The Dropout Economy | Hacker News Reader

The Dropout Economy

time.com

63 pointsjlhamilton70 comments

I'm gonna go with "probably not".

The article starts with a standard argument that schools suck, then launches into a libertarian utopia forecast. I'm not sure how you can have both a information economy AND people who can't put in the time at a school to learn.

Schools aren't some evil conspiracy to teach conformance, they're the only way to teach basic info to lots of kids. And if kids can't sit through it long enough to learn, the majority won't self teach either, no matter how much you want them to. So what do those people do?

There are other models for schooling, but covering classic reading/writing/math/history is still pretty important, and modern schools do a reasonable job of providing that the majority of kids.

Nice try, blaming those dumb students for an education system that's failing them. The problem is they don't do a reasonable job of teaching the basics. That's why poor minorities in DC and other places are demanding school vouchers-- but as long as teacher unions care more about their jobs than students not shit is going to happen.

Education has been going to hell for the past 30 years (or longer) so please don't delude yourself into thinking anything is going to magically change. The only change will be new legislation that restricts self-funded alternative education. (Maybe you've already noticed governments trying to shutdown food co-ops under the guise of "public health")

I think the truth is somewhere in between.

Yes, there are a ton of failing school districts, but it's not as if kids are clamoring to learn all they can and being told no. Kids aren't really motivated to learn the stuff (not that they ever have been in the history of education), and those schools aren't doing any motivating. It requires both parties to try.

I think the idea of fixing schools has, and will continue to be, examined to death. What no one seems to examine is the other half of it. How can we as a society stop perpetuating the "learning is uncool" myth? Maybe it's because a math competition will never be as exciting as a football game, maybe it's just part of human nature to be skeptical of intellectualism as a defense mechanism for the ego... I don't really know. But I don't think you can "solve education" without paying attention to that part as well.

But the cultural problem you're talking about is caused in large part by the structural problem. Students slack off because the system passes students along with impunity. Why bother studying math when you know you will get promoted anyway? The only way to fix that is to allows schools to kick poorly performing students out. There are plenty of students who want to do well but the system crushes them.

While I would agree that students shouldn't be passed with impunity, I'm not sure the fix is kicking students out.

The motivational factors that make sense to adults don't necessarily work on kids. Thinking back to when I was 13-14, being kicked out of school would have been a good thing to most of my peers. It would mean no more school, and school was a total hassle at that age.

I think the answer lies partly in finding ways to motivate students to learn, and I think the root solution to that is going to lie somewhere with teachers that can sell what they are teaching. I had history teachers that were so into their material it was almost infectious. I had an Algebra teacher that taught everything as if it were the coolest thing in the world. It's hard to not care about something when someone else is visibly excited about it.

And I think that has to be coupled with real expectations. People generally rise to the expectations that are set, and kids are no exception. The worst teachers I ever had were the ones that tried to pretend they were on the kid's side. The ones that would admit that what they were teaching was "pointless" but were "just trying to help us get through it because it is required". That is not inspiring.

Not only is it uninspiring, but it creates a responsibility vacuum. If things are pointless, and everyone knows it, and there is no real responsibility to take it seriously, then why take it seriously?

And finally, I think the biggest fix to the cultural problem has to come from our parents. Most parents are really just older kids, and deep down they have the same outlook on school as those teachers that admit it's "pointless". They talk a big game about education being important, but they don't back it up by actually considering it to be important. I don't think this has to come at the expense of other activities, but getting an A on a test should be at least as important and noteworthy to parents as winning a little league game or Prom night.

So yeah, part of it is structural, but it's by no means all structural. The education of people does not occur entirely between 8am and 3pm. Much of what we learn is from our peers and our parents and really anyone else we are exposed to socially. And crucially, the attitude we learn to adopt towards school comes almost entirely from these people who are not part of the school system, and that attitude is crucial in determining how much we get out of that 8am to 3pm period.

What do you propose they do with the kids they kick out?

I don't know what the parent proposes, but generally people propose that kids who read at a 2nd grade level, stay in 2nd grade.

The english grammar school system works alright. Around age 12 kids take a test that routes them either to higher academics or trade school. Those going the trade school route can go onto higher academics if they want, so it isn't set in stone. But in general, the kids who care about academics are grouped together, and those who don't are put in another group.

In this situation, doing well academically actually is looked upon favorably, more so in the single gender schools than in co-ed.

Nice try blaming unions for an education system that's failing students!

See how I turned that around on you? Simple answers are not to be found when talking about education.

You are falling into the conspiracy theory side of an education discussion almost immediately. You blame unions, then the government ("new legislation that restricts....").

It's frustrating really. I've rewritten the last part of this comment half a dozen times now. It's not worth arguing.

Any entity that resists change to a broken system is at fault. Unions bear part of the blame for the current state of our education system because they resist reforms that most people think are likely to improve education, like merit pay. This is assuming those people are correct, however.

Blaming the government also makes sense. The government runs most schools.

Yeah but it's still simplistic. Let's just get the government and unions out of it.. then we'll have.. no schools and no teachers! The market will step in, somehow! Hand-waving!

It's not 30 years. Kierkegaard was saying that in the early 1800s. Every generation thinks they're the LAST WELL EDUCATED GENERATION AND ALL THESE KIDS ARE NOT NEARLY WELL EDUCATED ENOUGH SO WE'RE SCREWED!

Has been happening for literally hundreds of years.

Poor minorities in DC didn't demand school vouchers -- the then-republican majority forced it through over the DC city council's objections. Those republicans were in fact in DC but none were poor and none were minorities.

Also, your forecasts are way out of line, the current admin big thing is teacher merit pay which is opposed by the unions. I'll personally send you a bottle of the liquor of choice if this administration or any of the next 3 attempt to outlaw private education.

Reihan isn't a libertarian. He's a young conservative. I know him actually, he sat in on a course I took on the conservative movement in American politics. He was the "actual conservative" the professor was showing off to the university students (who presumably aren't exposed to actual conservatives within academe). Reihan's a cool guy and was generally fun to argue with.

His author description mentions that he blogs at National Review and works for e21. I know one of the founding members of e21 actually, she used to be my buddy's neighbor. It's definitely not a "non-partisan" economics think tank, just a run-of-the-mill conservative outfit. I thought Reihan was at The New America Foundation, which actually is a non-partisan think tank known for being more sexy/interesting than your mainstream institutions. Maybe he's moved on.

Anyway, I agree, it's an odd piece.

I was wondering if someone would call him on the libertarian thing. While the general alignment of the person may be conservative, aren't the ideas still considered libertarian?

I've been considering a lot how to adjust use of words to make it clearer when I'm talking about ideas, since after all it's the ideas that matter if ideas are what we're discussing in the moment. Party alignments in non-election debate just muddy whatever the individual ideas are representing with preconceptions and even unrelated concepts, and it's harder to see where individuals cross-align, making negotiations and debates even harder than they already would be.

Conservatives and "young conservatives" in particular identify extremely strongly with the Republican party -- given that conservatism tends towards "identify with your own" far more than liberalism, this is significant.

Libertarians, entirely different set of motives.

I understand affiliations, although I'll have to take your word for it about the young republicans, What I was trying to do is bring out the point that in the world of ideas there are libertarian ideas that are separate from the the Libertarian Party, and so when we talk about ideas we don't necessarily need to find an actual affiliation with a particular party. Many people, particularly conservatives, seem to be aligning with libertarian ideals, even if they have no interest at all in the Libertarian party. A political idea never needs a party, it exists as an intellectual construct.

Disclaimer, I am not a libertarian, I align most closely with progressives, who don't have a viable party in the United States today, but I appreciate a lot of the work and ideas of conservatism, libertarianism, left-wing labor, and social democrat.

Isn't it far more interesting and valuable to talk about the world of ideas: libertarian, progressive, fiscal conservative, social conservative, fiscal liberal, social liberal, social democrat, socialist, lassez faire capitalist, and so on, than about specific parties, or to haggle over whether a person's party affiliation is the Republican Party when in fact it is a libertarian idea that is expressed. Isn't that just letting a party set the boundaries of the debate?

The ideas need to be the focus of the debate if we're to accurately discuss the work of an individual, regardless of their nominal party affiliation.

Well, sure, but personally if I'm dealing with someone who can say with a straight face that Sarah Palin would do a good job as president, I know to discount appropriately -- for that person, tribalism has surpassed ideas or truth as far as what they consider right.

I'm not sure that's correct. As far as I can tell, young conservatives identify more closely with 'conservatism' than with the party. Which is why young conservatives are drawn to things like the Tea Party rallies/movement. I think the ideology—more than the political structure of the party—is what motivates the youth.

But that's not really any different from liberalism. Most youth on the left identify themselves as 'progressives' and part of the 'progressive movement' rather than identifying themselves with the Democratic party apparatus.

The lead sentence is

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out

Anyone catch the logical and rhetorical flaw ?

First, we talk about how MIDDLE class kids are taught not to drop out.

Then we seemlessly move to all kids.

And...surprise! Some of them drop out.

Because, duh!, not all kids are middle class kids.

After reading that much stupid in the first half of the first sentence I stopped reading the article.

I wish the author had been more clear here and cited his statistic, but he's mostly right. The report "High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007" (http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064) has a graph showing that the middle income dropout rate is about the same as the overall rate. The upper income students make up for the lower income ones. And according to the report at http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/C... "Nationwide, nearly one in three U.S. high school students fails to graduate with a diploma."

Perhaps the author considers non-middle-class people to constitute (significantly) less than 30% of the population.

Not surprising. Most Americans consider themselves middle-class: poor people think they are lower middle class and rich people think they are upper middle class. This is why "the middle class is disappearing" is such an effective political message: most people identify with the middle class.

It probably doesn't help that the American class system is vague. There's no official threshold between the classes. In some countries, the "upper class" is, by definition, descended from nobility, so even a British billionaire would still be middle class.

If I were asked (as the author here was) to put together a piece on "10 ideas for the next 10 years" as part of a series subtitled "a thinker's guide to the most important trends of the new decade" - and for a national magazine to boot - I would at least try to make it tight and coherent, backed up by logical thought and good examples.

In this article, the author nowhere even states the theme he is trying to develop - instead, he presents a grab-bag of under-developed ideas, many of them cliched.

If you read the piece itself, I challenge you - quick now - to state its principal theme.

Here is my best guess: "Young people of all political persuasions are today increasingly rejecting middle-class ideals of school and work in favor of new forms of communitarian living by which they are returning to the soil and are otherwise seeking to escape the reach of nanny-state government."

This is just a guess cobbled together from fragments scattered throughout this piece.

What are those fragments?

Within a few paragraphs (about 1,000 words), we have a jumble of ideas that includes: 30% school drop-out rates; educational stagnation; projections of "fiscal doom;" jobless recovery; New Deal programs about to "starve;" sputtering industrial agriculture; millions of families living "off the grid;" food-distribution systems based on ancient Mayan know-how; communes and co-ops avoiding the nanny state; bourgeois rebels; exploding home schools; self-sufficient vertical farms built from scrap; an underground economy using barter/virtual currencies; libertarian "hacktivists; ever-increasing productivity levels; a surge in home jobs that will revive suburbs that are today "ghost towns;" fewer private homes and more "cohousing communities;" "gated communities" effectively seceding from their municipalities to pursue their own view of the good life; "broadband socialism;" a "new individualism on the left and the right; "freeganism;" "cage-free" families; and 23-year-olds plotting a cultural insurrection that will knock American society "off its axis."

It all makes the head spin (not the ideas themselves, about which I do not comment, but the way in which they are presented). When it is all said and done, who knows what the author really intended? He makes you work really hard to figure it out and then leaves you with a sense that the effort was not really worth it.

For some excellent guidelines on good essay writing (in this case, for undergraduates), see this splendid piece that got few HN upvotes when it ran (at an odd time, I think) but sets forth fine guidelines for aspiring students writing in this format: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/02/good_writing_in_politic....

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells.

Fuel cells are for energy storage, not generation. Something has to make the hydrogen (or hydrocarbon) to power them. Also, fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst. You know, rare expensive stuff that has to be dug out of the ground, processed, and refined before it can be shipped to factories that build fuel cells.

Living off the grid would require land for solar cells and/or wind turbines, and energy storage mechanisms for when it's neither sunny nor windy. Building this stuff requires factories (again), raw materials (again), infrastructure, and R&D. A small community can't afford these things. And that's just for basic stuff like electricity and transportation. The small communities could solve this by banding together and contributing resources to a collective pool. Some sort of federated system...

Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

So... what happens to the old people? How do these small communities trade? I'm guessing quite a few will be landlocked. If trade is limited, how do these little utopias have modern medicine? An MRI machine needs to be topped up with liquid helium to maintain its superconducting coils (which are manufactured in factories-blah blah blah). Contrast agents use rare elements like gadolinium.

The writer doesn't seem to realize just how interconnected the world economy is. Almost nothing I own was made anywhere near where I live. I can't start my day without touching something built at least 1000 miles away.

There's been a lot of serious talk about living off the grid since the '60s. Trouble is the grid is an engineering marvel that delivers a heck of a lot of utility. (OK the pun is intended, but still informative.) Living off the grid is likely to remain the provence of dedicated hackers for a long time to come, not something for the masses.

This should be titled "How I learned to stop being afraid and love the new upcoming mad max world."

I wonder what those new and exciting jobs will be in that post apocalyptic world the author pines for. Sexual slavery? Hunting rats for meat and fur? The technically inclined can scavenge parts from rusting machines built in the magical old times and try to fashion some kind of working vehicles out of them. Maybe the more artistically inclined can try being jesters to the local warlord.

The relative prosperity of our current lives depends on the incredible interconnectedness of society which allows high efficiencies by having people specialise and become very efficient in some very narrow areas of expertise. Just think of an ordinary $600 computer and imagine the tens or hundreds of thousands of engineers whose specialised knowledge went into making it. It is only a highly complex and interconnected society that can come up with something like that.

And if most people start "living off the grid" or disconnecting from society, or if we stop training our children how to live in society (which is what school is supposed to be for), you better get ready for types of poverty that you have never imagined even in your worst nightmares.

Oh and if everybody starts dropping out of school and society, good luck coming up with those "dirt cheap fuel cells."

It is very disturbing how a lot of people are getting a bigger and bigger hard on for some kind of an Armageddon event.

That definitely sounds better than raising the top marginal tax rate by 5%.

Reads like a concept for a Cory Doctorow novel to me.

I dislike that the author is simply stating all these amazing and utopian things that are going to happen without much in the way of facts to back it up. It sounds like his dream more than anything concrete.

Wow, you read my mind.

I often rate articles on "stupidities per paragraph" or even, in extreme cases, "stupidities per sentence". This is the first article I've read that can be accurately described with "stupidities per character".

So you're saying there are at least ~6,500 identifiable stupidities in this article? Of course you're not.

Point being: hyperbole has value, for this author and for you.

I'd say shalmanese is a far better writer than the author, based on the samples I've seen.

I don't think the author realizes how expensive it is to abandon society. I certainly would love to live in the middle of the forest with my own little hobby farm and pasture (and internet connection, of course) but for me to continue to work in a tech field, even remotely, I need things from the outside, like shingles, nails, plywood, hard drives. All together I probably need about $100k to $400k, depending on what type of living conditions I want, and that is with me still working as a knowledge worker on contract.

"Encrypted Digital Currencies" psshh. If the courts are not their to enforce ownership, the currencies will never take hold. It my as well read "Encrypted Digital Monopoly Money". The only type of currency that could possibly hold value for an semi-extended enough period of time would be some really stable MMORPG, but even there I'm grasping at straws.

> If the courts are not there to enforce ownership, the currencies will never take hold.

That's probably solvable.

Another problem, which I don't know how to solve, is that the US govt doesn't agree with the idea that transactions in other currencies are not taxable. If you're trading favors, the govt wants its cut.

You can argue that your expenses equal your revenues, so there's no profit, but they're pretty good at dealing with that dodge. (If you're consuming anything, they'll see its cost as profit, even if you acquired it with clams.)

I could see something like Facebookbux taking hold. Assuming FB actually launches a payment system, and their effective fees aren't too high.

I think one reason FB's payment system has been so long in coming is that they've been thinking through all the implications of being a parallel currency.

I'm guessing at that, but it seems likely.

They already exist and are called facebook credits: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1038

Hey, I'd missed that Farmville is accepting FB Credits now. That's pretty big.

They hadn't truly launched the credit system in a real sense. It existed, but was so low profile as to be non-existent, which I assumed was intentional. But with Farmville signing on, that's a pretty real launch.

The fee structure is still exhorbitant, though. Again, maybe intentional, to prevent it from being a practical parallel currency.

Probably intentional because that's their estimation of the demand curve -- their customers are app-writers who have to make a living off of facebook.

Everyone I know who leads the kind of lifestyle this article is touting is a drop out, yes. Trouble is, they dropped out of grad school, not high school.

Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school

I hate this statistic. I've known several people that dropped out of high school to get a GED instead. (It was faster for them and they were sick of school.) Others had to drop out of school because their family kicked them out of their house at 18. Both of them got GEDs later.

I'm among those students who dropped out of high school to accelerate my escape. I guess the phrase drop out hasn't dropped its negative connotations, so the author was using it to grab attention. But the essay is really about alternative paths to life goals, which is what many 'high school dropouts' are after.

I also dropped out of high school (and never bothered to get a GED; I went to college for a while and then dropped out to do a startup, so I've ended up with neither diploma).

It's kind of fun being able to put "high school dropout" on forms, while not being a deadbeat.

I'm impressed you got a college to accept your application without some kind of high school equivalency certification. How'd you manage that?

A few years out of school, however, and it's become very clear to me that "I just worked on this project for 6 months where we learned XYZ, had some hard times and eventually failed/succeeded/moved on." is much more attractive to the kind of people I want to work with than "I graduated cum laude from XYZ special university."

I was 16. MIT doesn't really care about high school diplomas. I'd already done 1580/1600 SAT and had a grad student and associate prof at MIT write letters of recommendation based on performance in a summer program (social engineering...)

I dropped out, then got two bachelor's degrees at Carnegie Mellon.

I could have gotten a GED, but in that case, why? I can't be drafted either way, and I don't particularly want to manage a McDonald's.

Somehow i'd think that this is the exception rather than the rule.

There's quite a few inner city schools where kids drop out because people just generally do other things when they are able.

While the author's analysis of the current situation is fairly accurate, his predictions seem to me to be wildly off.

There's a pretty strong movement going on, bringing scientific method to teaching. It's chronicled in a great NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

Basically it boils down to:

1. Find good teachers, based on how much their students improve. (Students of the top 5% of teachers improve test scores a full year more per year than students of the bottom 5%).

2. Analyze what the good teachers do that works better than what other teachers do. (For a small example: Stand still while giving instructions: moving around distracts).

3. Teach these techniques to other teachers, and analyze the results.

This process, if scaled, seems to me to have far more potential for improving the current system, than any wild-eyed tech-mediated vision of home-schooling [not to knock home schooling: it works great, but it ain't gonna scale to anywhere near a majority of the population].

All the nonsense aside I think it's true that people are no longer happy with "one size fits all" kinds of policies and institutions. This is not a bad thing and is simply one of the byproducts of improving technology that empowers individuals to pick and choose what fits them best be it education, food, clothes, etc.

If you're referring to the current state of unease within the electorate, I think it's the exact opposite issue -- how many times have you heard someone say "too much change"?

Politicians are a really poor metric when it comes to measuring change. They are always at least 2 decades behind the times and I can't really blame them for it since the people that put them in office are in their late 60s.

I'm not talking politicians, I'm talking the tea partiers -- the world's changing and it's not easy for everybody. A feeling that the world is changing and the easy ride we had is going away seems to be a powerful undercurrent there, to me at least. YMMV.

The world is always changing and only those with no historical perspective cling to bygone days.

Well, certainly I agree.

I'm still amused by liberal arts majors who somehow think that you can't work in the technical fields without a degree. Sure, a degree helps, but if you know what you are doing, it's not required.

Now, I know some really awesome people who went to college, and claim that they learned a lot there, I'm not saying it doesn't have value. hell, all other things being equal, I'll pick the applicant with a degree over the dropout, when I have the chance. But I also know many programmers and SysAdmins who didn't go to college, and a few who didn't finish high school. We don't need to live 'off the grid' mad max style. Not having a degree means that you will need to do real work for retail wages, for a while, but once you have experience, you get to upgrade to real wages.

It took me approximately sixty seconds on Google to bring up a page from the Census Bureau, breaking down income according to education level:

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032009/perinc/new03...

The median earnings of an American over 25 with less than a 9th-grade education is $18,180. For a high-school diploma or GED, it’s $27,963. For a bachelor’s degree (“for a lot of them, an overpriced status marker and little else”, says Salam), it’s $48,097.

In the sample from this survey, the folks with less than a 9th-grade education represented about 5% of the total; does Salam really have any evidence that 5% of the US adult population lives cheerfully off subsistance agriculture and cryptocash?

This article is too rooted in the middle class perspective for my tastes. To me the education system isn't failing these kids -- it's the other way around. They goto pretty good/safe schools and simply don't want the education being offered because they think they can beat the system. Probably many of them can because they have a safety net that allows them to reconsider their options down the road. It's the poor minorities who have dramatically higher drop out rates we should be considered about. If you don't have many opportunities in life you should maximize the "free" public education you can get and make the most of it.

Do you find it reasonable to burden a 5-year-old with the responsibility of maximizing the public education he is being offered? A 10-year-old?

When did Neal Stephenson start writing for Time?

That was what I was thinking - except stuff Stephenson writes about in Snow Crash that seems similar to what happens here is after some kind of societal meltdown.

The problem I see with this, is that the most talented middle class folks are still employed. It's these talented people who have the drive, creativity, and resourcefulness to home-school well, and to build new communities. Until and unless they are out on their butts, I don't think we will see this type of positive societal transformation.

It's likely we'll see more: crime and despair, and that all of those unemployed former worker-drones that the school system wrought, will increasingly look to the government for subsidies.

Rather doomy for my taste, but I think we are heading towards a complex future something like this - closer to cyberpunk than to Star Trek. Even though the current recession is a temporary affair, there are good reasons to be concerned about growing technological unemployment and its effects in the next few decades, especially upon white collar "knowledge workers".

The economy is starved for capital. Rich folks are hoarding it.

If we don't get all that capital out of the trust funds of the rich and back flowing through the economy, yeah, we're headed a dystopian future.

It's couched in pretty exciting/revolutionary/utopian language, but are the ideas really more likely to become mainstream now than at any time in the past? Seems like today's spin on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out

Very good article. I am surprized Times and CNN published it, given their track record for crap. We better get ready for the future. Go with the flow or risk being left behind with the old desintegrating structures. Same thing for our belief structures. Hehe.. this one is gonna be a biggie.

The writer of this article is a National Review blogger. Jonah Goldberg is one of the editors.

Point being? I hope I'm missing something, and mentioning the writer's other activities and associations isn't a substitution for evaluation of the content.

True, but it is helpful for evaluating what's useful to read.

A statement's author does not cause it to be true or false. The article could have been written by Albert Einstein and it would be just as wrong.

tl;dr:

Get off my lawn!

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