lower the stakes
July 24, 2020 6:09 PM Subscribe
Spend More on Society and Get More for Yourself - "The coronavirus crisis demonstrates a basic truth. American individualism has made individuals unhappy and, too frequently, sick. There is another way, an economist says." (via)
Populists, plutocrats and the democracy scare - "Populism: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups." (via)
The Debt Predators - "The financial system has turned credit intermediation into a debt mint that produces assets to enrich investors but leaves households, firms, and governments struggling with unsustainable liabilities. The COVID-19 crisis makes reform more urgent than ever." (via)
Billionaire Created a Perfect Experiment by Erasing $34 Million in Student Debt - "Two recent Morehouse graduates are starting their lives in very different places."
Why do people stay poor? (via)
more :P
Bidding for houses in better school districts is perhaps the clearest case in point. As the economist Fred Hirsch wrote, “The value to me of my education depends not only on how much I have but also on how much the man ahead of me in the job line has.”also btw...
That simple observation helps to explain why parents bid vigorously for houses in more expensive neighborhoods, where better public schools almost invariably are. But that has only increased housing prices in those neighborhoods. Half of all students still attend bottom-half schools, just as before. This dynamic has made life more difficult for millions of families, even though nobody intended to cause harm.
Growing recognition that pre-pandemic spending patterns have served the country poorly portends increased support for public investment in the future. Yet when individual and collective spending incentives are deeply in conflict, mere exhortations to spend differently won’t suffice...
Fortunately, a simple, efficient remedy for the consumption arms race is at hand. Higher taxation of the country’s top 1 percent of earners (2019 family threshold: more than $475,000) would reduce high-end private consumption. And when people at the top of the income distribution spend less, the frames of reference that shape spending decisions of those just below shift accordingly, and so on, all the way down the income ladder.
Each reduction in growth of private consumption would free up resources for additional spending on public health, climate mitigation, transportation and other neglected public needs.
- The stakes of distributional conflict in the United States have grown so high that elite contestants are escalating to near civil war to protect their positions in the distribution.
- To Freud, civilization is, essentially, structured guilt. No wonder it's so stressful!
- Are white elites so drawn to antiracism and "the great awokening" because they too quietly want to tear down — or at least chill out somewhat — a system that has left them high-strung, precarious, miserable?
- It's been so long since we've had a good economy. You've got to be at least as old as I am to remember it. In a good economy business competes for people.
Populists, plutocrats and the democracy scare - "Populism: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups." (via)
The Debt Predators - "The financial system has turned credit intermediation into a debt mint that produces assets to enrich investors but leaves households, firms, and governments struggling with unsustainable liabilities. The COVID-19 crisis makes reform more urgent than ever." (via)
Billionaire Created a Perfect Experiment by Erasing $34 Million in Student Debt - "Two recent Morehouse graduates are starting their lives in very different places."
Why do people stay poor? (via)
There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes the role of economic fundamentals - for example, differences in individual traits like talent or motivation make the poor choose low productivity jobs. The other, the poverty traps view, emphasizes that access to opportunities depends on initial wealth and hence poor people have no choice but to work in low productivity jobs. We test the two views using the random allocation of an asset transfer program that gave some of the poorest women in Bangladesh access to the same job opportunities as their wealthier counterparts in the same villages. The data rejects the null of equal opportunities. Exploiting small variation in initial endowments, we estimate the transition equation and find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty. Structural estimation of an occupational choice model reveals that almost all beneficiaries are misallocated at baseline and that the gains arising from eliminating misallocation would far exceed the costs. Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.Where do profits come from?[1]
Next up, we have something that Modern Monetary Theorists are famous for focusing on —how government budget deficits can generate financial surpluses for the private sector.The Deficit Myth: A Review (via)
This is possible because governments play a distinctive role in contemporary economies. What’s unique about government budget deficits is their ability to make everyone more financially secure. U.S. government budget deficits can even provide safe assets to the rest of the world (in addition to the domestic private sector) through increasing imports. On the flipside, government budget surpluses are a drag on aggregate profits, and drain financial net-worth from the economy.
If you look at the graphic below closely, you’ll see an illustration of a point I’ve been making over and over: cash payments to households is indirect financial support to businesses. You give them money, they’ll pay their rent. You give households money, they’ll make purchases. You give households money, they’ll pay interest which becomes business profits (paying down principal is a form of household saving, a point we’ll discuss below). However, readers shouldn’t take the lesson from this that all government budget deficits do is goose profits. They can also provide more financial security to households themselves. And from my perspective, clearly should.
Capitalists, [Kalecki (1942)] wrote, disliked what we now call MMT because it weakened their power. If governments can use fiscal policy to maintain full employment, they don't need to maintain business confidence and so "this powerful controlling device loses its effectiveness":'Fed Accounts' for all — with automatic and recurring payments triggered by economic crises - "The next coronavirus relief package must fix the flaws of the first, and here's how free bank accounts for all Americans at the Federal Reserve fit into that solution."[2,3]The social function of the doctrine of "sound finance" is to make the level of employment dependent on the "state of confidence." [Capitalists'] class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view and that unemployment is an integral part of the "normal" capitalist system.It is surely no accident that the backlash against functional finance came at a time when capitalists re-asserted their power over governments. Nor is it an accident that it's happened when capitalism has shifted away from mass-market Fordism to extractive finance capital: the former requires full employment and a mass market, the latter requires cheap money instead.
The next stimulus package must extend the unemployment benefit and provide a recurring guaranteed income of $2,000 per month, create free bank accounts at the Federal Reserve — “Fed Accounts” — for every American, and supply state and local governments with ongoing cash payments and ensure that future economic crises trigger automatic payments.America Looks Hopelessly Broke. It Isn't. - "For 40 years, both the left and the right have been unnecessarily obsessed with deficits, to the detriment of the well-being of citizens."
The federal government’s job is to spend to stimulate the economy during a crisis, and we know this strategy works. Now Congress must do the same for working people and for communities across the country.
Before the pandemic, many Americans were barely making ends meet. Only four in 10 Americans had $400 in the bank to weather an emergency, millions of households were living check to check, and many were spending more than a third of their income on housing. This was an economy with historically low unemployment and soaring stock markets. The coronavirus forced its brittle underbelly to the surface.
By providing to every American a $2,000 monthly guaranteed income, America will be a more resilient nation. Monthly cash payments will ensure people can pay rent and buy food, provide the peace of mind needed to socially distance today, and better prepare everyone for the next disaster.
According to the Federal Reserve’s data, 22% of Americans are underbanked or unbanked. About 40% of the unbanked used some form of predatory service such as a check-cashing service, pawnshops, an auto title loan, payday or paycheck advance, or a tax-refund-advance product. For perspective, currency exchanges typically charge 3% to cash a government check (one that has zero chance of bouncing), 1% of a utility bill to pay that bill, and up to 400% on a payday loan.
Put another way, billions of dollars’ worth of income and future wealth is being extracted from communities because we do not treat access to banking as a public utility like water or electricity.
When it came time to disburse the CARES Act checks, millions of people had no way to receive the help. Many waited weeks. Some are still waiting. The creation of free Fed Accounts will ensure everyone has a public option for a free bank account and to receive their guaranteed income for no cost via government keystroke.
more :P
- @WardQNormal: "From the moment Reagan made that joke about how the most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help,' we've been marching straight towards this disaster. Personally, I think 'the government won't help you' is much more terrifying."
- @teasri: "This is what happens when you give money to the bottom 50%--they spend it, any which way they can. There is the clue to getting out of the stagnation trap."[4,5,6]
- @jdcmedlock: "It is kind of funny to me that Niskanen manages to get coded as a center-right org while pushing for things like industrial policy, a universalist welfare state, higher capital gains taxation, etc."
- @NiskanenCenter: "The country that beat the Nazis, conquered the atom, and put a man on the moon now struggles to produce enough masks for its doctors and nurses. Free markets as we know them today are impossible without the modern state, and they function best when embedded in and supported by a structure of public goods that only government can adequately provide."
- @Lindsey_Brink: "The initial goals of the libertarianism were simple: lower taxes, less spending, fewer regulations. But the champions of free markets made deep-seated intellectual errors. As a result, libertarianism has reached a dead end."
- @Noahpinion: "The good ideologies will run a place well, until they mellow out and become systems, which people are generally comfortable with but not passionate about. The bad ideologies will make life a living hell, and flame out, either through internal collapse or external defeat."[7]
- @interfluidity: "The best and really only the US and the West can contribute to positive reform in China is to exemplify societies that are plainly superior, ethically and functionally, than what CCP is offering its people, in a way that is genuinely independent of CCP's China."
Funny how trickle down economics actually works, just in the opposite way it was sold. TAXING the top trickles the benefits down.
posted by keep_evolving at 6:33 PM on July 24, 2020 [11 favorites]
posted by keep_evolving at 6:33 PM on July 24, 2020 [11 favorites]
/waves hands around helplessly
I confess that I've only finished about a quarter of the links thus far, but how do we get from here to there without white guys in Hawaiian shirts shooting up the place while screaming about child sex palaces on Mars? Serious question despite the framing; the scope for maneuver is limited when your opponent has hallucinating drones willing to murder random people for nonsensical reasons and you do not/are not.
One can't limit their imagination just because assholes are gonna asshole, but by the same token my superfantastic solution to all of our problems doesn't really amount to a hill of beans if it cannot be implemented. People are unwilling to wear a piece of fabric to save the lives of their fellow citizens, what makes anyone think the drones are going to allow their masters to be required to pay more?
Someone who is convinced there are pedophile gangs smuggling Pure White Children to Mars for abuse is not someone that you are going to persuade using any rational argument, and there are a surprising number of them. So, now what? How do you win a game of chess against someone that's willing to shoot you rather than lose? Change it to a game of cards? They're still gonna shoot you.
posted by aramaic at 6:51 PM on July 24, 2020 [15 favorites]
I confess that I've only finished about a quarter of the links thus far, but how do we get from here to there without white guys in Hawaiian shirts shooting up the place while screaming about child sex palaces on Mars? Serious question despite the framing; the scope for maneuver is limited when your opponent has hallucinating drones willing to murder random people for nonsensical reasons and you do not/are not.
One can't limit their imagination just because assholes are gonna asshole, but by the same token my superfantastic solution to all of our problems doesn't really amount to a hill of beans if it cannot be implemented. People are unwilling to wear a piece of fabric to save the lives of their fellow citizens, what makes anyone think the drones are going to allow their masters to be required to pay more?
Someone who is convinced there are pedophile gangs smuggling Pure White Children to Mars for abuse is not someone that you are going to persuade using any rational argument, and there are a surprising number of them. So, now what? How do you win a game of chess against someone that's willing to shoot you rather than lose? Change it to a game of cards? They're still gonna shoot you.
posted by aramaic at 6:51 PM on July 24, 2020 [15 favorites]
Not everyone is into QAnon. Many who aren't, who have the "Trump and everything he stands for is evil" mindset, are contributing to income inequity by supporting a capitalist but less Trumpist system. You can start by adding them to the coalition of the working class and worry about QAnon later.
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:20 PM on July 24, 2020 [11 favorites]
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:20 PM on July 24, 2020 [11 favorites]
Half of all students still attend bottom-half schools, just as before.
Unless you can make all educational outcomes perfectly identical, no system of allocation, capitalist or not, can magic away the fact that half of all students will be in the bottom half of schools. It's purely an artifact of framing-- I think it's equally valid to measure absolute outcomes, not just pecking orders. Not sure why this fallacy offends me so much, maybe its a side effect of running through a stats textbook as a quarantine self-improvement project.
But equally important: the results are just as damning: according to the NAEP's 2015 survey at grade 12, 73 percent of white students were at basic or higher, but just 36 percent of black students. Questions at the basic level:
I confess that I've only finished about a quarter of the links thus far, but how do we get from here to there without white guys in Hawaiian shirts shooting up the place while screaming about child sex palaces on Mars?
It's probably dangerous to underestimate endemic racism as the domain of conspiracy theorists. Here in Cupertino, a majority asian town, a project to build more housing was met with fierce resistance, citing the affordable housing units as a problem:
By providing to every American a $2,000 monthly guaranteed income, America will be a more resilient nation. Monthly cash payments will ensure people can pay rent and buy food, provide the peace of mind needed to socially distance today, and better prepare everyone for the next disaster.
Unless Americans are free to spend that money to construct new homes, I don't see how that will lead to anything other than higher rents. I'm more positive about the Fed account / postal banking idea, but it's worth considering why the US Postal Savings System was shuttered in 1967.
posted by pwnguin at 11:39 PM on July 24, 2020 [1 favorite]
Unless you can make all educational outcomes perfectly identical, no system of allocation, capitalist or not, can magic away the fact that half of all students will be in the bottom half of schools. It's purely an artifact of framing-- I think it's equally valid to measure absolute outcomes, not just pecking orders. Not sure why this fallacy offends me so much, maybe its a side effect of running through a stats textbook as a quarantine self-improvement project.
But equally important: the results are just as damning: according to the NAEP's 2015 survey at grade 12, 73 percent of white students were at basic or higher, but just 36 percent of black students. Questions at the basic level:
- Determine x-value from graph
- Solve a story problem using multiple operations (calculator available)
- Identify the shape inside a regular polygon with the largest area
- Identify interval containing numerical value
I confess that I've only finished about a quarter of the links thus far, but how do we get from here to there without white guys in Hawaiian shirts shooting up the place while screaming about child sex palaces on Mars?
It's probably dangerous to underestimate endemic racism as the domain of conspiracy theorists. Here in Cupertino, a majority asian town, a project to build more housing was met with fierce resistance, citing the affordable housing units as a problem:
The high density housing at the current Vallco shopping mall site will bring down current housing values in our city. Housing won't be as badly needed, and there will be more lower income people living in our city. This would without doubt bring down our median average household income of 147,929 especially because Apple is very cheap in paying their employees.(emphasis mine). Referendums to redevelop that mall failed twice, and instead of tiki torch marches, opponents have chosen to bring lawsuits repeatedly. How they won is likely instructive: the state passed laws limiting the ability of cities to prevent housing as long as the development plan met core criteria. So now they're building out with 50% below market rate units, and cut the retail space by a third. I will grant you that the 50 percent number is likely chosen out of spite, but this is a clear case of city government interfering with the market to the detriment of society.
According to the sales pitch, the new housing units would include low income high density housing apartments. This would mean that we would have uneducated people living in Cupertino. A lot of other residents and I are concerned that this would make the current residents of Cupertino uncomfortable, and would split our city in half.
By providing to every American a $2,000 monthly guaranteed income, America will be a more resilient nation. Monthly cash payments will ensure people can pay rent and buy food, provide the peace of mind needed to socially distance today, and better prepare everyone for the next disaster.
Unless Americans are free to spend that money to construct new homes, I don't see how that will lead to anything other than higher rents. I'm more positive about the Fed account / postal banking idea, but it's worth considering why the US Postal Savings System was shuttered in 1967.
posted by pwnguin at 11:39 PM on July 24, 2020 [1 favorite]
...how do we get from here to there without white guys in Hawaiian shirts shooting up the place while screaming about child sex palaces on Mars?
Well, it ain’t gonna happen overnight. Even if we get the majority on board, it probably couldn’t get 100% done in my lifetime. But we shouldn’t let that discourage us so much we stop working on it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:08 AM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]
Well, it ain’t gonna happen overnight. Even if we get the majority on board, it probably couldn’t get 100% done in my lifetime. But we shouldn’t let that discourage us so much we stop working on it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:08 AM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]
re: the GOP's 'southern strategy' of cutting welfare as coded racism to appeal to "white supremacy, buttressed by paternalism and evangelicalism, whereby the Southern white masses relinquished political power to the few in exchange for maintaining their social status as better than the black man."
why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state: "The NYU scholar credited with 'providing the main theoretical basis' for welfare reform has a new paper out today. I share this clip in case anyone still doubts that (1) racism is central to the modern U.S. welfare state and (2) U.S. poverty research has so much progress to make."
more generally (or abstractly ;) the point about red-queen race status competition over positional goods is that it's unnecessary and wasteful. it succeeds in making people who participate more frantic and harried, when spending on 'society' -- public goods provisioning -- rather than, say, buying ever more expensive homes in a 'good' school district, would improve learning outcomes for everyone (even if "half of all students still attend bottom-half schools," right?), housing affordability for everyone and quality of life for everyone. you'd be able to relax more knowing you don't have to bankrupt yourself to meet basic needs if the state had you covered.
here is interfluidity on predatory precarity, which i guess i've been subconsciously channeling :P
Apple allocates more than $400 million toward its $2.5 billion commitment to combat California's housing crisis
posted by kliuless at 1:24 AM on July 25, 2020 [5 favorites]
why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state: "The NYU scholar credited with 'providing the main theoretical basis' for welfare reform has a new paper out today. I share this clip in case anyone still doubts that (1) racism is central to the modern U.S. welfare state and (2) U.S. poverty research has so much progress to make."
more generally (or abstractly ;) the point about red-queen race status competition over positional goods is that it's unnecessary and wasteful. it succeeds in making people who participate more frantic and harried, when spending on 'society' -- public goods provisioning -- rather than, say, buying ever more expensive homes in a 'good' school district, would improve learning outcomes for everyone (even if "half of all students still attend bottom-half schools," right?), housing affordability for everyone and quality of life for everyone. you'd be able to relax more knowing you don't have to bankrupt yourself to meet basic needs if the state had you covered.
here is interfluidity on predatory precarity, which i guess i've been subconsciously channeling :P
In a stratified, liberal capitalist society, the ability to command market power, to charge a margin sufficiently above the cost of inputs to cover the purchase of positional goods, becomes the definition of caste. When goods like health, comfort, safety, and ones children’s life prospects are effectively price-rationed, individuals will lever themselves to the hilt to purchase their place. The result is a strange precariot, objectively wealthy, educated and in a certain sense well-intended, who justify as a matter of defensive necessity participation in arrangements whose ugliness they cannot quite not see. In aggregate, they are predators, but individually they are also prey, and they feel embattled. So long as the intensity of stratification endures, they will feel like they have little choice but to participate in, even to collude to entrench, the institutions that secure their market power and their relatively decent place.also btw, re: cupertino...
Reforming government contracting, controlling medical costs, breaking up big-tech, opening the professions to international competition, these sound technocratic, even “pro-market”. But under present levels of stratification, the consequences of these things would be a revolution, whole swathes of society accustomed to status and political enfranchisement would find themselves banished towards a “normal” they used to only read about, opiate crises and deaths of despair, towards loss of the “privilege” it has become some of their custom to magnanimously and ostentatiously “check”. Did I say they? I mean we, of course.
But of course, not doing these things means continuing to tolerate an increasingly predatory, dysfunctional, stagnant society. It means continuing deaths of despair, even as we hustle desperately to try to ensure that they are not our deaths, or our children’s. Even for its current beneficiaries, the present system is a game of musical chairs. As time goes on, with each round, yet more chairs are yanked from the game.
The only way out of this, the only escape, is to reduce the degree of stratification, the degree to which outcomes depend on our capacity to buy price-rationed positional goods. Only when the stakes are lower will be find ourselves able to tolerate, to risk, an economy that delivers increasing quantity and quality of goods and services at decreasing prices, rather than one that sustains markups upon which we, or some of us, with white knuckles must depend.
Apple allocates more than $400 million toward its $2.5 billion commitment to combat California's housing crisis
posted by kliuless at 1:24 AM on July 25, 2020 [5 favorites]
But equally important: the results are just as damning: according to the NAEP's 2015 survey at grade 12, 73 percent of white students were at basic or higher, but just 36 percent of black students...I don't think this is capitalism's fault; it's a uniquely American struggle. And I don't think this is a positional good only useful for making hiring easier, basic math skills are useful on the job and in personal life.
I know it is not identical, but Caribbean parts of France and the Netherlands which are completely part of those countries (there are also some territories that are partially independent) have extreme disparities in income, education, unemployment, etc. This is even more striking because these disparities are generally smaller in Europe than in the US. The overwhelming majority of people on these islands are Black.
posted by snofoam at 4:58 AM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]
I know it is not identical, but Caribbean parts of France and the Netherlands which are completely part of those countries (there are also some territories that are partially independent) have extreme disparities in income, education, unemployment, etc. This is even more striking because these disparities are generally smaller in Europe than in the US. The overwhelming majority of people on these islands are Black.
posted by snofoam at 4:58 AM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]
CTRL-F "property tax" returns nothing. That is the root of the public education gap. Rich communities get fancy schools, poor communities get underfunded schools. Cities, with low property taxes thanks to corporate subsidies, have generally poor-performing schools with a few high-performing magnet schools for which there is enormous competition.
Fund schools uniformly by population.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:08 PM on July 25, 2020 [11 favorites]
Fund schools uniformly by population.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:08 PM on July 25, 2020 [11 favorites]
Thanks for this trove of links-i was just the other day trying to explain MMT as it relates to coronavirus policy to my parents but having trouble. Can't wait to share these links
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 5:22 PM on July 25, 2020
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 5:22 PM on July 25, 2020
interfluidity was my entry into MMT :P
MMT stabilization policy — some comments & critiques
Fund schools uniformly by population.
colorado tried (and should try again, along with every other state!)
MMT stabilization policy — some comments & critiques
Fund schools uniformly by population.
colorado tried (and should try again, along with every other state!)
BRUNDIN: Amendment 66 is predicated on the belief that a child's zip code shouldn't determine the quality of his or her education. It targets money at the kids who need it. Hickenlooper explains that high-poverty districts like Denver would get up to 40 percent more money per at-risk student because they're costlier to educate.posted by kliuless at 3:25 AM on July 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
HICKENLOOPER: And that money follows the kid. For the first time in the United States, if a kid drops out, the school stops receiving money from the district at that moment.
BRUNDIN: A big incentive, the governor says, for schools to keep students from dropping out. The driving force behind the measure is a young Democratic senator from Denver, Mike Johnston. He says districts with low property tax bases would get more state funding.
CTRL-F "property tax" returns nothing. That is the root of the public education gap. Rich communities get fancy schools, poor communities get underfunded schools. Cities, with low property taxes thanks to corporate subsidies, have generally poor-performing schools with a few high-performing magnet schools for which there is enormous competition.
Fund schools uniformly by population.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. But as an urban educator, I really dislike the notion that equal funding = equal opportunity. First off, there's a lot of bake-sale-and-PTA ways around equal funding. But quite beside that, growing up in poverty is bad for kids. Educating kids with trauma and with (on average) fewer socioeconomic resources costs more than educating other kids. If we want to provide equal access to education, the budgets need to be considerably higher in high-needs areas (per student) than elsewhere. I don't foresee this happening in the US, at least, though.
There's been a lot of consternation in the States about how giving more money to underperforming schools in areas with lots of poverty hasn't improved student outcomes. But that may have a lot of do with factors external to the school; if growing up in poverty made you better at school, rich parents would be giving away all their money.
posted by thegears at 1:56 PM on July 26, 2020 [4 favorites]
Fund schools uniformly by population.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. But as an urban educator, I really dislike the notion that equal funding = equal opportunity. First off, there's a lot of bake-sale-and-PTA ways around equal funding. But quite beside that, growing up in poverty is bad for kids. Educating kids with trauma and with (on average) fewer socioeconomic resources costs more than educating other kids. If we want to provide equal access to education, the budgets need to be considerably higher in high-needs areas (per student) than elsewhere. I don't foresee this happening in the US, at least, though.
There's been a lot of consternation in the States about how giving more money to underperforming schools in areas with lots of poverty hasn't improved student outcomes. But that may have a lot of do with factors external to the school; if growing up in poverty made you better at school, rich parents would be giving away all their money.
posted by thegears at 1:56 PM on July 26, 2020 [4 favorites]
Exactly. It’s the Equality vs. Equity cartoon in action.
I recently had a discussion with a rich white guy who was mad because the office at his daughter’s high school that helps disadvantaged students with college applications and financial aid didn’t do anything for his daughter. This young lady is currently happy and successful at a top university, and I pointed out that it appeared she didn’t actually need that office’s help. He got all pissed off and said, “it’s not about needs, it’s about rights.” This is the kind of mentality education in the U.S. is up against.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:59 PM on July 26, 2020 [3 favorites]
I recently had a discussion with a rich white guy who was mad because the office at his daughter’s high school that helps disadvantaged students with college applications and financial aid didn’t do anything for his daughter. This young lady is currently happy and successful at a top university, and I pointed out that it appeared she didn’t actually need that office’s help. He got all pissed off and said, “it’s not about needs, it’s about rights.” This is the kind of mentality education in the U.S. is up against.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:59 PM on July 26, 2020 [3 favorites]
School funding in England is based on a per-student allocation, plus extras regardless of local tax base. You can quibble with the numbers but the principle is broadly sound. Urban, suburban and many rural schools are generally good, the left behind schools are commonly in seaside resorts and small towns - anywhere where the local economy is terrible.
posted by plonkee at 11:10 AM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by plonkee at 11:10 AM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
Fund schools uniformly by population.
We have empirical evidence of the limits to that approach though. Countries like the UK (it's devolved, but no part of the UK uses local school funding) fund schools centrally from general taxation (the funding flow is complicated but this is basically correct), in fact schools serving areas with many poorer pupils or pupils with special needs get more funding per pupil.
It is still the case that "good schools" code for exactly the same things as in the US and that schools in wealthy areas are better funded in relative terms because it is cheaper to teach children who do not have special educational needs, come from troubled homes, and have no safe place to study and no role models who owe their success to their educational achievements.
Look at France. Extremely centralised school system in terms of funding, standards, everything. Does this system produce an egalitarian society where everyone is equally well educated?
posted by atrazine at 12:53 PM on July 27, 2020
We have empirical evidence of the limits to that approach though. Countries like the UK (it's devolved, but no part of the UK uses local school funding) fund schools centrally from general taxation (the funding flow is complicated but this is basically correct), in fact schools serving areas with many poorer pupils or pupils with special needs get more funding per pupil.
It is still the case that "good schools" code for exactly the same things as in the US and that schools in wealthy areas are better funded in relative terms because it is cheaper to teach children who do not have special educational needs, come from troubled homes, and have no safe place to study and no role models who owe their success to their educational achievements.
Look at France. Extremely centralised school system in terms of funding, standards, everything. Does this system produce an egalitarian society where everyone is equally well educated?
posted by atrazine at 12:53 PM on July 27, 2020
Look at France. Extremely centralised school system in terms of funding, standards, everything. Does this system produce an egalitarian society where everyone is equally well educated?
Were you going to answer that one? Cuz it's not as rhetorical as you might assume.
posted by pwnguin at 10:35 PM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
Were you going to answer that one? Cuz it's not as rhetorical as you might assume.
posted by pwnguin at 10:35 PM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
Sure.
On paper, the French system is egalitarian. Virtually no-one goes to private schools at the primary and secondary levels, education at all levels is well funded and entry to competitive secondary and post-secondary education is via well regarded exam systems with published standards.
It produces a system where everyone from the educated middle class on-up can compete on roughly equal terms for spots in the elite education that leads to entry into the government, financial / business, and engineering elites. This elite is essentially one interlocking group of graduates of the grandes écoles.
The path into power in France goes through:
Doing well in your last two years of high school in order to get admitted to,
One of the better prépas, where you spend 2-3 years preparing for the entry exam for,
One of the grandes écoles (not universities, although both prépas and grandes écoles now typically offer dual enrollment so that you can also get a degree this is really for people who want to work outside of France).
For people aiming for the top tier of government and business, the ENA (École nationale d'administration) as a sort of ultimate finishing school.
Despite not being universities, the academic rigour of the prépas and grandes écoles system is extreme, it is certainly the case that someone going through it will be substantially better educated than someone going through the "equivalent" elite funnels of the American Ivy League or Oxford / Cambridge in the UK.
At every stage, admission is via examination, at every stage it is basically free. In fact, at the higher levels you are considered a civil servant and receive a salary.
The result:
The children of senior managers make up 50% of the prep classes, around 50% at the engineering and scientific schools, more than 60% at the most prestigious engineering school (X), and almost 70% at the ENA.
The exam system is completely open, everyone knows what will be tested, materials to prepare are readily available, preparation classes are publicly funded. Yet this is still the result.
There is a high premium placed on things like "general culture" which covers things like French literature and on foreign language skills which are badly taught in France and essentially require private tuition.
There is an egalitarian element, a child of two cultured school teachers can compete on an essentially level playing field with the child of a banker and an ambassador. What it does not do is provide any real access for the least advantaged half of the population who find this path almost impossible to follow. For the average Mefite, this system would probably work very well on a personal level since a lot of us are personally very invested in education and knowledge but may not have a great deal of money but that doesn't mean it would lead to the egalitarian outcomes we might hope for.
France doesn't have the culture of endless unpaid internships either (I think they're legally rather problematic actually). So we really have to be careful when pick out some aspect of American, British, etc. culture and decide that this is the one weird trick that the elite is using to reproduce itself when we can see that other countries have similar stratification with very different systems.
posted by atrazine at 3:16 AM on July 28, 2020 [4 favorites]
On paper, the French system is egalitarian. Virtually no-one goes to private schools at the primary and secondary levels, education at all levels is well funded and entry to competitive secondary and post-secondary education is via well regarded exam systems with published standards.
It produces a system where everyone from the educated middle class on-up can compete on roughly equal terms for spots in the elite education that leads to entry into the government, financial / business, and engineering elites. This elite is essentially one interlocking group of graduates of the grandes écoles.
The path into power in France goes through:
Doing well in your last two years of high school in order to get admitted to,
One of the better prépas, where you spend 2-3 years preparing for the entry exam for,
One of the grandes écoles (not universities, although both prépas and grandes écoles now typically offer dual enrollment so that you can also get a degree this is really for people who want to work outside of France).
For people aiming for the top tier of government and business, the ENA (École nationale d'administration) as a sort of ultimate finishing school.
Despite not being universities, the academic rigour of the prépas and grandes écoles system is extreme, it is certainly the case that someone going through it will be substantially better educated than someone going through the "equivalent" elite funnels of the American Ivy League or Oxford / Cambridge in the UK.
At every stage, admission is via examination, at every stage it is basically free. In fact, at the higher levels you are considered a civil servant and receive a salary.
The result:
The children of senior managers make up 50% of the prep classes, around 50% at the engineering and scientific schools, more than 60% at the most prestigious engineering school (X), and almost 70% at the ENA.
The exam system is completely open, everyone knows what will be tested, materials to prepare are readily available, preparation classes are publicly funded. Yet this is still the result.
There is a high premium placed on things like "general culture" which covers things like French literature and on foreign language skills which are badly taught in France and essentially require private tuition.
There is an egalitarian element, a child of two cultured school teachers can compete on an essentially level playing field with the child of a banker and an ambassador. What it does not do is provide any real access for the least advantaged half of the population who find this path almost impossible to follow. For the average Mefite, this system would probably work very well on a personal level since a lot of us are personally very invested in education and knowledge but may not have a great deal of money but that doesn't mean it would lead to the egalitarian outcomes we might hope for.
France doesn't have the culture of endless unpaid internships either (I think they're legally rather problematic actually). So we really have to be careful when pick out some aspect of American, British, etc. culture and decide that this is the one weird trick that the elite is using to reproduce itself when we can see that other countries have similar stratification with very different systems.
posted by atrazine at 3:16 AM on July 28, 2020 [4 favorites]
It's the Equality vs. Equity cartoon in action.
maybe finland is more relevant:
Finland's national word 'sisu' conjures new meanings for tough times - "In a country of 5.5 million, Finland has had just over 320 deaths from the coronavirus. So far, they've succeeded in containing the disease. And they're not making a big deal about it. By some measures, this might be quintessential sisu."
posted by kliuless at 11:47 AM on July 28, 2020 [3 favorites]
maybe finland is more relevant:
There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union...also btw...
Kirkkojarvi’s teachers have learned to deal with their unusually large number of immigrant students. The city of Espoo helps them out with an extra 82,000 euros a year in “positive discrimination” funds to pay for things like special resource teachers, counselors and six special needs classes...
To get a second sampling, I headed east from Espoo to Helsinki and a rough neighborhood called Siilitie, Finnish for “Hedgehog Road” and known for having the oldest low-income housing project in Finland. The 50-year-old boxy school building sat in a wooded area, around the corner from a subway stop flanked by gas stations and convenience stores. Half of its 200 first- through ninth-grade students have learning disabilities. All but the most severely impaired are mixed with the general education children, in keeping with Finnish policies...
The school receives 47,000 euros a year in positive discrimination money to hire aides and special education teachers, who are paid slightly higher salaries than classroom teachers because of their required sixth year of university training and the demands of their jobs. There is one teacher (or assistant) in Siilitie for every seven students.
In another classroom, two special education teachers had come up with a different kind of team teaching. Last year, Kaisa Summa, a teacher with five years’ experience, was having trouble keeping a gaggle of first-grade boys under control. She had looked longingly into Paivi Kangasvieri’s quiet second-grade room next door, wondering what secrets the 25-year-veteran colleague could share. Each had students of wide-ranging abilities and special needs. Summa asked Kangasvieri if they might combine gymnastics classes in hopes good behavior might be contagious. It worked. This year, the two decided to merge for 16 hours a week. “We complement each other,” said Kangasvieri, who describes herself as a calm and firm “father” to Summa’s warm mothering. “It is cooperative teaching at its best,” she says.
Finland's national word 'sisu' conjures new meanings for tough times - "In a country of 5.5 million, Finland has had just over 320 deaths from the coronavirus. So far, they've succeeded in containing the disease. And they're not making a big deal about it. By some measures, this might be quintessential sisu."
posted by kliuless at 11:47 AM on July 28, 2020 [3 favorites]
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posted by snwod at 6:13 PM on July 24, 2020