This is a bit different than if I began snidely attacking you in vague and cryptic ways. If you are going to present unorthodox, discredited ideas as “obvious” and “adult”, be an adult and expect to be called out on it.
you quoted from my comment:
Those subjects in mainstream economics are real things. The talking points you listed are indeed naive misconceptions, and addressed as such throughout post-secondary economics courses (both macro and micro). If you want to disprove the existence of major elements of econ, you will have to get in line behind a long line of folks who haven’t made very good cases, either.
Even if you won the struggle to control what is “real” economic you’d have to retconn the entire field, burning entire libraries of books, and you would have to censor and persecute (in a literal, cops-and-prison kind of way) anyone who attempted to vary from the paleo-classical line when they noticed that it doesn’t work in the real world.
I wrote that list to prompt discussion about real economic issues brought up by Piketty. I’m not going to get into a shouting match with you over what is or is not real economics. You listed, in a snide way, economic “facts” which aren’t. Your support is entirely assertion based on a body of work best described as folkloric. My support is every econ program for a second-tier or better uni program, as well as most third-tier (and etc.-tier) universities which don’t depend too much on libertarian billionaires to fund their econ programs. Their support is hundreds of very smart people of the past several hundred years from (increasingly) diverse backgrounds and very diverse ideologies. Including libertarians. Fortunately for those libertarians, they are dead and are spared the facepalm.
There isn’t much to really shout about, anyway. The paleo-classical economics you presented is even more demonstrably false than the sometimes shaky or misapplied regular economics we bumble around with right now. And to be honest, I made that list for the benefit of others reading the thread to research and think about on their own.
I have a tuition waiver, but my fees at school have gone from about $400 or so to over a grand in about 5 years, in GA and we have to pay those no matter what.
I’m not sure because there are a handful of different accrediting organizations across the country. The one which has jurisdiction over CCSF has authority over California, Hawaii and some other parts of the western U.S. Last year the Department of Education concluded that this commission is itself out of compliance with several key standards for accrediting agencies (including conflicts of interest), but as of yet this hasn’t helped CCSF.
Wow. Thanks for the info. We all know about school boards being filled with agenda-riddled creationists and such, but I assumed an accrediting organization would be above politics and entirely education-based. I guess power really does corrupt, no matter how focused the “power”. Or maybe it’s that any organization has at least a few members who can be manipulated with cold hard cash.
The problem with high schools that don’t teach is because taxpayers keep saying they don’t want to pay the real cost of an education . The best high schools are the ones that cost the most.
Like schizophrenics who continually go on and off their medication, so to does funding for basic necessities go on and off.
The schizophrenic cycle is very understandable:
Take meds
Stop hearing voices.
Think “I’m cured now, no needs for meds.”
Start hearing voices.
At some point, society needs to recognize these cycles, document the feedback loops, and in good times, when we’re debating ‘well, what has education gotten us now?’ pull this out and end that debate.
But, as the cycle is constantly repeated, there’s a deeper logic to it that’s hard to escape:
“We simply do not trust the avoidance of acts (preventive care) as acceptable data”
I couldn’t follow where the second quote came from, but this relates to the “nudge” issue. The idea, if I have it right, is that society acting through the government will using preventative care, education, and other efficient interventions to “nudge” people into avoiding costly and/or unsustainable choices and lifestyles. But these inefficient choices and lifestyles make certain powerful people a lot of money (and those choices are fun for the individual), so there’s considerable push-back of both the AstroTurf variety and from the “I want my McNuggets!” crowd. But on the other hand, the people sucking the life out of people and money out of the economy have been “nudging” people since advertising was invented by the first con-artist in 83,144 BCE when a dapper wanderer made a neat living trading freshly chipped stone knives that turned red after a month due to being fresh, soft basalt rock rather than obsidian glass.
Bring up “nudge” in libertarian circles and they’ll go berserk with how cynical a ploy it is to use minimal interventions to get people to do things that are better for them in the long run. Meanwhile they giggle about how easy it is to get people hooked on a harmful or overpriced product with a clever marketing strategy and enough market power. So every few generations we are reminded that skeevy, larcenous bastards are just what they say on the label, and we should ignore them.
That’s a nice, simplistic theory, but it’s provably wrong. If you investigate, you’ll note that proponents of increased government school spending in California are always careful to compare California spending to the rest of the U.S., or compare spending as a percentage of GDP, rather than in per-pupil inflation-adjusted terms. The reason they do that is because if you actually look at the numbers, per-pupil inflation-adjusted spending has substantially increased since Prop 13 was enacted. Which leaves the awkward question of why California government schools were supposedly so good before Prop 13, and are now so bad, even though they are spending more money - a lot more money.
This is also a comfortable, simplistic theory that is provably wrong. The Washington D.C. government schools spend nearly $30,000 per student per year, and yet the system is one of the worst in the nation. Note that this is almost as much as the Sidwell Friends school, the elite private school where the President sends his children. It may come as a shock to a lot of people on this site, but the issues with American education - government and private - are far more complex and deep-rooted, and throwing money at them has simply resulted in a lot of wasted money.
Well that seems appropriate if we’re comparing school rankings between states, does it not? California ranked high among public schools when per-student spending was high, it ranks lower now that per-student spending is lower.
Where did you get $30K from? The highest estimates I’ve seen place per-pupil spending in D.C. still come in well under $20K.
Obviously spending alone doesn’t tell the whole story; a kid in a high-crime neighborhood and a broken home will need a lot more help to get the same learning outcomes as a rich kid with private tutors. A school in an upscale suburb can afford to spend more on teachers and less on security guards or anti-vandalism maintenace than a school in the ghetto. It’s also easier to attract highly qualified teachers to nice neighborhoods than ones where they might get shot on their way to work.
“Throwing money at the problem” may not be a guaranteed fix, but withholding money from schools is a pretty reliable way to ensure they fail.
And it should be obvious at this point that there is no correlation between “free” and good, and that “free” can actually be extremely expensive for everyone involved in numerous ways.
