Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

demos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 196 posts

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#121

Post by cokernel »

humanrebar wrote: post #117

Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty. First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much. Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and pove…

This is part of a three-part series of posts, one focused on education, one on work, and one on marriage. The author talks about marriage here:

http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-fai...

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#122

Post by randomdata »

studentrob wrote: post #74

Wow, the author was just recently fired, > On May 20, the progressive public policy organization, Demos, fired Matt Bruenig, a popular writer who covered poverty and inequality. [1] Best of luck to him and hope he finds another position. This article, though, is pseudoscience. It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end. Measuring the causes and effects of societal issues over th…

> It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end.

Funnily enough, the same way we concluded that education does fix poverty in the first place.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#123

Post by bluedino »

LionessLover wrote: post #60
Annatar wrote: post #57

The analysis neglects one major point: a lot of people got degrees in the humanities and arts: dual majors in English literature and history, or sociology and psychology... what are you going to engineer with that? Engineering requires physics, mathematics, molecular biology, chemistry, material science, higher logic and cognitive capacity... English literature won't help too much with finding a new tensile strength…

So if every "social science" major (and why not add business and law students) instead studied engineering, they'd all find jobs? I'm not even asking about well-paid jobs. Is there a shortage of engineers on the market now ? Would more engineers magically lead to more jobs (supply-side economics works so well... oh no!)? What's the difference between " anyone can be rich" and " everyone can be rich"? Because this is…

>> So if every "social science" major (and why not add business and law students) instead studied engineering

You can study engineering and not be much more than a peon checking plans, measuring tolerances.

You can NOT study engineering and come up with a fantastic design for a new device.

It doesn't matter what you study, you can't teach creativity, inventiveness, drive (and need).

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#124

Post by eli_gottlieb »

kijin wrote: post #100
tonmoy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about your developed country, but education seem to have helped the people in the poor developing country I am from. I feel as more people got educated, the more ambitious they became. Instead of doing the same things their forefathers used to do, they got a broader perspective and started venturing into more businesses. More engineers, doctors, accountants and economists have also helped. When you say t…

One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't. Exactly where that point is, seems to be a function of how many highly educated people a country can produce vs. how many jobs it can create. 100K new doctors and engineers, with 100K new jobs for them? Wonderful! But what if you only had 20K new jobs? Now you're in trouble. Instead of trea…

>One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.

I'm skeptical, given that the population-wide baseline of knowledge in the USA isn't actually that high. When the subject comes up, we hear that other countries teach their high-school kids calculus, linear algebra, and real physics.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#125

Post by sharemywin »

humanrebar wrote: post #117

Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty. First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much. Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and pove…

correlation is not causation. Could another likely argument be that poverty creates more stress on a relationship and it's the other way around? poverty causes relationship problems?

Also, minimum wage doesn't cover child care, so what's the point in having one partner working when it doesn't make economic sense?

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#126

Post by yummyfajitas »

sharemywin wrote: post #125
humanrebar wrote: post #117

Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty. First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much. Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and pove…

correlation is not causation. Could another likely argument be that poverty creates more stress on a relationship and it's the other way around? poverty causes relationship problems? Also, minimum wage doesn't cover child care, so what's the point in having one partner working when it doesn't make economic sense?

That's a possible argument but it seems unlikely.

If true, then a poor nation like India should have low marriage rates while a super rich one like the US should have high marriage rates. By Indian standards, everyone (including our very poor) is quite wealthy, so why do Indians do such a good job at getting and staying married while we don't? Compare also marriage rates and wealth over time - in the 50's marriage was a lot more common, yet by modern standards most people were poor.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#127

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rickycook wrote: post #37
autarch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)

and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need i…

This only works if the increase was achieved on a sustainable way. In practice it's probably over farming leading to destruction of the soil, eutrification or poisoning of water courses, and other damaging behaviours that are a long term detriment.

Farmers and farms can't be switched on and off to different crop production or different skilled occupations without considerable lag.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#128

Post by pbhjpbhj »

majewsky wrote: post #84
LordKano wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't. People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. We have a society that ne…

> Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Many current jobs may be subject to being automated away. I would certainly not recommend any future worker to set themselves up for a career in truck driving, because this job is likely gone in, let's say, 20 years. The "everyone should learn to code" crowd maybe recognizes that programming is one of the skills that is very hard to automate, so every new coder…

Truck mechanics with computer skills are likely to do well I imagine.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#129

Post by rhapsodic »

EliRivers wrote: post #91
DiabloD3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2. So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket. Making better workers only helps if t…

Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. This will be a very difficult change to make.

> Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy.

I don't know who believes that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. However I believe that, where no actual disabilities exist, family units should be self-supporting and should also share in the burden of maintaining a free, just and civilized society.

Re: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

#130

Post by slantaclaus »

LionessLover wrote: post #60
Annatar wrote: post #57

The analysis neglects one major point: a lot of people got degrees in the humanities and arts: dual majors in English literature and history, or sociology and psychology... what are you going to engineer with that? Engineering requires physics, mathematics, molecular biology, chemistry, material science, higher logic and cognitive capacity... English literature won't help too much with finding a new tensile strength…

So if every "social science" major (and why not add business and law students) instead studied engineering, they'd all find jobs? I'm not even asking about well-paid jobs. Is there a shortage of engineers on the market now ? Would more engineers magically lead to more jobs (supply-side economics works so well... oh no!)? What's the difference between " anyone can be rich" and " everyone can be rich"? Because this is…

If you're good at software engineering you can create your own job.
Post reply on HN