5 ms·

Poor countries are actually a great example. Vietnam for instance is an extremely poor nation. Their parity adjusted GDP/capita is $6,925. It's $2,305 nominal.

Poor countries are actually a great example. Vietnam for instance is an extremely poor nation. Their parity adjusted GDP/capita is $6,925. It's $2,305 nominal. They end up spending a paltry $450/capita party adjusted on education [2]. In the US we proudly spend $3,455/capita - upwards of 700% more. [1] This is a listing of nations in academic performance by PISA results. [2] This is a list of countries by how much they spend on education, if you'd like to compare other nations. Vietnam is not a single outlier. Vietnam is currently scoring 22nd in the world on math, and 7th in the world on science. The US is 41st on Math, 24th on science. And we spend more to anywhere in the world, excepting 3 nations, on education. You'll find Vietnam is not alone in this peculiar aspect. The correlation between government spending on education and educational performance is not particularly good. And people still think we need to substantially increase educational spending. This is really one of the fundamental problems with government. Everything is seen through the lens of money. Is something not performing well? You can solve it by just throwing more money at it! Of course this is not true. The spending tends to be wasteful at best, and completely ineffective at worst. The point I'm getting at here is that as you see these sort of results of spending across the range of government fields, being asked to give them large sums of your money to continue spending is one reason people can grow discouraged when being forced to give this government so much of their money. Or consider our completely pointless wars. The total cost for the Iraq war alone is going to end up in the trillions of dollars. And on top of all of this it seems that no matter how much the government increases their gross receipts, they still manage to dive ever deeper into debt. Again, that's not particularly encouraging. [1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-math-science-reading-skills-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-mat... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_%28%25_of_GDP%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...

Firadeoclus 8y ago
Given that education expenditure is mostly local (rather than, say, paying for imported commodities) there is little reason to compare dollar amounts. > This is really one of the fundamental problems with government. Everything is seen through the lens of money. That is the problem with government? I'd say this is the problem with a culture that sees everything outside the most personal through an economic lens. Government is not the exception here.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  See [1] for a response on relative dollar comparisons. To elaborate on what I mean by seeing things through an economic lens, imagine you see a problem that you need to fix. As this problem directly affects you, you're going to make sure that what you're doing is extremely likely to lead to a solution. And since you're also personally paying for it, you're going to keep costs as low as you possibly can. Your focus is on the solution and on minimizing costs. When government, high level or federal government in particular, solves problems they're taking on issues that frequently do not directly affect them. And they're spending other peoples' money. This leads to a rather broken system of motivations. Whether the prices involved are reasonable, or whether it's likely to lead to productive outcomes are not as important. Instead only the spending of money is seen as their action and role. I think an interesting 'parable' for government spending is Alaska. Like you may know Alaska is the only state with something like a basic income. They have their permanent fund [2] which each year pays out a substantial dividend to every single man, woman, and child living in the state. It reached as high as $2,700 in 2018 'kind of', but where did it come from? Massive oil reserves were confirmed in Alaska in the late 60s and the state immediately set to leasing access to these fields. It resulted in a great windfall of money like nothing before or since. And what happened to the state as a result of the newly enriched government? Well... not much. Somehow the government managed to waste all their new revenue without much of anything to show for it. Outrage within the state is what led then to the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund. It is a privately managed fund which receives and invests a certain amount of money from all oil revenue and then distributes those profits back to society. The euphemism for its purpose is to 'ensure future generations will have access to the wealth long after the oil reserves are gone.' In reality, it's about letting society actually have access to the wealth created from the natural resources of their state instead of letting the government waste it all. That alone is perhaps an interesting tale, but I think the most recent years are what really make the point. In recent years Alaska's government has been running their state into a dangerous deficit. Rather than adjusting their spending or trying to trim down waste or excess, they've turned to plundering dividends. I mentioned that $2,700 in 2018 as 'kind of'. The reason is that the state instead decided to make it $1,600 - effectively and legally stealing $1,100 from each man, woman, and child because they can't responsibly manage their own spending. Perhaps the dangers of having such a program in government control to start with. I have absolutely 0 problems with some fair portion of my money being used as a means to help better society as a whole. But government does not really seem to be a body capable of achieving this end. And the problem, as I see it, is that government is more interested in throwing money at problems rather than ensuring that those problems are solved. I think the physically closer we get to problems (federal < state < county < city < distict < community < family < individual) the more likely problems are to be solved effectively, efficiently, and rapidly. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600782 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
orbifold 8y ago
It is silly to compare the absolute expenses for education in different countries, you have to somehow normalize for example the teachers wages with respect to the purchasing power, since it is much cheaper to live in Vietnam compared to the US in absolute numbers. That is not to say that most likely something cultural leads to the poor performance of US high school education. According to J.Simons (Fields medalist turned hedge Fond billionaire) especially in STEM fields Schools compete with tech companies for talent and can only offer much worse compensation. The other thing is that in the 50-70ties the number of people that studied in preparation for and went to college was somewhere between 8-15% (continuously rising) it is much easier to teach smart students with few good teachers than to prepare basically everyone for college. In Germany my parents almost exclusively had PhDs as their teachers, now 60% of all students prepare for university and we have a shortfall of ~20000 teachers with half of the STEM education majors going to industry.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  To ensure there's no fundamental confusion, the terms you're talking about are "nominal" and "parity adjusted", which are what I gave. Nominal is the "absolute" cost of something. Parity is the adjusted value after compensating for how much things cost in a given region. You seem to be proposing that perhaps teachers in Vietnam are paid well relative to other jobs in Vietnam. This is not the case. A fairly recent government study indicated that some 50% [1] of teachers regret deciding to teach as a career, with the article going into detail on the lifestyle of a teacher - which is horrible, in large part due to dreadfully low compensation. PISA measures the performance of 15 year old students, so that is another topic altogether. This is why Vietnam is such an interesting case study. Like many things, our spending is driven more by intuition than data. And Vietnam shows that our intuition on successful educational outcomes is pretty much useless. [1] - http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-of-vietnamese-teachers-regret-their-career-decisions.html http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-...

Firadeoclus 8y ago

Given that education expenditure is mostly local (rather than, say, paying for imported commodities) there is little reason to compare dollar amounts. > This is really one of the fundamental problems with government. Everything is seen through the lens of money. That is the problem with government? I'd say this is the problem with a culture that sees everything outside the most personal through an economic lens. Government is not the exception here.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
See [1] for a response on relative dollar comparisons. To elaborate on what I mean by seeing things through an economic lens, imagine you see a problem that you need to fix. As this problem directly affects you, you're going to make sure that what you're doing is extremely likely to lead to a solution. And since you're also personally paying for it, you're going to keep costs as low as you possibly can. Your focus is on the solution and on minimizing costs. When government, high level or federal government in particular, solves problems they're taking on issues that frequently do not directly affect them. And they're spending other peoples' money. This leads to a rather broken system of motivations. Whether the prices involved are reasonable, or whether it's likely to lead to productive outcomes are not as important. Instead only the spending of money is seen as their action and role. I think an interesting 'parable' for government spending is Alaska. Like you may know Alaska is the only state with something like a basic income. They have their permanent fund [2] which each year pays out a substantial dividend to every single man, woman, and child living in the state. It reached as high as $2,700 in 2018 'kind of', but where did it come from? Massive oil reserves were confirmed in Alaska in the late 60s and the state immediately set to leasing access to these fields. It resulted in a great windfall of money like nothing before or since. And what happened to the state as a result of the newly enriched government? Well... not much. Somehow the government managed to waste all their new revenue without much of anything to show for it. Outrage within the state is what led then to the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund. It is a privately managed fund which receives and invests a certain amount of money from all oil revenue and then distributes those profits back to society. The euphemism for its purpose is to 'ensure future generations will have access to the wealth long after the oil reserves are gone.' In reality, it's about letting society actually have access to the wealth created from the natural resources of their state instead of letting the government waste it all. That alone is perhaps an interesting tale, but I think the most recent years are what really make the point. In recent years Alaska's government has been running their state into a dangerous deficit. Rather than adjusting their spending or trying to trim down waste or excess, they've turned to plundering dividends. I mentioned that $2,700 in 2018 as 'kind of'. The reason is that the state instead decided to make it $1,600 - effectively and legally stealing $1,100 from each man, woman, and child because they can't responsibly manage their own spending. Perhaps the dangers of having such a program in government control to start with. I have absolutely 0 problems with some fair portion of my money being used as a means to help better society as a whole. But government does not really seem to be a body capable of achieving this end. And the problem, as I see it, is that government is more interested in throwing money at problems rather than ensuring that those problems are solved. I think the physically closer we get to problems (federal < state < county < city < distict < community < family < individual) the more likely problems are to be solved effectively, efficiently, and rapidly. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600782 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

orbifold 8y ago

It is silly to compare the absolute expenses for education in different countries, you have to somehow normalize for example the teachers wages with respect to the purchasing power, since it is much cheaper to live in Vietnam compared to the US in absolute numbers. That is not to say that most likely something cultural leads to the poor performance of US high school education. According to J.Simons (Fields medalist turned hedge Fond billionaire) especially in STEM fields Schools compete with tech companies for talent and can only offer much worse compensation. The other thing is that in the 50-70ties the number of people that studied in preparation for and went to college was somewhere between 8-15% (continuously rising) it is much easier to teach smart students with few good teachers than to prepare basically everyone for college. In Germany my parents almost exclusively had PhDs as their teachers, now 60% of all students prepare for university and we have a shortfall of ~20000 teachers with half of the STEM education majors going to industry.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
To ensure there's no fundamental confusion, the terms you're talking about are "nominal" and "parity adjusted", which are what I gave. Nominal is the "absolute" cost of something. Parity is the adjusted value after compensating for how much things cost in a given region. You seem to be proposing that perhaps teachers in Vietnam are paid well relative to other jobs in Vietnam. This is not the case. A fairly recent government study indicated that some 50% [1] of teachers regret deciding to teach as a career, with the article going into detail on the lifestyle of a teacher - which is horrible, in large part due to dreadfully low compensation. PISA measures the performance of 15 year old students, so that is another topic altogether. This is why Vietnam is such an interesting case study. Like many things, our spending is driven more by intuition than data. And Vietnam shows that our intuition on successful educational outcomes is pretty much useless. [1] - http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-of-vietnamese-teachers-regret-their-career-decisions.html http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-...