Earlier quoted context omitted.
I very heartily disagree with letting the market decide education priorities, for two reasons. First, education is chock full of positive externalities, which will never be realized correctly. While "the economy" doesn't need underwater basket weaving - or art history, or literature - society still does. Even if people don't work in their field, the world is better for the increase in knowledge. Man does not live on…
>> society still does That's just, like, your opinion, man. Society certainly does not need so many graduates in English Literature: there are only so many open positions at McDonalds, and they as a rule do not require a degree. If there's market demand, society can pay real cash money for it. It used to be that most writers, painters, historians, etc, etc, had to also have an useful day job. _Albert Einstein_ had a…
The point of my argument is that this is one of those cases where that's not going to happen, because we're talking about positive externalities. A generally educated populace, especially in the liberal arts (reading, critical thinking, political science, etc.) is a powerful but diffuse societal benefit in a way that doesn't really have a buyer.
What that likely means is that society needs to collectively come up with a powerful institution to serve as a patron of education and the arts. We could all pay in some token amount of money, and then experts could redistribute it in more globally-optimal ways. While we're at it, that institution could probably take care of a lot of other externality-related problems, like building roads and maintaining some sort of conflict-resolution system. And we should probably all get a say in how it runs. Hey, wait a minute, this sounds familiar...