131–140 of 186 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That much I knew. But my thinking was that the amount spent and how was a better indicator. If they bring in $5000 in revenue and buy $5000 in golden toilet seats, it's not being spent well. But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
States can't run a deficit. Money in can never be greater than money out.
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In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant. Good job, you just discovered that our standardized tests scores are biased in favor of white kids.
Which is why those ethnicities then go on to have perfect 4.0 GPAs and rack up countless patents & inventions and start tons of successful new companies, thus proving those standardized tests wrong in the most effective way possible.
A better way to show that standardized tests mean nothing is to have every student take them, but then store them away for the next 40 years. No one knows the results. And then in 40 years correlate the results of these tests with "life success". We've already seen with one similar measure "IQ test", which has little bearing on academic placement, that it turns out to have very little utility in predicting "life success". UPDATE: Link on IQ -- http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html
But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer.
The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues.
Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level.
The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization.
How does one break this paradox?
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. —Socrates These kind of education articles are fucking stupid and only help fan the flames on all sides of deeply f…
I agree with you on many of your points. I would have to say I agree with you that the world will keep on improving, but to say that there aren't at least a FEW flaws with California's financial system and educational is not very conducive with the evidence. I can't find a reasonable human being that can agree with the pension system for state employees (I am actually unsure if it applies to teachers), which has to b…
The issue with pensions is that everyone used to do it. Private and public sector both. It's just easier for the private sector to declare bankruptcy and throw away their obligations. Pensions themselves are a giant scam to steal money from future generations. It isn't a failure of government or the public sector. It's a failure of one generation to consider their children or grand children.
The only people who ever thought pensions are a good idea are old or already retired. You're unlikely to meet a person like that.
>It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation.
The Leave It to Beaver household never existed. What makes you think home life has degenerated in the last 50 years?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars) 1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B) 2008-2009: $144B ($145) 2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B) Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled. You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less. I feel the urge to get ou…
I can't speak for California, but certainly here in Australia, there's been one factor increasing the cost of higher education: the rise of a managerial class within universities, who cost plenty but whose contribution to education and research is questionable. It'd be almost impossible to quantify - and it is probably only one of several factors - but the take-home point is that increased spending isn't necessarily…
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It’s from an essay of Mark Twain’s* where he talks about how people’s opinions depend on their social situations – where they get their money from, who they talk to, etc. (Corn-pone was a staple food.) It’s a little like the famous Upton Sinclair line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” So I take nazgulnarsil to mean that the author’s positio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is the implication that the state has grown much more wasteful in its spending over the last few decades? If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)
Repair the bugs in the american health care system? Americans spend more per capita yet get worse services.
It probably would have been cheaper to allow people to have real personal health savings accounts and provide a "last-resort" insurance that pays everything over some amount ($100K perhaps). That last bit probably would bring down premiums because of a max risk.
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His claim is that California is bottom of the barrel WRT the amount of money that it is reinvesting in its education system. (Hence the 'prime the pump' analogy)... This is true: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_per... To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and me…
The fundamental problem is that everyone has only ever focused on expedient solutions.
The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve.
In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result.
This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out.
Our political system needs a new heuristic.
(Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars) 1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B) 2008-2009: $144B ($145) 2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B) Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled. You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less. I feel the urge to get ou…
It has not more than doubled . Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them. Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664 $28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person. And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not every…
I would assume that the government is disproportionately likely to spend on these categories. So isn't this another way to illustrate inefficiency? If there's a correlation between government being a customer, and prices rising while the quality of the end product drops, that sounds like one more argument in favor of lower spending.
Here's the comment I posted:
I copied the following figures from the comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794
1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)
1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)
2008-2009: $144B ($145)
2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)
According to the comment thread, the state population increased from 15 717 204 in 1960 to 36 961 664 in 2010, which figures I assume are from the census.
My own calculations: that's about 1.7% population growth per year on average (1.017^50 * 15717204 ≈ 36 500 000) so we can interpolate the population in 1966 as 15717204 * 1.017^6 ≈ 17 400 000. That gives a state tax burden of roughly US$1610 per person in constant 2010 dollars. The 2009–2010 tax burden is US$3200 per person.
Therefore, at least over the 1966 to 2010 time period, if these figures are correct, then far from being the victims of an "enormous cheat" or "terrible swindle" in which state taxes were cut to the bone by a generation supported by state taxes, necessitating massive cuts in public services, state taxes per capita have nearly doubled during that period, adjusted for inflation using the CPI.
Some other possibilities were suggested in the comment thread:
• Maybe the CPI isn't the right deflator to use, because most of the state's revenues go to education and health care, not vegetables and beef, and these services have inflated in price much faster than the CPI. However, this doesn't rescue the "terrible swindle ... walking away from their obligations" claim.
• Maybe O'Hare isn't referring to public services as they were provided in California during the 1960s but during some earlier period, such as the 1940s. Prof. O'Hare, can you clarify your claims?
• Maybe most of the tax money is being wasted on unproductive things such as prisons, managers and administrators, or legislators, rather than being spent on productive things like public education and road maintenance. In this case, there is a "terrible swindle", but the perpetrators are not the voters or the taxpayers but the employees of the government.
• Maybe much of the high standard of living some decades ago was paid for by externalities. For example, power plants might have been less expensive to operate before the EPA was established, K-12 schools might have had higher quality when economic opportunities for women outside of them were sharply limited by institutionalized sexism, US military power might have kept the prices of many raw materials artificially low, and unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels might have kept the prices of energy and asphalt artificially low. As some of these externalities have been internalized, taxes would have to rise. For example, to attract the best and brightest women to teaching in K-12 education, the way we used to in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd either need a massive propaganda campaign about the nobility and importance of teachers (comparable to the one we have about soldiers), or we'd need to pay top K-12 teachers US$200 000 a year or more — with a credible commitment to continue to do so for half a century into the future.
So, on the face of it, the numbers don't seem to add up to support your claim. Can you help out with that?
Other comments related to this question include http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t... which seems to not be using the same facts as the commenter whose figures I quoted above.
The California Budget Project's summary gives a lower number of US$86.8 billion for 2009-10, which is still much larger than the inflation-adjusted per-capita 1966 number: http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budget...