Ah! If you mean “giving poor people more opportunities, thus leading to better use of human capital, increasing everyone’s living standards,”
Thank you for figuring out what I was thinking! One of my many problems in any discussion is I can’t figure out which things I need to state because there are other interpretations and which things I can leave unstated because everyone will quickly read it the same way.
This is the one I mean. I am fascinated by the progress human kind has made so far. I am interested in bringing that to new levels, and one way to do that is to use the pool of human resources we have ever more efficiently. Getting rid of arbitrary limits on what women or black people were allowed to do has been a great help in that goal. Avoiding a debilitating stratification may also be important.
do you have anything in mind when you refer to things that are better than, say, a public education system at providing poor people new opportunities?
Having raised kids, it seems unlikely to me that institutionalized public education for a nominal 6 hours a day (two hours work in 6 hours?) is all that need be done. Meanwhile, we observe that the more money a family has, the more they spend on advantages for their children. So while inexpensive or free public education is one good approach, another is just making poor families relatively richer generally. Which is most efficient? That is a discussion I think we should have, and i don’t think the answer is trivial, or that there is even necessarily only one “correct” answer. But the ideal that “we should all get to keep all the money we make, and spend it only on our children if we want” is a point I disagree with, and what I wanted to argue against in my OP. The captains of industry are generally from families that have given their children EVERY advantage. Of course it may be far from optimum to try to get to equality of
So yes, education is a great component of the kind of redistribution that I want. I suspect a more intact family doing more “enriching” activities together, not living in relative squalor, being able to teach “healthy choices” because price is not the only consideration when acquiring food, these may make generally redistributive policies efficient. Add to that our clear knowledge that marginal utility of dollars declines as you get more dollars, and we have a straightforward reason to choose progressive taxation to fund these things. (Note progressive income tax is not the only way to tax progressively, and income tax would not be my first choice of taxing, but that is another discussion).
With respect to education, in this essay about inequality (seriously read that whole thing) Paul Graham makes the point that improving access to education doesn’t actually decrease inequality since while to makes the poor richer, it also makes the rich richer.
There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from the rich. You could help the poor become more productive—for example, by improving access to education. Instead of taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks, you could enable people who would have become checkout clerks to become engineers.
This is an excellent strategy for making the poor richer. But the evidence of the last 200 years shows that it doesn’t reduce economic inequality, because it makes the rich richer too. If there are more engineers, then there are more opportunities to hire them and to sell them things. Henry Ford couldn’t have made a fortune building cars in a society in which most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers.
If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it’s not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever.
responds to a statistical generalization with 2 famous examples
I agree that this is wrong.
Scumbag Eugine Nier
Even though this is obviously a joke, with an over the top reference to popular memes, it still seems counterproductive for building a strong community.
That captains of industry are from wealthy families? It’s certainly consistent with everything I’ve read about the heritability of wealth and it’s easy enough to supply other famous examples (eg. Bill Gates III).
Thank you for figuring out what I was thinking! One of my many problems in any discussion is I can’t figure out which things I need to state because there are other interpretations and which things I can leave unstated because everyone will quickly read it the same way.
This is the one I mean. I am fascinated by the progress human kind has made so far. I am interested in bringing that to new levels, and one way to do that is to use the pool of human resources we have ever more efficiently. Getting rid of arbitrary limits on what women or black people were allowed to do has been a great help in that goal. Avoiding a debilitating stratification may also be important.
Having raised kids, it seems unlikely to me that institutionalized public education for a nominal 6 hours a day (two hours work in 6 hours?) is all that need be done. Meanwhile, we observe that the more money a family has, the more they spend on advantages for their children. So while inexpensive or free public education is one good approach, another is just making poor families relatively richer generally. Which is most efficient? That is a discussion I think we should have, and i don’t think the answer is trivial, or that there is even necessarily only one “correct” answer. But the ideal that “we should all get to keep all the money we make, and spend it only on our children if we want” is a point I disagree with, and what I wanted to argue against in my OP.
The captains of industry are generally from families that have given their children EVERY advantage. Of course it may be far from optimum to try to get to equality of
So yes, education is a great component of the kind of redistribution that I want. I suspect a more intact family doing more “enriching” activities together, not living in relative squalor, being able to teach “healthy choices” because price is not the only consideration when acquiring food, these may make generally redistributive policies efficient. Add to that our clear knowledge that marginal utility of dollars declines as you get more dollars, and we have a straightforward reason to choose progressive taxation to fund these things. (Note progressive income tax is not the only way to tax progressively, and income tax would not be my first choice of taxing, but that is another discussion).
With respect to education, in this essay about inequality (seriously read that whole thing) Paul Graham makes the point that improving access to education doesn’t actually decrease inequality since while to makes the poor richer, it also makes the rich richer.
Um, Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie.
“Scumbag Eugine Nier—responds to a statistical generalization with 2 famous examples.”
I agree that this is wrong.
Even though this is obviously a joke, with an over the top reference to popular memes, it still seems counterproductive for building a strong community.
Turned out true though.
What statistics? All I see is an assertion.
That captains of industry are from wealthy families? It’s certainly consistent with everything I’ve read about the heritability of wealth and it’s easy enough to supply other famous examples (eg. Bill Gates III).
Well, that’s more evidence than mwengler provided.