A free marketer (and I’m sorta one) is of the opinion that comparative advantages are not set in stone; an educated population tends, on average, to create more valuable (as in, higher GDP per capita) comparative advantages than a less-educated population. Thus, education is a very good thing indeed.
I disagree. Because you haven’t taken the costs of the college degree into account.
If it costs $100,000 to get a 4-year degree in Modern Sanskrit theory, with a minor in Bolivian dance pedagogy, and the person can’t a job with that sort of training and create value…what does that tell you?
It tells you that you destroyed value with that 100 grand, unless it came out of the person’s own pocket and they wanted that degree for purely intangible reasons that they, and only they, value.
But that’s true of anything–if you pay too much for a trivial good then you’ve lost. We wouldn’t argue that a society where everybody has a car means that the cars are automatically cheap and meaningless.
Human brains are by far the most important resource a society has. Educating it as far as possible maximizes that resource. If you’re saying that not everybody can handle the rigors required to get a degree than I agree but I totally disagree that there becomes a point when too many actors in an economy are highly educated.
Nothing has intrinsic value.
This is doubtful, if the costs the latter bore to get degrees was above the value they receive for it (which seems likely, frankly).
Well, your conclusions may be a little straw-stuffed as well. Evil? More dog-eat-dog. Maybe I’m wrong about 'em.
I’m entitled to you money? Nah. I may have some government spending ideas, but those are never developed by just one guy. Are free marketeers anti-helping people? Or only beyond the individual level?
But ok, you say free marketers have values. Are they all framed as benefits and costs? At what point do free marketeers stop defining value in terms of money? Are the ‘intangibles’ meant only for individuals, or at least off-limits to entities like governments/populaces? How do you feel about the existence of powerful organizations that are not corporations?
Money, products and services are all well and good. However, I suspect that an unregulated market will become distorted to such a degree that things like ease, quality, comfort will be increasingly difficult to achieve for an increasingly large portion of the population. What prevents an oligarchy? What prevents the top 2% from eventually denying a meaningful education to everyone else because the top 2% get the most value that way?
Sorry about the saints comment… sometimes certain capitalists can come across as dogmatic, as you mentioned.
If the question comes down to utility, in the sense that the goal is ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’, I don’t think the free market by itself necessarily achieves that. Do you?
Meh. It isn’t like I’m out to blow up everyone’s theory. I just have a lot of questions.
P1. Of course not. I love helping people. What does that have to do with the posts above?
P2. I defined value in terms of benefits other than money in my post above. I don’t know how a government can value an intangible. That makes no sense to me. I don’t understand the rest of the paragraph. If you could try and rephrase it, I promise to take another read and try to answer.
P3. How can an unregulated market become distorted? That sounds like a hammer of a sentence, in search of a nail.
What prevents an oligarchy? I don’t know. Do they need to be prevented? Is an oligarchy good? Bad? I don’t know. I didn’t realize a judgement was required here. What’s your point? Are Coke and Pepsi Oligarchs? Are they Bad? Good?
This last paragraph of yours creates some confusing strawmen, and makes some wild assertions (like unregulated markets will create ‘distortions’) and then puts the burden on me to somehow prove that bad things won’t happen in a free market.
What’s your debate premise here? That if I somehow can’t prove that an unregulated market won’t cause distortions and create oligarchys (whatever that is) then therefore free markets are bad? Are you asking me to disprove a negative?
Agreed. I never said that too many actors in an economy could be highly educated.
I agreed with ** gonzomax ** point that if everyone could get a college degree, it was possible for them to become worthless.
Especially if they are subsidized with resources other than the student’s, who (in that case) would be putting nothing at risk, and therefore created no checks and balances in the system where the degree would need to be something of any value.
Well, I don’t think I’m seeing any right answers from anyone here.
The first falacy is that, once again, people are assuming an invalid model of some static number of monolitic corporations and the millions of relatively ignorant and economically immobile masses.
The fact of the matter is that the economy grows because of technological innovation creating new products and services and allowing existing products and services to be created more cheaply with fewer resources. In order to do this, you need a highly educated workforce.
There aren’t a bunch of “Evil Capitalists” controlling the market and deciding if education benefits their business. Those with the most drive and academic talent pursue the best educations and those who don’t give a shit will either drop out or go to nth rate schools. It becomes very easy to differentiate talent based on academic performance, schools attended and other factors. And those individuals with greater talent tend to be in greater demand.
Ultimately a more educated workforce is more flexible and more innovative and provides a better benefit to the economy overall.
It’s been a few days, so let me step back and try to outline what I think are the limitations of the ‘free-market business-type’ mentality as it relates to genuine education.
IdahoMauleMan:
Hmm, rule of law? Liberty? Equality? Free speech? Freedom from religion? Consciousness itself? Must I go on?
This denial of intangibles gets at what I’ve always suspected about the free-market uber-alles types. My answer might seem like a bit of a wild accusation to you IdahoMauleMan, but just keep in mind I’m stepping back and observing the whole phenomenon, not painting a portrait of you personally.
I think passionate free-marketers are possessed by a spirit of Philistinism. That has multiple meanings, what do I mean?
Msmith says
From the wiki on kitsch:
Sorry Msmith, you’re falling into this pattern by reducing society itself to a function of free markets. An impoverished, morally dubious pantomime of a view indeed! The only thing you can tell about a person who went to a good school is how much money their parents had, not much talent the person has. There is often an inverse relationship between the two in fact, unless by talent you mean the lack of ability or will to consider things in any mode other than free-market calculation and self-reference to one’s imagined status and supremacy.
Consider some more:
Compare that to the Libertarian point of view: “The market is the answer. Before the question is even asked, the answer is the market.” See what I mean?
More:
Or, how nice to agree along with the rest of society that the children of the rich, who attend the best schools, are inherently more talented than everyone else and therefore entitled and superior! Kinda papers over complexities and contradictions of real life, doesn’t it?
But it is an empty, class-striving and hollow view with ultimately little to back it up besides market power. Common confusion: market power is not talent. Hand a check for a million dollars to a gorilla and then ask yourself if that animal’s market power makes it more talented than anyone else.
Anyway, the free-marketer’s philistinism and attraction to kitsch is what makes them half-blind and too insensitive to the subtleties of the human condition to ever be entrusted to make major social decisions on their own for the rest of us. To them everyone is already pre-categorized, their worth already measured (in market terms only of course), and their fates effectively pre-determined.
Our country was not founded by artless pencil-pushers!
What a complete strawman. There’s nothing about free marketers or libertarians that makes them any less appreciative of art than anyone else.
I actually think that heavy emphasis on liberal arts degrees and a push to make everyone go to college actually devalues the arts. When everyone’s an artist, it’s hard to separate the crap from the good stuff. When art becomes politicized, it’s hard to separate quality from current fashion.
When colleges are full of people with at best average intellects, and grade devaluation and egalitarianism demands that all their precious opinions are equally valuable, all you’re doing is elevating bullshit to high art. I sat through a graduate level course once called “The philosophy of space and time”. I was studying physics, so I thought it would useful to get a philosophical viewpoint. My god, what a load of tripe it was. The professor knew just enough physics to be dangerous, and the students were mostly morons. Again, this was a graduate level course, not some freshman intro class. I expected the material to be covered in some depth.
Here is an actual exchange from that course. I remember it perfectly, because I repeated it over and over again to my physics buddies over beers.
Professor: “Some theories tell us that time is a dimension like the others. So right now, you exist as an old man, just in a different place from where you are now. And you exist as a child in the opposite direction!”
Student: “I see! That would explain why we still have childlike qualities!”
<Insert loud sound of Sam Stone slapping his forehead>
I highly value education. I do not value the education factories and indoctrination centers that many modern college are becoming. I deplore the fact that we’ve convinced ourselves that doing four years of time studying watered-down Peruvian toenail clipping somehow makes you educated.
I also think there’s too much tendency to assume that education is what makes a country wealthy. Iraq is a fairly well educated country. Not so wealthy. The old Soviet Union had a highly educated population, but it was an economic basket case. But today, we pretend that all we have to do to be ‘competitive’ is to spend more money on education and push more people into college.
And why is it that the colleges are so crowded, and yet we seem to be running low on doctors, engineers, and scientists? Could it be that those faculties are actually hard, and require objective measures of competency? When you push everyone into college and stretch the resources thin while pushing down the average capability of the college student, perhaps the result is that you simply crowd out difficult faculties while ever more resources are diverted to where the money is, which is where the bulk of the bell curve of the population goes.
In the meantime, the decline of standards and quality has completely devalued a college degree. College degrees in liberal arts used to have value not because they were a measure of knowledge, but because they were a key performance indicator. Holding a degree meant you were above average in intelligence. It meant you were able to stick with a difficult four-year program, put up with tedious tasks for long periods of time, and high grades indicated you were a good thinker and problem solver. That’s why a degree in European History was still valuable when looking for a job as a business manager in a widget factory.
But when everyone has a degree, that value is lost.
I question the value of any degree from a faculty where a bullshit artist like Ward Churchill can teach for years and years without anyone calling out the fact that he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Which brings up the next point about modern liberal education - it is increasingly becoming a tool of political indoctrination rather than a place where serious academic inquiry takes place.
One more true story from my past: I once had a 3rd year English class, and our final exam was going to be worth 60% of our grade. It would be an essay exam on one of five books, chosen at random. One of those books was “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen. I had a busy semester, and never found the time to read that book. I had read the other four, so I rolled the dice and hoped that book wouldn’t be picked. Of course, it was. All I had read of that book was the dust jacket and the first couple of pages - not even the Coles notes. But I knew the professor was a feminist, and I knew the era of the book, so I wrote a 400 page essay on how the subtext of the book was that in a society where women are oppressed, marriage is the path to status, and blathered on about how all aspects of the relationships in the book could be seen as a class struggle. I had hoped that there was enough BS in the essay to squeak out a passing grade.
Well, I got an A+, and a A for the course. See, I had amazing, tremendous insight - into a book I never read. The amazing insight was boilerplate feminist dogma, and that’s all that mattered.
Er, 400 word essay. Not 400 pages.
Oh I agree that you can’t tell anything simply looking at which college a person went to. And that includes how much money they grew up with. Every kid at Harvard is not a trust fund baby. That’s why went I was a hiring manager, I also interviewed candidates directly.
I do know that it is extremely difficult to get accepted at a top school like MIT or Harvard based solely on academic acheivement. And I know that it’s relatively easy to get into most state universities.
In a free market economy, the schools that are perceived to offer the best career opportunities post-graduation are going to be in greater demand. Is there a risk that these schools will skew in favor of students from affluent families who can afford them? Or that successful alumni will create recruting pipelines that only hire from those schools? This can and does happen. However, ultimately businesses make decisions in order to be successful and schools want to maintain their reputation for academic excellence. I might show preferential treatment to alumni from my school, however I also believe alumni from my school tend to be superior students. If I am wrong, won’t the free market prove it to me soon enough if I hire incompetant employees who reduce my competetiveness?
I don’t understand what your references to Philistinism or kitsch have to do with free markets. Unless it is your attempt to insinuate that free markets produce inferior products. That may be the case, however they are the products that people want, based on how much resources the people are willing to use. Soviet Russia had exhorbitantly railroad stations (where train wait for YOU) with beautiful architecture. Meanwhile people have to wait in line for basic necessities.
See, in a free country, people don’t need to be told what “good art” is. They can decide on their own.
One of my friends operates a bookstore. He was talking about gnani yoga last time I saw him, and it reminded me of this conversation. I only read the first 1.5 pages so far myself, but maybe Sam and Smith would like to take a look, if only to soothe their negative experiences of ‘liberal’ education.
I read a few pages of your link. It did nothing but confirm my negative opinions.
For the record, I am not against a “liberal arts” education per se. I studied mostly liberal arts classes as my non-core electives when I was in engineering school and for a time I double majored in architecture. There is nothing wrong with studying subjects that interest you intellectually. I don’t, however, believe in studying bullshit or mysticism. I mean unless you are just looking to pad your GPA.
I don’t know how you could say that about gnani yoga 
Smith:
Here’s a quote from page 18. Tell me what’s the problem:
The problem is that it is bullshit that doesn’t mean anything. It’s poetic bullshit. But bullshit nevertheless.
What is it actually trying to say? That all life is interconnected no matter how simple or complex? And what does it have to do with yoga? Or this thread for that matter?
It’s not enough to say “yoga will make you stronger, healthier and thus it will improve your lifestyle”? People need to feel that it will put them in touch with the universe?
For one thing, evolution is not a process of moving to higher states of being. There’s nothing in evolution that says the next generation will be ‘better’ than the last.
That’s pretty much a fatal flaw in his entire ‘thesis’.
The problem with these guys is that they do not have rigor. Their ideas are presented as revealed wisdom, not as hypotheses to be tested in objective fashion.
And generally, what they are saying is so banal and trite that you could write a ‘Maharishi’ sayings generator that would fool a lot of people with semi-random gibberish.
Here, let me try:
As we use the computer, we become the computer. Our thoughts become digital, and the electrical impulses of our brains become amplified and mobile. We interact with each other; electron beings, freed from our own bodies, and they from theirs. Fellow travelers of the electronic ether. Electrons merge. Electrons that are manifestations of our inner selves as we release our thoughts through our hands and into the great maelstrom of community that is the internet. Interwoven threads of minds touch each other and fly apart - they seek each other out, and like minds cling together in a glorious burst of atomic energy. One by one, we find each other in the cloud. We form communities. We become the internet. It is our evolved, communal being, burst free from the boundaries of flesh and blood and combined into something greater than the sum of the parts. And before us the result: Goatse.
Where to start.
Of course there is. Any schoolchild knows that dust is attracted to a static charge. Nothing vital about that.
So the inclination of molecules to move against a concentration gradient (ie diffusion) is evidence of Life?
So why do so many living things die? Isn’t that proof positive that they don’t have sufficient “life energy” (whatever that is) to carry on their work?
So a a virus has more manifest life energy than the bacterium form which it evolved, even though the virus is itself non-living and the bacterium is alive?
And so on and so forth for the entire quote. Every single sentence is factually wrong as written. The only way that you can make it not be ignorant crap is by twisting the very menaings of the words into non-standard (ie made up) definitions.
Or, as msmith537 so eloquently stated, the problem is that it is bullshit that doesn’t mean anything.