I expect them to talk about such things, because those issues are controversial.
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Of course. But unions are a specific remedy for a specific class of persons (lorry drivers, doctors, dockers, and so on) whereas the UBI is a general remedy that applies to all.
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But 14% of the US population is about fifty million so an extra cost of 73 million USD is trivial in comparison.
I think education everywhere is strange, until you can read and write so that you can comprehend and explain complex ideas all the rest of schooling is pointless yet we insist on age based curricula that inevitably leave people only half educated before they move on to the next topic.
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That’s because the US educational system was designed to create compliant factory workers, not educated citizens.
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Unions don’t just benefit the trades they represent, they also benefit everyone by creating a higher floor for income. When the labor market as a whole has a high degree of union penetration, say 30+%, the higher prevailing wage set by the unions bleeds into non-union sectors.
For a simplified example of how this works, an accountant at a union construction firm will make more than one at a non-union construction firm, because the wage floor at the union company is greater. Now, if enough of the accountants in the accountant labor market as a whole are tied to union construction firms, the higher wages of the construction firm accountants become the prevailing wage for accountants in the labor pool in general.
Also, theoretically any class of workers can unionize. The reason that white-collar jobs do not unionize had more to do with the mechanics of their relationship to the capital class than anything else. In general, white collar jobs are in service to capital, while blue collar jobs physically produce it.
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I don’t know… I’m still not convinced. I’m not sure it solves the core problems of capitalism in the long run.
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I think that was true a half century ago but is no longer. Most working class jobs are in the service sector not manufacturing, and that trend has no end in sight. The tenuous link between productivity and blue collar wages has broken because there was really never any reason for the owners who spent capital to increase productivity to share profits with workers who produced more with the more expensive machines. As far as I can tell, fear of the Reds was the only reason to begin with. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, just what I see.
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The link goes to a PDF which says they got the information from “The National institute for Literacy” which doesn’t seem to exist. There is a “National Assessment of Adult Literacy” which works with the National Center for Education Statistics. However their last assessment appears to have been in 2003. At that time, they estimated that the “Percent Lacking Basic Prose Literacy Skills” in Wayne County Michigan, which includes Detroit, is 12%. (https://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/StateEstimates.aspx)
This is Fake News.
According to the NCES, Detroit illiteracy is only about 12%. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/StateEstimates.aspx
And it gets worse. The linked report is from 2011, when it was extensively reported by Huffington Post and others. NOBODY seems to have bothered going through and checking the original statistics: a ten-minute (max) job. No wonder Americans are so ignorant.
A trivially brief search will demonstrate you are wrong. What’s interesting is that the actual number of illiterate citizens of Detroit has been about the same since the 1960s, but the literate people have moved out in greater numbers.
“Seventy-three percent of fourth-graders in Detroit read Below Basic on NAEP 2015, three percentage points worse than two years earlier, while 56 percent of eighth-graders were functionally illiterate, two percentage points worse than in 2013.”
“More recently in 2015, the National Assessment of Education Progress determined 93 percent of Detroit’s eighth-graders were not proficient in reading, according to the brief.”
Even worse, DPS has been accused of preventing 33% of 4th-graders form even being tested, claiming one-third of their 4th-graders are in special education and thus exempt.
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Regardless of the statistics for School Children underperforming their grad level, the article here is about all Detroit not being able to “read.”
Speaking of literacy skills, here’s the first result from Google.
https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies/national-institute-for-literacy
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Follow the links. They dead end. Nor is there any indication, besides the supposed Detroit Regional Workforce, that they ever published any literacy statistics.
I hope you are not, for your own sake. It feels awful.
I wonder if well-being is relevant regarding the societies need for the ability of everyone to read and write. This cultural technique is supposed to be the basis for nearly every aspect of it, not only but quite importantly and for economical purposes. This seems so very un-American to the continental European in me, I don’t even know on which aspect to focus.
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My wife just took a course (Read America or some such name) to help the functionally illiterate become less so. They said most are ESL but not everyone.
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Illiteracy is a huge problem, but not only in the USA and it is interesting to look at the larger picture. For example, amongst developed countries, Germany and France fare worse than the USA despite having a functioning and free school system. Netherlands, with a school system similar to Germany and (I think) at least as many immigrants, fares better than the USA (and much better than Germany).
So it is not simple and there is no simple correlation between illiteracy and private schools or immigration.
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My personal experience with children who fare poorly at school was that they were not interested in actually learning, but about the social recognition of having a diploma. Let me explain. A diploma is a social construct. For example a doctor’s (physician) diploma means that your neighbours and patients will see you as a person of authority in medical matters. Being recongnised as that kind of person is what the poor schoolers associate with the diploma.
Basically, for them, a doctor’s diploma is a llicense to wear a white blouse and stethoscope, to earn enough to own a house large enough to host a practice and drive a large car around. It is not something where you learn how to find out if a patient with chest pains has a simple cold, coronary disease or a lung cancer. They don’t see that aspect at all.
It is the same with literacy or mathematics: they are not interested with learning to read or count, they are interested in being on stage with the others when the diplomas are handed out.
Interestingly, in my experience, this attitude will be found in all social classes. Maybe a bit less amongst the working poor, because their peers have less respect for a diploma. I am always surprised how many people at the higher end of the social scale have none of the skills they are supposed to have. But they have one skill: the ability to convince others that they are entitled to the social status they enjoy.
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Totem.
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My daughter also went to a great charter which was founded by teachers who affiliated with the local university to create a school where all the learning was inquiry based - no text books. The kids were taught to be little scientists about everything. I loved her school.
However, my brother has served in administration for several schools that had supposedly great educational ideas behind them (which is why he was involved; he has a long career of fostering alternative education) which were run by rich people who were bilking the system. One school hired him to be its principal, ignoring the wee problem (which he failed to research himself) that he could not legally serve as an administrator in Texas due to licencing issues. The school never opened.
It’s been really sad to see him getting screwed over because of the unscrupulous behavior of business people who are inserting themselves into education.
America, here’s a clue, business is a good model for business. It’s not a good model for government.
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