I'm not sure he's doing enough about entitlements. Even if taxes were lowered and the social security age pushed back a few years, we're still going to be eaten alive in 20 years, or so it appears to a lot of people.
Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
41–50 of 114 posts
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#42Public economic policy is a hard problem, and with all Respect to Philip there are a couple of points from the list of promises to business managers that are somewhat contradictory. 1) world's lowest percentage of GDP (among developed nations) spent on government; only with a low spend will investors have faith that taxes will stay low - This has the consequence of bad infrastructure, an uneducated workforce, less in…
"Besides empirical studies show that a good education system requires considerable public investment, and thus a larger percentage of GDP spent on government."
Citations to the studies, please?
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it matters as much how great a percentage of the GDP government spends, so much as how it is spent. Is the government spending money in ways that produce net positive social return? This becomes much harder as the absolute size of the bureaucracy grows. It is harder to manage a multi-trillion dollar budget than it is to manage Sweden. The United States has a large amount of military spending and redunda…
You're hinting at a very interesting problem here: The absolute size of bureaucracy. It seems ( I have no data to back this up) that the efficiency of bureaucracy decreases exponentially with it's size. This is obviously a bigger problem for large countries such as the US. There are advantages to size (setting the global agenda, advantages in areas where absolute amounts of money matter (for instance military - your…
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the ever expanding bureaucracy." -- Quoted from Civ 4 (and google didn't find me a source straight away)
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#44"Nobody has ever made a compelling argument for how having unionized teachers helps students. Nor has anyone ever made a compelling argument for how having tenured teachers helps student performance. Our country's best performing schools (all of them private) have non-unionized teaching staffs. We can't afford to experiment with unionized teachers anymore. The government created the right for public employees to unio…
Denmark has unionized teachers, and has a long history of public schools. Danes have invented C++(Bjarne Stoustrup), Turbo Pascal, C#, Dephi (Anders Hejlsberg) and Ruby on Rails (DHH). For a country with a population half of New York I think that's pretty impressive. I can't help to notice when working with foreigners that Danes have a much better knack at understanding a problem domain and coming up with creative so…
I'm considerably more familiar with countries that have great innovation and great economic growth without unionized teachers. So how do we tease out the effects of unionization? What kinds of contracts do the teachers have in each country, and what kinds of choices do the parents have if the local school down the street isn't helping their children learn?
See Choice of Schools in Six Nations
http://www.amazon.com/schools-nations-Netherlands-Belgium-Br...
(published as a United States government document in the 1980s) for more information about Europe than I know personally.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#45Wondering what possible expertise Greenspun brings to this arena. Worse, this post of his is just a long list of assertions without any references, supporting material or backup. I guess we're just supposed to accept on faith that he knows what he's talking about. Which is kind of how we got into this cluster F in the first place, isn't it? Thinking that your experience in specialty X translates to great insights int…
You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics. You know, the "dismal science." It is the discipline in which the introductory books outline the basic rules. Supply, demand, production possibilities curves, all that sensible, good stuff. It all makes sense --- experts in economics should be able to wisely guide nations and markets, right? T…
"You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics."
I've asked this question recently here on HN,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683
so I'll follow up in this thread. What would you recommend someone read who wants to learn something more about economics?
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#46"Nobody has ever made a compelling argument for how having unionized teachers helps students. Nor has anyone ever made a compelling argument for how having tenured teachers helps student performance." I agree with these statements. However, there are many public school systems in the USA that are successful. Why? That is the right question to ask. The education problem is much more complicated than simply giving pare…
"The 'good' schools would then be overrun with perspective students, requiring a selection procedure to determine who to accept."
Are you saying that no other school could learn anything from the better schools? The "good" grocery stores don't have to sell admission tickets, because other grocery stores learn their techniques in a free market.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US may spend a lot of money on education, but there is an underlying problem that isn't addressed in either your comment or Phil Greenspun's argument. K-12 education is primarily funded through property tax. This results in wealthy communities having great schools with tons of resources and poor communities that are using decades old resources and schools that are falling apart. So maybe you are correct in saying…
DC is regularly one of the top 3 school districts in the country in terms of per pupil spending. I don't think you would want to send your children there. There are fundamental incentive problems with public monopolies. When you have a group of dedicated, wealthy, involved parents, these negative incentives can be overcome. However, the system fails your average person, and it surely fails those who need the most hel…
DC spends more on administrative costs and less in the actual classroom than most other school districts.
The fact that DC's money is misspent does not automatically mean that the problem isn't money. And sure, one good way to raise money for the DC school system would be to streamline their administration.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spot on. Many of Greenspun's points make intuitive sense and thus seem like a good argument on their own, but they are quite incompatible. You can't have your cake and eat it too. I really like your point #1, and it's the most important. I'm not sure if there are empirical analyses to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educat…
I'm not sure if there are empirical analysis to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). The empirical analysis is all decidedly negative. The U.S. dramatically increased education spending in the past thirty years with nothing to show for it. On a local le…
Again: there's more to the funding situation than this factoid. It remains entirely likely that our schools are underfunded, in which case all you're pointing out is one of the causes of that underfunding (that school administration is sapping funds needed for teachers and classrooms).
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#49This is a fluff article. Tempting fluff that causes everybody to come to the comment section and offer up their preconceived ideas. But fluff is fluff, even if it's tasty. I don't see what I would gain from reading Greenspun's opinion on economic policy matters that I wouldn't get from reading Hayek, Friedman, or Keynes, or modern empirical arguments from places like Cato. What comparative advantage does Greenspun ha…
Do you have any actual problems with the article that would rate more than a DH0 response? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Can we not use shorthand from a blog post where well-established terminology already applies? Almost any fallacy you'd like to point out in someone else's argument here is better explained in the Nizkor list.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#50Here's a choice quote, just so you know where he's coming from philosophically: "If the product kills someone with a salary of $50,000 per year and 20 working years remaining, that is approximately $1 million in liability. [...] Punitive damages must be eliminated." Somehow, I'm just having a hard time believing that the challenges we face are due to businesses not investing because they're afraid of transit union st…
You need to recognize that he's coming from an aviation background, where multi-million dollar awards against parts manufacturers for pilot-judgment accidents were routine, and in fact did chase businesses (both manufacturers and service centers) out of the business as they couldn't afford liability insurance.