Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

> The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors

The prestigious schools are interested in hiring the best researchers. They don't much care how good they are as teachers.

Some are great, many are terrible teachers. And you don't get to see them much since all appointments are with TA kids anyway.

At the unknown schools the professors are there to teach and do little or no meaningful research so the are judged based on teaching ability, not grant-pulling fame. So they are on average much better teachers.

If you want an academic career, you need to hook with advisors who are famous in the field to get your early papers connected to their fame. But if you just want to learn and go into industry, you're better off with good teacher professors at the no-name school.

I did both, having a degree from a school you've never heard of (but is very good) and a degree from a top-1 (or top-3 depending on your biases) university. At the top university I had an advisor who was well-known in our field, which was fun. But I didn't go into research or academics so that advisor connection didn't do anything for my career. And he was so busy with grant and research work I only got to talk to him once a month.

In terms of learning I learned more from the unknown-name school where the professors were dedicated to teaching and were happy to chat about projects every day.

That's a typo its supposed to be "Unsheltered Homeless".

I don't think you're understanding the broader point. Look at the economic data. The PPP median household income and PPP net wealth is much higher in the US. Yes, the income/wealth distribution curve is skewed to the right here...

But the majority of Americans are wealthier than the majority of Europeans! A random sample of both populations would yield wealthier individuals on the US side.

Equal distribution by itself is a silly goal. The goal should be increase the net income/wealth as much as possible for as many people as possible.

> I certainly don't think that the economic system in the USA is better than those found in the EU, even though there are some metrics where you might make that case. But mostly what the USA has a lot of that the EU has much less of is economic churn - businesses constantly starting and almost all of them failing, followed by more businesses starting etc. This gives the impression of very prosperous, active economy, but I would question whether we really do much better out of this model than the EU does with their much less entrepeneurial systems.

This is an insane take. The technological innovation that comes out of the US blows Europe out of the water. Where is all the European competition? Just look at the financial statements of the largest EU and US corporations. The data is plain as day!

> The people who earn the most in our system are not the people who do difficult or unpleasant work, and it just seems preposterous to me to suggest that there is a link here.

You're wrong. Any meaningful tax revenue for wealth distribution would have to come from people in the upper quintiles. These are lawyers, doctors, engineers, oil rig workers, underwater welders, etc.

You still haven't suggested any actual policy change. I'm guessing you have a nebulous idea of "take it from the billionaires". There is no way in hell we can create a wealth tax that generates a $1T+ in annual tax revenue. There aren't enough billionaires to sustain such a tax and they absolutely have the means to legally evade taxes or jet off to anywhere in the world. Also, we already have the estate tax!

> This is not an example of what I think you're claiming it is an example of. Defaulting on pension obligations is about a failure to honor past labor contracts, not income/wealth redistribution.

Dude. Its literally a government run wealth distribution scheme. It's the basis for most citizen's retirement. The government isn't paying out what they had promised.

> Same way we can afford a war whenever "we decide" to fight one. Same way we can "choose" to spend more than the next 10 top military spenders combined. We are a rich country, and we could choose to place substantially more emphasis on the quality of life of all our people. But we "choose" to do otherwise.

We cannot afford infinite wars. Our military spending is dwarfed by our spending on social programs. Go read the federal budget for fucks sake. The majority of our budget is social security, medicare/medicaid.

Go read history and international news. How can you hear about the current events in Europe and claim that economic conditions are good? The region is unstable and full of young governments. The region cannot create its own energy, which kneecaps its own heavily industrial economy. The region is entirely dependent on the US/China and is just now decoupling from Russia. Macron is ranting about the lack of European Sovereignty. Inflation is much worse in the EU. The continent will definitely stabilize, and its not the end of Europe...but they've sustained significant economic damage.

I don't give a fuck about nationality. I don't think America or Americans are superior. Europe is our most powerful ally and I wish prosperity for the entire region. I just hate this constant populist rhetoric that the US needs to adopt undefined mythical tax/spending systems to achieve some fantasy utopia.

Please name the policy changes required to solve poverty in America. You'll be a hero.

To be fair, Supreme Court justices didn’t always used to previously be judges. So, you know, there’s a chance…

That’s an awfully big article with no actual examples of how the tests are currently, in any way, biased.

It’s funny how that article doesn’t mention the most obvious reason - it turns out intelligent people generally don’t get jobs as janitors, retail workers, or other minimum-ish wage jobs. Those intelligent people then have intelligent babies.

For some reason a large part of our society doesn’t want to acknowledge that genetics (highly) influence intelligence.