6 ms·

> The cost is low for the student but it's pretty high for the taxpayers. That is a supposition that proves to be false. The same happens for health care. To h

> The cost is low for the student but it's pretty high for the taxpayers. That is a supposition that proves to be false. The same happens for health care. To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that. Also, I would like to notice, that for European tax-payers it is an investment. That money spend in education brings back way more money that what the original cost was. So, to just talk about "cost" misses the point. > bouncing in and out, not bothering to finish it or prolonging it till their thirties, etc. Not true. I have never been in a classroom where anyone was above thirty, probably no one was over their 25 anniversary. But, that is my personal experience. Can you provide some data about that? I have not been able to find any statistics to confirm your statement.

twic 6y ago
Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  Americans are over 300 million people, and like Europe we are not homogenous. And many Americans believe European healthcare, education, and infrastructure are far superior to the U.S. The problem is that despite Europe being far more efficient at health, education, and infrastructure spending it also has a wide range of policies. So it's difficult to determine which policies are driving the increase in efficiency and which aren't.
  - coredog64 6y ago
    There’s no such thing as “European healthcare”. European countries (and I’m going to ignore Brexit and include the UK) approach provision of healthcare in a unique way. For example, the UK has the NHS, Switzerland has insurance mandates, and France has strict regulation of private insurance companies.
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      Yeah this was my point.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Yet all of Europe has one thing in common: people don't go bankrupt over surgeries because 99.99% of people have an insurance.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    What does homogeneity have to do with anything?
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      >Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside. Treats Americans like they all have the same beliefs, i.e. homogenous.
- seibelj 6y ago
  Europeans are utterly unable to create new global enterprises at the rate of America and China, apart from a few odd balls like Spotify. Different places optimize for different things, for better and worse.
  - plafl 6y ago
    Europe is a collection of small countries. It's not coincidence that the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, is the most populated country. And since this is going quite off topic here is some wild idea: let's keep just a fraction of the current universities, like say 5 or 10%, force talent in Europe to concentrate in a few places, force mixing across nations. Actually this is already encouraged somehow but let's be more brutal. Just thinking out loud maybe an stupid idea.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Whose fault is it that Europe has many small countries instead of being dominated by Germany the? If the EU hadn't stopped its continent-scale genocidal domination, it could be on par with USA and China for linguiatic and economic unity.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > Europeans are utterly unable to create new global enterprises at the rate of America and China, Having a homogeneous, single-language, single market of 350 million, and 1.4 billion people, respectively, is an enormous competitive advantage that Europe cannot replicate, without doing away with sovereignty and brainwashing ~80% of its population. And despite all that, the quality of life of the average European is pretty good.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      Counterpoint - Israel. Tiny country, unique language, way more success in tech and VC per capita than Europe.
      - vkou 6y ago
- booboolayla 6y ago
  Because they have European immigrants (like me) who are more than willing to explain to Americans what exactly leftist ideas mean in practice, and how much of it is false advertising. Stop pretending health care is better in Europe!
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Please refrain from nationalist slander. It's unproductive and against site rules.
- justinmeiners 6y ago
  Europeans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that things they pay a percentage of all income earned, over their entire life, are not free. It's incredible to watch from outside.
  - sushid 6y ago
    CAs tax rate when you factor in federal tax is comparable to the EU and we get none of the benefits.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > CAs tax rate when you factor in federal tax is comparable to the EU Nominal rates might be, but tax burden is not. California tax burden is well under 15% GDP, and federal collections in the state are a tiny bit higher than state tax revenues, together still under 30% tax burden. EU overall tax burden is over 40% of GDP.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        How do these numbers look when you count health care/insurance cost for CA instead of only for EU?
        danielheath 6y ago
        Count school fees and student debt too - public schools in most of the EU are good enough that you don’t have to go private the way the US does.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        You don't need to go private in the US, either, that's largely a status display and a mechanism for non-educational social benefits more than an actual educational benefit; like the difference between outcomes in different public schools outcomes, the vast majority of difference between education outcomes in private and public schools is explained by factors outside of the school attended that determine educational outcomes (socioeconomic status, parental educational attainment, engaged parenting, etc.)
golemiprague 6y ago
It may be a good investment for the people who actually studying a profession, people who will utilise the knowledge to create new business and jobs or are there to advance the academic knowledge. But many are just doing it for the "certificate" of finishing some academic studies in order to get a secretarial job in a corporate or governmental body which they could have done with a one month internship. This is not fair for the tax payers which actually finance a very expensive and long selection scheme for useless HR departments. Armies which usually recruit directly from high school are classifying employees much more efficiently and quickly and teach them the job much faster. So without getting into the argument of what is best, private based or government based education, this type of problem exists now in most countries but nobody wants to talk about it because it is marked as sexist since it affects mainly women who seems to mostly occupy those type of studies and jobs.
JamesBarney 6y ago
> Also, I would like to notice, that for European tax-payers it is an investment. That money spend in education brings back way more money that what the original cost was. So, to just talk about "cost" misses the point. How do they know this is the case at the margin? The analyses I've seen of this is usually [benefits of education] = [# of college grads] * ([avg. college grad salary] -[avg highschool grad salary]) Which has two large fundamental issues. One that college grads are differently from highschool grads in ways besides education, and probably the people most likely to go to college are the ones that would benefit from it the most. Not to mention several posts have talked about how much better educated Europeans are despite the U.S. spending significantly more money on education than any large European country.
- UrsaMedius 6y ago
  The Swedish report "Education and Economic Development - What does empirical research show about casual inter-relationships?" https://www.regeringen.se/rapporter/2005/12/ess-20054/ https://www.regeringen.se/rapporter/2005/12/ess-20054/ asks a similar question and starts its conclusions as follows: "Our results are potentially contradictory. On the one hand, we have shown that the best studies which used variations in education between countries and regions – here we consider recent studies to be more reliable – indicate that there are no strong external effects from education. On the other hand, we have pointed out that there is strong evidence that education leads to improved health and life expectancy, politically more active citizens, lower crime and possibly that the children of educated persons become more productive. One explanation for these seemingly contradictory results may be that the favourable effects of education are not sufficiently strong to have an impact on economic development. It is also possible that the traditional measure of GDP is too narrow (and perhaps insufficiently stable) to capture the favourable effects."
dnautics 6y ago
> That is a supposition that proves to be false. To date, that may be true. But give it a few decades. With the GI bill and the immediate post-war boom the US is arguably ahead of Europe in terms of the "college access for all" mindset, and cost of college only really became near the turn of the millenium (note that college debt is a "millenial" issue) and unbearable around 2005-2010 or so; so US colleges have had a bit more time to hone the fine art of rent-seeking.
AdrianB1 6y ago
> To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that. There is a major flaw in this argument: mixing incentive with potential. Yes, governments have the potential to be more efficient due to scale, but there is no incentive to do it. Smaller for profit institutions don't have the economy of scale, but have the incentive to be very efficient. In the end, private institutions need to be extremely efficient to compete with the free state colleges in Europe, while free state colleges have zero motivation to improve and compete, their money is a given.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  > while free state colleges have zero motivation to improve and compete Couldn't this argument be extended also to primary schools? Shouldn't they too be profit-maximizing businesses? Or are they already?
- Kbelicius 6y ago
  This would be a valid argument if the only incentive for human action was money. Since we know that to be false makes your argument invalid.
DINKDINK 6y ago
>To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that. An institution whose survival depends on profits is incentivized to...reduce costs, not increase them. All profits are, are the difference between what is consumed and what is produced. Either your argument is: institutions who produce more than they consume are bad or a service provider ("centralized state education") can be granted a monopoly to the service and will, more efficiently, produce the service. Typically monopolies charge monopoly prices (bad for everyone except the monopolist), if the granted monopoly has its prices legislated to address these concerns (the case in Europe), it must sacrifice either on {cost, quality, quantity, quickness of delivery} of the product. If you really do think that monopolized industries outperform markets with "wasteful profits" you might study the history of the CCCP and democratic welfare states. The market manipulation that started in US education is a result of price fixing -- the price of education is a molested price: service purchasers don't select on electing a provider based on cost because that market price has been pushed up by government-secured debt to which a party cannot default on (otherwise know as selling yourself into slavery). Since producers have less competition on price, they compete on quality, quantity, and quickness. It's the same issue that resulted in the FAA price-setting airline tickets - airlines couldn't compete on cost so they had an ever increase set of luxury options to attract customers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation#Civil_Aeronautics_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation#Civil_Aer... https://fee.org/articles/the-effects-of-airline-regulation/ https://fee.org/articles/the-effects-of-airline-regulation/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

twic 6y ago

Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JamesBarney 6y ago
Americans are over 300 million people, and like Europe we are not homogenous. And many Americans believe European healthcare, education, and infrastructure are far superior to the U.S. The problem is that despite Europe being far more efficient at health, education, and infrastructure spending it also has a wide range of policies. So it's difficult to determine which policies are driving the increase in efficiency and which aren't.
- coredog64 6y ago
  There’s no such thing as “European healthcare”. European countries (and I’m going to ignore Brexit and include the UK) approach provision of healthcare in a unique way. For example, the UK has the NHS, Switzerland has insurance mandates, and France has strict regulation of private insurance companies.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    Yeah this was my point.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Yet all of Europe has one thing in common: people don't go bankrupt over surgeries because 99.99% of people have an insurance.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  What does homogeneity have to do with anything?
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    >Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside. Treats Americans like they all have the same beliefs, i.e. homogenous.
seibelj 6y ago
Europeans are utterly unable to create new global enterprises at the rate of America and China, apart from a few odd balls like Spotify. Different places optimize for different things, for better and worse.
- plafl 6y ago
  Europe is a collection of small countries. It's not coincidence that the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, is the most populated country. And since this is going quite off topic here is some wild idea: let's keep just a fraction of the current universities, like say 5 or 10%, force talent in Europe to concentrate in a few places, force mixing across nations. Actually this is already encouraged somehow but let's be more brutal. Just thinking out loud maybe an stupid idea.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Whose fault is it that Europe has many small countries instead of being dominated by Germany the? If the EU hadn't stopped its continent-scale genocidal domination, it could be on par with USA and China for linguiatic and economic unity.
- vkou 6y ago
  > Europeans are utterly unable to create new global enterprises at the rate of America and China, Having a homogeneous, single-language, single market of 350 million, and 1.4 billion people, respectively, is an enormous competitive advantage that Europe cannot replicate, without doing away with sovereignty and brainwashing ~80% of its population. And despite all that, the quality of life of the average European is pretty good.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    Counterpoint - Israel. Tiny country, unique language, way more success in tech and VC per capita than Europe.
    - vkou 6y ago
booboolayla 6y ago
Because they have European immigrants (like me) who are more than willing to explain to Americans what exactly leftist ideas mean in practice, and how much of it is false advertising. Stop pretending health care is better in Europe!
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
Please refrain from nationalist slander. It's unproductive and against site rules.
justinmeiners 6y ago
Europeans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that things they pay a percentage of all income earned, over their entire life, are not free. It's incredible to watch from outside.
- sushid 6y ago
  CAs tax rate when you factor in federal tax is comparable to the EU and we get none of the benefits.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > CAs tax rate when you factor in federal tax is comparable to the EU Nominal rates might be, but tax burden is not. California tax burden is well under 15% GDP, and federal collections in the state are a tiny bit higher than state tax revenues, together still under 30% tax burden. EU overall tax burden is over 40% of GDP.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      How do these numbers look when you count health care/insurance cost for CA instead of only for EU?
      - danielheath 6y ago
        Count school fees and student debt too - public schools in most of the EU are good enough that you don’t have to go private the way the US does.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        You don't need to go private in the US, either, that's largely a status display and a mechanism for non-educational social benefits more than an actual educational benefit; like the difference between outcomes in different public schools outcomes, the vast majority of difference between education outcomes in private and public schools is explained by factors outside of the school attended that determine educational outcomes (socioeconomic status, parental educational attainment, engaged parenting, etc.)

golemiprague 6y ago

It may be a good investment for the people who actually studying a profession, people who will utilise the knowledge to create new business and jobs or are there to advance the academic knowledge. But many are just doing it for the "certificate" of finishing some academic studies in order to get a secretarial job in a corporate or governmental body which they could have done with a one month internship. This is not fair for the tax payers which actually finance a very expensive and long selection scheme for useless HR departments. Armies which usually recruit directly from high school are classifying employees much more efficiently and quickly and teach them the job much faster. So without getting into the argument of what is best, private based or government based education, this type of problem exists now in most countries but nobody wants to talk about it because it is marked as sexist since it affects mainly women who seems to mostly occupy those type of studies and jobs.

JamesBarney 6y ago

> Also, I would like to notice, that for European tax-payers it is an investment. That money spend in education brings back way more money that what the original cost was. So, to just talk about "cost" misses the point. How do they know this is the case at the margin? The analyses I've seen of this is usually [benefits of education] = [# of college grads] * ([avg. college grad salary] -[avg highschool grad salary]) Which has two large fundamental issues. One that college grads are differently from highschool grads in ways besides education, and probably the people most likely to go to college are the ones that would benefit from it the most. Not to mention several posts have talked about how much better educated Europeans are despite the U.S. spending significantly more money on education than any large European country.

UrsaMedius 6y ago
The Swedish report "Education and Economic Development - What does empirical research show about casual inter-relationships?" https://www.regeringen.se/rapporter/2005/12/ess-20054/ https://www.regeringen.se/rapporter/2005/12/ess-20054/ asks a similar question and starts its conclusions as follows: "Our results are potentially contradictory. On the one hand, we have shown that the best studies which used variations in education between countries and regions – here we consider recent studies to be more reliable – indicate that there are no strong external effects from education. On the other hand, we have pointed out that there is strong evidence that education leads to improved health and life expectancy, politically more active citizens, lower crime and possibly that the children of educated persons become more productive. One explanation for these seemingly contradictory results may be that the favourable effects of education are not sufficiently strong to have an impact on economic development. It is also possible that the traditional measure of GDP is too narrow (and perhaps insufficiently stable) to capture the favourable effects."

dnautics 6y ago

> That is a supposition that proves to be false. To date, that may be true. But give it a few decades. With the GI bill and the immediate post-war boom the US is arguably ahead of Europe in terms of the "college access for all" mindset, and cost of college only really became near the turn of the millenium (note that college debt is a "millenial" issue) and unbearable around 2005-2010 or so; so US colleges have had a bit more time to hone the fine art of rent-seeking.

AdrianB1 6y ago

> To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that. There is a major flaw in this argument: mixing incentive with potential. Yes, governments have the potential to be more efficient due to scale, but there is no incentive to do it. Smaller for profit institutions don't have the economy of scale, but have the incentive to be very efficient. In the end, private institutions need to be extremely efficient to compete with the free state colleges in Europe, while free state colleges have zero motivation to improve and compete, their money is a given.

galaxyLogic 6y ago
> while free state colleges have zero motivation to improve and compete Couldn't this argument be extended also to primary schools? Shouldn't they too be profit-maximizing businesses? Or are they already?
Kbelicius 6y ago
This would be a valid argument if the only incentive for human action was money. Since we know that to be false makes your argument invalid.

DINKDINK 6y ago

>To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that. An institution whose survival depends on profits is incentivized to...reduce costs, not increase them. All profits are, are the difference between what is consumed and what is produced. Either your argument is: institutions who produce more than they consume are bad or a service provider ("centralized state education") can be granted a monopoly to the service and will, more efficiently, produce the service. Typically monopolies charge monopoly prices (bad for everyone except the monopolist), if the granted monopoly has its prices legislated to address these concerns (the case in Europe), it must sacrifice either on {cost, quality, quantity, quickness of delivery} of the product. If you really do think that monopolized industries outperform markets with "wasteful profits" you might study the history of the CCCP and democratic welfare states. The market manipulation that started in US education is a result of price fixing -- the price of education is a molested price: service purchasers don't select on electing a provider based on cost because that market price has been pushed up by government-secured debt to which a party cannot default on (otherwise know as selling yourself into slavery). Since producers have less competition on price, they compete on quality, quantity, and quickness. It's the same issue that resulted in the FAA price-setting airline tickets - airlines couldn't compete on cost so they had an ever increase set of luxury options to attract customers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation#Civil_Aeronautics_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation#Civil_Aer... https://fee.org/articles/the-effects-of-airline-regulation/ https://fee.org/articles/the-effects-of-airline-regulation/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]