28 ms·

Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

221 points by apsec112 10y ago

jgh 10y ago
I don't really have the time, energy, or knowledge to create a fully cited refutation of the author other than to say that this just seems really wrong. It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct. But it seems wrong in the sense that they're missing the forest for the trees. Between 1991 and 2014 a lot has changed, particularly in the earning power of the generation being cited as being more educated. This is probably has very little to do with their education, more like it's kind of a macroeconomic ... situation ... they were born in to. And this is for a country that already has the highest GDP in the world. Maybe a better way to look at it would be to use people who were born into poverty and see if the rates of escaping it have changed because of more education....I don't know...this just feels like this author is picking a weird fight with education.
- Falkon1313 10y ago
  >Between 1991 and 2014 a lot has changed, particularly in the earning power of the generation being cited as being more educated. This is probably has very little to do with their education, more like it's kind of a macroeconomic ... situation ... they were born in to. I suspect that's the point. That the reasoning "people with degrees aren't poor, so let's just give everyone a degree" wouldn't result in eliminating poverty, it would result in a bunch of poor people with degrees.
  - jgh 10y ago
    sure, we all ride the ebb and flow of the economy, but if we were talking about developing countries or even historically impoverished communities in the US i suspect it would be harder to make the argument that education doesn't help.
- studentrob 10y ago
  > It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct You were on the right track in your first sentence. The author is not an academic publishing a paper. He's a political blogger drawing conclusions he wants from handpicked data. This post was not reviewed by anyone and should not be regarded as fact simply because some data was included. In fact, the author was fired from this blog a few days ago [1], which makes the appearance of this post on HN today even stranger [1] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-civility-tool-control-political-dissent http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-...
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    The author was not fired for being incorrect. He was fired for arguing on twitter in a manner that caused negative emotions about his publisher. Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack. Do you have any concrete arguments against his conclusions?
    - studentrob 10y ago
      > Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack. I did not mean to imply his firing invalidates the article. It was just an observation. You're right, his firing has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of the article, and the pseudoscience invalidates all by itself. This article describes the concept of pseudoscience pretty well [1] [1] https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....
argonaut 10y ago
> Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute claim to have hatched a bipartisan consensus plan for reducing poverty. As exciting as that sounds, the details of the plan, unfortunately, won't be available until David Brooks unveils them at an event on December 3rd. This is really all you need to read. He's attacking strawmen for the rest of the article, because the actual Brookings/AEI report is more detailed and specific. You can find it here: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2015/12/03-brookings-aei-plan-poverty-opportunity-reeves http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2....
fiatmoney 10y ago
The only part that matters: "having more education does not necessarily increase people's productive capacity".
mac01021 10y ago
The statistics would be a lot more informative if they broke out the educated segments of the population by field or college major. I don't think many in the 21st century would expect a bachelor's or associates degree in english or history to provide many opportunities for additional income.
- apsec112 10y ago
  Forbes: "Six Reasons Why Your College Major Doesn't Matter" (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/08/12/six-reasons-why-your-college-major-doesnt-matter/#144427777977 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/08/12/six-reaso...) NY Times: "Does the College Major Matter? Not Really" (http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/does-the-college-major-matter-not-really/ http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/does-the-colle...) WSJ: "Your College Major Is a Minor Issue, Employers Say" (http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/04/10/your-college-major-is-a-minor-issue-employers-say/ http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/04/10/your-college-major-is...)
  - redthrow 10y ago
    Major Premium: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/major_premium.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/major_premium.ht...
    - apsec112 10y ago
      Sure, that's what the data shows. But that won't mean very much if everyone says the opposite. Most people never really dig into the numbers.
    - lotharbot 10y ago
      Interesting data. Seems to me like there's a top tier of 3 highly technical majors (EE, CS, ME), and then a big cluster of 9 pretty decent majors (10 of the 12 at this stage might reasonably be called "STEM"). Communications is in the decent tier for women but not men. And then there are a bunch of weaker majors. The only thing that's even remotely surprising to me is that Chemistry isn't a little higher.
pm90 10y ago
This article compares two graphs and deduces some rather broad realities from it, which are rather incorrect. It assumes that the state of the economy is the same today as it was 25 years ago: obviously, this isn't true. The skill sets in demand have changed drastically which must be accounted for. That said, it does make the good point that it is rather easy to get misled by statistics that say that college graduates have lower unemployment rates. Or to assume that just by graduating high school/college guarantees a job, automagically. I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless. Of course one doesn't have to go to college to get that. But it certainly seems like the most straightforward and fun way to do so (if you manage not to get too indebted etc.etc.).
- apsec112 10y ago
  "I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless." I think this is what psychologists call a "taboo tradeoff". Education (and life, health, freedom, etc.) is a sacred value, while money is a secular value, so it's considered taboo to trade one off against the other. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-taboo-tradeoff/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tabo...) Unfortunately, making these tradeoffs is necessary, because there are many competing values and a limited supply of money. For example, you can show that a hospital must either a) assign a consistent dollar value to human life, or b) must be wasting resources, ie. it could be saving more lives with the money it has. See eg. Peter Singer's essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.ht....
  - tommyman 10y ago
    That seems a very long-winded way of saying that people have values that are more important than financial gain. I guess I'm interpreting wrong because that is obvious and there is nothing taboo about it (cultures will be different re. taboos anyway).
    - 10y ago
andrewclunn 10y ago
This article taught me something... which apparently will have no impact on my ability to avoid poverty.
Chinjut 10y ago
Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because the benefits (so far as the job market was concerned) were largely relative rather than absolute to begin with. (In case it matters, I’ve felt this same way as a student, as a teacher, and as a member of industry. From every side, it has seemed to me that an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way, for the most part, but rather is used only as some competitive signaling filter.)
- Chinjut 10y ago
  (And, yes: education can of course grant skills which are genuinely required for certain jobs. This being Hacker News, I suppose we'll hear that everyone should learn to code. I'm all for everyone getting to do whatever they wish to do, and if that wish is learning to code, so be it. But I suspect, if everyone did suddenly learn to code, we'd find that coding would, with corresponding suddenness, cease to be a ticket out of poverty...)
  - LordKano 10y ago
    I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't. People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. We have a society that needs people with many diverse skills. We should be investing more in tech or trade schools than we are in colleges and universities. People need a way to gain the skills they will need to earn a living but sending everyone to college is a universally bad idea. It'll turn the Bachelor's degree into the new High School Diploma.
    - 10y ago
rayiner 10y ago
It's worthwhile to consider where the point of diminishing returns is with education. I'd argue that we are well past it. There is not really that much work even in the modern economy that requires more than a 10th grade general education. We know that because in countries like Germany it is quite common for someone to exit the formal schooling system at 16 and still get a white collar job.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Isn't there a greater focus on apprentices and in-work training though? It's not like people leave school at 16 and stop learning, surely?
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Yes; German workers in some industries are arguably more educated than their American counterparts because of the training and continuing education programs in their workplaces.
    - wwweston 10y ago
      Sounds like an undue burden on German businesses; how can we expect the private sector to thrive when businesses might be bearing their own training costs instead of shrugging them off to labor and a public education system?
- chii 10y ago
  I think rather than not educating, I say there needs to be more education, for advanced topics, such as the sciences. More people ought to be doing research. Research into better tech, material sciences, bio sciences etc. A 10th grade education is not enough.
  - Chinjut 10y ago
    If there's a lack of people doing scientific research, it's not because there's a lack of people educated enough to do so. Look at the supply of science PhDs vs. openings for science jobs. Every year, more science PhDs graduate and most of them find themselves unable to get jobs actually doing the science they love and trained for. (Everyone should be able to access whatever education they want, for whatever reason they want it. There are serious inequalities in education access (like everything else) in this country(/world), which need be addressed as a moral issue. So don't misread me as against any of that. But, again, if there is a national deficit in scientific research, it's not because we fail to produce science PhDs, but rather because we fail to fund jobs which take substantive advantage of those PhDs)
joelbrewer01 10y ago
Hmm, so higher education levels do not fix poverty. But what if the problem is that we just aren't teaching the right things? Could higher quality education -- better teachers, more relevant curriculum, less focus on paper degrees, more focus on creativity -- fix poverty?
cro1 10y ago
This is just a random unqualified observation so take it with a pinch of salt. When I compare educated Indian and Chinese people to Americans I just see more willingness to put in hard work on the mundane stuff. Americans with the same educational qualifications who see a year or two of grunt/drudge work ahead of them to move up the food chain, will more likely quit and do whatever is currently hip. Now some small fraction of these people actually do well and the majority whose startups/youtube channels/gadget blogs/music bands fail find themselves in those overeducated poverty bins. From what I have seen in Indian and China, I highly doubt poverty is increasing in those educated bins.
- KJP191 10y ago
  I live in Beijing and can assure you that there is no shortage of lazy Chinese people with degrees. If you're American, perhaps what you see is just a result of the type of people who make it through the immigration process
sndean 10y ago
I saw a study recently [0] that suggested that college acceptance alone, regardless of attendance, was a good predictor of lifetime earnings. E.g., if you're accepted into Harvard, but decide instead to attend a cheap state school (or don't goto any college), you'll end up earning just as much as your identical twin who attended. [0] I'm looking for it now..
- throwawaykeno 10y ago
  > (or don't goto any college) I don't remember that being part of the conclusions. Also, it's hard for me to take that study seriously. Good state schools can be as good as or better than Harvard. Basically I took the conclusion to be "there's a lot of greatness outside of the ivys"
  - sndean 10y ago
    >> (or don't goto any college) > I don't remember that being part of the conclusions. That's true, it's possible my brain created that part. > Basically I took the conclusion to be "there's a lot of greatness outside of the ivys" Yeah. Put that way, it's a lot less interesting. Still, regarding ways to avoid high student debt, it's useful information.
stalcottsmith 10y ago
No one seems to be asking what was done to education to produce the higher graduation rates. Is it really true that everyone is now "smarter" or were standards changed to achieve the desired outcome? What good is it to have a college degree that is marginally superior to or in the case of some majors, no better than a high school diploma of 25 or 40 years ago?
tropo 10y ago
You can classify degrees by the portion of students who end up doing something directly requiring that degree. Suddenly, it becomes clear what is going on. Your high school guidance councilor probably told you that the degree wouldn't matter much, which is correct for somebody like him. For a large portion of the population, a degree is purely signalling. It shows you are a more upper class, more able to plan ahead, more willing to show up every day, and more willing to put up with nonsense. People with these sorts of careers are fighting to out-signal each other. If we made a bachelor's degree free, they'd need a master's degree. (actually already happening, even w/o being free) If the master's degree were standard, they'd need the doctorate. The skills actually demanded require no such thing, and would've been beneath high school 80 years ago. It's an arms race, pure and simple. Individuals may benefit from getting to the top, but it does our economy no good to encourage and support this. Keeping people out of the workforce while diverting money toward funding the arms race is harmful. On the other hand, there are degrees for which most students end up in a career that more-or-less requires the degree. Famously, it's the STEM stuff, but this also applies to nursing. We know something from the fact that students end up taking jobs which require their degree: these fields are not purely an arms race. These fields can still take more people. These fields have degrees that are of value beyond signaling. Our economy would benefit from getting more people into these fields.
- mjevans 10y ago
  While I agree that more people in the STEM fields would be a good thing, it's with a caveat: those people should actually enjoy and do well in those fields. I would like society to be a little more flexible about basic living so that overall greed can be less of a problem and following your passion, dreams, and doing new things can be explored options.
danjayh 10y ago
One thing the author totally overlooked - when you have a large percentage of the population that spends an extra 2-6+ years in education, that same large percentage of the population spends 2-6+ less years producing things for people to consume. If those same people aren't more productive as a result of their education, this means that the net productivity of society is lower as a result of the education, while the number of people in the society is the same. End result is that the stuff:people ratio goes down, and poverty naturally increases. Education has an extremely high cost both in terms of lost productivity and resources consumed to provide it. Misapplied education will throw additional people into poverty, every time. Possibly directly, through onerous student loans, or indirectly by consuming resources that could have been used to produce basic goods for consumption.
stevetrewick 10y ago
Author states that if you contemplate the two graphs you'll have an epiphany. Quite right, it went "Wow, that is not how you analyse data and I'm sure I heard about an actual investigation with cited sources and actual math and everything which came to pretty much the opposite conclusions". [0] [0] https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/ https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/
- _Robbie 10y ago
  The link you cited seems to be answering the question "Does more education for an individual decrease poverty for that individual?", while the original post is answering the question "Does more education for a society decrease poverty for society as a whole?". These are two very different questions, and it is quite possible that they have opposite answers.
anovikov 10y ago
To me it sounds obvious, education improves your competitive position. If everyone improves their competitive position, nobody does. It is the employers who are better off, not people.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  but people now live in a society which has been made better by more-educated people who have produced better products more efficiently etc.
  - anovikov 10y ago
    But it will not decrease poverty. Rather, will likely increase for people who will appear to be unable to keep up. Because poverty is a relative term. You are poor vs majority of population (there is also absolute poverty, but it almost doesn't exist in developed nations including the USA, and can be only result of mental condition or heavy substance abuse). After all, most American poor are well-off from a purely material point of view even compared to West Europeans (bigger houses, cars, etc.).
known 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
known 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer will create new jobs
nishitsh 10y ago
Gaining degree makes most of us poor, Isn't that the case. What i was thinking can we build a infrastructure on top of blockchain technology to make the very fact of education free and for all as every one knows each others ability or degree or area of expertise with this infrastructure.
SFJulie 10y ago
Education made jobs more competitive. It was a social lift taking people up. On the other hand, by making workers more productive it reinforced the competitive advantage of being born wealthy. Too harsh competitions creates cheating. And there is no lift taking wealthy/high positioned people down when they are incompetent, especially when governments gives free money to the stock exchange (QE). Well, we are heading full speed to Victorian era and hard social conflict, because educated poor will eventually understand the game is rigged.
- zeemonkee3 10y ago
  We could only wish to be as socially mobile as the Victorians http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract EDIT: from the paper, it appears that mass education in England toward the end of the Victorian era only made a short-lived dent in social mobility, presumably because any temporary advantage in being more educated levelled out after a generation. In the UK up to the 1960s-1980s, working class people could get a leg up through grammar schools and fully-funded higher education (tuition and modest living costs subsidized by the government) - if you could prove you were smart and hard-working enough, you had a chance to rise up. This ladder was successfully kicked away by comprehensive education and mass higher education (with introduction of student loans rather than free grants). The politicians who introduced these measures of course ensured their own children were privately educated.
  - SFJulie 10y ago
    So funny, it reminds me of my banana republic called France: our public teachers are on strike once a year to complain they don't have enough fund to support their mission of "social lift" and republican equality, but they are the first to shortcut and walkaround egalitarian measure to ensure a better success to their kids and the wealthy one they put in "special classes"... Sometimes, I lose trust in what people pretend to do when I look at what they actually do. Nowadays France (and some European countries) over invest in higher education that only increase segregation funded by the public taxes, while finland radical focus on early years and well being of kids have proven way more cheaper and efficient. I so wish our elite PhD in ministers could read scientific papers, figures, and be fucking curious, but well, it would mean more competition for their own kids. Wouldn't it?
Annatar 10y ago
The analysis neglects one major point: a lot of people got degrees in the humanities and arts: dual majors in English literature and history, or sociology and psychology... what are you going to engineer with that? Engineering requires physics, mathematics, molecular biology, chemistry, material science, higher logic and cognitive capacity... English literature won't help too much with finding a new tensile strength alloy, and sociology can be only marginally used at best when trying to design a small form factor pump which must reliably pump inordinate amounts of gas or fluid, or when attempting to craft a VHDL or Verilog program to reprogram the FPGA, in order to test a new chip design, or when studying protein folding while trying to isolate the cause of cancer... Just going to college and getting a degree in something like sociology or English literature, because it's the easy way out, isn't enough to end poverty; no wonder it does not work! Ironically, those very same history majors did not learn from history: most humanities and arts majors (poets, writers) were poor. It has to be a university degree for the professions in demand, and the graduate must be ambitious, pay attention to detail, and want to deliver high quality work, not take shortcuts at every turn and opportunity "because math is hard".
- LionessLover 10y ago
  So if every "social science" major (and why not add business and law students) instead studied engineering, they'd all find jobs? I'm not even asking about well-paid jobs. Is there a shortage of engineers on the market now? Would more engineers magically lead to more jobs (supply-side economics works so well... oh no!)? What's the difference between "anyone can be rich" and "everyone can be rich"? Because this is similar. Yes, anyone can better themselves through more education in "the right field". What makes you think that "anyone" and "everyone" is the same problem? Have a look at science and the problem of Ph.D.s to find jobs in their fields (chemistry, physics, biology - not "social science" Ph.D.s): http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-... (also has a Part #2 linked at the bottom)
  - Annatar 10y ago
    Of course not; hardcore, laissez faire capitalism like there is in the United States would correct that, and the salaries would go down. However, as it stands, there is an overabundance of humanities & arts majors, and way too little engineers and scientists; meanwhile, the industry has been almost completely off-shored over the last 60 years. The only thing left for those people to do is work in the service industry, if they are lucky. But when too many compete for a limited resource, selection kicks in, and overabundance drops the wages. Education won't help with that, as we see, but it might help with organizing oneself, or "going at it on one's own" and opening a business. A good lesson to learn from that would be that hard core, laissez faire capitalism is just as destructive as a totalitarian communist system. In order for the population to be able to live comfortably, capitalism must be enhanced with socialist safeguards and a system of checks and balances built in, like Sweden, Austria, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland did it. Switzerland for example has low taxes and respects private property, and especially protects and fosters enterpreneurship, making it very corporate friendly, but it also has a very strong welfare safety net. One would think that would make a lot of Swiss draw on unemployment and disability, but Swiss work 42 hours per week minimum (compare and contrast to France, where they work 35 to 37), and unemployment in Switzerland is among the lowest in the world.
pythia__ 10y ago
It will more likely be (state subsidized?) embryo selection for the genetic markers of intelligence (see, e.g., https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection), not work on proxies like education, that will substantially reduce poverty. While this solution is outside the Overton window in America today, that will change as the benefits become more visible.
gizi 10y ago
In technology, programming work is about looking up, composing, and debugging code. I yet have to meet one person who learned it at school. In the school environment, the emphasis is, has always been, and will always be, to repeat things from memory. If the IT teacher were good at looking up, composing, and debugging, and given the kind of salaries you that get when you are good at that, he would not be teaching. He would seek to multiply his income often ten times by actually doing it, instead of teaching it. In fact, you can only learn from people who are doing it themselves. Everybody else does not really know how to do it. Therefore, the teacher is only good at what will give you beautiful credentials: repeating from memory. That is also what he will seek to perpetuate with his own students. Formal education does not only NOT fix poverty. Formal education actively creates it. Instead of spending your formative years learning the skill that will make you gain income, you learn to repeat from memory. There is not one industry where this would be of value. You need to be able to produce things of value, just to survive. It is exceedingly dangerous to spend all your time on things that will never produce any value at all.
aylmao 10y ago
I wonder how much technology has to do with this. A lot of jobs that existed a few years ago don't any more, and the wealth/time saved isn't going back to the people; work hours are not shorter, and low-end jobs aren't better paid. I would guess not a trivial amount. Which is sad. Keeping people employed is much more important in the grand scheme of things than whatever percentage efficiency gain some of this tech brings.
pritambarhate 10y ago
In my observation Education isn't the main/only criteria for getting a job. Skills get you a job. But education and good academics help you to qualify for the interview. If in the interview you can prove that you have the skills to perform the job, most likely you will get the job. The problem is traditional education is focused on theoretical knowledge and doesn't stress enough on practical skills. Unfortunately in India there are many Computer Science engineering students who after 4 years for Computer Science education, fail to write a simple Frequency Counter in a programming language of their choice. This shows that something in the education system is not right. The colleges are producing engineers by hundreds of thousands every year, but the overall quality of education these guys have received is so poor that most of them are not employable. I know about computer science because I work in this field. However I think more or less the situation is the same in other fields.
bassislife 10y ago
If there is a market for the education you received, it should. If the job market conditions change, it might not unless the person is resourceful. Also note that the OP is talking about the US but education is often really the key for developing countries to attain a higher level of prosperity. Because the market is still quite open there.
studentrob 10y ago
Wow, the author was just recently fired, > On May 20, the progressive public policy organization, Demos, fired Matt Bruenig, a popular writer who covered poverty and inequality. [1] Best of luck to him and hope he finds another position. This article, though, is pseudoscience. It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end. Measuring the causes and effects of societal issues over the span of 25 years should be done by sociology PhDs, not political bloggers. [1] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-civility-tool-control-political-dissent http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-...
- tim333 10y ago
  I'm not sure you can even measure the causes and effects of societal issues over the span of 25 years by looking at statistics. I mean you can see stuff change and form hypotheses but it's hard to determine very much that way.
- randomdata 10y ago
  > It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end. Funnily enough, the same way we concluded that education does fix poverty in the first place.
  - lintiness 10y ago
    we concluded education fixes poverty because it was politically obvious and popular -- still is.
coldtea 10y ago
Because education just removes one obstacle -- there are many: 1) parental encouragement for development and time spent with the child (depending on income too, e.g. single parent working deadly shifts), 2) family atmosphere (economic pressure leads to lots of things, depression, violence, etc). 3) connections 4) security (if you start studying/working paycheck to paycheck, you might not get to a point to be able to take more risk because you have no cushion money) 5) actual security (your neighborhood, city district, etc might not be the most safe/encouraging/etc growing up). 6) lack of role models (close to you, not some people on the media)
frign 10y ago
So can one assess this is a racial problem after all? For years, liberals tell us the high poverty of negroes and hispanics was due to lack of education. If it's not education, what is it then? And why are Asian-Americans not facing the same issues? I suspect it's a racial identity issue. The best way to understand this point is looking at the mainstream media and how the different races are portraied. Only an idiot would ignore this influence on people, especially because the USA are by far the biggest TV consumers. If you start judging me for asking these questions or downvote me without giving a reason, you should be ashamed of yourself. Reasons for downvoting are welcome though, so keep them coming! :)
- douche 10y ago
  Nobody wants to admit it, but in broad strokes, intelligence and success is heritable. https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-response-to-the-nytimes-article-on-school-districts-test-scores-and-income/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...
Pica_soO 10y ago
Always be suspicious when one solution promises to fix all the problems? It might not be a true Scotsman. Now how do i get rid of the piling up remainders of this ugly feeling of social responsibility? The poor only got to blame themselves for not being ruthless enough? No, that sounds like encouraging crime. The poor only got to blame themselves for not reading enough? No. The poor only go themselves to blame, because they where born to the wrong parents? Now it sounds heartless. And that is what all this about. Finding ab-solvent to inhale for a ugly problem to go away. Everything is allowed as long as it doesn't touch core dogmas and allows to shirk responsibility. The poor only got to blame themselves, because they loose so much energy by thermodynamics. Half there food goes up in heat. Hah, that's it, we should educate them to wear five layers of sweaters in the summer- and if they don't do it- they only got to blame themselves. Those unruly holy poor, who put my own existence to a metric i don't like.
emblem21 10y ago
TIL HN thinks the complexities of the future can be unraveled and brought to bare in a predictable, progressive manner if we just strictly adhere to the established frameworks determined by our immediate ancestors. Poverty, that is, the lack of power, is not something you fix. It's not something you augment, either. Power is a gas and ego is the vacuum. The bigger your ego, the more gas you can carry. However, not all gas is equal, and not all ego has spherical perfection. The paradox is that power requires subservience. The greater the capacity of power, the greater the potential for subservience. Knowledge is not power. Power is power. Everything else is the attempt at accumulating power.
clitmouse 10y ago
hyperinflation in education cost should effect poverty more than anything
mh-cx 10y ago
The article misses an important point: It does not explain what definition of poverty all this is based on. There are some definitions like "people having less than 60% of the average real income". But's that's a very relative: If the average income is rising over the years, people defined now as "poor" may live at the same standard as the average in 1991. If that's the case I would not neccessarily consider them "poor". So I think it would be interesting to do the same statisical breakdown but in regard to the absolute standard of living.
gadders 10y ago
As someone who grew up on a housing estate in the UK and frequently had free school meals and uniform grants from the state due to my father's unemployment, it definitely fixed mine.
Overtonwindow 10y ago
I disagree with this article. Education can fix poverty, but only if that education is responsible. Meaning: avoiding for-profit colleges and getting a degree in something competitive. So much of college today is debt-loading with classes students don't need, don't want, and shouldn't have to take. So long as universities treat students as cash machines, instead of humans seeking empowerment through education, we will continue a vicious cycle of high debt, unmarketable degrees, and sustained poverty.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  The first step in that is expanding which schools are included in the"for-profit" group. Very few schools are really non-profit.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  You're not addressing what seems to me to be the most significant part of the OP's argument. Getting dropouts to get high school diploma's should be the biggest win - and isn't related to college degree choice or business models. Yet it looks to have been the biggest loser.
jcfrei 10y ago
Just a side note: The OPM is adjusted for inflation (set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, updated annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, see: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm#official http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm#official). So if wages and inflation always increase in sync then there would be no reason for the number of people living in poverty to change (even if their living standards are higher in absolute terms) - apart from changes in the income distribution of the whole population. That being said, I did initially expect changes in the distributions for poor people with respect to education (more poverty among people with HS degrees than among people with uni degrees). But now that I think about it, there's really no reason why the number of available jobs which require a certain degree should change at all - ie. more electrical engineers can only create more electronics companies (and jobs) if the market has a demand for it or otherwise will just decrease the respective median wage. It seems obvious to me now but I didn't think about it like this before...
- sten 10y ago
  If you view education as teaching people to learn, then you might have an argument that education rates enable and empower people. If you're training robots who don't think for themselves then you'll encounter the situation you've just described.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    Empowerment carries a fairly high risk and if you are already in a poor economic situation, you a very likely to not be able to tolerate it. Plenty of people in good economic standing aren't willing to tolerate it. As such, most people are going to end up choosing the far less risky path of being "robots" anyway.
jimhefferon 10y ago
At high schools with high poverty populations (say, large free lunch numbers), there has in the past twenty years been a big push to increase graduation numbers. Now, you can increase graduation rates in two ways (or a combination). Both involve the students who used to flunk out. (1) You can have them learn more, provide them with help so they don't need that job to eat, etc. (2) you can make up ways for them to get high school credit for doing what they would have done had they simply left. All too often, what happens is (1). After all, people respond to rewards and administrators are rewarded for higher grad numbers. But the net-knowledge is not very much increased by (1).
known 10y ago
Education does not fix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
humanrebar 10y ago
Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty. First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much. Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and poverty levels in the same neighborhoods. Likewise, there is a very strong correlation between marriages in households with children and poverty rates in those households. Very few households with two working partners live in poverty. It's... complicated to discuss family structure when talking about poverty and child welfare, but it's possible (I would argue likely) that family structure is a key contributor here. In my opinion it's rather foolish not to at least bring it up and consider it.
- cokernel 10y ago
  This is part of a three-part series of posts, one focused on education, one on work, and one on marriage. The author talks about marriage here: http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-failed-and-unnecessary-cut-poverty http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-fai...
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    His argument here seems particularly weak. He seems to be saying "Scandinavia doesn't have this problem, and anyway, it's really hard to get more people to marry." I don't find that a very compelling argument.
    - hsitz 10y ago
      I think the argument is more along the lines of: (1) We've tried lots of different programs and wasted lots of money and resources trying to promote marriage; all have been failures, we have no idea how to actually promote marriage. (2) It's not necessary to promote marriage to solve the poverty problem. Thus (3) we should forget about the "marriage promotion" programs as part of the fight against poverty; we can deploy our resources better elsewhere.
alivarys 10y ago
Some say that stats are deceiving. They aren't, but one can make them lie. Thanks for doing them right.
jernfrost 10y ago
I am surprised by how many people fundamentally misunderstand the authors point. Surely he knows that a well educated workforce is important for an economy. However what the author is addressing is this naive belief that education almost exclusively can solve poverty problems. This is the idea which has been thrown around for years. Governments, economists etc have focused far too much on presenting statistics showing the benefits of education in general without any concern for what people actually learn or whether there is ever a potential for just spending too much time on education. As someone who has believed for years we are over-educating our people in the west, I've generally felt a complete dismissal of this opinion. Education helps! End of discussion, is the feeling I sense. If you care to look it is pretty clear that the education hysteria has gone off the rails. Jobs people could perfectly well do with high school education, now requires a bachelor. Suddenly a master is a requirement where usually a bachelors degree would be sufficient. We have come to believe learning only happens in school. That is where I think we are going wrong. My mother is a journalist and never took more than high school education. Yet she is a very accomplished journalist which knows a lot about her field. Today it is next to impossible to become a journalist without having lots of education, often multiple degrees. A software developer with a Bachlor and two years of work experience doesn't know less than a student fresh out of a Master program. They just know different stuff. What the people need to get out of poverty is relevant skills for the economy, but that is not a game of making sure your country has ever higher percentages of college graduates. Switzerland is a case in point. It is a high tech economy with some of the lowest level of college education. How can this be? Because in Switzerland almost anything can be learned through vocational training programs. Massive amounts of learning is happening in a sophisticated private enterprise. That just doesn't show up on the kind of statistics politicians obsesses about. We don't need more education. We need education far better aligned with the needs of the economy and private enterprise. We also need to make it accessible people at all rungs of society. X number of years of education in the US is not going to help when so many schools in poor areas of America are exceptionally bad. There is no mystery to this. America is the only advance country where the bulk of education spending goes to the well of rather than the needy. This is through the American tradition requiring students to go to their school district and tying funding to property taxes as well as relying on substantial amounts of fundraising by parents. It is a bit late to start handing out scholarships for poor but talented students when they reach college age. The damage has already been done. You got to start thinking education from the very first years.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Gravityloss 10y ago
If we turn this around: if we assume that in the global well connected economy, you're paid roughly in proportion to the value you provide, can education increase your ability to provide value?
scalio 10y ago
We are told we need knowledge about some things in order to make money and subsequently not to starve. We are supposed to gain this knowledge in school and maybe uni, and then head off to a grand career. I mostly agree with this idea (not so much with its real life implementation). I get where it's coming from, knowledge is what pushes us forward, after all: mathematical knowledge allows us to play with abstract and complex systems, physical knowledge is the application of some of these abstract systems to physical observation, historical knowledge enables us to reason about our past or our origin. Then there's a massive body of knowledge about human products: literature, visual art and music spanning thousands of years, social and economic systems lasting centuries, the list goes on. Now that's nice and all, but knowledge needs to be applied to something to be of any use. Which incidentally is the problem we are seeing currently: knowledge is pumped into peoples' heads and is expected to magically produce solutions, while we're not even in agreement over the problems (what are the common goals we are aiming for, as a race?). No wonder it doesn't work, knowledge needs physical and mental room to grow. That makes a safe and comfortable environment a requirement for any supposedly functional educational system, but also one that is often not satisfied. In other words, the problem is not that education doesn't fix poverty, it's that our shitty politics and social non-systems do not give people enough piece and quiet to explore their knowledge. Edit to add: It is much more convenient to blame a malfunction on the most obviously failing part rather than recognising that the underlying machinery is not providing the right environment for said part to operate in, wearing it harder than necessary.

221 points by apsec112 10y ago

jgh 10y ago

I don't really have the time, energy, or knowledge to create a fully cited refutation of the author other than to say that this just seems really wrong. It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct. But it seems wrong in the sense that they're missing the forest for the trees. Between 1991 and 2014 a lot has changed, particularly in the earning power of the generation being cited as being more educated. This is probably has very little to do with their education, more like it's kind of a macroeconomic ... situation ... they were born in to. And this is for a country that already has the highest GDP in the world. Maybe a better way to look at it would be to use people who were born into poverty and see if the rates of escaping it have changed because of more education....I don't know...this just feels like this author is picking a weird fight with education.

Falkon1313 10y ago
>Between 1991 and 2014 a lot has changed, particularly in the earning power of the generation being cited as being more educated. This is probably has very little to do with their education, more like it's kind of a macroeconomic ... situation ... they were born in to. I suspect that's the point. That the reasoning "people with degrees aren't poor, so let's just give everyone a degree" wouldn't result in eliminating poverty, it would result in a bunch of poor people with degrees.
- jgh 10y ago
  sure, we all ride the ebb and flow of the economy, but if we were talking about developing countries or even historically impoverished communities in the US i suspect it would be harder to make the argument that education doesn't help.
studentrob 10y ago
> It might not be technically wrong because the author seems to be citing facts and I'm sure they're correct You were on the right track in your first sentence. The author is not an academic publishing a paper. He's a political blogger drawing conclusions he wants from handpicked data. This post was not reviewed by anyone and should not be regarded as fact simply because some data was included. In fact, the author was fired from this blog a few days ago [1], which makes the appearance of this post on HN today even stranger [1] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-civility-tool-control-political-dissent http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-...
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The author was not fired for being incorrect. He was fired for arguing on twitter in a manner that caused negative emotions about his publisher. Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack. Do you have any concrete arguments against his conclusions?
  - studentrob 10y ago
    > Implying that this somehow invalidates his argument is a fallacious ad-hominem attack. I did not mean to imply his firing invalidates the article. It was just an observation. You're right, his firing has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of the article, and the pseudoscience invalidates all by itself. This article describes the concept of pseudoscience pretty well [1] [1] https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....

argonaut 10y ago

> Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute claim to have hatched a bipartisan consensus plan for reducing poverty. As exciting as that sounds, the details of the plan, unfortunately, won't be available until David Brooks unveils them at an event on December 3rd. This is really all you need to read. He's attacking strawmen for the rest of the article, because the actual Brookings/AEI report is more detailed and specific. You can find it here: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2015/12/03-brookings-aei-plan-poverty-opportunity-reeves http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2....

fiatmoney 10y ago

The only part that matters: "having more education does not necessarily increase people's productive capacity".

mac01021 10y ago

The statistics would be a lot more informative if they broke out the educated segments of the population by field or college major. I don't think many in the 21st century would expect a bachelor's or associates degree in english or history to provide many opportunities for additional income.

apsec112 10y ago
Forbes: "Six Reasons Why Your College Major Doesn't Matter" (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/08/12/six-reasons-why-your-college-major-doesnt-matter/#144427777977 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/08/12/six-reaso...) NY Times: "Does the College Major Matter? Not Really" (http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/does-the-college-major-matter-not-really/ http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/does-the-colle...) WSJ: "Your College Major Is a Minor Issue, Employers Say" (http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/04/10/your-college-major-is-a-minor-issue-employers-say/ http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/04/10/your-college-major-is...)
- redthrow 10y ago
  Major Premium: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/major_premium.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/major_premium.ht...
  - apsec112 10y ago
    Sure, that's what the data shows. But that won't mean very much if everyone says the opposite. Most people never really dig into the numbers.
  - lotharbot 10y ago
    Interesting data. Seems to me like there's a top tier of 3 highly technical majors (EE, CS, ME), and then a big cluster of 9 pretty decent majors (10 of the 12 at this stage might reasonably be called "STEM"). Communications is in the decent tier for women but not men. And then there are a bunch of weaker majors. The only thing that's even remotely surprising to me is that Chemistry isn't a little higher.

pm90 10y ago

This article compares two graphs and deduces some rather broad realities from it, which are rather incorrect. It assumes that the state of the economy is the same today as it was 25 years ago: obviously, this isn't true. The skill sets in demand have changed drastically which must be accounted for. That said, it does make the good point that it is rather easy to get misled by statistics that say that college graduates have lower unemployment rates. Or to assume that just by graduating high school/college guarantees a job, automagically. I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless. Of course one doesn't have to go to college to get that. But it certainly seems like the most straightforward and fun way to do so (if you manage not to get too indebted etc.etc.).

apsec112 10y ago
"I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless." I think this is what psychologists call a "taboo tradeoff". Education (and life, health, freedom, etc.) is a sacred value, while money is a secular value, so it's considered taboo to trade one off against the other. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-taboo-tradeoff/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tabo...) Unfortunately, making these tradeoffs is necessary, because there are many competing values and a limited supply of money. For example, you can show that a hospital must either a) assign a consistent dollar value to human life, or b) must be wasting resources, ie. it could be saving more lives with the money it has. See eg. Peter Singer's essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.ht....
- tommyman 10y ago
  That seems a very long-winded way of saying that people have values that are more important than financial gain. I guess I'm interpreting wrong because that is obvious and there is nothing taboo about it (cultures will be different re. taboos anyway).
  - 10y ago

andrewclunn 10y ago

This article taught me something... which apparently will have no impact on my ability to avoid poverty.

Chinjut 10y ago

Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because the benefits (so far as the job market was concerned) were largely relative rather than absolute to begin with. (In case it matters, I’ve felt this same way as a student, as a teacher, and as a member of industry. From every side, it has seemed to me that an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way, for the most part, but rather is used only as some competitive signaling filter.)

Chinjut 10y ago
(And, yes: education can of course grant skills which are genuinely required for certain jobs. This being Hacker News, I suppose we'll hear that everyone should learn to code. I'm all for everyone getting to do whatever they wish to do, and if that wish is learning to code, so be it. But I suspect, if everyone did suddenly learn to code, we'd find that coding would, with corresponding suddenness, cease to be a ticket out of poverty...)
- LordKano 10y ago
  I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't. People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. We have a society that needs people with many diverse skills. We should be investing more in tech or trade schools than we are in colleges and universities. People need a way to gain the skills they will need to earn a living but sending everyone to college is a universally bad idea. It'll turn the Bachelor's degree into the new High School Diploma.
  - 10y ago

rayiner 10y ago

It's worthwhile to consider where the point of diminishing returns is with education. I'd argue that we are well past it. There is not really that much work even in the modern economy that requires more than a 10th grade general education. We know that because in countries like Germany it is quite common for someone to exit the formal schooling system at 16 and still get a white collar job.

onion2k 10y ago
Isn't there a greater focus on apprentices and in-work training though? It's not like people leave school at 16 and stop learning, surely?
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Yes; German workers in some industries are arguably more educated than their American counterparts because of the training and continuing education programs in their workplaces.
  - wwweston 10y ago
    Sounds like an undue burden on German businesses; how can we expect the private sector to thrive when businesses might be bearing their own training costs instead of shrugging them off to labor and a public education system?
chii 10y ago
I think rather than not educating, I say there needs to be more education, for advanced topics, such as the sciences. More people ought to be doing research. Research into better tech, material sciences, bio sciences etc. A 10th grade education is not enough.
- Chinjut 10y ago
  If there's a lack of people doing scientific research, it's not because there's a lack of people educated enough to do so. Look at the supply of science PhDs vs. openings for science jobs. Every year, more science PhDs graduate and most of them find themselves unable to get jobs actually doing the science they love and trained for. (Everyone should be able to access whatever education they want, for whatever reason they want it. There are serious inequalities in education access (like everything else) in this country(/world), which need be addressed as a moral issue. So don't misread me as against any of that. But, again, if there is a national deficit in scientific research, it's not because we fail to produce science PhDs, but rather because we fail to fund jobs which take substantive advantage of those PhDs)

joelbrewer01 10y ago

Hmm, so higher education levels do not fix poverty. But what if the problem is that we just aren't teaching the right things? Could higher quality education -- better teachers, more relevant curriculum, less focus on paper degrees, more focus on creativity -- fix poverty?

cro1 10y ago

This is just a random unqualified observation so take it with a pinch of salt. When I compare educated Indian and Chinese people to Americans I just see more willingness to put in hard work on the mundane stuff. Americans with the same educational qualifications who see a year or two of grunt/drudge work ahead of them to move up the food chain, will more likely quit and do whatever is currently hip. Now some small fraction of these people actually do well and the majority whose startups/youtube channels/gadget blogs/music bands fail find themselves in those overeducated poverty bins. From what I have seen in Indian and China, I highly doubt poverty is increasing in those educated bins.

KJP191 10y ago
I live in Beijing and can assure you that there is no shortage of lazy Chinese people with degrees. If you're American, perhaps what you see is just a result of the type of people who make it through the immigration process

sndean 10y ago

I saw a study recently [0] that suggested that college acceptance alone, regardless of attendance, was a good predictor of lifetime earnings. E.g., if you're accepted into Harvard, but decide instead to attend a cheap state school (or don't goto any college), you'll end up earning just as much as your identical twin who attended. [0] I'm looking for it now..

throwawaykeno 10y ago
> (or don't goto any college) I don't remember that being part of the conclusions. Also, it's hard for me to take that study seriously. Good state schools can be as good as or better than Harvard. Basically I took the conclusion to be "there's a lot of greatness outside of the ivys"
- sndean 10y ago
  >> (or don't goto any college) > I don't remember that being part of the conclusions. That's true, it's possible my brain created that part. > Basically I took the conclusion to be "there's a lot of greatness outside of the ivys" Yeah. Put that way, it's a lot less interesting. Still, regarding ways to avoid high student debt, it's useful information.

stalcottsmith 10y ago

No one seems to be asking what was done to education to produce the higher graduation rates. Is it really true that everyone is now "smarter" or were standards changed to achieve the desired outcome? What good is it to have a college degree that is marginally superior to or in the case of some majors, no better than a high school diploma of 25 or 40 years ago?

tropo 10y ago

You can classify degrees by the portion of students who end up doing something directly requiring that degree. Suddenly, it becomes clear what is going on. Your high school guidance councilor probably told you that the degree wouldn't matter much, which is correct for somebody like him. For a large portion of the population, a degree is purely signalling. It shows you are a more upper class, more able to plan ahead, more willing to show up every day, and more willing to put up with nonsense. People with these sorts of careers are fighting to out-signal each other. If we made a bachelor's degree free, they'd need a master's degree. (actually already happening, even w/o being free) If the master's degree were standard, they'd need the doctorate. The skills actually demanded require no such thing, and would've been beneath high school 80 years ago. It's an arms race, pure and simple. Individuals may benefit from getting to the top, but it does our economy no good to encourage and support this. Keeping people out of the workforce while diverting money toward funding the arms race is harmful. On the other hand, there are degrees for which most students end up in a career that more-or-less requires the degree. Famously, it's the STEM stuff, but this also applies to nursing. We know something from the fact that students end up taking jobs which require their degree: these fields are not purely an arms race. These fields can still take more people. These fields have degrees that are of value beyond signaling. Our economy would benefit from getting more people into these fields.

mjevans 10y ago
While I agree that more people in the STEM fields would be a good thing, it's with a caveat: those people should actually enjoy and do well in those fields. I would like society to be a little more flexible about basic living so that overall greed can be less of a problem and following your passion, dreams, and doing new things can be explored options.

danjayh 10y ago

One thing the author totally overlooked - when you have a large percentage of the population that spends an extra 2-6+ years in education, that same large percentage of the population spends 2-6+ less years producing things for people to consume. If those same people aren't more productive as a result of their education, this means that the net productivity of society is lower as a result of the education, while the number of people in the society is the same. End result is that the stuff:people ratio goes down, and poverty naturally increases. Education has an extremely high cost both in terms of lost productivity and resources consumed to provide it. Misapplied education will throw additional people into poverty, every time. Possibly directly, through onerous student loans, or indirectly by consuming resources that could have been used to produce basic goods for consumption.

stevetrewick 10y ago

Author states that if you contemplate the two graphs you'll have an epiphany. Quite right, it went "Wow, that is not how you analyse data and I'm sure I heard about an actual investigation with cited sources and actual math and everything which came to pretty much the opposite conclusions". [0] [0] https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/ https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/

_Robbie 10y ago
The link you cited seems to be answering the question "Does more education for an individual decrease poverty for that individual?", while the original post is answering the question "Does more education for a society decrease poverty for society as a whole?". These are two very different questions, and it is quite possible that they have opposite answers.

anovikov 10y ago

To me it sounds obvious, education improves your competitive position. If everyone improves their competitive position, nobody does. It is the employers who are better off, not people.

lotharbot 10y ago
but people now live in a society which has been made better by more-educated people who have produced better products more efficiently etc.
- anovikov 10y ago
  But it will not decrease poverty. Rather, will likely increase for people who will appear to be unable to keep up. Because poverty is a relative term. You are poor vs majority of population (there is also absolute poverty, but it almost doesn't exist in developed nations including the USA, and can be only result of mental condition or heavy substance abuse). After all, most American poor are well-off from a purely material point of view even compared to West Europeans (bigger houses, cars, etc.).

known 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

known 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer will create new jobs

nishitsh 10y ago

Gaining degree makes most of us poor, Isn't that the case. What i was thinking can we build a infrastructure on top of blockchain technology to make the very fact of education free and for all as every one knows each others ability or degree or area of expertise with this infrastructure.

SFJulie 10y ago

Education made jobs more competitive. It was a social lift taking people up. On the other hand, by making workers more productive it reinforced the competitive advantage of being born wealthy. Too harsh competitions creates cheating. And there is no lift taking wealthy/high positioned people down when they are incompetent, especially when governments gives free money to the stock exchange (QE). Well, we are heading full speed to Victorian era and hard social conflict, because educated poor will eventually understand the game is rigged.

zeemonkee3 10y ago
We could only wish to be as socially mobile as the Victorians http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract EDIT: from the paper, it appears that mass education in England toward the end of the Victorian era only made a short-lived dent in social mobility, presumably because any temporary advantage in being more educated levelled out after a generation. In the UK up to the 1960s-1980s, working class people could get a leg up through grammar schools and fully-funded higher education (tuition and modest living costs subsidized by the government) - if you could prove you were smart and hard-working enough, you had a chance to rise up. This ladder was successfully kicked away by comprehensive education and mass higher education (with introduction of student loans rather than free grants). The politicians who introduced these measures of course ensured their own children were privately educated.
- SFJulie 10y ago
  So funny, it reminds me of my banana republic called France: our public teachers are on strike once a year to complain they don't have enough fund to support their mission of "social lift" and republican equality, but they are the first to shortcut and walkaround egalitarian measure to ensure a better success to their kids and the wealthy one they put in "special classes"... Sometimes, I lose trust in what people pretend to do when I look at what they actually do. Nowadays France (and some European countries) over invest in higher education that only increase segregation funded by the public taxes, while finland radical focus on early years and well being of kids have proven way more cheaper and efficient. I so wish our elite PhD in ministers could read scientific papers, figures, and be fucking curious, but well, it would mean more competition for their own kids. Wouldn't it?

Annatar 10y ago

The analysis neglects one major point: a lot of people got degrees in the humanities and arts: dual majors in English literature and history, or sociology and psychology... what are you going to engineer with that? Engineering requires physics, mathematics, molecular biology, chemistry, material science, higher logic and cognitive capacity... English literature won't help too much with finding a new tensile strength alloy, and sociology can be only marginally used at best when trying to design a small form factor pump which must reliably pump inordinate amounts of gas or fluid, or when attempting to craft a VHDL or Verilog program to reprogram the FPGA, in order to test a new chip design, or when studying protein folding while trying to isolate the cause of cancer... Just going to college and getting a degree in something like sociology or English literature, because it's the easy way out, isn't enough to end poverty; no wonder it does not work! Ironically, those very same history majors did not learn from history: most humanities and arts majors (poets, writers) were poor. It has to be a university degree for the professions in demand, and the graduate must be ambitious, pay attention to detail, and want to deliver high quality work, not take shortcuts at every turn and opportunity "because math is hard".

LionessLover 10y ago
So if every "social science" major (and why not add business and law students) instead studied engineering, they'd all find jobs? I'm not even asking about well-paid jobs. Is there a shortage of engineers on the market now? Would more engineers magically lead to more jobs (supply-side economics works so well... oh no!)? What's the difference between "anyone can be rich" and "everyone can be rich"? Because this is similar. Yes, anyone can better themselves through more education in "the right field". What makes you think that "anyone" and "everyone" is the same problem? Have a look at science and the problem of Ph.D.s to find jobs in their fields (chemistry, physics, biology - not "social science" Ph.D.s): http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-... (also has a Part #2 linked at the bottom)
- Annatar 10y ago
  Of course not; hardcore, laissez faire capitalism like there is in the United States would correct that, and the salaries would go down. However, as it stands, there is an overabundance of humanities & arts majors, and way too little engineers and scientists; meanwhile, the industry has been almost completely off-shored over the last 60 years. The only thing left for those people to do is work in the service industry, if they are lucky. But when too many compete for a limited resource, selection kicks in, and overabundance drops the wages. Education won't help with that, as we see, but it might help with organizing oneself, or "going at it on one's own" and opening a business. A good lesson to learn from that would be that hard core, laissez faire capitalism is just as destructive as a totalitarian communist system. In order for the population to be able to live comfortably, capitalism must be enhanced with socialist safeguards and a system of checks and balances built in, like Sweden, Austria, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland did it. Switzerland for example has low taxes and respects private property, and especially protects and fosters enterpreneurship, making it very corporate friendly, but it also has a very strong welfare safety net. One would think that would make a lot of Swiss draw on unemployment and disability, but Swiss work 42 hours per week minimum (compare and contrast to France, where they work 35 to 37), and unemployment in Switzerland is among the lowest in the world.

pythia__ 10y ago

It will more likely be (state subsidized?) embryo selection for the genetic markers of intelligence (see, e.g., https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection), not work on proxies like education, that will substantially reduce poverty. While this solution is outside the Overton window in America today, that will change as the benefits become more visible.

gizi 10y ago

In technology, programming work is about looking up, composing, and debugging code. I yet have to meet one person who learned it at school. In the school environment, the emphasis is, has always been, and will always be, to repeat things from memory. If the IT teacher were good at looking up, composing, and debugging, and given the kind of salaries you that get when you are good at that, he would not be teaching. He would seek to multiply his income often ten times by actually doing it, instead of teaching it. In fact, you can only learn from people who are doing it themselves. Everybody else does not really know how to do it. Therefore, the teacher is only good at what will give you beautiful credentials: repeating from memory. That is also what he will seek to perpetuate with his own students. Formal education does not only NOT fix poverty. Formal education actively creates it. Instead of spending your formative years learning the skill that will make you gain income, you learn to repeat from memory. There is not one industry where this would be of value. You need to be able to produce things of value, just to survive. It is exceedingly dangerous to spend all your time on things that will never produce any value at all.

aylmao 10y ago

I wonder how much technology has to do with this. A lot of jobs that existed a few years ago don't any more, and the wealth/time saved isn't going back to the people; work hours are not shorter, and low-end jobs aren't better paid. I would guess not a trivial amount. Which is sad. Keeping people employed is much more important in the grand scheme of things than whatever percentage efficiency gain some of this tech brings.

pritambarhate 10y ago

In my observation Education isn't the main/only criteria for getting a job. Skills get you a job. But education and good academics help you to qualify for the interview. If in the interview you can prove that you have the skills to perform the job, most likely you will get the job. The problem is traditional education is focused on theoretical knowledge and doesn't stress enough on practical skills. Unfortunately in India there are many Computer Science engineering students who after 4 years for Computer Science education, fail to write a simple Frequency Counter in a programming language of their choice. This shows that something in the education system is not right. The colleges are producing engineers by hundreds of thousands every year, but the overall quality of education these guys have received is so poor that most of them are not employable. I know about computer science because I work in this field. However I think more or less the situation is the same in other fields.

bassislife 10y ago

If there is a market for the education you received, it should. If the job market conditions change, it might not unless the person is resourceful. Also note that the OP is talking about the US but education is often really the key for developing countries to attain a higher level of prosperity. Because the market is still quite open there.

studentrob 10y ago

Wow, the author was just recently fired, > On May 20, the progressive public policy organization, Demos, fired Matt Bruenig, a popular writer who covered poverty and inequality. [1] Best of luck to him and hope he finds another position. This article, though, is pseudoscience. It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end. Measuring the causes and effects of societal issues over the span of 25 years should be done by sociology PhDs, not political bloggers. [1] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-civility-tool-control-political-dissent http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-...

tim333 10y ago
I'm not sure you can even measure the causes and effects of societal issues over the span of 25 years by looking at statistics. I mean you can see stuff change and form hypotheses but it's hard to determine very much that way.
randomdata 10y ago
> It is just statistics slapped together with a desired conclusion drawn at the end. Funnily enough, the same way we concluded that education does fix poverty in the first place.
- lintiness 10y ago
  we concluded education fixes poverty because it was politically obvious and popular -- still is.

coldtea 10y ago

Because education just removes one obstacle -- there are many: 1) parental encouragement for development and time spent with the child (depending on income too, e.g. single parent working deadly shifts), 2) family atmosphere (economic pressure leads to lots of things, depression, violence, etc). 3) connections 4) security (if you start studying/working paycheck to paycheck, you might not get to a point to be able to take more risk because you have no cushion money) 5) actual security (your neighborhood, city district, etc might not be the most safe/encouraging/etc growing up). 6) lack of role models (close to you, not some people on the media)

frign 10y ago

So can one assess this is a racial problem after all? For years, liberals tell us the high poverty of negroes and hispanics was due to lack of education. If it's not education, what is it then? And why are Asian-Americans not facing the same issues? I suspect it's a racial identity issue. The best way to understand this point is looking at the mainstream media and how the different races are portraied. Only an idiot would ignore this influence on people, especially because the USA are by far the biggest TV consumers. If you start judging me for asking these questions or downvote me without giving a reason, you should be ashamed of yourself. Reasons for downvoting are welcome though, so keep them coming! :)

douche 10y ago
Nobody wants to admit it, but in broad strokes, intelligence and success is heritable. https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-response-to-the-nytimes-article-on-school-districts-test-scores-and-income/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...

Pica_soO 10y ago

Always be suspicious when one solution promises to fix all the problems? It might not be a true Scotsman. Now how do i get rid of the piling up remainders of this ugly feeling of social responsibility? The poor only got to blame themselves for not being ruthless enough? No, that sounds like encouraging crime. The poor only got to blame themselves for not reading enough? No. The poor only go themselves to blame, because they where born to the wrong parents? Now it sounds heartless. And that is what all this about. Finding ab-solvent to inhale for a ugly problem to go away. Everything is allowed as long as it doesn't touch core dogmas and allows to shirk responsibility. The poor only got to blame themselves, because they loose so much energy by thermodynamics. Half there food goes up in heat. Hah, that's it, we should educate them to wear five layers of sweaters in the summer- and if they don't do it- they only got to blame themselves. Those unruly holy poor, who put my own existence to a metric i don't like.

emblem21 10y ago

TIL HN thinks the complexities of the future can be unraveled and brought to bare in a predictable, progressive manner if we just strictly adhere to the established frameworks determined by our immediate ancestors. Poverty, that is, the lack of power, is not something you fix. It's not something you augment, either. Power is a gas and ego is the vacuum. The bigger your ego, the more gas you can carry. However, not all gas is equal, and not all ego has spherical perfection. The paradox is that power requires subservience. The greater the capacity of power, the greater the potential for subservience. Knowledge is not power. Power is power. Everything else is the attempt at accumulating power.

clitmouse 10y ago

hyperinflation in education cost should effect poverty more than anything

mh-cx 10y ago

The article misses an important point: It does not explain what definition of poverty all this is based on. There are some definitions like "people having less than 60% of the average real income". But's that's a very relative: If the average income is rising over the years, people defined now as "poor" may live at the same standard as the average in 1991. If that's the case I would not neccessarily consider them "poor". So I think it would be interesting to do the same statisical breakdown but in regard to the absolute standard of living.

gadders 10y ago

As someone who grew up on a housing estate in the UK and frequently had free school meals and uniform grants from the state due to my father's unemployment, it definitely fixed mine.

Overtonwindow 10y ago

I disagree with this article. Education can fix poverty, but only if that education is responsible. Meaning: avoiding for-profit colleges and getting a degree in something competitive. So much of college today is debt-loading with classes students don't need, don't want, and shouldn't have to take. So long as universities treat students as cash machines, instead of humans seeking empowerment through education, we will continue a vicious cycle of high debt, unmarketable degrees, and sustained poverty.

dexterdog 10y ago
The first step in that is expanding which schools are included in the"for-profit" group. Very few schools are really non-profit.
CWuestefeld 10y ago
You're not addressing what seems to me to be the most significant part of the OP's argument. Getting dropouts to get high school diploma's should be the biggest win - and isn't related to college degree choice or business models. Yet it looks to have been the biggest loser.

jcfrei 10y ago

Just a side note: The OPM is adjusted for inflation (set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, updated annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, see: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm#official http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq2.htm#official). So if wages and inflation always increase in sync then there would be no reason for the number of people living in poverty to change (even if their living standards are higher in absolute terms) - apart from changes in the income distribution of the whole population. That being said, I did initially expect changes in the distributions for poor people with respect to education (more poverty among people with HS degrees than among people with uni degrees). But now that I think about it, there's really no reason why the number of available jobs which require a certain degree should change at all - ie. more electrical engineers can only create more electronics companies (and jobs) if the market has a demand for it or otherwise will just decrease the respective median wage. It seems obvious to me now but I didn't think about it like this before...

sten 10y ago
If you view education as teaching people to learn, then you might have an argument that education rates enable and empower people. If you're training robots who don't think for themselves then you'll encounter the situation you've just described.
- randomdata 10y ago
  Empowerment carries a fairly high risk and if you are already in a poor economic situation, you a very likely to not be able to tolerate it. Plenty of people in good economic standing aren't willing to tolerate it. As such, most people are going to end up choosing the far less risky path of being "robots" anyway.

jimhefferon 10y ago

At high schools with high poverty populations (say, large free lunch numbers), there has in the past twenty years been a big push to increase graduation numbers. Now, you can increase graduation rates in two ways (or a combination). Both involve the students who used to flunk out. (1) You can have them learn more, provide them with help so they don't need that job to eat, etc. (2) you can make up ways for them to get high school credit for doing what they would have done had they simply left. All too often, what happens is (1). After all, people respond to rewards and administrators are rewarded for higher grad numbers. But the net-knowledge is not very much increased by (1).

known 10y ago

Education does not fix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

humanrebar 10y ago

Family structure is actually huge when talking about poverty. First, poverty statistics comparing 1950 to today are more complex than they appear since the marriage rate has dropped a lot. There are more single-income households, so the average household income looks different though income might not have changed all that much. Second there is a very strong correlation between marriage rates in neighborhoods and poverty levels in the same neighborhoods. Likewise, there is a very strong correlation between marriages in households with children and poverty rates in those households. Very few households with two working partners live in poverty. It's... complicated to discuss family structure when talking about poverty and child welfare, but it's possible (I would argue likely) that family structure is a key contributor here. In my opinion it's rather foolish not to at least bring it up and consider it.

cokernel 10y ago
This is part of a three-part series of posts, one focused on education, one on work, and one on marriage. The author talks about marriage here: http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-failed-and-unnecessary-cut-poverty http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-fai...
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  His argument here seems particularly weak. He seems to be saying "Scandinavia doesn't have this problem, and anyway, it's really hard to get more people to marry." I don't find that a very compelling argument.
  - hsitz 10y ago
    I think the argument is more along the lines of: (1) We've tried lots of different programs and wasted lots of money and resources trying to promote marriage; all have been failures, we have no idea how to actually promote marriage. (2) It's not necessary to promote marriage to solve the poverty problem. Thus (3) we should forget about the "marriage promotion" programs as part of the fight against poverty; we can deploy our resources better elsewhere.

alivarys 10y ago

Some say that stats are deceiving. They aren't, but one can make them lie. Thanks for doing them right.

jernfrost 10y ago

I am surprised by how many people fundamentally misunderstand the authors point. Surely he knows that a well educated workforce is important for an economy. However what the author is addressing is this naive belief that education almost exclusively can solve poverty problems. This is the idea which has been thrown around for years. Governments, economists etc have focused far too much on presenting statistics showing the benefits of education in general without any concern for what people actually learn or whether there is ever a potential for just spending too much time on education. As someone who has believed for years we are over-educating our people in the west, I've generally felt a complete dismissal of this opinion. Education helps! End of discussion, is the feeling I sense. If you care to look it is pretty clear that the education hysteria has gone off the rails. Jobs people could perfectly well do with high school education, now requires a bachelor. Suddenly a master is a requirement where usually a bachelors degree would be sufficient. We have come to believe learning only happens in school. That is where I think we are going wrong. My mother is a journalist and never took more than high school education. Yet she is a very accomplished journalist which knows a lot about her field. Today it is next to impossible to become a journalist without having lots of education, often multiple degrees. A software developer with a Bachlor and two years of work experience doesn't know less than a student fresh out of a Master program. They just know different stuff. What the people need to get out of poverty is relevant skills for the economy, but that is not a game of making sure your country has ever higher percentages of college graduates. Switzerland is a case in point. It is a high tech economy with some of the lowest level of college education. How can this be? Because in Switzerland almost anything can be learned through vocational training programs. Massive amounts of learning is happening in a sophisticated private enterprise. That just doesn't show up on the kind of statistics politicians obsesses about. We don't need more education. We need education far better aligned with the needs of the economy and private enterprise. We also need to make it accessible people at all rungs of society. X number of years of education in the US is not going to help when so many schools in poor areas of America are exceptionally bad. There is no mystery to this. America is the only advance country where the bulk of education spending goes to the well of rather than the needy. This is through the American tradition requiring students to go to their school district and tying funding to property taxes as well as relying on substantial amounts of fundraising by parents. It is a bit late to start handing out scholarships for poor but talented students when they reach college age. The damage has already been done. You got to start thinking education from the very first years.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Gravityloss 10y ago

If we turn this around: if we assume that in the global well connected economy, you're paid roughly in proportion to the value you provide, can education increase your ability to provide value?

scalio 10y ago

We are told we need knowledge about some things in order to make money and subsequently not to starve. We are supposed to gain this knowledge in school and maybe uni, and then head off to a grand career. I mostly agree with this idea (not so much with its real life implementation). I get where it's coming from, knowledge is what pushes us forward, after all: mathematical knowledge allows us to play with abstract and complex systems, physical knowledge is the application of some of these abstract systems to physical observation, historical knowledge enables us to reason about our past or our origin. Then there's a massive body of knowledge about human products: literature, visual art and music spanning thousands of years, social and economic systems lasting centuries, the list goes on. Now that's nice and all, but knowledge needs to be applied to something to be of any use. Which incidentally is the problem we are seeing currently: knowledge is pumped into peoples' heads and is expected to magically produce solutions, while we're not even in agreement over the problems (what are the common goals we are aiming for, as a race?). No wonder it doesn't work, knowledge needs physical and mental room to grow. That makes a safe and comfortable environment a requirement for any supposedly functional educational system, but also one that is often not satisfied. In other words, the problem is not that education doesn't fix poverty, it's that our shitty politics and social non-systems do not give people enough piece and quiet to explore their knowledge. Edit to add: It is much more convenient to blame a malfunction on the most obviously failing part rather than recognising that the underlying machinery is not providing the right environment for said part to operate in, wearing it harder than necessary.