7 ms·

Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halv

• rickycook 10y ago
  and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need in this (somewhat contrived) analogy
  • DiabloD3 10y ago
    Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2. So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket. Making better workers only helps if there are enough better jobs to go around, otherwise it is just inflating a massive bubble in the education industry.
    • EliRivers 10y ago
      Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. This will be a very difficult change to make.
      • musha68k 10y ago
        The problem is that neo-liberal capitalism has essentially been the only remaining big "story" over the last 30 years. First it weeded out all ideas of communism and recently it seems to slowly but steadily trump even European social capitalism, eventually it might simply eat itself and turn humanity into a literal "state-machine". There really seems to be "no alternative" today and consequently people seem to see no way out of that box for the most part. "The Unnecessariat" which got posted here yesterday was a very sobering read in that regard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765581
      • rhapsodic 10y ago
        > Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. I don't know who believes that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. However I believe that, where no actual disabilities exist, family units should be self-supporting and should also share in the burden of maintaining a free, just and civilized society.
        • tokensimian 10y ago
          It's a common way of expressing teh question, does the population serve the economy, or does the economy serve the population? Put another way, should countries protect workers or owners? (A false dichotomy, of course, and an oversimplification to boot.)
    • yummyfajitas 10y ago
      We definitively do NOT have "too many workers". There are millions of jobs out there which are simply not getting done due to lack of a worker willing/able to do them, or due to regulations making the job illegal. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou... We have "not enough jobs" when everyone who wants one has a butler, maid, cook and driver. (Or butlerbot, cleaning bot, autocook 2000 and self driving car.) That's not the world we live in today.
      • sbov 10y ago
        Not every "job" is a job. I would totally pay someone $0.01 per hour to clean my house each day.
        • yummyfajitas 10y ago
          Yes, that's a perfect illustration of labor scarcity. You want work done but it isn't getting done. Other work that isn't getting done: childcare for working women, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, building new public works - most left wing types have a massive laundry list of jobs that aren't getting done. Maybe those folks are just full of it and we shouldn't actually tax the rich to get those things done?
          • mac01021 10y ago
            You normally write very clearly, but I have no idea what you're getting at with this particular comment. Is any of this sarcasm? Are you sincerely suggesting that not being able to find someone to work for 1 cent per hour means that there is a labor scarcity? What's this business about public funding of municipal infrastructure and how does it relate to the conversation at hand?
            • dragonwriter 10y ago
              Scarcity means that a resource is limited and has an opportunity cost, so, yes, of there is any minimum cost, the resources is scarce.
  • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    This only works if the increase was achieved on a sustainable way. In practice it's probably over farming leading to destruction of the soil, eutrification or poisoning of water courses, and other damaging behaviours that are a long term detriment. Farmers and farms can't be switched on and off to different crop production or different skilled occupations without considerable lag.
• fennecfoxen 10y ago
  > doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;) No. Noooo. This stuff is all connected. At a minimum, leading to consumers of cabbage spending less money in the market for foodstuffs, instead being free to spend the money elsewhere, leading to an increase in their personal well-being and economic growth in other sectors. (And that's assuming that there is no change in the number of entrants into the home-cabbage-farming sector.)
  • Programmatic 10y ago
    From the perspective of the farmer it's still worse than zero-sum because they've paid to become educated while still bringing home the same amount of income. This scenario also assumed that education brought real productivity gains vs. being a signal.
    • Domenic_S 10y ago
      It's actually negative-sum, because it presumably costs some amount of money/work/resources to produce more cabbages. So while cost-per-cabbage increases, sales price decreases. Compare and contrast to the arguments about "highest worker productivity in history" while wages stagnate.