It seems to me that possibly the highest return on investment a government can do is investing in education.
More intelligent people likely impacts tax revenue, crime etc. does anyone know if there are studies done on this?
The purpose of education is also very widely misunderstood. I often see (for context: I'm in Eastern Europe) regrets that the education process does not provide valuable life skills, that there is too much focus on subjects like physics or biology.
School teaches you to be systematic, to look for information, to know that even if you don't like or want to know something, you have to sit down and learn it. These are very important lessons that can later be translated into other "life skills".
There'll still be a varied quality of in-house teaching, but at least the primary lessons could be world-class regardless of the location.
Education definitely can scale, but good education scales much less well than slick-but-ineffective education.
Yes, that would be best, but that removes the most fun aspects of teaching (curriculum development, lecturing) from the local teachers, while leaving them the most draining (keeping students on task, discipline, keeping the classroom quiet).
That's why doing it well requires more money. That's why parents need to be involved, which is why we need a better economic system where productivity increases actually lead to more free time instead of an increasingly Dilbert way of working.
School tries to teach this. The literature seems to indicate that it's not very good at actually teaching this.
Starting at “artificial scarcity”/zero and building up/out is ridiculous.
There are plenty of people who would do such work, who probably need little training, but reliable routine blows up the speculation game. We exist in a state similar to watching a movie; suspended disbelief. These 60+ yo political truths? Don’t look away!
We know a whole lot more about logistics and manufacturing now than we did in the 50s.
It’s time for the story to move along.
Uneducated people with a nice conservative religion is the way to go.
(if you are lucky enough to have the privilege to select your government without a bloodshed)
> Although these elements can be expensive, “when well-implemented and supported by subsequent schooling, high-quality preschool can pay for itself. Studies of high-quality programs that have followed students into adulthood find up to $17 returned in social benefits for every dollar invested. This is because people who attend preschool are more productive in school, work, and society generally—with higher levels of education and earnings, less involvement in delinquency and crime, and fewer chronic health problems,” said W. Steven Barnett, Founder and Senior Co-Director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University.
https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/press-release/what-does-...
I disagree, you don't need to have a smart society, you can have a moral society and that takes away a lot of government spending for the unruly. An overproduction of highly educated people doesn't make a society better if there isn't demand for those jobs.
You really think the problem is lack of investment? Education is insanely overfunded, but it still fails to provide its basic function - that is, of educating its consumers.
Inspire and grow the intelligence of the next generation? Nah, let’s sell ads and figure out how to make people spend more time on social media, getting rich in the process.
According to [1] the American people spend $14,891 per public school pupil per year. So if a single classroom has 30 students, that classroom gets $446,730 of funding.
And yet, as I understand things, American classrooms don't look like they've had $440k per year spent on them.
This thing about 'amazing teachers vs. terrible teachers' is a really, really bad mythology.
Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values.
In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish.
But the same school and teachers magically transplanted into an upper middle class neighbourhood will flourish.
America invests more as a % of GDP in education than most nations, even raw $ per student [1]
The other thing that nobody wants to contend with, is that America has a giant community of migrants, often undocumented, from very poor countries with a different culture that live in more segregated isolated communities, and form a kind of 'working class backbone', but which makes it harder for their kids to break into the middle class. The surpluses from this labour are immesurable.
California and Texas are rich at least in part because they have millions of people willing to work very cheaply in addition to millions who will work 'off the books' even more cheaply - and who do the work well because they are 'happy to be living the dream'.
PISA (OECD) standardized testing (see: 2018 and historical) shows this stark difference: Asian and White kids have done consistently well for decades. Black and Latino kids are consistently 'doing a bit better' (i.e. closing the gap), but the increase in their population offsets the net improvement and drags the average down.
The 'education' issue in the US is a giant canard. If you can get kids into good families, with good parents, stable jobs, no violence i.e. 'what you and I would normally expect in life' - those kids will do just fine in the current system as it is.
> In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish.
These two paragraphs are mutually contradictory. A high-quality, community-minded teacher is not going to want to deal with "gang violence and threats" if they aren't being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them. They've got plenty of alternatives, after all.
It's hard for me to grasp how people can really even think that way for anything but careerism - I always felt that it would be the perspective of industry, not the the community at large.
Teachers love children, and want to help, that is their vocation and calling.
For most people, money obviously matters, but it's not everything.
Generally, speaking, they are going to view children in worse conditions as a challenge and an opportunity to help, not some 'crap to contend with'.
Surely a few teachers are going to want to 'teach the best students' but that's a smaller cohort.
More broadly, yes, it can probably be a bit depressing to work in crappy schools, but they do often pay a bit extra.
But ultimately, the point is moot, because even if schools do operate 'sub optimally' in the face of non-participation from students, those same schools would pick up as the students did i.e. if you solve for the community problem, the school will be up to the task.
Bad schools are not creating these environments, it's the other way around.
The model for education works fine, just get people stable jobs, stable families, conscientious lifestyles and educational outcomes will go up.
Most people don't have 'careers' they have 'jobs' and if they can do something they want to do then that's a bonus for them.
So comp. takes a completely different kind of form there, outside the scope of what we normally consider performance/bonus oriented among professionals.
It's a bit like Nursing, a semi-socialized trade where we establish pay rates via budgets, Unions, a bit of supply and demand etc..
As to why software devs make so much, it's a simple matter of revenue per employee. Software is insanely scalable. While it is capital intensive to produce software, it is nearly free to distribute. A handful of developers can produce multi-billion dollar software programs, because the market is the entire internet (billions of people). A grade school teacher can at most teach 30 or so kids at a time.
Engineers ship results.
Pretty sure many parents would be ok with a result based comp for their kids teacher.
They're claiming an average of about $40k, and $63k at the 90th percentile, for an "entry level teacher." However, note, the shape of the distribution is really, really freaking weird, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I assume you're speaking of the US, apologies if that's not the case. While there's waste in the system I'd argue that we do not over spend on most students.
Let's start with the statistic that the average spend per student in the US is $15,000. This number is misleading, a more useful number is the median spend per student, which is closer to $11k[0]. It is not uncommon to see per student spend around $9k[1] (p32). The US is more unequal in its spending than most first world countries.
Perhaps more important, spending by many other nations is under counted relative to the US. Learning is highly dependent on overall health and feelings of safety. Food and housing programs, mental health services, etc. contribute substantially to educational outcomes. Finland, for example, invests heavily in early childhood mental health[2]. Budget-wise, this is mostly accounted for in their health spending whereas in the US, such services are generally accounted for under special education (~17% of school spending).
[0] https://aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=9248
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020303.pd
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207411.2020.1...
[1 ] https://archive.attn.com/stories/11036/how-military-and-educ...
States pay for education, Federal pays for military. The Federal government isn't responsible for funding education, so it is unsurprising that they have a relatively small budget for it.
It's a well known fact that US supremacy is mainly due to their military power, but, for example, they lack behind in many other areas, even compared to not completely developed countries like China (that invests a lot more in education[1][2] and cultural products[3])
[1] the United States spent 2.6 percent of GDP on total expenditures on education institutions
[2] public expenditure on education in China amounted to around 4.22 percent of national GDP. That value increased from around 2.5 percent in the mid-1990s to above 4 percent in 2012
[3] China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013, the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.
Can you cite a source for that claim? Genuinely curious, because I don't know if I've ever heard someone suggest it. (Conversely, the idea that education is substantially underfunded is generally assumed - at least in my bubble.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...
I'm not sure what qualifies as "insanely" but there's a gap.
But, national per student spending only really small part of the story. It is more instructive to observe that there are lots and lots of school districts which spend more than $15k, but nevertheless get atrocious educational outcomes, for example New York City, Baltimore, or Chicago. If New York City public schools can spend nearly $30k per student, but nevertheless have worse outcomes than national average, why would anyone believe that more money is what American schools need?
Those South Dakota teachers didn't think so.
The amount of spending isn't the problem -- we've consistently increased spending. But that increased spending doesn't increase classroom budgets or teacher salaries significantly.
Education in the US has never been more accessible or more extensive, yet we have a massive student loan crisis ($1.71 trillion of debt) and we import more knowledge workers than we produce (~350k H-1B visas in 2016 and 2017).
Maybe we're just "doing it wrong", but we're not yet seeing the fabled "highest return on investment".
More intelligent people are likely a detriment to MLM revenue.
It's also managed at the school level, which means all kinds of people with eccentric belief systems are motivated to take over school boards and force their issues on others.
But elements of curriculum design are also created semi-centrally. So you can get the worst of all possible worlds, with corporations skimming money from classrooms while faddy ineffective teaching techniques collide with school board skirmishes.