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Comment by chrisbennet | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, kids (in the US) could afford to go to state schools without racking up horrendous debts. Now, the in state tuition in my state (NH) is over $28K a year. Education was once a societal priority. Maybe we should, as a society, value educating our populace as much as say, we value imprisoning them? [1] It wouldn’t surprise me that we societally do value it but something is thwarting us from getting what we value.

[1] $30-$60K year https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-cost-of-a-nation-of-incarce...

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Hello from Amherst NH!

I think the problem is the opposite, college as presently exists is something we value far too much. Lots of people go to college and learn essentially nothing.

I'd fully support free tuition if and only if college was actually hard and rigorous. Instead for most people it's daycare and I don't think we should subsidize daycare for 18 year olds.

https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...

One of the surprising things to me is that most people do not actually pay the sticker price, many colleges have needs based financial aid that brings it down, before even talking about things like Pell grants.

From reading the headlines it's easy to think that graduating with 100k in debt is normal, but the average is "only" 37k. And the median is lower still (media loan payments at ages 20-30 are $203 vs average $351[1]).

Which basically says to me that the issue with student loans isn't so much how expensive college is in general, it's that we have a segment of the population, like the author falling into a trap where they graduate with far more debt than they should.

You're pretty spot on about your comments on state support though, FiveThirtyEight had a good piece on how tuition costs at public universities have largely been due to a decrease in government funding: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...

Coming from Australia it's also a bit odd that so many students move to go to university. Most of the people I knew at university were still living with their parents. Partly this is just the concentration of the population in a few major cities, but I think it's also the general trend of building universities close to population centers, and maybe less strong differentiation between university profile sin different regions.

[1]https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

Georgia does it right. The Zell Miller & Hope scholarship + cheap cost of living makes university incredibly affordable.

I literally made money while attending Georgia Tech for my engineering degree. 100% of my tuition was paid for by the state

Important to remember it was paid for from Georgia lotto proceeds, making it a tax on the poor to pay for middle-class education.

Disclaimer: Hope recipient

Tax, "a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.".

Nothing about the lotto is compulsory or based on income. I don't think its fair to say that its a "tax on the poor".

This scholarship has been great for the state overall and was a smart move. Georgia Tech is now a top 5 engineering school in the us, and top 10 worldwide. UGA became a highly ranked University. The tier 3 schools became tier 2, and tier 2 schools tier 1.

If it wasn't for this scholarship you'd have overall worse schools, and a brain drain on your hands.

Lotteries are marketed pretty directly to lower income folks, and you can tell it's working because they're the ones buying most of the tickets. They also spend a higher percentage of their income on it. This is just sort of empirically clear, like do you see lottery signs in upper middle class areas? Nope. You see them in the "poor" grocery stores (not Whole Foods), gas stations, and liquor stores. For maximum convenience, some check cashing/pay day loans have lottery booths too.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-is-a-tax-on-the-poor-...

> If it wasn't for this scholarship you'd have overall worse schools, and a brain drain on your hands.

I mean, if you're OK with this kind of redistribution (FWIW I am too, it makes a lot of sense) then I think we should ask the richest of us to foot it, not the poorest of us.

They're marketed at that target segment to avoid the problems that came with not providing a state-sponsored version of those services. If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people. The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways.

> If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people.

I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece. All that happened here is the state is reserving that right for itself, justifying it as taxing a vice. This is a common theme -- look at cigarettes and alcohol -- but in basically every case it's lower income people who are shelling out.

> The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways.

This is a common policy argument (see cigarettes/alcohol above or legalizing drugs), but does this even make sense? White collar crime is pretty rampant, so what if we legalize it and make an embezzling tax? Or human trafficking is a persistent scourge, what if we legalize it and tax it?

Furthermore, these vice taxes are regressive flat taxes. If we start legalizing things and replacing the criminality with a tax, really that only opens it up to people with means. It's still ruinous for lower income people to engage with it. Which is -- you probably won't be surprised to hear -- another reason the lottery preys on lower income people.

I think we should just admit that this stuff is discriminatory -- a lot on class but at least a little on race.

> I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece

No, it isn't. The odds from an individual ticket are irrelevant. Only the ratio of expected value to price matters when if you want to call it a fleece. The state lotteries offer many different variance options with Powerball being among the largest. And while the lottery is, in nearly all cases (there have been some exceptions), negative EV, it's not so much so that you'd call it fleecing.

Remember, the original lotteries were unregulated and those selling tickets would pick the winning numbers based on the numbers that gamblers had chosen to minimize the number of payouts. That was a fleece. It wasn't until they developed a system where the winning numbers were determined by the results of horse races that there was some semblance of fairness to the system, but operators still found ways to minimize winners winninga.

> I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece.

Nah. If it paid off at a billion to 1, I would buy some tickets ;-)

There's a clear difference between gambling/drinking/smoking/drug abuse and the crimes you mentioned like embezzling and human trafficking. The former are self victimizing while the latter directly victimize others. That's the rationale behind legalization and why nobody would suggest it for regular crimes. Essentially it's giving people the freedom to make their own mistakes as long as they aren't hurting anyone but themselves. Instead we tailor the laws to protect others from being hurt by collateral effects (no smoking in public buildings, no stealing for drug money, no advertising cigarettes to kids, etc) and we raise money, often to support programs to educate people about the risks of those behaviors and help those who want to recover.

From what I've seen from places that have legalized various vices, it seems to always end up doing more good than criminalization.

There's really no such thing as a victimless crime, because there's no such thing as an act that affects only the actor. Drinking alcohol has an impact on others, smoking cigarettes has an impact on others, same with gambling and so on. You can separate based on "collateral effects", but the whole thing is a continuum and we draw the lines arbitrarily.

I dislike this line of reasoning because it leads us naturally to the conclusion that vice taxes (etc.) are the best we can do because some people are very incorrigible and many people are a little incorrigible. While I think we'll never eradicate "vices", I do think most of them have root causes and the most effective thing would be to treat those. If we think Behavior X is unhealthy to the self or societally damaging, sure taxing it is a way to balance out the damage to society, but that does nothing for the person. If we spent time fixing smoking, for example, we'd save so many lives and so much money that it's kind of bewildering that we haven't done it.

I do think legalization in general is better than criminalization -- but only because the US criminal justice system is deeply harmful. It would be better if we treated the more serious users of vices instead of imprisoning or aggressively taxing them.

Ok, but who gets to decide where to draw the line between harmful behaviors and nonharmful ones. One could argue that just about everything we do has some degree of risk, some more than others. As you say it's a continuum. Should we ban unhealthy foods? Should we ban contact sports? How about extramarital sex? The values of the person you ask will dictate whether any given thing is a vice or a pastime.

What right do you have to say whether the enjoyment someone finds in a vice is offset by the damage it does to their health or finances or social life? And for any given vice, usually the ill effects are a function of how heavily one uses the vice. So does a full ban to save the few who overindulge balance against depriving the rest of the option to make small trades against their own lives for some pleasure? Should we ban alcohol to save the alcoholics at the cost of everyone else being able to unwind with a beer? We tried that and it didn't go very well.

Evidence seems to point to education and access to treatment being far more effective than bans. And it's very difficult to get any kind of long term results by involuntarily treating someone, so I'm not sure there's much to be gained by criminalization with enforced treatment instead of just punishment.

At the end, you pretty much have to let people make their own informed decisions. Anything else sounds like a step toward an authoritarian state dictating everything you do.

> Ok, but who gets to decide where to draw the line between harmful behaviors and nonharmful ones.

You're right, this is tricky. But consider China's opium epidemic in the late 19th century. A lot of legalization advocates argue that drug use is a victimless crime, but in that epidemic 13.5 million people were addicted to opium. That has a huge social cost. Or US prohibition in the early 20th century: alcohol was leading to awful domestic abuse and it caused women to be the strongest supporters of the 18th amendment.

In fact the prohibition case is interesting because I think we went about it entirely the wrong way, which was the point of my parent post. If we simply criminalize the act then we're essentially saying whomever commits the "vice" is incorrigible and has to be separated from polite society. One step better is to tax the act so society can in some ways be reimbursed for the cost of the behavior. But the best step would be to discover why so many people are abusing alcohol in the first place and solve that problem. We'll only have the justification to do that though, if we recognize that the people who fall victim to those vices deserve our support, rather than just being abandoned as morally weak or fundamentally lower than us.

The cool thing about that is then we don't need to have some weird arbitrary line between, "oh 2 drinks is OK, 4 drinks you're going to jail". And we help people who fall victim to alcoholism or whichever vice we're talking about. It's a win-win, if only we can get over our preening moralism.

But in general you're right, there's not a lot of daylight between an act and a crime because not everything we regulate has a moral underpinning. But that doesn't mean those regulations can't do good, and it certainly doesn't mean that just because we enact some regulations we're inevitably headed towards totalitarianism. That's just a slippery slope fallacy.

I think his point was the money is not being taken from them forcibly by the state, as is the case with a tax. One could rightly argue that the state should also not be in the lottery business. In this case though there is no coercion.

There are forms of coercion beyond force -- beyond the IRS garnishing your paycheck in this case.

I really think coercion discussions are interesting. You might remember when SCOTUS was debating the constitutionality of the ACA, and essentially said everything was fine except the funded Medicaid expansion. The opinion of the court was that the subsidies were too "coercive" and that no state could reasonably decline them even if they had other good reasons for doing so (whatever they might have been... let's stipulate those good reasons exist).

The reason I think coercion discussions are interesting is that they tend to reveal bias. It's fundamentally a discussion about whom you have sympathy for. If you have sympathy for lower income people who are burning their money in hopes of the slimmest chance at a better life (honestly though, more like the dopamine high of imagining a better life and escaping their stressful life for 15 seconds at a time) then you'll see the system as coercive. If you think they should wise up and not be so obviously scammed, then you'll think they get what they get.

Or in the ACA case. If you have sympathy for the states who are philosophically against the welfare state and you see the Medicare subsidies as an irresistible corrupting (politically speaking, declining Medicaid subsidies when people in your state are dying from lack of medical care is a tough sell) device, then you'll see the system as coercive.

I was a HOPE recipient at Georgia Tech. I took a random signals class from Mark Clements which had its basis in probability and statistics. He brought up the regressive nature of the lottery and the ethics of it: the expected value of these games is negative and in the case of scratch games, so negative that you can't even easily assign a dollar value to how bad it is. The state markets these games even though they aren't in citizens best interests. The state has given itself a monopoly on these games, so there is no competition to the poor payouts. If you look at who plays lottery games in Georgia, it's mostly lower class people transferring their wealth to middle and upper class families.

> I don't think its fair to say that its a "tax on the poor".

Someone smarter than me once said "the lottery is a tax on those who are bad at math."

Which has some pretty good wisdom behind it.

It can be great for the state and a "smart move" and still be exploitative.

There's a middle ground here.

I used to feel the same about the lotto being a game for "consenting adults", but it's a game that the state has a monopoly on and markets primarily to the least educated and most in need of hope. That should make recipients uncomfortable.

not every state has as an elite engineering state school like Georgia though :/

I got into GT out of state for CS but I'd end up paying like 40k/year so I decided against it.

Georgia tech didn't always use to be a top 5 engineering school.

Through cheaper (than other states) tuition and programs like the hope it rose in rankings

> Maybe we should, as a society, value educating our populace as much as say, we value imprisoning them?

Even with college as expensive as it is, there are literally an order of magnitude more college students than prisoners in the US (22m vs 2.2m). Making it cheaper would of course further alter that.

Naturally, education is important. But there's no way to hand out college educations without (1) significant changing what the average education is or (2) significant lowering the average standard of living.

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These articles are always about people who wanted to go to very expensive private schools (see item 1). There are tons of reasonably priced universities.

I went to

1. University of Florida (public school) which even without one of the easy Florida scholarships is $3200 per semester tuition.

2. Brigham Young University (religiously affiliated private school) which even without one of its academic scholarships is $2800 per semester.

Without savings, scholarships, tax credits I could literally cover one year full tuition with a 40 hr/wk $10/hr summer job.

> Now, the in state tuition in my state (NH) is over $28K a year.

https://admissions.unh.edu/tuitionfees

Looks like 18.5k$, which is still about 8.5k$ higher than most other states.

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