51–60 of 99 posts
True, but I hope we aspire to more than necessities and comforts of life. If we worked more and directed the effort, Armstrong might be a name of a town 240,000 miles away.
I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired. You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration. But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging…
As an immigrant who has been in the USA for some 15 odd years, I think this is about right. I've done a fair bit of traveling, and imho parts of Europe, South Asian & South American countries have a very work-less, pro-vacation culture. Its like, lets work a little bit for the money & then go home & spend time with the family. Here in the USA, I worked with Partners & MDs at GS with multi-million $ networth, and they'd still show up to work at 7am & leave work at 7pm. I'd often wonder what the motivation was. Too much peer pressure. Partners work 12 hours, so MDs clock in 13, so VPs are forced to do 14 & associates all-nighters. Forget 4 hours, if you can get Wall St to do the regular 8 hours instead of 12+, that would be an achievement in itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution. This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how mu…
Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism? I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world. By whom? In particular, are there any ratings of American versus European universities by people who have experience of both? I only have experience of the latter; from what I've heard from Americans talking about their university experience, it sounds markedly inferior.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...
Most of the weight is on research. Fair enough. I'm prepared to believe that conclusion, at least as an overall tendency. However, the context of the discussion was education, and that's the context in which I'm disputing the basis of the claim of superiority of American universities.
Of the fraction of the weight placed on quality of teaching, a significant chunk goes on 'perceived prestige' which obviously begs the question.
A small chunk goes on student/teacher ratio, which is a weak indicator; in particular, its behavior is more threshold than monotonic (i.e. you don't want it to be too high, but there's no real advantage in having it remarkably low).
And a chunk goes on total budget per teacher, which is a positively perverse criterion and tends to substantiate the stories I've heard about the level of waste in American universities.
So that's the 'world university rankings'. Moral of that story: when you see an official looking table that seems to support a controversial conclusion, look carefully at where the data comes from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution. This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how mu…
Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism? I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.
People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when it has the potential to have the bi…
In the past century, the average retirement age has been steadily decreasing up until very recently when it began going up again[1]. People spend more time in school earlier, but education usually leads to working later in life as well[2]. [1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf [2] http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pd...
Do either of these explore why? My initial uninformed guess is that knowledge based fields many college grads go into are much less tied to physical fitness and thus workers are able to continue their jobs later into life when physical labor wouldn't be possible.
Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the ric…
When America was still Capitalistic, still had a functioning free market system, the results it produced in both education and healthcare put the European welfare state model to shame. If you go back 30, 40, 50 years America embarrassed most of Europe in both healthcare and education. For decades America had both the best healthcare system, and a very cost effective system. That reputation has only been lost in the l…
You mean, when Europe had done less to advance out of the destruction of WWII, and much of it was under the thumb of the Soviet Union? Sure. Of course, being "capitalistic" in a different sense than the mixed economies of Western Europe had nothing to do with that; even 50 years ago the US was also a mixed economy with significant regulation and social welfare systems (some of both of which have been disbanded in the interim).
The economy is not a zero sum system, almost by definition. Working less will not mean more jobs are available. In fact, lower economic output may reduce the number of jobs available significantly.
Also, correlation does not imply causation. Modern societies with lower carbon footprints are those with smaller industrial/shipping industries and good public transit. That probably correlates pretty well with reduced working hours, but selling this a ecological alternative is a bit of a stretch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...
Okay, taking a look at the criteria they say they use. Most of the weight is on research. Fair enough. I'm prepared to believe that conclusion, at least as an overall tendency. However, the context of the discussion was education, and that's the context in which I'm disputing the basis of the claim of superiority of American universities. Of the fraction of the weight placed on quality of teaching, a significant chun…
>when you see an official looking table that seems to support a controversial conclusion
I've presented some data. If you have contrary data, present it. Otherwise it's just your opinion, no? I mean, you dispute the metrics they use, but don't provide any of your own. What would be a better measure of the quality of teaching?
Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the ric…
Why do you think private healthcare isn't working? Free market is typically inefficient if 1) there's not enough competition or 2) customers don't make optimal market decisions. Which one is it in private healthcare?
Source: http://kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/total-number-of...