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> Strongly disagreed. Well, I strongly ask why you think that. My logic is that if your government is below average at administering schools, then assuming peo

> Strongly disagreed. Well, I strongly ask why you think that. My logic is that if your government is below average at administering schools, then assuming people perform rather averagely, any other institution or organization has a better chance of providing better schooling than the government. Of course, it is always possible that your private market is even more corrupt and useless than your corrupt and useless government, in which case you probably have bigger fish to fry.

the_af 7y ago
Well, I think education is both a right and a key strategic asset of any state, and is way too important to be left to the private sector and to the whim of market forces, and that people with more money don't deserve better education. I also think market forces tend to optimize for undemocratic goals. By the way, in my experience government corruption and private sector corruption go hand in hand and it's very unlikely that only one of the two is present but the other isn't. It's almost always a perverse symbiosis. I'm not sure why we're talking about corruption though, and why you introduced this angle into the conversation...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Well, I strongly ask why you think that. My logic is that if your government is below average at administering schools, then assuming people perform rather averagely, any other institution or organization has a better chance of providing better schooling than the government. If your people supply a government that is below average at administering schools, there is no reason to assume that your people would be average or better at administering schools through any other mechanism, and there are clear reason to expect that education does not have the features that allow some real markets to approximate the performance of ideal markets; particularly the utilities are temporally distant from the purchase decision, not easily clearly associated with the purchase decision, and not received by the purchaser.

the_af 7y ago

Well, I think education is both a right and a key strategic asset of any state, and is way too important to be left to the private sector and to the whim of market forces, and that people with more money don't deserve better education. I also think market forces tend to optimize for undemocratic goals. By the way, in my experience government corruption and private sector corruption go hand in hand and it's very unlikely that only one of the two is present but the other isn't. It's almost always a perverse symbiosis. I'm not sure why we're talking about corruption though, and why you introduced this angle into the conversation...

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Well, I strongly ask why you think that. My logic is that if your government is below average at administering schools, then assuming people perform rather averagely, any other institution or organization has a better chance of providing better schooling than the government. If your people supply a government that is below average at administering schools, there is no reason to assume that your people would be average or better at administering schools through any other mechanism, and there are clear reason to expect that education does not have the features that allow some real markets to approximate the performance of ideal markets; particularly the utilities are temporally distant from the purchase decision, not easily clearly associated with the purchase decision, and not received by the purchaser.