Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A letter to my students

blogs.berkeley.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 186 posts

Re: A letter to my students

#121

Post by eli »

ataggart wrote: post #81
eli wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the implication that the state has grown much more wasteful in its spending over the last few decades? If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)

Pension and health care outlays are not exogenous givens. The economy is not some external entity which government passively receives prices. Likewise the recession is not some external thing that can be waited-out like a hurricane. Our actions, and particularly those of that blunt club called government, entirely affects what emerges from the market making up the economy.

That's easy to say, but what specifically do you suggest they do about it? Given where we are right now (and setting aside CA's ridiculous laws regarding how they can reallocate their budget), what would you change to free up hundreds of billions of dollars without raising taxes?

Take over healthcare and beat back prices? Hey, I'm all for it, but I think that's gonna cost more in the short term.

Re: A letter to my students

#122

Post by yummyfajitas »

elai wrote: post #93
eli wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the implication that the state has grown much more wasteful in its spending over the last few decades? If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)

Repair the bugs in the american health care system? Americans spend more per capita yet get worse services.

Do you have evidence for worse services?

(E.g., something like higher post-diagnosis death rates for statistically comparable people?)

Re: A letter to my students

#123

Post by duairc »

c1sc0 wrote: post #109
igravious wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Funny, I didn't notice that bad language at all until I re-read the comment.

Wow, I had to reread it at least 5 times before I noticed it. "Fucked" for some reason is much less offensive to me than other forms like "fucking"... not like that is extremely offensive either, but "fucked" doesn't even seem at all bad.

Re: A letter to my students

#124

Post by mkr-hn »

SolarUpNote wrote: post #59
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…

Wolfram Alpha should come in handy here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=california+population

I've been running all over the place for graphs over the last week for different things, and that site never occurred to me.

Thanks for the reminder.

Re: A letter to my students

#125

Post by hammmatt »

korch wrote: post #92

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. —Socrates These kind of education articles are fucking stupid and only help fan the flames on all sides of deeply f…

I agree with you on many of your points. I would have to say I agree with you that the world will keep on improving, but to say that there aren't at least a FEW flaws with California's financial system and educational is not very conducive with the evidence.

I can't find a reasonable human being that can agree with the pension system for state employees (I am actually unsure if it applies to teachers), which has to be the biggest money whole I could ever conceive.

Also, I am not sure of the statics, but it is no secret that LA public schools are some of the worst in the country. In the intercity schools anyway. However, I do agree with you that the author doesn't prove his point of declining schools, nor does he prove that increased funding will make them better. He offers this poor anecdote that is obviously politically self-edited.

It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation. Which seems to have a strong connection a child's educational success. I don't believe the author intended to go beyond anything other than his experience with his students, which by admissions filtering are hypothetically better than the over student.

Btw, loved the Abe Simpson quote. However, this situation triggers another famous entertainment quote in my mind.

Reporter: "Mr. Norris, how does it feel to have your career not be taken seriously by a younger internet driven generation of 'joke-sters?'"

Chuck Norris: Boys will be boys.

Re: A letter to my students

#126

Post by nanospider »

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…

Looks like there's a Ycombinator startup idea in here somewhere!

Re: A letter to my students

#127

Post by mkr-hn »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #50
mkr-hn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I applaud you for making an observation which could easily fuel an ad-hominem attack on an obvious partisan, and then holding back after observing that regardless of his biases, he is just tabulating official numbers.

When I see source and unknown reliability in the same post, my instinct is to check and make sure the person who said it knows where to find the tools to make that judgment on their own.

Sometimes they end up in disagreement with me, but I always prefer informed and still wrong to uninformed and wrong[1]. :)

[1]Which is not to say these numbers are wrong or right. I'm speaking generally.

Re: A letter to my students

#128

Post by JabavuAdams »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #49
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…

In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant. Good job, you just discovered that our standardized tests scores are biased in favor of white kids.

Don't get distracted. I suspect that you would find an even stronger correlation with "home culture", but that's too hard to define and to measure.

Any ethnicity can have a scholarly culture, but for people starting out at the bottom, in a new society, it's less common.

There's also a selection bias against those who have not moved up in society. E.g. take a depressed area -- if the people with the gumption to improve their situation do so and leave, what's left? Right, concentrated fail.

Re: A letter to my students

#129

Post by vital101 »

antidaily wrote: post #119
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.

It's really depressing. I still have a hard time deciding which is worse: bad paved roads or washboarded dirt roads. Decisions decisions...

Re: A letter to my students

#130

Post by patio11 »

krschultz wrote: post #117
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…

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 every…

I did actually look at the population numbers but, inexplicably, just did a mental guesstimate rather than getting out my calculator or trusty paper. I apologize: it seems my mental guesstimate was on the wrong side of 2.
Post reply on HN