As long as people are allowed to vote in the US, we have an incentive to ensure they are all well educated.
Surely a large part of this problem that the article doesn't mention is that college is too fucking expensive. And an obvious solution to that is to tax rich people and use that to fund universities so that students don't have to go so far in debt in order to become productive members of society.
It's crazy how many problems today boil down to "a tiny fraction of elites are hoarding all the wealth" and yet we seem to assume the solution of "tax them and use that money to benefit others" is simply impossible.
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink." Inexpensive tertiary education means that more people go through the motions of being educated, à la high school, for an additional four years because "that's what they're supposed to do" and then emerge none the better for it.
A system of heavily subsidized post-secondary vocational schools, like what Germany has, seems like a better path.
The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso. The tough pill to swallow, if we are to follow in e.g. Sweden's footsteps, is that you need to tax the middle class a lot more if you want the government to provide more services.
By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE. Why are we contemplating building a new patio and switching to Whole Foods when we're not even on pace to pay off the house??
> The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso.
I disagree, and I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument.
My metric for whether a tax system is progressive enough is pretty simple: is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
Some amount of inequality is healthy. The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
> By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE.
Good point! It would be really great if the government wasn't funneling billions into the coffers of defense companies by starting nonsense wars.
Cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations and going into greater debt for it is a two-handed gift to the rich: they pay less taxes and they make money directly from the government by being paid interest when they loan money to the government.
I shouldn't have to tell you that "but it's a conservative think tank" is merely ad hominem. If you think Jessica Riedl is misrepresenting the facts, I and many others would appreciate your elaborating. I'm afraid you haven't even read it.
Nonetheless, our ideas about social justice clearly differ. You abhor inequality in itself, I abhor poverty. So perhaps it won't make sense to argue the facts.
I do want to point out also that while it would certainly be good to eliminate unnecessary "defense" spend, it won't be close to enough. By far the biggest sources of deficit are entitlements: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. No one seriously proposes cutting taxes on the wealthy. It might be nice for the sake of fairness (you'd disagree) but unfortunately we will need a painful period of increased tax on everyone paired with serious cost-cutting if we intend to balance the budget... without just printing more dollars, which is basically another tax.
> I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument
Do you only ingest ideas from places that you're already inclined to believe? How do you get challenges to your beliefs?
> is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
> Some amount of inequality is healthy.
What amount of inequality is just right, then? On one hand you suggest that we should redistribute to lower inequality, but on the other you seem to see some kind of beneficial role, or at least a neutral role, of inequality in a society.
> The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
Countries as diverse as Sweden, the Philippines, and Nigeria all have worse inequality in wealth than the US[0]. On the other end, countries like Iceland, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan have similarly low wealth inequality. I might posit that wealth inequality doesn't even make the top 10 of what makes a health society that's nice to live in.
You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone else to educate them in way that conflicts with your interests.
Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.
But if we care about people being educated enough to vote, a high school education is enough. Or at least, what high school was 50 years ago was enough.
If you care about voting, fix primary and secondary education. The universities aren't the main problem.
> One man's eduction is another man's indoctrination
This is pretty silly. Any amount of new knowledge tends to make the brain more critical. The only real exception is rote memorization without application.
> What kind of content do you think would trigger that?
The kind of political propaganda that leads to the US reelecting a convicted rapist whose selects another rapist to lead the Department of Defense who then renames it to the Department of War and, true to the name, starts unilaterally attacking other countries.
If trump getting elected was due to AI, I wonder why every nation isn't electing similarly awful politicians? Hungary just elected a new president who seems a lot better than his predecessor, and a lot better than trump. The Canadian prime minister is genuinely one of the best politicians I've seen in my lifetime! The list goes on and on.
No blaming trump on anything other than the people who voted for him is like blaming school shootings on anything other than guns:a popular American passtime, and complete and utter nonsense.
Bear with me this digression into freedom of speech, before addressing your point.
The utilitarian argument for freedom of speech and expression in America finds its roots in the Marketplace of ideas.
Verification is frankly, the task of all our markets - to set up incentives for being right.
With no government interference in the exchange of ideas, citizens would be better able to discuss ideas, including those not popular with the establishment.
Since no one has a monopoly on truth, it would be through this competition, and fair traffic society would be better able to understand truth and thrive.
That worked, when we had newspapers that were funded, where the media landscape was not consolidated, and where we didn’t have an abundance of technology that overwhelmed our ability to verify and be informed.
Today, through entirely private forces, we can monopolize, fracture and shape the traffic in our marketplace of ideas.
Trump is very much the ideal candidate to ride the media environment. The right side of the political spectrum is simply a far more efficient at providing a wrestling style experience for its audience. Its consolidated media environment largely pays lip service to journalistic standards, and sells a coordinated set of ideas for its audience.
The Fox News effect is a case in point, and this was from the 90s.
This media model has been co-opted globally, with every party and government now providing patronage to media houses to keep them afloat, and to build their own narratives.
The citizen who engages in these media markets simply does not enter a vibrant competitive market anymore.
You are lucky. Some people, when laid off, struggle with all of the stress of not knowing how to pay bills that you do and on top of that struggle with a sense of lost self worth and other psychological pain.
I feel like a good chunk of that loss of self worth is caused by the struggle to pay bills? In other words, the psychological pain is a symptom of the economic pain.
I don’t think you can make much progress against the psychological pain unless you deal with the economic pain, and once you deal with the economic pain, the rest will go away.
I've heard plenty of anecdotes of people well off financially getting psychologically distressed after a layoff so I don't think it's purely financial.
Sure, I am certain there are some people who feel that way.
The person I was directly responding to was talking about people who faced both money worries and identity struggles. I think a good portion of those people are likely mostly being affected by the financial worries, and won't feel better until that is resolved.
There's another aspect this article doesn't mention that I think about a lot.
I've been on the same team for over a decade, as have many of my teammates. I've probably spent more time in the same room with some of these people than I have my wife and kids. We've shared hundreds of meals together, built things together, struggled together, traveled together, laughed, grieved.
In all meaningful senses of the word, they are my tribe.
And if one of us gets laid off, we're effectively forcibly ejected from the tribe by a complete stranger.
Yes, we can socialize outside of work too, and we do sometimes. But there is simply no replacement for the kind of connection you get from working on the same project together for hours a day every day.
A lot of times you realize that talking shop made much of your connection, or continuing the in-jokes from work. When you're out of the loop, it's no longer the same.
I love talking to people about their work, especially if it's a field I know nothing about. People spend eight hours a day doing something, they have a lot of knowledge about it.
When it's a job that's opaque to me, I like asking "What's a typical day for you like at work?"
Only about 1-in-10 people have even heard of my company (AMD). Most that have are businesspeople/investors/tech workers. That is slowly changing but it is difficult to explain what segment of the economy I work in.
About 30% of Canada are in the public sector. There aren't enough jobs in the private sector, so we hire many people to reduce the unemployment rate.
Asking such a person "what's a typical day for you like at work?" would be "writing/approving briefing notes/decks". Generally, you'd ask what ministry they're in and go over the org chart. You can spend about 20 minutes figuring out the exact agency/ministry/division they work in relative to yours, then gossip about name changes or re-orgs.
Unfortunately, that only works if you're also a public sector worker.
Also, youth unemployment rate in Canada is about 15% right now. Even bringing up the subject of jobs makes people in my age group uncomfortable since you're forcing them to admit they're unemployed. It's too risky a question.
When you look around or start talking to older folks you discover that retirement is often a traumatic transition, even when entered voluntarily. The loss of structure, frequent social interaction, and a sense of meaning can be really difficult. There are a lot of people who retire and die not long after because they sort of stop thriving in the absence of those things. It's particularly bad for men who relied on their career both for their self worth and their social interaction.
> I feel like browser extension marketplaces are a failed experiment.
People rightly criticize all of the problems around vendor-lock-in and rent-seeking with platform app stores, but this is a good example that they do indeed provide some value in terms of filtering out malware.
The degree to which they are successful at that and add enough value to overcome the downsides is an open question. But it's clear that in a world where everyone is running hundreds of pieces of software that have auto-update functionality built in and unfettered access to CPU power and the Internet, uncontrolled app stores a honeypot for malicious actors.
This also ignores that mobile phones are now being used as an effective botnet. Just gotta get some poor devs to include your SDK and off you go.
AI companies make use of these botnets quite a bit as well. Why don't we hear more about it? because it is really really really hard to inspect what is actually happening on your phone. This post actually kinda disproves that the closed rent seeking model is better in any way.
> People rightly criticize all of the problems around vendor-lock-in and rent-seeking with platform app stores, but this is a good example that they do indeed provide some value in terms of filtering out malware.
But browser extension marketplaces aren't a free-for-all; they're exactly like the platform app stores in all the bad ways.
Whatever value they provide is completely and totally irrelevant compared to giving Microsoft, Google, and Apple the unilateral discretion to end any software developer's career, or any software development business, by locking them out of deploying software with no recourse. Nobody has a problem with optional value-add stores, but all three have or are moving towards having complete control of software distribution on the hardware platforms used by billions of people.
Over here it's a combination of having a tradition of historical reconstruction and fairly strict gun laws, that don't extend to other weapons.
Case in point: you can open-carry a sword, unless you're displaying violent intent. Concealed carry of any obviously dangerous blade is prohibited, which spurred speculation on what to do with, e.g. a bread knife.
Consensus in the community is that you need to hold a loaf of bread in the other hand.
Imagine choosing to be an expert in something that you think is a coin flip away from making the world worse.
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