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Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

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Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#161

Post by studentrob »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #132
studentrob wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct You were on the right track in your first sentence. The author is not an academic publishing a paper. He's a political blogger drawing conclusions he wants from handpicked data. This post was not reviewed by anyone and should not be regarded as fact simply because some data was included. In fact, the author wa…

The author was not fired for being incorrect. He was fired for arguing on twitter in a manner that caused negative emotions about his publisher. Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack. Do you have any concrete arguments against his conclusions?

> Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack.

I did not mean to imply his firing invalidates the article. It was just an observation. You're right, his firing has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of the article, and the pseudoscience invalidates all by itself.

This article describes the concept of pseudoscience pretty well [1]

[1] https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#162

Post by panglott »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #126
sharemywin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correlation is not causation. Could another likely argument be that poverty creates more stress on a relationship and it's the other way around? poverty causes relationship problems? Also, minimum wage doesn't cover child care, so what's the point in having one partner working when it doesn't make economic sense?

That's a possible argument but it seems unlikely. If true, then a poor nation like India should have low marriage rates while a super rich one like the US should have high marriage rates. By Indian standards, everyone (including our very poor) is quite wealthy, so why do Indians do such a good job at getting and staying married while we don't? Compare also marriage rates and wealth over time - in the 50's marriage wa…

Cross-national comparison between India and the US introduces a whole bunch of unrelated variables.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#163

Post by Houshalter »

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.

The truck driver and the welder will be replaced by robots. The programmer will not.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#164

Post by morgante »

aylmao wrote: post #68
Annatar wrote: post #57

The analysis neglects one major point: a lot of people got degrees in the humanities and arts: dual majors in English literature and history, or sociology and psychology... what are you going to engineer with that? Engineering requires physics, mathematics, molecular biology, chemistry, material science, higher logic and cognitive capacity... English literature won't help too much with finding a new tensile strength…

I've always thought the smartest people study humanities, and this post just confirmed how dumb the engineering mindset can be.

The smartest people and the stupidest people study humanities.

If you're very intelligent, you can do very well with a social science or humanities degree. In fact, you will do better than with a STEM degree—the highest positions in society are dominated by people with non-STEM degrees.

On the other hand, it's very easy to end up un(der)employed if you're not particularly intelligent and got a humanities degree. Meanwhile, your equally intelligent peer who got an engineering degree is doing just fine as developer or technician.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#165

Post by Programmatic »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #110
autarch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

From the perspective of the farmer it's still worse than zero-sum because they've paid to become educated while still bringing home the same amount of income. This scenario also assumed that education brought real productivity gains vs. being a signal.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#167

Post by randomdata »

kdamken wrote: post #137
humanrebar wrote: post #117

Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty. First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much. Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and pove…

I would agree that family structure plays a huge part. Kids are expensive and take a lot of energy. As much as we as a society celebrate single moms, it's a tough gig to work full time and raise your kids alone. I don't think anyone would say it's the ideal family situation. One reason the marriage rate may be is dropping is that it's become fairly disincentivized for men. A lot of younger men (25-35) I know voice co…

> One reason the marriage rate may be is dropping is that it's become fairly disincentivized for men.

The business relationship is rather pointless, for both sexes, these days.

Marriage once existed so that, traditionally, the woman would stay at home to care for the household and children allowing the man to focus on his career. The idea being that the man would do better with help than he could all on his own, thus the woman sharing in the proceeds she helped create. This is why divorce defaults to splitting assets 50/50.

Now that men and women are much more apt to work independently – each working both in and out of the home – there is little need to solidify a legal partnership to protect the partner not collecting the income.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#168

Post by arethuza »

Houshalter wrote: post #163
Kurtz79 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The truck driver and the welder will be replaced by robots. The programmer will not.

I'm pretty sure programmers will be replaced by AIs at some point - it'll just take longer than truckers or welders.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#169

Post by vkou »

pfisch wrote: post #50
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…

What about job creators? Some people are going to create new business opportunities through education, and then they will hire more educated people to help them. It seems like you have experienced education from a bunch of non-entrepreneurial sides. Not everyone is an employee.

When are these educated job creators going to create jobs in the Rust Belt?

The people living there have been waiting for that for decades, now.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#170

Post by vkou »

pfisch wrote: post #50
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…

What about job creators? Some people are going to create new business opportunities through education, and then they will hire more educated people to help them. It seems like you have experienced education from a bunch of non-entrepreneurial sides. Not everyone is an employee.

When are these educated job creators going to create jobs in the Rust Belt?

The people living there have been waiting for that for decades, now. Giving all of them PHDs in chemistry and medicine won't do a damned thing.

Only a few industries in the US are actually short on qualified people - and they can't absorb 20 million retrained people.

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