School Is to Submit
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
Schooling has many benefits to the kids as well (which the author does address), but I find it really interesting that simply the existence of schools provides a benefit to society, even when nothing is taught there.
"Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done"
Now, funding public school and paying more income tax does bring in more revenue for the government, which governments tend to like.
No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage (as such workers historically have been and inevitably will be afforded by the people who make such suggestions). Prison labor, mentally ill people, and teenage schoolkids are already used to undercut adult labor in such roles.
Hm, notice how I didn't say "low-skilled workers". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
Someone who is learning to weld at age 14 will usually not accrue even a secondary education let alone college. Sorry, just a fact of how "alternate education" programs turn out in real life. Having been to a top high school, everyone I know who went through those programs is now working at a gas station. If you think it will be different this time, please explain how.
Families should not be forced to rely on child labor as income, full stop. We tried that and it had a whole raft of negative consequences, as do the minor initiatives we've made into labor of various classes of teenage-youth-labor/mentally-disabled labor/prison labor. They are always used to undercut wages of normal-skill labor - we've tried it in the past, we're trying it in the present, and pretty soon instead of the 2-income family you are talking about the 6-income family - particularly now that labor utilization is on a permanent downward trend because of automation. The work that is available for such people tends to be of the $1/hr kind.
Not everyone is cutout to be a university graduate going on to a white-collar career. I was expelled from high school because I didn't fit the mold. Leaving school and going in to a trade was the best thing I could have done at the time.
I feel many young people are under-served by school. They don't have the drive / desire to do uni and school didn't teach them anything useful, like basic financial management, how to lay a brick, or fix a leaking tap.
On the large scale you get our current education system, where people take out big loans to get trained as a teacher and then usually burn out in 3-5 years and take a job at Starbucks.
And you especially get mentally ill people who work a register for $2 an hour and displace an able worker who needs to feed their family. There's no excuse for that, we are a modern society and we can take care of our disadvantaged as well as paying a living wage. People should not be forced to rely on the mentally ill or child laborers to make ends meet, that's simply unacceptable in modern society. We honestly don't even need every abled worker anymore, let alone the mentally disabled.
If a disabled person wants to work despite being given benefits I think they should be allowed to.
Perhaps the only reason he is having to accept a lower wage in the first place is because of his appearance. (People afraid of someone who doesn't look normal) which speaks nothing about his effectiveness or capability.
You're preventing people from joining in society, because they are different. That's some prejudice and discrimination.
We are all going to have to get used to the idea that someone who isn't in the workforce isn't "worse than useless", as you put it. When you put it in so many words, that's really a hideously offensive concept. Sometimes people drop out of college and start the next Apple or Microsoft or become the next Andy Warhol. The rates of enterpreneurship in Scandinavia are nearly an order of magnitude higher than the US. Believe it or not people actually don't want to sit idle and will start working on that one crazy idea if you let them.
We can certainly find something for disabled people to do regardless of whether it's paid. In no way should we prevent people from joining in society - but society is so much more than a paycheck. There are so many things to do in society that help our fellow citizens but don't necessarily pay a check every two weeks. But until we get something like a basic income going, we also must ensure that things like mentally-disabled and prison labor don't the labor market that's actually feeding families.
Raising the minimum wage is only going to accelerate the automation of low-skill labor.
Because in my country, vocational schools are mostly terrible. First, most employers expect you at least have a state issued "maturity diploma" that signifies that you have completed some sort of secondary education. When you finish in many of our vocational schools, you get just a vocational certificate, that most people view as a lesser to maturity diploma.
The worse thing is, that in our underfunded school system, with severe lack of good teachers, vocational schools are at the bottom of the pit. So it is highly probable, that you end up with teacher, ho doesn't know how to teach, doesn't know his trade all that well, and even if he knows, he is so under-paid he doesn't care. And you wouldn't have proper tools anyway.
Then there were few incidents where attempts to introduce already working businesses to the schooling system, to move closer to real apprentice-ships resulted in a weird system where business would take you into training for last year to work for them, but after a year they lay you off, because they know they will have steady supply of junior work-force and don't really care to have more senior workers.
That is not to say there are no good vocational schools. If you are into electrical engineering, you have lots of options where you would leave with maturity diploma as well as a certificate that lets you freelance repairing electrical equipment. And I know several chef schools that are decent, but getting enrolled can be even harder than getting to top tear high-school.
Finally, our politicians seem to swinging between two extreme positions, either (almost) everybody should end up on a university, and it doesn't really matter what they learn there, or almost nobody should even get to high-school unless they pass a rigorous, state-crafted exam and most people should do just a vocational training.
These were mostly anecdotes from Czech Republic, if anybody has counter-examples, feel free to post them :-)
They are only low-skilled laborers until they're not. That's kind of the whole point of an apprenticeship.
> Someone who is learning to weld at age 14 will usually not accrue even a secondary education let alone college
So you're telling me they'll avoid throwing upwards of $100k on a worthless diploma for a bullshit humanities degree and actually start making good money right out of the gate? Damn, I wish I had done that.
> Families should not be forced to rely on child labor as income, full stop.
At what point did I ever suggest that families should be "forced to rely on child labor". You're tilting at windmills. Every single one of your responses to this thread have been chalk full of straw men.
Just try to step outside your basic-income socialist anti-capitalism bubble for a moment and hear me out. When I talk about apprenticeships, I'm not talking about the lowest achieving students being whisked out of the system to languish in a low income field. I mean apprenticeships at high tech companies, non-profits, etc; white-collar jobs where they are trained very specific skills that transfer to any company within that given industry.
I'm basing this on the reality that most of what people learn in terms of being productive members of society happens on the job, regardless of the field. Our liberal arts experiment has failed miserably and we're facing the next big financial crisis in the form of student loan debt because of it.
Where I work we have local high school students come in for 1 week of 'work experience', but for most of them it takes a good week of training to get them up to speed on how our processes work. If they could stay for longer it would make them more useful to us and they'd also learn a lot more and have more of any idea of what it's actually like to work 38hr weeks. Maybe they could even be paid.
I believe school could do so much more.
You really see this in action when school is closed and half your coworkers are missing.
John Updike
The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.)
> When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told.
[Citation needed] and so on, and so on...
In conclusion, I think were the essay falls apart is, that it does not examine different kinds of submit. 'submit' is a very different word if the pupil submits to a teacher out of a deep desire to learn a new skill or if someone submits to a warlord. (And both are very different from submitting to a boss at a workplace.) Plus it would be nice to see a rejection of the standard story, that school mainly teaches useful skills.
What? Japan adopted representative democracy, human rights, capitalism, fractional reserve banking, the metric system, and even western attire. China is more authoritarian, but has made many of the same changes. Their economic prosperity is highly correlated with these changes.
And I'm flabbergasted that you think the USA doesn't prove his point. The original American culture was from the native Americans. Once it was replaced with British culture, the economy of north america flourished. In places where native culture was replaced with others (Spanish/native culture in Mexico, Portuguese/native culture in Brazil, etc), the people haven't had the same level of success. Similarly, Spain and Portugal haven't had the same prosperity as the UK. When it comes to per capita GDP, the effect of culture is vastly underestimated.
> [Citation needed] and so on, and so on...
He links to a citation in the sentence after your quote.[1] The paper is a study of the differences in cotton mill productivity in various countries. The author accounts for varying levels of technology, training, and other factors. He finds that the biggest factor affecting productivity is culture.
Honestly, I think you're reading this far too uncharitably. It's a blog post, not an academic paper. If the author took the time to address the objections in this thread, it would have been 10x as much work.
1. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-Is...
On the other hand, I'd like to see more in-depth investigation into cultures role into prosperity of people. For example, I would really like to see the reasons why in certain states it is culturally acceptable to accept bribes.
More likely, simple domestication. The "culture" of cities are born of the variety of euro-domestication. Horses, Sheep, etc. (https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?t=387)
My understanding of China is more limited, but it seems they will become a developed nation first before adopting things like representative democracy, human rights etc.
> He links to a citation in the sentence after your quote.[1]
Indeed I overlooked that link, so I should have chosen a different claim that needs a good argument. ( The claim that education became more rigid as a general trend in history seems dubious for example.) However, looking very quickly through the paper, it does not seem to claim that culture as most important factor is well understood, instead he seems to build an argument that local factors are very important and suggests that culture may be the most important local factor.
Except for voting and human rights, Japan adopted all the things I listed before WWII. The Meiji era was full of westernization.
I don't think people realize just how insanely dysfunctional other cultures can be. Plenty of poor countries lack concepts we consider basic. Take Haiti, for example. I'll quote a couple paragraphs from a doctor who volunteered there after the earthquake[1]:
> It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable.
> Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn't in his office.
I hope that gives an idea of the culture gains Robin Hanson is talking about. Such concepts only seem obvious to us because we were raised in a culture that already had them.
I stopped reading here. The US developed its own culture, it did not largely develop 'western' culture, though it is very influential.
I think the comeback of Japan after WW2 speaks against this. Also the US are probably a good example of copying the existing British institutions (with the exception of the crown, although you might argue that the US president is king-like).
More broadly speaking, it's probably not so much about "submitting to a rich nation", which is a pretty crazy simplification that doesn't apply to many former colonies. But I think you can find a strong correlation between former parts of the British Empire and now Commonwealth or Ex-Commonwealth and the successful implementation of institutions that give them wealth and freedom. Read "Why Nations Fail" [1] to get some examples of that, one that I remember was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botswana.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp...
Seriously? In 1945, Japan literally submitted wholesale to a rich nation (the US), allowing it to change their laws, customs, etc. It was called "unconditional surrender". General MacArthur ran the country for a few years. Japan is probably the best example of how that approach can be successful.
Indeed, the article would be better with less speculation (presented in the form of assertions) and more data collecting.
I'm sure the people of these nations would love to watch their culture be erased as they become an underclass in the territory of a powerful nation. Just ask the Native Americans!
When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told. They won’t show up for work reliably on time, have many problematic superstitions, hate direct orders, won’t accept tasks and roles that that deviate from their non-work relative status with co-workers, and won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before, especially when new ways seem harder.
"Many problematic superstitions?" What? Who is this guy even talking about? This sounds like a caricature, not an actual description of reality.
The farming mode required humans to swallow many changes that didn’t feel nice or natural to foragers. While foragers are fiercely egalitarian, farmers are dominated by kings and generals, and have unequal property and classes. Farmers work more hours at less mentally challenging tasks, and get less variety via travel. Huge new cultural pressures, such as religions with moralizing gods, were needed to turn foragers into farmers.
Again, how does he know this? Is he just making up stories, or is this based on some sort of evidence?
I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously.
It took a couple of months to get an exterminator in willing to deal with them; cats = black magic = no employees (relatively well educated and very well paid for the town) were willing to deal with them.
The fact that you're writing this post in English significantly bolsters the point the author made about acculturation. You live in a world in which the English essentially won the culture war, and imposed their culture on a vast swath of the globe. (Check out this fine map of places England has not invaded for some perspective: http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-wh...)
While it might be controversial to say that English culture generates on average more wealth than some other cultures, I think it would be reasonably easy to demonstrate that something about the English acculturation of colonies left them better off financially than other European and Asian colonizers.
And, by better off, I mean vastly better off. Compare Nigeria (British, $3k+ per person GDP) to CAR (French, $350 per person GDP). I'm not cherry picking, either. America to Mexico. We live in a world shaped by the Brits.
To your point, financial well-being isn't anything like the only measure. At least in America, part of what made growth easy was whole-sale genocide. Places with more balanced colonization plans got much more strung out violence and economic difficulty. I would argue due to culture conflicts, at least in part.
I don't think the author is disputing this in the essay, though. He is instead saying that more individualistic cultures who will not engage with Western school systems hurt their economic outcomes, for a variety of reasons.
Did you just compare an oil rich country ( Nigeria ) against a land locked central African nation to prove your point ?
I can compare India ( per capita $6,209 ) which was invaded by the British, has official Language as English and copied most of it's political system from Britain, to Mongolia ( per capita $11,024 ) which was never invaded by British ( Mongolia has a fair amount of mineral reserves ).
In the US, the European settlers killed all of the natives and took the land over for themselves. In the northern states, the economy was a mix of small farms and industrial production. In the southern states, the economy was plantation-based, built on slave labor of imported Africans. In both North and South, most of the accumulated wealth stayed local, though the two regions ended up with radically different social structures and a substantially different level of per capita wealth.
In Latin America, by contrast, there were only a few settlers who set themselves up as elite rulers of the natives, who they subjugated and robbed, but left alive (excepting the large proportion who died of disease or were killed in armed rebellions). All of the wealth created by indigenous Latin Americans was systematically stolen and given over to the colonial Spanish authorities, and much of it was shipped back to Spain.
Later on, the US was able to build a strong federal government with a diverse power base. In Mexico, by contrast, since independence the government has been relatively weak with looser control over the country, and power has been much more concentrated, with less power equality.
You can’t just chalk this up to “English” vs. “Spanish” culture. What Spain did in Latin America is much more similar to what the British did in India or southern Africa (or Ireland for that matter), with analogous though not precisely identical historical outcomes. There are lots of other geographical, logistic, geopolitical, etc. differences between all of these places, so colonial strategy alone isn’t any kind of complete model.
In the third world, they did. Those systems are what drive poverty.
Quite a few places would have been better off without the fucking over by the Europeans, and infinitely better off if given a large capital infusion without conditions (see the Marshall plan and the reconstruction of Japan).
The wholesale destruction of life and property in Europe in WW1 and WW2 had huge benefits to people living there now (due to the wholesale rebuilding of social infrastructure).
Sure about that? I wouldn't want 50 harmless cats exterminated just because they bother the uptight guests of the hotel occasionally. I live in a country were stray cats are everywhere, and they routinely come in my apartment too. No problem, I enjoy it and have had they chance to raise many kittens as well.
Full disclaimer: I took a young feral cat into my custody once (after it appeared behind my window on the second floor), but it is still worth mentioning.
This is believed by some to be one of the reasons why HIV, and rape, is so prevalent in South Africa - people with HIV will often rape virgins to cure themselves, thus also spreading the disease.
Here in Cambodia expats constantly gripe about lazy native people, considering them stupid for not wanting to embrace every facet of Western culture. A common example that I've seen repeated in books and internet forums alike is that Cambodians won't adopt Western farming practices (like showering plants in pesticides) and so they must be just backwards and ignorant. Never is it considered that the native people, who have lived here for generations, might have different priorites or know something that a rich asshole from the West, who's been here 6 months, does not.
That's probably true in many companies too. A lot of employers, especially white collar / creative employers, don't want or need total drones. But they also can't have people who are utterly unable to work towards common goals.
I remember a somewhat notorious guy at Google who got fired because he was wildly, vociferously opposed to much of what the rest of the company was doing much of the time. Can't remember his name, though.
Then again I'm mostly assuming we're talking about the same person because he was one of the only ones I would count as particularly "notorious". The fact that our recollections are so different might mean you're talking about someone from many years ago (before my tenure).
Like let me give you an example. Say a worker produces a widget. They can produce the widget in an hour or in two hours. They feel better if they produce it in two hours. Modern work practices would force you to have them produce it in one hour to lock in that profit of the additional hour of work. At the end to cost of the item would be affected by how much time is given for work. Say the cost is doubled by doing things this way. At the end the worker earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. To me that would be a better out come than goods that cost 1/2 as much. Not so for the economy.
In fact it would be very good if we could use automation to do just this. Make work more pleasurable. But the way the economy is set up, and the logic that goes with it. This is simply not going to happen.
The average worker doesn't earn the same in real terms - that's just not possible in this world.
If you have 100 workers producing 100 loaves of bread the average (real) wage is 1 loaf which costs $1. If we adopt your policy the workers produce 50 loaves. The average real wage is now only 0.5 loaves of bread (== $1) but bread costs $2.
You can't cut production without corresponding cuts in real wages.
The impact on the prices is negligible maybe even zero, the impact on profits is probably tiny if exists. The impact on the cashiers ? huge.
So why did they do it the other way ? because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom. And it definitely needs to be fixed.
That's a very strong claim, which I don't agree with at all. Why do you think this is true?
Btw, that's an interesting story about the cashiers in Israel, haven't heard of it before. Do you have a citation?
>> "because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom."
- races to the bottom - companies will do a lot to save cents per product, even sabotage quality. that's what i see in the appliance market - where everything is a piece of shit reliability wise. Same in the clothing market(shitty chemicals), ikea furniture, low quality of many software products, many electronic components(micro controllers), etc.
Exploitation and power imbalances - Besides state protection - that's relatively hard to get, for many jobs, employers have most of the power and they behave accordingly. suicides in Apple factories(again it would matter to Apple almost at all if employees had reasonable conditions) or the story from Israel is one among many.
Are you Israeli BTW?
Yes, I am Israeli.
definition of exploitation: make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).
> power imbalances
Some people have capital, most people don't. Those who don't have it are exploited as in above.
> races to the bottom
This is a bit more difficult to prove. But from Wikipedia:
"The race to the bottom is a socio-economic phrase which is used to describe government deregulation of the business environment or taxes in order to attract or retain economic activity in their jurisdictions. An outcome of globalization and free trade, the phenomenon may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production."
We call this Economic Liberalism and it is the prevailing economic theory.
There is a logic that justifies all of this as a good and positive thing from a societal or even a global development prespective. But the cost for all of these is definitely paid by the individual.
And only as long as people aren't hammered 24/7 with ads and consumption imperatives -- a lot of people believe those can be easily resisted and that they never buy anything because of these etc, but statistically most of them are overestimating themselves, they are as susceptible as anyone to consumerism persuasion which includes ads, fashion, peer pressure, status signals, being more attractive to potential partners and tons of other things besides.
Having more time to explore novel ideas will probably become more beneficial to society in the future. Or maybe not, but I like to dream.
Perhaps, but they will also be unemployed because their company's competitors would eat their lunch and put them out of business.
However, I disagree that most workers would be happier being less productive. I think people generally take pride in their work and want to be productive as they can possibly be. They understand it benefits the company, the customer, their coworkers, and ultimately themselves because the company that can deliver the best product for the best price wins.
> The proximate cause of inefficiency in at least some cases was the workers' refusal to accept more machinery, but the choices of workers correlated with the local real wage. Whatever constrained the choices of workers in cotton textiles, or whatever determined their preferences, must have applied to all of the local labor force. Unfortunately the sources on the textile industry do not allow me to go with any confidence beyond this limited ascription of responsibility to local influences.
So workers in Bombay, who were being payed less than workers in England, refused to take on more responsibilities until they received higher wages. Sounds pretty fair to me. Given the information at hand, we could posit that Western countries were more successful at organizing labor instead of assuming, like the author does, that it can be fundamentally attributed to culture, and that less-developed countries like India should just adopt Western culture. Maybe if they adopted Western culture, they could come colonize Western nations, then they'd be really successful. /s
I can't see this as anything more than some sort of strange philosophical flexing, and the author could stand to get another degree--perhaps this time in history.
[citation needed] because human nature is egalitarian isn't it.
> Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation
What you mean is, British colonialism is the only way to run a country. That sort of thinking lead to wholesale massacres, and the British loosing 4 consecutive wars in Afghanistan.
This is the sort of thinking that died out in the 1930s when the indian servants poisoned their british master's tea.
Of course you don't suggest that spain should have submitted to the moors, who were demonstrably more advanced in financial, artistic and technological means.
Progress doesn't happen because the populous reject change, its because progress only happens through chance. The industrial revolution was sustained in england because, despite massive political change, england didn't completely purge/remodel the upper-classes. There was the same level of suffering and servitude.
> Forager children aren’t told what to do; they just wander around and do what they like
[citation needed]
Have you ever fucking seen how foraging works? The child follows the parent and actively learns, or they die when they get lost. Do you think that the knowledge that some red berries are bad is instinctive?
> While human foragers are especially averse to even a hint of domination, they are also especially eager to take “orders”
Logic isn't your strong suit is it? Basically your article could be summed up as:
Humans don't like being bullied or enslaved. If you change the practices of leaders, the plebs will follow.
Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job. They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world.
One famous result from psychology is that having people focus on an extrinsic reward for doing something tends to completely overshadow the intrinsic reward involved in performance.
Contrast this with the cost of tuition and the dots naturally connect. (Of course, the opportunity cost of spending four years of your life doing something shouldn't be understated either.)
School as training for submission to authority went mainstream during the Industrial Revolution, when employers needed a large but passive workforce. But that's a longer story than I have time for now.
[1] http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-Ro...
>>But they won’t be publicly ranked and corrected nearly as often as in school, even though such things will happen far more often than their ancestors would have tolerated.
Are you kidding? Their ancesters would even be publicly killed/maimed by other foragers if they couldn't perform as expected or didn't conform to the rules of the society.
I hate when modern people try to paint very rosy pictures of the past, especially of the so called tribal (hunter-gatherer) people. Many tribal societies can be seen to be guided by a single principle "survival of the fittest" and generally the survival function is some combination of "ability to perform as expected by other tribals" and "conformity to arbitrarily chosen rules by the tribal society".
>>They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be trained by many adults, can select them to be the most prestigious adults around, and can stop training with each when they like.
Here the author ignores one important aspect :- not even the forager children can stop training with each "when they like": there are many important factors to be considered here; that if a forager kid has not yet learnt how to "earn food and other things needed to survive" he/she must continue training and it may be under those adult(s) he/she may or may not like to train under.
>>Have teachers continually give students complex assignments with new ambiguous instructions, using the excuse of helping students to learn new things.
If any human language is used to give instructions, those instructions will be ambiguous. I doubt if the foragers used any unambiguous human language.
In short, the rise and need of schools is a very important topic and this article leaves too much out. If time permits, I will write my thoughts on it.
I find his title interesting though, the problem isn't education, but schooling. Another commenter touched on this, but if you're actually interested in this subject check out Illich's book. It's a lot more radical than this hard to understand piece.
Another thing, at the end why is the concept of appearing as "prestigious forager teachers" instead of the actual "dominating bosses" listed as a benefit? Maybe I'm not reading it right.
tl;dr: read Illich.
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.h...