The word "debt" appears way too little. The word "credit" isn't even in the article. The whole mess we're in is because of borrowing from the future via a debt bubble to escape deflation after the dotcom/telecom bust of the early 2000's. I think Greenspun needs to read up a bit more on whats really happened.
Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
91–100 of 114 posts
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#92Wondering what possible expertise Greenspun brings to this arena. Worse, this post of his is just a long list of assertions without any references, supporting material or backup. I guess we're just supposed to accept on faith that he knows what he's talking about. Which is kind of how we got into this cluster F in the first place, isn't it? Thinking that your experience in specialty X translates to great insights int…
There are references, supporting materials, and backup. Read the article again. And are you saying that we got into this cluster F by listening to Phil Greenspun, or other amateurs? It seems to me that the well-paid "experts" in finance and the media deserve most of the blame rather than internet people shooting their mouths off.
....bringing up a good point which is: why are people like Lawrence Summers, Paulson, Bernanke etc. expected to get us out of this mess when they CREATED it?
Things WILL get worse as our political system is unwilling to punish incompetence and the people who predicted this stuff would happen aren't being listened to now that its obvious they were right.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're hinting at a very interesting problem here: The absolute size of bureaucracy. It seems ( I have no data to back this up) that the efficiency of bureaucracy decreases exponentially with it's size. This is obviously a bigger problem for large countries such as the US. There are advantages to size (setting the global agenda, advantages in areas where absolute amounts of money matter (for instance military - your…
It's possible to have very efficient bureaucracy. European Commission that basically runs European Union (500M people) has just around 25,000 employees [1]. This is tiny. Just to get an idea about the scale: New York City (8M people) government employs 250,000 people (though to be fair, I have no idea who is included in this total) [2]. EC seems to be doing something very right. They offer very good working condition…
There is a tough competition for these civil servant jobs
Because they are massively, massively corrupt.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_co...
"For nine consecutive years the EU court of auditors has refused to sign off the budget. The numbers are huge. The annual EC budget is around ¤100 billion (£65 billion). The auditors cannot clear 95 per cent of that. We simply cannot tell what is happening to that money"
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
PHP too (Rasmus Ledorf). But where do all these people you mention live now? On the other side of the Atlantic. Another success story is Skype, which was founded by a Dane and a Swede. Did they decide to start the company in Denmark or Sweden? No, it's a Luxemborg company. Denmark has a history of a relatively free economy. In the 1960's the government was smaller than in the US. And the biggest companies in Denmark…
Yes that is the contradiction - an apparently great educational system paid for by taxes that are so high that the smart and successful Danes leave the country and make their money elsewhere in order not to pay the high taxes.
It is not tho' - those taxes pay for a lot of other things, such as perfectly capable people not working. We have the same problem in the UK.
Solution: NO welfare AT ALL to anyone who doesn't complete their education. And backdate it to the 70s.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it matters as much how great a percentage of the GDP government spends, so much as how it is spent. Is the government spending money in ways that produce net positive social return? This becomes much harder as the absolute size of the bureaucracy grows. It is harder to manage a multi-trillion dollar budget than it is to manage Sweden. The United States has a large amount of military spending and redunda…
You're hinting at a very interesting problem here: The absolute size of bureaucracy. It seems ( I have no data to back this up) that the efficiency of bureaucracy decreases exponentially with it's size. This is obviously a bigger problem for large countries such as the US. There are advantages to size (setting the global agenda, advantages in areas where absolute amounts of money matter (for instance military - your…
The solution to this problem is federalism, but we've drifted a ways from the balance of state and federal power that used to exist. Constituents don't care about where the things they want are coming from, and they will vote for the people who give them those things. The end result is a federal government that is ever increasing in size. It would take a massive civic education effort to fix this problem.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, he observed a correlation. In this case, there's a very reasonable argument to be made against a causal relationship: cheap cities don't institute rent control.
While I disagree with the article, that argument is probably easy to respond to; there are relatively expensive cities that don't have rent control, and his measurements are deviation from median, not just the median rent itself.
Neither of those is an effective counter-argument:
1) The existence of expensive cities without rent control doesn't tell us anything about the effect of rent control on rent (cities can be expensive for lots of reasons unrelated to rent control), unless you do a study comparing roughly equivalent expensive cities, some with rent control, and some without. The author didn't do that -- he compared cities with rent control, to cities without, and found that cities with rent control are more expensive. This was bad experimental design.
2) His measurements found that the distributions around the median were different for expensive cities vs. inexpensive ones. But it doesn't really matter that he was comparing the shapes of the distributions, and not their medians, because one can reasonably expect that expensive cities will have a larger contingent of really expensive homes than inexpensive cities, even without the effect of rent control. For that matter, rent control might be the only thing giving the expensive cities a stock of inexpensive housing at all!
Again, for a proper experiment, the author needed to compare equivalently priced cities, varying only the factor of rent control. He didn't do that.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The evidence that I've seen suggests the correlation between school spending and educational achievement is weak. There may be specific districts that we can target as being underfunded, and money might help those districts. But untargeted increases in education spending seem unlikely to help. After all, there are very well funded districts in the United States that are horrible. That would be my main argument. Then…
I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument. For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school distric…
"I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures)."
That criterion has the same problem with education as it does with charitable organizations: it decouples money spent from results achieved. Maybe the answer to more effective schools and charitable organizations is better administrators who can only be recruited with competitive salaries. If that's the case, using that criterion would force schools and charitable organizations to hire less capable administrators in order to get enough funding.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#98Every single piece of Philip Greenspun's writing I've ever read has seemed (to me) to be a massive collection of assertions with absolutely no logic backing up any of them.
Some of those assertions turn out to be correct, of course. But in terms of quality of discourse, Greenspun is roughly even with your average internet troll.
I guess it's ironic that this post is itself completely unfounded. But it's like 2:00 and I'm really tired and it astonishes me that this blog post could get so much support here, so I'd just like to get this ball rolling and see if any of you agree with me.
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the students are doing well, spending an hour on interesting side topics won't hurt the test results. If students are doing poorly, then sticking to the basics is the way to go. Walk before running, and all that. As far as the race to the bottom, standardized testing prevents it. The race to the bottom is what you described; make your test easier than others to avoid problems with whiny parents/students. A standar…
The existing situation is this: there are standardized tests, teachers are sticking to the basics -- they have no choice since they've got to teach to the test like everyone else (lest your students score a percentage point lower than another teacher's students), students are doing poorly, students are passing anyway because of the enormous forces on teachers in the broken system. The standardized tests are part of w…
Wait, I'm confused:
a) there are standardized tests
b) students are passing anyway because of the enormous forces on teachers
If the standardized tests from a) determine the grades, then how is b) possible? How can pressure on the teachers cause a student to pass if the teachers are not the ones assigning grades?
Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to have very efficient bureaucracy. European Commission that basically runs European Union (500M people) has just around 25,000 employees [1]. This is tiny. Just to get an idea about the scale: New York City (8M people) government employs 250,000 people (though to be fair, I have no idea who is included in this total) [2]. EC seems to be doing something very right. They offer very good working condition…
There is a tough competition for these civil servant jobs Because they are massively, massively corrupt. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_co... "For nine consecutive years the EU court of auditors has refused to sign off the budget. The numbers are huge. The annual EC budget is around ¤100 billion (£65 billion). The auditors cannot clear 95 per cent of that. We simply cannot tell what is happ…
Do you really believe that they could get away with 95% fraudulent spending? That nobody would notice 95 billion Euro corruption?
Or to put it another way, if this is true, it means that they are able to run real EC functions with just 5 billion Euro budget. That would quite efficient indeed.