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The problem is the word "capitalism" - it implies just for-profit enterprises. But capitalism is really just how Marx branded "free enterprise." > Therefore if

The problem is the word "capitalism" - it implies just for-profit enterprises. But capitalism is really just how Marx branded "free enterprise." > Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education, national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism. Capitalism - free enterprise - handles all of those pretty well except national defense and maybe policing. Charities are part of capitalism. Infrastructure's not so bad for government to build. In wealthy countries, charities vastly outperform government in alms and welfare because it doesn't create power structures that people try to hijack and lobby. As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. Look at the standard American middle school and high school curriculum - very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense. They teach algebra fairly well in American high school and almost nothing else. I can't believe that any educator would be in favor of government-run education: It sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice.

btilly 17y ago
Please do not confuse efficiency of directing money with being able to realistically address the problem. I grant that well-run charities are much more efficient than government. However not nearly enough money is voluntarily donated to charity to realistically address the problems that exist. Based on http://www.givingusa.org/press_releases/releases/20080622.htm http://www.givingusa.org/press_releases/releases/20080622.ht... we collectively donate about $300 billion per year. That's about $1000 per year per person. But to bring up one example, about 1% of the population gets schizophrenia, and about a third of those we do not have effective treatment for. In a country with 300 million people that's about a million people with an untreatable mental illness that is very expensive to deal with. At a minimum that would take 10-20% of the total available for charity for a cause most people haven't even heard of. Once you take out all of the money donated to causes donators care about - such as museums, cancer research, third world poverty, and a million splinter causes (such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation), there simply isn't enough left to address a lot of very real and expensive needs. Moving on let's look at your claims about education. I won't disagree with any of your criticisms. I've said the same and worse before. However I'm aware of one fact that you are probably not. Which is that, after controlling for parent's socioeconomic status, students who go to public schools in the USA do better on tests measuring their academic performance than students who go to private schools. (If you don't control for the large correlation with parent's socioeconomic status, public schools come out worse.) So as bad as the public option is, the private one seems to be worse! Not to mention that the big problem the public option solves is delivering education to those who are poor enough to not afford it for themselves. Not doing that would limit how much of an educated workforce was available in the future, to the detriment of everyone. But why does private education deliver a worse product? Part of the problem is that parents aren't as good of judges of the quality of their children's education as they think they are. So private schools are incented to do things that make parents think they are doing a good job at the cost of actually doing a good job. Incidentally education isn't the greatest illustration of the problem. Public health provides much better ones. For instance patrons of a restaurant are not in a position to judge whether sanitary procedures are being followed in the kitchen. Residents are unable to judge how good the water they receive is. Which is why public health was one of the first areas where economists came to understand why the invisible hand of the market didn't do a good job of provisioning the need.
radu_floricica 17y ago
> very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense. That's the best description of what's wrong with education I heard in a loong time. Just, congratulations.
- krschultz 17y ago
  Sounds like you went to a bad public school. Except for personal finance my high school hit those well. I've always thought if we can have drivers ed and health in school we should have a personal finance class though.
jaytee_clone 17y ago
As side from definition, I think of capitalism as an algorithm with no inherent moral obligation. It's neither good or evil. Thus it's critical to apply capitalism only where it fits. When a business's profit is proportional to the well being of the mass, then capitalism is great. Problem arise when profit is proportional the degradation of the public health, the number of wars being waged, and the amount of people being imprisoned. Then of course we have to "regulate" it. Some may say capitalism is "in-efficient" when it's regulated. I completely agree, in the sense that any algorithm is in-efficient when there is more over heard. It may be easier to think of the task of improving the state of the world as a global optimization problem in computation. Experienced computer scientists will tell you that the hardest part of an optimization problem is defining exactly what is to be optimized - Think fitness measure in a genetic algorithm. This make sense. We can make an algorithm as efficient as possible, but if we are optimizing the wrong thing then all the work are pointless. As complex as the world is, I can't bring myself to believe that profit alone is enough as the fitness measure. That's why people have proposed adding other measures such as carbon emission credit to be traded in a capitalistic algorithm. (Maybe we should even add more measures such as health and education credit.) Some may call this "regulating" capitalism. I personally think it's just redefining the fitness function, which is a very sensible thing to do in terms of computation.
- krschultz 17y ago
  I have been explaining the "capitalism is only efficient if the incentives are aligned with what is best for society" concept a lot lately in the healthcare debate. If the industry got paid for making people healthier, we would be much healthier. They are currently paid for treatments performed, based on price. Thus they optimize for lots of expensive treatments. There is a correlation between lots of expensive treatments and health, but not a direct one. The only direct result is higher spending on health care. If we paid for outcome, healthcare would undoubtedly be cheaper, and probably better as well.
  - jaytee_clone 17y ago
    I can't agree with you more. How can we implement such an incentive alignment? It's quite hard. Yes, true health care should be preventive, but this also means money is paid before any health problem occurs. Yet the general public are reactionary consumers. Why would they pay when they are still healthy? Perhaps you have a better suggestion.
mkn 17y ago
As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice. What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly not the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education. The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones? The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes. Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.
- barry-cotter 17y ago
  The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily imagine a smaller bureaucracy. If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents. Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the bigger a school district becomes. Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think 10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private schools, and second would be to think about moving.

btilly 17y ago

Please do not confuse efficiency of directing money with being able to realistically address the problem. I grant that well-run charities are much more efficient than government. However not nearly enough money is voluntarily donated to charity to realistically address the problems that exist. Based on http://www.givingusa.org/press_releases/releases/20080622.htm http://www.givingusa.org/press_releases/releases/20080622.ht... we collectively donate about $300 billion per year. That's about $1000 per year per person. But to bring up one example, about 1% of the population gets schizophrenia, and about a third of those we do not have effective treatment for. In a country with 300 million people that's about a million people with an untreatable mental illness that is very expensive to deal with. At a minimum that would take 10-20% of the total available for charity for a cause most people haven't even heard of. Once you take out all of the money donated to causes donators care about - such as museums, cancer research, third world poverty, and a million splinter causes (such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation), there simply isn't enough left to address a lot of very real and expensive needs. Moving on let's look at your claims about education. I won't disagree with any of your criticisms. I've said the same and worse before. However I'm aware of one fact that you are probably not. Which is that, after controlling for parent's socioeconomic status, students who go to public schools in the USA do better on tests measuring their academic performance than students who go to private schools. (If you don't control for the large correlation with parent's socioeconomic status, public schools come out worse.) So as bad as the public option is, the private one seems to be worse! Not to mention that the big problem the public option solves is delivering education to those who are poor enough to not afford it for themselves. Not doing that would limit how much of an educated workforce was available in the future, to the detriment of everyone. But why does private education deliver a worse product? Part of the problem is that parents aren't as good of judges of the quality of their children's education as they think they are. So private schools are incented to do things that make parents think they are doing a good job at the cost of actually doing a good job. Incidentally education isn't the greatest illustration of the problem. Public health provides much better ones. For instance patrons of a restaurant are not in a position to judge whether sanitary procedures are being followed in the kitchen. Residents are unable to judge how good the water they receive is. Which is why public health was one of the first areas where economists came to understand why the invisible hand of the market didn't do a good job of provisioning the need.

radu_floricica 17y ago

> very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense. That's the best description of what's wrong with education I heard in a loong time. Just, congratulations.

krschultz 17y ago
Sounds like you went to a bad public school. Except for personal finance my high school hit those well. I've always thought if we can have drivers ed and health in school we should have a personal finance class though.

jaytee_clone 17y ago

As side from definition, I think of capitalism as an algorithm with no inherent moral obligation. It's neither good or evil. Thus it's critical to apply capitalism only where it fits. When a business's profit is proportional to the well being of the mass, then capitalism is great. Problem arise when profit is proportional the degradation of the public health, the number of wars being waged, and the amount of people being imprisoned. Then of course we have to "regulate" it. Some may say capitalism is "in-efficient" when it's regulated. I completely agree, in the sense that any algorithm is in-efficient when there is more over heard. It may be easier to think of the task of improving the state of the world as a global optimization problem in computation. Experienced computer scientists will tell you that the hardest part of an optimization problem is defining exactly what is to be optimized - Think fitness measure in a genetic algorithm. This make sense. We can make an algorithm as efficient as possible, but if we are optimizing the wrong thing then all the work are pointless. As complex as the world is, I can't bring myself to believe that profit alone is enough as the fitness measure. That's why people have proposed adding other measures such as carbon emission credit to be traded in a capitalistic algorithm. (Maybe we should even add more measures such as health and education credit.) Some may call this "regulating" capitalism. I personally think it's just redefining the fitness function, which is a very sensible thing to do in terms of computation.

krschultz 17y ago
I have been explaining the "capitalism is only efficient if the incentives are aligned with what is best for society" concept a lot lately in the healthcare debate. If the industry got paid for making people healthier, we would be much healthier. They are currently paid for treatments performed, based on price. Thus they optimize for lots of expensive treatments. There is a correlation between lots of expensive treatments and health, but not a direct one. The only direct result is higher spending on health care. If we paid for outcome, healthcare would undoubtedly be cheaper, and probably better as well.
- jaytee_clone 17y ago
  I can't agree with you more. How can we implement such an incentive alignment? It's quite hard. Yes, true health care should be preventive, but this also means money is paid before any health problem occurs. Yet the general public are reactionary consumers. Why would they pay when they are still healthy? Perhaps you have a better suggestion.

mkn 17y ago

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice. What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly not the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education. The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones? The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes. Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.

barry-cotter 17y ago
The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily imagine a smaller bureaucracy. If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents. Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the bigger a school district becomes. Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think 10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private schools, and second would be to think about moving.