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A letter to my students

blogs.berkeley.edu

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Re: A letter to my students

#181

Post by wvoq »

etal wrote: post #148
byrneseyeview wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation. 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…

Those sectors are also much harder to automate, relative to the rest of the economy, since people want individual attention from doctors and teachers. So as the cost of everything else drops thanks to improved automation and technology, the proportion of our wealth that we spend on necessary but less-automated services increases. (There's a term for this effect, but I'm having trouble finding it again.)

Cost disease.

Re: A letter to my students

#182

Post by etal »

wvoq wrote: post #181
etal wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those sectors are also much harder to automate, relative to the rest of the economy, since people want individual attention from doctors and teachers. So as the cost of everything else drops thanks to improved automation and technology, the proportion of our wealth that we spend on necessary but less-automated services increases. (There's a term for this effect, but I'm having trouble finding it again.)

Cost disease.

Thanks!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) [...] involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. [...]

Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time because productivity gains come essentially from a better capital technology. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.

Re: A letter to my students

#183

Post by elai »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #122
elai wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repair the bugs in the american health care system? Americans spend more per capita yet get worse services.

Do you have evidence for worse services? (E.g., something like higher post-diagnosis death rates for statistically comparable people?)

They often just get refused service, even after paying way more.

Re: A letter to my students

#184

Post by kenjackson »

gwern wrote: post #173
kenjackson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accept of course those standardized tests are the gatekeepers to the best schools, best programs, best networks, and likely even confidence and motivation. 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 see…

Any of which should only reduce the magnitude of the ethnicities' outperformance. Not eliminate it entirely. You don't need to go to Harvard to start Apple or Dell or Google. (To give an analogy, Asians are heavily discriminated against in higher ed; but when I look around, it seems to me that unlike blacks, they outperform.)

Yet none of those companies were founded even by poor white youths, much less black youths (even white females). Apple, founded by Jobs, who did an internship at HP as a high school student, and attended Reed. Google by Stanford grad students, Dell, son of a doctor and stockbroker, who went to UT Austin. Microsoft, two Harvard students.

The problem is that a young black kid raised where many are raised, SAT scores not withstanding, likely won't have the opportunities that those I listed had. Let me give a glimpse of Michael Dell's early life, from Wikipedia: "The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals. Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered his first teletype machine in junior high, which he programmed after school."

If you go into the inner-cities, this type of early life, even from the bright and ambitious will likely look very different.

And lastly, Asians are disciminated against in a very different way than Blacks are. They are discriminated in the belief that they excel at math and engineering. I've seen first hand, in elementary school, how powerful expectations are (and there is good data around this too).

Re: A letter to my students

#185

Post by lzw »

neeson wrote: post #48
bokonist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this source of unknown reliability ( http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/California_state_spendin... ) state & local spending as a percentage of state nominal GDP went from 20% to 24% from 1992 to 2009. Don't know the numbers going back to 1960, but I'd be shocked if spending was lower then. For the change in average levels of education and knowledge, the cause seems pretty obvious to me. If you extended…

To rephrase what you just said: Mexicans, because of their ethnicity, are less able to understand (for instance) mathematics, even when given the same amount of instruction, than people of the ethnicities that characterize the population of California circa the 1960s (i.e. predominantly white). Did I get that right?

Ah, and a racist troll to boot! Hilarious!

Re: A letter to my students

#186

Post by pbhjpbhj »

korch wrote: post #92

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…

OT: When quoting the Simpsons TV show why don't people credit the writers instead of crediting the fictional character.

If someone quote "If music be the food of love, play on ..." then they credit Shakespeare (rightly or wrongly) not the fictional Duke Orsino of Illyria.

Sorry, but it bugs me.

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