Treating children for worms yields long-term benefits, says new study
news.berkeley.edu
news.berkeley.edu
Decreased Parasite Load and Improved Cognitive Outcomes Caused by Deworming and Consumption of Multi-Micronutrient Fortified Biscuits in Rural Vietnamese Schoolchildren https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144834/
Parasite load explains 67% of the worldwide variation in intelligence: "Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...
If for long time there were no means to get rid of worms, how come the difference in intelligence that allowed to invent a cure for worms to be?
I see "worm free living" as a consequence of higher intelligence than vice versa.
With those come good health insurance, being able to afford co-pays, being able to take time off work to go to the doctor, being able to comply with complex instructions like changing your diet, being able to research your diagnosis even if it's in lots of long latin words, being able to tell good advice from bad when researching online, being able to take time off for treatment or recovery, knowing the magic incantations to get yourself taken seriously, knowing when it's a good idea to get a second opinion and how to go about that, less stress caused by financial worries or job insecurity, etc etc
For example, most first world urban kids do not eat berries directly from the bushes. These berries they eat are controlled for worms among other things.
"Templer & Arikawa (2006) also found that average IQ correlated significantly with average skin darkness (r = −0.92). The authors offered little explanation of why this trend exists, except that they believed skin colour was related to exposure to certain climates over evolutionary time."
I doubt that scientists today would dare to make such statements, for the fear of being "cancelled".
IQ tests should be taken with a grain of salt.
It also depends on what you think is important. Smart people are not always wise people.
If you look on the net you will hear that some celebrity (say Alyssa Milano) took an IQ test and got a crazy high score.
There are just 60 of them so it is not hard to practice and I am sure there is some racket of psychologists in Hollywood who coach people to take the test and then send them to the psych across the street to get them tested.
Some technical caveats: So yes, on some level you can approximately group sets of people into things roughly matching modern broad racial categories on the basis of genetics. This isn't because of anything real (i.e. there's nothing all members of a group share that doesn't exist "outside" them), but simply because you can broadly categorize any large set of things, regardless of whether those categories are actualized. Race as a social construct (e.g. identifying someone as "black" or "caucasian") is absolutely, undeniably a thing. It's simply not reflecting an underlying biological reality. There are also people in the community who argue that even if racial categories aren't biologically actualized, they're still useful (or that the definition I gave previously doesn't apply), but that's a much more complicated matter for which entire libraries' worth of debate exist.
[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(18)30363-X [2] https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I... [3] https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statemen... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5299519/
Since tests are necessarily biased, maybe the way forward is to tune the bias to the test subjects. Then, out the window goes "standardized", at least for that interpretation of "standardized" which means everyone takes exactly the same test. (And which is never literally true, because year over year, you cannot use exactly the same test questions.)
I think tests tuned to cultural differences would never fly in America because the idea is contrary to political correctness. Everyone is equal by definition, why would they need a special test. Cultural differences, what? We are all Americans; gear the test to American culture!
And then, what if it turns out that members of a certain minority group do better on IQ tests designed for them, yet is is found that white, upper-middle class kids also do better if given those tests? Oh the horror: members of minority X are actually dumb, and the test they are given isn't actually tuned to them culturally, but nothing more than dumbed down. The conservatives would have field day.
It goes both way. Anyone who suppresses politically incovenient, yet relevant information about minorities, actually doing disservice to them; it is a worst kind of racism and "white privilege", to set arbitrary boundaries what is true and what is not wrt to some group of people.
How is it "white privilege" to say we should reject a test design that was designed to support white supremacy?
In the context of medical research specifically, different groups experience different health issues at different rates. It's important to understand these differences so that we can help the groups in question, or to gain further understanding into what causes the issue as we search for a universal improvement.
[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-mis...
Some would indeed try to use IQ tests to validate their prejudices and proclaim that "science says dark-skinned people are not as smart as asians". Um, no. Science says we should stay humble and ask questions.
People bringing up racial crime statistics as a valuable scientific avenue of investigation has contributed to hurting and discrediting me and my community throughout my life and historically. Even if the correlation exists, can we meaningfully act on it other than as a mechanism for discrediting programs that holistically address the issue in a system where guilt by association or ethnicity means nothing?
Denouncing statements about correlations between autism and airplanes haven't done people with autism a disservice in this sense either; it's driven research towards holistic and sensible studies and interpretations.
I hope one day you do not dismiss the issues that minorities like myself have encountered for generations as "white privilege" in the future.
And, call me a canceller myself, but somehow I doubt any such causal mechanism would actually be intrinsic to the human populations themselves. Such a strongly disadvantageous mutation as decreased cognitive ability would get weeded out by natural selection: you don't spend 20% of the body's calorie budget on an organ that isn't doing its job.
How many scientific breakthroughs across history took more than one person to figure them out and where subsequent thinkers built atop foundations and tidbits of those who went before them? (Almost all of them, IMO.)
Imagine if in the early days of AIDS, we couldn't talk about the role HIV might play in AIDS for fear that it would cast a negative light on communities affected by AIDS.
Imagine if we couldn't talk about the effects of parental, community, and early educational involvement in children's outcomes in life until we had perfect proof. Imagine we couldn't talk about the effects of inter-generational poverty until we had perfect proof.
"Until we have airtight causal links, we need to keep this quiet" is certainly not the way to make the fastest nor most effective scientific progress.
The stronger solution IMO is "publish what you observed, what you conclude from it, what you think good next steps are, and provide your signature and contact information" and let people openly collaborate and build on each other's work.
Imagine if Linus Torvalds published the first version of Linux anonymously. Would we be in the same spot now as a technology society if collaboration were limited to anonymous, arms-length interactions on public channels?
Yeah, right, then the only living large animals would be humans.
SAT prep courses help a little but won't bring them into the normal range. Their parents are big donors and make the case that they're doing a favor to the smart kids by hooking them up with the economically connected.
Harvard puts up Dan Bell's "Whiz Kids" to the task and discovers that standardized tests discriminate against minorities as much or more than they discriminate against their donors, so Stephen Jay Gould got grants to write books for ten years about how bad IQ tests are.
Parasite prevalence and the distribution of intelligence among the states of the USA https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
> we found that the correlation between average state IQ and infectious disease stress was − 0.67 (p < 0.0001) across the 50 states. Furthermore, when controlling the effects of wealth and educational variation among states, infectious disease stress was the best predictor of average state IQ.
We always assumed it was from bio mother drug use. We have since met various bio grandparents, etc.
Apparently reduced IQ just runs in the family.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/9031909/worm-wars-explained
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/08/18/macartan-h...
Frankly I'm appalled that intestinal worms still plague so many human beings. I happily spend about $50 a year to worm a herd of horses, a herd of cattle, and a dog. Surely as a species we can find the resources to buy these children some pills, at least until we cowboy up and eradicate these worms from our planet entirely.
We did: it's called universal healthcare - and many of our species' nation-states already use this system and have been seeing the overall positive results for about a century now - but some societies, for a variety of reasons, do not.
https://www.medicaid.gov/chip/index.html
"The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is a joint federal and state program that provides health coverage to uninsured children in families with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid, but too low to afford private coverage."
Dozens (every US state and territory is handled separately) of separate systems in which you can fill out a bunch of paperwork to apply to have insurance for children is nowhere close to the zero friction "free at the point of use" goal of universal healthcare.
Some countries with universal healthcare don't do a great job of achieving zero friction, but they're all way ahead of a disjointed paperwork process that only results in getting insurance that ought to have been free for everyone from the outset.
And, one of the most obvious problems is: CHIP only covers children you can provide an SSN for. So maybe Steve, aged 4 is covered because you had him in San Antonio but his older sister Esther was born in Mexico and travelled over the border with you. She can't get CHIP because she doesn't have an SSN and powerful people want to make sure it stays that way.
I am not going to enumerate all the reasons why it’s a nonstarter, but at least one is that it massively increases the cost of any such social program to a point it becomes both practically and politically untenable.
I’ve visited and used healthcare services in many of those other Western countries as a foreigner, and every single time I was required to file paperwork and pay a deposit in cash (or rarely by card) before receiving services. I would not have expected any differently, as I’m not a tax-paying citizen in those countries. On a mostly unrelated note, I write this while currently residing in San Antonio (as used in your example scenario).
I would believe it’s more financially sensible in the larger scheme of things to cover the cost of healthcare for illegal residents, but I haven’t seen any evidence that demonstrates that, and even with such evidence its still politically untenable.
My point is that such a scheme is so politically untenable that even existing Western universal healthcare countries do not have such a scheme. It’s far more radical than what is typically advocated in the US.
Maybe they’ve changed the rules since then, but at least my personal experience was the flow was to establish whether I was a Spanish or EU citizen, as I was not I was obligated to pay a sizeable deposit before even being seen for triage. There was certainly no indication any other foreigner would have been treated differently.
That distinction can be in addition to, but will more often wholly replace a distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
You can make a purely economic rationale for this if you want: Residents pay tax, and non-residents don't (in the US some non-residents still pay tax but that's not usual for any other country). If your universal healthcare is largely paid for as an "insurance" scheme, such residents are probably obliged to join the scheme, so it makes sense they'd also get the benefits.
I assume if you're in Spain, with no proof of residence you'll be asked to pay?
Do you recall which hospital was that? Sounds like you were sent to a private hospital.
My experience may not have been representative then, as it could have gone differently in a public hospital, but I am unsure. It seemed based on what I was told at the time that I could only seek treatment at hospitals that accept foreigners except in the case of an emergency severe enough to require an ambulance (I called an Uber to take me). I think any hospital would have ensured I was stable but not admitted me for multiple days of care other than one with a foreigner's department. But, it may be that a public hospital would have treated me without any concerns about my citizenship or residency.
In some countries I visited the foreigner's department was more involved in handling currency exchange and payment details, but less concerned with care or providing services (Czech Republic was this way at FN Motol for instance: https://www.fnmotol.cz/en/samoplatci/).
If you are a resident citizen of an EU country, you can often seek treatment in other EU countries under the same social medicine scheme they have and your citizenship/residency paperwork covers you. I'm not sure if Country A bills Country B or how that works exactly, but it was pretty clear that the foreigner's department concept was for non-EU citizens who were private pay and ineligible for social medicine.
So you probably meant non-residents and illegal immigrants. I'm not aware of non-residents (tourists, mostly) being covered anywhere. As for illegal immigrants, it depends: France has at least some free coverage, so has Spain and I'm sure some other countries. In France it's called the AME (Aide Médicale d'État). Like any system it's being gamed and abused, hence why it's being reformed and should not be copied as-is. But at 1 billion EUR/year the benefits certainly outweigh the cost.
(The back of your card in Germany has the international information.)
As others have pointed out, I don't think any of these societies limit benefits to citizens. In the UK, emergency care is free for everyone, and there are few checks on other forms of care in practice. I seriously doubt that someone who was in the country illegally would have any problem registering their child with a GP. Doctors aren't trained to perform immigration checks, and are not usually interested in doing so.
But someone without an SSN? In Canada, you don't get healthcare coverage without proof of legal residency. And that's what most (not all) western countries do. Why would we hold the US up to a higher standard?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
Most likely, Esther can also "provide an SSN". Identity theft is normal.
I guess that it is widespread knowledge that you can be in such a situation, but to read it spelled out on medicaid.gov is really something...
At least they're nice enough to let you go without medical assistance, but save your children.
If, and that's a big if, as a species we can find the resources to buy these children some cheap pills then it's not necessarily worming tablets.
But it's complex, people love the idea of de-worming kids. It sells well, and once you open up aid to communities then you can do a lot of other stuff. It's not the 50 cent pills it's the $1000s finding them and training someone to get to them, so tomato tomato who pays for that.
There are at least 300 species from multiple phyla that feed on humans. We might also consider those species that feed on our livestock, although such an action would have less ethical urgency.
It isn't impossible that other species might eat them, but given their baroque life cycles it seems quite unlikely that any other species depends on them for survival. But sure, if people decide to start with tests on isolated tropical islands, I won't argue.
>> there are many cases in the natural environment where parasites like this are the vector limiting overpopulation
Can you provide a couple of examples? I'd be interested in looking into this further to see how that works. Obviously, predators are a different category, and fill an important niche in the ecosystem, but I was unaware that species classically considered "parasites" performed a similarly important role. For example, ticks on moose seem very different from wolves hunting them.
https://phys.org/news/2020-08-parasites-important.html
This is the link above which made me overconfident to easily find on the web many examples of such natural regulations. But I could not find a lot... what is more easy to find is mathematical studies showing the effect on populations.
Here is one study considering the potential implications of parasites eradication:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222570/
For some particular examples, the red grouse is a bird whose population follows periodic cycles, and the cause is a parasite. Removal of the parasite smoothed out the population variations. You can imagine other species (plants or animals) whose own population cycles would be adapted to the old cycles, and these species would be impacted by the smoothing out of red grouses.
Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4694?seq=1
More generally, when a parasitic regulation disappears, the next in line would be resources regulation, that is the species starves when the food is scarce, and thus the population plummets. That could lead to a very different population dynamics (as the red grouse example shows, but there can be situations where the graph is sharpened instead of dampened like here), and because of that one or several species can disappear.
Regarding the fact that it's appalling that so many people still deal with this problem -- I agree. As Gelman says (second link I posted in GP), the reason that magnitude of effects is important is opportunity costs:
> The 800-pound gorilla in the room is opportunity cost, or cost-benefit analysis. As you say, who could be against de-worming kids? I’m reminded of Jeff Sachs’s argument that all of these sorts of interventions are worth doing, and that rather than trying so hard to rank the cost-effectiveness of different health and economic interventions, the rich countries should just kick in that 1% of GDP or whatever and do all of them. I’m not saying Sachs is necessarily right on this, I’m just saying that most of the discussion seems to be on traditional statistical grounds (Is there an effect? Is it statistically significant? Has it been proven beyond a reasonable doubt?) and the cost-benefit or opportunity cost calculations are implicit.
Pet prescription meds are only slightly less of a scam than human prescription meds.
You are impressed by how much variation a veterinarian must account for in a single species, and they handle multiple species.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618732/
Deworming increases response of immune system [2] and can lead to higher inflammation, more allergies and autoimmune diseases.
[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/113/44/12526.full
Right now I think we have to eat better.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
The article is incorrect. Hookworm was never eradicated in the US. It was just confined to poor, black folks. [0]
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
That is incorrect. Worms are endemic to the USA. See the CDC's posting "Parasites - Hookworm" at https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/hookworm/index.html
As a child I was treated regularly for worms, including but not limited to hookworms. Worms infest whites as well as blacks, Hispanics, and everyone else. Both rich and poor get worms. As the CDC posting states: "Hookworm infection is mainly acquired by walking barefoot on contaminated soil. One kind of hookworm can also be transmitted through the ingestion of larvae." And what kind of child doesn't walk barefoot in the mud or eat dirt?
The answer possibly is sickly children! Some hypothesize that exposure to worms may be necessary for a child to develop a proper immune response:
"Are Worms Key to Health?"
https://www.nhs.uk/news/heart-and-lungs/are-worms-key-to-hea...
The amount you can positively change a child's life for the better means that reasonable expenditures on known problems should almost be a no-brainer.
( I'll see if I can dig up an article link about the difference in outcomes per $ spent, versus age of recipient.)
Edit: here are multiple links within the article about the above: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/social-programs-...
https://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-heckman...
https://www.nzae.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Rea_and_B...
IS THE HECKMAN CURVE CONSISTENT WITH THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON PROGRAM RETURNS BY AGE?
The Heckman Curve depicts the empirical evidence on rates of return to public investment in human capital as rapidly diminishing with age. Investment early in the life course is characterised as providing significantly higher rates of return compared to investments targeted at people who are older. In this paper we use the Washington State Institute for Public Policy estimates of program benefit cost ratios to assess whether the Heckman Curve is consistent with the latest evidence. The data does not support the claim that programs targeted earlier in the life course provide the largest returns, or that adult programs will have benefit cost ratios that are less than one. The paper concludes by discussing the various features of both human capital and interventions that might explain why the predictions of the Heckman Curve are not consistent with the evidence.
I think education is also high ROI, but just like anything else in economics, you can only push it to a certain level after which one gets diminishing returns. For the purpose of the discussion here, we should spent more on education of younger kids.
The idea that "throwing money at" education will yield no benefit is preposterous on the face of it, when so many schools lack such basics as sufficient textbooks, desks, and pencils. This is not even getting into the more modern research on better pedagogical techniques or the other ways in which a school can be a support system for at-risk children (like meals).
https://www.cato.org/blog/there-really-national-teacher-shor...
Practically unlimited school budgets in Kansas City had ~0 impact on student test scores.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-c...
Throwing money at education works if money is the limiting factor. That is not the case in any large part of the US, or most of the developed world.
I have a friend who went into Teach for America after college, and my cousin taught in NYC public schools for a bit after her undergrad. I've seen the look in my friend's eyes when I ask about his school's resources (we both went to a fairly good public school). I don't think he'll ever teach in a public school again.
I once bought my cousin classroom supplies for her birthday so she wouldn't have to. I mean, printing paper for assignments, pens, that sort of thing; the bare minimum that she was otherwise paying out of pocket. She cried after receiving them, as a human I don't typically associate with overbearing emotion.
These are Chicago and NYC public schools, respectively. I know it's a big country, but in both cases, we're talking thousands of kids in each of these districts. And it seems unlikely to assume that these two anecdotal experiences are somehow insane outliers among schools in the US, at least according to the experience of (almost) every other public school teacher I've talked to. Money matters, a lot, and if the total amount in schools somehow isn't a problem, then then the process of distributing it to where it's most needed sure as hell is.
It's the same for calculators, pencils, pens, gym shorts, closed-toe shoes, and lots of other things.
Teachers should never ever diminish their own pay by buying supplies. That pay is for personal use. Spending it at work creates an ugly competition, especially if the supplies improve teacher ratings. It's an arms race that consumes teacher pay.
Schools are funded out of local property taxes. Thus, poor areas—where the students and their families can't afford to be paying for specific school supplies that may vary "according to teacher preference"—are exactly the ones that don't have enough money for the school to be providing these things.
I agree that teachers should never be spending out of pocket to provide supplies for their classes. But the solution isn't to force students whose families are already having to choose between food and heat, or rent and a new pair of (second-hand, beat-up) shoes for their rapidly-growing adolescent, to be the ones paying out of pocket.
The solution is to fund all schools adequately so that the supplies necessary for reasonable teaching styles can be properly provided for by the school.
The schools are funded. Some of our best funded schools, the ones in DC for example, are particularly terrible. It's crazy enough to make one wonder if funding makes things worse!
Typical problem: The school buys Chromebooks or iPads for everybody. There is no consequence for property destruction. Kids make a sport of tossing them down stairwells. The school provides replacements at no cost to the student. Maybe the student is "supposed to" reimburse the school, just like the student is "supposed to" not purposely destroy property, but nobody has the will or ability to enforce anything.
>> Nobody gave me the option to show up without school supplies. That would be an "F" grade.
That sucks, I'm sorry you had that experience. In a public school system, that's not the way I think it should be. If your family can't (or even won't, some caregivers are worse than others) afford to provide the basics of school supplies like notebooks and pens, then the community should pitch in the maybe $20/year per student in that situation to make that happen. Failing a minor because they can't obtain simple supplies, and who fundamentally don't have much control over that part (or most other) parts of their life, in a mandatory public school environment, is ridiculous and a failure on behalf of the community.
>> The schools are funded. Some of our best funded schools, the ones in DC for example, are particularly terrible. It's crazy enough to make one wonder if funding makes things worse!
You're going to need to provide multiple, peer-reviewed sources from reputable institutions demonstrating an inverse relationship between funding and performance in primary or secondary schools if you want a chance of getting me to believe this. Alternatively, if you really believe this, school matriculation and funding rates are public record. You could do your own study. Otherwise, the "it's enough to make one wonder" is a lazy rhetorical device commonly used in situations without enough empirical evidence to back up a claim, because it obscures the relevant core aspects of one's argument. I'm going to treat it as such.
>> Typical problem: The school buys Chromebooks or iPads for everybody
Typical where? I'm a millennial, and both iPads and Chromebooks were available for (relatively) cheap. The school didn't supply them, and I went to a well-funded public high school. We had computer labs, with additional access in the library for after-school assignments if we needed it. There wasn't a budget to buy individual devices for everyone--the only laptops available had to be loaned out like a library book for multimedia projects, and (almost, because sometimes stuff happens) came back intact.
Again, I have family and friends who have worked in public schools that have literally had to purchase their own supplies to print out student assignment sheets. Those schools aren't buying markers for whiteboards, let alone iPads and Chromebooks for each student. Maybe somewhere, somehow, this has happened. But your description of "typical problem" and the subsequent attempt to generalize that experience to most everywhere else in the country is so far removed from my own experience (and, to be honest, basically every other person I've known, from Massachusetts to California) that I find it unlikely to be actually true.
>> Maybe the student is "supposed to" reimburse the school [...] but nobody has the will or ability to enforce anything.
Even if there had been the money to buy those devices, if there was the widespread property damage on those devices, you can take it to the bank that there wouldn't have been replacements purchased. Board of Education and city council meetings are brutal, and the money (if it was still kept in the school budget at all) would almost certainly have been diverted to something else. Despite fairly good economic times before COVID-19, there's a lot of districts that still hadn't fully recovered from the Great Recession.
It isn't totally crazy to think that funding could cause some performance problems. Money buys gadgets, and gadgets are distractions. All computing devices are repurposed into game machines.
If teachers "literally had to purchase their own supplies", where was the union? Was the school firing teachers who didn't forego a portion of their pay to get supplies?
Replacements get purchased because it won't be acceptable to have some students without the equipment, particularly if that involves any demographic factors that could cause a scandal. The risk of a civil rights lawsuit, or even just a major unflattering news story, is not going to be taken.
I'd also like to know where the union was, although I suspect they were working on it or were fighting for other things. As I mentioned before, recovery to even pre-Recession levels has taken a long time even with educator union action, and even then has been uneven across the country[3]. If you're actually interested, I can reach out to those people in my life for more specifics, but it may be a few days before I hear back.
I disagree about the actions that a school administration would take. To me, it's more likely they'd just say "nope, that didn't work" and use them for in-class-only activities for a few years until the machines gave up, rather than spend money on replacements. Because it's a hypothetical, I don't see much of a way forward here, besides just agreeing to disagree.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465430660033... (may need to use SciHub, etc. for access)
[2] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED596199.pdf
[3] https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/3-6-19s...
I immediately notice that the study is funded by the American Federation of Teachers. That makes it credible like a smoking study funded by tobacco companies. This should not be getting served by a .gov web site! I also see that the authors have highly biased credentials, and that none are related to economics or statistics.
It says "Moreover, using models that estimate the spending levels required to achieve common outcome goals, we find that the vast majority of states spend well under the levels that would be necessary for their higher-poverty districts to achieve national average test scores." which is technically true because the needed funding is beyond infinite. No amount of school funding can fix bad students. The study's comment that this "would likely be a multi-generational effort" can be seen as an admission that the funding won't actually work.
The claim that "there is now widespread agreement" that the schools need more money appears to be an argumentum ad populum.
I see a repeated claim that schools serving students with poverty need more money per student. If true, this proves that money is not the problem. Bad students are the problem.
The "progressivity" idea throughout the document is really disgusting. The idea is that problems unrelated to school funding could be fixed by throwing more money at the problem. There is the assumption that we should prefer spending money to educate people who don't want education over spending money to improve the education of people who actually want it. That is wasteful.
BTW, regarding the actions that a school district would take regarding destroyed property, it's not a hypothetical. I think it was last week that I had a teacher explaining it to me, but I can't find the comment right now. The kids were tossing them down stairwells for fun, but I don't remember the brand of hardware. I've also known teachers, not just from my own childhood but as an adult, and it fits. Schools are horribly mismanaged. Bad management shouldn't be rewarded with larger budgets.
>> "would likely be a multi-generational effort can be seen as an admission that the funding won't actually work.
I squinted pretty hard, and failed to see that admission. I do see an honest acknowledgement that lack of funding builds systemic issues in areas with poor educational systems, which takes time to resolve. "Give all the money overnight and that will fix everything immediately" is completely different from "some extra money to make sure kids actually have pens and paper".
Also, describing "widespread agreement" isn't a logical fallacy in this case, it's a necessary precursor to public policy. Can you imagine setting policy based on the reverse? "Very few experts agree about this topic, so lets do...." It's as important in education policy as it is for choosing the next large particle physics experiment. The article is largely a meta-analysis anyway--describing the current consensus is sort of the point.
>> I see a repeated claim that schools serving students with poverty need more money per student. If true, this proves that money is not the problem. Bad students are the problem.
This sentence and the following paragraph comes uncomfortably close to being a dog-whistle about poor people (and let's be honest, many of whom are people of color) being fundamentally bad students and not worth spending money on because they don't care about learning anyway. I think your logic about what proves what is shallow and flawed, and the sentiment harmful.
I can't prove or disprove your anecdote about kids destroying computers, or how widespread that is, but it's sort of a sidetrack here anyway. There's a spectrum between "every family must pay for private tutors and materials out of pocket for the their children's entire education" and "let's have public schools give free laptops to students to destroy with no consequences". My point is that having thousands of kids in the "go to school but can't be successful because they lack access to the basic materials" part of that spectrum is the wrong answer, and one that is easily fixed by increasing funding for that purpose.
I suppose the fallacy was not a claim of correctness due to actual popularity. It was a claim of correctness due to non-existent popularity. We don't all agree.
Lack of money for pens and paper seems to be fake. Remember that they are dirt cheap. Blowing the budget on computers, then claiming that you can't afford pens and paper, is a great tactic to fight for an unjustified funding increase. When I see millions of dollars being spent on football stadiums, my blood boils. Clearly, the budget is far too large. It is purposely misallocated. You could increase the budget enough to buy every student a ream of paper and a box of pens every day, and there still wouldn't be enough money for pens and paper.
I know a person who taught in a DC school. There is no teaching. Nobody is willing to cooperate. That's how it goes, and no amount of money will fix it.
Spending all our money on bad students will harm society. We need high achievers. We need the gifted. Money spent on the better students is more productive, leading to great engineers and scientists who will produce the civilization-enabling technology.
If you own a trailer home in a bad trailer park, and you also own a cute townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood, where should you spend the money to install a marble floor? Putting the marble floor in the trailer home is a wasted investment.
Lack of money for pens and paper is not fake. I'll link a few articles below to help you, just from this year, but it's not. I mean, it's just not. That's the reality of public schools. I don't know how else to convince you. Feel free to Google News or DDG "lack of school supplies" and you'll hit a ton of additional links from all over the country [1][2][3].
In any case, your last couple paragraphs are getting a little of base, but yeah, it boils my blood to see that much money spent on football stadiums too. No argument there. Yes, programs for the gifted and high-achieving are needed as well. But refusing to get kids the basics of what they need to even start being successful simply because they come from a poor family isn't just unethical, it prevents kids who would otherwise being high-achievers from even getting in the race. That cuts society off at the knees.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/30/540448101/nationwide-teachers...
[2] https://investors.thecloroxcompany.com/investors/news-and-ev...
[3] https://www.wsoctv.com/community/family-focus/school-supplie...
Imagine that you are a school administrator. If you save money, your budget will get reduced since you obviously don't need it. If you spend the money on pens and paper, things will function OK and people won't vote to increase property taxes. If you blow the money on something else, so that you run out of money for pens and paper, you'll get sympathy and maybe more money.
Well, the solution is obvious. You need to engineer the budget so that you can't afford pens and paper. Buy a new mural. Replace perfectly functional carpeting in your office. Use up the paper by sending junk mail home with the kids. Replace the landscaping. Hire your cousin to seal the pavement.
Paper is $0.011 per page. Pens are $0.0865 each. It costs just $55.17 to give each student a new pen and 20 sheets of paper every single day for the entire school year. California spends over $20,000 per student. DC spends somewhere between $27,000 and $29,000 per student per year.
Just 0.19% to 0.28% of the budget is enough to fund that wasteful amount of pens and paper.
Comparison shouldn't be limited to the USA. Budgets in the USA are way above international norms, even ignoring the poor countries.
Tell me, Mr. Cato Institute, how "throwing money at" these problems can't solve them.
The net result of policy like the above is 'grades have gone up (because of no uniform measuring) and our union is receiving record dues!'
We have to push our elected officials towards practical and meaningful improvements and stop letting outside interests influence elections and policy so heavily.
You can waste money on schooling or get proper care to infants in the first place.
Super oversimplified but I’ve found it tells the general story: you can’t just come back to it later and expect to find the same progress. Constant nurturing, whether from yourself or a caregiver or an education system, is what has an impact. And I believe this is true for almost any age.
But yes, some less general stuff will get old quick.
Thats just insane.
I'm all for planning and financial outlooks but there's a point where this becomes "let them eat cake"
Evidence Action "Deworm the World Initiative" is one of GiveWell's top charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
Novel treatment of Multiple Sclerosis with parasitic worms: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5666823/
https://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11...
Enterobius is quite common across the world. It's also considered to be minimally pathogenic, so it probably is only treated in symptomatic cases.
But from what I've seen in research and been told by doctors, they see no reason to worm adults as a precaution. I'm not sure what the supposed downside is of doing it once a year or so - nasty side effects?
https://www.nhs.uk/news/heart-and-lungs/are-worms-key-to-hea...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080108063512/kuro5hin.org/stor...
Is going from "deworming children make less poor" to "the worms cause poor outcomes" such a stretch?
[0] http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/twenty-year-econom...
Is going from "deworming children make less poor" to "the worms cause poor outcomes" such a stretch?
Sure, it is likely.
Anyway, in this case, I do not believe deworming was as common as you assume:
> Baseline parasitological surveys indicated that helminth infection rates were over 90%, and over a third had a moderate-heavy infection according to a modified WHO infection criteria (Miguel and Kremer 2004)
> Drug take-up rates were high, at approximately 75% in the treatment group, and under 5% in the control group (Miguel and Kremer 2004).
5% of the population taking the drug when >90% should means the drug is not "common".
I mean, faecal transplants are a thing now.
As a species, we spend trillions of dollars a year on armaments and the machinery of war, and can't even definitively answer simple questions about our own bodies. What a disappointment we are.