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Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

philip.greenspun.com

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Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#61

Post by fizzer9 »

His ideas about schools and education are incomplete. One reason we have teacher's unions is to help avoid good teachers being fired due to ignorant complaining noisy parents (and students). And by the way, even with unions a female student can ruin a male teacher's career with a simple "he touched me" lie.

Smart parents will do their best to send their kids to private schools, but the less fortunate kids will get stuck in public. If it were even easier/cheaper to send your kids to private, then there would be an even greater separation between the kids who's parents care and the kids who's parents don't give a damn (the haves and have-nots).

The answer isn't to make more private schools, the answer is to fix public schools. And the problem with public schools is not the teachers. The teachers are working within a system that is broken. Rather than go into the details, here's a quick example: you're a teacher. You cover the material in class. You're inventive, dynamic, clear, withit, the whole nine yards. You assign homework on the material, go over the homework, and then give a quiz (on that material). Students fail because they didn't study and don't care (and this stems from most parents not giving a shit about school as long as their kids are out of the house and having some fun in sports). You go over the quiz in class, and give a test later in the week (on the same material). The students fail because they don't care and didn't study. You have a choice: do you fail a bunch of students and bring down a shitstorm of parent complaints and administration complaints? Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?

If you fail a bunch of students, administration will claim that you're a bad teacher. You'll have constant visits by "guests" (from administration) in the back of the room evaluating you. Parents will complain loudly that you're inept. Everyone will turn you into a scapegoat. If you're not tenured, you're gone.

Let me give you a hint: teaching is just a job, like any other job except that you're helping kids and so you try to go the extra mile if you can. But it's still just a job, and its not worth all the shit you get to make it rigorous if no one else is doing it, if you get no help from administration, and if you in fact get severely punished for it.

You want to fix education? Let the teachers teach, and let them fail students who fail. And for Pete's sake, get rid of the fucking standardized tests. They turn education into color-by-numbers.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#62

Post by pelle »

mixmax wrote: post #6

Public 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…

Good analysis. One point though about Sweden. Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government.

Sweden's current face of big government didn't start until the 60s when all the companies except Mysql were already large.

For more see Johan Norberg's writings on this: http://www.johannorberg.net/?page=articles&articleid=45

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#63

Post by Prrometheus »

tptacek wrote: post #60
Prrometheus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence that I've seen suggests the correlation between school spending and educational achievement is weak. There may be specific districts that we can target as being underfunded, and money might help those districts. But untargeted increases in education spending seem unlikely to help. After all, there are very well funded districts in the United States that are horrible. That would be my main argument. Then…

I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument. For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school distric…

Well, going back to the original argument that we need to spend a greater percentage of GDP to achieve higher educational achievement, I think we could both agree that the problem is less straightforward than that, that the United States spends more money per student than other countries even in some of its worst schools, and that unnamed structural reforms that encourage schools to be better managed can increase educational performance in the United States without necessarily spending more money.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#65

Post by tptacek »

Prrometheus wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument. For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school distric…

Well, going back to the original argument that we need to spend a greater percentage of GDP to achieve higher educational achievement, I think we could both agree that the problem is less straightforward than that, that the United States spends more money per student than other countries even in some of its worst schools, and that unnamed structural reforms that encourage schools to be better managed can increase edu…

Sure, although the same logic doesn't preclude simply spending more top-line dollars and sucking up the fact that there's too much overhead.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#66

Post by jbert »

"eliminate government-owned housing so that these properties can be returned to the tax base and used to their full potential"

Would the government really make more ongoing income from taxes on rent rather than rent? That seems unlikely.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#67

Post by russell »

mk wrote: post #32
Prrometheus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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 educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). " Most people don't get this point, but the US spends A LOT of money on education, more than most countries. "More money" is the easy answer, the one that politicians…

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…

In California the public schools are funded mostly by the state with some additional money for wealthy districts grandfathered in. Still we have the disparity. Wealth districts have volunteer parents, fund raising, and voters willing to approve special bond issues. The poorer districts tend to be poorly run, wasting more money. They have less community support, fewer volunteers, etc., etc. There are individual schools in poorer districts that do extraordinary things, but usually it's the case of an extraordinary principal.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#68

Post by sokoloff »

tptacek wrote: post #52
sokoloff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't extremely high liability insurance costs a structural part of the aviation industry? I'm sure many of the same forces drive companies away from the nuclear power industry. Regardless, I can hold both thoughts in my head at the same time: that we need punitive damages to ensure that companies don't factor in predictable loss-of-life liability into their business plans, as they do with many other liabilities, and…

$53 million in compensatory damage against a carburetor company for the crash of a single-engined 2-seater due to an exhaust valve failure? (Because the carb was recently replaced, and thus was within the statute of limitations.) http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/torts-damages/8890265-1.htm...

Granted, that's only one case, but how many $500 carbs does that company have to sell to cover $53mm in exposure? How many more times than the tiny market for those carbs (that engine is no longer in use in a production aircraft)? I've left explicit instructions to my family that if I should pass crashing my airplane, that they are not to sue my maintenance facility or anyone else in the aviation industry. I hope that never comes to pass, but if it does, I wouldn't want to be part of perpetuating this ridiculousness.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#69

Post by timr »

tptacek wrote: post #31
hank777 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. He bases his argument on the idea that rent control causes high rents as demonstrated in places like NY. This is patently false in my opinion, but my opinion is not what counts. The reason I say it is unsubstantiated and therefore insane, is that he provided no argument for the idea that there is a causation between high rents and rent control. The author falls into the all too common trap of mapping a co…

Are we talking about the same article? In the one I remember, he backed his argument up with a survey of deviation from median rent in markets with and without rent control.

Yes, he observed a correlation. In this case, there's a very reasonable argument to be made against a causal relationship: cheap cities don't institute rent control.
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