I'd be curious to see a breakdown by age. I can imagine a lot of people under 35 whose experience with capitalism was the great financial crises, the housing crises, and the continued eroding of "safe" jobs. Not to mention the meaninglessness that comes with wage labor. It's no wonder that people increasingly have a less favorable view of capitalism and a more favorable view of an alternate system.
I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.
What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?
Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.
So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:
- electrify everything, including industrial processes
- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification
- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation
- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere
It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.
I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.
I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.
Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.
> What does "working on climate change" look like?
There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).
>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)
Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."
I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.
Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.
Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.
There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.
Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.
Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.
"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.
While I more or less agree with your assessment, capitalism won't solve the problem of negative externalities like CO2 emissions unless private actors are provided incentives by public actors like governments. Tesla has done a lot to reduce CO2 emissions from personal vehicles, but they wouldn't be where they are today without loans from the DOE or tax credits on electric vehicles.
I think this could largely be an issue with public or VC/PE funded companies. There's plenty of private companies of small/mid size that make plenty of money but don't feel a need to grow excessively. You could think of the local plumbing company, or a small boutique consulting firm. They want to grow, but there's a natural barrier that's hard to cross without becoming a very large company and changing the nature of the company that the owner may be enjoying.
I have always wondered how that would apply to software companies though. If you make something that works really well and everyone wants to buy it, you could grow fairly large financially without needing a ton of people if you just focus on that one program that makes you successful. I imagine it's hard to not feel a need to scale up dramatically when you have millions of users/customers asking for new features.
Valve Corporation is one of such private companies, mostly known these days for its Steam game updates and store platform.
Being private didn't prevent it turning into a monopsony, ironically for the discussion, maybe because its competitors were mostly public companies (and so didn't care enough to do a good job) ?
They are not immune to walled garden issues though (SteamWorks), but maybe their private structure helped enshittification to proceed much slower ?
Why do people drag out trade schools? Sure they can make sense financially, but there's a heavy toll of working with your body instead of sitting in an office chair for work. And the numbers don't lie, college graduates make significantly more than non college grads. You might have loans, but your career trajectory can be much higher with a degree.
I'm surprised funding isn't the number 1 issue across the spectrum. It's abundantly clear the schools near me are already underfunded and also have a 100 million a year budget hole. You can complain about admin and what not, but at the end of the day class sizes are big and schools are being closed. That's a massive funding issue.
Chicago Public Schools spends $30,000 per student per year on some of the worst outcomes in all of education. It's clearly not sufficient to just "fund" education.
Naperville's school district (USD 203) 45 min west of Chicago spends ~$20k/year per student on substantially better outcomes. Why? Because, broadly speaking, you can't fix student parents and home life in the classroom (Naperville median household income is $135,772).
OK, but if you can't fix student parents and home life in the classroom, even by spending 50% more per student, then why pay 50% more per student? Is it really buying you very much?
Honest question, because I don't really know. One could argue that it's throwing money into a hole, trying to fix unfixable problems. Or one could argue that it's not fixing things, but it's doing at least some to close the gap. Does anyone have actual evidence one way or the other? A controlled experiment, or something?
For whatever reason, spending money on schools seems to be more palatable to lawmakers than some other things that might have a better outcome. For example, something like school lunches, which have a huge benefit [0] is under fire from certain politicians [1], even though these programs have near universal appeal. It's a similar story for the child tax credit.
You're not wrong, at all. This is the hard conversation to have. What would it take to improve outcomes? How much spending would it take? To me, it appears we are not willing to fix the overarching system, by which I mean support systems for parents for children 0-18. We don't want to pay for pre-k. We don't want to pay for daycare. We don't want to pay for quality K-12 education (over 1000 US school districts have moved to a 4 day week in an attempt to retain teachers). In some states, we're even unwilling to pay for student lunches. Instead, society as a whole wants to spend as little as possible to get able bodied workers and taxpayers out of the pipeline, while treating early education as babysitting so parents can be productive workers. It also wants to outlaw reproductive healthcare that leads to these outcomes, but does not care about the outcomes.
If you want my hot take, the solution is to drive as much funding as possible into family planning. This is where the dollars are most effective. This quickly shrinks the funnel of unwanted children on a go forward basis, allowing for the focus of resources on the remaining pipeline of children to be nurtured and developed by, hopefully, welcoming and resourced parents. There will be second order effects of course (see rapid total fertility rate decline across the world), but I believe we can all agree that suffering reduction for all involved is a worthy cause to pursue.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/preventing-unplanned-preg... ("While the controversies persist, most people agree that empowering women to have only the children they want has positive benefits for everyone in the form of better pregnancy outcomes, improved child well-being, more opportunities for women and their partners, reductions in costs to governments, and lower abortion rates.")
I think the point is that $/student is not a great metric. You could spend $500K/student, have world-class teachers, and still not improve their home life or how much their parents value/support their kids' education. Without parental engagement, you're not going to move the needle on outcomes.
Agreed, but who is going to say "no amount of reasonable spending is going to materially improve outcomes because parents and systemic socioeconomic issues are the problem" though? Not a lot of appetite for that conversation. Easier to say "fund schools more" because that problem feels tractable.
Wealth and income inequality, as well as societal support for parents [1] [2], are important components in any fix of this situation when discussing "resourcing". My comment should not be read as "only the well off should have children." That was not the idea I intended to communicate, and I agree it is distasteful. I believe there is plenty of work to do already simply ensuring folks who don't want kids are empowered to not have them [3] [4] [5] [6], I leave the other problems mentioned in this comment to others to triage and action. Good luck to those folks, I don't envy that book of work; it's going to take decades to fix.
Three things about that stat (you'll get varying numbers for it, by the way, from different sources):
* First, obviously, it's an average (you get it by simply dividing the total budget by the total number of enrolled students) across the entirety of Chicago, which is a huge city with schools that have wildly different challenges.
* It's risen sharply in the last few years as CPS has attempted interventions of varying credibility --- for instance, by drastically expanding the number of school counselors. So it's not really accurate to say that CPS has tried the experiment of spending $30k/student and arrived at this outcome; the jury isn't yet out on it. More than $10k of the "per student cost" probably falls into that bucket.
* Something like 15% of this expense is pension. That's bad, but it's not really a policy lever CPS has to play with, either.
I went to CPS k-12. One important thing to note is that CPS is absolutely full of amazing schools, its just that its full of utterly garbage ones too. Now, as for that data, it exists because a lot of the kids cant read at all when they enter. To CPS's credit they do pretty decently taking all these kids who are far behind and brining them almost to grade level, but its just hard for me to say thats a huge accomplishment when tons of kids are still so far behind.
That's a pretty important confounding factor, don't you think? Might that change the way one should interpret the data - knowing that kids weren't starting at a level playing field, but in fact playing catch-up from the beginning?
> To CPS's credit they do pretty decently taking all these kids who are far behind and brining them almost to grade level, but its just hard for me to say thats a huge accomplishment when tons of kids are still so far behind.
What precisely do you expect a school district to do? If kids are behind, it's going to take more time and effort to get them up to speed and there are only so many hours in a day; only so many days in a year; only so many years before the kids leave at 18. Sounds like you expect a miracle, and I don't think any other district could do what you're expecting either.
CPS does a pretty damn good job, even by your own account.
My biggest problem with CPS is that a quarter of the highschoolers in the district opted out for charter schools, the vast majority of them poor. This happened because parents realized that many schools in CPS are incapable of proving their kid with a decent learning environment. Tbh I don t really think theres much CPS can do about that since I mostly blame parenting, but I think its a huge problem that a quarter of families here just noped the fuck out of the public school system.
The high schools are definitely where CPS has major issues I agree that the elementary schools are on the right track.
My mother was a teacher at my public high school and sent me to the public schools where I grew up. She knew the schools were bad -- they're ranked deep in the bottom half of Massachusetts -- and always would say something to the extent of "but how would it look for a public school teacher to send their kids to private school?". Well, I sort of wish she had? If the schools are a mess and you know it directly from experience, to do otherwise is pretty ridiculous. We have to be honest with reality.
I'm no fan of teachers unions, but this factoid doesn't actually tell us much. The head of CTU wouldn't even theoretically need to be a teacher in order to advocate effectively for their constituents.
In Chicago, sending your kids to Catholic school is hardly an indictment of the system. It's a very Catholic city. I went to Catholic primary school despite the local CPS K-8 probably being better (and despite my mom teaching there).
She's taking heat for it, obviously, but the heat is motivated: the CTU is intensely political, and has enemies. I'm not a fan. But my point stands: it doesn't really say anything about CPS policy that the head of CTU isn't a CPS customer.
I think at least the head of the group that represents public school teachers could find a single public school worthy of her own children. But apparently not
I'm not sure what you mean. There are obviously CPS schools with exceptional outcomes. I don't think anyone seriously believes that you can't do better than diocesan schools anywhere in CPS. This reads more like a dunk than analysis.
Yeah, that is particularly egregious but I have a friend who worked for years in the education bureaucracy and specifically moved to a particular neighborhood for the schools. It's slightly more subtle but the same indictment.
American schools are some of the best-funded per capita in the world. There are always budget "shortfalls" and demands for more money because you can always spend more money. That doesn't mean you're getting better results. Some of the best funded schools in the country are getting some of the worst outcomes (e.g., Baltimore.)
Most of the money is just wasted. The biggest factor is home life. It totally dominates. The second-biggest is classroom size and teacher salaries. That's mostly ignored as we engage in increasing technological interventions (hand every kid in iPad) and cripple teacher independence and authority via administrative policy.
Because Finland learned the best way of teaching - getting parents involved a LOT more.
You can fund the schools $1bn per student, but since the child spends only about 40% of their annual awake time at school - you can only do so much.
The more parental involvement, the better the outcome. A single parent that works 2 jobs and doesn't look after their kid's education will result in poor outcome no matter what.
The article says it depends on your party affiliation. democrats tend to think funding is the biggest issue. republicans are caught up in reactive culture war nonsense. basically all of American politics at the moment...
Being caught up in "reactive nonsense" is an oxymoron. By definition you're saying they're reacting to something else, so they're not the ones pushing it.
Public school by me gets more funding per child than the private school tuition. And the building Ng maintenance was just done using a bond measure. Yet it has 90%+ not passing tests.
LOL on a tenth the funding my non-US school created way better outcomes. US education funding is hopelessly inflated. It's the students who suck and no matter how much you spend on the teachers, the students won't stop sucking.
The cars have adapted to hit people better though, at least for a given size of car. See Euro NCAP pedestrian test. Cars have softer front ends, and they even pop up on impact to give a softer landing for the pedestrian. Also, automatic emergency braking systems.
Automatic brakes, driver warning systems, better medicine to treat you if you do get hit. Less alcoholism and drunk driving. Radial tires, led headlamps, automatic windshield wipers, daytime running lights, ABS, airbags, hell I think a lot of cars didn't even have seatbelts standard back when some of these were set.
I think when people think of the ideal urban environment, they're thinking 3-6 story mixed use buildings close to the street with tree lined streets. People have an idea of miles of single use suburbs because that's the prevailing model. I'd say almost all urbanists don't want everything to be like downtown.
It is definitely a major problem that the US has so much strictly residential zoning in most suburbs. This zoning may allow schools, and possibly churches, but often nothing else.
Allowing for small amounts of light commercial (cafés, small grocery stores, etc) to be sprinkled in would actually immensely improve things. Having a store within a few suburban blocks (perhaps 5-10 minutes walk, less with a bike) would obviously be helpful. But in many suburbs that is pretty rare. You may get the occasional small cluster of commercial zoning near main access roads, but often not placed to be sensible reachable by anything but car for nearby residences.
This is even technically achievable with strictly single use zoning if planned as part of a development, specifically zoning small areas for such businesses, strategically placed so as to be easily reachable from the residences without needing cars. But we often just don't do that. Even when there are rules requiring new developments to include some percentage of commercial space, developers tend to clump that near the entrance roads, potentially quite far from many residences.
Admittedly it is understandable that people are wary of having commercial spaces in the middle of residential clusters, unless the roads are carefully laid out such that they won't cause significant traffic on the residential streets. This generally means they are along specialized through streets (which have limited access to the residential areas, to make routes that cut though residential streets unappealing to through traffic), but that very same limited access also means most residences cannot easily reach those areas without cars. This can be avoided with smart layout, pedestrian/bike only paths to these areas, etc., but I just don't see that nearly as often as it should happen.
This is exactly what I was referring to. The sad part is that once an area is zoned solely residential and built up, even if the zoning is changed, it is very hard to bring in the light commercial establishments because they just don't fit.
