Topic: How much does investing in education of less fortunate pay off? (Read 2034 times)

Have a look at the link in this thread.
Seems to pay off pretty well in Finland.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/collectivists-at-it-again-56166

I own a product installation, repair, and service company that employs tradesmen/craftsmen and helpers learning the trade/craft.

I have more and more people with college degrees applying for positions every time I put up a help wanted ad. I never had degreed individuals asking for work before the mid 2000's, and I have been in business since 1986. I had helpers who were going through college though, but they were by no means considered a serious candidate for advancement because they stated all that they were there for was to make some money to get through school, and when school was fiished, they usually left for greener pastures.

In my opinion, college degrees are a dime a dozen and do absolutely nothing unless you can be one of the lucky few to get in on the ground floor with a large company who isnt going belly-up or cutting staff positions of people with little to no seniority.

To me, hand skills are more important than college degrees. If you can create, install, repair, and service something, you have much more value in the world today. You can sell or barter your skills for what you need to survive even if you dont have an official "job".

Much of what we do requires the craftsmen to be part roofer, electician, floorman, carpenter, plumber, mason, painter, and mathmetician. Heck, I even repair and service our vehicles from time to time to save money, so you can add part automobile mechanic to the mix.

All that said, I dont think there is anything wrong with educating ones self as much as possible, and it certainly cant hurt to be degreed. Its just adds more diversity to the mix. But to go into debt for it and depend on it in todays world is a huge mistake in my opinion.

If anything, I would tell them to get agricultural degrees if they must get a degree. Feeding the population from domestic resources will be a huge deal in the upcomming decades.

Ok, so for the analogy to work

1) The dog repellant turns the dogs into tigers
2) We don't know if they will be nice or mean tigers

Tiger Replant sounds cooler.

Which is a bigger problem for you? Should you invest in dog or tiger replant?

I'm talking about the USA because thats what I'm most familiar with.

Just to mention, I'm not talking about US economy, I don't even live in USA

Theres alot more people with government education though, so that doesn't really say anything about a correlation between the education and violence. I'm more likely to be bit by a dog than a tiger, that doesn't mean dogs are more dangerous than tigers...

Another aspect of this is reeducation of people who have now obsolete skills. I'm no fan of Obama, but this quote has been taken endlessly out of context (I even saw a WSJ story doing it, and even more amazing, have heard "left wing" people rationalizing the out of context point):

http://mediamatters.org/research/201106150011

I disagree with him that a "jobs council" will be able to successfully predict the future, but not necessarily that there should be no role of a government in supporting people while they retrain. This is especially true as more and more of the work that takes little training can be done easier/cheaper by machine. Also this is probably better handled at a state level.

Ooh, looks like someone lives in a fancy neighborhood

I'm more likely to be robbed/killed by someone with a government education than someone without.

Damn, I just remember that interaction with the opposite sex impairs your mental skills. This is even more complicated then I thought :/

Aaand we come back to investing money in success

The biggest problem is that sports can easily be given an incentive because you need less imagination and more focus. You just say "run faster and get money" and the dude runs faster.

Making a good scientist is more complicated then that. You need to find talented students and reward them right away. Now, giving them a reward that doesn't make them lazy is the complicated part. From the top of my head, I'd say they could get more free time from education that does not concern them (like sports) and possibly giving them access to technology that gets them laid (like an earlier access to a driver's licence)

Entertainers are best left to their own devices, they know what they're doing

So, you don't agree that the places where you're more likely to get killed/robbed are the places that lack government education?

I think the world would be better without violence. I'm not under any illusion that that is going to happen, but the right direction is to stop praising government violence as good. You can't have 'government education' without violence and the threat of.

I'm completely against coercive funding of anything. If it has more value than cost someone will buy it.

That said, I don't even think it's good to voluntarily fund an institution that makes kids (aka people) learn things against their will.

My 3yo has learned so much (walking, talking, and drawing to name a few) with zero coercion. No one is ever going to coerce him to learn anything. I expect he will learn things he doesn't enjoy as a means to his own desired ends. I'm sure there will be things that other people consider very important that he won't ever learn. He'll probably spend lots of time learning things that I don't think are important. That's fine because it's his time.

As far as details of what education will be like after the herding everyone to the same place is over I have no idea. That's a bigger question than "How will soup get made?" or "What will people do for fun next weekend?". It's worse than simply no one knowing the answer, even with full knowledge of everything the answer wouldn't fit in 10 million books.

If you want to participate though all you have to do is think of a way to turn stuff that people value less into stuff that people value more, they'll happily let you pocket some of the difference too.

I think if academic achievement got you laid in high school, and was associated with the type of fame and money bestowed upon athletes and entertainers, we would have alot more people doing well in school. Colleges would send scouts out to the inner city schools to find the intellectual diamond-in-the-rough, etc. So besides structural problems, there are cultural factors at play as well.

while pointing at problems seems like a great accomplishment, I still didn't hear the real answer: Should we keep things as they are, but try to improve the education system, or should we remove government-sponsored education altogether? Or, should we do something else?

FreeMoney hit the nail on the head...

Well my basic message was that (anecdotally):
Government + cronyism -> misuse of tax revenue -> draining of more wealth from poor neighborhoods than gets put back.

In other words, it does not appear to work out (despite all the good intentions) according to the hypothesis of:
Government appropriates more money for education -> better schools, etc -> end the cycle of poverty

The two videos in my second post are to illustrate how fucked up it can get. Just "throwing money" at this problem is not going to work. It is a complex problem requiring a more complex solution than "more school funding."

I agree we can always have a better government and a better education system. Or, are you trying to tell us that we don't need an education system at all because it supports the current government system too much?

So... which of these posts have anything to do with my question?