111–120 of 237 posts
Status is zero sum, so it’s not even possible to create an arbitrary amount of elite schools to begin with.
> Status is zero sum Nobody really likes status. Everybody likes competence. Competence increases the pie for everybody.
I think part of it is that competence is much harder to check for than status. Status is inherently very "legible", which can make it useful even if it only kind of correlates with competence.
The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.
As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage.
1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...
Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that student…
Not everyone in the USA needs to go to an elite, great or even good school. What they need is to be taught a little bit about the world, and they need to be taught the value of hard work. These days all the poor people just want to be fed dreams of "passive income" and have "fulfilling jobs". Most jobs = trading time for money. Harder the job, more money you get. So work hard at school, you get more money at your job…
I think you're out of touch with the realities of being poor. Are you familiar with the ghetto tax? Let me tell you the situation of an old friend. He was working his ass off to put himself through college even with scholarships because his family was too poor to pay for anything and could not qualify for a loan. He worked one job taking care of his special needs brother, and another job at a brewery while getting hi…
Your friend accomplished more for his effort. He supported his family and himself during education. Of course it was much harder. So did my father, had no resources from his parents, he had to sacrifice his studies to support his sister and finished university years later.
I don't think money is the real barrier, it's attitude towards learning. Some families are more "educational" even if they are not rich. The best academics do not come from the richest families, I think there is even a negative correlation between wealth and academic achievements at the top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment highlights the most crucial insight on QE: it is a relatively novel monetary policy innovation that was implemented as an emergency response to the 2008 crisis on a very large scale and, as such, we had no experience using it. 14 years later, we’re finding out what it means for an economy to have the Federal Reserve buy a large amount of US debt.
QE isn't novel by any stretch, even in 2008. The Federal Reserve had a similar program back in 1930s around the Great Depression and the Bank of Japan has had a full-swing QE program since like 2001.
Not everyone in the USA needs to go to an elite, great or even good school. What they need is to be taught a little bit about the world, and they need to be taught the value of hard work. These days all the poor people just want to be fed dreams of "passive income" and have "fulfilling jobs". Most jobs = trading time for money. Harder the job, more money you get. So work hard at school, you get more money at your job…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The COVID relief bills were actually a one-time exception to a 100 year old reality. 1) Congress directly modified the Federal Reserve's charter to give money directly to private persons. 2) There were also payments directly from the US Treasury. 3) There were also things that involved that traditional convoluted process of the Treasury selling more bonds to the international market and pretending not to know that th…
What individuals did the fed give money too? The stimulus payments were paid through the US Treasury like any other congressional spending bill.
I'm sure experiences vary but I did all my general ed stuff at a very good community college with excellent teachers and a class size of about 20-30 people max per teacher. Many teachers were professionals with other jobs who taught as well, so it was an excellent educational experience, for the kind of things most people take in their first two years at any university. Then I transferred to a well-recognized researc…
> We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales. While this is a very crass over-generalization, I've found you really see this in the graduates. I've found Ivy league school graduates to be sort of... disconnected from reality? Like experts in education who clearly don't understand any of the on-the-ground realities of teaching (your lesson plan is beautifully structured, but we can't use it because it…
We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.
The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.
But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.
The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.
Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that student…