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Or, from the abstract: " While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not transl

Or, from the abstract: " While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility" As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise), and therefore makes education hereditary.

wutbrodo 10y ago
> As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise) It's actually worse than that; Danish equality of opportunity isn't just "meaningless", it doesn't exist (relative to the US). There was a recent study done that indicated that income mobility (after taxes and transfers) in Denmark isn't any higher than in the US. This means that the taxes and transfers aren't actually having much of (any?) effect on equality of opportunity, as measured by the outcomes of the next generation.
- netcan 10y ago
  The elephant in the room on many such topics is that state policies are a part of the picture, but often a limited part. It's not just material advantages that child members of a class or subculture receive relative to peers. It's soft education, example and such. A child of a doctors and lawyers extended family is more likely to conform to this pattern than a child of a subculture where this is foreign. Educational parity and even parental income parity can narrow the gap, but it can't close it. Who your parents are matters, apples fall close to trees.. Pick your cliché
  - mseebach 10y ago
    Denmark was rich (by international comparison) and equality was a well established value long before the welfare state. A song written by one of the most popular poets of the time, Grundtvig, in 1820, contained the line "Og da har i rigdom vi drevet det vidt, når få har for meget og færre for lidt." ("We have achieved much in wealth, when few has too much and still fewer too little". My translation does not do the poetic qualities of the original justice, but it's pretty accurate for content.)
uola 10y ago
Where is the supporting evidence in the paper of that educational outcomes is "because of disincentives"? At least I can't find any.
- mseebach 10y ago
  Did you look? I literally ctrl-F'ed for "incentive" and found this. Page 44: 3.5 Welfare Levels and Educational Incentives It is well established that the economic returns to education are substantially lower in Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries than in the U.S. (see, e.g., Fredriksson and Topel, 2010; Harmon et al., 2003) ... As noted in Edin and Topel (1997) and Fredriksson and Topel (2010), incentives to pursue education diminish as returns to education decrease and welfare benefits increase. That's just the first few lines, the argument is hashed out (with references) over the next couple of pages.
  - uola 10y ago
    Yes, I did look but unless you put a heavy emphasis on the word "partly" the conclusion in the paper didn't seem in line with the abstract. "The results presented here establish a negative relationship between educational enrollment and the level of public benefits, albeit with two caveats. First, it is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the underlying behavioral parameters—we strongly encourage future research to explore this relationship further. Second, we neither have precise estimates of [...] the disincentives for educational attainment that wage compression and public benefits constitute. Hence, we cannot determine whether the similarities in educational mobility in the two countries occur because the effects offset each other, though we find this to be a plausible explanation given the evidence at hand."
    - mseebach 10y ago
      That section just says that they don't know how to isolate the effect of public benefits from that of the wage compression disincentives?

wutbrodo 10y ago

> As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise) It's actually worse than that; Danish equality of opportunity isn't just "meaningless", it doesn't exist (relative to the US). There was a recent study done that indicated that income mobility (after taxes and transfers) in Denmark isn't any higher than in the US. This means that the taxes and transfers aren't actually having much of (any?) effect on equality of opportunity, as measured by the outcomes of the next generation.

netcan 10y ago
The elephant in the room on many such topics is that state policies are a part of the picture, but often a limited part. It's not just material advantages that child members of a class or subculture receive relative to peers. It's soft education, example and such. A child of a doctors and lawyers extended family is more likely to conform to this pattern than a child of a subculture where this is foreign. Educational parity and even parental income parity can narrow the gap, but it can't close it. Who your parents are matters, apples fall close to trees.. Pick your cliché
- mseebach 10y ago
  Denmark was rich (by international comparison) and equality was a well established value long before the welfare state. A song written by one of the most popular poets of the time, Grundtvig, in 1820, contained the line "Og da har i rigdom vi drevet det vidt, når få har for meget og færre for lidt." ("We have achieved much in wealth, when few has too much and still fewer too little". My translation does not do the poetic qualities of the original justice, but it's pretty accurate for content.)

uola 10y ago

Where is the supporting evidence in the paper of that educational outcomes is "because of disincentives"? At least I can't find any.

mseebach 10y ago
Did you look? I literally ctrl-F'ed for "incentive" and found this. Page 44: 3.5 Welfare Levels and Educational Incentives It is well established that the economic returns to education are substantially lower in Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries than in the U.S. (see, e.g., Fredriksson and Topel, 2010; Harmon et al., 2003) ... As noted in Edin and Topel (1997) and Fredriksson and Topel (2010), incentives to pursue education diminish as returns to education decrease and welfare benefits increase. That's just the first few lines, the argument is hashed out (with references) over the next couple of pages.
- uola 10y ago
  Yes, I did look but unless you put a heavy emphasis on the word "partly" the conclusion in the paper didn't seem in line with the abstract. "The results presented here establish a negative relationship between educational enrollment and the level of public benefits, albeit with two caveats. First, it is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the underlying behavioral parameters—we strongly encourage future research to explore this relationship further. Second, we neither have precise estimates of [...] the disincentives for educational attainment that wage compression and public benefits constitute. Hence, we cannot determine whether the similarities in educational mobility in the two countries occur because the effects offset each other, though we find this to be a plausible explanation given the evidence at hand."
  - mseebach 10y ago
    That section just says that they don't know how to isolate the effect of public benefits from that of the wage compression disincentives?