Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[ipecac]

People do not cheer for a flat increase in number, they cheer because more and more demographics who didn't get to go to college before now do go. This is a good thing, degree flooding being an unfortunate side-effect.

Many do actually cheer for an increase in number, and the flooding is already a good enough reason to decrease the number. Yes, you may live in countries post-flood where things have somewhat restabilised, but there is Bernie and his unwitting attempts to cause a flood and massive problems for his naive supporters who think that getting free college be good for them in the current US context.

Now that there are more people getting to college, I say raise the bar. Make that degree harder to obtain, filter out the chaff that way.

In other words, reality means that you need to reinstate the existing inequality because of flooding.

Again, I say that inequality is sometimes a good, even necessary thing.

[Japper007]

In other words, reality means that you need to reinstate the existing inequality because of flooding.

No, reality demands we instate a different kind of inequality, one based in intellect and work ethic rather than what family one is born into. That difference is not insignificant, much as you may pretend it is.

meritocracy>plutocracy

[ipecac]

You're missing the point ipecac by assuming that those advocating for free college want everyone to go to college.

You're missing the point, I don't think everyone that uses the slogan of 'college for all' wants literally everyone to go. But the labour market for graduates is generally oversupplied already, and any increase just makes it worse.

What us 'liberals' want is the ability for anyone to go to college.

Why should that be a right given that in countries where college is free, it doesn't often, if most of the time, give any more significant advantage?

You're right in saying that college degrees have been devalued, but the solution isn't to make college inaccessible for most people.

The most important way is to rein in universities who use subsidies as an excuse to jack up the costs even more.

What I want is for people interested in specific fields, industries, or careers that require higher education, should be able to go and study degrees relating to that field, to help them start a career. People who are interested in solely earning enough money to get by comfortably can enter the workforce after high school, or learn a trade, etc. etc. without this requirement of "a degree". Both types people will ahve the opportunity to succeed in life, however they choose, and be happy.

Such idealism.

[ipecac]

In other words, reality means that you need to reinstate the existing inequality because of flooding.

No, reality demands we instate a different kind of inequality, one based in intellect and work ethic rather than what family one is born into. That difference is not insignificant, much as you may pretend it is.

I meant the existing inequality where few get degrees that give that a significant advantage.

Applying the criterion of 'individual skill or ability' unfortunately is racist in the USA. Ergo affirmative action. Which by the way, you preferred to ignore, as below.

Why did you immediately jump to affirmative action? I don't even believe in that stuff.

Are you aware that it is being actively applied in the USA in college admissions, and also elsewhere?

Currently the state of affairs in the USA where blacks and other minorities are treated unjustly (voter suppresion laws, police brutality against them being de facto decriminalised, vastly greater conviction rates for crimes which would earn most whites a mere slap on the wrist) is an evil.

For an objective evaluation of the situation, you will need to include the fact of affirmative action, including that they are favoured during US college admissions. You don't, for some reason.

[ipecac]

In short, yes there are places in the West where there is free college, and things have stabilised there.

But in many other places where there is no free college, there are already big problems and making college free will just make things worse, so it's not at all a good idea.

As always, you need to stop that assumption that that because it works in X place, it should just work in place Y even though there are big differences. Yes, I mean you, Japper.

[ipecac]

It's not explicit but it's so obvious were it's going. Denying privilege is the point of no return; because without the privilege the money is just being stolen. It's going to go into ipecac's death spiral now; he didn't add anything because T-hawk said racist first.

After both sides have declared the other side racist a sufficient number of times to satisfy themselves, I find myself wondering what's the point of it all.

[T-hawk]

The issue raised by this viewpoint is this. If a group sees that you have privilege through an accident of birth and that others don't and seeks to raise everyone up to an equal level, how do they go about getting your support?

This is a good question.

I'll start by backing up to lay out how I arrived at what you call privilege.  I have my programming career and upper-middle-class economic position.  That started when my also middle-class father bought a computer for the house when I was 3 and taught me to use it.  By around age 10 I was teaching myself programming from library books.  I've always had that analytical aptitude and the work ethic to apply it to something productive.  Then the privilege ran out.  After I was about 17, my father was often unemployed and I got no economic support from my parents.  An inheritance from a great-grandmother paid for one year of college.  I paid for the next three myself, with a combination of jobs and loans.  That college had an internship jobs program with very good relations with employers, the last of which hired me full-time upon graduating, which established enough experience that I've never had any difficulty finding jobs ever since.  I repaid all the loans within about five years.

At what point could you make that set of events equal for everyone?  I got individualized instruction from a parent on a career field starting by age 3.  Are you going to nationalize child-rearing to that degree so that everyone has that?  That's really about the only place I can see to accomplish what you want.  Free college does not accomplish this.  I still have a head start of ten-plus years of practice and analytical thinking over anyone who just begins a career field then.  Any sensible employer would choose to hire me with that much additional experience over someone of equal work ethic and talent but without that.

How could you possibly 'solve' that?  Ban me from learning computers until college age so that other candidates can keep up with me?  Mandate that employers hire without regard to life experience?  Hand out to everyone an equal economic position even though I spent my college years working to achieve it once the privilege ran out?

This brings me to another point, about how education and employment works, that ties in with the discussion about college.  I may have said some of this somewhere upthread.

Jobs exist for the benefit of the employer.  Nobody is entitled to employment.  What creates a job is your ability to produce economic value.  An employer doesn't seek to hire just anyone with a college degree.  They seek to hire the best and most productive person they can find.  They do this not because they seek to provide someone an economic living, but because they seek profit from that person's activity, in an environment that can leverage it.

Education is not a magical ticket to employment.  Jobs are scarce.  More don't materialize when more people are educated.  There is a limit to how many white-collar jobs can exist.  Think of everything you consume from professionals, everything like housing, banking, insurance, entertainment, advertising, government services, communications and technological devices, transportation and travel.  To produce and provide all that really takes only about 20% of the population, thanks to leverage and economies of scale and technology.  Beyond that, the market is saturated.  There is no room for any more productive jobs to exist without cannibalizing some other form of consumption.  (For a microcosm of this, look at the overcrowded Steam games marketplace these days.)

Society got fooled into thinking that college degree equals employment because, for a while, those numbers were about equal.  For the pre-war and baby-boomer generations, about 20% of adults earned college degrees, and that closely tracked with the number of professionally productive jobs that exist.  But it was not the education or the degree that caused the employment.  What causes employment is possessing a viable capacity to produce something that someone will pay for.  That capacity is relative, to do it better than the next competitor, until the market is saturated.

That's the problem the millennial generation has found.  Twice as many of them graduate college, but that doesn't double the number of economically productive jobs, because there isn't twice the consumption to support them.  When everyone has a degree, then no one does.  A degree is no longer a useful signal for an employer to identify that top 20% of workers by skill and productivity.  Maybe a master's degree does, but that eventually becomes saturated as well.  And labeling as a degree a field with no productive value like gender-studies does not create employment in that area.

Coming back to Trasson's point: I am not attached to being in that 20% relatively, but I am attached to the level of satisfaction I derive from my consumption.  If you want me to agree with a liberal economic proposal, figure out how to expand others' goods of fortune without penalizing mine.  Grow the pie, as I said previously.  I am not sure what sort of proposals that would actually be or how possible it even is, but I contend I don't need to, that onus is on the proposer.  All I can say is that it has to be fundamentally about growing the pie, not yelling at me to forfeit some of my piece.

Here's one example I can give: I'm opposed to Obamacare, but not socialized health care in general.  Obamacare fails because it mandates demand without expanding supply, which is a mandate that the price rise.  A system that would succeed would control the price to benefit all consumers including me.

[SadGit]

  A degree is no longer a useful signal for an employer to identify that top 20% of workers by skill and productivity.  Maybe a master's degree does, but that eventually becomes saturated as well.  And labeling as a degree a field with no productive value like gender-studies does not create employment in that area.

Needs more braintime to do a proper reply. But this point is strong. Add to it that even in fields with some slight value adding a degree does not lead to more jobs. Take libraries. In DK this used to be a trade school diploma with 2*6 months of internship to learn the practical part of the job and decide which sub field to specialise in. Got changed to univeristy degree with bastardised bachelor+ 6 months "solve a problem and write it up" bit or a pure masters. Yay librarians, everyone cheered, wages must go up because look how qualified we are now. And wages did go up. Productivity also... ish. Because public libraries are funded by the public penny and while taxes did also go up, noone wanted to spend that fat loot on libraries. Instead headcount went doooown, and everyone had to run faster. Could have saved everyone those extra years in university, made them run a bit faster at work and still had the productivity boost. And not a bunch of stressed out part time working ladies and a similar amount of bitter ladies on benefits. Did society benefit from the free education they all had? Was the increase in overall number of acedemics a boost to society? Did lifting them from skilled labour to graduates smooth out inequlity (given that employment is now at 1/3 of 1990 headcount)?

[ipecac]

Here's one example I can give: I'm opposed to Obamacare, but not socialized health care in general.  Obamacare fails because it mandates demand without expanding supply, which is a mandate that the price rise.  A system that would succeed would control the price to benefit all consumers including me.

Some leftists want to address the fact that the cost of college education is overpriced, but choose to address this by subsidies, which gives universities the excuse to bump costs up even higher.

Similarly with Obamacare, they want to deal with overpriced healthcare with more subsidies, which just helps insurance companies bump costs up even higher.

Mere sentiment driving short-sighted and superficial 'solutions' that only make things worse.

[AdrienIer]

Follow your dreams, unless you come from a poor background. In that case you might compete with people born in wealthy families, and that would be bad. Got it.