Comment by Nrsolis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nrsolis | Hacker News Reader

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If you don't think earning a PhD substantially improves your material existence, I'd beg to differ. There are plenty of folks who don't have PhD's who would be better positioned in the job market if they had the talent and opportunity to earn one. For every student lucky enough to earn a spot doing research there are plenty that don't have the opportunity and have to go out into the real world and earn a living.

I meet plenty of PhD's in my regular practice. Not every person earns a PhD and stays in academia. PLENTY earn that degree and use it as a stepping stone to a high-paying job in the private sector.

As for oil executives: they're not going to be the biggest winners here. Shareholders likely will be. That repatriated capital is going to lead to a huge share buyback and dividends. Wanna know who's going to get a large chunk of that? PENSION FUNDS for state employees. If you think CALPERS doesn't stand to benefit from this surging stock market you're not paying attention.

I wonder if you realize how much you sound like a lobbyist? Without a tax subsidy, there is a calamity. Every time someone warns that a tax increase will affect investment or job creation or cause a shift in the deployment of capital, people in favor of said increase downplay those fears.

All the folks who said that a $15 minimum wage would kill job creation....were those folks wrong?

And here we are, hearing that the removal of a special tax treatment will massively impact graduate education. Well, maybe. Maybe not. I guess we will have to see.

So the cost to a student to receive a PhD goes up a bit. Big deal. Is that gonna kill research entirely? There is already a glut of PhDs here in the USA. Maybe a few less isn't such a bad thing.

> There are plenty of folks who don't have PhD's who would be better positioned in the job market if they had the talent and opportunity to earn one.

Cool anecdotes and all, but there's data on this question and you're wrong. PhDs do not increase lifetime earnings.

This isn't a case of dueling anecdotes. It's a normal fact we can verify with data.

> As for oil executives: they're not going to be the biggest winners here. Shareholders likely will be.

And I suppose oil executives store their fortunes in bold bars...?

> PENSION FUNDS for state employees

This is such a BS excuse for favoring capital.

It is, in fact, possible to write tax code that differentiates between the two.

The current tax bill does not, in fact, actually do so.

And worse, it even rolls back benefits that did differentiate between "filthy rich" and "working class saving for retirement"!

> I wonder if you realize how much you sound like a lobbyist?

Says the one conflating upper class investment income with pension funds while defending a policy that slashes retirement benefits and dismissing hard facts with personal anecdotes about how well-off people making 30k/yr are...

AHEM.

https://www.wes.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/blog_20140722...

PhD programs are not full of modal students; what you want to do is compare the average PhD with the average person who did not get a PhD but would've been accepted into a program. On that note, compare students' industry offers after undergraduate to their post-graduate incomes, and account for opportunity cost

Sounds like a great research project. Let me know what you find.

AHEM. As above, it takes work to be as wrong as you are, so this seems like either an amazing amount of ignorance, or deliberate deception.

1. What it shows: Students good enough to get accepted into PhD programs are good enough to get paid more in general. Good we're talking about this -- the market clearly values these people!

2. What it misses: ... But what if a PhD-capable person instead just went directly into industry? What is the opportunity cost of taking a pause of 4-7 years to do R&D for the public?

3. What economists found: By looking at students graduating from a good school and therefore PhD-capable, and then comparing the result of them doing 4-7 years of PhD vs not.. the students who took time to contribute to science lost out on a ton of money. They're quite literally donating their time to society.

Phrasing it as _subsidizing_ these people to do R&D is misleading. The reality is the government is underpaying for the public service of growing the economy, especially relative to market rates for people equally qualified to make a bunch of $$$ working on social media ads and fancy juice machines.

But that breaks the narrative. The actual studies show the salary sweet spot is somewhere between a BS and MS. That means federal institutions must _lure_ PhDs, not drive them away.

> AHEM. As above, it takes work to be as wrong as you are, so this seems like either an amazing amount of ignorance, or deliberate deception

This sort of uncharitable swiping breaks the HN guidelines. So do insinuations of astroturfing, which you did elsewhere in this thread. I realize it can be hard to restrain oneself when someone else is wrong on the internet, but please make the effort and edit such acid out of your comments if you want to keep posting here. You can always set 'delay' in your profile to give yourself time to edit before others see your comment; that's what I do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you please stop posting uncivilly to Hacker News? You've done it a lot, and it's destructive of the community. Also, please don't do flamewars here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yep nope. When you compare people qualified for entering PhD programs (e.g., CS graduates), and the outcome of joining the PhD program vs not, there is clear wage suppression. You cannot argue that the market is right to dissuade this activity, because the people who do go into PhDs are responsible for a disproportionate amount of economic advances.

If you care about economic impact, you should be increasing funding, not eating the seed corn.

And as my above post, it seems you are either unaware of what R&D does and who does it, or are effectively performing the work of a paid Russian troll.

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