Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan • Hacker News Board

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#71

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 12:16 AM UTC

fizzer9 wrote: post #61

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 st…

"Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?...get rid of the fucking standardized tests. "

Standardized tests are the solution to the first problem. This is what we do at both NYU and Rutgers (with intro classes), and it works quite well.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#72

Post by jfoutz » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 12:27 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #68

tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

If were to drive carelessly and make this happen to these two guys, i'd have to pay to fix it, and likely go to jail. For some reason, we're not allowed to simply suspend a company's business license, so we have to make due with fines and fees.

I don't think punitive damages should go to the victim. I do think punitive damages are worthwhile. It's not any one person's fault, it's the fault of the organization as a whole. The organization as a whole should suffer as i would suffer if i did something similar.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#73

Post by mixmax » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 12:29 AM UTC

pelle wrote: post #62

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

Interesting comment that points to why economics is such a hard disciplline: Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government. - So does this indicate that small government is a cause for successful Swedish companies? It might, but since you can't recreate the experiment you will never know for sure, all you know is that there is a correlation. There are probably many other things that could have caused these particular companies to be successful. The Swedish system of education is one.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#74

Post by frig » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 12:36 AM UTC

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…

If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded".

Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options.

Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up.

For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range.

If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on.

So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is:

(A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer.

(B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?".

There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork.

If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#75

Post by fizzer9 » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 12:42 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #71

fizzer9 wrote: post #61

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 st…

"Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?...get rid of the fucking standardized tests. " Standardized tests are the solution to the first problem. This is what we do at both NYU and Rutgers (with intro classes), and it works quite well.

Greenspun seemed to be talking about public high schools, and that's what I was talking about as well.

Standardized testing is just a race to the bottom. As soon as everyone agrees upon the standardized test, anyone who teaches anything outside of the box at all gets punished because an hour spent on something that's interesting and happens to catch the students' fancy on a given day is one less hour spent preparing them for the standardized test.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#76

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 12:59 AM UTC

fizzer9 wrote: post #75

yummyfajitas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?...get rid of the fucking standardized tests. " Standardized tests are the solution to the first problem. This is what we do at both NYU and Rutgers (with intro classes), and it works quite well.

Greenspun seemed to be talking about public high schools, and that's what I was talking about as well. Standardized testing is just a race to the bottom. As soon as everyone agrees upon the standardized test, anyone who teaches anything outside of the box at all gets punished because an hour spent on something that's interesting and happens to catch the students' fancy on a given day is one less hour spent preparing…

If the students are doing well, spending an hour on interesting side topics won't hurt the test results. If students are doing poorly, then sticking to the basics is the way to go. Walk before running, and all that.

As far as the race to the bottom, standardized testing prevents it. The race to the bottom is what you described; make your test easier than others to avoid problems with whiny parents/students. A standardized test puts a floor on how far down you can go.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#77

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 1:04 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #68

tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

So, three points:

First, liability is clearly a structural disadvantage of the aviation industry. But that doesn't make it a crisis for business in general.

Second, the story you've cited seems not to be a clear cut case of tort abuse. The plaintiffs built a case around an FAA finding that implicated the carb, they were armed with a record of unanswered complaints about the same carb part, and the carb company staged an ineffective defense, blaming ice, oil changes, and pilot errors in ways that were apparently easily refuted.

Third, even if this was a clear-cut case of tort abuse, it doesn't really answer my argument. I concede that tort abuse is an issue. I just think it's ludicrous to respond to it by eliminating the concept of punitive damages. Companies really do factor predictable liabilities into their business plans. Look how every health care organization handles HIPAA.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#78

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 1:06 AM UTC

timr wrote: post #69

tptacek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I disagree with the article, that argument is probably easy to respond to; there are relatively expensive cities that don't have rent control, and his measurements are deviation from median, not just the median rent itself.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#79

Post by pelle » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 1:28 AM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #73

pelle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting comment that points to why economics is such a hard disciplline: Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government. - So does this indicate that small government is a cause for successful Swedish companies? It might, but since you can't recreate the experiment you will never know for sure, all you know is that there is a correlation. There are…

Agreed. It's a complex issue. However historically the combination of small government, trust and openness has proved to cause growth throughout the world.

The economist Mauricio Rojas wrote a very detailed analysis of the Swedish Economy and the Welfare State throughout history, which is available here: http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665891.pdf

I haven't read the full report yet, but it looks very interesting.

We have to be careful about the education as being treated as the golden ticket for growth. I believe a combination of good primary education and a strong research culture is of vital importance to growth, but without the right infrastructure for entrepreneurs it wont do anything.

Just look at all the people educated to the nth degree in failed communist economies to see what I mean. Also see the reoccurring debates here about the value of higher education for an additional counter point to education.

Sweden by the way were pioneers in using School Vouchers, something that the Democratic party in the US is heavily against.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#80

Post by laut » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 1:40 AM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #14

tokenadult wrote: post #2

"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…

PHP too (Rasmus Ledorf).

But where do all these people you mention live now? On the other side of the Atlantic.

Another success story is Skype, which was founded by a Dane and a Swede. Did they decide to start the company in Denmark or Sweden? No, it's a Luxemborg company.

Denmark has a history of a relatively free economy. In the 1960's the government was smaller than in the US. And the biggest companies in Denmark today were founded a long time ago. Before the welfare state in Denmark grew really big. Maersk, the biggest container shipping company in the world, for instance.

Today the average child born in Denmark is going to be a net cost to the Ponzi scheme called the welfare state. So it's an unsustainable system. I think the country is still coasting on the culture and work ethic of the previous generations. But the work ethic is deteriorating now that the welfare state has been around so long there are families where the parents have always lived from welfare and never really had a job.

It still "works" despite the big government, not because of it. Also, it could be worse, Denmark is #11 on the Economic Freedom Index. It is easy to start a company, there are relatively few restrictions on investment etc. But - the taxes are very high. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cf...

Denmark has something a similar to Milton Friedmans idea of a school voucher system, where you can put your kid in a private school and you'll get a subsidy from the state. So you kind of get the taxes paid for government school back and the private school gets the money. The parents just have to pay a smaller fee to the private school in addition to the government "voucher money". There is no good reason why government should run the school. But they do. Some of them are private though. So if you think Denmark's school system is so great, maybe you should support getting the government out of schools in the US.

- another Dane who left Denmark.