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Comment by b9a2cab5 | Hacker News Reader

The idea that education (in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition) is zero sum is wrong. Educational equality starts with parents giving a shit about their kids' education. Why do you think Asians overachieve on every benchmark we have? Could it possibly be because there are cultural factors that motivate parents to care very strongly about their childrens' education?

America spends the most in the world per capita on our schools and has terrible results. It's clear that tossing more money into a black hole won't fix the problem.

Anecdotally, in high school I never heard any white/Latino/black friend joke about getting yelled at if they got a B.

> unpaid internships

You might want to take a look at levels.fyi. Internship salaries are higher than a lot of full time jobs nowadays.

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...in technology. Unless we're seriously going to force everyone into tech jobs, we need an economic model that works for broadly most industries.

As an example, nearly all starting first-year internships in law are unpaid. People who don't take those will be competing with those that did do them the next year.

We don't need more art historians and event coordinators and other roles for which internships are unpaid. For every degree that actually results in positive return on investment (so, not most liberal arts degrees), internships are paid. Economics, biology, chemistry, business, statistics, law, these are all degrees that mostly have paid internships.

About the only place where you can reasonably say "we need more of these people" but is unpaid is legislative offices. And I agree, government should hire fewer but more highly paid and higher performing staff.

Tech jobs are about capturing externally-created value with network structures... if everyone had a tech job then where's the external value come from?

Asians in Asia don't outperform the US overall. We just get the most driven and smart Asians as immigrants.

Incorrect. If you take a look at the 2018 PISA rankings [1] the top is dominated by Asian and East European countries. Is it a coincidence that ex-Soviet countries which had a strong state focus on STEM are top ranked? Or that the top 10 contains basically every 1st world Asian country (Japan, South Korea, and the Asian city states)?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

> getting yelled at if they got a B

This seems like a child of recent immigrants thing more than Asian. Don’t 2nd and 3rd generation Asian perform on par with society at large?

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