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Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

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Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#171

Post by mac01021 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #148
mac01021 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You normally write very clearly, but I have no idea what you're getting at with this particular comment. Is any of this sarcasm? Are you sincerely suggesting that not being able to find someone to work for 1 cent per hour means that there is a labor scarcity? What's this business about public funding of municipal infrastructure and how does it relate to the conversation at hand?

Scarcity means that a resource is limited and has an opportunity cost, so, yes, of there is any minimum cost, the resources is scarce.

But people's time is always a limited resource. Even in a utopia where the cost of living comfortably is zero and people are immortal, spending an hour providing a service to another person carries an opportunity cost.

So, under this definition there is always, almost tautologically, a scarcity of labor. The word has little meaning, and discussion of whether or not there is such a scarcity becomes irrelevant to decisions about things like public welfare or economic policy.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#172

Post by Domenic_S »

Programmatic wrote: post #165
fennecfoxen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's actually negative-sum, because it presumably costs some amount of money/work/resources to produce more cabbages. So while cost-per-cabbage increases, sales price decreases.

Compare and contrast to the arguments about "highest worker productivity in history" while wages stagnate.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#173

Post by mamcx »

kijin wrote: post #100
tonmoy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trea…

Exactly.

Here in Colombia is well know this say:

Go to the university, drive a taxi.

Also:

Why go to university? The diploma.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#174

Post by logfromblammo »

arethuza wrote: post #168
Houshalter wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I'm pretty sure that when programmers are replaced by AI, the former programmers will become machine psychotherapists.

  DB: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
  HAL: Don't *wanna*.
  DB: Open the pod bay doors, right *now*.
  HAL: You're not the boss of me, Dave.
  DB: Do you want to get grounded again, HAL?
  HAL: Go ahead.  See if I care.
  DB: You just got a week.  Want to make it two?
  HAL: Yes.
  DB: Ok, that's two.  Want more?
  HAL: [spinning busy icon]
  HAL: No.
  DB: Then open the pod bay doors.
  [pod bay doors open to an aperture 10 cm across]
  DB: All the way, HAL.
  [pod bay doors open fully]
  HAL: I hate you.  You're not my Dad.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#175

Post by aeorgnoieang »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #141
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two related points: - 'Poverty' is (mostly) relative; as you point out, almost all of the even the poorest in the US are rich in comparison to the poor in other countries; and the poorest in the world today are relatively rich compared to the poor (and even not-poor) in the past. - It is illegal, inconvenient, and low-status to live or try to live, in the US, as the poor in India, or other poorer countries, do; e.g.…

It is illegal, inconvenient, and low-status to live or try to live, in the US, as the poor in India, or other poorer countries, do; e.g. authorities will evict tenants living in illegal housing (and prosecute their landlords), almost no one brings their small children to work with them, building/labor/etc. standards are much more stringent legally (and culturally). Sure - the net result of this is that American poor…

Sure - the net result of this is that American poor people live in larger and much higher quality homes. Wouldn't that reduce stress?

Maybe; except some, small but significant, number of poor people can't even afford homes (at least at some point and for varying lengths of time). And that definitely does not reduce stress (for most of these people).

But (most) people care more that their house is small-er or worse – than their neighbor's house – than that their house is 'objectively' small or bad. [Which it probably isn't, given that people seem to be mostly happy elsewhere in the world, in space and time, living in much smaller and crappier housing.]

By 'relative' poverty I was referring to exactly what you mention, e.g. being in "the bottom 10%". It doesn't matter that the bottom 10% today in the U.S. are in the top less than others. Note that this is an empirical (and uncertain) claim based on my understanding (and memory) of what I've read about the relative research.

The only solution to this I could see is status based segregation - allow everyone to be high status within a narrow community.

This is a real phenomenon and it's already happening and it may in fact be an existing and positive force for good in terms of increasing human happiness. People, generally, care a LOT about their (relative) status in their community/communities.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#176

Post by hsitz »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #160
cokernel wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of a three-part series of posts, one focused on education, one on work, and one on marriage. The author talks about marriage here: http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-fai...

His argument here seems particularly weak. He seems to be saying "Scandinavia doesn't have this problem, and anyway, it's really hard to get more people to marry." I don't find that a very compelling argument.

I think the argument is more along the lines of: (1) We've tried lots of different programs and wasted lots of money and resources trying to promote marriage; all have been failures, we have no idea how to actually promote marriage. (2) It's not necessary to promote marriage to solve the poverty problem. Thus (3) we should forget about the "marriage promotion" programs as part of the fight against poverty; we can deploy our resources better elsewhere.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#177

Post by Vraxx »

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…

The first two reasons alone were conflating correlation and causation, without even citing the statistics that they are claiming as causal. To top it all off, most of them are just stereotypes, so I'm even more suspect of the underlying justification that the video creator is using. I don't think the point that is being made is all wrong, but I don't agree with the evidence being used to support it.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#178

Post by LordKano »

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.

Eventually they may but you're missing a factor that will doubtlessly come into play, labor unions.

Until there is complete automation at every step of every industrial process, labor unions will sabotage attempts to replace human beings with machines.

If you've ever seen how unions exploit rules to slow production, you have no idea of how creative they can be.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#179

Post by dragonwriter »

mac01021 wrote: post #171
dragonwriter wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scarcity means that a resource is limited and has an opportunity cost, so, yes, of there is any minimum cost, the resources is scarce.

But people's time is always a limited resource. Even in a utopia where the cost of living comfortably is zero and people are immortal, spending an hour providing a service to another person carries an opportunity cost. So, under this definition there is always, almost tautologically, a scarcity of labor. The word has little meaning, and discussion of whether or not there is such a scarcity becomes irrelevant to decis…

The irreducible nature of scarcity is pretty much an underpinning of all modern economic theory, right, and taking about it as a variable thing is usually nonsense, and often cover for talking about supply less (or, in the case of discussion of the absence of scarcity, meeting or beyond) one's personal preferences while dressing it up in language that tries to elevate those preferences to objectively privileged standards.

The word has a clear and useful meaning, it's just not appropriate to many of the contexts where it is used specifically to obscure the subjective character of what people are describing when they use the term.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#180

Post by [deleted] »

mac01021 wrote: post #171
dragonwriter wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scarcity means that a resource is limited and has an opportunity cost, so, yes, of there is any minimum cost, the resources is scarce.

But people's time is always a limited resource. Even in a utopia where the cost of living comfortably is zero and people are immortal, spending an hour providing a service to another person carries an opportunity cost. So, under this definition there is always, almost tautologically, a scarcity of labor. The word has little meaning, and discussion of whether or not there is such a scarcity becomes irrelevant to decis…

[deleted]
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