Hacker News Reader

Comment by frognumber | Hacker News Reader

I think the corollary is about taxpayer accountability.

It's easy to make the argument:

"If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness."

That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industrial policy, it's about cold, hard economics.

One step more complex -- but equally high ROI -- is towards having a functioning democracy. That's economics, but a bit more squishy.

Investing in the arts, humanities, and music is a good thing as well. However, that's a very different bucket of money. I wouldn't lump it in with the former two.

View on HN

You don’t think investing in arts, humanities, and music contributes to a functioning democracy?

Last time someone got rejected from art school, there was a bit of a fascism that happened, so investing in arts totally contributes to functioning democracy!

I believe the argument was that they do contribute to a functioning democracy, as opposed to investment in training nurses and carpenters, who are being trained for economic reasons. The argument was that the two goals are so different that they should be funded differently.

In what way do nurses and carpenters not contribute to a functioning democracy?

The things thay directly help democracy are well considered viewpoints, humanities research, journalism, law etc. Stuff that influences decision makers including voters hopefully roughly for a greater good although we all may disagree exactly what that means.

Nurses and carpenters help society and functioning civilization.

For that to work, what you need is for the nurses and carpenters to be well versed in basic economics and how pundits lie with statistics etc. for when they go to the polls, rather than to have an oversupply of English majors who go on to have careers as a Walmart greeter or become structurally unemployed.

In other words, we need more people with a minor in the humanities and fewer people with a major in it.

I can agree with that. You need everyone to be a thinker and some to be deeper thinkers.

Their direct work output contributes to a functioning democracy, but does so indirectly by providing material goods and services, which I refer to by the shorthand "economic reasons". We don't train nurses and carpenters because their training directly supports democracy; we train them because we want to live inside and be cared for when needed, and these things are incidentally good for any society, democratic or otherwise.

They may of course contribute as individuals, too, but their training is not required for them to do so.

Not at all, most of these are obviously "symptoms" of a well functioning society (not just democracy), not its cause.

Regardless of whether we classify it as humanities or political science (as neither seems to be looked at as terribly useful in the states), a population without some grasp of civics does not lend itself to a healthy democracy

Not everyone must be a plumber or electrician, but we're well-served by having some basic knowledge, and an ability to find answers to the questions that arise as we do basic handywork, such as changing a lightswitch or replacing a faucet. Similarly, we are well-served as a society when we can answer basic questions about our democracy past the age of 18; IE, shortly after testing ends, and typically before it actually matters - when voting.

Not everyone needs to become a licensed electrician, or have a deeper-than-average understanding of civics. But knowing someone you can trust with an answer that isn't purely to line their own pocket is still important.

I usually don't like to get into these subjects on HN, but I'll expand just a little bit on what I mean.

All political systems (all of them) have "holes" in that they're more or less dependent on individual virtue to function in a long-term fashion - some of them having holes so large they can only work as naïve thought experiments with perfect civically-minded (thus imaginary) people - and not academic knowledge, which is completely orthogonal to said virtue.

That "grasp of civics" you're talking about is the same, it's not about knowing but being willing to make some real thankless efforts; the culprits in the proverbial "Tragedy of the commons" aren't ignorant.

i like your framing of "holes" in political systems. one way to put it is that a political system has "holes" if the ideal/desired outcome is not a Nash equilibrium.

however, my understanding (though i can't speak for the other commenters) is that the reasoning behind "humanities-educated people make better democracies" is NOT that humanities-educated people are more virtuous, and thus will willingly not degrade the commons (the reasoning you seem to be criticizing). rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).

the usually cited problem with democracy is that it gives the people the power to choose, but it does not automatically makes them capable to make good choices. that's where the education comes in.

clearly many questions require technical/domain knowledge to be answered and are not simply a matter of preference. for example, fixing your car, or building a bridge. and even running a business or cooking an elaborate meal. with technical knowledge, you are able to make better decisions whatever your preferences are. humanities education is then implied to be the "technical knowledge" for participating in society.

of course, in that case, we can discuss what should be the content of the "humanities education", but that's another discussion...

> rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).

I can see where your reasoning is coming from but I mostly disagree. I can see two factors that could prevent manipulation: 1. The rare case of wisdom (that I define as being strong willed enough to think independently and not fall for self-deception/wishful thinking + intelligent enough to think correctly) which doesn't apply here since education doesn't influence this and 2. Manipulation going too much against the previous indoctrination, which does apply here but kinda defeats the point.

In fact, I'm mostly distrustful of intellectuals (!= intelligent people). That misattributed Thucydides quote about scholars ("The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.") further illustrated by Uncle Ted ("Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today.") summarize my position.

Where I do agree is that practical/technical knowledge allowing individuals to be more independent and less reliant on specialized technicians to change a light bulb is highly important. Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so (cf modern cars, appliances or operating systems). I suspect that this isn't a coincidence considering the aforementioned ramifications...

i agree that wisdom / an independent thinking spirit is an important factor to prevent manipulation and that it's not something easily taught.

but i also believe that in fact knowledge is another very important factor in resisting manipulation (absent from your list), and more generally, being part of a functioning democracy. i mean here knowledge of lofty things like history, economics, sociology, which can then serve as a base to know and understand more practical things, like laws, regulations, taxes, government subsidies, or how roads, schools, or health insurance is funded -- otherwise how could anyone make any decision regarding these topics? and all of these things can be taught.

independent thinking is important but with zero knowledge you could maybe be convinced to join a cult or something, for example. like, for ancient peasants the king was effectively a god anyway.

of course, all of this is highly idealized. i agree with you and Uncle Ted. academia, in practice, often is not a place that champions these ideals. but maybe it could be.

> Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so

yeah, i fear these developments

It's a lot easier to have a functioning society without art majors than without civil engineers.

Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.

... or someone who has a hard time seeing how most actual arts, music, and humanities college degrees have that impact.

Examples of things with high-impact towards civics:

- Philosophy, especially political philosophy. Aristotle, Confucius, Marx, Smith, ...

- History, political science, economics, journalism

- Theory of law, studied academically. Lawyers, for the most part, have the opposite effect.

- Anthropology + international relations

Examples of things which currently don't:

- Most major in art, film, visual studies, literature, African/women's/LGBTQ/Asian/... studies, language majors, linguistics, ...

This is a statement about the practice of such majors. For example:

* Art/film/... ought to contribute, historically has contributed, and in much of Europe, actually still does. In most of the US, it leads to either unemployment or work in advertising, and doesn't teach the right things.

* Looking at the experiences of different minorities ought to contribute. In practice, most of these majors are dysfunctional self-admiration cults, with people citing each other's work, due to misaligned incentive structures in academic hiring.

* It's no coincidence that the most important work in philosophy, in the past century, was not done by philosophy majors.

* A Chinese / French / Russian / ... major will place you about one tier down from a Chinese / French / Russian / ... immigrant in terms of... just about everything.

In either case, many of these things do still have value, but it's not the same funding bucket.

A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.

Sure, but how much art do we need for that? One (or a few) sculpture can satisfy the needs of a large community. There are many more than that.

> Sure, but how much art do we need for that?

A lot more than we have now.

> One (or a few) sculpture can satisfy the needs of a large community.

I cannot disagree more. You may as well say that no one should tell stories anymore because we already have the Iliad and Hamlet. You may as well say that Vincent van Gogh was wasting his time picking up a paintbrush because we already had so many great Renaissance paintings.

Art isn't a commodity where you spend 15 minutes a day Admiring Art and it gives you the aesthetic equivalent of your daily protein intake.

> But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times

I completely agree with you, but

1) you can make art without taking out enormous loans and

2) if you want to pay cash or take out a private loan to attend these schools you still can

3) learning about art does not make you an artist, it makes you a museum curator.

The last one is probably the most important. An expensive degree does not make your painting more beautiful, or your notes more in-tune, or your bakery more delicious. It is a credential.

> It's easy to make the argument:

And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work.

There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com