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A letter to my students

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Re: A letter to my students

#111

Post by kds »

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…

Not just less or more inflation-adjusted revenues and their spending as absolute sums - the per-capita values impacted by the population growth would be even more informative.

Re: A letter to my students

#113

Post by jlangenauer »

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…

I can't speak for California, but certainly here in Australia, there's been one factor increasing the cost of higher education: the rise of a managerial class within universities, who cost plenty but whose contribution to education and research is questionable.

It'd be almost impossible to quantify - and it is probably only one of several factors - but the take-home point is that increased spending isn't necessarily an indicator of better education.

Re: A letter to my students

#114

Post by vital101 »

I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so. At the very least, we might not be un-paving roads.

Re: A letter to my students

#115

Post by stevoski »

Locke1689 wrote: post #40
patio11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cap…

I think you should be looking at revenue by taxes as a % of GDP, rather than in $ terms. Real GDP per person is much higher in CA today than in 1964. Did government spending increase relative to the size of the economy? Or decrease?

Re: A letter to my students

#116

Post by moron4hire »

ohyes wrote: post #69
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…

His claim is that California is bottom of the barrel WRT the amount of money that it is reinvesting in its education system. (Hence the 'prime the pump' analogy)... This is true: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_per... To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and me…

The fundamental problem is that everyone has only ever focused on expedient solutions.

Re: A letter to my students

#117

Post by krschultz »

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…

It has not more than doubled. Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them.

Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664

$28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person.

And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not everything. The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.

It is fashionable to be anti-government, but the the numbers don't seem that bad to me when you look at the whole picture.

Re: A letter to my students

#118

Post by moron4hire »

_delirium wrote: post #18
abcxyz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.

We have no way to control for all of the variables. There are so many factors to why education costs are so inflated, the relative effect of technology on the cost is impossible to determine.

Re: A letter to my students

#119

Post by antidaily »

vital101 wrote: post #114

I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so.…

Un-paving roads? Man, that's depressing.

Re: A letter to my students

#120

Post by mkr-hn »

igravious wrote: post #101
Retric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to see how CA as fucked themselves look at spending on prisons, pensions, and personnel. Prisons ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_rate_of_inma... ) Just locking up all the bad people sounds like a great idea but it's also ridiculously expensive and provides little long term benefit. Pensions without appropriate savings repres…

Pity you had to use such crude language while making your point. I'd like to see these figures per state. And then I'd like to see the percentage of the budget over time that is allocated to locking up citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...

I think it's a safe bet that anyone who finds themselves this deep in a site like HN is either an adult, or a kid with parents who give him/her a lot of freedom.
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