13 ms·

37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree h

37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades. This is a horrible and vicious feedback loop, but it's hard to blame the employers, who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). The blame lies at the feet of an uncontrolled government loan policy that has given the BS this new status. College is eating years of our lives and is transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector of the economy. In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.

thundergolfer 7y ago
That 37% of people really needs to be understood as bifurcated though. There is the (smaller) group that do the degrees that lead to high skills and gainful employment (medecine, engineering, finance), and the other (larger) group that are enrolled in mostly cotton-candy degrees (Communications, Business, Media) that lead just to debt. Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.
- imagetic 7y ago
  I think comms/broadcast degrees often are pointless. But in media, anything web/video and journalism focused was a solid career until very recently. Wages are dropping fast in that field. Social media and phones really took a chunk out of it. It feels like the collapse of newspapers all over again, especially in the TV sector.
  - burner831234 7y ago
    Its always surprising when on HN these degrees are considered non desirable and yet every time one of us starts a company we realize we need them.
    - voxl 7y ago
      Let's assume you're telling the truth, how many would be needed? How many social media experts versus engineers? Sales is the real hidden people employer, you'll probably have as many or sales people than engineers, but the fact of the matter is now all degrees are created equal.
  - shantly 7y ago
    I can well imagine "ran a Youtube channel with x,xxx subscribers in High School" being way more valuable for getting into media work than a degree in media would be, which is something that wouldn't have even been possible not that long ago.
lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
First off you just stated that 63% of the US population 25-34 is either illiterate or non consceintious, so, yikes. Secondly, I'd love to see some real data on college as a misallocation of resources. Everything ive seen would suggest the opposite. The "college experience" is kinda the height of a true free market place for ideas and people leave better for it. The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.
- isoskeles 7y ago
  Maybe you went to a great college. I went to a large state school, and the "college experience" there was not at all like you described it. At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test. College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.
  - lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
    I also went to a large state school (although to be fair, one that's fairly highly rated for STEM). Access to people, both socially and academically, access to information, access to opportunity (I did not get a degree in CS yet here I am making piles of cash in this field) all increase with the resources available at uni. Asking a high school student, especially one that likely grew up in a small town with limited exposure to people careers, and ideas, to go into an uncaring workforce essentially unable to pivot for the rest of their lives sounds heartbreaking. I strongly believe that my opportunity should be available to every person. As a side bar I think this probably should start way earlier than college; more well run state boarding schools would be a huge life line to high performing students stifled by their geography.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I went to an excellent college, and I don’t think public money should be spent on “the college experience.” It’s not like American college graduates are leaving well versed in the works of Aristotle. We’re talking about spending tax dollars subsidizing what is mostly drinking/sex/video games/partying, with someone occasionally picking up a shallow idea.
specialist 7y ago
My alternate theory: glut of labor.
- virmundi 7y ago
  It’s that and the poor state of public education. I couldn’t read this article so I searched using similar terms. Seiners could only find 15% of applicants that could read at the 9th grade level. Companies are finding that the Federal government has been driving education into the ground since it took over on the 70s. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-workers-college-degree-apprenticeships.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/educ...
rexpop 7y ago
> College is eating years of our lives True, and it's exploitative in a Marxist sense. > transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector Confusing to me. Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity? I am not seeing the towering edu-monopolists' gravitational pull warping markets and other economic realities. > In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry. There are a few others, such as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex (Militarization of Police, War on Drugs, etc.), Monocrop Agriculture chewing through our ecological endowment, etc.
- JPKab 7y ago
  Why do you assume the financial institutions, rather than the colleges themselves? Don't you think that a person being paid a salary to teach students skills that are less valuable than what the person pays is also benefiting? What about university administrators? A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    > A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs. Do you have a source for this. This is possibly one of the dumbest things I've heard coming from a university.
    - JPKab 7y ago
      https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/university-of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets-hmm/amp/?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15759966951207&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fstevensalzberg%2F2012%2F04%2F22%2Funiversity-of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets-hmm%2F https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.forbes.com...
Recursing 7y ago
> it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry. wasn't there an article trending on HN a few hours ago about the 2T$ for Afghanistan?
- merpnderp 7y ago
  $100 billion a year isn’t even close to the biggest misapplication of resources in the US economy.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    No, but I'd still take a three-fold increase in NIH funding, or a 14x increase in the NSF budget.
- tick_tock_tick 7y ago
  drop in the bucket by comparison
- mschuster91 7y ago
  Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2. There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam) was eliminated - which led to the Taliban rising again with public support and the Iraqi political landscape essentially fractured. With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    I think an important part of the story with Germany is that Hitler's rise was substantially aided by the Germany's treatment after WW1. Everybody was aware of the importance of doing a better job this time.
ip26 7y ago
More so than real estate? You might pay $50k for your education, but in hot markets with no construction you might pay literally a million dollars more than for the same house elsewhere. Huge allocation of resources there on the zero-sum competition with other buyers in the market.
- zepto 7y ago
  That’s not misallocation. House prices are not meant to be uniform. It’s based on supply and demand.
  - ip26 7y ago
    The allocation is the huge portion of your salary going towards your mortgage. The (arguable) "mis-" part is that while it's normal for some property to be worth more than others, and the housing market is functioning as it should given the parameters, we have chosen to make the supply highly inelastic in desirable places with predictable outcome.
    - zepto 7y ago
      Why are people choosing to accept salaries that are too low?
      - ip26 7y ago
        (Proven) collusion between employers to keep wages down would be one reason.
        zepto 7y ago
        Proven?
        ryanmercer 7y ago
        Given companies have a legal responsibility to make a profit for shareholders...
snowwrestler 7y ago
This only makes sense if you think that bachelors degrees contribute no value during the entire lifetimes of the people who receive them, which seems like a pretty huge assumption that should not pass unexamined. I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem. It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.
- knzhou 7y ago
  > It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education. That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)
  - hackerc 7y ago
    I still retain and use college knowledge in fields not directly related to my programs of study...
    - knzhou 7y ago
      You are an outlier, as is just about everybody else commenting here.
  - jacobsenscott 7y ago
    I'm a programmer with a bachelor degree, majored in CS and minored in math. I can't do my kids AP calc anymore. I haven't used it in 20 years of programming.
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
sharadov 7y ago
I think it also comes down to the "quality" of the college, good schools and great teachers can make a massive difference. College allows you to explore your interests, make friends with a wide variety of people, which you may not be able to do later in life. I got a good education - but besides that, I made great friends who introduced me to interests which am still pursuing. Unfortunately, a lot of the American college experience centers on binge drinking, getting laid, frats and sororities and college sports. Find a school that is not about the above BS and you'll get a first-class experience.
- porknubbins 7y ago
  Its not just the college but a program. #1 thing no one told 18 year old me that I wish they had- a mathematics degree (for example) from generic state university will pretty much get you the same job interviews as a fancy school degree will. Because employers respect the fact that Mathematics is hard wherever you do it. An Economics degree from nowhere gets you pretty much nothing while a Ivy Econ degree will get you into consulting or banking, and even more so for pure humanities. The less technical the material the more work the reputation of the school has to do.
  - sharadov 7y ago
    Makes sense, but an Economics degree from Harvard teaches you a lot more ( the course and projects are way harder, the people teaching it are top-notch in their field). In engineering, as well, I've seen the same computer science degree and courses being a joke at another university compared to where I went.
- bumby 7y ago
  There has been some study that shows the school itself correlated with post school achievement with a large caveat: those who were accepted to “higher” quality schools but ended up attending a lower regarded institution did just as well. The implication being it has less to do with the school and more to do with the students who can get accepted to those schools.[1] There was a comparatively larger impact on those coming from lower level income families. There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender [1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Krueger+estimating+the+payoff+of+more+elite+college&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3Dl8qDNf3LIwMJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kru...
wtvanhest 7y ago
Big 3: Cost structure of college Cost structure of healthcare Mass incarceration (actual cost + lost GDP etc.) If we fixed those 3, or at least dramatically reduced their impact, we would unlock 30+ years of growth. Its basically free money, just sitting there, waiting for someone to restructure each of them.
- permatech 7y ago
  Can we spread that free money doing something about climate change?
- zanny 7y ago
  There are a lot more broken cost structures - housing, which has similar potential losses to incarceration with the stress of rent driving drug use and homelessness costing a ton and taking potentially productive people out of the economy. Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies). Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc. Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    Housing is cheap in small towns. As I understand it, America has "Section 8" housing which pays most of the rent for unemployed people and they pay 30% out of their unemployment benefit. So are homeless people really just choosing to live in a city where they're not eligible for section 8 because they don't want to live in a small town? Or have they done something so badly wrong that they can't get it anywhere? If your income is too high for section 8 but too low for rent, then you need to move because your labor is worth less than your living costs.
noobermin 7y ago
63% of people between 25 to 34 (or may be less for those still in school but I imagine not by much) isn't "vashingly small."
- username90 7y ago
  You read that wrong, most people aren't conscientious and those who are conscientious are likely to get a college education.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    Then you're saying most people are unable to be gainfully employed. That's a pretty fatalistic (and unrealistic) read of the current situation.
    - username90 7y ago
      What are you talking about? You can be gainfully employed and be a productive member of a team without being conscientious. I fit in that group.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
>37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades. So you think 63% of the population under 34 are either illiterate or unconscientious?
ryanmercer 7y ago
>who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). It just chaps me that employers immediately think (in my case) 14 years of professional working experience is worth less than being able to APA format your paper and temporarily remember stuff for a test between rounds of beer pong.
aiphex 7y ago
I think a larger misallocation of resources is money that is syphoned off / sucked out of every sector and sent to offshore tax havens.. University did take a chunk of my life that I would have liked to be earning money and growing my family. But it was a much better experience, and made me a much better person than when I was surrounded by ignorant and bitter men working in the trades as a commercial electrician.

thundergolfer 7y ago

That 37% of people really needs to be understood as bifurcated though. There is the (smaller) group that do the degrees that lead to high skills and gainful employment (medecine, engineering, finance), and the other (larger) group that are enrolled in mostly cotton-candy degrees (Communications, Business, Media) that lead just to debt. Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.

imagetic 7y ago
I think comms/broadcast degrees often are pointless. But in media, anything web/video and journalism focused was a solid career until very recently. Wages are dropping fast in that field. Social media and phones really took a chunk out of it. It feels like the collapse of newspapers all over again, especially in the TV sector.
- burner831234 7y ago
  Its always surprising when on HN these degrees are considered non desirable and yet every time one of us starts a company we realize we need them.
  - voxl 7y ago
    Let's assume you're telling the truth, how many would be needed? How many social media experts versus engineers? Sales is the real hidden people employer, you'll probably have as many or sales people than engineers, but the fact of the matter is now all degrees are created equal.
- shantly 7y ago
  I can well imagine "ran a Youtube channel with x,xxx subscribers in High School" being way more valuable for getting into media work than a degree in media would be, which is something that wouldn't have even been possible not that long ago.

lordCarbonFiber 7y ago

First off you just stated that 63% of the US population 25-34 is either illiterate or non consceintious, so, yikes. Secondly, I'd love to see some real data on college as a misallocation of resources. Everything ive seen would suggest the opposite. The "college experience" is kinda the height of a true free market place for ideas and people leave better for it. The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.

isoskeles 7y ago
Maybe you went to a great college. I went to a large state school, and the "college experience" there was not at all like you described it. At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test. College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.
- lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
  I also went to a large state school (although to be fair, one that's fairly highly rated for STEM). Access to people, both socially and academically, access to information, access to opportunity (I did not get a degree in CS yet here I am making piles of cash in this field) all increase with the resources available at uni. Asking a high school student, especially one that likely grew up in a small town with limited exposure to people careers, and ideas, to go into an uncaring workforce essentially unable to pivot for the rest of their lives sounds heartbreaking. I strongly believe that my opportunity should be available to every person. As a side bar I think this probably should start way earlier than college; more well run state boarding schools would be a huge life line to high performing students stifled by their geography.
rayiner 7y ago
I went to an excellent college, and I don’t think public money should be spent on “the college experience.” It’s not like American college graduates are leaving well versed in the works of Aristotle. We’re talking about spending tax dollars subsidizing what is mostly drinking/sex/video games/partying, with someone occasionally picking up a shallow idea.

specialist 7y ago

My alternate theory: glut of labor.

virmundi 7y ago
It’s that and the poor state of public education. I couldn’t read this article so I searched using similar terms. Seiners could only find 15% of applicants that could read at the 9th grade level. Companies are finding that the Federal government has been driving education into the ground since it took over on the 70s. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-workers-college-degree-apprenticeships.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/educ...

rexpop 7y ago

> College is eating years of our lives True, and it's exploitative in a Marxist sense. > transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector Confusing to me. Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity? I am not seeing the towering edu-monopolists' gravitational pull warping markets and other economic realities. > In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry. There are a few others, such as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex (Militarization of Police, War on Drugs, etc.), Monocrop Agriculture chewing through our ecological endowment, etc.

JPKab 7y ago
Why do you assume the financial institutions, rather than the colleges themselves? Don't you think that a person being paid a salary to teach students skills that are less valuable than what the person pays is also benefiting? What about university administrators? A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs. Do you have a source for this. This is possibly one of the dumbest things I've heard coming from a university.
  - JPKab 7y ago
    https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/university-of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets-hmm/amp/?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15759966951207&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fstevensalzberg%2F2012%2F04%2F22%2Funiversity-of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets-hmm%2F https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.forbes.com...

Recursing 7y ago

> it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry. wasn't there an article trending on HN a few hours ago about the 2T$ for Afghanistan?

merpnderp 7y ago
$100 billion a year isn’t even close to the biggest misapplication of resources in the US economy.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  No, but I'd still take a three-fold increase in NIH funding, or a 14x increase in the NSF budget.
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
drop in the bucket by comparison
mschuster91 7y ago
Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2. There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam) was eliminated - which led to the Taliban rising again with public support and the Iraqi political landscape essentially fractured. With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I think an important part of the story with Germany is that Hitler's rise was substantially aided by the Germany's treatment after WW1. Everybody was aware of the importance of doing a better job this time.

ip26 7y ago

More so than real estate? You might pay $50k for your education, but in hot markets with no construction you might pay literally a million dollars more than for the same house elsewhere. Huge allocation of resources there on the zero-sum competition with other buyers in the market.

zepto 7y ago
That’s not misallocation. House prices are not meant to be uniform. It’s based on supply and demand.
- ip26 7y ago
  The allocation is the huge portion of your salary going towards your mortgage. The (arguable) "mis-" part is that while it's normal for some property to be worth more than others, and the housing market is functioning as it should given the parameters, we have chosen to make the supply highly inelastic in desirable places with predictable outcome.
  - zepto 7y ago
    Why are people choosing to accept salaries that are too low?
    - ip26 7y ago
      (Proven) collusion between employers to keep wages down would be one reason.
      - zepto 7y ago
        Proven?
        ryanmercer 7y ago
        Given companies have a legal responsibility to make a profit for shareholders...

snowwrestler 7y ago

This only makes sense if you think that bachelors degrees contribute no value during the entire lifetimes of the people who receive them, which seems like a pretty huge assumption that should not pass unexamined. I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem. It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.

knzhou 7y ago
> It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education. That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)
- hackerc 7y ago
  I still retain and use college knowledge in fields not directly related to my programs of study...
  - knzhou 7y ago
    You are an outlier, as is just about everybody else commenting here.
- jacobsenscott 7y ago
  I'm a programmer with a bachelor degree, majored in CS and minored in math. I can't do my kids AP calc anymore. I haven't used it in 20 years of programming.
- snowwrestler 7y ago

sharadov 7y ago

I think it also comes down to the "quality" of the college, good schools and great teachers can make a massive difference. College allows you to explore your interests, make friends with a wide variety of people, which you may not be able to do later in life. I got a good education - but besides that, I made great friends who introduced me to interests which am still pursuing. Unfortunately, a lot of the American college experience centers on binge drinking, getting laid, frats and sororities and college sports. Find a school that is not about the above BS and you'll get a first-class experience.

porknubbins 7y ago
Its not just the college but a program. #1 thing no one told 18 year old me that I wish they had- a mathematics degree (for example) from generic state university will pretty much get you the same job interviews as a fancy school degree will. Because employers respect the fact that Mathematics is hard wherever you do it. An Economics degree from nowhere gets you pretty much nothing while a Ivy Econ degree will get you into consulting or banking, and even more so for pure humanities. The less technical the material the more work the reputation of the school has to do.
- sharadov 7y ago
  Makes sense, but an Economics degree from Harvard teaches you a lot more ( the course and projects are way harder, the people teaching it are top-notch in their field). In engineering, as well, I've seen the same computer science degree and courses being a joke at another university compared to where I went.
bumby 7y ago
There has been some study that shows the school itself correlated with post school achievement with a large caveat: those who were accepted to “higher” quality schools but ended up attending a lower regarded institution did just as well. The implication being it has less to do with the school and more to do with the students who can get accepted to those schools.[1] There was a comparatively larger impact on those coming from lower level income families. There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender [1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Krueger+estimating+the+payoff+of+more+elite+college&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3Dl8qDNf3LIwMJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kru...

wtvanhest 7y ago

Big 3: Cost structure of college Cost structure of healthcare Mass incarceration (actual cost + lost GDP etc.) If we fixed those 3, or at least dramatically reduced their impact, we would unlock 30+ years of growth. Its basically free money, just sitting there, waiting for someone to restructure each of them.

permatech 7y ago
Can we spread that free money doing something about climate change?
zanny 7y ago
There are a lot more broken cost structures - housing, which has similar potential losses to incarceration with the stress of rent driving drug use and homelessness costing a ton and taking potentially productive people out of the economy. Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies). Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc. Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Housing is cheap in small towns. As I understand it, America has "Section 8" housing which pays most of the rent for unemployed people and they pay 30% out of their unemployment benefit. So are homeless people really just choosing to live in a city where they're not eligible for section 8 because they don't want to live in a small town? Or have they done something so badly wrong that they can't get it anywhere? If your income is too high for section 8 but too low for rent, then you need to move because your labor is worth less than your living costs.

noobermin 7y ago

63% of people between 25 to 34 (or may be less for those still in school but I imagine not by much) isn't "vashingly small."

username90 7y ago
You read that wrong, most people aren't conscientious and those who are conscientious are likely to get a college education.
- noobermin 7y ago
  Then you're saying most people are unable to be gainfully employed. That's a pretty fatalistic (and unrealistic) read of the current situation.
  - username90 7y ago
    What are you talking about? You can be gainfully employed and be a productive member of a team without being conscientious. I fit in that group.

eli_gottlieb 7y ago

>37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades. So you think 63% of the population under 34 are either illiterate or unconscientious?

ryanmercer 7y ago

>who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). It just chaps me that employers immediately think (in my case) 14 years of professional working experience is worth less than being able to APA format your paper and temporarily remember stuff for a test between rounds of beer pong.

aiphex 7y ago

I think a larger misallocation of resources is money that is syphoned off / sucked out of every sector and sent to offshore tax havens.. University did take a chunk of my life that I would have liked to be earning money and growing my family. But it was a much better experience, and made me a much better person than when I was surrounded by ignorant and bitter men working in the trades as a commercial electrician.