The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy • Hacker News Board

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#241

Post by anonymouskimmer » Thu, May 31, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

mark212 wrote: post #95

seibelj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors. Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts. But even without option 2, option 1 would…

I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose, but it is deeply unfair that the price of a good "public" education is being able to afford the real estate in that catchment area / school district.

> I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose

Here's a random article which shows that often it's done on purpose: http://hechingerreport.org/wealthy-towns-able-secede-higher-...

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#242

Post by anonymouskimmer » Thu, May 31, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

mark212 wrote: post #224

toasterlovin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...

I remain skeptical of that part. There are, however, plenty of cities in the US where the school district boundaries are drawn very precisely to enable the imposition of property taxes that support the schools. It becomes a sort of private-public school, in the sense that all the homeowners in the district pay extra and those schools have sports teams and labs and orchestra and field trips that the kids on the other…

"This is impossible in California, however"

Oh no it's not. Plenty of rich neighborhoods in California have, or have tried, to split out their own district from the larger, more heterogenous district.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#243

Post by anonymouskimmer » Thu, May 31, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #74

AstralStorm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not just this. Pulling strings without separating out housing is enough. If you build a new school it will still start or with the segregated out "worse material". The only way out is indeed to forcibly randomize and disperse - Even then there will be local social clustering.

I don’t want to forcibly do anything. I want to unshackle market forces to solve the problem in a better way. Don’t ban poor people from your town. Don’t create a monopoly on local education. The rules should forcibly ensure competition rather than forcibly control how people live and get educated.

The easiest way to unshackle market forces would be to ban the state legislatures from mandating the public schools' particulars.

And "forcibly ensuring competition" doesn't seem like this is truly unshackling market forces. Unlike the free market there are genuine community-wide positive-sum benefits to oligolopic cooperation between schools.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#244

Post by anonymouskimmer » Thu, May 31, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

mirko22 wrote: post #92

Which form of society would allow for complete equality? Where everyone has the same things to eat, drink and learn and everyone is missing the same things (usually luxury). I can’t think of any social system like that mostly cos it all involves people and not all people are the same and will behave differently inevitably wanting different stuff which will lead to more more inequality over time. Maybe someone has ide…

Isaac Asimov's short-story "No Connection" features a race of intelligent descendants of bears who basically treat each other equally, with equal dignity.

If a bear feels called to a particular vocation, that vocation is equally respected whether it is ditch-digger or administrator (which is just another job). If no bear feels called to a particular community need then the bears perform that job on a rotating basis. The story didn't describe what would happen if a lot of bears felt called to a particular job, but I presume there would just be very little work for any of them to do in that job, and that most of their time would be spent on the "community jobs".

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#245

Post by tejtm » Sat, Jun 02, 2018, 3:06 AM UTC

anbende wrote: post #2

Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the…

Although I agree it is a continuum, And I would like to think I am not contributing to the problem, I will point out that we in general are not the ones to choose where the cutoff is and historically, revolutionary retribution strikes deeper than the top 1%.