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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’?

#231

Post by oriolid »

gumby wrote: post #82
slibhb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances. If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe? I don't think Europe is "worse" than the US. I think Europe is optimized for the poor whereas the US is optimized for the middle class and above. There are good arguments for both of these situations. In…

> 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…

Another thing is that Europe didn't have any need for Paypal and others, because we already had working national bank transfer systems and SEPA for international transfers. The only time you'd need to cash a check was when you received a payment from USA.

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

#232

Post by Bostonian »

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.

Murray has never said that. He supports deregulating the labor market, de-emphasizing educational credentials so that lower-IQ people are not locked out. He also supports a basic income https://basicincome.org/news/2020/06/review-of-charles-murra... .

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

#233

Post by usaar333 »

benrbray wrote: post #21
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…

In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. I've studied alongside classmates who could't spend as much time studying as me, simply because they had to support themselves with part-time or full-time work just to keep their head above water.…

In these discussions, there's often conflation between absolute improvements across society and ability of society to alter the rank ordering of students (or cut variance between students). Various environmental improvements have improved the former over time; not so much the latter (assuming that's the goal).

See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work for a deep discussion on this.

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

#234

Post by robocat »

sokoloff wrote: post #224
robocat wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have just decided to be four inches taller than I am /s.

I have depressed friends that I believe can’t reasonably be expected to just decide to “do”, and I have other friends that seem to naturally have an abundance of “do”.

Yes, we can learn the skill, or we can be taught the skill, but otherwise your statement seems unrealistic to me.

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

#235

Post by oriolid »

zepto wrote: post #183
arvinsim wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But US Big Tech does affect at a global scale. What are the chances of a country developing their own search engine? Their own mobile OS and hardware? Their own social networking app?

What are you talking about? Lots of countries have their own social networking apps. Some have their own search engines. Also, quite a few countries have strong computer science schools and developers. Linux was developed in Finland. Raspberry PI was developed in England. “Big tech” isn’t preventing them from developing anything. The only thing holding these countries back is their business culture.

> Linux was developed in Finland.

I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland. If you want more Finnish operating system, try Jolla. There was a lot of Finnish contribution to Series 60 too, but it's kind of awful.

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

#236

Post by JohnWhigham »

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:…

I think the real reason is buried deeper: most Americans have instilled into them that governments are not to be trusted. It's why government salaries suck, it's why it's largely filled with people that couldn't find jobs in the private sector (sad but true). This sentiment bleeds over into education, with nonsense talk of "leftist indoctrination", teachers being stereotyped as money-hungry and lazy because of their unions, and so on.

This isn't that far-fetched; the country was basically founded by rich conspiracy theorist farmers that didn't want to pay taxes.

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

#237

Post by mnowicki »

treis wrote: post #160
ARandumGuy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding in U.S. schools is super unequal. Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low. That means low funding for the local school, which lowers the quality of education for students, which makes it harder for the students to get out of poverty, which keeps the district's poverty level high. It's a self reinforcing cycle,…

>Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low This is a common myth but it's not backed up by the numbers. Poverty is (mostly) concentrated in inner cities and those inner cities typically contain large office builds which pay lots of real estate taxes but send no kids to schools. If you look around different states the hi…

that's interesting to hear, and I'll have to take your word on it for now, but I'm curious why(unless things have significantly changed in the past 6-7 years) inner-city schools are still horrendously bad. I've experienced schools in both the worst parts of Philadelphia as well as in middle-class suburbs of Philly, and the contrast is even more exaggerated than they make it seem on TV shows/movies that depict these types of schools.

Obviously the students who are raised in these high-crime areas and surrounded by a community that's significantly harsher are going to be harder for teachers to manage, and I do think this is a very big part of it, but there are some things that clearly aren't related to that(such as equipment and the quality/quantity of staff)

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

#238

Post by lappet »

rayiner wrote: post #66
blakesterz wrote: post #4

This one seems kind of tough to quickly summarize, since it covers so much. I guess the final paragraph does a decent job: Education, training in cognitive and noncognitive skills, nutrition, health care and parenting are all among the building blocks of human capital, and evidence suggests that continuing investments that combat economic hardship among whites and minorities — and which help defuse debilitating confl…

Part of the conflict over “values and culture,” however, is over things that affect human capital. As a Bangladeshi immigrant who married into a white American family, it’s really hard for me to not notice the devastation mainstream American culture has racked on the ability to develop human capital. My younger siblings in law, who are in their early 20s live in towns (these are mainly white, working to middle class…

I think this is the main con of American individualism. The alternative is the culture in Asian societies and perhaps to some extent in European ones as well - there is always an Uncle or Aunty who is watching out for you. Of course that has cons where you can't do things that are unconventional, but at the very least you have a stop gap to help young people who are lost.

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

#239

Post by robocat »

gotoeleven wrote: post #220
robocat wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im not sure what your point is. Your statement >>> 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. is a trivially correct, banal point. The parent comment was implying with his "I know even more people who are rich and lazy" comment something that, while it may be true fo…

You said “it is a myth that most rich people inherited their wealth”, which you introduced as a subject, and I don’t think his comment was trying to say anything about your point exactly, either way. He said he was talking anecdotally, i.e. he was explicitly talking about his experiences which are true by definition, and not generalising to what your experience might be.

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

#240

Post by WalterBright »

sokoloff wrote: post #225
WalterBright wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It was fully in place for the 2018-2019, and 2019-2020 school years. So yeah, I expect measurable improvement in results.
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