7 ms·

Policy for Growth and Innovation

54 points by gatsby 12y ago

solve 12y ago
Student loans! Nothing is more profoundly affecting young American's ability to innovate after they've left school, than the growing, crushing debt from student loans. It's the primary reason that I've moved out of the US for the last several years. I didn't want to waste all of my 20's and 30's, never being able to take sufficient time off to build the innovation that I want to exist. On the flip side, not having this debt while working in the US is a huge relative advantage for recently-immigrated foreigners.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Not having that debt should give foreigners a huge advantage whether or not they come to the US, but that does not seem to be the case.
  - solve 12y ago
    * All else being equal. As in, explaining to people here why e.g. a $70,000 / yr salary in the US would be much more attractive to them than it would be to me, with >$100,000 in high interest student loans. And all often is nearly equal in the US - as long as you speak English and can get the visa without the company's help.
hugs 12y ago
I'm glad he specifically mentioned the cost of housing. This is the main reason I've moved away from the Bay Area and currently live in Chicago (Oak Park, just west of the city). ($300-400K gets you a nice 3BR/2Bath single-family detached house with a yard near good schools near public transportation and 10 miles from downtown.)
pen2l 12y ago
Good essay, but one small nitpick: The problems with education are well-documented—teachers make far too little, it’s too difficult to fire bad teachers, some cultures don’t value education, etc. Many of these are easy to fix—pay teachers a lot more in exchange for a change in the tenure rules, for example—and some issues (like cultural ones) are probably going to be very difficult to fix. As another HN'er has pointed out, teacher pay or funding is absolutely not the issue. Per rayiner: Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-... More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html?m=1 http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc. > Sometimes the government people ask “Would you ever move YC out of the US?” with nervous laughter? I really like it here and I sure hope we don’t, but never say never. Hah. :) No you won't. Or, not that you won't, rather, it seems beneath you guys to say something like this. Of course you would, and should move out of the US if it proves to be a profitable decision, it just seems a little underhanded to use it as a political bargaining tool to get your aims. But I understand now that this is how the game works, so I guess I'm undecided about how I feel about this.
- sudioStudio64 12y ago
  You are right. If impoverished areas aren't counted the US actually ranks quite high in education compared to other countries. Its inequality that stems from the historical precedents you mention that determine outcomes.
  - hellbannotifier 12y ago
    Looks like you've been hellbanned. Replying here because it's the last comment of yours with a serviceable reply link.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. The inner city is definitely a problem, especially when concerns about crime and safety get in the way of basic education. But perhaps the worst off, regardless of race, are people who live out in the country, probably because they are consistently the most impoverished people in the nation. I see all kinds of pilot programs in D.C., NYC, and so on. I don't generally see them in Winona, Mississippi. And it's universally agreed that small town Mississippi is a rough place to get an education. As for data, go look at the ranking of states' education programs: http://www.alec.org/publications/report-card-on-american-education/ http://www.alec.org/publications/report-card-on-american-edu... ...now compare that list against a population density map of the U.S. I say all that to say that the conversation here and elsewhere really miss the mark for a huge chunk of struggling Americans. Cheaper housing is great, sure. But cheap housing isn't the problem for people in rural areas. Access to affordable broadband internet sure is, though.
- tzs 12y ago
  From the Judge Posner article you linked to: Analysis of the PISA results has revealed some other interesting facts. One is that higher teacher salaries dominate small class size as a factor in high PISA scores. This is a reassuring finding because it suggests that secondary school education can be improved at no net increase in cost, since higher teacher salaries are offset by larger classes—if class size is raised in proportion to increases in teacher salaries, there is no net increase in the school’s cost, and there should actually be a reduction in cost in the long term because a reduction in the number of classrooms reduces the size and therefore cost of a school even if each classroom is larger That seems to indicate that paying teachers more does help.
justizin 12y ago
I've really liked a lot of what I've read from Sam since he has taken the reigns, but I really don't like the jingoism in the immigration language. The United States needs to stop trying to be "the greatest nation in the world", and we need to participate in a globally and locally aware economy. I'm certainly not against all immigration, but the problem is, an essay like this is better used to support that argument than to make any substantive change to education. I started training for my craft at 12 years old, under the direction of my grandfather, who was the Director of Engineering at one of the largest research institutions in the world. Having all that going for me, he still used the fact that my poor, stupid parents had to ask him for help to cover the cost of raising me to discourage me from developing the skills that actually made me employable - he was adamant that I become Microsoft certified instead of learning Linux. A bit of a tangent intended to illustrate the american exceptionalism, the greatest generation. This old fart wanted me to work with Windows, and work for the NSA, at 15. For friendship, mentorship and often employment, foreigners were my greatest resource, in their home lands, over The Internet. Why do all the "smartest" and "best" need to live here, on land that's already stolen? It's been a great struggle over the past 21 years to continue educating myself and to find opportunities to cover my living costs that wouldn't forcibly detract from what I would learn. I lived in SF for nearly ten years under the poverty line, sometimes working for entrepreneurs for under minimum wage. People in the Bay Area tend to stop looking for workers in the US when they reach Fremont, sometimes when they reach the end of their own driveway.
- ojbyrne 12y ago
  s/reigns/reins/
  - justizin 12y ago
    Totes respect and thank you for your poignant correction. [EDIT: this has to be the randomest rant in response to a grammar correction of all time, but I was surprised to find no ideological responses at all, and I wanted to pontificate ;d] I read at college level in elementary, but I think it's easy to see how that might also lead to having some softened edges, because education was rarely available to me when it was relevant. I assume this to be true of most people, I think there is one thing people resent about tech that is kind of a revenge of the nerds thing, and part of that to me is like, look, even colleges didn't have room for a lot of the nerds. Where the hell do you go if you are a poor, chronic nerd who can't get into college? Obviously, I assume my experience with this to be acute compared to a similarly talented person who is not white. There are a lot of smart people in the USA. I know it is important for us to be a place where some smart people who would be oppressed to migrate, as we are a nation of immigrants. I adamantly think we should look to the children of immigrants who pick food, clean homes, offload ships, plumb toilets, fix elevators, etc.. before we look to foreign adults. I strongly feel the USA economy will be the most healthy in a world where people in other parts of the world have a healthy local economy and a proportionate ability to ours to participate in the global economy. I think global information economy makes more sense than global economy which tranfers things like food between continents, while creating harmful pollution. If there is American Exceptionalism, I think it should make what is supposed to be right about the west present everywhere, without military force, but instead by empowering the working class to become knowledge workers. And we should stop absorbing into western culture what is inherent to fascism.
sudioStudio64 12y ago
Business people often mistake their success in one area as a validation of all their ideas. There is a kind of, and I really don't mean to sound condescending or accusatory, naïve optimism about the motives of other members of their class. Getting rid of regulations on the production of medicine, but focusing on regulating AI...a subject which has recently been in vogue among the digerati...kind of illustrates how radically divergent the priorities of that political cohort are from the middle class.
Zikes 12y ago
I find it odd that this plan for "fixing innovation" doesn't mention anything about patent reform.
gautambay 12y ago
> It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world. As the internet increases parity in education globally, immigration reform will become even more important for the US to retain its edge, as people born outside the US will comprise a larger percentage of the world's best entrepreneurs. As an immigrant trying to fix education, #1 (fix education) and #3 (education reform) ring especially true for me, but it's also fascinating to think how closely-tied the two are.
fivedogit 12y ago
Here we go again on the immigration thing. Very disappointing. It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. That benefits businesses and, in turn, VCs. Two things, specifically, irritate me about Paul's and Sam's argument in favor of immigration reform. 1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" My (and others') opposition to immigration reform is based on a desire to stop the ever-progressing tilt of power and leverage towards businesses and away from labor. To suggest that we are scared of competition (or worse) is offensive. 2. The idea that there aren't enough engineers to go around is simply not true. I know several capable engineers (myself included) who have struggled to find work because companies (a) want you in a tech hub already (b) seem unwilling to train someone from 90% to 100% to do the job and (c) want to pay as little as possible. It feels lazy. "We really don't want to relocate and train folks, so let's just change the immigration laws."
- UK-AL 12y ago
  I don't mind immigration if its universal for every profession, lawyers, accountants, doctors, vcs, accelerators, financial people etc etc Most immigration reformers only want very specific immigration for their specific industry. Which kind of highlights whats its really about, AKA Price of labour. That i don't agree with. If it increases supply universally, that's good because income is relative. If it increases supply to screw a specific group, then no. I also think in the end, they will bite themselves in the butt. Software development will end being seen as a mediocre commodity job, anyone decent will move into other professions.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  It's been frustrating to see this cross-talk between the two "camps" on the immigration issue. You're right, the most common criticism of PG's (and now Sam's) stance on immigration reform has been that it would be used to depress domestic wages for software engineers, and they keep not addressing that directly, which makes it easy for critics to continue beating that particular drum. (Some other people, including dang at the top comment in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572, have rebutted that aspect of the call for immigration reform.) And perception is part of the problem too. On one side, you have some VC and incubator people saying there just isn't enough talent domestically, and on the other, you have people who say they are talented and looking for work and not getting anywhere. We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. PG's essay really didn't help matters; there needs to be something written with some specific ideas, some on-the-record statements from hot companies that can't find talent, and a direct response to the critics on the wage issue, at the least. Something that would meet the desired standards for long-form content submitted to HN if it didn't come with a recognizable byline. I'm still on the fence on this thing. California is the leading exporter of agriculture in the U.S. in part because of a huge, cheap immigrant labor force. That helps to keep the cost of food low, which benefits a lot of people and benefits California quite a lot overall. It also keeps the cost of agricultural labor low. It's pretty unlikely that that is the sort of immigration that PG and others are agitating for, but without any specifics, that's only an assumption.
nhaehnle 12y ago
> Very low growth and a democracy are a very bad combination. Why? It would be interesting to see a justification for this. Very low growth and capitalism are a problematic combination if you believe Piketty, in the sense that the combination can become poisonous for democracy and many other values of the enlightenment.[0] But I don't see how democracy is necessarily incompatible with very low growth (or even a shrinking economy). Note that I still believe growth is a good thing regardless of this (unlike some people especially from an environmentalist bent), but it irks me when statements like this are thrown around with an unjustified air of authority. Other than that, sama really misses the elephant in the room, which is plain old macroeconomics. This is more of a problem in Europe than in the US, but bad macroeconomic beliefs are pretty pervasive within the political elite, to the point where the same person will wring their hands asking for how to enable growth, but refuse to listen to what mainstream academic economists are saying (let alone heterodox academic economists). [0] With the typical rate of growth below the typical rate of return on capital, society necessarily becomes more divided by wealth and poverty.
- malisper 12y ago
  He linked to another essay of his: http://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government http://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government
- nostromo 12y ago
  Democracies generally don't live within their means. That's because elected officials know that voters demand more services than they're willing to pay for. Democracies have gotten away with this by inflating past debts away (in effect, paying for debt via growth). But in a low-growth world, many more western democracies are going to end up like Greece. http://www.economist.com/node/21561932 http://www.economist.com/node/21561932
  - nhaehnle 12y ago
    Yes, that seems to be where sama is coming from. On the other hand, I suspect that this is again one of those truisms that may not really be true at all. Consider that in Europe (and to a lesser extent also in the US), mainstream academic economists have essentially been begging politicians to spend more, as that is what the macroeconomic models have been advising them to do for the last few years. And yet there has been a lot of austerity. This really clashes with the idea that elected officials simply give in to demands by voters. The story is obviously more nuanced than this simple truism. Add to this that it is unclear what "living within their means" even means. If you look at it in terms of physical goods and services available, then of course they are living within their means, because living beyond means at the level of a society is physically impossible. You could then clarify your definition to encompass something like "being on a sustainable path into the future", but again, if you evaluate that in terms of physical reality a fair evaluation is probably that democratic states are on average better at preserving resources etc. than states with other forms of government. The cynic in me would say that the whole "democracy and low growth don't go together" is really code for "democracy and low growth and the kind of unequal society I like don't go together",[0] because of course democratic voting outcomes will demand fairness in the sense that if a belt-tightening across society is necessary, the belts of those at the top have to be tightened the most. So: democracy, low growth, unequal society: pick any two out of three, but you can't have all three at once. [0] Though I assume most people talking about these issue are not consciously aware that there even is a distinction.
ap22213 12y ago
Regarding education, do the people who need it the most (underutilized adult workers) clearly understand how to pursue it? Do they understand the costs, benefits, risks, and rewards? I doubt it. Policies should emphasize the of dissemination information that ties education to opportunity. That way people can make informed decisions (e.g. 'if I do these things, spend this much money, spend this much time, then I can expect to make this much money, in these metro areas'). Maybe education is partly a design problem? What if education was just easier to plan for, obtain, validate, and apply?
ojbyrne 12y ago
Feeling some dissonance: "Public companies end up with a bunch of short-term stockholders who simultaneously criticize you for missing earnings by a penny this quarter and not making enough long-term investments." "Target a real GDP growth rate. You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it." I can't fully express what I dislike about these two statements, they just seem conflicting. Perhaps suggesting some of the Tea Party-ish coddling the "job creators" and punishing the "welfare mothers."
- lhc- 12y ago
  Also, reducing entitlement spending but increasing spending on teachers will somehow improve education numbers, even though a large percentage of lowest scoring students are also those who most rely on things like welfare to get by. There's a pretty direct correlation between being poor and doing poorly in schools.
bokonist 12y ago
Sam says "It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world." but he also says, "I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending, actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars in the future." So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you can spend money to improve it. It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there is nothing else I can do. The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes. So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to "max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on? Learning consists of four components: 1) book learning 2) practice 3) mentorship/coaching 4) motivation to do the above 3 things As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself. Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money. Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of "spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than they did in school. So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way. If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the amount of money it spends producing it. It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole. Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it. Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the expense of transitioning to a art based economy. One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years. I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5% transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of the market?
saosebastiao 12y ago
I realize this is an essay, and I realize that it intentionally takes the normative over the positive, but there really needs to be some [citation needed] tags all over the place. There are always some liberties that can be taken when you speak from a position of authority, but this is like listening to a presidential debate. If you are trying to influence the policy and not the election, you need to be able to influence people that can read past your authority and posturing.
vasilipupkin 12y ago
"If I had to take a company public, I’d love to only have my shares priced and traded once every month of quarter." sorry, that's a bit non-sensical. The enormous uncertainty associated with lack of transparent pricing would lower both private and public market equity valuations. We want prices to be as transparent as possible
ecopoesis 12y ago
What an incredibly naive view of the world. As others have pointed out, reducing education to "moar money!" is simplistic. Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? Maybe we should instead focus our efforts on helping the unemployed and underemployed already in the US get training and jobs. Cheaper Bay Area housing only helps people in the Bay Area. There's a whole lot more to the United States. Wouldn't a better policy be to try to make it so businesses in Detroit, or Buffalo or any other dying city can be as successful as those in Silicon Valley? Reducing regulation: the old cry of business owners everywhere. Regulation can be good. Sam uses the example of drug companies, and yes, bringing new drugs to market is expensive. But the consequences of screwing up or literally deadly. See the example of Vioxx. Isn't one of the rallying cry of hackers right now Net Neutrality? How do we think that's going to be accomplished outside of regulation? Isn't the lack of regulation (not calling broadband Title II) what got us into this mess?
- j_baker 12y ago
  > Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? I don't have a source handy, but I believe studies have shown that immigration does indeed help economic growth with the vast majority of that growth benefiting the immigrants themselves.
  - datasage 12y ago
    How much of the economic growth is simply due to adding more participant the the economy vs innovating new markets? When you start normalizing for factors such as inflation and population growth, US economic growth in the past couple of decades ends up being very low.
- ecopoesis 12y ago
  And to not be only critical, here's what my policy for growth and innovation would be: 1) Decrease the income gap between the rich and the poor. This isn't just about raising wages for the poor, but also decreasing wages (via taxes or maybe just straight up regulation). I'm not suggesting that we pay everyone the same: it should still be possible to become rich. But the current difference of ~4000x between a full-time minimum wage job and the top earners is obscene. Decreasing the income of the super rich will not really hurt them, and businesses would be better off reinvesting that money in making improving the business, or the whole country would be better off spending that money on social services. Increasing the wages of the poor and middle classes will help them immensely. Too many people live paycheck to paycheck, where a single illness can destroy their lives by forcing them into payday loans or credit card debt that becomes impossible to get out of. These debts are a drain on the economy, and forces a large portion of the US population into wage-slavery. Our goal should be to have no one living paycheck to paycheck, giving folks the ease of mind and comfort so they have an opportunity to innovate a=instead of just struggling to survive. 2) Increase the social safety net. This includes everything from improving and expanding government sponsored health care, to improving government sponsored retirement, to expanding government cash payments to individuals (either through welfare expansion or some sort of basic income). The theory behind this is that innovating (doing a startup) is giant risk most people aren't willing to take. And unless you're independently wealthy, it's a risk most people shouldn't take. Found a startup, get a cancer: you're bankrupt. Work for a startup that that doesn't have a retirement plan and doesn't pay market wages in hope of the IPO payoff, and they go bust: there goes a big portion of your retirement, hope you like working till you're 80. Increasing the safety net means people will be more willing to take risks, and some of those ricks will pay off, driving innovation and growing the economy.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bokonist 12y ago
"Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth." I'm going to leave aside the issue of high-skilled immigration for moment and talk about Sam's addendum of "immigration more generally." Low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America have not yet shown evidence of assimilating into the American mainstream. Income and educational attainment is still much lower, the communities are still segregated, etc. So there are two possibilities: Possibility 1) It will be just a matter of time before they assimilate, just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate. Possibility 2) For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult. It is even more so when there is a fluid border with Mexico, and the U.S. no longer does the same sort of cultural imperialism it did in the early 1900's in order to assimilate immigrants. Thus long term, assimilation will not occur. Long term, the U.S. will end up looking a lot like Brazil, with a white overclass, a brown helot class, and a black underclass. Technology growth will slow as it becomes low status for the educated white overclass to do real work. Political corruption will grow as voters will vote as tribal blocks, and votes are determined by buying the votes, rather than making good policies for the nation. I don't want to get into an argument about whether 1) or 2) is more likely. But I will argue that there is at least a 5% chance that 2) is true. If 2) is true, it would fundamentally change the character of the U.S. in a very negative way. If we slow down immigration, and 1) turns out to be right, then we can always let more immigrants in later. If we accelerate immigration, and 2) turns out to be true, it cannot be undone. Not ever. Thus even if there is a 5% chance that 2) is right, it makes sense to slow down third-world immigration, until we can prove that assimilation will occur.
- pen2l 12y ago
  You bring up good points -- but reading that quote again, > "Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth." That's not justice. Sam complains about discriminating on country of birth, but yet he's discriminating on class/merit/competency. If we have The VC's way of doing things, we're not going to increase immigration for people who really fairly deserve to be here -- the gays getting prosecuted in Uganda, the atheists fighting for life in Saudia Arabia, you're advocating getting folks here who are most likely doing well in their home places. Let me tell you, the rockstar engineers in India, China, etc. are usually from the upper classes in India, China, etc., if they don't come here, I assure you they will be able to find nice-paying jobs there and remain in the upper class tier.
Alex3917 12y ago
> Fix education. - The disparities in education levels in the US are primarily a product of parenting styles, not the school system. Having a better school system would obviously be good, but it's probably not possible to improve our school system enough to overcome the contribution (or lack thereof) from parents. - We currently have a teacher retention problem, which may be more important than the problem of not being able to fire bad teachers with tenure. Roughly 50% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, and that's after investing a substantial amount of time and money to get the relevant masters degree and certifications. While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons. So any system that makes it easy to fire bad teachers may well end up creating a system with a higher ratio of bad teachers to good teachers. I agree that the root of most of America's problems revolve around education, but spending more money on education isn't going to fix (or even ameliorate) our problems unless it is deployed very judiciously. (And it may well be possible to improve the school system by spending less money than we spend currently.)
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > We currently have a teacher retention problem But we don't have a lack of teachers. Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working conditions? > While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons. That's true of any job, though. What makes the teaching profession special in this regard?
  - Alex3917 12y ago
    > Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working conditions? Absolutely. > That's true of any job, though. Not really. In most jobs you can get fired due to internal company politics. But there aren't a lot of jobs where the general public can force your boss to fire you for, say, being insufficiently racist.
api 12y ago
What I keep saying about SF's housing crisis is that it's this: "Economic growth, affordable housing, NIMBYism, pick two." The Bay has picked the first and the last. I also get the sense -- though I don't live there -- that the people protesting the explosion of rents and house prices are the same people who insist that nothing too tall or big be built and that every new construction be subjected to a whole slew of restrictions around how "green" it is, how it will "impact the local community," etc. While these concepts aren't bad in and of themselves, when applied at the civic scale in this way they typically just provide opportunities for obstructionists who want to keep prices high. So in the end it ends up being a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance -- in this case greens and preservationists with slumlords and banks working hand in hand to keep rents and costs high. Activists of virtually every political persuasion tend to be horribly naive about the ways their interests and concerns can be twisted to serve agendas they may not otherwise support.
bokonist 12y ago
Question for Sam about the issue of high-skill immigration: Does YC have any sort of tracking of the number of engineers blocked from going to YC companies because they could not get a Visa? Could Sam write an essay with some anonymized examples of what happens when a skilled worker is prevent from working for a YC company? This kind of first-hand evidence can go a long way toward convincing other people of your point.
bdcs 12y ago
>A third change would be something to incent people to hold shares for long periods of time. One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years. "However most empirical studies find that the relationship between [Financial Transaciton Tax] and short-term price volatility is ambiguous and that "higher transaction costs are associated with more, rather than less, volatility"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effect_on_volatility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effe...
jqm 12y ago
The fairness angle (regarding immigration) is kind of strange. If the country was actually concerned about "fairness" for non-citizens, it would have had a substantially different foreign policy over the last 50 years. "Don't deserve special right because I was born here....". Uh, ya, that is kind of the definition of a citizen of a sovereign country. At least until the emergence of an enlightened global citizenship system (eventually inevitable, and I for one will welcome the day...).
pskittle 12y ago
No offence to sam but how many people who can affect policy changes read his blogs?

54 points by gatsby 12y ago

solve 12y ago

Student loans! Nothing is more profoundly affecting young American's ability to innovate after they've left school, than the growing, crushing debt from student loans. It's the primary reason that I've moved out of the US for the last several years. I didn't want to waste all of my 20's and 30's, never being able to take sufficient time off to build the innovation that I want to exist. On the flip side, not having this debt while working in the US is a huge relative advantage for recently-immigrated foreigners.

happyscrappy 12y ago
Not having that debt should give foreigners a huge advantage whether or not they come to the US, but that does not seem to be the case.
- solve 12y ago
  * All else being equal. As in, explaining to people here why e.g. a $70,000 / yr salary in the US would be much more attractive to them than it would be to me, with >$100,000 in high interest student loans. And all often is nearly equal in the US - as long as you speak English and can get the visa without the company's help.

hugs 12y ago

I'm glad he specifically mentioned the cost of housing. This is the main reason I've moved away from the Bay Area and currently live in Chicago (Oak Park, just west of the city). ($300-400K gets you a nice 3BR/2Bath single-family detached house with a yard near good schools near public transportation and 10 miles from downtown.)

pen2l 12y ago

Good essay, but one small nitpick: The problems with education are well-documented—teachers make far too little, it’s too difficult to fire bad teachers, some cultures don’t value education, etc. Many of these are easy to fix—pay teachers a lot more in exchange for a change in the tenure rules, for example—and some issues (like cultural ones) are probably going to be very difficult to fix. As another HN'er has pointed out, teacher pay or funding is absolutely not the issue. Per rayiner: Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-... More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html?m=1 http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc. > Sometimes the government people ask “Would you ever move YC out of the US?” with nervous laughter? I really like it here and I sure hope we don’t, but never say never. Hah. :) No you won't. Or, not that you won't, rather, it seems beneath you guys to say something like this. Of course you would, and should move out of the US if it proves to be a profitable decision, it just seems a little underhanded to use it as a political bargaining tool to get your aims. But I understand now that this is how the game works, so I guess I'm undecided about how I feel about this.

sudioStudio64 12y ago
You are right. If impoverished areas aren't counted the US actually ranks quite high in education compared to other countries. Its inequality that stems from the historical precedents you mention that determine outcomes.
- hellbannotifier 12y ago
  Looks like you've been hellbanned. Replying here because it's the last comment of yours with a serviceable reply link.
humanrebar 12y ago
> The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. The inner city is definitely a problem, especially when concerns about crime and safety get in the way of basic education. But perhaps the worst off, regardless of race, are people who live out in the country, probably because they are consistently the most impoverished people in the nation. I see all kinds of pilot programs in D.C., NYC, and so on. I don't generally see them in Winona, Mississippi. And it's universally agreed that small town Mississippi is a rough place to get an education. As for data, go look at the ranking of states' education programs: http://www.alec.org/publications/report-card-on-american-education/ http://www.alec.org/publications/report-card-on-american-edu... ...now compare that list against a population density map of the U.S. I say all that to say that the conversation here and elsewhere really miss the mark for a huge chunk of struggling Americans. Cheaper housing is great, sure. But cheap housing isn't the problem for people in rural areas. Access to affordable broadband internet sure is, though.
tzs 12y ago
From the Judge Posner article you linked to: Analysis of the PISA results has revealed some other interesting facts. One is that higher teacher salaries dominate small class size as a factor in high PISA scores. This is a reassuring finding because it suggests that secondary school education can be improved at no net increase in cost, since higher teacher salaries are offset by larger classes—if class size is raised in proportion to increases in teacher salaries, there is no net increase in the school’s cost, and there should actually be a reduction in cost in the long term because a reduction in the number of classrooms reduces the size and therefore cost of a school even if each classroom is larger That seems to indicate that paying teachers more does help.

justizin 12y ago

I've really liked a lot of what I've read from Sam since he has taken the reigns, but I really don't like the jingoism in the immigration language. The United States needs to stop trying to be "the greatest nation in the world", and we need to participate in a globally and locally aware economy. I'm certainly not against all immigration, but the problem is, an essay like this is better used to support that argument than to make any substantive change to education. I started training for my craft at 12 years old, under the direction of my grandfather, who was the Director of Engineering at one of the largest research institutions in the world. Having all that going for me, he still used the fact that my poor, stupid parents had to ask him for help to cover the cost of raising me to discourage me from developing the skills that actually made me employable - he was adamant that I become Microsoft certified instead of learning Linux. A bit of a tangent intended to illustrate the american exceptionalism, the greatest generation. This old fart wanted me to work with Windows, and work for the NSA, at 15. For friendship, mentorship and often employment, foreigners were my greatest resource, in their home lands, over The Internet. Why do all the "smartest" and "best" need to live here, on land that's already stolen? It's been a great struggle over the past 21 years to continue educating myself and to find opportunities to cover my living costs that wouldn't forcibly detract from what I would learn. I lived in SF for nearly ten years under the poverty line, sometimes working for entrepreneurs for under minimum wage. People in the Bay Area tend to stop looking for workers in the US when they reach Fremont, sometimes when they reach the end of their own driveway.

ojbyrne 12y ago
s/reigns/reins/
- justizin 12y ago
  Totes respect and thank you for your poignant correction. [EDIT: this has to be the randomest rant in response to a grammar correction of all time, but I was surprised to find no ideological responses at all, and I wanted to pontificate ;d] I read at college level in elementary, but I think it's easy to see how that might also lead to having some softened edges, because education was rarely available to me when it was relevant. I assume this to be true of most people, I think there is one thing people resent about tech that is kind of a revenge of the nerds thing, and part of that to me is like, look, even colleges didn't have room for a lot of the nerds. Where the hell do you go if you are a poor, chronic nerd who can't get into college? Obviously, I assume my experience with this to be acute compared to a similarly talented person who is not white. There are a lot of smart people in the USA. I know it is important for us to be a place where some smart people who would be oppressed to migrate, as we are a nation of immigrants. I adamantly think we should look to the children of immigrants who pick food, clean homes, offload ships, plumb toilets, fix elevators, etc.. before we look to foreign adults. I strongly feel the USA economy will be the most healthy in a world where people in other parts of the world have a healthy local economy and a proportionate ability to ours to participate in the global economy. I think global information economy makes more sense than global economy which tranfers things like food between continents, while creating harmful pollution. If there is American Exceptionalism, I think it should make what is supposed to be right about the west present everywhere, without military force, but instead by empowering the working class to become knowledge workers. And we should stop absorbing into western culture what is inherent to fascism.

sudioStudio64 12y ago

Business people often mistake their success in one area as a validation of all their ideas. There is a kind of, and I really don't mean to sound condescending or accusatory, naïve optimism about the motives of other members of their class. Getting rid of regulations on the production of medicine, but focusing on regulating AI...a subject which has recently been in vogue among the digerati...kind of illustrates how radically divergent the priorities of that political cohort are from the middle class.

Zikes 12y ago

I find it odd that this plan for "fixing innovation" doesn't mention anything about patent reform.

gautambay 12y ago

> It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world. As the internet increases parity in education globally, immigration reform will become even more important for the US to retain its edge, as people born outside the US will comprise a larger percentage of the world's best entrepreneurs. As an immigrant trying to fix education, #1 (fix education) and #3 (education reform) ring especially true for me, but it's also fascinating to think how closely-tied the two are.

fivedogit 12y ago

Here we go again on the immigration thing. Very disappointing. It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. That benefits businesses and, in turn, VCs. Two things, specifically, irritate me about Paul's and Sam's argument in favor of immigration reform. 1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" My (and others') opposition to immigration reform is based on a desire to stop the ever-progressing tilt of power and leverage towards businesses and away from labor. To suggest that we are scared of competition (or worse) is offensive. 2. The idea that there aren't enough engineers to go around is simply not true. I know several capable engineers (myself included) who have struggled to find work because companies (a) want you in a tech hub already (b) seem unwilling to train someone from 90% to 100% to do the job and (c) want to pay as little as possible. It feels lazy. "We really don't want to relocate and train folks, so let's just change the immigration laws."

UK-AL 12y ago
I don't mind immigration if its universal for every profession, lawyers, accountants, doctors, vcs, accelerators, financial people etc etc Most immigration reformers only want very specific immigration for their specific industry. Which kind of highlights whats its really about, AKA Price of labour. That i don't agree with. If it increases supply universally, that's good because income is relative. If it increases supply to screw a specific group, then no. I also think in the end, they will bite themselves in the butt. Software development will end being seen as a mediocre commodity job, anyone decent will move into other professions.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
It's been frustrating to see this cross-talk between the two "camps" on the immigration issue. You're right, the most common criticism of PG's (and now Sam's) stance on immigration reform has been that it would be used to depress domestic wages for software engineers, and they keep not addressing that directly, which makes it easy for critics to continue beating that particular drum. (Some other people, including dang at the top comment in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572, have rebutted that aspect of the call for immigration reform.) And perception is part of the problem too. On one side, you have some VC and incubator people saying there just isn't enough talent domestically, and on the other, you have people who say they are talented and looking for work and not getting anywhere. We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. PG's essay really didn't help matters; there needs to be something written with some specific ideas, some on-the-record statements from hot companies that can't find talent, and a direct response to the critics on the wage issue, at the least. Something that would meet the desired standards for long-form content submitted to HN if it didn't come with a recognizable byline. I'm still on the fence on this thing. California is the leading exporter of agriculture in the U.S. in part because of a huge, cheap immigrant labor force. That helps to keep the cost of food low, which benefits a lot of people and benefits California quite a lot overall. It also keeps the cost of agricultural labor low. It's pretty unlikely that that is the sort of immigration that PG and others are agitating for, but without any specifics, that's only an assumption.

nhaehnle 12y ago

> Very low growth and a democracy are a very bad combination. Why? It would be interesting to see a justification for this. Very low growth and capitalism are a problematic combination if you believe Piketty, in the sense that the combination can become poisonous for democracy and many other values of the enlightenment.[0] But I don't see how democracy is necessarily incompatible with very low growth (or even a shrinking economy). Note that I still believe growth is a good thing regardless of this (unlike some people especially from an environmentalist bent), but it irks me when statements like this are thrown around with an unjustified air of authority. Other than that, sama really misses the elephant in the room, which is plain old macroeconomics. This is more of a problem in Europe than in the US, but bad macroeconomic beliefs are pretty pervasive within the political elite, to the point where the same person will wring their hands asking for how to enable growth, but refuse to listen to what mainstream academic economists are saying (let alone heterodox academic economists). [0] With the typical rate of growth below the typical rate of return on capital, society necessarily becomes more divided by wealth and poverty.

malisper 12y ago
He linked to another essay of his: http://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government http://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government
nostromo 12y ago
Democracies generally don't live within their means. That's because elected officials know that voters demand more services than they're willing to pay for. Democracies have gotten away with this by inflating past debts away (in effect, paying for debt via growth). But in a low-growth world, many more western democracies are going to end up like Greece. http://www.economist.com/node/21561932 http://www.economist.com/node/21561932
- nhaehnle 12y ago
  Yes, that seems to be where sama is coming from. On the other hand, I suspect that this is again one of those truisms that may not really be true at all. Consider that in Europe (and to a lesser extent also in the US), mainstream academic economists have essentially been begging politicians to spend more, as that is what the macroeconomic models have been advising them to do for the last few years. And yet there has been a lot of austerity. This really clashes with the idea that elected officials simply give in to demands by voters. The story is obviously more nuanced than this simple truism. Add to this that it is unclear what "living within their means" even means. If you look at it in terms of physical goods and services available, then of course they are living within their means, because living beyond means at the level of a society is physically impossible. You could then clarify your definition to encompass something like "being on a sustainable path into the future", but again, if you evaluate that in terms of physical reality a fair evaluation is probably that democratic states are on average better at preserving resources etc. than states with other forms of government. The cynic in me would say that the whole "democracy and low growth don't go together" is really code for "democracy and low growth and the kind of unequal society I like don't go together",[0] because of course democratic voting outcomes will demand fairness in the sense that if a belt-tightening across society is necessary, the belts of those at the top have to be tightened the most. So: democracy, low growth, unequal society: pick any two out of three, but you can't have all three at once. [0] Though I assume most people talking about these issue are not consciously aware that there even is a distinction.

ap22213 12y ago

Regarding education, do the people who need it the most (underutilized adult workers) clearly understand how to pursue it? Do they understand the costs, benefits, risks, and rewards? I doubt it. Policies should emphasize the of dissemination information that ties education to opportunity. That way people can make informed decisions (e.g. 'if I do these things, spend this much money, spend this much time, then I can expect to make this much money, in these metro areas'). Maybe education is partly a design problem? What if education was just easier to plan for, obtain, validate, and apply?

ojbyrne 12y ago

Feeling some dissonance: "Public companies end up with a bunch of short-term stockholders who simultaneously criticize you for missing earnings by a penny this quarter and not making enough long-term investments." "Target a real GDP growth rate. You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it." I can't fully express what I dislike about these two statements, they just seem conflicting. Perhaps suggesting some of the Tea Party-ish coddling the "job creators" and punishing the "welfare mothers."

lhc- 12y ago
Also, reducing entitlement spending but increasing spending on teachers will somehow improve education numbers, even though a large percentage of lowest scoring students are also those who most rely on things like welfare to get by. There's a pretty direct correlation between being poor and doing poorly in schools.

bokonist 12y ago

Sam says "It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world." but he also says, "I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending, actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars in the future." So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you can spend money to improve it. It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there is nothing else I can do. The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes. So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to "max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on? Learning consists of four components: 1) book learning 2) practice 3) mentorship/coaching 4) motivation to do the above 3 things As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself. Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money. Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of "spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than they did in school. So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way. If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the amount of money it spends producing it. It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole. Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it. Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the expense of transitioning to a art based economy. One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years. I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5% transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of the market?

saosebastiao 12y ago

I realize this is an essay, and I realize that it intentionally takes the normative over the positive, but there really needs to be some [citation needed] tags all over the place. There are always some liberties that can be taken when you speak from a position of authority, but this is like listening to a presidential debate. If you are trying to influence the policy and not the election, you need to be able to influence people that can read past your authority and posturing.

vasilipupkin 12y ago

"If I had to take a company public, I’d love to only have my shares priced and traded once every month of quarter." sorry, that's a bit non-sensical. The enormous uncertainty associated with lack of transparent pricing would lower both private and public market equity valuations. We want prices to be as transparent as possible

ecopoesis 12y ago

What an incredibly naive view of the world. As others have pointed out, reducing education to "moar money!" is simplistic. Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? Maybe we should instead focus our efforts on helping the unemployed and underemployed already in the US get training and jobs. Cheaper Bay Area housing only helps people in the Bay Area. There's a whole lot more to the United States. Wouldn't a better policy be to try to make it so businesses in Detroit, or Buffalo or any other dying city can be as successful as those in Silicon Valley? Reducing regulation: the old cry of business owners everywhere. Regulation can be good. Sam uses the example of drug companies, and yes, bringing new drugs to market is expensive. But the consequences of screwing up or literally deadly. See the example of Vioxx. Isn't one of the rallying cry of hackers right now Net Neutrality? How do we think that's going to be accomplished outside of regulation? Isn't the lack of regulation (not calling broadband Title II) what got us into this mess?

j_baker 12y ago
> Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? I don't have a source handy, but I believe studies have shown that immigration does indeed help economic growth with the vast majority of that growth benefiting the immigrants themselves.
- datasage 12y ago
  How much of the economic growth is simply due to adding more participant the the economy vs innovating new markets? When you start normalizing for factors such as inflation and population growth, US economic growth in the past couple of decades ends up being very low.
ecopoesis 12y ago
And to not be only critical, here's what my policy for growth and innovation would be: 1) Decrease the income gap between the rich and the poor. This isn't just about raising wages for the poor, but also decreasing wages (via taxes or maybe just straight up regulation). I'm not suggesting that we pay everyone the same: it should still be possible to become rich. But the current difference of ~4000x between a full-time minimum wage job and the top earners is obscene. Decreasing the income of the super rich will not really hurt them, and businesses would be better off reinvesting that money in making improving the business, or the whole country would be better off spending that money on social services. Increasing the wages of the poor and middle classes will help them immensely. Too many people live paycheck to paycheck, where a single illness can destroy their lives by forcing them into payday loans or credit card debt that becomes impossible to get out of. These debts are a drain on the economy, and forces a large portion of the US population into wage-slavery. Our goal should be to have no one living paycheck to paycheck, giving folks the ease of mind and comfort so they have an opportunity to innovate a=instead of just struggling to survive. 2) Increase the social safety net. This includes everything from improving and expanding government sponsored health care, to improving government sponsored retirement, to expanding government cash payments to individuals (either through welfare expansion or some sort of basic income). The theory behind this is that innovating (doing a startup) is giant risk most people aren't willing to take. And unless you're independently wealthy, it's a risk most people shouldn't take. Found a startup, get a cancer: you're bankrupt. Work for a startup that that doesn't have a retirement plan and doesn't pay market wages in hope of the IPO payoff, and they go bust: there goes a big portion of your retirement, hope you like working till you're 80. Increasing the safety net means people will be more willing to take risks, and some of those ricks will pay off, driving innovation and growing the economy.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bokonist 12y ago

"Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth." I'm going to leave aside the issue of high-skilled immigration for moment and talk about Sam's addendum of "immigration more generally." Low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America have not yet shown evidence of assimilating into the American mainstream. Income and educational attainment is still much lower, the communities are still segregated, etc. So there are two possibilities: Possibility 1) It will be just a matter of time before they assimilate, just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate. Possibility 2) For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult. It is even more so when there is a fluid border with Mexico, and the U.S. no longer does the same sort of cultural imperialism it did in the early 1900's in order to assimilate immigrants. Thus long term, assimilation will not occur. Long term, the U.S. will end up looking a lot like Brazil, with a white overclass, a brown helot class, and a black underclass. Technology growth will slow as it becomes low status for the educated white overclass to do real work. Political corruption will grow as voters will vote as tribal blocks, and votes are determined by buying the votes, rather than making good policies for the nation. I don't want to get into an argument about whether 1) or 2) is more likely. But I will argue that there is at least a 5% chance that 2) is true. If 2) is true, it would fundamentally change the character of the U.S. in a very negative way. If we slow down immigration, and 1) turns out to be right, then we can always let more immigrants in later. If we accelerate immigration, and 2) turns out to be true, it cannot be undone. Not ever. Thus even if there is a 5% chance that 2) is right, it makes sense to slow down third-world immigration, until we can prove that assimilation will occur.

pen2l 12y ago
You bring up good points -- but reading that quote again, > "Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth." That's not justice. Sam complains about discriminating on country of birth, but yet he's discriminating on class/merit/competency. If we have The VC's way of doing things, we're not going to increase immigration for people who really fairly deserve to be here -- the gays getting prosecuted in Uganda, the atheists fighting for life in Saudia Arabia, you're advocating getting folks here who are most likely doing well in their home places. Let me tell you, the rockstar engineers in India, China, etc. are usually from the upper classes in India, China, etc., if they don't come here, I assure you they will be able to find nice-paying jobs there and remain in the upper class tier.

Alex3917 12y ago

> Fix education. - The disparities in education levels in the US are primarily a product of parenting styles, not the school system. Having a better school system would obviously be good, but it's probably not possible to improve our school system enough to overcome the contribution (or lack thereof) from parents. - We currently have a teacher retention problem, which may be more important than the problem of not being able to fire bad teachers with tenure. Roughly 50% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, and that's after investing a substantial amount of time and money to get the relevant masters degree and certifications. While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons. So any system that makes it easy to fire bad teachers may well end up creating a system with a higher ratio of bad teachers to good teachers. I agree that the root of most of America's problems revolve around education, but spending more money on education isn't going to fix (or even ameliorate) our problems unless it is deployed very judiciously. (And it may well be possible to improve the school system by spending less money than we spend currently.)

humanrebar 12y ago
> We currently have a teacher retention problem But we don't have a lack of teachers. Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working conditions? > While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons. That's true of any job, though. What makes the teaching profession special in this regard?
- Alex3917 12y ago
  > Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working conditions? Absolutely. > That's true of any job, though. Not really. In most jobs you can get fired due to internal company politics. But there aren't a lot of jobs where the general public can force your boss to fire you for, say, being insufficiently racist.

api 12y ago

What I keep saying about SF's housing crisis is that it's this: "Economic growth, affordable housing, NIMBYism, pick two." The Bay has picked the first and the last. I also get the sense -- though I don't live there -- that the people protesting the explosion of rents and house prices are the same people who insist that nothing too tall or big be built and that every new construction be subjected to a whole slew of restrictions around how "green" it is, how it will "impact the local community," etc. While these concepts aren't bad in and of themselves, when applied at the civic scale in this way they typically just provide opportunities for obstructionists who want to keep prices high. So in the end it ends up being a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance -- in this case greens and preservationists with slumlords and banks working hand in hand to keep rents and costs high. Activists of virtually every political persuasion tend to be horribly naive about the ways their interests and concerns can be twisted to serve agendas they may not otherwise support.

bokonist 12y ago

Question for Sam about the issue of high-skill immigration: Does YC have any sort of tracking of the number of engineers blocked from going to YC companies because they could not get a Visa? Could Sam write an essay with some anonymized examples of what happens when a skilled worker is prevent from working for a YC company? This kind of first-hand evidence can go a long way toward convincing other people of your point.

bdcs 12y ago

>A third change would be something to incent people to hold shares for long periods of time. One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years. "However most empirical studies find that the relationship between [Financial Transaciton Tax] and short-term price volatility is ambiguous and that "higher transaction costs are associated with more, rather than less, volatility"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effect_on_volatility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effe...

jqm 12y ago

The fairness angle (regarding immigration) is kind of strange. If the country was actually concerned about "fairness" for non-citizens, it would have had a substantially different foreign policy over the last 50 years. "Don't deserve special right because I was born here....". Uh, ya, that is kind of the definition of a citizen of a sovereign country. At least until the emergence of an enlightened global citizenship system (eventually inevitable, and I for one will welcome the day...).

pskittle 12y ago

No offence to sam but how many people who can affect policy changes read his blogs?