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"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
by 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 agoThat 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).
- jdietrich 10y agoThink about it in terms of opportunity cost. Money spent on one thing cannot be spent on something else. Saying "this is always more important than financial gain" in effect means "this is always more important than everything else". That's clearly a form of taboo - you're rejecting outright the idea of trade-offs between competing values.