Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? • Hacker News Board

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#151

Post by NotSammyHagar » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

billytetrud wrote: post #95

whimsicalism wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there is a huge problem in school funding. School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. > There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may n…

> we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. Source? I'm surprised to hear that. > The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations. I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse…

I think the solution to this is full federal funding of us public schools. Some people won't like that because they will argue we'd be pushing some federal vision of education. As a graduate of southern education, I argue we should talk about the widespread support for racist laws like Jim Crow instead of just saying slavery was bad and the civil war ended those problems.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#152

Post by GhostVII » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

eigenket wrote: post #116

taneq wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees. > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so t…

Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably…

At least in my university, the failure rate for STEM programs is much higher than non-STEM, despite having a higher entrance average requirement. So that is some evidence for those programs being more difficult.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#153

Post by insert_coin » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #94

kapuasuite wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are tradeoffs anywhere - which means we should rationally assess what we're putting into education and whether at least some of those resources can be put to better use in other ways.

Too much optimization reminds me of what happens when removing all slack from supply chains: when it fails it takes down the whole system. I'd leave some inefficiencies here and there, we're human after all. Of course, I'm not talking about gross inefficiencies. But are there any? By what measure?

There is only one that matters, the number of graduates working in a field unrelated to the degree.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#154

Post by insert_coin » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

ggggtez wrote: post #118

sokoloff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking over the list of top billionaires, well under half appear to have been passive beneficiaries of birth randomness.

Is this supposed to be reassuring? From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually the thing we want to reward in our tax code.

Aren't prosperity and wealth things we want to see? We shouldn't tax wealth at all, that is what we want, a wealthy society.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#155

Post by quartesixte » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

eunoia wrote: post #129

gknoy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you study history, philosophy, or ethics, then? Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library” Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university structure. Alternatively: everyone should read the classics.

If you are fortunate to go to a top tier university, many of the non-STEM classes will (hopefully) be taught by Professors who are active contributors to their fields, and use their lectures as a "rough draft" of a future book they will publish. Of what value being at the "cutting edge" of literary theory is up for debate, but there are some things that aren't easily available at your local public library.

Also sometimes it's just cool to have the guy who wrote the textbook be your professor.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#156

Post by quartesixte » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:24 AM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #148

dash2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I love literature and art, my bedroom is lined with poetry books in several languages, and for that very reason, I dislike much of the modern humanities, with their pious, dreary approach to these beautiful and important things.

> I dislike much of the modern humanities with their pious, dreary approach As someone who recovered from a mild case of being a STEMlord in college, grandiose claims of unearned self-importance are what turned me off from literature classes. I was always down to take a class in history, philosophy, or music if my schedule had an opening for that semester, but I took the minimum I could get away with in languages & l…

History based English departments might have been more up your alley.

Took a class on Shakespeare centered around recreating the plays as they were meant to be played, and the historical context they were played in. Fascinating stuff, and a lot less susceptible to pure rhetorical analysis nonsense.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#157

Post by billytetrud » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #151

billytetrud wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. Source? I'm surprised to hear that. > The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations. I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse…

I think the solution to this is full federal funding of us public schools. Some people won't like that because they will argue we'd be pushing some federal vision of education. As a graduate of southern education, I argue we should talk about the widespread support for racist laws like Jim Crow instead of just saying slavery was bad and the civil war ended those problems.

> full federal funding of us public schools

Why isn't state funding wide enough?

The politics around education funding are mudled because governments love to put stipulations around receiving funding, so they can control the recipients. I would agree with those who don't want the federal government to take more control over how education happens. But I could be convinced of federal funding of schools. Of course, both of these things already happen to a (large) degree.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#158

Post by ad8e » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:35 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #145

ad8e wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like imperialism a lot, from harder to softer sciences. It can represent a frustration that people are missing something very obvious, reflecting an underlying ignorance that is farcical or embarrassing. For example, Hardy the mathematician is best known not for his brilliant work in number theory or analysis, but for one paper in 1908 which taught biologists how to multiply numbers together. Ergo, we can presume t…

I thought reverb was mainly implemented with running windowed convolution, making delay line tuning not important.

Convolutional reverb has the advantage of being able to easily replicate real, recorded rooms. But all of its other properties are worse than an algorithmic reverb when both are implemented correctly.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#159

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #117

tsimionescu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not…

> People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle) What year did that right begin?

By definition, innate means that there is no beginning - it's as old as humanity itself.

Re: Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

#160

Post by v-erne » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

ChainOfFools wrote: post #123

v-erne wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe saying that our mental models are mere models and not reality would be a bit shorter, profound and usefull :)

maybe, but I try to avoid (or at least subordinate) phasing that implies a dualist distinction between the real and the mental. even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right? such contextualization does indeed impair portability...

>> even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?

That's quite materialistic take - I think the jury is still out on whether mind is inseparable from material reality (even if we treat it only as an emergent phenomena)