficiencies in the funding system, and it is currently making progress toward phasing in those reforms."
Apparently the state was calling for a level of funding, but not providing the money and requiring local taxes to make up the difference. (Hence "fully funding".)
You cannot produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
Summer of 2018 is too late for the 2018/2019 year. That gives them 2019/2020 (half messed up due to the pandemic) and 2020/2021 (half messed up and ongoing).
Since this seems to be yet another issue of a state screwing low income districts, one wouldn't expect any change in high income districts, either.
You do realize this is about where the money was coming from. The state had a constitutional mandate to fund education at a certain level and weren't doing so. Local and federal funding was making up the gap.
You won't see any impact to education because there isn't more money coming to education as a result of this ruling. Rather more money can flow from federal and local gov't to other programs (or in theory taxes could be lowered). This case is about funding sources more than funding amounts.
Anyone who thinks that this fixes education is crazy or insincere. It potentially raises just as many questions as answers. What it should do is relieve pressure from poorer communities though. It also does open the door to pass future education initiatives at the state level which require funding, which can improve education.
But the problems with education are more systemic than just the educational system itself. That said, its good that the state pick up its constitutional responsibility to fully fund education in the state.
I'm not sure you can tell much after only 3 years and one of those years schools were shut down for covid. Let's check back in about 3 or 4 years and see how they're doing.
For a student who was educated for 10 years under funding level A and where funding level B was available for 1 full school year (2018-2019), resulting in some changes in the classrooms in the districts only after some time delay after funding was approved, I'd expect to see almost no change in the spring 2019 testing. Spring 2020 testing was impacted by COVID. It's fine that we have different expectations, though.
The thing is, the "fully-funding" issue has completely vanished from the agenda. It is never discussed anymore. It's back to the same old "we need more funding to make a difference" rhetoric.
In fact, I recall the very day the legislation passed, the same advocates were demanding even more money.
I've lived in Seattle for over 40 years now. Long enough to see innumerable funding increases based on demands that "this time it'll fix the schools". Nothing has moved the needle.
One of these is wrong:
1. the way the school system is set up and run
2. our expectations of what the schools can accomplish
"The thing is, the "fully-funding" issue has completely vanished from the agenda. It is never discussed anymore."
The state was failing to provide funding to all of the school systems in the state. The legislature came up with a plan to fix that and the state Supreme Court agreed with it. There isn't much else to say there.
This is akin to expecting improvement of a building constructed on shaky foundation after increasing funding when the construction reached the 8th floor.
Does Washington do standardized testing on kindergartners or first graders? If not, I agree with your claim that there’s no evidence [in any direction] to test this specific hypothesis most precisely.
I agree with (what I believe is part of) your position that lack of money isn’t the sole (and not even primary) problem in our schools. More money alone won’t fix anything. Maybe it’ll bring back music or other specials that some kids like, but money alone won’t put our education on par with Switzerland, China, or Singapore.
It’s also probably true that whatever is actually needed will also need money, at a minimum in the transition period. It’s a necessary but not sufficient input.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, plus citation needed.
Not to mention that you can only know whether the foundation improved after you build on top of it... which is something we can only observe in the future.
Note that I am not saying that you are incorrect in your assessment. All I am saying is that it's too early to know one way or another.
Institutional changes take time. Even with all that additional funding, it's still the same teachers teaching the same kids in the same schools. If the level of funding remains stable and the society gives the schools and the teachers sufficient autonomy, you may expect results in 20-30 years.
I think the real reason is buried deeper: most Americans have instilled into them that governments are not to be trusted. It's why government salaries suck, it's why it's largely filled with people that couldn't find jobs in the private sector (sad but true). This sentiment bleeds over into education, with nonsense talk of "leftist indoctrination", teachers being stereotyped as money-hungry and lazy because of their unions, and so on.
This isn't that far-fetched; the country was basically founded by rich conspiracy theorist farmers that didn't want to pay taxes.
>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need as much specialized education or tools, and trial and error is free.
This is just the same "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric that has been repeated for generations. The truth is that "trial and error" is not free because some people need to spend all their energy and resources treading water just to stop themselves from drowning. Having the safety net under you to catch you when you fail is not a universal truth in American society. This restricts certain classes of people from ever even attempting to "DO THINGS".
Being a do-er... what a nice, simple, seemingly intuitive concept.
I grew up in a rich area; all of my friends (even the screwballs) are in white-collar jobs, they are all "senior this" and "lead that". I'm 30. Even the people who were serious screw-ups, getting in trouble, drugs, rehab, etc. are doing relatively well - they just had unlimited re-tries.
On the contrary, my wife is from a relatively poor area. Most of the people she knew are poor, have a number of kids, and are just struggling to make ends meet in blue collar jobs.
I don't think my rich kids group had "the ability to DO THINGS". They just had every advantage & their failures were just setbacks in a nearly inevitable path to success.
For what we expect of schools they are underfunded. Schools provide before and after care outside of normal hours, they provide all 3 meals to many students. Counseling, social services, health care ... it's not just teachers in the classroom.
Now, if the US wanted to actually fix poverty and inequality dealing with the symptoms wouldn't roll down to the schools to deal with.
Negatory. Us shovels more funding per student into its public schools than almost any other country. That funding is spend poorly, mostly on administrative functions that no doubt demonstrate in great detail how great each school is.
Comparing countries by PPP doesn’t account for the cost of education between countries. A collage educated worker in Mexico is much cheaper than a collage educated worker in Luxembourg even accounting for PPP.
In fact if you compare countries by Median household income PPP. You find a familiar ordering,
Luxembourg 52,493, Norway 51,489, Sweden 50,514, Australia 46,555, Denmark 44,360, United States 43,585. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Differences in scope between each country such as what pays for school lunch programs explains much of the difference.
But still, there isn't a lack of funding in the US, not when you compare it with every other developed country. Switzerland is not a cheaper country than the US, far from that. Still, being a teacher there is a highly respected profession, and a high school teacher can make 7-8000 per month (last time I spoke with a Swiss). They still pay less per student than the US.
If you ask me, I'm going to guess that building large football practice fields with nigh lighting, driving buses on all the hills twice a day, paying 200k to non-teachers, these things all add up.
Exactly. The biggest problem with US schools is poverty. It isn't anything directly to do with the school system, but the school system is tasked with "leaving no child behind" when the thing holding many children back is poverty of their families.
To be clear, the results aren't great. We pay teachers more, we have pretty much no focus on elite athletics, less political mucking around in the actual education process.
The fundamental problem with these types of analysis is that it is the aggregate and average of a large mostly sparse country with a large population. Between Federalism, local & state politics, wealth concentration, and geographic constraint leads to some interesting and costly quirks to our school systems.
It turns out that wealthy public school districts are extremely good and compete at the top of the world stage, and poor school districts are really, really, terrible and underperform on the world stage by a substantial margin.
Could you support this with data of your own? I know that applies to university level education, but I've never seen the data for lower levels of education.
Funding in U.S. schools is super unequal. Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low. That means low funding for the local school, which lowers the quality of education for students, which makes it harder for the students to get out of poverty, which keeps the district's poverty level high. It's a self reinforcing cycle, which need to be fundamentally re-structured.
>Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low
This is a common myth but it's not backed up by the numbers. Poverty is (mostly) concentrated in inner cities and those inner cities typically contain large office builds which pay lots of real estate taxes but send no kids to schools. If you look around different states the highest per pupil spending is by far in the cities. As an example, Atlanta public schools spends $15k per pupil while the surrounding suburban counties are 8-10k per pupil.
that's interesting to hear, and I'll have to take your word on it for now, but I'm curious why(unless things have significantly changed in the past 6-7 years) inner-city schools are still horrendously bad. I've experienced schools in both the worst parts of Philadelphia as well as in middle-class suburbs of Philly, and the contrast is even more exaggerated than they make it seem on TV shows/movies that depict these types of schools.
Obviously the students who are raised in these high-crime areas and surrounded by a community that's significantly harsher are going to be harder for teachers to manage, and I do think this is a very big part of it, but there are some things that clearly aren't related to that(such as equipment and the quality/quantity of staff)
What we think of as school quality is mostly the quality of the students. Richer districts have, on average, students of high SES with parents that are more willing & able to help their kids succeed in school. Poorer districts have, on average, lower SES kids with terrible living situations and parents.
Having disruptive kids also makes educating them much more expensive. Discipline issues chew up a lot of resources and disrupt learning for other students. So you have to spend more to provide equal quality instruction.
And, of course, just because they spend more money doesn't mean they spend it on things that help educating students.
Perhaps the people should provide the teachers /school with more ways to punish disruption. Let schools expel and suspend disruptive students. Don't let bad actors hurt the rest. But from what I've heard, they do the opposite.
This might have been true at some point in the past, but it is very much false now, and has been false for at least a decade or two. If local property tax revenues are low, the shortfall is made up for with state and federal funds. Just look at the data: worst performing urban schools often have more funding than better performing ones in rural areas or in smaller towns. If you don’t believe me, just show me a few examples, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with, if the pattern is as strong and casually important as you suggest it is.
"All but one of the several multi-state studies find a strong link between spending and outcomes –indicating that money matters on average. Importantly, this is true across studies that use different data-sets, examine different time periods, rely on different sources of variation, and employ different statistical techniques. While one can poke holes in each individual study, the robustness of the patterns across a variety of settings is compelling evidence of a real positive causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes on average. However, an examination of single-state studies suggests that,on average, money matters, but that this is not always so in all settings or in all contexts."
The amount of local funding for public education varies wildly from state to state. In New Mexico in 2018, only 15% of public school revenue came from local sources. However, during the same year in Nebraska, that number is 53%.
So yes, in some states differences in local property tax has a minimal effect on school funding. But in other states, the issue is still a significant issue.
And in Nebraska, can you find a strong correlation between funding levels and schools performance? I asked you for examples, can you find any?
Importantly, if in many states the school funding is equalized, and yet we still have wide difference in performance between good and bad schools, why would anyone expect that changing funding structure in Nebraska would change school outcomes in a significant way? If school funding levels in Michigan are similar across the board, with worse performing schools getting more, not less funding than better performing ones, clearly something else than funding is responsible for these disparities, isnt it? Lastly, as funding disparities have been equalized in many places in past decades, have we ever observed lower funded schools catch up to better funded ones?
The school funding differences are quite obviously not responsible for disparities in school outcomes, and it is beyond clear to me that the entire goal of this narrative is not to improve schools, but instead to funnel more tax funds to politically allied groups, using children as a cover.
> can you find a strong correlation between funding levels and schools performance
In New Zealand there is a negative correlation.
The performance of schools in New Zealand is very strongly correlated with “the decile” which is how wealthy the area where the school is located (i.e. how well off the parents are correlates with how well their children do academically).
The schools in areas of poverty get more state funding, but the results at those schools are very poor, because the parents are poor, and poor parents often cause poor students (edit: cause is the wrong word here, sorry).
Our government otherwise funds schools per student at a fairly flat per capita rate, so there is not the variation in school funding (ignoring private schools) like that which occurs in the US.
I am just pointing out that in New Zealand the main correlation for average student ability is their home, not their school.
> I am just pointing out that in New Zealand the main correlation for average student ability is their home, not their school.
Right. Whatever the casual mechanism is at play, increasing funding of schools is not going to make much of a difference for the kids -- it will, though, for employees of the school systems.
Maybe, but I went to one of the worst funded schools in my state (MN at the time) and got a great education. We were a rural area with only a small tax base, but everyone cared that we got a good education and so the money was carefully spent to give us a good education with the limited money. In fact as a kid I commented that it didn't seem like we had poor funding as we had a lot of activities and great education. Then it was explained that the historical mining areas of the state had a much better tax base, as did the inner city schools (they got the taxes from expensive downtown properties), and even suburban districts had industrial areas to tax.
Most first world countries are well above the US’s 5% GDP in public education expenditures; schools absolutely are underfunded in the US.
It may also be unusually poorly administered, but this isn't like healthcare where US public spending is on par, as a share of GDP, with other developed countries despite doing far less with it.
We're also still using the same educational model we were in the 1700s. We know a lot more about learning now, and that model makes no sense.
We know young kids learn through play yet we continually force them to learn through the equivalent of lectures.
For older students that can learn through lectures, we insist on giving in-person lectures. This means that 99.9% of students are taught by sub-par lecturers. Highschool and college students are foolish to attend lectures person. Instead they should just watch the best in the world on opencourseware/youtube.
Hands-on lab experience and group work is useful and difficult in a remote setting but a very small amount of HS/college time is spent on that. I'd argue pretty much all in-person HS/college time should be spent on that.
We still attempt to teach the mechanics / tools first, like math and calc before the motivation. We do this even though we know that the human brain generally ignores information without utility. We should instead provide students a long-term goal they are interested in and introduce math / calc / physics as a means to achieve that goal.
It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation corrected cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50 years.
My own elementary school (not in CA), has double the amount of staff with the same pupil head count, plus I don't doubt that the salaries have risen faster than inflation and/or GDP improvements. OTOH, teachers were famously poorly paid in days of yore.
You say paid poorly, but exactly how poorly? Usually the upfront pay was offset by a good pension, medical benefits and having the summer months off was a huge benefit.
Teachers around here now make the average staring salary for a Bachelors Degree and still get the good benefits and time off.
I have a friend that was a teacher in palo alto at a public school, she taught special ed and was making 86k, not exactly poor but I could imagine a teacher at middle school or high school making more.
Sure. I can agree with that. The point being that, with the current schooling infrastructure, the amount of money needed to do what needs to be done isn't there.
>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point.
How do you define that though?
Do you consider someone working a minimum wage job full-time to be in this category? Someone making $15-20 an hour but without any real opportunity for advancement?
It's probably oversimplified but the idea is there. Maybe it would be better put as "the ability to do things the person next to you can't or won't do".
Being a cashier for a fast food joint on night shift is absolute hell on your mental and physical health, it takes a ton of endurance, and is all around not very pleasant. But a lot of people have that endurance and the ability to power through it. Being a cab driver takes a ton of time and hours and puts your safety at risk continually...but a lot of people know how to drive and risks is something anyone can take (even if they, rightly so, would rather not to).
Building a web app in a cushy office (or working from home!) is honestly not that hard and rather enjoyable, but right now not that many people can do it, so it pays well. As tools become friendlier and the knowledge spreads though, it very well might end up paying less for the simpler roles than the cashier or driver is. (like in the dot com crash).
It's always been about being able to do what others can't. Education, connections, capital, they're all means to that particular end. Shuffling assets in a fidelity account to set up a 3 fund portfolio isn't rocket science and will make you a lot of money, but most people can't do it because they lack the capital.
Thus, the ability to "DO THINGS". Some of those abilities can come from hard work, some come from luck, some from who you know, some because you were born to rich ass parents.
Amusing this definition of "the ability to do things the person next to you can't or won't do" basically contradicts the idea that DO THINGS can possibly be a great equalizer. Any equality that only some people can have, is pretty much by definition not equality.
I do think it can still be an equalizer, though diversity. If you can code but I can't, while I can do project management but you can't, then both our "do's" are valuable. What prevents THAT from working is that the amount of people who can do each will be different as will the demand. We're straight back at capitalism.
This speaks towards hustle culture. As a kid, I was making $20/hr plus by going door to door raking leaves. The narration of 'get a job ' is not for doers, but rather 'go produce value for others'.
Have you ever met a person who eats rice and ramen and whatnot all week so they can make it to their next paycheck(s), and eats next to nothing before pay day because they literally just don't have money to buy food to eat. You want them to quit their job(s), and what, figure out something else in ~4 days before they have 0 dollars left for food & electricity & rent & internet(if they have it at all).
I know a couple people like this, and I know there are many out there in this situation with several kids to worry about. Maybe your aware of this and were referring to people with disposable income and savings, but those people don't really need to do something else because apparently things are working out for them better than the vast majority of people. I don't want to assume too much but this comes off sounding really badly.
Never-mind the fact that these low-paying jobs exist and someone will have to do them, therefore some percentage of the population will be in this situation, often despite working several jobs and dealing with a lot more than most of us have to on top of that. I don't see how anyone can have this view without also implicitly stating that some % of the population are necessarily just not good at doing things and deserve to live through that kind of struggle because of it.
1) There's no reason you can't look for a job before quitting your current one. In fact, you should always be looking for better opportunities, no matter how much you like your current job.
2) Is it harder for parents, single or not? Yea. Yet these are the people you most often see make the change. They have the right motivation, moreso than singles their age without kids.
3) The fact that the low paying job exists, and will always exist, doesn't mean you have to be the one to do it forever. Or anyone else.
You get a job, you get experience, you move on to a better job, and someone with less experience takes over your old job. The world turns.
>some percentage of the population will be in this situation
Yes- entry level workers, kids, and maybe some people that are rebuilding their life. They're not meant to be careers.
This is a great take and is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. I think you're optimistic about the right things though in that getting stuff done at an individual level has never been more valuable. Likewise, learning facts in an academic setting has never been less valuable. School teaches and kids learn, but it doesn't teach the right stuff anymore.
Yup. Having an education doesn't do anything (as in diplomas). Being educated does. The quality of the public schools matter a lot.
As for college... It was a differentiator, not an equalizer. When so many people have college degrees, they're just an expectation and all of a sudden you raised the bar, so people who don't have them are even more screwed.
The analogy I always like is MMORPG expansions/level cap raise. Every time the level cap raises, new players to the game take that much longer to catch up. The developers then need to add a bunch of "catch up" mechanics to artificially close the gap.
I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so generalized no one has any agency over it except companies with enough money to push a narrative across 300 mil people. Either that or the way you think about US has to change. I find it hard to believe every state does things the same way but still you say "US" has a problem and not Georgia or California. Why not think locally to your state which has a lot of independance in how it does things? Maybe then it would be easier to push reform
The US could create an amendment to say something like "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Which would give individual States the right to control a lot of things. Is that kind of what you're thinking?
To anyone who does not get the irony in the above, this already exists as the Tenth Amendment. It is effectively ignored because it is considered legally redundant with the Constitution itself.
I disagree if it was effectively ignored, a lot of things would be better and alot of things would be worse. While the lines between state and federal power has even diminished, it’s very much still there.
The interstate highway system and the freedom of movement between the states greatly restricts the ability for states to have meaningfully different policies from one another. A popular policy that works for the current population of the state may become an economic disaster once residents of other states move in to join the action.
That’s exactly how the USA was originally designed to work, and how it originally worked up until early-to-mid 20th century. It was only then when a bunch of power grabbing politicians, along with a bunch of complicit elements in the judicial apparatus, have twisted the US into completely different system that we now get to suffer from.
It’s not just power-grabbing politicians. It’s what the populace desires. Look at the overwhelming support for something like universal health care. That is a massive expansion of federal power.
A large number of Americans desire massive federal power.
> A large number of Americans desire massive federal power.
It's complicated.
A 2016 Gallup poll (https://news.gallup.com/poll/27286/government.aspx) revealed that 55 percent of respondents preferred power to be concentrated in state governments; 37 percent preferred the federal government.
Another group of surveys (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa759_web...) shows that Americans strongly prefer state and local governments to lead on health insurance (62 percent, versus 38 percent preferring federal leadership), welfare (68/31 percent), unemployment (55/26 percent), education (75/25 percent), pre-kindergarten education (71/25 percent), transportation (78/22 percent), law enforcement (73/20 percent), job training (75/20 percent), housing (83/18 percent), and paving roads (77/9 percent).
The problem with the universal health care polls is that 1) "universal healthcare" is such a broad term that can mean anything from NHS style single provider to Switzerland style universal privatized systems, and 2) it's entirely possible to favor a "universal healthcare" system that's administered and funded at the State level as opposed to the Federal level.
Don't conflate the desired political goal with the political source.
There's no reason states couldn't implement it if they wanted to. And some did.
Which is part of why it's such a power grab. The "universal" part of it goes against the entire concept of tiered / federated / rupublic type of government.
It's dogmatic. Politics has become religion, especially to the non-religous, and most don't realize it.
"Catholic" means "universal". We can't allow States to have their own laws, when they might not align with the Truth. Praise Science!
Because you pay your taxes to the central entity that is running those programs. In the US, the majority of taxes go to the Federal gov't, not the states.
The federal government should then stop levying those taxes, so that states could then collect more and run their own programs. The federal Medicare tax is already so high that the federal healthcare spending per capita is already exceeding healthcare spending per capita in almost all European countries, yet Medicare/Medicaid only cover a fraction of the population. Seriously, with the same amount of money (in per capita terms) that US government already spends on healthcare, UK or France are able to provide universal coverage. If the federal government is too inept to do the same, it should give up trying, and instead make space for states to do that instead.
Most European countries are of the size of US states. If they can run their healthcare just fine, it only makes it dumber idea to try to centralize it in US at the federal level.
In Canada, the single payer healthcare system is Provincial, not Federal, and yet the income tax brackets at Canada's Federal level are roughly equal to those in the US (in fact are actually higher for some earners).
If we wanted to take Canada's cue, there's plenty of room to increase State tax rates even if we did nothing about Federal taxation. Or we could take Switzerland's cue and totally flip the distribution, where Cantonal taxes far exceed Federal income tax.
I'm not sure how that would work without allowing the individual states to act like separate countries. E.g. by being able to put tariffs on other states, sue them for their externalities, place restrictions on people who don't live and work in the state, etc.
At that point, I'm not sure what you gain by not being completely separate countries.
What you could do is to enumerate powers of the federal government, and one of those powers would be to “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”, with the understanding among the authors of the document that “regulating commerce” means regulating trade and tariffs, so that nobody then can misinterpret it as giving the federal power to regulate anything they want by arguing it affects interstate commerce.
Honestly the first two should be a federal thing. I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country. If we were to pull up on a Alien planet and see this kind of election style we would ridicule the ridiculousness that is the US election system.
Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free?
We’re 50 different states that are, in theory, supposed to be quite independent of each other. (In some ways, even more so than the EU. For example, the EU has no equivalent of our anti-commandeering principle. The EU can direct national administrative organs to carry out task, while the U.S. federal government can’t direct state administrative units.
The issue of why taxpayers won’t pay doctors to deliver children is orthogonal to the point I’m making. If taxpayers in California or New York want to do that, they should do it.
> We’re 50 different states that are, in theory, supposed to be quite independent of each other.
That ship sailed over the horizon a long time ago, like at the latest with the adoption of the 14th Amendment nearly 150 years ago. When you took the oath to become a lawyer, you didn't swear allegiance to whatever state you happened to be living in at the time. And sociologically, I'd venture that most U.S. citizens think of themselves as Americans, not as Marylanders or Texans (OK, granted, a lot of Texans think of themselves as Texans first, which isn't a good thing).
> When you took the oath to become a lawyer, you didn't swear allegiance to whatever state you happened to be living in at the time
My New York bar oath says: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York." You don't swear loyalty to the constitution of a mere administrative subdivision.
> And sociologically, I'd venture that most U.S. citizens think of themselves as Americans, not as Marylanders or Texans (OK, granted, a lot of Texans think of themselves as Texans first, which isn't a good thing).
I think that depends on the context of the question. If you ask people in the abstract, I agree most people identify as American first. But people have very well-developed affinities and prejudices about their states versus neighboring states that verge on nationalistic sentiment. Texans do, of course, which is something I find charming. But so do Oregonians. Having spent much of my adult life in Georgia, I can tell you exactly what I think about Floridians, Alabamans, South Carolinians, Mississippians, etc. (A lot of these sentiments play out through college football, the way they play out through soccer in Europe.) My wife, being a fifth generation Oregonian, would not move to California to save her life. Having relocated to Maryland, we have both cultivated an active dislike of Virginians (what the heck are they doing here, with their license plates?)
> My New York bar oath says: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York."
The words "looking at your bio, I'd guess" are so reliably a marker for bad HN comments that I'm a little surprised the site doesn't auto-flag such comments. The guidelines ask you not to write things like this here.
I'm guessing you were my downvote, and yet I can't downvote your comment.
The relevant text of the 14th Amendment here is its opening declaration: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States ...." [0] (Emphasis added.)
In other words: Under the 14th Amendment, United States citizenship takes precedence over state citizenship — kind of like the old boast, civis romanus sum: I'm a Roman citizen. (The implication was: fuck with me at your peril.) Cf. Act 22:25: "As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, 'Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?'"
To be sure, there are Lost-Cause diehards who claim that the 14th Amendment never actually came into effect because the Southern states refused to ratify it and so it didn't get the necessary 3/4 of states; courts have consistently rejected that claim [1]. If anything, the former Confederate states should be grateful that they didn't get the treatment that the Allies meted out to the Germans and Japanese in 1945 and afterwards — one recent commentator, remarking on the outrages perpetrated in and by the post-Civil War South, tweeted that "Sherman should've mowed the deep south like a lawn, making multiple passes." [2]
You(ABA/Federal Gov't) claim us as subjects to your federal state. Notice the COVID bailouts going to the highest cost of living states with the largest state income taxes and budget deficits/debts? I don't really give a fuck about equal protection for states when the administrators are wholly removed from accountability. Notice the gun laws in DC and NY - the political and financial centers? Weird how the powerful in those states aren't accountable for their failures, always a bailout at the expense of labor for their financial and political quandries.
How many times in the last couple decades have the financiers revealed themselves as liars while paying no personal cost for their lies and deceits?
In an above comment -
" > My New York bar oath says: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York."
Note the order. "
The 14th Amendment is a fraud not because Southern states didn't ratify it while not apart of the Union. It's a fraud in the lack of enforcement against the power structures that initially enacted it.
I don't believe you'd see it my way, I'm thinking because it's a bit - to quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
My homework extends to knowing you're a lawyer, and given you do contract law for start ups I'm willing to bet you help them steal via the protections of the corporate veil.
Again, the 14th Amendment says we're all equal before the law but I don't see a lot of boards / c-suite scumbags going to jail or having the previous decades of 'earnings' clawed back. And definitely not seeing any corporate death penalties. As far as I can tell, you're one of the dudes that helps them achieve a superior legal status to mere flash and blood humans like myself.
> I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country.
This is how it works in the EU as well, and per the GGP commenter, the prescription was for the US to be more like the EU, which is how it was set up in the first place anyway per the GP comment.
> Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free?
Except there are several different viable ways of providing universal healthcare. You can have a single payer system like Canada/Denmark/American Medicare, you can have a single provider system like the UK/Veterans Administration, you can have a purely private non-employer funded system like Switzerland or the Netherlands, you can have a public-private mix like Germany, or only universal catastrophic coverage like in Singapore. Each approach has its own trade-offs, and those trade-offs are political in nature, where some States might prefer one set of trade-offs and others may not.
This is exactly how Canada's single payer healthcare came about. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer system is Provincial, not Federal. The Federal government provides supplemental funding, but that only happened after each Province independently developed its own system, and only after all Provinces unanimously agreed to the Federal health transfer. As of 2020, Federal transfer payments in Canada only amount to 22% (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/45/E1408).
Because people get paid to do those jobs, and the government mandating that they do it for free, or for some reduced price is theft of labor. We've already fought that war.
This isn't "over reach of federal government" - it's ensuring that the citizens of anyone who wants to be part of a certain association have certain basic rights.
> In order to send representatives to the European parliment, the EU requires that representatives be elected in fair elections
And the US Constitution requires that its member states have a republican (small r) form of government.
> Part of being a member state of the EU requires having access to some sort of public healthcare system
First of all, that's not even true; the only requirement is that the member states accept the European Health Insurance Card regardless of how the healthcare is financed (publicly or privately). The Netherlands, for instance, gets its healthcare primarily through private health insurance. An EU-like approach to healthcare in the US would be for the Federal government to establish a common standard that can apply across disparate health insurance systems that are implemented, funded, and administered by the States, but that's not really what the D party is selling (as far as I know).
Environmental Policy (EPA). Family policy (gay marriage, transgenderism, etc via the Supreme Court). Healthcare (Obamacare). Education (no child left behind, the dept of education). Higher education (federal backed guarantees). We can go on...
This has been one of the least informed comments I have read recently - most of the things you are attributing to democrats are were actually republicans.
The concept of an individual mandate goes back to at least 1989, when The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, proposed an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer health care.[121][122] It was championed for a time by conservative economists and Republican senators as a market-based approach to healthcare reform on the basis of individual responsibility and avoidance of free rider problems. Specifically, because the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires any hospital participating in Medicare (nearly all do) to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, the government often indirectly bore the cost of those without the ability to pay.[123][124][125]
It was coauthored by Representatives John Boehner (R-OH), George Miller (D-CA), and Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Judd Gregg (R-NH). The United States House of Representatives passed the bill on December 13, 2001 (voting 381–41),[8] and the United States Senate passed it on December 18, 2001 (voting 87–10).[9] President Bush signed it into law on January 8, 2002.
While a lot of that is true, it’s also pretty pointless to argue about what political labels people used decades ago as if that is relevant to the merits of political groups today with those same labels. Political parties and other such labels drift significantly over time. You might as well argue that the GOP is great because John Milton was a “republican.”
I'm not sure how to respond to this comment. The comment I responded to asked for examples of things the federal government nationalizes, with the support of democrats. You seem to believe that a policy being championed by a republican president means that it is somehow 'not democrat'.
This is similar to how people make out Iraq to be a republican war even though in enjoyed broad bipartisan support.
The facts you mentioned here are obvious. I didn't think they needed much spelling out for moderately educated Americans.
If the question is 'do republicans nationalize things'? The answer is... yes. All national politicians do.
I hate how we literally split everything, including bipartisan things up, into neat little democrat/republican boxes.
I mean... duh. I'm just pointing out the general trend towards nationalizaton. It's not just a matter of democrats. Republicans do it all the time against their own values.
I think my kids would look at me strangely if, after asking me what to do in life, I said, “DO THINGS.” I think more specifics are in order. Like, do what? Or, what are the things worth doing? There’s just not enough information available on what things have ROI.
Holy hell dude, are you calling the working class lazy and the professional class hard-working?! This tells me you don’t have a lot of contact with the working class. The working class busts their asses while most software devs I know work about 2 hours a day from their couch in pajamas.
Someone who works at a warehouse or fast food joint is a much harder worker than a software architect. Probably also working 60-80 hours a week across a couple jobs just to pay rent. Meanwhile I just spout bullshit all day and play corporate politics without really knowing anything nor having much ambition, and I’m somehow worth 20-40x what someone at an Amazon warehouse is.
Americans glorify hard work while undervaluing efficiency.
For example, I often hear fellow Americans brag about how many hours they put in or how intense their work is. This is true all the way from the blue collar trades to the most white collar (management consultants are notorious for this).
In reality, it's better to use fewer hours to accomplish the same goal. There is no inherent value in applying more time to something.
The truth is the SW architect, the CEO of many corporations, etc are more efficient than the lowest level workers. I know this is not popular, and it makes many uncomfortable, but it is undeniably true. This is because both the SW architect and the CEO and the management consultant and the operations manager, etc, are all into automation, which is an efficiency increasing process.
This is not just automation in terms of building robots (which maybe a SW architect is involved with), but also automation in terms of making the lowest level workers replaceable by developing corporate policy, procedures, etc. The CEO provides the service of automating investment returns to his/her company's shareholders.
In this light, it is obvious why certain professions earn more. They are way more efficient with their time.
> I’m somehow worth 20-40x what someone at an Amazon warehouse is.
Because your work is quite a bit more efficient. I mean, like many here, I write software for a living. Once my software component works, it works. It will work forever with minimal maintenance once it stabilizes, and will provide the company with many many years of value, even if I and my team were to drop dead. In other words, we are automators. The automators are always going to do better.
Anyway, going back to the lazy/hard-working dichotomy. These terms are used with unnecessary moralistic overtones. There is nothing wrong with working two hours a day, and there is nothing inherently good about working 14 hours. We need to stop acting as if those who work more have some inherent virtue. This leads to all sorts of social pathologies such as the toxic version of the bootstrap mentality.
> The truth is the SW architect, the CEO of many corporations, etc are more efficient than the lowest level workers. I know this is not popular, and it makes many uncomfortable, but it is undeniably true. This is because both the SW architect and the CEO and the management consultant and the operations manager, etc, are all into automation, which is an efficiency increasing process.
I don't think this has anything to do automation, it's more likely due to their ability to delegate
And I don't mean their skill with delegating I mean the fact that they are in a position where they can tell other people to do their work for them.
It's easy to appear super productive if you are in a position to claim the productivity of other people as if it were your own.
its not just delegation, but the importance of strategy. In large orgs, things go fairly slow but wide. It is beyond importance that the direction set is a good direction. This requires talking to people, understanding the market, understanding trends, and the boiling it down into what the org should focus and do versus stop doing.
Uh I don't know what management consultants you've met but as an industry it is the opposite of efficient. It's an industry that's built on stealing value from the productive bits of society by leveraging the social status of it's employees. Some software is certainly very efficient and productive but after many years in software I can tell you that a lot of software work is repeated broken window fixing. It's not about lazy / hardworking it's about those with social capital and those without. Those with it prosper and those without it flounder.
I used to be a management consultant, so I have a lot of experience and a lot of insider knowledge.
Management consultants automate away the explanations a CEO or executive has to give. They can just point to their superiors and inferiors and say 'Bain said to do blah'. No one's going to get fired for buying Microsoft, or listening to McKinley.
Inside the industry itself, the actual consulting is heavily automated. Consultants are mainly glorified data entry technicians, inputting numbers into pre-built models and using pre-made assets to assemble a good-looking presentation. There's some skill to it in terms of speaking, but the process is heavily automated to make it extremely efficient.
It definitely saves the executives time, which is why they'd hire them.
> Some software is certainly very efficient and productive but after many years in software I can tell you that a lot of software work is repeated broken window fixing.
There is a common fallacy I see often when driving on the freeway during rush hour. Some people seem to believe that if they just took the surface streets, they would get to their destination faster. That is because they are spending more of their time moving on the surface streets, but on average they're still going slower than the freeway people. In short, they trade a large variance in a higher average speed on the freeway for a lower variance in a lower average speed on the roads.
This analogy extends to hard work. Americans glorify the worker taking the surface streets -- i.e., the one actively "doing" something even if the amount of work being done per unit time is very small -- rather than the one in the stop-and-go traffic -- the architect who works two hours a day intensely, and then takes time off, or the SW engineer who works for 30 minute stretches and then rests to compile his software. In reality, the latter two get to their destination faster, even if it seems like they're doing nothing most of the time. For some reason, the steady work is valued more than the high acceleration/high deceleration work.
That is to say you identify frustrations with software (repeated broken window fixing) which certainly exist, but they do not detract from the fact that the automaton enabled by software is still incredibly valuable. I don't see how this is even debatable. The increase in productivity directly attributable to software is undeniable.
EDIT; I'll point out that I ran away from management consulting. I hated it, and I have little good to say about the industry. But it's undeniable they automate away the decisions of executives to the point people are willing to pay.
I am actually unclear on what you mean by "Do". You seem to be using it in a very general sense, as in people who do something, anything, are better off than people who do nothing. That seems pretty obvious, movement is the very definition of work after all. However, the very vague way in which you talk about "Doing" creates a kind of Rorschach test where your readers can take any meaning they would like. So what is it, exactly that you mean? What sort of specific actions should a person take to raise their station in life? What about people not "doing"? Can you describe their life?
I agree with their interpretation. "Be more ambitious" isn't a solution to poverty. There are plenty of ambitious people to compete with at every income level.
Consider this thought experiment. Think of the people working at your place of employment in low-level positions who make less money than you. Do you think they are on average doing less productive work than you, or less likely to be "doers"? I am guessing you feel the answer is yes.
Now think of the people in high-level positions who make more than you. Do you think they are on average doing more productive work than you? I am guessing you feel the answer is not so obvious with this question.
It is better to use a peer instead of yourself to reduce bias. Do you think your tech lead does more valuable things than your average peer? Probably yes.
I think you're wrong. Doers have always been able to progress better than parasites, across social classes. Since the beginning of time.
What "changed", is that before, imagination and creativity were unnecessary for the mass. You had the field, the factory, your dad's craft or utility store, the army, the navy etc etc. Things were predictable, sorted by first level need.
Now hum you're a data analyst in a crypto exchange, what's the public school doing to make others armed to reach this social function?
I had a french education, very wide and messy, strict and deep, in a safe and rich private school, and I find that lack of desire to focus on easy equalitarian checkboxes gave me the flexibility to accept there's no purpose or goal to life and you have to adapt. In the Hong Kong bank I work at now, I see an enormous over-representation of french people and I wonder if that's a tell... but maybe it's just we learned english and flee the country.
So weirdly, I think before people did stuff and today you have to create stuff, education cannot be simple and follow premade receipes to teach peasants how to read to be the equal of factory workers. It has to go deep, focus on building a dynamic intelligence.
Or in not so many words: maybe equality isn't as useful to teach or reach as adaptability.
In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is the great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances.
Furthermore, strong labor laws have compressed salaries towards the mean, so people are not locking themselves into poverty by working low-wage / low-skill work, but there's a difference enough that people are incentivized to get educated. I think it's a decent harmony - compared to other countries, where you have a poor working class and rich/wealthy middle/upper middle class.
I think that if education is the only ticket to a better life, then you get stuck with the problem that not all educated people are equal, and only certain educated people get to climb socioeconomic classes (too many schools, too many graduates, i.e inflation)
> In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is the great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances.
That is a great explanation in theory, but simply does not work out in practice. In order to support the safety net, the EU has to impose several regulations that remove the ability of people to 'take chances', such as higher taxes on business, paternity/maternity leave policies that cause parents to have fewer children, higher regulatory atmosphere, etc.
Whether it's in business, family, education, etc, the EU is not particularly excellent at any. America still has most of the world's large innovative companies, still has a higher birth rate, still has more VC money (and access to capital in general), and still has the best universities and best research institutions.
> Odd that there are so many EU countries at the list of most happy countries when EU is not good at anything
Putting words in my mouth. I never said the EU is not good at 'anything'. But it's not as good as America in terms of financing, innovation, or education.
One does not need great capital access, top-notch technology, or even the best education to be happy. You sad that european safety nets lead to the ability to 'take chances'. Typically, the result of this would be more innovation, which leads to more capital, which leads to better financing, which incentivizes education so that those with education can convince investors to invest in new innovation. However, the result you claim does not exist in Europe at the same level it exists in America.
Does the median american even benefit from these sorts of things? I would guess not at all, but I'm sure for the 1% the regulatory environment is extremely favorable. Someone working with their hands doesn't care much about national financial policy, since it has very little practical effect on their life vs. something like a national healthcare policy, which they would use regularly throughout their lives.
Perhaps not, but you're changing the goalposts. You said European style safety nets would spur individual innovation and risk taking. That was the only metric I was interested in. If you want to change the conversation to generic 'benefits' or happiness, by all means, go ahead, but that's not a conversation I'm personally interested in.
Maybe it does spur innovation and risk taking, but not the sorts of innovation that brings VCs to the room like a vulture to carrion.
The average American works 25 hours a week. The average German works 18 hours a week. That's another 7 hours you can spend with your children, 7 hours to spend learning an instrument, 7 hours working on art, 7 hours exercising or engaging in physical activity. To me, these are all cases of individual innovation and self improvement. Maybe you now have time after your job as a German to plan your business venture, and you have the time to properly plan for risk taking activities such as this. Due to the hours worked and the requirements that the social safety net be fulfilled by continued employment at certain employers that offer these benefits, it really does feel that most Americans are lacking opportunities to individually innovate or take risks that Europeans might not have issue with, since their social benefits are not tied to their employer and they overall work less hours and have more vacation time and longer parental leave periods.
The corporate tax might be nominally higher in the US, but the cost of doing business is definitely higher in Europe. When you have to pay 55% to the state if an employee has a salary above 100k, that will seriously hinder your ability to hire top talent, retain them, and motivate them (why work harder if it will go down the tax drain?)
It's not a tax drain though. It funds things like higher education and healthcare. Things that most Americans have to pay out of pocket if they want which entrenches the lack of class mobility in this country. Imo the european system is better.
> It funds things like higher education and healthcare
The US funds the healthcare above and beyond what any other country on Earth is doing. I think it's 50% higher than the next contender, per capita.
As for higher education, the US universities are doing much much better than their European counterparts. If you get a STEM degree, you're basically set for life in the US, pay your debts in no time and then enjoy a salary that can easily be 2 times higher than in Europe. In Europe you get a free education, which opens up the exciting opportunity to toil for 60k-80k (pre-tax) a year for the rest of your life. Take the tax out, and you're left with around 50% of that money.
The US universities are fine. The STEM graduates are fine. The problem is with all the non-marketable degrees for which students get into serious debt. I don't think we should subsidize those more, I think we should discourage students from attending useless degrees. If the government will pay for the degrees, then the government will also have a heavy hand in picking winners and losers in terms of classes, degrees, schools etc. This is how it's in Europe, and it shows, they are lacking performance.
Not every US STEM degree gets you a six figure job. STEM majors are some of the most awarded degrees in all colleges; there is a huge oversupply in the labor pool unless you are able to differentiate yourself which is not easy and usually requires post graduate education or nepotism. For the vast majority of STEM B.S. degrees, even a computer science degree in the midwest, you might be toiling for 60k-80k too. No one I knew who graduated in computer science in my undergrad has some glamorous bay area life today. Most ended up getting jobs in places like Nebraska or somewhere humid in the south writing terrible enterprise software and they complain to me how much it sucks. The bay area and that high income tech culture is a tiny little bubble, despite all the ink spilled over it.
I was talking about averages, you counter with a very specific example: midwest or southern states software devs.
I could counter with Italy, where you can call yourself lucky if you get 2000 Euros a month after taxes, as a senior dev. And it's not a particularly cheap country either.
Keep in mind that the sums are usually before tax. Income taxes in the US for a 100k salary can be as low as 10%. Add 5% for healthcare and you end up with 85% in your pocket. In Europe, with the exception of Switzerland, they will take 45-55% of your money, especially above 60k; so from a 60k salary in Germany you take home 30k.
I would say 30k vs 85k is a lot to make up the difference for "free" college and "free" healthcare.
If you could choose free university and then 50 years of 30k income VS 200k in debts and then 50 years of 85k income, what would you choose?
But again, my point is that the US education and healthcare have enough funding even with the lower taxation. Funding is not a problem, US has more or similar funding than other developed nations: healthcare, education, welfare benefits.
> Most ended up getting jobs in places like Nebraska or somewhere humid in the south writing terrible enterprise software and they complain to me how much it sucks.
Hello, friend. No but seriously, if anyone has any good advice on how to escape this, I’m listening.
This is going to be an extremely heterodox opinion. Please be charitable. As far as I know I'm the only person other than my wife with this opinion. I don't get this from anywhere. Then again, I don't read very much sociology so I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I come by these views honestly.
My wife and I are pretty traditional Catholics. That is to say... we don't use birth control. We also got married pretty young. All things considered, I imagine we will have about 4 - 6 kids by the time she enters menopause. This informs my views.
Now to my points.
From a business perspective, people taking time off for their kids is disruptive to the business. Try as you may to incentivize businesses to get around this, the truth is that a worker that is present is going to be better than one who takes several weeks off every 2-3 years. Now, the typical response is that parents are more productive and dedicated as employees. That is perhaps true, but I doubt the parents of six children are any more productive or dedicated than the parents of one or two.
In order for a good fertility rate, you need most couples to have 2 or 3 kids, and some to have 4 or more kids, to account for those who do not marry or cannot have kids or cannot have enough to replace themselves.
If parents can potentially take up to a year off (as they can in Canada for example), which is incredibly disruptive to business, then companies are not going to want to hire them. This is not going to take the form of explicit 'no parents allowed'. But rather, all incentives ultimately 'leak' -- incentives are a leaky abstraction.
At some point the additional loyalty and hard work one gets from parents is going to be balanced off by the risk that you may have to give them one year off. Companies do not need to explicitly fire parents for this to shake out in the market. Parents are going to internally police themselves as well. Due to how much of a benefit being able to take a full year off is, parents are going to succumb to the natural social pressure of not demanding too much of society. If every kid is an excuse to take a year off, it's not long before parents with lots of kids are seen as welfare queens. We already see this in places like France, where President Macron has made remarks about how ambitious women don't have lots of children.
This also leads to an incentive to not have kids because those that put in that extra year that a parent may take off accelerate their promotions at a faster speed. Thus, kids grow up seeing that the childless are the most successful and then want to emulate that path.
I feel this pressure currently. With the birth of a new baby pending, and the likely addition of another child a few years after, if I were to take 12 months off as some european countries allow, I'd soon develop the reputation of that guy who takes years off at a time. Work one year, then leave the other. Already, it's common in the quiet recesses of the break room for child-free colleagues to complain about having to cover for the mom/dad having another kid. This sort of resentment will never go unheeded; the effect is just subtle. Ultimately, this will have the effect of making parents feel guilty, thus making them reconsider having a kid. I already feel guilty about taking time off for my next baby.
So, I believe these three effects -- the self-policing of parents who don't want to be seen as leeches, the natural advancement of the childless/those with fewer children over those with more, and the subliminal incentive to hire workers who are not going to take long, disruptive breaks every few years -- leads to a society in which only having some X number of children is really acceptable. In contrast, in American society, there is less incentive to be nosy in people's childbearing lives. Whether someone has six or ten, since society provides comparatively less to the kids, as long as the parents can provide for them, many people see childbearing as a personal decision. In a more collectivist society, where government does provide a lot of benefits, then having 'too many' children can become a source of social shame much in the way that the title 'welfare queen' carries a stigma of being on government benefits.
I don't believe such constraints can be overcome by more government regulation. Or if they can, I haven't seen anywhere that does so successfully. The effects are natural. Imagine if a 20 year old woman got a nice job in a Canadian company. Then at age 22, after two years of exemplary service, got married and had a baby every year until 40. This is a bit extreme, but certainly within possibility if she wanted it. Now she requests one year off each time. That woman is 'entitled' to twenty years off. Don't you think she'll face lower career prospects, less advancement, and less employment? Now, imagine she just takes every other year off or every fourth year off, etc? It seems to me these negative effects scale linearly and they do so simply because each child represents time taken out of the workforce, while your childless / less fruitful colleagues are advancing freely.
Back to my personal observations. I have a few acquaintances who are also having big families. guess what? Their paternity/maternity leaves are much shorter. They realize that if they took the full benefit, they will have less career advancement, less prestige, and reduce their chances of employment. Thus, they take less. In America, where it's normal to take a short paternity break (or maternity of only a few months), this carries little stigma, and they're just seen as hard-working. In places where most parents take many many months off, then these parents would be seen as bad parents.
Yes EU does not have more VC money or crazy startup unicorns but also it has a lot less bums dying on the street and people ruined by medical bills.
There is no need to help Elon Musk or Travis Kalanick to take chances. There is a need for average Joe to be able to say "f*k it I am quitting" so he can get something better.
That is why topic of this submission is about equalizing society.
So we want to have a society where people are not dying on the streets but maybe going to Mars will take us longer.
Just because the European system isn't perfect doesn't mean we can't learn from it or try to emulate its strengths. For too long the American approach has been "other ways aren't perfect so we'll keep doing it our way". But I think its becoming clear that "our way" does not lead to better outcomes across a wide range of metrics. Not seriously entraining some major adjustments based on these learnings is borderline insanity.
> You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances.
If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?
I don't think Europe is "worse" than the US. I think Europe is optimized for the poor whereas the US is optimized for the middle class and above. There are good arguments for both of these situations. In the US, it is widely felt that the system should serve the tax payers. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to have a lot more solidarity with the poor who, for whatever reason, don't pay significant taxes. Additionally (and controversially), I think a significant amount of the European attitude comes down to ethnic solidarity. European countries are ethnostates and the US isn't.
One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc like everyone else.
> One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc like everyone else.
Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone business both in handsets and wireless network equipment. And this wasn't just the manufacturers; texting was pretty heavy and ubiquitous in the mid 1990s while it was still a novelty for the US a decade later.
Europe was a significant player in the early PC revolution and other technologies ubiquitous today; consider, for example, that the ARM processor was developed in the UK.
There was an interesting discussion in the Economist that appeared in HN a week or so ago discussing how Europe has fallen behind economically over the last couple of decades. It's rather surprising.
Another thing is that Europe didn't have any need for Paypal and others, because we already had working national bank transfer systems and SEPA for international transfers. The only time you'd need to cash a check was when you received a payment from USA.
> Europe was a significant player in the early PC revolution and other technologies ubiquitous today; consider, for example, that the ARM processor was developed in the UK.
And Minitel.
While laughed at today, it was a demonstration that people were willing to spend money online (and a working payment system).
I don't think so; in particular I believe the strength of the European economy in the late 90s was merely hysteresis from the growth and investments of the 70s and 80s.
There is a certain structural "stiffness" which is a mix of regulation and culture but I don't believe it changed much. There was a big war in the middle of the 20th century that you might have heard of :-) and I feel like it upended things; poor countries like Sweden and Switzerland were able to spring ahead and the low energy point that the economy settled on was actually pretty solid for the second half of the 20th century: a resilient network of medium sized businesses with great socialization (the soi-disant "Mittelstand" of Germany is the most well known example). Unfortunately it didn't respond well to the global giants of the late 20th and early 21st century.
It makes me think that actually, the war had the same imposition of "stiffness" to all its biggest players. The US, Japan, the nascent EU and even the former Soviet Union all had a defined "place in the world" in the post-war order and followed more-or-less the same trajectory with their domestic economy. Gradually things started slipping, the Soviets being the obvious first to collapse, but everyone started running into some issues later in the 20th century and started kicking the can down the road to address them.
Countries outside of those great-power roles in the conflict didn't end up on the same timeline and so are landing in a different place today. Australia or Taiwan for example; both changed status and became markedly more independent.
Are 95% (to be conservative) of the tech unicorns US-based ?
At this point, you can start drawing a trend. European successes are more the exception than the rule, which is kinda irrelevant anyway as 95% of European successes will end up being merged into a US behemoth...
Europe has enormous, deep pools of capital. The culture though is to fear loss rather than fear loss of upside. Capital is deployed differently in the US and China.
And to the rest of your comment - paying in taxes and getting universal benefits benefit society as a whole, not just the poor.
I think it was finland that got rid of private schools, and all of aa sudden schools got WAY better , for everyone.
Insulating people with wealth from everyone else is an overt societal negative. People are their experiences, and if you go through life without meeting people with different experiences than you, you grow up in a bubble.
Having everyone be able to enjoy life and not having a govt bought off that laser focuses on making a small class of people even richer is their goal, not solidarity with a certain class.
Finland has good results because of the methods of teaching, not because of the ownership of the schools. We have a school on this system in my town and 2 kids in the family went there, the system is better even if the school is ... private.
> why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?
I know people who started start-ups and spun out side projects here in Europe (both the UK and the continent).
One thing I noticed was that when it came time to raise money almost of all of them ended up needing American investment. We don't have anywhere near as much VC capital here in Europe and the banks are incredibly conservative.
Plus depending on the country the taxes/fees for being self-employed or starting your own business can be incredibly punitive.
> One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation.
While we do benefit from American innovation I'd also argue it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for want of a better term - we don't grow our own huge firms like Yandex, Baidu etc. and instead just hand our cash over to American ones (Google, Facebook etc.)
> I'd also argue it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for want of a better term
I think that’s a terrible term for it unless you think that America is somehow responsible for preventing Europe from developing its own tech industries.
I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland. If you want more Finnish operating system, try Jolla. There was a lot of Finnish contribution to Series 60 too, but it's kind of awful.
> I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland.
Linus did quite a bit before the network of hackers joined in. But I don’t disagree with you. My main point is that the US, and big American tech companies don’t have a monopoly on talent.
Not monopoly, but they do pay well and let developers do things, and those two things attract talent. AFAIK it used to be really uncommon in European companies to have advanced career path for engineering, and switching to management is still kind of expected.
> it used to be really uncommon in European companies to have advanced career path for engineering, and switching to management is still kind of expected.
That matches my experience. It concurs with the statement I made elsewhere in this thread that what is holding Europe back is its business culture, not some kind of American Colonialism.
Not purposely, but the dominance of American tech does make it almost impossible for European competitors to arise. That's why the Chinese are hesitant about US tech.
> If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?
Someone told me a joke about the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. The Vasa was an ambitiously designed ship that capsized shortly after leaving the shipyard on her maiden voyage. The joke was that they build the museum to send the message that if you try to do anything ambitious, you'll fail, and they'll build a museum to your failure so others won't make the same mistake.
As a % of population, and % of military spending... does "less innovation" hold up? I assume you have some data backing that claim, would be interesting if true, and the reasons why.
Personally, I think we're going to see a change in the trend of relying on two superpowers (USA, China) for tech and innovation. For the past years, it's been increasingly obvious that the political landscape can change almost overnight.
Europe has also been lacking a proper VC scene and culture, but this seems to have changed more in the past years.
So, don't expect the next 20-30 years to be identical to the previous decades.
You think in Europe people are more free to take chances than the US? There is less of a need to take a chance so people play it safe. Why risk it all or anything when your needs are met and money gets taxed highly at the upperend.
I'm not sure you're talking about exactly the same thing this article is talking about.
Social safety nets provide basic access to essentials and (mostly) equalize access to things like healthcare, but don't really do anything to help someone go from "poor" to "middle-class", or any other trip up the social ladder.
That person needs to do something to increase their earning potential beyond what their parents had.
Is the education the new to education people on the bottom level are getting really the same?
We have heard plenty of stories of grades watered down to meet graduation targets, students being unable to get less than 50%, the proliferation of crappy for profit schools like Corinthian, and students being piped into college just to take tons of remedial courses.
You have to ask if the majority of 'educated' people actually do things of value. Perhaps we should simply follow a Lysenkoist approach of simply handing out a diploma to one and all.
Forgive me for the old man moment, but I was just musing about how little my life has changed since the 1970s. Noticeable differences: TVs have more pixels, airliners look the same but are slower, you can order manufactured goods from your house without using the mail system, improvements in medicine where they can see what they are doing (surgery),these kids music it's all noise. Digital music and arguing on a communications network have been around since the 1980s.
After all the fuss and fury, it's really all on the margin. You have to wonder what all these newly minted degree holders actually do. The growth of the FIRE industry is one answer.
A degree holder in any field in 1970 could open many doors. Today a degree by itself could land you at Burger King. You need more education to obtain less now.
It doesn't help that any student can get a loan to study whatever they want, often without any regard for future income potential.
Most STEM majors don't have problems finding jobs.
The days of an Art History degree being enough to qualify you as a "college graduate" for a 9-5 desk job in an unrelated field are certainly over.
Which makes sense, economically. More college graduates means more specialized degrees to fill niche jobs, which generally pay better. Bushiness have a better chance of getting someone who's degree matches the job position, and don't need to settle for "college graduate" in unrelated field.
The problem with this, from the angle of the employee, is that if they want to move from an HR position to something else they have to entirely retrain and acquire a new degree. Gets cost prohibitive quickly and puts even more emphasis on getting that choice right the first time.
Education is a multiplier of IQ, not an equalizer. Many people, although policymakers won't admit it, don't have the IQ to study at the high school level, for example learning algebra. Even more people don't have the IQ to study at the college level, for example studying calculus and writing a coherent, footnoted term paper. And only a small fraction of the population has the IQ to do significant research and earn a PhD. Charles Murray has discussed the IQ prerequisites of educational levels in his book Real Education.
The article says,
"In the U.S., the big achievement gaps across lines of race or social class open up very early, before kindergarten, rather than during college."
Race and class differentials on IQ tests have been well documented but are in Paul Graham's category of What You Can't Say.
In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. I've studied alongside classmates who could't spend as much time studying as me, simply because they had to support themselves with part-time or full-time work just to keep their head above water. I've met plenty of people who are more or less happy with their current job, and spend time thinking critically about their hobby or other non-academic things.
Sure, all other things held equal, maybe inherent intelligence is the limiting factor. But that's the point -- not everything else is equal. There are barriers other than IQ preventing people from achieving more, and I think we'd all be better off helping them overcome those barriers.
Besides, IQ tests are a pretty phony measure of intelligence. They're about as reliable as lie detectors.
> In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking.
I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many people out there whose brains don't have the computational power to do your job. And for a subset of those people keeping any job would be a challenge. That's not something that they control or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe they can't).
I don't think it's really about computational power -- it's about practice and experience. It's about how hard those people choose to work and what things they choose to put effort into over their lifetime. All those choices accumulate over a lifetime, to the point where I agree, yeah, it'd be really hard for someone who has worked as a nurse their entire life to suddenly start over and start writing software. Just like it would be an insurmountable task for me to start over and go into medicine, or work on a construction site.
I disagree with the idea that somehow, innate intelligence sets the bar so low. There's definitely a bar somewhere, but I'd argue that most of our jobs (even in tech) don't come anywhere close to reaching that limit.
I'd argue that most of us here are of pretty average intelligence, it's just that our life circumstances have pushed us into a role where we get to exercise our brain muscles.
One thing is that having good teachers helps immensely. For a a lot of people I meet, when they reflect on their high school math and programming classes, the story is always the same: They had a lousy teacher that had them do everything by rote memorization, without explaining the underlying principles. They got the impression that that's what the whole field is like, and that they weren't smart enough, so why even bother. Occasionally, they'll be interested in hearing me explain what I do, and their response is always the same: "Wow. I wish someone had it explained it that way to me before."
I don't think that my point is getting across because you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the people for whom the innate intelligence limit is low, by definition.
People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a mental disability. That's just under 5% of the population. Do you think those people can take your advice and just put in more effort? What about the people who score just above that threshold? Do you think they could do your job only if they had better teachers? I don't think they could.
We all have natural limitations - it's much better to recognise that some people's limitations are holding them back so much that they can't function normally in modern society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that people just need to apply themselves more.
Strictly speaking, yes, you're right that some people are mentally deficient. But no one is disagreeing with the fact that people with mental disabilities exist.
So I'm focusing instead on otherwise productive members of society who just don't happen to be scientists or engineers. Those people are definitely in a position to benefit from better educational opportunities.
My intent was to argue against what I read between the lines of the original comment I responded to -- the insidious implication that certain races or certain classes of people have innate mental deficiencies, and that we should use that observation to allocate resources in society.
Further, some technical people unfortunately have the mindset that somehow what we do is special, on a completely different level from what "normal" people do, and that "anyone who works in a non-technical position is mentally deficient". This thinking is absurd -- I've known people who sure, couldn't sit down and compose a 30-page essay, but they can strip a car down to its bare parts and reassemble it, no problem. I'd disagree with anyone who tries to say that's not real intelligence.
Maybe none of this is what you had in mind when you replied to my comment, so forgive me if I misinterpreted you. I responded in the context of the OP.
"My intent was to argue against what I read between the lines of the original comment I responded to -- the insidious implication that certain races or certain classes of people have innate mental deficiencies, and that we should use that observation to allocate resources in society."
Of course people should be judged as individuals, not members of their race or class, when applying to college etc. But differentials in IQ tests are mirrored on the SAT and ACT, on AP exams, on NAEP, and on state achievement tests. It has been shown that the SAT does not underpredict the college grades of black and Hispanic students or of lower-income students. If you evaluate all college applicants based on SAT and AP exam scores, you will end up "allocating resources" such as seats at selective colleges unevenly by demographic group, even though the process is race-blind. I think this is just, but advocates of equity do not.
> I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math.
That strikes me as an insightful point.
I'd say that the main point of math, considering how little the average person actually uses it beyond the elementary school level, is to teach people to learn and to approach problems in a different way. It has the same value as learning Latin or simple computer programming for a non-specialist.
Also, the learned helplessness applies across society. A time and place filled with the self-employed (mostly farmers) has been replaced with worker bees. For various reasons normal skills sets now lack construction, vehicle repair, clothing fabrication, food production but are big on increasingly arcane theories of software development.
It seems to me that learned helplessness is the largest single change of modern times.
> I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking
Well, hang on - there are actually learning disabled people who are incapable of learning to tie their own shoes. That's an extreme outlier, of course, but it suggests that there are two possible interpretations for "intelligence": one, that everybody has an upper cognitive limit that they'll never be able to surpass, and the mentally disabled are just struck with a very unfortunately low limit. The other is that being mentally disabled is like being crippled: you either are able to walk/run (learn) or not, and it's just a matter of how much effort you expend in improving it if you have it. Even then - we know that some people learn much faster than others, so that would define intelligence as a measure of how quickly you can absorb new concepts. You seem to be leaning toward the feel-good, but very provably wrong, "everybody is as smart as everybody else" (captured by the Facebook-popular "everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" quote falsely attributed to Einstein), but you're not doing anybody any favors suggesting that it's going to be as easy for them to learn calculus (if they can learn it all) as it was for you.
When I was a child, my parents tried very hard to teach me how to tie my shoes, but I could not figure it out. To this day, I just tie them in knots and then make loops to make it seem like I tied them properly.
I now have a PhD in mathematics and work at a top tech company.
It turns out that I have pretty severe dysgraphia (I have difficulty with cognitive tasks requiring fine motor skills). I think people only noticed because I couldn’t tie my shoes.
In these discussions, there's often conflation between absolute improvements across society and ability of society to alter the rank ordering of students (or cut variance between students). Various environmental improvements have improved the former over time; not so much the latter (assuming that's the goal).
I.Q. is overrated because it lets failing educators and failing educational methodologies ("let the kids discover all the math by themselves! See, no need to teach!") off the hook. I'm willing to bet that even a random kid with no more than a room temperature I.Q. can learn all the algebra they need for school by playing some DragonBox.
I’m skeptical of tabula rasa myself (Speaking as someone on the less capable/“inferior”/low IQ side of the curve) but if true this will have to be remedied with a a robust safety net, right? Somehow Murray doesn’t seem to agree - as a set of policy prescriptions, it feels to me that the message is people like me should just starve.
I struggle to believe that intelligence is fundamentally limited, but I often wonder if the child brain is super susceptible to negative effects based on their environment. Anecdotally, if your parents did not do well in school, and you were born into relative poverty, chances are you aren't going to be an Oxford professor. But if your parents are well educated professionals, it's more likely you're going to follow in their footsteps.
I think education is the great equaliser, but it needs to be nourished early and often or you quickly lose out.
No it's not.
Quality education has always been for the rich and continues to be.
Not to be dramatic but meritocracy feels like a lie at this point.
I got accepted to a T30 uni, but surprise surprise, there's no way I can attend it, cuz they don't give scholarships based on financial need, and the ones which do, would have me graduating into 6fig debt... Not in this economy I'm not gonna do that...
Amazing feeling to have your dreams crushed and hard work rendered useless just due to green paper
Frankly the headline is pretentious af for even asking this question
> Is education no longer “a great equalizer of the conditions of men,” ... but instead a great divider?
The article is very "feet on the earth", it reviews existing data and arguments, and generally advocates for a "no" as an answer to that question.
But what if education were a great divider? What if--like wealth--the education gap were self-reinforcing, even across generations?
To the well-educated, that seems far-fetched, but it's easy to find examples across the world where some people choose to believe or live according to X, which results in less emphasis put into "modern" education, which in turn makes it easier to keep believing in X, and so on.
On the other side, learning skills A, B and C may require a considerable investment in time and money. Right now is not that bad, but just imagine for a moment that ten or fifteen years of education were needed for job K, which pays three orders of magnitude more than the jobs that people who live according to X have access to.
Still, death would seem the perfect equalizer (not education), except if expensive life-extension is added to the mix...
I think it's cultural, but not perhaps in the way you describe.
Parents who believe in education often produce better-educated children. Reading to them when they're small, helping with homework when they need it, talking about college even when they're young, and just not letting them give up on school. I suspect that, at least to some degree, that is transmissable - that is, it tends to produce children who, when they are adults, will value education for their children.
Has education ever been ? Can it ever be ? I'm not sure it makes sense to hope that anything could prevent offspring to be more similar (and have more similar lives) to their parents that to random member of their species.
Gregory Clark is very sobering in this regard :
>>ongoing debate over what kind of investments in human capital
If we start by adopting the "human capital" frame, we've already biased the discussion. The premise of this frame is that earnings are all to be understood as returns on capital. Earnings that are not returns capital are evidence if some sort of dark capital.
A related frame is a supply/demand understanding of executive pay, or lawyer salaries... it's hard to square observations with theory, resulting in some pretty weird conclusions.
If we want to explore new ideas, imo, it's best to avoid rhetorical or theoretical frames that yielded the old ones.
This article is a perfect case in point. Models of parenting "types" as causal to earnings. What bollocks.
In public education, it's no longer 'equal opportunity', the no-child-left-behind has evolved into 'equity result', i.e. the ISD and teachers are rated based on how all students' scores are the same.
in high schools I know ,the tests are designed so easy that many can score 90+, so you see the whole class are all squeezed into the 90~100 range, everyone is happy and feeling justice and fairness, except that they will fail in college so we will need increase H1B
cap more.
these I feel are not good for the future of the country, good intentions do not necessarily mean good result, quite the opposite.
Sorry, education is very important. But more important is who you know ... however that came to be. Might be family, chance, lucky, fortune. But it's true. I hate that it's true, but it is true. Hence, education is not the great equalizer, it is the mildly helpful stabiliser.
Don't believe me? Look around ... many good examples of educated people making it, but many more people of educated people who knew "someone" making it. Worse, many uneducated people matching or exceeding that performance.
It's harder to affect directly, but I think parenting is key for producing better educational outcomes - the parts about parenting style were pretty cool to see codified.
Briefly: many educational institutions were not designed to increase equality, but to protect professions by acting as gatekeepers through a process of cartelization.
Going to school in state is still cheap for most Americans. UCLA is 13k a year in state, CSULA is 6k a year in state. USC gives you a full ride if your household makes below a certain amount. It's no small chunk of change but its possible to put a dent in it if you work long hours in the summers between classes, and have roommates or live with family.
Kid one goes to college, graduates with a degree in musical theater, has a $120k debt and gets a $50k first job in marketing. Kid two does two years an a plumbing apprentice. She's been making $45k per year, has no debt and just got her license... And is now making $90k.
Student loans are a big problem but it's not because trade jobs exist. It's because the federal government subsidizes tuition without bothering to pass any laws to cap it. Conveniently lobbied for in turn by public universities, all paid for with the public's money, turning around and selling patents to capitalists and reselling the stadium to the public. And making off like bandits.
And don't kid yourself, any given city where a marketer makes $50k, even before commissions, will not be seeing plumbers make $90k.
> And don't kid yourself, any given city where a marketer makes $50k, even before commissions, will not be seeing plumbers make $90k.
Well... about that... Case in point: Indianapolis, In. Average marketing job pay: $55k. Average Plumber $78K (as of 2020). Ok, it's not $90K, but that is the average. It's similar in other cities.
Not if it puts you in 20-150k of debt you can't drop in even in bankruptcy. Those with the means move on with an education and connections while others may not even be able to afford the maintenance on a car.
For Austria it has been an equalizer in the 1970 to the 1990 when Socialist parties guaranteed free quality education for everyone and parental leave (for woman back then) of more than a year.
Since then the educational system has been largely privatized, education by means of sheer oversupply completely devalued and turned into a money game. The more money you are willing to pay, the easier it will become to get a degree, mostly unaffected by the cognitive ability of the student. As this fact is increasingly tickling into society, the effect is that education is no longer an equalizer.
It is really interesting to read the comments in this thread.
From an outsider's perspective, US has been the most prosperous country in this planet. People generally have good chances to move up the class ladder. And there are a lot of active enterprises. But I had the strong feeling that this stop to be the case in recent decades.
The reason, as I see it, is the natural tendency of capitalism, people seeking to maximize their individual capital. In the past century, with the pressure of the cold war, this tendency is balanced by the government, as US needed its working class to actually make innovations and make products to gain the advantage in the competition with the Soviet Union. In fact, the working class got their best treatment during the cold war, and then it worsens in recent decades.
Now with the Soviet Union dead, and China is still too young to be an actual competitor. There is no obstacle for the capitalists to play their games. It should be evident for most Americans that the price of properties are inflating while the increase of their salary slowed. The government also got eroded, most of the people there are either capitalists or have good relationship with them. What will be their incentives to change the rules?
This is not just the problem with US, it happens also in China. And I don't see a solution to it. The lower classes are controlled tightly by the media, which is controlled by the capitalists. And the middle class is thin and divided. In fact a lot of the middle class try very hard to climb the social ladder so they can be one of the upper class. They don't want the game changed, just "modified" to benefit themselves a bit.
"Schooling" is what is really meant in the article -- not true "education" of which there is little of in most compulsory schools. According to two-times NY Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, Prussian-derived compulsory schooling as practiced in the USA was primarily instituted to dumb people down and make them compliant workers, consumers, and soldiers. Gatto argues that if you give schools more money and they will only do that primary mission more effectively. Gatto calls this a "conspiracy against ourselves" where populations knowingly made a tradeoff 150 years or so ago to get the perks of cheaper mass-produced consumer goods and fearsome armies and swaddling cradle-to-grave bureaucracy -- but at a long term cost of the spirit.
See Gatto's book (one of many): "The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling"
https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...
"John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system. ... In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thought, and more easily controlled; most people involved in the system no doubt believe that they are trying their best to really teach their students. However, the system itself (which Gatto often characterizes as a complex web) ensures that its real purpose is served, despite the efforts of individual reformers within it - that true democracy is rendered unworkable even as the trappings of democracy are allegedly bolstered. Seen in this light, these institutions that produce barely literate, dependent, conformist, incomplete individuals full of emotional and psychological problems, who lack real knowledge (and whose capacity for acquiring such is deliberately weakened or eliminated), and who are just `educated' enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, are not, in fact, failing schools - on the contrary, if we are to believe Gatto's analysis, they are performing their designated function PERFECTLY. That purpose is to mold people in such a way as to make them more easily controlled by corporations and the state (a clear-cut example of how, contrary to popular myth, the interests of big business and those of big government more often than not coincide.)"
Or for a short essay on this, consider Gatto's "Seven Lesson Schoolteacher":
https://www.life-enthusiast.com/articles/children-seven-less...
"... Look again at the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance – all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. ..."
And while sometimes college can be a bit of a relief from some of the worst of this, graduate school and professional schools then brings it back with a new twist, as explained in "Disciplined Minds":
https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
There are of course some great teachers scattered about in many schools. There are students who evade some of the worst of this dumbing down by luck or skill or hobbies. There are families that homeschool in a variety of ways. There are even some schools that support alternative models. https://www.educationrevolution.org/store/findaschool/member...
But the majority of schooling for most people (at least in the USA) remains overall a dulling "equalizing" experience -- especially if you are brighter and so needed to be reduced in intensity to become a standardized product.
Education never was the "Great Equalizer". Its purpose has always been "to educate people in what they need to know."
Now, "what they need to know" differs by caste.
The high caste learn how they deserve their privileged position, how to perpetuate their position, and who are the key players.
The medium caste learn how to set up or run business and merchant operations, how to be an exec, how power works, who are the key players within their field, and how to cultivate their networks.
The low caste learn how to do the jobs they're destined for, how to take orders, how to climb the ladder (somewhat), and hopefully how to politick at work.
The bottom caste are lucky to learn anything beyond reading, writing, and a smattering of arithmetic. They might learn a few things to help them in their jobs, but there's really no point since they're easily replaced anyway.
Education follows our birth caste. That's all we're raised to realistically aspire to, and that's also all the higher castes will allow for you unless you get VERY lucky (i.e. someone wasn't paying attention), or someone throws you a bone (scholarship or the like - and even then you're limited in how far you can rise without resentful pushback). New money is always frowned upon for at least a few generations.
Most of us are in the bottom two castes. Medium is reserved for the 2% whose families are wealthy and influential enough. I doubt you know anyone in the high caste.
I somewhat agree with the sentiment although I think it's a bit pessimistic and as described holds a stronger resemblance to a YA dystopian novel than reality.
I went to a state school (i.e. public school in American terminology) in a poor area and studied hard and did well, got scholarships, went to Uni etc.
There are some problems with people not being able to afford to dedicate time to study - this can be solved by offering a maintenance allowance to all students, as I believe is done in some Nordic countries.
But the biggest issue I saw in my high school was people either giving up on education altogether, or having unrealistic expectations leading them to choose University degrees with poor job prospects.
Note, I include the trades in education as in fact they better than many University degrees when it comes to helping people improve their lot in life.
Eh, it’s pretty real, we just call it going to a top school. People like me will never achieve what the people at Ivy+ schools will, and I’ll be locked in a lower caste for good.
I thought one of the main complaints of the system is “too many ivy leaguers” (who share diff values), so why aim for the thing that we talk bad about?
What’s bad about not being part of the derided elite class?
I can totally understand wanting to reject and "smashing" the elite Ivy League.
I can't understand wanting to join them if they are so bad. It's akin to slaves wanting the right to own slaves --that's not the solution to the problem of the institution.
Citizens in a democracy need to learn to how to participate in a democracy. Citizens in a capitalist system need to learn how capitalism works. Citizens in an engineering economy need to learn engineering.
Schools are controlled primarily by state and local governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines:
Republican legislatures have shown they are quite capable of passing legislation about education that serves little purpose beyond a political agenda, as this year's crop of bills banning critical race theory shows (critical race theory being a graduate level discipline that is not taught in public secondary schools).
And bills like the voucher program you describe have been shown to have mixed results at best. If you live at the poverty line that West Virginia bill does not provide you any additional choice in your child's education, unless there are numerous private schools in West Virginia that charge $4600 or less in tuition, which I would not expect. Otherwise it's simply a transfer of funds away from public schools to middle and upper class families who were already leaning away from public education and the private (largely religious) institutions they prefer. If the intent was truly to provide school choice to all, they could end enrollment based on residence and allow low income families to choose to place their children in high performing schools in high income areas, but that kind of choice is not the intent of these programs.
1. An entrepreneurial teacher/teachers could provide a service for these suddenly flush parents at $4600 per child.
2. Most politicians, from either side are either corrupt or incompetent, so these labels don’t matter much to me. But if you actually look at the people running most say schools/admins and even large chunks of the government bureaucracy it’s people who believe in large government and like that lifestyle. This is true even in deep red areas.
Finally, the argument “more money”/resources needed to improve the bad quality is something that has been going on for 50+ years and it’s gotten worse over time. At what point do you say, “geez guess more money isn’t the answer!”
I think Thomas Sowell said once something along the lines that the black schools in DC at about late 1800s-early 1900s was OUTPERFORMING those of the white schools in the region. If one is to look at the present day schooling in the same region, those children/teens are functionally illiterate.
So what needs to be done, is to give a voucher to every parent to decide where to go. Right now the system sends MORE money to a school if it’s failing, and or they allow the failing school to survive.
> I think Thomas Sowell said once something along the lines that the black schools in DC at about late 1800s-early 1900s was OUTPERFORMING those of the white schools in the region. If one is to look at the present day schooling in the same region, those children/teens are functionally illiterate.
There's a lot of quiet stereotyping going on where people assume that blacks have always underperformed whites in schooling, economic growth, etc.
In reality, this is a recent phenomenon. Well into the 50s/early 60s, black incomes were growing much faster than whites.
> So what needs to be done, is to give a voucher to every parent to decide where to go.
So, we just say 'fuck all the kids who were born in the wrong zip code' and can't overcome the distance gate to go to a better school with the voucher?
Well seeing as how the biggest failing schools are in large metros this argument doesn’t hold much does it?
One of the biggest school system is in NYC and the average student graduating high school is reading at a 10 year old level or less.
One could also imagine some sort of large vehicle whose sole purpose is to provide rides for students to attend the schools.
Let me see if I can do some more research on such a scheme. Perhaps, one could paint them a vivid color, so that people could know they are “educational vehicles”. Maybe yellow? I think I’ve seen such a system before…
Lastly, right now you’re saying:
“Born in the wrong zip? And the school is failing? Sucks to be you! Not my problem”
Or what am I missing? At least provide the opportunity for someone rather than force them to a particular outcome
Rich elites, which almost everyone on this forum is, imagine that the poor people in the inner city who want vouchers want to send their kid to some swanky rich kid school where everyone wears a blazer.... they don't. They want to send their kids to the ordinary private schools that would exist in their communities if they were able to afford non-public education.
In general, Catholic school is per capita cheaper than public. In fact, according to https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school, $4600 would be enough to cover the average Catholic elementary school in the US as a whole.
> Otherwise it's simply a transfer of funds away from public schools to middle and upper class families who were already leaning away from public education and the private (largely religious) institutions they prefer.
I also notice you use religious as a pejorative. There is little reason to do so. Catholic schooling for example provides better outcomes for low-income minorities than public schools, including when adjusted for poverty, parental behavior, etc. Thomas Sowell goes in depth in his book "education in america".
> If the intent was truly to provide school choice to all, they could end enrollment based on residence and allow low income families to choose to place their children in high performing schools in high income areas, but that kind of choice is not the intent of these programs.
Low income families do not want to place their kids in high performing schools in high income areas. That doesn't actually work. This typically leads to ostracization of the poor kids in school and the creation of two separate tracks.
My wife and I are in the best high school in our city ... if you're white or rich. If you're black it's the worst. It's in an extremely rich area, but it also includes a predominantly black poorer inner city neighborhood.
> I also notice you use religious as a pejorative. There is little reason to do so.
While I tend to agree that Catholic schools are good at teaching science (except for reproductive science!), evangelical schools often teach against evolution, climate change, etc. A popular Christian textbook refers to the theory of evolution as “a wicked and vain philosophy.” And many of these schools accept vouchers! That means taxpayer funds set aside for education are actively being used, by religious schools, to make students dumber, in an explicit attempt at religious and political indoctrination.
People claim this with little evidence. At my conservative Catholic school we discussed contraception in great detail. More than my public school classmates. We learned about all the available options, how they worked at the chemical level, and why they were morally unacceptable. In fact, we had a whole full-semester class on this and on abortion. We learned about the various drugs used to induce abortion. The various methods of abortion. Our first sex ed curriculum was in the fourth grade. And yes, this was a very conservative catholic elementary school, with a very strict orthodox Irish nun for principal.
The real complaint here isn't that Catholic schools don't teach contraception, abortion, etc. It's that they teach that they are immoral. The morality of contraception and abortion is not a scientific argument.
Another complaint I hear about 'conservative' sex ed, is that they don't talk about sex as fun, but I literally never experienced this at my catholic school. We had our married teachers be incredibly candid about pleasure. In my all boys high school, I remember one in particular pointing out that sex without a condom felt way better. And guess what... he was right... thanks Mr Tory.
The last thing I'll say is my own experience as a newlywed. My wife when we first married had irregular cycles. She went to public school. She accepted this as normal (which it is certainly, but not the way she was having them.... 100 day long cycles followed by 20 day ones). I went to all boys Catholic school, where we learned about natural family planning. By the time we married as 21 year olds, I knew that the church taught a system of menstrual tracking that could be used to avoid or achieve pregnancy and fix cycle issues.
I encouraged us to sign up for an NFP class. My wife wanted to use the pill. I told her that based on her history of migraine, the pill may cause blood clots and lower libido (which newly wed wants that...). Anyway, she went on the pill and had all the typical reactions one would expect. She decided in frustration to take an NFP class.
Anyway, we did that, and my wife learned so much about her cycle. She said she wished she had learned it in school. Guess what? The girls at our all girl sister school did learn about it. Via NFP tracking, she learned her cycles were likely off due to her thyroid. A trip to the doctor later, she had normal cycles. Then we had a series of miscarriages, including some late ones. We visited a Catholic doctor who took her full history and looked at her menstrual charts. She immediately saw some more discrepancies that indicated some hormone things, but she also noted that her migraines could be a blood clotting problem, especially given her reaction to the pill. Anyway, some tests later, and some blood thinners and some supplemental progesterone, we had our first child after seven miscarriages. Now, after successful pregnancies, we know that it's likely a blood clotting problem. Man... if only she had learned that a bad reaction to the pill and a history of migraines is often indicative of blood clotting problems, she would have avoided all that unnecessary suffering. Thank goodness we learned about it in Catholic school.
That is to say, I credit my own Catholic high school education for being able to see what was obviously ailing my wife and she and I both wish she had had access to the same education in high school. It would have saved her a lot of unnecessary inconvenience over having an irregular cycle, and us a lot of grief over having lost those babies. Frankly, our experience of the science taught by the church, turned us from lukewarm Catholics (I had learned a lot of facts but disagreed with the church over its moral teachings) into pretty traditional ones.
> Schools are controlled primarily by state and local governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines
Fine, but the claim was about the teachers' union. In a red state, who does the teachers' union campaign for? I'd bet that there are few examples of the teachers' union campaigning for Republicans, even in a red state.
> Schools are controlled primarily by state and local governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines:
Looking at the uproar about Critical Race Theory, it appears that even the deepest red states have school hierarchies run by the blue. In addition, the Department of Education and other federal agencies are a thing.
> it appears that even the deepest red states have school hierarchies run by the blue
This is definitely not the case. Consider: unless consistently-"red" legislatures and governor's offices are putting "blue" people in charge of their educational departments, it couldn't be the case. Further, in many states, individual districts play a major role in deciding the course of education, so even if that were the case, "red" school districts would have to be electing "blue" school boards, and I can 100% confirm that, as one might expect, they do not do this, generally.
[EDIT] further—and I'm heading into speculative territory here, I admit—I'd guess that people holding school administration PhDs—so, qualified for superintendent-type roles—identify, on average, as farther right than the average of PhD holders, and probably than most individual PhD areas of study except maybe business-related ones. There are lots of very conservative school administrators out there.
I don’t buy this argument for a couple of reasons. The first is that you have to look at the percentage of candidates for the job from each tribe. Just like really blue cities are inevitably at odds with their really red tribe police officers who inevitably live in the suburbs. Similarly, public universities in red states have no choice but to hire really liberal professors because like 95% of professors vote Democrat and the remainder vote libertarian or green, etc. You could try convincing the professors to go be police officers and vice versa, but neither is actually interested in the other job.
Secondly, these sorts of policies often come from the bottom up, from students or teachers. Administrations often roll over out of self preservation or apathy.
Ah, higher ed. Yes, that may have a different dynamic. My comment was from the POV of primary and secondary education. For instance, it's definitely not the case that this:
> Secondly, these sorts of policies often come from the bottom up, from students or teachers. Administrations often roll over out of self preservation or apathy.
Is happening in any widespread or common way in k-12 school districts, with admin hired by "red" school boards elected by "red" voters capitulating to most any "blue" political inclinations of teachers. As for the students in those age ranges, for most of that span they have a strong tendency to very closely follow the political views of their parents, so that's mostly irrelevant as far as pressure goes.
>Schools are controlled primarily by state and local governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines
This isn't reality, schools are ran by school administrators and education leadership heavily skew leftist.
I'm not American, but the core flaw that I've never had explained away for me in voucher or "school choice" systems is how "bad" schools get better.
E.g., school in my district is bad. They don't have enough resources, or their teachers are bad. People begin taking their kids out of the school which means the school now has less money. Assuming they could fire teachers at will, they can't even now afford the "better" teachers who would likely cost more. They definitely can't afford more learning resources or an expansion to lower class sizes.
So how do you prevent schools either going into a vicious or virtuous cycle?
>So how do you prevent schools either going into a vicious or virtuous cycle?
I expect that you have to try it and add controls as necessary. Not only are these systems too complicated to model in any simple way, but have multiple players each with their own demands. It's a strategy problem as much as simply channeling some money.
It seems to me that the end game always becomes one of segregation of 'good' vs. 'bad' students. The teaching part isn't purely an aside, but matters less than you might think. So, you have to ask how important it is for the good to drag along the bad (or visa versa) and how detrimental it is to produce schools that are, in essence, jails.
I mean, take a look at how the non-voucher system works in SF. Lottery system and if you end up with a crappy school, you either put your kid in a private school or try and game the system to get them switched. The parents who are poor don’t have the bandwidth or knowledge to do it so they just get stuck with whatever school. So you end up with the same problem. Crappy schools have kids of parents who don’t value education or parents who don’t have an option.
At least with vouchers the parents, rich or poor have a choice where their kids go.
What exactly makes a crappy school? I went to the school dictated by my geography my whole life which online rankings don’t indicate as anything special - is this just a thinly veiled proxy for SES?
Percentage of time teachers spend on crowd control instead of teaching would be one good measurement, along with percentage of children performing at grade level.
In crappy schools, little learning occurs as the classroom resembles a zoo, and many/most students are several grade levels behind.
I went to both what people would consider "Crappy schools" and "good schools".
Crappy schools have an awful student body, many of which don't want to be there, are further behind in their learning than their grade indicates, are disruptive, and teachers have to spend large amounts of time calling security to have students removed or disciplining students. Often, the parents blame the schools and teachers for all their kids' problems.
In my experience, some of the teachers were still trying their best (usually young ones that weren't made cynical yet) but others were too burned out to care much since you only had to look around and see it was mainly hopeless.
The crappy school had fights every day in classes and in the hallways and were fairly violent places.
In the good school (last couple years of school) I wasn't sure the teachers were any more talented but the students showed up on time, listened, did their assignments, and were not violent or disruptive. Honestly, it was really strange to me the first few months and felt probably like when a prisoner is put back into society and they don't quite know how to act at school yet. Any slight I'd meet with threatening behavior to defend myself and intimidate, but I found it wasn't necessary after some time. I hated that school too but I think it was more I disliked a lot of the people there and the reason why was because I was initially resentful of their comfortable, happy life and civility, and just how functional things were. People listened to their teachers and wanted to succeed. I know that sounds crazy, but I was used to going to an insane asylum every day year after year and this was different. The friends I made at the crappy school are the best friends I've had but as the years have gone on many of them are dead from suicide or drugs or have had a really difficult go of it as adults. It all catches up.
I spent my entire school life in the public school system of a large city and I would never send my kids to those schools. It's not really that the schools that are "good or bad" per-se - it's the student body that determines that and that is largely decided by the parents and communities of those children. So much money has to be spent on security (my HS had 10 full-time staff) and discipline that there's not money for "nice things". But, the administration knows they need to hit numbers so kids are passed along if they show up and I knew more than a few kids who graduated and couldn't read past a 5th grade level.
Reading this it seems closer to peer group than school itself. I guess I’m part of the peer group that has to be avoided at all costs, to the extent of paying $30-$50k a year for private school.
So that’s the sad thing. So many of the kids did have potential and wanted to learn but the school environment was tainted with enough disruption to ruin it. Kids that could excel would be disruptive and I should know since I was one of them. It was anarchy at times and why not participate in it?
Kids are impressionable and will adapt to the culture they’re immersed in. I took on bad values because I was immersed in that. I’m only grateful afterwards I was able to figure it out. I lost a few years early on but was able to recover. I only wish I was immersed in a serious academic environment rather than prison training. My kids absolutely will not be immersed in that and I wish no parent that wants to surround their kids with likewise parents would have to settle for that. It’s why funding students and not schools is the best path. Poor, single moms would have the option of getting their kids out of these public school hell holes.
The failing schools will also get fewer students going for them. Money per student will be the same as it always was, and quite often with a better student/teacher ratio as well.
No. Schools benefit from economies of scale like almost everything else. If you have a school building designed for 2000 students and you have 600 attending, do you think it will be cheaper, the same, or more expensive per student to operate the building?
It will cost more per student, which leaves less money available for teachers so the student/teacher ratio would get worse. The facilities will not be kept up as required. Programs will be cut.
Also ignored in your analysis is that generally when school choice is available, the students most likely to leave a school are the high performers and the most likely to stay are the low performs and students with special needs, who are more expensive to educate and were previously subsidized by the high performers. If you compare the services provided to special needs students at a school in a wealthy area to the services provided to special needs students at a school in a poor area, there will be a massive difference in quality.
You don’t. You kill the school at some point. Some organizations become so dirty they cannot be cleaned. So you allow people to select into better organizations and you let these die. Then you ensure that those administrators don’t all end up together in a new school.
Schools suffer from the same Too Big To Fail. We have to let them fail and let parents have free choice.
You haven't gotten an explanation because people who advocate for "school choice" systems don't want the bad schools to get better. They just don't want their kids to interact with people who go to the bad school.
That describes why people pay for private school more than it describes why people would support vouchers. The theory is that "school choice" would mean everyone would flee the worst schools and they'd be compelled to clean up their act or dissolve.
I don't exactly see how that's similar; no one is complaining that their school district is lousy because it's overregulated, they're complaining that it's mismanaged or corrupt and that without something like vouchers, only the wealthy can opt out, and poorer kids get trapped.
Ultimately I think pure free-market school choice in practice would fail not so much because of regulatory capture or a cash-grab, but because changing schools is disruptive and won't fix the problems of students with dysfunctional home lives.
Better than the current “sunk cost mentality” of public schools where poor schools have more money thrown at them until someone finally realizes its not a money issue.
It’s literally the opposite of efficient use of funds. You want to shift more money to the better run schools not the worst run schools.
Yet magically, when the state has held a Democratic majority, the first time there's been a budget surplus since the dot-com boom.
The city is not the top level when it comes to funding, champ. It takes, literally in this case, a decade to start to undo the damage of Republican misappropriation and sabotage.
> Yet magically, when the state has held a Democratic majority, the first time there's been a budget surplus since the dot-com boom.
To be fair, that's probably as much due to a ballot measure lowering the budget threshold down from a 2/3 supermajority and thereby actually making the state governable.
OTOH, that measure was heavily pushed by the Democratic governor and legislature and opposed by Republicans, so...
In 1962. The repeal had been knocked down multiple times in proposition attempts thereafter.
Yet Republicans would campaign on preventing the repeal of such a measure and it didn't happen until Democrats had full control of the Capital again. Hmmm, curious. It's almost as if Republicans have a history of being unable or unwilling to work with others.
> oh wait, the city hasn’t had a Republican since the 70’s.
I’m pretty sure there is a word missing in this sentence that radically alters its meaning (I can think of several candidates, either before or after “Republican”, that might make it true), but SF definitely has some Republicans.
Haha no. Lots of regulations are just written in vegetable oil. The US regulated marriage between races using anti-miscegenation laws. Written in blood my ass.
There are two kinds of great fools in the world: those who say regulations are always good and those who say regulations are never good.
Alright. You rendered your entire point to "hurr, left wing bad" but with just many more words.
For anyone else, take a look at who keeps cutting funding to education and funneling funds to profit oriented companies before you let this guy play this kind of disingenuous game here.
Especially as Reason's positions often carry the Libertarian bent of "fuck you, got mine" as the motivation to further erode the equal playing field that education was supposed to be... often this is in the form of distance gating "good" schools away from the "bad" ones, and by proxy, the "bad" neighborhoods... whatever the cloak term of choice is these days, eg "underperforming", challenged, ghetto, etc...
No, they “f** you I got mine” attitude is exactly what a person like myself hates to see. It’s the same thing as FB pushing for social media/internet regulations, it makes you wonder why they are pushing for it.
When you create a department of X, the actual incentive is for that department to make things worse so they can get more funding.
The current system is not producing the equal playing field that education was supposed to be. So, you whine about those suggesting school choice, but what's your solution? Because the current system isn't working, and doesn't look like it's going to start working any time soon.
