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Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

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Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#91

Post by EliRivers »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #51
rickycook wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need i…

Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2. So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket. Making better workers only helps if t…

Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. This will be a very difficult change to make.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#92

Post by musha68k »

EliRivers wrote: post #91
DiabloD3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2. So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket. Making better workers only helps if t…

Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. This will be a very difficult change to make.

The problem is that neo-liberal capitalism has essentially been the only remaining big "story" over the last 30 years. First it weeded out all ideas of communism and recently it seems to slowly but steadily trump even European social capitalism, eventually it might simply eat itself and turn humanity into a literal "state-machine".

There really seems to be "no alternative" today and consequently people seem to see no way out of that box for the most part.

"The Unnecessariat" which got posted here yesterday was a very sobering read in that regard:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765581

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#93

Post by zeemonkee3 »

SFJulie wrote: post #54

Education made jobs more competitive. It was a social lift taking people up. On the other hand, by making workers more productive it reinforced the competitive advantage of being born wealthy. Too harsh competitions creates cheating. And there is no lift taking wealthy/high positioned people down when they are incompetent, especially when governments gives free money to the stock exchange (QE). Well, we are heading f…

We could only wish to be as socially mobile as the Victorians

http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract

EDIT: from the paper, it appears that mass education in England toward the end of the Victorian era only made a short-lived dent in social mobility, presumably because any temporary advantage in being more educated levelled out after a generation.

In the UK up to the 1960s-1980s, working class people could get a leg up through grammar schools and fully-funded higher education (tuition and modest living costs subsidized by the government) - if you could prove you were smart and hard-working enough, you had a chance to rise up. This ladder was successfully kicked away by comprehensive education and mass higher education (with introduction of student loans rather than free grants). The politicians who introduced these measures of course ensured their own children were privately educated.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#94

Post by dagw »

lotharbot wrote: post #44
redthrow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, Math being "pretty weak" was a bit of an overstatement. I meant that for a major that's generally considered to be hard and lead to a lucrative career (it's part of "STEM" after all), it's not that different from Pol Sci or Business (and it does worse than Accounting or Economics, both of which are non-STEM), which most people probably wouldn't expect.

I find it shocking that accounting and economics aren't considered STEM. (Though at least some subsets of economics are on the official DHS list.) I would expect (but do not have data to support) that those who do accounting/econ who take a more math-oriented approach do better than those who take a less math-oriented approach.

Anecdotally, all my friends who sprinkled a few economics and finance courses onto their math degree, are doing much better than all my friends who sprinkled a few math courses onto the economics degree.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#95

Post by accnumnplusone »

Chinjut wrote: post #11

Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because th…

Two categories of developer on my team: life-long programmers, and people with two years of dev experience since their computing degree pushing their way into management. Why did the latter bother with that degree? And why are they muddling the dev team for their negligible experience?

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#96

Post by jhbadger »

LordKano wrote: post #20
Chinjut wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(And, yes: education can of course grant skills which are genuinely required for certain jobs. This being Hacker News, I suppose we'll hear that everyone should learn to code. I'm all for everyone getting to do whatever they wish to do, and if that wish is learning to code, so be it. But I suspect, if everyone did suddenly learn to code, we'd find that coding would, with corresponding suddenness, cease to be a ticket…

I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't. People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. We have a society that ne…

I'm old enough that I was taught BASIC in middle-school circa 1981. Back then, it was taken for granted that "computer literacy" involved teaching people to code.

Am I a "professional programmer" today? Well, I do program as part of my job, but I'm technically a microbiologist/immunologist. Analyzing data by writing code is a lot more efficient and repeatable than the fiddling with spreadsheets that non-coders do.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#97

Post by tim333 »

studentrob wrote: post #74

Wow, the author was just recently fired, > On May 20, the progressive public policy organization, Demos, fired Matt Bruenig, a popular writer who covered poverty and inequality. [1] Best of luck to him and hope he finds another position. This article, though, is pseudoscience. It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end. Measuring the causes and effects of societal issues over th…

I'm not sure you can even measure the causes and effects of societal issues over the span of 25 years by looking at statistics. I mean you can see stuff change and form hypotheses but it's hard to determine very much that way.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#98

Post by nine_k »

accnumnplusone wrote: post #95
Chinjut wrote: post #11

Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because th…

Two categories of developer on my team: life-long programmers, and people with two years of dev experience since their computing degree pushing their way into management. Why did the latter bother with that degree? And why are they muddling the dev team for their negligible experience?

Do you think that IT managers should not have an idea how developers work, or about the fundamentals of programming?

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#99

Post by nekopa »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #85
dagw wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. Absolutely, and if all those people also knew how to code, they could find ways to apply the skill to their jobs to make them more efficient. People shouldn't learn to code so that they can…

Please give some example how knowledge of programming would help a truck driver, a cook or a welder to be more efficient in their jobs.

I'll give it a try:

Truck driver: Knowledge of the travelling salesman problem. Algorithms in general to find optimal routes. A little programming knowledge to help with automating their excel sheets to record expenses.

Cook: OOP as it is applied to a kitchen and its staff: are there more efficient ways to divide roles and responsibilities between different jobs in the kitchen, or are the defined roles (line cook, sous chef, etc) already at local optimum. Database programming can help with inventory management, etc...

Welder: (Disclaimer: I have absolutely zero knowledge of welding) FLow charting work process to find more efficiency. Decomposing a task to be completed into more effective sub tasks. Using Big O concepts to help with estimating how long a job will take to complete using different methods.

I think there is a lot programming can teach outside of being able to program a computer.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#100

Post by kijin »

tonmoy wrote: post #23
Chinjut wrote: post #11

Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because th…

I don't know about your developed country, but education seem to have helped the people in the poor developing country I am from. I feel as more people got educated, the more ambitious they became. Instead of doing the same things their forefathers used to do, they got a broader perspective and started venturing into more businesses. More engineers, doctors, accountants and economists have also helped. When you say t…

One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.

Exactly where that point is, seems to be a function of how many highly educated people a country can produce vs. how many jobs it can create. 100K new doctors and engineers, with 100K new jobs for them? Wonderful! But what if you only had 20K new jobs? Now you're in trouble.

Instead of treating this as a first world problem, developing countries should employ their brightest minds right now to research why this is happening in the U.S. and find a way to avoid getting stuck in the same place 20-30 years from now.

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