691–700 of 888 posts
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You are assuming that education makes a difference? And that someone (the government?) can provide that 'great education'?
This whole thread is mostly about getting into college So yea, the consensus is that edu, knowledge and exp make a difference
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> Why wouldn't we want that? Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem. The points that you have made above are why there are still many more female nurses -- it's not like they will accept every single man, there's simply a lower threshold than there is for women. I think a lot of the arguments about whether AA makes sense at all should really be reframed as…
> Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem. And one thing to consider is that people don't choose colleges just based on academics, they also choose them based on social environments, and as such universities have an incentive to try to create amicable social environments to attract the best students. Case in point: I decided not to go to a good engineering s…
I dont think many people have such a privilege
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Depends on your definition of capital. Of course, you can make any system work with any definitions. It's just more cumbersome to eg state your theorems in cryptography, if your definition of prime numbers includes 1. When talking about factors of production, it is useful to differentiate between labour, capital and land. The main distinguishing factor between capital and land is that land is in fixed supply, but you…
i was going to reply land could be 'fixed capital' but doing some quick wiki shows as you say, land itself may not constitute as "capital" [0]... interesting Land itself is not included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, even though it is a fixed asset. The main reason is that land is not regarded as a product (a reproducible good). But the value of land improvements is included in the statistical concept o…
Depending on your analysis, it can sometimes make sense to include land under fixed assets. Eg when you are running a company your accounting can perhaps treat durable assets and land the same?
If you are looking at whole economies, it's often useful to treat land separately. Even if that's not always done.
But I'm some kind of Georgist at heart, as you might be able to guess.
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Even if we levelled all wealth, life would be limited by the finiteness of resources, and only economic development - which this levelling would inhibit - would alleviate such scarcity. Consider what would have happened if society had followed John Stuart Mills' advice in 1848 and maximized for equal distribution of income, resulting in per capita GDP barely increasing from its $2,000 level over the last 170 years: "…
One possibility is that such an egalitarian society would have produced more brilliant engineers and economists, by providing more opportunity to manifest one's talent to lower economic classes. And they then could, perhaps, figure out the unsustainability of their trajectory earlier, and correct it to produce somewhat slower but steady growth without environmental catastrophes, translating to better long-term outcom…
Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both. To some extent, it is true. Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. Race in America, however, is fraught. The history of racism is rece…
>>Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both. Race is an unchangeable, decided at-birth deal. Class on the other hand changes based on how you succeed to that end. People do feel class as something that is not fixed, and can be changed. In some way getting rid of Racism means changing other people, and changing class requires one to change one's own ways.
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> You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile: This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Which is another way of saying that the difference is not useful in assembling a university's incoming class. Once you get above a certain level, the tests decrease in utility to categorize individuals into tiers. Once you get to a certain level of capability, you…
>This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Skill difference between top 1% and top 7% is huge in ELO based games
If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.