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Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#221

Post by mnowicki »

beerandt wrote: post #190
only_as_i_fall wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. How do you define that though? Do you consider someone working a minimum wage job full-time to be in this category? Someone making $15-20 an hour but without any real opportunity for advancement? I don't understand the criteria.

Then the do-ing in this case would be quit working the dead-end job and finding another one. If what you're doing now hasn't presented an opportunity for advancing, don't keep doing the same thing and expect different results.

Have you ever met a person who eats rice and ramen and whatnot all week so they can make it to their next paycheck(s), and eats next to nothing before pay day because they literally just don't have money to buy food to eat. You want them to quit their job(s), and what, figure out something else in ~4 days before they have 0 dollars left for food & electricity & rent & internet(if they have it at all).

I know a couple people like this, and I know there are many out there in this situation with several kids to worry about. Maybe your aware of this and were referring to people with disposable income and savings, but those people don't really need to do something else because apparently things are working out for them better than the vast majority of people. I don't want to assume too much but this comes off sounding really badly.

Never-mind the fact that these low-paying jobs exist and someone will have to do them, therefore some percentage of the population will be in this situation, often despite working several jobs and dealing with a lot more than most of us have to on top of that. I don't see how anyone can have this view without also implicitly stating that some % of the population are necessarily just not good at doing things and deserve to live through that kind of struggle because of it.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#222

Post by asoneth »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #180
asoneth wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence. But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social o…

>I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status. Are we talking status relative to others or relative to the starting position? There will always be the deadbeat child of someone wealthy who's still wealthier than you but all the "doers" I know have climbed the socioeconomic ladder at least a couple rungs in their adult lives.

The quoted statement was referring to absolute socioeconomic status.

I agree that relative movement is possible and I also know a lot of extremely hard-working people (both rich and poor) who have been successful and climbed a rung or two in their lives.

My point was more that the average wealthy person I know doesn't seem to have a particularly greater or lesser "ability to do things" compared to the poor people I know. Whereas if the "ability to do things" was really a substantial socioeconomic equalizer then I would have expected that DO-ers would be over-represented the higher up the socioeconomic ladder you climb instead of evenly distributed at each level. Perhaps it's different at the very top and the very bottom?

(As a contrast, in the military I found a positive correlation between an officer's rank and their ability to do things. Most of the colonels I worked with had an impressive intellect and drive, and even moreso with the generals I met.)

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#223

Post by bhupy »

andechs wrote: post #192
rayiner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elections? Healthcare? (Continuing to push Medicaid expansion onto states that don’t want it?) Child care? Education?

In order to send representatives to the European parliment, the EU requires that representatives be elected in fair elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect... Part of being a member state of the EU requires having access to some sort of public healthcare system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card This isn't "over reach of federal government" - it's ensuring th…

> In order to send representatives to the European parliment, the EU requires that representatives be elected in fair elections

And the US Constitution requires that its member states have a republican (small r) form of government.

> Part of being a member state of the EU requires having access to some sort of public healthcare system

First of all, that's not even true; the only requirement is that the member states accept the European Health Insurance Card regardless of how the healthcare is financed (publicly or privately). The Netherlands, for instance, gets its healthcare primarily through private health insurance. An EU-like approach to healthcare in the US would be for the Federal government to establish a common standard that can apply across disparate health insurance systems that are implemented, funded, and administered by the States, but that's not really what the D party is selling (as far as I know).

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#224

Post by sokoloff »

robocat wrote: post #204
gotoeleven wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your anecdotes not withstanding, it is a myth that most rich people inherited their wealth. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche... Maybe you don't trust this source but there are many others like it. This bizarre push to make everyone think that there's no meritocracy, which I guess goes hand in hand with the fashionableness of being a victim, is cynical poison being driven by people with rad…

Your example is like saying playing NBA basketball makes you taller. His point was that there are plenty of people that don’t become wealthy even though they work hard and have hustle. And there are plenty of wealthy people that didn’t need to work hard to get it. Looking at the self-made wealthy will select for people that “do”, but that does not imply that “do” makes you wealthy.

For any given individual "do" is almost surely better than "not do". That's the choice facing an individual as they contemplate how to live their life.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#225

Post by sokoloff »

WalterBright wrote: post #159
John23832 wrote: post #7

Two parts: First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need a…

> chronically underfunding schools In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted. There has been zero improvement in results. There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all. Edit:…

Would you expect a measurable improvement in results in 2 normal years, to say nothing of two COVID-impacted school years?

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#226

Post by vinceguidry »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #180
asoneth wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence. But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social o…

>I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status. Are we talking status relative to others or relative to the starting position? There will always be the deadbeat child of someone wealthy who's still wealthier than you but all the "doers" I know have climbed the socioeconomic ladder at least a couple rungs in their adult lives.

The real problem with this line of thinking is this conversation needs to revolve around things we can put on a political agenda, and there's no way to put "make more kids that do things" on a political agenda. We can put access to education on that agenda, and did, back in the 90s.

I don't know what the next societal band-aid will be, but it probably won't get us any closer to actual equality of opportunity. Still doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#227

Post by oriolid »

mnouquet wrote: post #173
gumby wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc like everyone else. Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone business both in handsets and wireless network equipment. And this wasn't just the manufacturers; texting was pretty heavy and ubiquitous in the mid 1990s while it was still a novelty for the US a decade later. Europe was a…

> Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone business There was no such thing a "European domination", it was all Nokia, and to a much lesser extend Ericsson.

Siemens was there too before the Nokia domination.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#228

Post by usaar333 »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #131
Bostonian wrote: post #8

Education is a multiplier of IQ, not an equalizer. Many people, although policymakers won't admit it, don't have the IQ to study at the high school level, for example learning algebra. Even more people don't have the IQ to study at the college level, for example studying calculus and writing a coherent, footnoted term paper. And only a small fraction of the population has the IQ to do significant research and earn a…

I’m skeptical of tabula rasa myself (Speaking as someone on the less capable/“inferior”/low IQ side of the curve) but if true this will have to be remedied with a a robust safety net, right? Somehow Murray doesn’t seem to agree - as a set of policy prescriptions, it feels to me that the message is people like me should just starve.

There's leftists out there who argue just that.

https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Inju...

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#229

Post by BeFlatXIII »

viscanti wrote: post #48
kungito wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so generalized no one has any agency over it except companies with enough money to push a narrative across 300 mil people. Either that or the way you think about US has to change. I find it hard to believe every state does things the same way but still you say "US" has a problem and not Georgia or Calif…

The US could create an amendment to say something like "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Which would give individual States the right to control a lot of things. Is that kind of what you're thinking?

The interstate highway system and the freedom of movement between the states greatly restricts the ability for states to have meaningfully different policies from one another. A popular policy that works for the current population of the state may become an economic disaster once residents of other states move in to join the action.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#230

Post by temp8964 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #13
temp8964 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds amazing. So the group of kids with 70% fatherless can achieve the same as the group of kids with 30% fatherless! Wow.

What does this even mean? What in-group jargon is this?

See data here: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/107-children-in-s...
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