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That doesn't say anything about which is cause and which is effect, which is what is relevant for an increase in college education to make a more productive wor

That doesn't say anything about which is cause and which is effect, which is what is relevant for an increase in college education to make a more productive workforce. In fact, the labor productivity growth rate does not seem to have significantly changed at all, even as the percentage which is college educated has gone up a lot: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDYGTH https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDYGTH

dahart 7y ago
Again, I wasn’t talking about productivity, that is orthogonal to my point. I was talking about the income taxes that the government extracts from the workforce, and the income taxes the government gets are higher on average from college grads. Productivity is subjective, and while it matters indirectly to whether the economy is growing, it has no direct bearing on whether the government recoups it’s investment in student loans after losses from defaults. Income taxes directly offset those losses. Productivity... who knows, it depends heavily on your agenda and point of view. To address your point directly, I don’t personally believe that non-grad programmers are as economically productive as grads on average. I would totally believe that non-grads are as productive at building UI widgets and CRUD apps and stuff like that. However, inventions and patents are absolutely dominated by people with postgraduate degrees. It’s not a matter of hourly output, it’s a matter of yearly compound interest, and the compound interest in computer programming is generated by research. It is overwhelmingly PhDs who are developing neural networks and AI methods right now, overwhelmingly postgraduates who are the architects of new hardware and of new software methods. These are the things making the computer industry grow larger in fundamental ways.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Having done my master's degree in neural networks in the 90's, I reluctantly have to admit that they are not all that productive in the great majority of cases where they are used (although there are exceptions). The reality is that the vast majority of what AI or neural networks are used on, is buzzword bingo.
  - dahart 7y ago
    I agree with you there! But... the buzzword bingo is generating big business right now, even if it’s a fad or doesn’t work well or poorly applied.

dahart 7y ago

Again, I wasn’t talking about productivity, that is orthogonal to my point. I was talking about the income taxes that the government extracts from the workforce, and the income taxes the government gets are higher on average from college grads. Productivity is subjective, and while it matters indirectly to whether the economy is growing, it has no direct bearing on whether the government recoups it’s investment in student loans after losses from defaults. Income taxes directly offset those losses. Productivity... who knows, it depends heavily on your agenda and point of view. To address your point directly, I don’t personally believe that non-grad programmers are as economically productive as grads on average. I would totally believe that non-grads are as productive at building UI widgets and CRUD apps and stuff like that. However, inventions and patents are absolutely dominated by people with postgraduate degrees. It’s not a matter of hourly output, it’s a matter of yearly compound interest, and the compound interest in computer programming is generated by research. It is overwhelmingly PhDs who are developing neural networks and AI methods right now, overwhelmingly postgraduates who are the architects of new hardware and of new software methods. These are the things making the computer industry grow larger in fundamental ways.

rossdavidh 7y ago
Having done my master's degree in neural networks in the 90's, I reluctantly have to admit that they are not all that productive in the great majority of cases where they are used (although there are exceptions). The reality is that the vast majority of what AI or neural networks are used on, is buzzword bingo.
- dahart 7y ago
  I agree with you there! But... the buzzword bingo is generating big business right now, even if it’s a fad or doesn’t work well or poorly applied.