jacob wrote: ↑Thu May 24, 2018 8:27 am
The US is very individualistic---note how often the phrase "you and your family" enter everyday language---and this is why we're having this discussion in the first place. The issue is not in preventing rich parents from helping their rich children (going around and looking for "illegal tutors"). The issue is that poor children don't get help. Since culture and education (ditto health) does transfer (which the social mobility index is a finite number between 0 and 1), this mathematically creates socioeconomic strata.
very good. brute has several thoughts on this.
1.the "tribe to cover" is much smaller in Finland or Denmark than it is in the US, and it's much more homogenous. that means it's much easier to solve these problems. just like apparently global warming, brute believes these network effects to grow exponentially: it's more than 2x as difficult to maintain a property among a tribe 2x the size. US, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia.. brute would say that out of all the "bigger countries", the US and China are the only ones to have solved this, and isn't convinced the Chinese solution (overt top-down totalitarianism) is better.
being a small, homogenous country is playing on easy mode: the solutions don't need to be good to work. Finland could probably elect a horse and still guarantee good education.
the flip side is, brute isn't convinced that there is a solution for the big countries - maybe the problem is just impossible to solve, and it's more a question of slowing the decline or collapse.
maybe some dividing and conquering is in order? according to brute's theory, it would be easier to manage the 50 states individually than to manage the whole US. this is why brute supports secession and federalism (and yes, states' rights).
2.the success of a solution (like supporting poor children/banning rich children from using tutors) depends a lot on what type of game is being played - zero sum or not? unfortunately, the rules of the game aren't stated clearly anywhere, so many participants can be playing different games while still interacting with each other, often assuming the other participants to be playing in the same game.
brute's simple heuristic is:
positive-sum game => help the poor (i.e. making a bigger pie). all humans get to be winners!
zero-sum game => attempt to convert to positive-sum game, because the alternative is a race to the bottom, class warfare, fracturing of society. to win, humans have to throw other humans off the ladder.
of course it's rarely a binary thing in reality, but brute is convinced that education in the US is way too zero-sum for its own good. this is where the whole 9.9%-guilt thing comes from, and the willingness of humans to suggest banning tutors (frankly, in brute's opinion, an absurdly totalitarian idea).
so how does one transform zero-sum games into positive-sum games? brute has actually been thinking about this for years, but isn't sure he knows a general formula.
here are some ideas for education specifically:
trades
- there are many unemployed/underemployed humans, yet there are millions of job openings e.g. in skilled trades
- the gap between these 2 circles consists mainly of trade skills and geography
- trade skills are skills and require investment of time and money, but are not innately impossible for most humans (not affected much by the IQ argument)
- the geographical gap is due to humans being emotionally attached to their place of living, because of imperfect knowledge ("the same job pays 2x as much in North Dakota"), and to a degree because humans don't value money over everything else.
- the reason for the trade skill gap, in brute's opinion, is mostly cultural and imperfect knowledge (which is part of the culture). blue collar jobs have a bad image, and many humans literally don't know that their plumber makes way more than they do.
college
- there is also a large negative gap (oversupply?) between college jobs and college grads. this has led to an extreme zero-sum game, the aforementioned "requires college degree and ability to lift 25lbs" situation, where human children now go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to work as a barista.
- brute thinks that government subsidy of college has done a lot of damage here, but so has the "college for all humans!" culture. it's not that not all humans deserve college, it's that college isn't a good investment for most jobs. trade schools would serve many humans much better.
so in brute's opinion, it's largely a cultural issue plus some deregulation. brute thinks it's pretty easy to deregulate in principle, but has no idea how to change culture.
in other news, brute just realized that he likes pareto improvements. he's very opposed to banning rich parents from tutoring, but is all for helping out poor parents or children - probably because that doesn't necessarily affect any humans negatively, thus being a pareto improvement. notably, brute would include raising taxes in "hurting others", so raising taxes to help the poor is not a pareto improvement.