331–340 of 548 posts
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> What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class? https://www.fastcompany.com/90642878/worker-pay-went-up-just... And that’s not even starting on lobbying and policy.
So the rich made stocks go up because they want to destroy the middle class ?
The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school or even most upper middle class private sc…
I hear this a lot and I have a hard time believing it. What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class? Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with diminishing public schools and everything to do with their maximizing their own children's education. If we end private schools, do we still allow paid tutors? If so, I don't see how that field gets levelled.
Only schools where wealthy people live get good funding, so when they concentrate where they live to one place, everywhere else suffers
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The corporate tax might be nominally higher in the US, but the cost of doing business is definitely higher in Europe. When you have to pay 55% to the state if an employee has a salary above 100k, that will seriously hinder your ability to hire top talent, retain them, and motivate them (why work harder if it will go down the tax drain?)
It's not a tax drain though. It funds things like higher education and healthcare. Things that most Americans have to pay out of pocket if they want which entrenches the lack of class mobility in this country. Imo the european system is better.
The US funds the healthcare above and beyond what any other country on Earth is doing. I think it's 50% higher than the next contender, per capita.
As for higher education, the US universities are doing much much better than their European counterparts. If you get a STEM degree, you're basically set for life in the US, pay your debts in no time and then enjoy a salary that can easily be 2 times higher than in Europe. In Europe you get a free education, which opens up the exciting opportunity to toil for 60k-80k (pre-tax) a year for the rest of your life. Take the tax out, and you're left with around 50% of that money.
The US universities are fine. The STEM graduates are fine. The problem is with all the non-marketable degrees for which students get into serious debt. I don't think we should subsidize those more, I think we should discourage students from attending useless degrees. If the government will pay for the degrees, then the government will also have a heavy hand in picking winners and losers in terms of classes, degrees, schools etc. This is how it's in Europe, and it shows, they are lacking performance.
e.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-unive...
To put it shortly: if everybody has X, then nobody has X.
Education and healthcare in the US do not lack funding. We don't need more money thrown at these nuanced and delicate problems.
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I believe the gap between private schools and public schools, because I've seen it (a good friend of mine had to repeat a grade coming from his rich-area public school to our private school). But is there any evidence of a gap in instructional quality between (eg) Eton and upper-middle-class private schools? I don't know a ton about the topic, but this would be pretty surprising given my current low-confidence unders…
Even here on HN I've seen "looking to hire" posts where they basically come out and say they will only consider people from elite colleges and universities. It's hard to see stuff like that, so blatant, and not conclude there's a signaling-networking phenomenon going on. It comes up in other things I've seen too, where I know some idea has been floated over and over again by various groups, and then some deal is anno…
If we start by adopting the "human capital" frame, we've already biased the discussion. The premise of this frame is that earnings are all to be understood as returns on capital. Earnings that are not returns capital are evidence if some sort of dark capital.
A related frame is a supply/demand understanding of executive pay, or lawyer salaries... it's hard to square observations with theory, resulting in some pretty weird conclusions.
If we want to explore new ideas, imo, it's best to avoid rhetorical or theoretical frames that yielded the old ones.
This article is a perfect case in point. Models of parenting "types" as causal to earnings. What bollocks.
Education is worthless if there are no opportunities. In Argentina, there are PhDs as cab drivers. Opportunities are correlated to how well authorities run the country. There is some data trying to pinpoint relationships with other factors: GDP, corruption, and religion, etc. https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22
Don't forget that Argentina's economy was the brainchild of the right wing in the United States, and specifically the Chicago School of economics. They overthrew a democractically elected government and installed a military dictatorship, in order to push their preferred economy
A lot of people here need to talk to some entrepreneurs. It doesn't matter how good, or how well funded, the school system is: if the family is poor, you're not going to be able to float rent on the storefront you need, or purchase initial inventory of whatever you're making, much less soak up a few false starts, much less take out a bank loan to do any of these things. Period. This does not in ANY WAY mean there sho…
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So the rich made stocks go up because they want to destroy the middle class ?
As per the source I linked: the rich captured all the gains and failed to increase everyone else’s pay to even match inflation.
The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school or even most upper middle class private sc…
Education does not significantly improve outcomes. Period.
What people observe is that people who went to top-tier schools end up being very successful, and make the (totally false) inference that top-tier schools make you successful.
In reality, the people who were almost certainly going to be successful anyway get into the top-tier schools, partially on merit and partially because this is the legitimation process for the upper class in the US.
If you stuff a million poor people into the top-tier schools, this won’t actually fix anything, because A) those people are much less likely to succeed no matter what B) you can’t actually have a million people in the upper class.
We’re currently in the throes of dealing with B). Turchin calls this “elite overproduction”. You have millions of people who (think they) went through the process to become upper class (going to college), but it turns out that was just a signifier - a signifier that’s been totally destroyed by the push to send everyone to college.
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Then why healthcare isn't greatly expensive in Europe, with, you know, 40+ independent countries?
Because you pay your taxes to the central entity that is running those programs. In the US, the majority of taxes go to the Federal gov't, not the states.
Most European countries are of the size of US states. If they can run their healthcare just fine, it only makes it dumber idea to try to centralize it in US at the federal level.