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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

It's odd that the article regards privately owned schools, hospitals, and libraries as absurd abominations. Private schools are a huge part of the American education system, and they're not the problem. Even when the funding is public, lots of jurisdictions in the US are moving toward privately owned schools, i.e. charter schools. The Catholic Church runs private schools around the world and is widely lauded for it. A big portion (most?) of the best American universities are private. 80% of hospitals in the US are private. Private is good.

Can someone explain for me how Free Basics would be harmful for anyone? If there's an alternative way to bring full internet connectivity to people who currently can't pay for it, wouldn't that alternative beat Free Basics in the market? The article briefly mentions "public internet access" as an alternative, but the Indian government has already failed the 400 million Indians without electricity, and 1 billion without internet. "The Indian government can probably get the money somewhere" reveals a total misunderstanding of the scale of the problem and places a laughable faith in the Indian government, the incompetence of which is in fact the single largest factor holding India back. Why not give market solutions a chance?

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It should be mentioned that currently 40% of Indian children are enrolled in private ("independent") schools, which in turn make up 25% of the K-12 schools in India[1]. The public school system is viewed as such a poor education that demand for private schools is high, and thus can be quite affordable too; as low as $2 per month[2]. Which even in India is within the reach of most families (minimum wage there is ~$225/month).

[1] http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/role-of-private-sec... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/world/asia/for-indias-poor...

There's an interesting Econtalk episode on those schools: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/12/james_tooley_on.htm...

Instead of repeating my response I'll link to our previous exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793258 (edit: updated the link)

Meanwhile I'll point out that this sort of disdain coupled with a demand that India accept a Faustian bargain ("Who could possibly be against this?", as Zuck says) is exactly what prompts people to think of this perspective as a variation of the "White Man's Burden".

I reject the idea that if someone comes up with a plan for a country, upon turning it down the country has to provide an immediate substitute. If I say highly-polluting cars are affordable and will give more people mobility, it doesn't mean opponents have to immediately provide less-polluting cars at the same price.

You've linked one level too deep into the conversation.

My arguments about the power of the free market are not limited to India or any particular country. I preach the same for America. The American government is incompetent and is holding back growth.

The number of dreadful services produced in the free market is amazingly high also. Many organisations do a MUCH worse job than government.

But they can and should go out of business

Except they often don't. Being horrible and abusing people is very profitable. Democratic governments can also be voted "out of business", and the result is more-less the same as with companies: good and evil thrive, what disappears is people and organizations too stupid or too inhibited to game the system.

Evil business is often sustained by some form of government subsidies. Examples abound in education, healthcare, finance, etc.

True, but so are good ones. Subsidies are orthogonal to business morality.

One of the great things about business is that they don't have to follow much morality besides their own self-interest to be useful to society.

Subsidies preserve broken business models at great cost to not just taxpayers, but economic efficiency and quality of service. They create and perpetuate structural deficiencies in the economy. They reward political rent-seeking instead of creating real value for people.

As they pile up, the cumulative effect becomes worse and the ability of society to change its mind erodes. At an extreme, when subsidies drive a huge portion of economic activity, returning to a free market requires years of painful readjustment.

They also support business models that do good when doing good is not profitable. Or basic research, which is pretty much by definition something the market won't touch with a ten-foot pole. Or ventures that could be the milestones to fixing something big about the world (see: Tesla Motors).

The great thing about business is also one of the worst things about it. Profit drive is a very powerful optimization force, and we owe to it most of the wealth around us. It's great when it kind of follows along the lines society wants it to. But, as you said, it has essentially no reason to keep doing that, and so when being horrible and evil is more profitable, the business turns horrible and evil and that's where we need the government - an agent that does not follow the same incentive gradient - to step in and force that business to behave.

The market is like a great river. It's simple - it flows downhill. Put an obstacle on its way, and the river shall destroy it or route around it. But just as majestic and life-giving it is, it can equally easily take lives away. It will flood villages and cities without stopping. Governments are like people tasked with landscaping. They don't have the power of the river. But they can put things on its path to redirect it - whether away from settlements in danger, or towards a barren land, or straight into a power plant that will help feed millions.

We need both.

Politicians are subject to market forces just like everyone else. It just happens to be a market for votes, and the tools at their disposal include pandering to special interests, demagogy, class-warfare, and racial division. Taxes, subsidies, and regulations are driven at least as much by those as by any genuine concern for the people or the economy. And they always want to spend someone else's money instead of their own!

I agree that we need both. Basic research is a good example. I'm not familiar with the economics of electric cars, but you might be right about Tesla too. But beware the easy incrementalism of this all. Each step is logical and difficult to oppose on its own, but the collective result is a society drained of its dynamism and freedom. And then the real kicker is that the government programs that you sacrificed them to don't work. They become barriers to entry for competition, vehicles for political pork, permanent bureaucracies that lobby for their own existence, and more opportunity to waste other people's money.

As an aside, businesses do have a very good reason to continue to serve the public interest: they need to continue to create value for their customers, or they soon won't have any.

In a way markets and governments aren't really that different from one another. I think people often forget that neither exists in a vacuum. Politicians, like you say, are part of the market too! They want money (like everyone) and they have power and influence to sell. Supply and demand are there, and so the trade happens. To stop it completely we'd have to staff our governments with alien beings that would not desire anything we could offer them.

(And no, disbanding all governance will not make power spread itself evenly among everyone - it's not a stable state. We'd be back to having warlords instead.)

RE Tesla, they took some DOE loans (inb4 someone pops up with "evil Musk eating taxpayer money" again - loans which they paid back in full and way before the due time) that were important to their growth. It's a textbook example of why those loans, and other grants, exist in the first place.

I agree that all the problems you mentioned are real and important. Governments do create nasty issues. But they handle some things well. Markets too have issues, just different ones, and also have terrible failure modes in other areas (which include bribing governments into changing laws to benefit them instead of the general population). Personally, I'm advocating for dropping the ideological approach and just evaluating every problem on its own, whether it is solved best by top-down governance, bottom-up free market work, or some combination of both.

Private is also classist. Either you're already wealthy and the cost doesn't matter; or you're working harder and saving less money for retirement as that money is siphoned off on a kid learning how to be a good worker bee and being socialized.

Private schools exist from an aristocratic history. England has this nonsense also. Meanwhile there are countries who take public education seriously and there is essentially no such thing as private education. Look at how Scandinavian countries do this. And the Germans are offering U.S. college students free degrees, many of them stay in Germany. And by and large the education level in these countries is more uniform, where in the U.S. it's again, quite classist.

So if you're in favor of feudalism, yeah private school is a great idea.

As for Free Basics, I think it's for the users to decide whether it meets their needs or not, but for that to be possible Facebook shouldn't be referring to what they offer as an essential service. Facebook itself is not essential. A full, unabridged Internet connection, is essential. But that's not what's offered. Further, the connection with the user requires dual certificates, so Facebook can see what everyone's doing even if they aren't using Facebook proper - something an ISP doesn't even get to do. The harm is the obfuscation.

Germany has a three tier class system built right into its education system.

it is not a class system, it's integrating some aspect of meritocracy. It is performance, not wallet based.

Performance is highly correlated with household income for fairly obvious reasons, regardless of system.

Of course, but there's a difference between income being relevant yet incidental, and embracing it as a completely appropriate model to relish in.

Not everywhere. Schooling is totally state-dependant.

And maybe the fiercest and bitterest war waged in state politics over the last decades were about school systems.

In Hamburg there are mostly comprehensive schools. In the largest state, Northrhine-Westphalia, there are still those separate tiers, but comprehensive schools are probably the majority.

I'm glad you mention the Scandinavian countries, because they are an example that rejects your argument. 14% of the students in Sweden go to private schools, without "siphoning off" the parent's money, by using a voucher system.

Who funds education can and should be a separate argument from who runs the schools.

> lots of jurisdictions in the US are moving toward privately owned schools

Jurisdictions are moving toward charter schools because their teachers are not unionized, and can therefore be paid less salary and benefits than public school teachers, with the side “benefit” of breaking public schoolteachers unions. Additionally, charter schools help rich white people redirect their tax money away from funding public schools in poor brown neighborhoods. Finally, charter schools are much less regulated w/r/t the salaries they pay their management or the services they purchase from other firms, which makes them a booming profit center, and gives plenty of slush to spend on lobbying, bribes, and PR/marketing.

Alternet isn’t the most neutral source, but check out this lengthy piece for a decent rundown of some of the sources of profit in the charter school world: http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/who-profiting-charters...

That's an awfully cynical view of it. An alternate narrative is that public school bureaucracies, perverse incentives for teachers unions, and political meddling from government created a system that was failing to offer students a good education. Mix that in with a very American belief in the power of free choice and free markets, as well as a belief that ability to pay should be no barrier to an education, and charter schools are the solution that has emerged.

I think there's problems with that narrative too. The impact that good teachers can have on kids from very troubled homes is probably overstated, and teachers unions have often been fighting against performance rating systems that unfairly ignore that. But in defense of charters, a performance rating system that doesn't work won't survive very long in the private sector.

Edit: Perhaps a better question, that avoids the nasty politics of the current situation, is: what does the ideal system look like? My inclination is that it would look more like charter schools than like public schools.

The ideal system probably looks a lot like Finland, where teaching is a selective high-status profession with good pay, benefits, professional development, and autonomy; schools are competently managed; students are treated as people instead of numbers in a spreadsheet; and everyone in every wealth bucket receives a solid education.

The precise policy details might not apply in extremely different societies/political systems, but the high-level goals should be the same:

Highly qualified professional teachers with good career prospects and lots of personal responsibility and a culture of continuous professional development, adequate school infrastructure and materials, focus on the individual needs of diverse children, resource equality for students regardless of wealth or social class, work to solve child poverty and other severe social problems that prevent any education system from functioning.

And in finland there is school choice, which means that the money follows the student. If no students choose to go to school X, the school gets shut down. This is quite similar to what the charters in the US represent.

Actually not at all similar to US charter schools.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...

These aspects from the article sound like US charter schools.

"...teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. "

"All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher."

"If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it."

"In Finland parents can also choose."

But it may be that the finnish model is slipping anyway:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/is-finland-a-choice-les...

"Finnish eighth-graders today perform slightly lower than seventh-graders did in 1999."

I give them two decades.

> These aspects from the article sound like US charter schools.

Some charter schools. A minority. Others are run like tiny military academies, or have gone all-in on high-stakes testing, or profit by relying on low-paid short-term teachers with high turnover, or are mainly financial schemes/scams with schools attached (cf. the alternet link a few posts upthread).

All of the bits you listed actually sound precisely like my southern California suburban public elementary school experience in the mid–late 1990s. Unfortunately the school got constant pushback from the school district and state for not being excited enough about letter grades or standardized tests, but was able to mostly persist its culture through support from local parents.

This seems like a game of chicken. The "teachers, ex-teachers, school administrators" are betting that public elementary and secondary education would have to be much, much worse than it already is in order to justify supplementing it with something, anything else. They're wrong.

That’s horseshit. The public schoolteachers I know closely are dedicated professionals who work 70-hour weeks, agonize over their students progress and personal situations, and buy classroom materials out of their substandard salaries because their schools are broke.

The hard work, mediocre pay compared to alternative professions, and lack of autonomy and social respect they receive takes its toll though, and teacher attrition is higher than ever. Instead of “playing chicken” as you suggest, experienced teachers are retiring in droves and top potential teachers are scared away by poor career prospects, and as a profession teaching is hollowing out. Most states cut education budgets sharply after the 2008 recession and in general those budgets still haven’t recovered. I fear that in another decade or two public education will be in a very tough place, having lost a huge proportion of its human capital with no easy way to get it back. In parts of the US this is already a crisis, but the political response has been to further demonize teachers and push for more standardized testing, voucher programs, charter schools, and so on.

It's probably accurate to say that the blame lies more with administrators than with teachers, and more with the American public than with either of those parties. The term "hollowing out" is really just another sort of demonization. It doesn't matter though. Taken as a whole, USA public education consumes more resources per student than it did a generation ago, with steadily declining outcomes. There is no law of nature ensuring that children can only learn in such dismal conditions. "In another decade or two", students will get their educations in some other fashion. Hey, it happened to travel agents!

The problem is that teacher compensation has not scaled with educational spending over the past few decades in the US. K12 spending in the public sector has increased faster than inflation * population growth everywhere, yet median teacher pay has gone down (I think average is stable but that's because some senior teachers get really sweet packages).

Even if states cut education budgets sharply in 2008 it shouldn't have been a problem, because it's not like teachers 30 years before that were suffering under much more parsimonious spending. It's just that when they cut those budgets, someone decided to pass the pain on to the teachers instead of figuring out where the real waste was.

The atrocious thing is that the teacher's unions keep clamoring for more educational spending instead of higher teacher pay. Empirically speaking in the US, more educational spending will correlate with lower teacher pay.

There have been proposals to sharply raise pay as part of reforms that make it easier to hire and fire teachers. Teachers' unions have always been extremely opposed.

> A big portion (most?) of the best American universities are private. 80% of hospitals in the US are private. Private is good.

Mark Zuckerberg's Op/Ed piece[1] specifically makes the case that Free Basic's is valuable likening it to public healthcare, public education, and public libraries.

So yes, private good. But private also is private, and not beholden to the public. Free Basics isn't private, though Zuck et al would like it to be accepted and lauded as a public service.

[1] http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/free-...

Putting aside this particular argument, I'm fascinated by what appears to be Zuckerberg's philosophy of creating profitable business models to provide public goods that are traditionally the realm of governments or charity. When successful, and I don't think they always can be, such solutions seem fundamentally more robust. They don't require continual interest from the donor class or the use of government coercion. And the resulting businesses would have a stronger incentive to spend their money wisely.

> philosophy of creating profitable business models to provide public goods that are traditionally the realm of governments or charity

Unless we're talking about B-corp's [1], such a philosophy is not compatible with the legal responsibility a corporation has to its shareholders.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

I don't think this is true. The B-corp just gives shareholders a cause of action in court against management for not pursuing the social objectives of the company. A corporation is free to pursue any lawful interest. Here is a good article about this: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...

Interesting. In this particular case, though, Free Basics is designed in a way that allows Facebook to track what content is being accessed, without any explanation as to why, aside from the obvious incentive of being able to use that browsing data to create user models.

An advertising giant offering "free internet" with the ability to MITM and track https connections is hardly charity.

The problem with Facebook is that it's trying to invent problems for its solution. It has been my observation that the limited internet accessibility in India is less because of people not being able to afford it (internet is quite cheap, and definitely affordable for anybody who can afford to have a phone capable enough for modern web) but because there is a huge barrier to internet literacy. Most people aren't online because they do not know the benefits of email, search or social networks. And even if they do know the benefits, there's a barrier to learning it. I have many relatives in my family who are well to do but don't know how to use the browser properly. At the same time, a lot of people in the lower income classes don't feel the internet is important enough to invest in the resource to access it, eg web capable phones. Free basics will not provide that section of people any kind of benefit, because it doesn't lower any of those barriers.

> Can someone explain for me how Free Basics would be harmful for anyone?

It makes the entire technological infrastructure of the country grow crooked, relying on a particular corporation as backbone, rather than growing their own.

Why not give market solutions a chance?

Because "market solutions" demonstrably fail in the presence of externalities, esp. for public goods.

Besides market equilibria are provably intractable in the general case anyway... (Unless P = NP, that is).

Please be specific - which externalities do you see as arising from this model?

We (Indians) already suffer a lot due to free things provided by government. (Laptop, Cycle, Bus Pass, for students, TV, Mixie, Fan for household) all in public money but labeled as the party that is in power. Now a private company starting this, tomorrow what stop Reliance doing this where they encourage to buy from thier stores across India. Or send Ads of particular party for vote with higher preference? TV and News is already fully controlled by mafia parties. Now internet and next text with whatsapp i think.

As for the public/private debate, at least for schools, I can some points. Indian school system is very different from the US ones. Majority of the schools, both public and private follow curriculum set by either two central boards (CBSE and CISCE) or the individual state boards. In either case, the level of education based on the curriculum is not very different between public and private schools. So many students are now enrolled in private schools solely because the public schools have highly inefficient management with teachers hardly qualified enough to teach to them not turning up at all.

The case is entirely opposite in higher education. People swear by public institutes and universities and private institutes (barring a few big ones) are looked down upon because they have historically charged more for a lesser education compared to the highly subsidized and excellently staffed public universities.

Public schools in India also have teachers with excellent credentials (i.e. Kendriya Vidyalaya) but some of them just don't care to teach better. I've done my whole schooling from various KVs across Rajasthan, most of the teachers were actually quite good, but they weren't motivated to innovate and experiment. We were rarely informed about Olympiads, competitions, scholarships etc. Also, management was definitely terrible most of the time.

Short answer: we don't want Zuckerberg to be directing the information consumption of a few hundred million people. He isn't trustworthy.

I'd argue nobody is that trustworthy.

A bit late! He's already doing that!!!

The public/private thing is a red herring. Ownership isn't really central here. Nobody would object if Zuckerberg wanted to give these people Internet access.

The question, if we can agree the open network is something desirable, is will this initiative help the population get Internet access sooner or later? My bet would be later, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

Why isn't facebook running this programme in USA? There are 50 million Americans without internet. Although 50 million is not as big as 600 million Indians without internet, it is still bigger than populations of many countries Facebook is running Free Basics in. The Americans without internet are usually old and poor and internet connectivity can do a lot for them. A lot of these people cannot afford the internet.

My only question...would Americans think it would be wise to destroy Net Neutrality?? Just asking. Perhaps someone should try and get Facebook to start this in USA.

According to this http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/28/15-of-americ... , only 19% of those without internet (2.8% of the total population) cited cost as a factor. EDIT: I looked further into those numbers (http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-wh...) and only 6% (not even 1% of the US population) said "too expensive" when asked why they didn't have internet. The other 13% is from those who answered "don't have a computer". So in short, this isn't a problem in the US.

It's not a problem in US doesn't mean the initiative will not be welcomed there. Toll free phone numbers exist and are used extensively in the US, Free Basics can work on similar lines. Obviously, introducing the initiative will raise questions on violation of net neutrality.

Private is one thing; owned by a giant corporation is another. There ane no Exxon schools or Bayer hospitals AFAIK.

This could help http://blog.savetheinternet.in/what-facebook-wont-tell-you-a...

you've conflated nonprofit and forprofit entities as though they are the same thing, but they're not. there's a world of difference between a private library which is nonprofit (there are lots of those) and one that is owned/controlled by a forprofit corporation.

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