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A letter to my students

blogs.berkeley.edu

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Re: A letter to my students

#31

Post by [deleted] »

mkr-hn wrote: post #29
bokonist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this source of unknown reliability ( http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/California_state_spendin... ) state & local spending as a percentage of state nominal GDP went from 20% to 24% from 1992 to 2009. Don't know the numbers going back to 1960, but I'd be shocked if spending was lower then. For the change in average levels of education and knowledge, the cause seems pretty obvious to me. If you extended…

Here's an excerpt from the bio of the guy who runs the site: "Despite 35 years living in Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin." However, he does link to real government sources (near the botton), so you can…

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Re: A letter to my students

#32

Post by barrkel »

mkr-hn wrote: post #12
achompas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government revenue (usually: taxes) funds the services governments provide for its people. Example: USPS has seen slow/negative net revenue growth, so they're considering cutting Saturday service.

That much I knew. But my thinking was that the amount spent and how was a better indicator. If they bring in $5000 in revenue and buy $5000 in golden toilet seats, it's not being spent well. But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.

It's only good if the books are genuinely worth $5000. That was one of the interesting things that came up with Feynman's time vetting school books in California:

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another.

[...]

[During my time on the commission,] there were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.

Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?"

And he gave a number: It was less!

The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!

Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's cheaper?"

"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't normally use . . ." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper. The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"

That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.

Re: A letter to my students

#33

Post by jerf »

Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium): http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu...

See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.

Re: A letter to my students

#34

Post by achompas »

abcxyz wrote: post #10
achompas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.

Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.

Teaching is a weird beast. Computational techniques have improved, but we haven't improved educational techniques much beyond "smaller class sizes" and "online lectures."

We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.

Re: A letter to my students

#35

Post by reynolds »

jerf wrote: post #33

Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium): http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu... See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.

He mentions in the article that California has plenty of money but aren't spending it on education.

Re: A letter to my students

#36

Post by jerf »

patio11 wrote: post #23
pg wrote: post #4

There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower. Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflati…

Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars) 1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B) 2008-2009: $144B ($145) 2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B) Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled. You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less. I feel the urge to get ou…

Budget chart: http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu...

It's from a ca.gov domain, so I'm not sure it gets much more authoritative.

You can do your own analysis, but one snapshot would be 137B total spent in 2000-1 to 200B total spent in 2010-11. I chose to include federal funds on the grounds that for the topic in question, that would seem the relevant measure since a lot of those federal funds lately have been for public services, the topic in discussion. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl shows the inflation rate across that time frame as a 1.27 multiple, vs. a 1.46 multiple in California spending.

You can make the numbers somewhat worse by using 2009-2010's expenditures of 221B; how fair you think that is is up to the reader, I guess. Given that our author probably still thinks that's not enough, arguably that would be a more fair demonstration of what is still apparently not enough money.

Re: A letter to my students

#37

Post by _delirium »

jerf wrote: post #33

Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium): http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu... See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.

> on expenditures growing faster than inflation and faster than the growth of the economy

I can buy that they've grown faster than inflation, but have they indeed grown faster than the growth of the economy? I haven't been able to dig up good data on what CA state expenditures were as a percentage of state GDP in, say, the 1960s. (They're currently around 24% of state GDP, if you can find something to compare that to.)

Incidentally, the document you linked doesn't appear to cover most of the actual budget; it's the kind of fake official budget that's passed every year, which currently covers about 1/4 of actual spending. This site has better estimates for the past 20 years, but doesn't go back past 1992: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=19...

Re: A letter to my students

#38

Post by patio11 »

_delirium wrote: post #15
wheaties wrote: post #3

I think the author is mistaken. You see, what happened in years past is that they "took out a loan" to pay for now with the promise that they'd pay it later. However, later has come and now those that benefited the most can't understand why those that have to pay for it need to tighten their belts. None of us want to stop paying for it but we've learned what they haven't: you have to live within your means. My father…

They didn't take out a loan, though--- the generation of Californians he's talking about (pre-1970s) built a bunch of infrastructure while also balancing the state budget.

One quibble: those "balanced" budgets included pension guarantees and other contractual terms offered to state workers (1962: health insurance) which

a) cost "nothing" to just write in the paper -- quite easy to balance

b) were actuarial suicide

c) will never be repealed.

Re: A letter to my students

#40

Post by Locke1689 »

patio11 wrote: post #23
pg wrote: post #4

There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower. Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflati…

Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars) 1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B) 2008-2009: $144B ($145) 2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B) Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled. You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less. I feel the urge to get ou…

So I went ahead and did a calculation of my own: revenue by all taxes per capita in the state of California between 2005 and 1964.

All following figures are from US census data:

  Total revenue from all taxes per capita 1964: $2182.85 (helpfully provided by the 1964 census).
  Total revenue from all taxes 2005: $146,692,000,000
  Total resident population of California, 2005: 36,250,000
  Total revenue from all taxes per capita 2005: $4,046.68
1964 number is also adjusted using the CPI calculator
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