As someone who grew up on a housing estate in the UK and frequently had free school meals and uniform grants from the state due to my father's unemployment, it definitely fixed mine.
Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
101–110 of 196 posts
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless." I think this is what psychologists call a "taboo tradeoff". Education (and life, health, freedom, etc.) is a sacred value, while money is a secular value, so it's considered taboo to trade one off against the other. ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tab…
That seems a very long-winded way of saying that people have values that are more important than financial gain. I guess I'm interpreting wrong because that is obvious and there is nothing taboo about it (cultures will be different re. taboos anyway).
Think about it in terms of opportunity cost. Money spent on one thing cannot be spent on something else. Saying "this is always more important than financial gain" in effect means "this is always more important than everything else". That's clearly a form of taboo - you're rejecting outright the idea of trade-offs between competing values.
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#103I disagree with this article. Education can fix poverty, but only if that education is responsible. Meaning: avoiding for-profit colleges and getting a degree in something competitive. So much of college today is debt-loading with classes students don't need, don't want, and shouldn't have to take. So long as universities treat students as cash machines, instead of humans seeking empowerment through education, we will continue a vicious cycle of high debt, unmarketable degrees, and sustained poverty.
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#104Earlier 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.
People have no fucking clue how welding actually works here, do they...
There's a difference between slagging shit together with a MIG gun, and stick or TIG welding. Ideally, you would know all the chemistry and physics underlying what you are doing, but the reality is that most people learn rules of thumb and get on with it. Use this type of rod, and this setting on the welder, for plain steel, this combination for stainless, and this one for aluminum. Most welders, even the very good ones, frankly don't have the brainpower to handle programming - and that's okay. They make a decent living for themselves and their families. I wouldn't want to suck down that much argon and oxidized metal, but it is what it is.
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#105Just a side note: The OPM is adjusted for inflation (set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, updated annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, see: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm#official). So if wages and inflation always increase in sync then there would be no reason for the number of people living in poverty to change (even if their living standards are higher in absolute terms) - apart from changes in the income distribution of the whole population. That being said, I did initially expect changes in the distributions for poor people with respect to education (more poverty among people with HS degrees than among people with uni degrees). But now that I think about it, there's really no reason why the number of available jobs which require a certain degree should change at all - ie. more electrical engineers can only create more electronics companies (and jobs) if the market has a demand for it or otherwise will just decrease the respective median wage. It seems obvious to me now but I didn't think about it like this before...
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#106I disagree with this article. Education can fix poverty, but only if that education is responsible. Meaning: avoiding for-profit colleges and getting a degree in something competitive. So much of college today is debt-loading with classes students don't need, don't want, and shouldn't have to take. So long as universities treat students as cash machines, instead of humans seeking empowerment through education, we wil…
The first step in that is expanding which schools are included in the"for-profit" group. Very few schools are really non-profit.
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#107To me it sounds obvious, education improves your competitive position. If everyone improves their competitive position, nobody does. It is the employers who are better off, not people.
but people now live in a society which has been made better by more-educated people who have produced better products more efficiently etc.
But it will not decrease poverty. Rather, will likely increase for people who will appear to be unable to keep up. Because poverty is a relative term. You are poor vs majority of population (there is also absolute poverty, but it almost doesn't exist in developed nations including the USA, and can be only result of mental condition or heavy substance abuse).
After all, most American poor are well-off from a purely material point of view even compared to West Europeans (bigger houses, cars, etc.).
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#108Well, 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…
> the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right?
Largely, no. You just cannot do certain jobs without a high level education. Engineering, science, medicine for example.
>an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way
Yes... Including whole courses such as "women's studies/gender studies", anything connected with religious studies, much of B. Arts etc.
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#109At high schools with high poverty populations (say, large free lunch numbers), there has in the past twenty years been a big push to increase graduation numbers.
Now, you can increase graduation rates in two ways (or a combination). Both involve the students who used to flunk out. (1) You can have them learn more, provide them with help so they don't need that job to eat, etc. (2) you can make up ways for them to get high school credit for doing what they would have done had they simply left.
All too often, what happens is (1). After all, people respond to rewards and administrators are rewarded for higher grad numbers. But the net-knowledge is not very much increased by (1).
Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a commonly accepted conclusion that education increases income primarily through competitive advantage (i.e. it's a zero sum game). Take, for example, being educated on home farming methods to grow 200 cabbages a year instead of 100. In this case your income grows directly as a result of your education. Now yes there are some cases that may be signaling, but I'd like to see some empirical evidence…
Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)
> doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)
No. Noooo. This stuff is all connected. At a minimum, leading to consumers of cabbage spending less money in the market for foodstuffs, instead being free to spend the money elsewhere, leading to an increase in their personal well-being and economic growth in other sectors.
(And that's assuming that there is no change in the number of entrants into the home-cabbage-farming sector.)