Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
Kildall couldn't break the IBM logjam with CP/M because he couldn't call the IBM CEO directly.
Quality of life wise, what really matters is how secure you feel in regards to family life.
For example, one might likely rather be a ditch digger in Manhattan then a doctor in Brazil that has to live with the daily threat of kidnappings.
And then buy a boat.
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
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
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.
Suicide in Rural America on the rise (2019) https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/suicide-rates-a...
Drug overdose death rate 10% higher in Rural America (2019) https://www.gatewayfoundation.org/addiction-blog/rural-subst...
Why is Teen Pregnancy Higher in Rural Areas? (2016) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/teen-birth-rate-higher-r...
1-https://users.nber.org/~denardim/research/Wealthsurvey.pdf - 2https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/68507/13/Karagiannaki_Effect%20of%... 3-https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14954
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.
From my brief search (they have a LOT of publications) I couldn't find any publications from them on family wealth as a predictor.
[0]: https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1571970023782.pdf
Your therapist or coach should be talking to you about the importance of taking care of yourself and getting after your own individual goals.
Your school board and legislature should be talking about solving systemic problems.
Don’t spitefully wait for your legislature to act before you start exercising self-discipline.
Don’t get in the way of people trying to solve systemic problems because they make your self-discipline less needed in some way.
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.
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.
Mind expanding a little more on that?
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.
Of course, rich kid will not end up like poor kid, but they will be much less rich than their parents.
Most people who are not rich do con themself with that belief. Life becomes bearable only if you have a degree of delusion.
The problem is two fold: poor AND stupid people can't start businesses. Funding the schools solves half the problem.
Smart and poor people can start businesses they just need to rely on partners for funding.
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.
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.
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.
Class war is real, the rich are winning, and education is a key part of that war.
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.
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...
[1] https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...
[2] https://study.com/articles/How_Much_More_Do_College_Graduate...
[3] https://slspotlight.com/opinion/2018/03/19/high-school-dropo...
[4] http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/education-might-be-...
[5] https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2005/october/high-schoo...
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.
I mean this in good spirit, is there proof that societal classes are bound by size?
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.
"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?
1. https://gcalers.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/what-makes-eton-so-...
"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?]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy
The facebook idea came from the booklet tey give each class with a picture of the student's face and location.
https://readwrite.com/2009/05/10/mark_zuckerberg_inspiration...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
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.
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
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.
Only schools where wealthy people live get good funding, so when they concentrate where they live to one place, everywhere else suffers
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).
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!
https://www.fastcompany.com/90642878/worker-pay-went-up-just...
And that’s not even starting on lobbying and policy.
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.
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.
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.
Opportunities are correlated to how well authorities run the country.
There is some data trying to pinpoint relationships with other factors:
GDP, corruption, and religion, etc. https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22
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.
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.
Data: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universidad_de_Buenos_Aires#Es...
They overthrew a democractically elected government and installed a military dictatorship, in order to push their preferred economy
If you're going to make context less comparisons, Cuba is one of the most developped countries in Latin America.
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
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.
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.
You have to improve opportunity.
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.
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27606393
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.
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:
https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/high-school-seniors...
If this is factored out, one could see more uniform outcomes.
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.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=16288...
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2016/dads-play-key-role-in-chi...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
And what of it? There has never been a time in human history where starting position has mattered less. NONE!
Don't just take my word for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOiQgleiRtU
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!
Class still exists with its advantages, from BS (e.g. who you know) to real (e.g. security to invest in yourself long-term).
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche...
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.
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.
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 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.
[1] http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...
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.”"
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.
Edit: the fully funding was in place in 2018
https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-fundin...
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].
Yet something doesn't work.
WHY?
[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal...
[3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
How fast do you expect results?
The Washington Supreme Court decision: http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/843627.opn.pdf
"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 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.
It takes decades for any society scale effect to become evident.
This isn't that far-fetched; the country was basically founded by rich conspiracy theorist farmers that didn't want to pay taxes.
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".
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.
Schools are not underfunded in the U.S., they waste money. Big difference.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Teachers around here now make the average staring salary for a Bachelors Degree and still get the good benefits and time off.
Is that adjusted for national or local price levels?
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?
I don't understand the criteria.
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.
If what you're doing now hasn't presented an opportunity for advancing, don't keep doing the same thing and expect different results.
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.
A large number of Americans desire massive federal power.
At that point, I'm not sure what you gain by not being completely separate countries.
Hence "United States."
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.
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.
That is all there is to it.
The irony about hard work is that everyone can be a hard worker so you are more likely to end up in a buyer market if that is your selling point.
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.
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)
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.
Denmark + Norway: 22%
Sweden: 21.4%
Finland: 20%
Germany: 15%
Nederlands: 25%
France: 25%
USA: 21% (but 35% until 2017).
Birth rates are also the same: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...
> the EU is not particularly excellent at any
Odd that there are so many EU countries at the list of most happy countries when EU is not good at anything:
https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/the-10-happiest-countries...
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.
Could you expand what you mean by this? The higher birth rate in US (compared to Europe) is usually attributed to poverty and religion.
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.
Kind of a brain dump, sorry.
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.
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.
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.
And Minitel.
While laughed at today, it was a demonstration that people were willing to spend money online (and a working payment system).
There was no such thing a "European domination", it was all Nokia, and to a much lesser extend Ericsson.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What leads you to believe there is less innovation in Europe? Do you have data to back up that assertion?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work for a deep discussion on this.
https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Inju...
I think education is the great equaliser, but it needs to be nourished early and often or you quickly lose out.
20 000 people? 30% of country? 70% of country?
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...
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.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/110873/1/Working_Paper_67.pdf
EDIT: See also https://edi.opml.co.uk/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Kyrg...
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 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.
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.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-review-o...
Briefly: many educational institutions were not designed to increase equality, but to protect professions by acting as gatekeepers through a process of cartelization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kids aren’t learning valuable career skills, but merely that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
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...
Here is a conference on educational alternatives starting tomorrow: https://www.aeroconference.org/keynote-speakers-1
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.
Related on an mythical "equalizer" making people fit an arbitrary standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
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 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.
What’s bad about not being part of the derided elite class?
There is a little of the latter happening.