[HN Gopher] Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
___________________________________________________________________
Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
Author : dash2
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-06-11 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wyclif.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wyclif.substack.com)
| jugg1es wrote:
| "a third of social science papers have zero citations" ... wtf?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| As I've speculated elsewhere on this discussion, it's write-
| only journals that exist to appease accreditation audits.
| nohuck13 wrote:
| We're walking into the middle of an argument that's been going on
| for a while here.
|
| "Economic(s) imperialism" is the tendency of economists to write
| papers topics outside traditional economics. While the people in
| (say) the sociology department seem to have to confine themselves
| to sociology.
|
| As Tyler Cowen writes on Marginal Revolution [1] quoted by Kevin
| Munger in the piece this piece is responding to:
|
| " - Mammograms and Mortality: How has the Evidence Evolved?
|
| - Surviving a Mass Shooting
|
| - Representation is Not Sufficient for Selecting Gender Diversity
|
| - Back to School: The Effect of School Visits During COVID-19 on
| COVID-19 Transmission
|
| - The Public Health Effects of Legalizing Marijuana
|
| Those are all new NBER working papers, issued today. To be clear,
| I do not intend this list as criticism, either of these papers or
| of the NBER (for one thing, I have not read them). But surely it
| is worth pointing out that something has changed. If you think
| economists should be doing these papers, does that translate into
| a relatively low opinion of the quantitative standards in those
| fields proper? Or maybe the economists are better at spotting
| interesting questions and seeing the work through? Yes or no? How
| exactly should we imagine the (possible) comparative advantage of
| economists with these topics? I mean these as genuine questions,
| not snarky ones. I have never been a per se opponent of economic
| imperialism. "
|
| [1]
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/04/wo...
| ad8e wrote:
| I like imperialism a lot, from harder to softer sciences. It
| can represent a frustration that people are missing something
| very obvious, reflecting an underlying ignorance that is
| farcical or embarrassing. For example, Hardy the mathematician
| is best known not for his brilliant work in number theory or
| analysis, but for one paper in 1908 which taught biologists how
| to multiply numbers together. Ergo, we can presume that
| biologists prior to 1908 did not know how to multiply numbers,
| and that multiplication introduced a shining light on the
| field. [1]
|
| A more concrete example is that anthropology was introduced to
| statistics in the 1960s. [2] Before that, many papers use
| storytelling as their main evidence. They reflect the thesis
| the author wants to present, and experiments were not available
| to anthropologists as a tool. This makes it hard to tell which
| papers should be taken seriously and which should not. You
| either trust the author or don't; you can't analyze his
| procedure. So papers cannot build on each other, and progress
| is halting. The quality of anthropology papers rises
| substantially after 1970, thanks to experimental methods.
| Scientific imperialism has turned modern anthropology into one
| of the paragons of social science, with enormously interesting
| results today.
|
| Here's a fun experience in which you can discover this
| phenomenon for yourself. Synthetic reverbs rely on delay lines,
| and the question is, how to choose the delay lengths? Every
| reverb engineer has spent impressive amounts of time manually
| tuning their delay lengths in random ways, then listening to
| the result, then tuning some more. The task is to choose a set
| of N real numbers such that their lattice points (linear
| combinations with nonnegative integral coefficients) are
| maximally separated in the best sense you can. For example, if
| N=2, then 1 and 5/7 would be unsuitable, because 1 x 5 = 5/7 x
| 7 = 5, and exact overlaps are poorly separated. Irrational
| numbers do better, because they at least never have exact
| matches. Manual tuning is hard because tweaking one number to
| erase an overlap will introduce a different overlap.
|
| You, the non-mathematical reader, can now solve this problem by
| navigating to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_constant,
| reading the definition of "quadratic irrationality", and
| picking square roots of squarefree integers as your solution.
| Congratulations, in 5 minutes, you solved most of a major open
| problem, on which reverb engineers have spent 10000 hours and
| made no progress. First person to write a paper gets credit.
| [3]
|
| There's a general malaise in reverb engineers regarding
| mathematics and science. Some people already have the
| background information to solve the problem, as they know 1.618
| is the solution for N=2 (which leads to Hurwitz's theorem, then
| Markov constants). But then they advocate for 1.618^x for N>=3,
| which means they are doing cargo cult mysticism around magical
| numbers, rather than actual mathematics. Note that powers of
| 1.618 are linear combinations of smaller powers, so their
| answer is the worst possible.
|
| [1] I'm just joking. But only partially joking. Hardy-Weinberg
| principle. [2]
| https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.an.14....
| [3] I'm joking for real this time. Writing a paper will do
| nothing.
| dash2 wrote:
| I think this will entertain you:
| https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-
| research...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| One of my favorite podcasts is ostensibly economics, but I've
| noticed that the topics tend to really be only tangentially
| related to economics. What they really seem to be are
| statisticians, not economists particularly.
| nohuck13 wrote:
| Ooo, would you share? Wild guess: "More Or Less"?
| paulpauper wrote:
| >In the abstract this might be a difficult question to answer,
| but today, it's really not. Guys, a third of social science
| papers have zero citations. Let's not kid ourselves: most of this
| work might as well never have been written; it affects nothing;
| nobody even cares enough to disagree. Meanwhile, two thirds of
| social psychology experiments fail to replicate. Does economics
| do better? Well, sure, yes, some experimental economists are
| quietly smug because 60% of their results replicated. Whoopee!
| Only 40% of what we produce is misleading, i.e. literally
| harmful!
|
| >We aren't starving for quantity: we're drowning in garbage. If
| we have higher standards than other social science disciplines,
| good, they should be higher still.
|
| I dunno why this article went so viral. The author makes
| elementary reasoning errors. Top journals have very high
| standards in terms of adhering to academic rigor,
| competitiveness, statistical analysis, etc. Whether or not it
| replicates or is cited is secondary. The journal has little way
| of predicting how often something will be cited or how well it
| will replicate; their main focus is publishing papers that meet
| academic standards and are of interest to subscribers and the
| scope of the journal...
|
| IMHO, it is irrelevant if we are 'drowning in garbage'..the more
| important metric is, are there more diamonds, rather than
| lamenting about the size of the rough.
| gmac wrote:
| _it is probably a step backward that submitted articles no longer
| get anonymized in many journals. The logic behind this was that
| reviewers would know, or look up, the author anyway. In effect
| this was giving in to corruption._
|
| I completely agree that this is a terrible change. Of course,
| reviewers are often able to work out whose work something is.
| Even before widespread preprints on the web, citations were often
| a giveaway.
|
| But plenty of reviewers won't do it, on principle, and even for
| those that do, that fact that they're obviously not meant to know
| is a very strong signal that they shouldn't take it into account
| in their decision.
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| To me it's pretty obvious that the social "sciences" are science
| in name only. Operationally they are more akin to astrology or
| numerology than physics. They serve a social function of allowing
| people to believe that we know more about the world, that we have
| have more predictive power, than we do. They let our governments
| pretend that they are more powerful and effective than they
| really are. It's _frightening_ to think that e.g. the Fed
| (Federal Reserve) doesn 't know what they are doing (
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/greenspan-admits-flaw-to-c... )
| so we all pretend that that they do despite clear evidence that
| they do not. (Taleb's "Black Swan" effect: we immediately forget
| that we were so sure black swans don't exist, and carry on as if
| we had known all along.)
|
| I have no idea what, if anything, to do about this.
| [deleted]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's interesting how much of Substack has quickly become an
| opinion page for a bubble of "rationalist", pseudo-libertarian
| thinkers. It is almost a mono-culture at this point: the
| obligatory links to Tyler Cowen, the obligatory mention of race
| and biology, and footnotes just for the aesthetic.
|
| > Trade-offs between the quality of research, and the welfare of
| social scientists, should always be resolved in favour of
| research quality.
|
| This seems non-obvious to me and quite glib for someone who is
| allegedly a social scientist (which is basically applied
| ethics/utilitarianism).
| jmeister wrote:
| The "bubble" you speak of find themselves censored out of the
| bigger bubble that is mainstream media/academia.
|
| You're free to look away.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > You're free to look away.
|
| I read plenty of these blogs, the idea that they only have a
| home at substack is absurd, and there's plenty of people
| regularly saying more controversial things in the
| conservative media.
|
| Tyler Cowen, etc. are hardly censored.
|
| I just find them _boring_.
| greenail wrote:
| Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early
| 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being
| a big push to get more people into college with the assumption
| that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a
| notion that everyone should go to college and this has been
| buttressed with government support but what if this idea is
| wrong? What if the incentives created lots of university
| departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was
| actually benefitting society. This may show up as lots of
| superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even
| based on the scientific method. Maybe the incentives focused
| universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in
| the cash made readily available through government subsidies
| targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees. Have we
| reached a state of elite-overproduction?
| fallingknife wrote:
| Any major that ends in "studies"
| tartoran wrote:
| > Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
|
| I don't see that as a bad thing. Of course they won't be elites
| when overproduced but its output, when looking at the big
| picture, will be positive. If you're so with your view why stop
| at universities then? Why educate the masses at all? Why not
| have classes of educated and uneducated people?
| kapuasuite wrote:
| There are tradeoffs, though - the resources that are poured
| into higher education are resources that cannot be spent on
| other vital things.
| Aunche wrote:
| I think the better question is why exactly are we pouring
| so many resources into higher education? Most of my classes
| were taught by lecturers making at best $80 an hour
| teaching a class of a hundred. The real work is done by the
| TAs who make at best $15 an hour. Where is the rest of the
| money going to?
| ajmadesc wrote:
| "Administration", "outreach", "development"
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes but there are tradeoffs everywhere. I'd look at the big
| picture instead. Are we better off than, say, 100 years
| ago?
| kapuasuite wrote:
| Yes, there are tradeoffs anywhere - which means we should
| rationally assess what we're putting into education and
| whether at least some of those resources can be put to
| better use in other ways.
| tartoran wrote:
| Too much optimization reminds me of what happens when
| removing all slack from supply chains: when it fails it
| takes down the whole system. I'd leave some
| inefficiencies here and there, we're human after all. Of
| course, I'm not talking about gross inefficiencies. But
| are there any? By what measure?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Like giving a $200k/yr tech worker $6k in stimmy checks?
|
| There are broad benefits to having an educated society,
| this rhetoric about 'elite overproduction' has
| classist/snobbish undertones, in my view.
| kapuasuite wrote:
| Tax dollars that go to universities for one reason or
| another are tax dollars that cannot be spent on
| healthcare - tax dollars that can't be collected from tax
| exempt institutions (like almost all universities) are
| tax dollars that can't be spent on maintaining
| infrastructure. The possibilities are endless. The
| questions isn't whether or not education is "good",
| because it obviously is, it's whether the level of
| resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect
| elsewhere, which is probably true.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > which is probably true.
|
| Hm, is it? My guess is that government spending on
| college probably is probably a net positive investment in
| terms of revenue for the govt due to downstream growth,
| likely also lowers the cost to do other things in
| industry.
|
| There is extensive evidence that further public spending
| on healthcare does not have a size-able impact on
| outcomes, unfortunately. [0]
|
| > the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to
| better effect elsewhere
|
| But why the focus on education? Why not increase, say,
| inheritance taxation and then use it to fund those
| additional things? Couldn't we make better use of the
| resources our society devotes towards making sure that
| the kids of rich parents are also rich?
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_
| Experime... You really can't beat social science research
| like this and the followup in 2010.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| A podcast I listen to[0] had a throwaway line that's stuck with
| me. I'm not sure if it's actually correct, this isn't an area
| I'm an expert in, but it's interesting nonetheless.
|
| > Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses
| that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or
| whatever.
|
| If that's true, wouldn't it explain why colleges do things that
| don't make sense for education?
|
| 0 - Well There's Your Problem Podcast, Episode 71
| rmah wrote:
| The idea that real estate speculation being the baseline goal
| of universities is funny but doubtful.
|
| Instead, consider that survival is almost always one of the
| main goals of any larger organization. That happens for a
| variety of personal, individual reasons: job security,
| reputation halos, personal networks, etc. But in the end, it
| translates into organizations taking actions simply to
| survive. And since one of the best ways to survive is to
| grow, taking actions to grow.
|
| This is true for everything from charities that take care of
| the poor and sick to for-profit corporations to government
| agencies. And, of course, universities.
|
| So why does a university spend a ton of money on renovating
| their football stadium? Simple, it makes alums happier (more
| donations), it looks better on televised games (enhanced
| reputation), etc. It helps the university survive.
| ajmadesc wrote:
| > The idea that real estate speculation being the baseline
| goal of universities is funny but doubtful
|
| Drexel university is spearheading the gentrification of
| west Philadelphia.
|
| They paid tens of millions for a dirty old tire shop.
|
| They require the first three years of your degree to be
| spent in overpriced uni owned housing.
|
| The chancellor makes one of the highest salaries in the us.
|
| That's the only example I can really think of
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think the type of person who tends to browse HN has a
| problem with latching on to phrases or ideas that "sound
| interesting" and then never doing any further research. I
| think it's where a lot of the rhetoric around 'elite
| overproduction' comes from.
|
| > Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses
| that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or
| whatever.
|
| Why would that incentivize colleges to enroll more students?
| How does college as real estate speculation business work?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You can disagree with the podcast without attacking me.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm attacking myself as much as you, I have this
| problematic tendency to latch onto interesting sounding
| ideas.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains
| find compression irresistible, to the point of self-
| dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly
| collapsed reality is encountered.
|
| even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided
| neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is
| biased toward obligate compression.
| v-erne wrote:
| I believe saying that our mental models are mere models
| and not reality would be a bit shorter, profound and
| usefull :)
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| maybe, but I try to avoid (or at least subordinate)
| phasing that implies a dualist distinction between the
| real and the mental. even the 'merest' of mental models
| is also part of reality, right?
|
| such contextualization does indeed impair portability...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a perfect example of incentives being wrong. If you're a
| huge corporation with land, property, and a tradition of
| relying on bequests and bloated fees, the reward function
| will optimise for more land, more property, more bequests,
| and more fees.
|
| The nominal purpose - education - becomes more of a marketing
| exercise than the primary concern.
| legulere wrote:
| Access to universities was even less based on merit than it is
| today I think. Also I think that we're actually hindering
| progress by trying to limit research to topics that have direct
| use following out of it.
| rednerrus wrote:
| We should be pouring the money we pour into universities into
| high schools. We should set the bar higher for what we expect
| of high school students. We should create vocational programs
| so that kids come out of high school with skills that help to
| improve society. If you want to improve society, give kids a
| sense that they can make a difference and be functional members
| of society.
|
| We should also be pouring money into early childhood
| development. We should setup community centers for
| expecting/new mothers. Women can go to these community centers
| for support, education, and to be with other mothers.
| notJim wrote:
| > Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go
| to college and this has been buttressed with government support
| but what if this idea is wrong?
|
| I think the problem with this line of thinking is that since
| the US is a highly-developed country, we depend on having a
| well-educated, highly productive workforce in order to maintain
| our economy. The US is no longer a place where you have large
| numbers of people working in huge low-tech factories, for
| example, because the productivity of those factories does not
| afford the living standards of a highly-developed country.
| Instead, developed countries perform R & D and need highly-
| skilled workforces. To the extent we have manufacturing, it
| tends to be highly-automated advanced processes. Again,
| automation is enabling high worker productivity here.
|
| It seems like the issue may be misallocation of the education
| being produced, not too much education in general.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| Universities producing MBA grads, still produce nothing of
| value. At least liberal arts challenges you to think.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever
| its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an
| innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle).
|
| Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be
| considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the
| plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it
| should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not a new
| phenomenon, and they have sometimes been much more destructive
| than some of today's examples. Race science, phrenology,
| medicine in the time of bloodletting and others have been
| respected academic pursuits created by elites, not the result
| of anything like over-education.
| alexashka wrote:
| > People have an innate right to...
|
| No, they don't.
| closeparen wrote:
| Everyone "can handle" arbitrarily much busywork. Whether the
| lights are on or anything is happening intellectually is
| another story. I would like to see every American teenager
| have that experience, but my experience was that in high
| school, the very top of the class caught glimmers of it
| occasionally.
|
| I think when you send "everyone" to college, it's going to be
| no different for them than high school was for "everyone"
| (and for the smart kids in their less-special subjects): chug
| through the tedium with as little of your brain as possible,
| while away the hours and the months until you get to
| something you actually care about. That's a reasonable way to
| warehouse teenagers while their parents are at work, but
| 18-22 year olds could plausibly be doing something else.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > People have an innate right to be as educated as they want
| (and can handle)
|
| What year did that right begin?
| octopoc wrote:
| But does education need to look like universities and
| colleges? Education used to look (for most people) like
| apprenticeships, which is more like a tutoring approach
| without study of anything unnecessary to your trade.
|
| Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination
| of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to
| broaden horizons).
| gknoy wrote:
| How would you study history, philosophy, or ethics, then?
|
| Those classes covered things which I have never encountered
| in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on
| how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like
| the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one
| studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has
| an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.
| eunoia wrote:
| "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for
| $1.50 in late fees at the public library"
|
| Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not
| for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire
| this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university
| structure.
|
| Alternatively: everyone should read the classics.
| closeparen wrote:
| Missing:
|
| - Someone who knows those books to explain and lead
| discussions about them.
|
| - A place to hold those meetings.
|
| - Some kind of accountability for actually doing the
| readings, writing the papers, and internalizing some
| understanding.
|
| That costs a little more than $1.50 but it has no right
| to cost $150k. It's not like graduate student wages are
| expensive.
| wahern wrote:
| Interestingly, my neighborhood public library in the
| Outer Richmond district of San Francisco offers free
| Great Books-style discussion groups. I never attended a
| session but always noticed the schedule on the bulletin
| board. Googling it just now, it's apparently led by
| members of the Great Books Council of San Francisco
| (https://www.greatbooksncal.org/).
|
| When my children get old enough I hope to attend with
| them. I had the great fortune to experience a Great Books
| program for 2-3 years in high school (a pet project of a
| teacher who fought tooth and nail to fund that class) and
| consider it a formative experience.
| eunoia wrote:
| Yeah to be clear I don't mean to say a liberal arts
| education is literally only worth $1.50. I personally
| place immense value on learning.
|
| Just to point out that much like working at a high level
| in tech, a degree is actually not a hard pre-requisite to
| having an understanding of the humanities, ethics, etc.
|
| Also just like STEM, many will absolutely benefit from
| the structure of a university setting.
|
| I just couldn't resist the Good Will Hunting quote.
| leto_ii wrote:
| This position strikes me as unjustifiably elitist, reminiscent
| perhaps of Allan Bloom's _The Closing of the American Mind_.
|
| > lots of university departments that were superfluous,
| producing nothing that was actually benefitting society
|
| Who's to decide precisely what does and doesn't benefit
| society? More so, how can you decide in advance which line of
| inquiry will prove fruitful and which won't? Shouldn't you cast
| a broad net, especially when it comes to academia?
|
| > government subsidies targeting those who could not complete
| STEM degrees
|
| This, I'm sure, varies greatly between countries. But why do
| you think there's such a clear hierarchy of academic topics?
| It's quite dismissive of entire fields to assume that the
| people who are involved with them are simply STEM drop-outs.
|
| As a side note I would also have to say that lumping together
| science, engineering and mathematics doesn't make much sense to
| me - this observation is not targeted at the parent, it's just
| a general peeve I have.
|
| > Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
|
| What would the alternative be? Back to the aristocracy, or to
| something like the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque?
| grahamburger wrote:
| This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we
| (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much
| better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to
| college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out
| what to do about University.
|
| (Saying this as someone who never finished college/university,
| largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't
| make it work.)
| billytetrud wrote:
| Elementary and middle school is far more important than high
| school. The earlier you go, the more important it is.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If we actually wanted to improve education in our schools,
| we would just finish desegregating them.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| How do we accomplish that, short of randomizing which
| school students are assigned to and then dealing with the
| transportation headache to make it happen? Schools
| continue to be segregated because of underlying
| socioeconomic realities; changing that is how we
| desegregate the schools, I don't know how we could
| feasibly reverse that causality.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think randomization plus weighting for geographic
| distance could work. The issue with busing was never the
| actual busing, and there are plenty of places (like my
| hometown) where parents send their kids further out to
| ensure that they attend a school that is majority their
| race rather than the local neighborhood school.
|
| I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully
| desegregated their schools with a similar approach that
| kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan
| with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95%
| approval income under $75k).
|
| In another place I lived, the top public magnet school
| was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally
| refused to send their kids there, but would send their
| kids to a different magnet that was further away.
|
| The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often
| overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason
| that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of
| parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to
| send their kids to a school where they would be in the
| racial minority.
|
| Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which
| represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That
| represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed
| socioeconomic reality.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where
| parents send their kids further out to ensure that they
| attend a school that is majority their race rather than
| the local neighborhood school.
|
| Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state,
| AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands
| of the parents, with some narrow exceptions.
|
| I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state
| is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and
| 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair
| to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the
| students are largely the same race.
| billytetrud wrote:
| We definitely need more choice in schools. Parents should
| be able to decide where there children go to school
| independently of where they live.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| What do we do when choice conflicts? Say, if a black
| family wants to send their kid to local school in a
| predominately white neighborhood, and there is a limited
| capacity?
| billytetrud wrote:
| Lottery
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My guess is this approach would also be desegregating.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Glad we agree : )
| grahamburger wrote:
| It seems like the solution most institutions land on for
| this kind of thing is just a first come first serve sign
| up list. Kids who attended the school the previous year,
| and kids who have siblings currently attending the
| school, get first priority for open slots. The rest of
| the slots are first come first serve. This is how my
| kid's school, a charter school, works.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Sign-up lists self select for parents who are most
| motivated to get the best school, which has the risk of
| maintaining roughly positive correlation with the
| parent's socioeconomic status.
| billytetrud wrote:
| There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of
| segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to
| go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I
| think calling the second "finishing" the first is
| misleading.
|
| However, there is a huge problem in school funding. The
| fact that school funding is primarily local means that
| poor neighborhoods get bad schools. That is a huge
| problem. We definitely should make funding of schools
| more egalitarian. Eliminating local funding in favor of
| state funding would do a lot for the public school system
| I think. But I also think giving parents more choice in
| schooling would also be a big win.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > However, there is a huge problem in school funding.
|
| School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you
| might have been led to believe - federal & state funding
| usually makes up for the differences in property tax
| funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad
| schools.
|
| > There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of
| segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to
| go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I
| think calling the second "finishing" the first is
| misleading.
|
| The distinction you're making is between de jure
| segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are
| constitutional violations.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools.
|
| Source? I'm surprised to hear that.
|
| > The distinction you're making is between de jure
| segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are
| constitutional violations.
|
| I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black
| people to live near each other and go to schools with
| each other. People segregate themselves socially all the
| time, for better or worse, and it has nothing to do with
| the constitution. It would be incredibly dubious to
| suggest that forcing people to integrate socially would
| be an appropriate government action - especially if done
| over a long period of time.
| dnautics wrote:
| https://www.asumag.com/research/top-10s/article/21126924/
| amo...
|
| In the top spending districts there are two extremely
| good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii)
| are generally well known as terrible.
|
| LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both
| terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on
| there
|
| Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so
| much. The common factor between these districts is
| rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on
| a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on
| lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)...
|
| Eliminating rubber rooms is _finally_ coming to NYC:
| Tarsul wrote:
| I read an interview[1] with the general secretary of German
| trade and he lamented that in Germany for many, many years
| the consensus was that more and more people had to study.
| Thias was also because the OECD said so, not just German
| politicans. He says we don't need so many people who go to
| university, and I wholeheartedly agree. And this is coming
| from Germany where the education system is a lot more
| forgiving than in the US/UK etc. (in that you don't need to
| study STEM to earn good money, and studies are cheap) But I
| think in the coming years there will be a lot of rethinking
| about these things.
|
| [1]https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-
| den-k...
| bluedino wrote:
| >> focus on making high school much much better
|
| Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid
| we can, for 'fairness'
| TheTrotters wrote:
| I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for
| politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers.
|
| If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass
| them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then
| you'd end up with clear racial disparities.
|
| I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the
| cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But,
| based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian
| Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with
| blacks at the bottom.
|
| It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative
| attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the
| problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not
| quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like
| everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards
| enough everyone will meet them.
|
| It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to
| change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address
| them, not pretend that they don't exist and that
| incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
| ihsw wrote:
| Self-selection has already lead to increased racial
| segregation, Asian and white students are already
| increasingly being put into private or charter schools.
|
| If we want to improve academic performance of students in
| predominantly black neighborhoods then we should
| aggressively remove disruptive students from classrooms
| regardless of race. An entire classroom is held back by a
| handful of students intent on raising hell and it does
| more harm towards ambitious young black boys and girls
| than any policies intent on solving "disparities."
|
| Disparities in outcome is not evidence of discrimination.
| baq wrote:
| Not passing a kid sets them back 10 years of life (yeah I
| made up that number but it's what I'd expect to happen when
| you end up in a negative feedback loop like this).
| Education doesn't have a binary outcome.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go
| to college and this has been buttressed with government support
| but what if this idea is wrong?
|
| > What if the incentives created lots of university departments
| that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually
| benefitting society.
|
| I would say that those are two completely independent issues,
| that just look alike because of policy.
|
| Now, about the actual subject, I'm not sure. The knowledge one
| gets at higher education brings a lot of possibilities too.
| It's not all signaling. An educated society is supposed to
| create wealth by itself, and this seems to happen on practice.
| I would look elsewhere for the origins of our current economic
| stagnation.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Agree with your larger point but:
|
| > This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers
| and journals many not even based on the scientific method.
|
| seems very STEM-centric. It sounds like you're saying academia
| outside of the realm of science is useless which I completely
| disagree with.
| burnished wrote:
| nah, this is a huge problem in STEM fields
| fallingknife wrote:
| I think the problem is that non-STEM classes have been dumbed
| down to the point where they just aren't on the same level.
| You see lots of failed science majors in English class, but
| no failed English majors in differential equations class. But
| why not? Writing is hard, and if you had to be as good of a
| writer to be an English major as you do at math to be a math
| major, lots of people would fail out of that too. But they
| don't because those classes are easy. I've never actually
| heard anybody argue that the subject matter isn't worthy.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > You see lots of failed science majors in English class,
| but no failed English majors in differential equations
| class.
|
| I always find this funny to read, because that's more or
| less what happened to me. I was originally very interested
| in philosophy and the classics, but I just couldn't keep up
| with the reading and paper assignments. I'm not a bad
| writer in general, but I'm terrible at writing academic
| papers. I picked CS/math because I was tired of staring at
| a blank word document and slowly panicking for a week. with
| CS/math, I could just sit down and start making progress
| immediately on a problem set or coding project.
|
| I see the point of what you're saying though. there's a
| limit to how rigorous an english class can practically be.
| the difference between bad and mediocre writing is mostly
| mechanics. but what's the difference between good and great
| writing? I doubt the "experts" could even agree, let alone
| come up with a rubric for grading papers.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| A distinction should be drawn between "this entire field is
| useless" and "the current discussions in this field are
| wankery". IMO, STEMlordery stems from students surmising--
| correctly or not--that their humanities professor's
| publications are wankery and then falsely assuming that the
| entire field is hokey junk.
|
| Accrediting boards who demand proof that all departments
| produce relevant scholarly work are also to blame for the
| situation, as it leads to a proliferation of write-only
| journals that will publish any word salad that can be
| convincingly proven to be in dialogue with contemporary
| scholarship.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I have observed that purported STEMlordery is more of myth
| than reality, or a caricature created by the media. I have
| found that on many stem-centric communities that people
| employed in STEM have great respect for the humanities,
| such as history, philosophy, or writing. Look at how many
| non-STEM articles get voted to the top of hacker news, such
| as articles about literature or philosophy.
| [deleted]
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Undergraduate underclassmen and high school students are
| where you find most real live STEM lords. STEM
| professionals may be ignorant of the humanities, but they
| are (for the vast majority) no longer condescendingly
| dismissive enough to be true STEM lords.
| dash2 wrote:
| Personally I love literature and art, my bedroom is lined
| with poetry books in several languages, and for that very
| reason, I dislike much of the modern humanities, with
| their pious, dreary approach to these beautiful and
| important things.
| greenail wrote:
| I'm suggesting that we may be overinvesting in some parts of
| academia outside the realm of science and that publishing in
| a journal may not be the best way to measure how to tune
| those investments. Sokal's work in 1996 was interesting and
| "Sokal Squared" seems relevant to the topic. A journal's
| ability to filter out parody seems like a good test for
| evaluating the overall quality of investments in a field.
| deertick1 wrote:
| Not OP, but would like to say : I don't think science outside
| of stem is useless, but it is fundamentally different and
| fundentally less reliable/reproducible. In terms of
| reliability and rigor, it seems to go about like : Math ->
| computer science -> physics/chemistry -> biology ->
| everything else.
|
| As you continue, you must ignore more independent variables
| to conduct an experiment. By the time you get to social
| sciences where you're doing self reported survey studies on
| your sensation of gender acceptance, you cant really call it
| science anymore.
|
| Not saying its useless, but ir absolutely should not be
| treated with the same level of reverence and trust as the
| harder sciences. People act like the government should be
| making policy decisions based on psychology thesis papers, or
| that id you disagree with some purple haired feminism
| professor, you are a science "denier."
|
| Ultimately this is a function of poor education, and hivemind
| thinking caused by our inundation with news and various
| media.
|
| But yeah, my point is STEM (in its colloquial usage) is
| really all that can be considered science and people tend to
| mistake any academic paper or public persona for science or a
| scientist respectively, and that just isn't so.
|
| Sorry for the rant.
| dash2 wrote:
| Article author here. I take your point, but you know
| there's more to social science than studies of feelings
| about gender acceptance, right? Here's a randomized
| controlled trial about how to distribute bednets for
| malaria: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sitefiles/f
| ile/bednet.... Getting this right potentially saves
| thousands of lives. It's a rigorous experiment, so in terms
| of causality you could argue it's considerably tighter and
| less theory-dependent than e.g. earth sciences.
|
| There are really two issues here which get conflated.
| First, social life is complex, people aren't like atoms,
| and all our explanations are gross simplifications. Second,
| yes, there's a lot of bullshit social science out there.
| But there's also some real social science, and it can
| address important issues.
| albatruss wrote:
| Something important to understand is that the hard sciences
| are more rigorous, but that's because they're easier to
| model than what the social sciences have to deal with. The
| naming is confusing.
| bregma wrote:
| But everyone knows you can only get rich by working in STEM.
| Have you ever heard of a musician worth millions? Or a
| writer? Or an actor? Or an athlete? Fashion designer?
| Game_Ender wrote:
| What percentage of writers, athletes, actors, or musicians
| are worth millions? Compare that to the number of STEM
| graduates.
|
| It's not that you cannot, it't about the likelihood.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The humanities also include law, politics, and economics
| [1].
|
| What percentage of laywers, politicians, and economists
| are worth more than STEM graduates?
|
| How much relative power does each sector have?
|
| [1] Technically a social science, certainly not a
| hardcore STEM subject.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Economics is not in the humanities, political science is
| not in the humanities, and law is not typically
| considered in the humanities.
|
| It kinda sounds like you don't know what the humanities
| are.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities#Law_and_politics
|
| Just to be clear, you're both kind of right, but I take
| objection to your overly aggressive stance on this where
| you rebut and accuse without providing any sort of
| evidence.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences are
| usually lumped together as "not-STEM".
| fallingknife wrote:
| Have you ever heard of one any one of those who anybody
| gave a shit where they went or if they went to school?
| (Other than athletes, of course, but for them school is no
| more than an unpaid apprenticeship forced on them by
| monopolistic leagues.)
| paulpauper wrote:
| You have to look at relative frequency, median wages. A
| competent coder can made a solid 6 figures.But it requires
| top .001% of music or athletic ability to make money as a
| pro. Just being very good at football may be enough to
| letter but not to join the NFL. Same for writing or acting.
| World famous actors or writers can make tens of millions of
| dollars at their craft, but some unknown guy who join #10
| at Facebook , Airbnb, or coinbase can easily be worth as
| much or more.
| Frost1x wrote:
| There's a lot of non-scientific papers produced from the
| sciences, they're just heavily laced with jargon, complexity,
| or intentionally limited scope to make publication viable and
| hide the shortcuts behind them.
|
| When I was young I believed things outside of the sciences
| and math were useless. As I've grown older, I realize the
| tremendous value of the arts, humanities, and other studies.
| They're just not as obviously functional or as easily
| quantifiable and much of this work is difficult. These
| studies help us think as humans and not machines. Yes, they
| can be gamed by disingenuous and often do get low rewards in
| society, but they're not inherently useless disciplines. The
| other studies provide much value to what makes life worth
| living, IMO.
|
| Literature, art, the human state. I love science, don't get
| me wrong, but I also enjoy the rest.
| mariodiana wrote:
| My understanding of the history (in the United States) is this.
| College used to be almost exclusively for the rich. Now, while
| there were always students who went to college as a stepping
| stone to the further study of medicine, law, or theology, there
| were plenty of rich kids -- "legacies," they were called -- who
| went only because they were from the "right kind" of families,
| and went only to network with others from the same social
| circles.
|
| This is where the idea of a "Gentleman's C" comes from. You
| see, their lives were already pretty well set out. You made
| connections, graduated, and then went to work for your father
| or uncle, or your father or uncle's firm; or, married the
| daughter of a well-to-do family and went to work for your
| father-in-law.
|
| But there has long been an egalitarian and meritocratic strain
| in the United States, and after WWII, as a way of saying thank
| you to those who had saved the world from Hitler, the GI Bill
| was started. This was a great success.
|
| The GI Bill made it possible for older, generally more mature,
| and generally more motivated individuals to attend college.
| Interestingly, the "gentlemen" students, the anecdote goes,
| used to complain about these people as "DAB's": Damn Average
| Busters. Those on the GI Bill weren't satisfied with grades of
| C (whether real or given with a wink).
|
| Now, here I break from the history to my own opinion. The
| former GI's were a special cohort. To identify them as merely
| middle and working class people benefiting from college, and
| from there to imagine that all (or nearly all) middle and
| working class young people could benefit from college just does
| not follow.
|
| But, whether or not one follows from the other, it's a
| _wonderful_ thing for a politician to promise, and just the
| kind of thing people want to believe. Promising to send the
| children of your constituents to trade school just doesn 't
| have the same ring to it. So, it became _college for
| everybody._
|
| From here, I can pick up with what you're saying, and add that
| what you're saying jibes with what Allan Bloom said, way back
| in 1987, with his _Closing of the American Mind._ Bloom argued
| that middle class people are far more practical, economically
| -- not having well-to-do fathers, uncles, and father-in-laws to
| fall back on; and because of that, colleges had to retool to
| become far more practical. In other words, many of the new
| degrees -- at least at first -- were closer to the aims of
| trade schools than traditional liberal arts curriculums. It
| seems like things were like that for a while.
|
| Where I think it gets worse is that government money has
| created a bubble in higher education, a bubble that has created
| degrees which I term _luxury_ degrees. These degrees are
| neither traditional college curriculums or glorified trade
| school syllabi. These are the so-called "navel gazing" or
| "basket weaving" courses. Maybe, if you were rich and lacked
| the ability to take over the family business, your rich parents
| might send you off to study one of these luxury majors, and
| that might make some kind of sense. Maybe you'd still meet a
| nice girl or boy, and then fall back on your trust fund. In any
| case, it would be their money and their business; and, in any
| case, how much of that sort of thing would there be? But
| spending taxpayer money to fund these courses of study and
| produce these degree holders is ludicrous. It is gross
| malinvestment, plain and simple.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
|
| I'm very curious about this line of thought, as it seems to
| have become very popular in the blogospher over the past year
| or two.
|
| What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"? I'm
| curious what the implications of this line of thought are.
|
| Generally, I think more education is better than less - I am
| wrong to think that?
|
| My personal hypothesis is that this fear of elite
| overproduction is being generated by existing professionals who
| are afraid an increasing supply of educated workers reducing
| their negotiating position/compensation.
| distribot wrote:
| I think this elite notion is over-simplified and inaccurate.
| It suggests that some significant portion of students are at
| these kind of "walled garden", elite institutions where
| students become disconnected from the struggles of "real
| people".
|
| 80% of students go to a school where over half of applicants
| are accepted. Yes, these schools definitely are centers of,
| frankly, liberal idealism and free-spiritedness. But I think
| that would be the case in any system where young people are
| pretty unsupervised and have lots of time to read and study
| (or party). In my experience though, they aren't factories
| for elites in the common sense of that word. They're just a
| reflection of how you need much more training to be
| competitive in the job market today.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvar.
| ..
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Not OP. My interpretation is that society doesn't really
| need as many university degrees as we are producing. Not
| because of competition but because not all jobs require a
| college degree, and ideally we should be increasing the pay
| of those jobs.
|
| It might be better to adopt a model similar to the German
| or Swiss, in which people follow different tracks depending
| on their skills and interests, and not everyone goes to
| college, instead a lot of people go to trades schools. Of
| course for that to work in the US a huge societal change
| would need to happen first or alongside.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs.
|
| The pay of which jobs? The ones that require a college
| degree or not.
|
| > Not because of competition but because not all jobs
| require a college degree
|
| And are the number and prospects of these jobs increasing
| or decreasing?
|
| I also find this whole conflation of having a college
| degree and being an elite silly. The problem seems much
| less to be that we have too many educated people and
| seems much more that wealth is concentrated by the small
| subset of wealthy people who "got here first" and then
| get the compounding returns.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"?_
|
| Underemployment, leading to...
|
| Long term student debts, leading to...
|
| Fewer people starting families
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Long term student debts
|
| I agree that this is a problem, and to the extent that we
| make it too easy for 18 year olds to take out massive
| amounts of debt, that is bad.
|
| But I feel like many of the people arguing about "elite
| overproduction" would be opposed to something like making
| all public schools free or just free community college.
| leetcrew wrote:
| part of "elite overproduction" (or even the crux, as I
| understand it), is giving more degrees than jobs actually
| exist for those degrees. from this perspective, it
| doesn't make any sense to spend more tax dollars on even
| more degrees that we (allegedly) don't need. a college
| degree will stop being a "ticket to the middle-class" (as
| my alma mater described it) somewhere before everyone has
| one.
|
| that's the economic side of the argument anyway. I
| partially agree with what you said further up the chain,
| that education is a value unto itself. but it depends on
| what kind of education is actually being obtained. imo, a
| four year program that focuses on one main area and
| requires a smattering of intro-level courses in others
| isn't worth that much if you don't end up getting a job
| related to that area of focus. I guess if the major was
| interesting to you, that's something, but was it worth
| four to six years of your life?
| taneq wrote:
| > Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go
| to college and this has been buttressed with government support
| but what if this idea is wrong?
|
| The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and
| not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of
| their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees.
|
| > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more
| "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily
| available through government subsidies targeting those who
| could not complete STEM degrees.
|
| Nail, head, yep.
| eigenket wrote:
| Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have
| a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I
| absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that
| on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM
| subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really
| difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a
| philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd
| probably fail.
|
| Viewing non-stem stubjects as a lesser course for "those who
| could not complete STEM degrees" is simultaneously idiotic
| and elitist, which is pretty impressive.
|
| I also completely disagree with the naive assumption that
| non-vocational degrees are "useless degrees", there is a big
| difference between something being "useless" and you,
| personally, not understanding the use.
| scroot wrote:
| There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to
| do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse
| this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in
| the terms of the economics profession.
|
| Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend
| a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the
| past would be so much poorer without people willing to
| engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists
| argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more
| difficult than ANE studies.
| taneq wrote:
| Well yeah, it's nice to be independently wealthy and
| spend your life studying whatever takes your fancy, and
| if you can afford to do so then good on you.
| scroot wrote:
| I think the point is that everyone should have such an
| opportunity without having to be independently wealthy in
| the first place.
| taneq wrote:
| I think we agree on the fact that it's nice to have nice
| things, and it'd be nice of the government paid for more
| nice things?
| eigenket wrote:
| Similarly a lot of stuff that falls under the STEM
| umbrella is completely useless. I have spent months and
| years of my life working on difficult math problems a
| bunch of which will probably never have any real-world
| application.
| taneq wrote:
| Congrats on getting a job as a mathematical physicist!
| Among my cohort (which includes a few maths/physics double
| degrees) that makes you something of a unicorn.
|
| If you take a moment to revisit my post, you'll notice I
| never mentioned difficulty. I'm well aware that some non-
| STEM degrees are incredibly complex and I make no claim to
| any ability in those areas for myself.
|
| I also never made any value judgement about courses being
| "greater" or "lesser". That's a subjective call and ymmv.
|
| I absolutely don't discount all non-STEM degrees as being
| 'useless' and there's plenty of insight and wisdom to be
| had from people with a deep understanding of history, or
| comparative culture, or any number of fields.
|
| And yet I still feel it's a grave disservice to tell the
| average high school student that they should go to
| university for the sake of it, even if that means
| specializing in glazing techniques in 14th century French
| pottery or whatever other navel-gazing pursuit, while your
| insane U.S. tuition fees are extracted from them.
| eigenket wrote:
| Well I don't have a permanent job, I'm an adjunct, and
| not based in the US so maybe I experience a slightly
| different job market to your cohort.
|
| I was mainly focusing on the line "targeting those who
| could not complete STEM degrees", which seems to heavily
| imply that the non-stem options are a lesser choice for
| those for whom stem is too difficult.
| Ekaros wrote:
| We have been long past point where just a degree is enough.
| What the degree is in is also important. And here even some
| hard-science paths like physics can be limiting.
| 13415 wrote:
| Can you give me an exact definition of "benefitting society"?
| That sounds a lot like the "real value" of things that salon
| communists talk about all the time. Count me a skeptic.
| Opinions about what benefits society differ vastly, and I'm not
| sure there could be a compelling "objective benefits" theory in
| this area. Society is what people make of it and how they and
| elected representatives shape the future.
| eyeundersand wrote:
| > We should stop trying to pay for good work, and instead, try to
| hire people who like doing good work and damn the pay. This is in
| line with the traditional folk wisdom of Cambridge: "hire good
| people and let them get on with it".
|
| > Lastly, to make the economists less greedy, they should be paid
| less.
|
| Ha, I needed a good chuckle in the morning. I'll be damned if I
| accept a job where they except high-quality work for pennies.
| From my conversations, my colleagues share this sentiment. Also,
| comparing a (severely underpaid for the work they do) post-doc's
| salary to global income and saying they're doing fine is a bit
| disingenuous. -phd candidate in applied econ.
| ggggtez wrote:
| > to make economists less greedy they should be paid less
|
| How about we tax billionaires, and pay our academics real
| wages?
|
| I was an academic once, and I made near minimum wage. It's
| insane to set up a reward structure that punishes thinking
| people and rewards the randomness of birth.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm very much in favor of taxing inheritance at much higher
| levels, but I think there is a debate to be had whether the
| marginal dollar is best spent on social science research or
| academia writ large.
| ggggtez wrote:
| I've seen those arguments against free college (what if
| people get a useless degree in literature!). I think it's
| bogus.
|
| I want to live in a society of thoughtful intelligent
| people. I pretty much don't care what you study. I don't
| care if it has immediate industrial impact like STEM.
| Higher education is tied to all sorts of benefits,
| including lower crime rate, better health outcomes...
|
| I think if someone wants to attend college, and they've got
| the aptitude, then I want that person to do it. I don't
| want them prevented from learning because of cost.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Looking over the list of top billionaires, well under half
| appear to have been passive beneficiaries of birth
| randomness.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Is this supposed to be reassuring?
|
| From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that
| rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me
| any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually
| the thing we want to reward in our tax code.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's not clear that the tax code is rewarding that in a
| significant way. You might argue it's failing to punish
| it enough for your taste, which is a fine discussion to
| have.
|
| When I look over the top 10 here, 9/10 are on that list
| from being overwhelmingly self-made and I want what 8 of
| those have created to exist. (I think lots of other
| people self-evidently want LVMH to exist, even though I
| don't care either way. Same with L'Oreal though that's
| also the one that's not self-made.)
|
| https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
| ganzuul wrote:
| I think he may have discovered socialism but the word is
| anathema to his reality.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Yeah this reads like some nonsense wankery, and subscribed to
| nonsense ideas like "Great Men of History", eg in the part
| about preferring the output of sexual harassers over the output
| of many more less problematic researchers.
|
| There's a reason the saying is "Science progresses one death at
| a time", and not "Science progresses by being sexual-harassment
| apologists"
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I expect you'll be downvoted for this comment, as most of HN
| appears also to be engrossed by "Great Men" theories.
| seibelj wrote:
| The moment any economic argument is made that relies on human
| altruism is the moment it should be rejected. Some people may
| act altruistic some of the time, but in aggregate people refuse
| to be scammed to help the "greater good".
| dash2 wrote:
| Are you sure? You know about public goods experiments with
| punishment, right?
| eyeundersand wrote:
| Curiously, most econ folks seem to miss this. More likely:
| they conveniently ignore it when it suits their ends or when
| writing opinionated pieces after they've "made it".
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Huh? Can you point to examples? I can think of a few, but I
| am unaware of any field or approach that has this tendency
| _less_ than Economics.
| p_j_w wrote:
| There are an unfortunate amount of people out there who think
| everyone else should do their jobs out of love of the work and
| not worry about pay. I've found they rarely hold themselves to
| this standard, though, and try to find excuses for why it
| shouldn't apply to them. You hear people who aren't teachers
| say this about teachers quite often, especially when they're
| complaining about the yearly education budget.
| dash2 wrote:
| Article author here. I do indeed work in an economics
| department. I admit that my sentiment was a bit tongue-in-
| cheek, because the chance of the discipline supporting this
| idea seems... low. But I do worry about the effect of very
| high salaries for "big shots", and I take seriously the risk
| that we attract people with the wrong mindset.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Many humanities faculty will complain that they're paid lower
| salaries than faculty in other areas, yet they'll say
| students should major in their (low paying and hard to find a
| job) fields because education is not about money.
| rajacombinator wrote:
| It'll make more sense when you start thinking of the economics
| profession as a priesthood.
| bsedlm wrote:
| >The research industry
|
| I see this as an oxymoron, it's the kind of scenario that makes
| for bad science such that no amount of incentinves,
| discincentives, and/or "metrics" can fix.
|
| From "research industry" I get the idea that they want
| industrial-scale scientific production. Industrial activities are
| all about roughly predictable outcomes and mostly steady
| productivity output.
|
| On the other hand scientific research seeking real novelty is---
| because of the novelty, very unpredictable. So when I read
| "research industry" I think they refer to "industrial novelty-
| seeking".
|
| I can imagine somebody saying "we need 10 completely, gound-
| breaking scientific research articles peer-reviewed every quarter
| for publication!"
| erikerikson wrote:
| It seems you are thinking of industry as one might use the term
| "heavy industry" or "industrial manufacturing". It is also
| valid to speak of people being industrious or laboring for
| purpose in a similar manner. For example laboring with their
| attention and experiments on better understanding the world we
| live in. In other words, the research industry.
|
| Sadly, would you imagine being said is a bit of what the
| incentives appear to demand. The "publish or perish" phrase is
| just one popular reference to that.
| helloSam43 wrote:
| perish? or is this some theory of leaving academia for the
| cloth?
| erikerikson wrote:
| Indeed :D
| toyyodas82727 wrote:
| It's too bad that we don't have research positions similar
| to parish priest postings.
|
| We could assign enthusiastic researchers to underserved
| primary/secondary school teaching positions relevant to
| their field. In exchange, the researchers could get an
| extra stipend and a classroom to use as off-hours lab
| space.
|
| I guess the hard part would be setting up a good network of
| remote advisors to help everyone stay on track, without
| enabling the usual toxic power dynamics of academia.
| [deleted]
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