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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#351

Post by adrianN »

nickpp wrote: post #349
adrianN wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't claim to be an expert in politology, but what I remember from school seems to indicate that the common ownership of the means of production is the core idea of communism. I don't understand how a stock market is antithetical to that. As I see it, common ownership of the means of production can be achieved both with and without a stock market. Could you maybe elaborate your standpoint?

A stock market allows people to acquire ownership in companies, but it will be highly unequal: some of them will have more, some will have less, some will have none. That unequal ownership will generate correspondingly unequal rewards. No communist system can allow that. Instead, the companies are uniformly state-owned and the rewards added to the state coffers where they will be pillaged and shared by the politicall…

Appropriate taxation could lower the inequality in the stock markets.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#352

Post by t-writescode »

jseban wrote: post #227
t-writescode wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their unfairness for the collective and individual betterment is arguably a good thing.

It could be and also could not be, it depends on where you draw the line. You want to incentivise strong people as much as possible (freedom), and also help weak people as much as possible (redistribution). If you tip too far over to either side, it's going to be a bad thing, and there is probably a much better way to find the sweet spot than to argue over what is "fair".

Completely agreed!

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#353

Post by pnutjam »

caddemon wrote: post #83
pnutjam wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/sat-act-standard...

Again, OP claimed that top US schools directly ask your income in applications, implying this information was used directly in admissions decisions. It is not, and any admissions tests Oxbridge uses certainly have similar issues of correlation with wealth.

Please review page, 13. http://web.mit.edu/timblack/Public/admissions/application_gu...

They claim to be "need blind", but they still ask. I'm not sure when they started that policy, but a quick search claims they are only one of 5 schools that claim to be "need blind".

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#354

Post by redis_mlc »

alephnan wrote: post #104
jdlshore wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having trouble understanding the point of your story. It sounds like you don't think very highly of this friend. Does she know you talk about her this way?

> Does she know you talk about her this way? Yes, I make it a very clear to remind people of their entitlement and privilege > It sounds like you don't think very highly of this friend. I don’t . I should have stated it was a college friend, now strangers. > I'm having trouble understanding the point of your story. Entitled “posh” people who got into these academic institutions because they’ve been told their whole l…

Why do you feel it's your job to point out people's privilege or entitlement? Who asked you to judge them?

It's none of your business.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#355

Post by simonh »

vr46 wrote: post #221
simonh wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm friends with a gang of three Oxford graduates, who met each other there in the 80s. I know them through mutual interests and like minded mutual friends. They're just part of the gang, get on with everyone regardless of background. What you do notice though, is they absolutely know how to work their asses off. They're constantly organising things, writing stuff, offering to edit and help develop other people's wor…

I hear you and it’s like this with my school alumni too, but I don’t think that the school and university can take too much credit for this, all these boys (and I went to a boys’ school, if that wasn’t clear) were very much like this at 11 or 13, education just refined and channeled them. This is why I find the self-selecting group quite odd, as membership is only one indicator of common ground.

Oh sure, to a large extent top selective schools have great results because they select the best pupils to start with. The question is are they adding the best value; are they the best environment for students that talented to go to. I would hope so, but I suppose it depends what the student wants out of it.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#356

Post by truth_ »

emmelaich wrote: post #311
pjc50 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(MA Cantab matriculated 1997) > kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all. I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :) > you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it do…

My reading of Feynman says he was thinking of physics all the time .. even when pranking, womanising and bongo playing.

Yes, I found that a weird argument as well. It is not an argument at all.

Feynman drank, played bongo, womanised, slept with some of his friends' wives.

But that does not mean everyone who does that is a great Physicist. Neither all great Physicists do these.

Taking an outlier and using him for justification of something seems obtuse.

I love Feynman, and have a picture of him on my wall. But that does not mean I idealize or even like everything he did in his life.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#357

Post by iso1631 »

jseban wrote: post #239
iso1631 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not, system 2 might have 90 people with 60k and 2 people with 10m, but there's also 8 people with less than nothing. I'm far more interested in the quality of live of the 5th, 10th and 25th percentile than the 50th, 90th and 99th.

Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work, and the less money you will have overall. If you redistribute too much, you will lower your overall productivity and not have enough money and your average will go down. If you redistribute too little, you will have a revolution. What I'm trying to say, is that everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise…

> Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work

You'll have to back that claim up

> everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist

Well I don't care about the mean - not much use if Rockerfeller takes 90% of the income of a country and the rest have to deal with the 10% even if the mean is high. I care about how much money I have (specifcally what goods and services I can get with it), and how that is affected when various things happen (someone crashes their car into me, I get a cancer diagnosis, find that the CEO has been running the company into the ground and we're all laid off)

During the Great Compression, income inequality dropped dramatically, while the median increased. This was driven by policies like strong unions, the New Deal and Price Controls, and resulted in America's golden age, where the working and middle classes were far better off in 1960 than they were in 1930.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#358

Post by iso1631 »

trasz wrote: post #344
jseban wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what has happened to all of the failed communist countries.

[citation needed]

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Austria, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Germany, hellholes like that where you can't even have the joy of going bankrupt because your kid got shot at school and you need to pay for the surgery

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#359

Post by vr46 »

simonh wrote: post #355
vr46 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you and it’s like this with my school alumni too, but I don’t think that the school and university can take too much credit for this, all these boys (and I went to a boys’ school, if that wasn’t clear) were very much like this at 11 or 13, education just refined and channeled them. This is why I find the self-selecting group quite odd, as membership is only one indicator of common ground.

Oh sure, to a large extent top selective schools have great results because they select the best pupils to start with. The question is are they adding the best value; are they the best environment for students that talented to go to. I would hope so, but I suppose it depends what the student wants out of it.

This is very much a given - start with the best and success is pretty much guaranteed. I am not sure many kids even know the difference between two schools, I certainly had no clue. Perhaps the costs these days - unaffordable - are making students more clued-up?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#360

Post by caddemon »

pnutjam wrote: post #353
caddemon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, OP claimed that top US schools directly ask your income in applications, implying this information was used directly in admissions decisions. It is not, and any admissions tests Oxbridge uses certainly have similar issues of correlation with wealth.

Please review page, 13. http://web.mit.edu/timblack/Public/admissions/application_gu... They claim to be "need blind", but they still ask. I'm not sure when they started that policy, but a quick search claims they are only one of 5 schools that claim to be "need blind".

That is need blind for internationals, which is quite rare. Need blind for domestic students is a long list which you can see here, and includes basically every school that one would call "top": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission

They ask for the information at the same time as the application so that aid packages can be offered in a timely fashion. It can take months to process everything, and students need to know the cost far enough before the decision deadline to weigh their options.

The financial aid office operates entirely separately from the admissions office at MIT, and I'm sure this is the case at other schools that claim to be need blind. Need blind has a clear definition, and there are legal implications to being a need blind school (for domestic students) in the US. It isn't just some marketing thing.

To your point about indirect economic discrimination, I'll note MIT is very clearly the best Ivy+ at admitting low income students: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... That doesn't mean there isn't still a long way to go, but MIT is for sure not using need information in their admissions decisions, and if anything actively tries to not just take a ton of elite private school kids.

Actually, the next step probably will be to stop need blind admissions so that parental income can more explicitly be used to correct for disparity in opportunity.

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