There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower.
Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflation?
Actually, I think you have to go back further. My grandfather, a poor kid from west LA, went to UCLA and then UC Berkeley as an engineering student back in the late 1930s / early 1940s.
He learned Latin in high school (think inner city kid learning Latin). Grew up with all the airfields in LA and mechanical engineering seemed like the thing, I guess. So despite being interned (he was a Japanese American) he went on to be a very successful engineer and eventually businessman (owned his own hydraulics company, etc.).
It's arguable that a lot of this happened because of a golden age in California's educational system. Same thing with my parents. I've met them and they're idiots -- but at least my father benefited greatly from UC Berkeley (he's a philosophy professor).
I think PG is right to question what exactly is going on. But there really was an extraordinary investment in higher education (for whatever reason) in the early- to mid- 20th century. And arguably, that affected a lot of things which we Californians take for granted.
I think what the OP is trying to say is that our attitude about public education has changed. It was irrational, the level of investment that was made into higher education pre-1980s (both raising and allocating funds). And today's set of challenges may require a different emphasis (e.g., charter schools, leaner campuses, more online learning, etc.) -- but that generous spirit that, afaik, built California into a great state -- that's not worth overlooking.
Pensions without appropriate savings represent a huge drain on the government that "suddenly appears" (after 30+ years).
Personnel costs rise not just with inflation but with the completion from the local job market. Unfortunately for the state it can't reduce benefits when times get tough.
Pity you had to use such crude language while making your point. I'd like to see these figures per state. And then I'd like to see the percentage of the budget over time that is allocated to locking up citizens.
Wow, I had to reread it at least 5 times before I noticed it. "Fucked" for some reason is much less offensive to me than other forms like "fucking"... not like that is extremely offensive either, but "fucked" doesn't even seem at all bad.
I think it's a safe bet that anyone who finds themselves this deep in a site like HN is either an adult, or a kid with parents who give him/her a lot of freedom.
sigh Totally unexpected down-modding :) At the time I left this remark the commenter had only like 3 or 4 points and I was afraid that his use of the word "fuck" was causing his pertinent info to get overlooked. So I was trying to steer people towards this salient info regarding incarceration rates. I am not in the slightest bit offended by the language :) I was afraid others might be and was trying to offset that behaviour and I get modded down to the flames of hell and those who reply to me get tons of karma.
For fuck's sake, where's the justice? Anyway, the dudes now got over 30 points so maybe my heroic effort did not go in vain. On-topic: unjustly locking up a whole swathe of your citizen's has got to be a drain on resources. Compare US incarceration rates to most Western European countries and think about the consequences for a while.
What's also missing from the picture is the comparative advantage that the US had in the fifties compared to the rest of the world (with Europe in shambles after WW II). Today it's a lot harder/more expensive to have the best educational system now that the others are doing a decent job again.
It has not more than doubled. Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them.
Population in 1960: 15,717,204
Population in 2010: 36,961,664
$28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person
$119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person.
And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not everything. The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.
It is fashionable to be anti-government, but the the numbers don't seem that bad to me when you look at the whole picture.
I did actually look at the population numbers but, inexplicably, just did a mental guesstimate rather than getting out my calculator or trusty paper. I apologize: it seems my mental guesstimate was on the wrong side of 2.
The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.
I would assume that the government is disproportionately likely to spend on these categories. So isn't this another way to illustrate inefficiency? If there's a correlation between government being a customer, and prices rising while the quality of the end product drops, that sounds like one more argument in favor of lower spending.
Those sectors are also much harder to automate, relative to the rest of the economy, since people want individual attention from doctors and teachers. So as the cost of everything else drops thanks to improved automation and technology, the proportion of our wealth that we spend on necessary but less-automated services increases.
(There's a term for this effect, but I'm having trouble finding it again.)
Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) [...] involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. [...]
Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time because productivity gains come essentially from a better capital technology. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.
That sounds like you're taking a favored conclusion and arguing backwards.
How many people have health insurance in the US?
How many of those are government employees? (Answer: far less than half)
Is the government running health insurance? (Answer: no).
EDIT: Wasn't trying to get too political on this. I just find the argument "the government buys some health insurance, so that's why it's expensive" outrageously unpersuasive.
I can't speak for California, but certainly here in Australia, there's been one factor increasing the cost of higher education: the rise of a managerial class within universities, who cost plenty but whose contribution to education and research is questionable.
It'd be almost impossible to quantify - and it is probably only one of several factors - but the take-home point is that increased spending isn't necessarily an indicator of better education.
I am non-faculty/research staff at a state school in the US. I agree. Faculty positions get cut or shifted to adjuncts and lecturers while managers who spend most of their time managing other managers keep getting their 5%.
Absolutely the same case in California. Along with other corporate giveaways and general waste. And no one willing to take responsibility for getting rid of it -- they're too busy making deals with the beneficiaries.
It's from a ca.gov domain, so I'm not sure it gets much more authoritative.
You can do your own analysis, but one snapshot would be 137B total spent in 2000-1 to 200B total spent in 2010-11. I chose to include federal funds on the grounds that for the topic in question, that would seem the relevant measure since a lot of those federal funds lately have been for public services, the topic in discussion. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl shows the inflation rate across that time frame as a 1.27 multiple, vs. a 1.46 multiple in California spending.
You can make the numbers somewhat worse by using 2009-2010's expenditures of 221B; how fair you think that is is up to the reader, I guess. Given that our author probably still thinks that's not enough, arguably that would be a more fair demonstration of what is still apparently not enough money.
So I went ahead and did a calculation of my own: revenue by all taxes per capita in the state of California between 2005 and 1964.
All following figures are from US census data:
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 1964: $2182.85 (helpfully provided by the 1964 census).
Total revenue from all taxes 2005: $146,692,000,000
Total resident population of California, 2005: 36,250,000
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 2005: $4,046.68
1964 number is also adjusted using the CPI calculator
I'd just like to point out to people reading this (since one commenter already said something then deleted his comment), that I am actually very liberal. I strongly believe in the fundamental role of the government in the welfare of the nation and I also strongly believe that we should be taxed for the money that's needed to make that happen.
HOWEVER, what I will never do is frame statistics or data just to fit my argument better. I was curious about this statistic (I don't really believe this tiny bit of data is really evidence for any drastic response) and decided to do the grunt work with the past US census data to satisfy my curiosity, whatever the results.
Also, the US census papers look way better in 1964 than they do in 2005. I think the 2005 documents may have a more legible typeface but it certainly makes me go "ugh." The margins are very bad in the '05 docs, too.
I think you should be looking at revenue by taxes as a % of GDP, rather than in $ terms. Real GDP per person is much higher in CA today than in 1964. Did government spending increase relative to the size of the economy? Or decrease?
I think that's a good point. The increase should be compared to the increase in GDP, the increase in the workforce (women working) and a number of other variables. I'm swamped as it is, maybe you want to do those calculations? ;)
Those nominal budget figures vary widely from the actual budgets, though, and how much varies year to year. For example, the 2009 nominal budget is indeed $119.2b, but 2009 state revenue and expenditures are somewhere around $450b. I suppose an interesting question would be whether on versus off-budget spending was a similar or different ratio in 1965.
So is the implication that the state has grown much more wasteful in its spending over the last few decades?
If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)
Pension and health care outlays are not exogenous givens. The economy is not some external entity which government passively receives prices. Likewise the recession is not some external thing that can be waited-out like a hurricane. Our actions, and particularly those of that blunt club called government, entirely affects what emerges from the market making up the economy.
That's easy to say, but what specifically do you suggest they do about it? Given where we are right now (and setting aside CA's ridiculous laws regarding how they can reallocate their budget), what would you change to free up hundreds of billions of dollars without raising taxes?
Take over healthcare and beat back prices? Hey, I'm all for it, but I think that's gonna cost more in the short term.
I'm pretty sure that's working as intended. Might be better off loosening restrictions on how health care providers operate so they can work it out themselves.
On a more serious note, there isn't one solution. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to spend less and bring more money in. It took this country, and that state, a few decades to get into that mess. It will probably take just as long to get back to the prosperity the 40's and 50's were known for.
Sadly, the US Gov is going to make it worse. Go look at the budget for Indian Health Service versus the number of people served, then expand that to cover all Americans. For a bonus, check the level of service compared to the private sector.
It probably would have been cheaper to allow people to have real personal health savings accounts and provide a "last-resort" insurance that pays everything over some amount ($100K perhaps). That last bit probably would bring down premiums because of a max risk.
Looking for answers in such macro terms is probably not an effective response to the problems posed in the article.
What would likely be more effective would be data on changes in teacher salaries over time, changes in administrator salary over time, etc.
This makes a huge difference in the argument if for no other reason than that the increase in revenue over time has been due to increased services (not necessarily relating to the betterment of the state or its educational systems) rather than the deepening of the pockets of existing services in 1964.
According to Prop 13 grand-daddy Howard Jarvis, state revenues have indeed increased since Prop 13 passed (1978).
We have a heckavu budget morass in California. Our ballot initiative democracy has _written into the constitution_ both spending minimums (40% of general budget from Prop 98) for education, and tax maximums. It's a massive vote of no confidence to strip our legislatures of the working room to make a budget.
I'm going to agree with the letter here. Somehow, in California in the 60s, we decided as a state to build the world's best civil infrastructure. We (well my grandparents) built this to benefit residents statewide. The terms of debate have changed from what makes the best place to live, to fear or sounds-nice-but-not-right-nowism.
From 2/3s majorities, to social issues, to pensions, we're in a real hole. But a rebuilt civil infrastructure is necessary, decline is obvious.
Not an answer, but you should probably adjust by some sort of CA wage index rather than purely inflation, since a lot of things the government pays for have grown more expensive much faster than inflation (like salaries of sysadmins, and land). Looking at revenues as a percentage of state GDP would be one approximation (that would also bake in a correction for population growth).
I do think it's likely they haven't decreased greatly, though--- imo a bigger factor has been that where the money is spent has shifted greatly (less on education, more on cops and prisons, for example).
His claim is that California is bottom of the barrel WRT the amount of money that it is reinvesting in its education system. (Hence the 'prime the pump' analogy)... This is true:
To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and mean-spirited.
If a politician wants to raise taxes (in any way, even on the wealthiest 1 or .1%, who would barely notice), countless will bitch about it, without regard for data or reason (or common sense). It will be a knee jerk reaction.
WRT to his assumptions, I don't think that he is assuming that California is not spending its money wastefully (see his mention of the penal system). There is an argument to be made, however, that it is incredibly difficult to reclaim wasteful spending that has already been done. (California is not going to pardon 60% of its prison population and close its prisons or cancel state pensions).
So the expedient solution, if you believe in spending more on education and social services, would be to tax more.
(but no politician in their right mind would say that).
I think that there is a distinction to be made here between /politically/ expedient solutions, and expedient solutions with regards to actual goals.
The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve.
In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result.
This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out.
Our political system needs a new heuristic.
(Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)
According to this source of unknown reliability ( http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/California_state_spendin... ) state & local spending as a percentage of state nominal GDP went from 20% to 24% from 1992 to 2009. Don't know the numbers going back to 1960, but I'd be shocked if spending was lower then.
For the change in average levels of education and knowledge, the cause seems pretty obvious to me. If you extended the border of California 400 miles south into Mexico, the average state scores on tests of math, history, and English would obviously go down, simply because of the composition of the population. Similarly, if you move 10 million Mexicans into California, the average test scores of the people living within the borders of California will fall (even if there is no change in the amount of learning for one individual person). In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant.
Here's an excerpt from the bio of the guy who runs the site:
"Despite 35 years living in Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin."
However, he does link to real government sources (near the botton), so you can check to see if he weighs by ideology when posting numbers.
I applaud you for making an observation which could easily fuel an ad-hominem attack on an obvious partisan, and then holding back after observing that regardless of his biases, he is just tabulating official numbers.
When I see source and unknown reliability in the same post, my instinct is to check and make sure the person who said it knows where to find the tools to make that judgment on their own.
Sometimes they end up in disagreement with me, but I always prefer informed and still wrong to uninformed and wrong[1]. :)
[1]Which is not to say these numbers are wrong or right. I'm speaking generally.
To rephrase what you just said: Mexicans, because of their ethnicity, are less able to understand (for instance) mathematics, even when given the same amount of instruction, than people of the ethnicities that characterize the population of California circa the 1960s (i.e. predominantly white). Did I get that right?
Mexicans in general score lower on tests of English and math, both in Mexico and America. See for one example: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html#axzz0xaC7EpRR This data is well known and not-controversial. The reasons for the test score disparity are quite controversial.
My point is simple. You have a group A of 10 million that on average score 450 on the math SAT. You have a group B of 10 milllion that score 500 on average. If you randomly move 5 million from group A to group B, then statistically, the average score of group B will fall to ~481.
In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant.
Good job, you just discovered that our standardized tests scores are biased in favor of white kids.
Which is why those ethnicities then go on to have perfect 4.0 GPAs and rack up countless patents & inventions and start tons of successful new companies, thus proving those standardized tests wrong in the most effective way possible.
Accept of course those standardized tests are the gatekeepers to the best schools, best programs, best networks, and likely even confidence and motivation.
A better way to show that standardized tests mean nothing is to have every student take them, but then store them away for the next 40 years. No one knows the results. And then in 40 years correlate the results of these tests with "life success". We've already seen with one similar measure "IQ test", which has little bearing on academic placement, that it turns out to have very little utility in predicting "life success".
UPDATE: Link on IQ -- http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html
Any of which should only reduce the magnitude of the ethnicities' outperformance. Not eliminate it entirely. You don't need to go to Harvard to start Apple or Dell or Google. (To give an analogy, Asians are heavily discriminated against in higher ed; but when I look around, it seems to me that unlike blacks, they outperform.)
Yet none of those companies were founded even by poor white youths, much less black youths (even white females). Apple, founded by Jobs, who did an internship at HP as a high school student, and attended Reed. Google by Stanford grad students, Dell, son of a doctor and stockbroker, who went to UT Austin. Microsoft, two Harvard students.
The problem is that a young black kid raised where many are raised, SAT scores not withstanding, likely won't have the opportunities that those I listed had. Let me give a glimpse of Michael Dell's early life, from Wikipedia: "The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.
Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered his first teletype machine in junior high, which he programmed after school."
If you go into the inner-cities, this type of early life, even from the bright and ambitious will likely look very different.
And lastly, Asians are disciminated against in a very different way than Blacks are. They are discriminated in the belief that they excel at math and engineering. I've seen first hand, in elementary school, how powerful expectations are (and there is good data around this too).
You are lying with statistics, albeit possibly unknowingly.
That article comes right out and says that IQ does not have an effect on life outcomes, if life outcomes are normed for educational attainment. It then goes on to say that IQ does not predict career success, if career success is measured by money and normed for career type. That's like saying air temperature has no effect on snow cover, if snow cover is corrected for season. And altitude.
And of course, no argument is complete with an anecdotal Feynman story.
Two grad students at CalTech were having a discussion about what Feynman's IQ must be. They bandied 180... maybe even to 200. When coincidentally Feynman walks right past them.
One of the students pipes up and meekly asks Feynman, "Professor Feynman, what is your IQ?"
Feynman turns around and responds, "120". The grad students have a look of disbelief. To which Feynman adds, "but its all in Physics".
Actually the analogy you made is very appropriate. If you do control for season and altitude, and snow cover is not correlated with temperature still, you have a problem.
But sticking with just the article. The point he makes is that its the educational attainment that people pay for, not the IQ score. Now you're saying, "But educational attainment is a product of IQ score". Possibly, but in controlling that factor you can attempt to tease out the extent at which it really is the educational attainment rather than simply the IQ.
A better way to put is that if IQ was in itself the key to life success then it wouldn't matter if you went to college or not. Rather, what the data seems to show is that those with high IQs seem to at least have the wisdom to know that educational attainment will be the key their life success. Quite possibly being tracked into by virtue of a higher IQ.
BUT the data should show that regardless of credential, higher IQ yields more success. But it doesn't show that.
Now there are a lot of factors that potentially come into play. And that was my original point. One can't look at SAT scores and then say, "those with high SAT scores do better in life", when there are so many comingling factors that complicate the equation, and are ridiculously difficult to control for in the real world.
Don't get distracted. I suspect that you would find an even stronger correlation with "home culture", but that's too hard to define and to measure.
Any ethnicity can have a scholarly culture, but for people starting out at the bottom, in a new society, it's less common.
There's also a selection bias against those who have not moved up in society. E.g. take a depressed area -- if the people with the gumption to improve their situation do so and leave, what's left? Right, concentrated fail.
That of course assumes that the money needed provide the same services for the people grows at the same rate as the population growth. In other words, the cost per person might actually be significantly lower to provide services for 1million people than it would be to provide services for 20 million people. And maybe this isn't due to a government 'inefficiency' (mismanagement of funds), but rather an inefficiency that is inherent in the design of our cities and services (Meaning: Long term problem requiring redesign of many services in order to increase spending efficiency).
So really, I think it's far more important to question:
1) How has the cost for these public services scaled with the population in the past?
2) Based on that, how do I think the cost of the these public services scale with the population in the foreseeable future?
3) Is this increase in expenditure due to wasteful mismanagement of funds, or a design problem in our cities and services?
If you try your hand at this "armchair budget analyst" game, you'll learn that its easier practically and politically (yes, politically) to just raise the money, especially in a state like CA:
To be fair, the CA real estate boom/bust really did a number on the state's coffers. To ignore the impact of the "great recession" is to not see the problem accurately. The govt relied on increasing property tax revenue that disappeared as quickly as the monopoly money used to pay for it (aka subprime loans) and on state income taxes and sales taxes from workers who quickly lost their real estate bubble jobs. If those workers still had their jobs and homeowners still had their homes, we'd find something else to complain about. Moral of the story is be careful when playing with credit.
Not just less or more inflation-adjusted revenues and their spending as absolute sums - the per-capita values impacted by the population growth would be even more informative.
That much I knew. But my thinking was that the amount spent and how was a better indicator. If they bring in $5000 in revenue and buy $5000 in golden toilet seats, it's not being spent well.
But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
It's only good if the books are genuinely worth $5000. That was one of the interesting things that came up with Feynman's time vetting school books in California:
At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another.
[...]
[During my time on the commission,] there were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?"
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's cheaper?"
"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't normally use . . ." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper. The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
Agreed. But given that 49 out of 50 states were struggling to fall under budget this past year, we can safely say they're cutting the useful stuff now.
Great anecdote from NY State on a recent episode of This American Life ("Social Contract"): Arizona sold their state capitol to cover costs, and now pays rent to use the building.
I don't think I'm being as clear as I should be. I'll see if I can rephrase it tomorrow. Trying to think economics at this time of night often proves hazardous for me. :)
I think this is actually a much less helpful question than you think it is. For a lot of reasons, outside factors made things like real estate and healthcare a lot more expensive for the state of california. I don't see any evidence that CA is any more wasteful than it was 40 years ago.
Or, put another way, where exactly do you see an extra $100B in CA's budget?
California per-pupil spending 2008: $9,015 California’s Annual Costs to Incarcerate an Inmate in Prison: $47,102
Why should those be, in any way, comparable?
Prisoners need cells, three meals a day, healthcare, clothing, and constant supervision, 24 hours a day. Schoolchildren only need classrooms and supervision for six hours a day five days a week. And prisons can't get away with a 30:1 inmate-to-guard ratio, either. It makes perfect sense that a prisoner should cost more than a schoolkid.
Of course I'm sure California prison guards are still ridiculously overpaid. My personal solution to this conundrum is to outsource California's prisons to Mexico.
Of course it's reasonable that prisons are more expensive on a per capita basis. The real question is which of those are most const-effective in making CA a better place to live. Putting all those people in prison was a choice.
Apparently this professor is better acquainted with the definition of the word posterity than Paul Carr. Thanks again for pointing that out the other day.
Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html it's 31% of the budget, with the next largest expenditure being Health and Human Services.
There are few major issues with the California budget.
1) Much of the revenue is required by law to be allocated in a certain way. This leaves the government with very little wiggle room to make changes to the budget.
2) State workers have powerful unions that have burdened the government with an amazing out of debt and future obligations in terms of pension of benefits. No matter what the budget shortfall, the government must meet these obligations.
3) When revenues increased during the DOT COM boom, government was more than happy to spend the increased revenue on new services rather than either decreasing taxes or saving the money in a "rainy day" fund.
4) California is a mess of red-tape and bureaucracy. I'm actually surprised how many startups do business in California and the Bay Area with the all the labor laws and extra benefits that businesses have to pay for that other states don't, like CA SDI that pays for paid leave, while other states don't have it. Also, state land use laws and regulations were directly responsible for the increase in housing prices by making it so difficult to build new developments (among other factors, of course).
Californians have burdened themselves with a massive amount of debt and regulations that have severely hampered the ability of businesses to grow and contribute to state job growth. A article posted a few weeks back showed that there's a huge exodus of people from California to other states. I personally left California (East Bay) because I couldn't afford to buy a home and settle down with my family, not to mention the 9.75% sales tax on purchases from Newegg.com!
Since he's coming from the perspective of someone noticing a decline in the UC system, he might be partly noticing a shift within the education spending, rather than overall spending declining (and over-generalizing that perspective). Here's some funding data for the UC system, which has a downward trend in per-student terms since around 1990, except for a brief upward blip during the dot-com boom, and is now lower than it's ever been (as far back as I can find data, anyway):
That probably understates the decline somewhat, because the cost of living in California has grown faster than inflation, so funding should probably be adjusted against a wage index of some sort. Going by pure inflation-calculator adjustments like I used in the above table assumes that you can pay staff in 2010 the same salary as they would get 1965, adjusted only for inflation. That would mean getting professors for around $55,000, sysadmins for around $45,000, etc., which you aren't going to have much luck with.
Benefits outside this direct funding were much more generous in my parents' generation also--- my dad went to a private university in California with his tuition mostly paid by the state, courtesy of the Calgrants program, which used to pay for any California student with grades above a certain level and with financial need to attend any California university, public or private. So to some extent it is sort of annoying that a generation that benefited from those kinds of programs, getting their degree without incurring student-loan debt, now thinks that they need to be cut.
It's interesting that the enrollment has grown much faster than population growth (and I'd suspect, much faster than the population of the age 18-22 population, since there was a bulge in that age group in 1970). So what really may be happening is that the spending is spread thinner, as the "everybody should go to college" meme has spread.
True, although the spending is down from 1985-1990 levels even without the per-student calculation. It doesn't seem to be for explicitly partisan reasons either, since the UC system was well-funded under Deukmejian (a Republican) and then had its funding cut under Wilson (also a Republican).
Interestingly, most of the faster-than-population enrollment surge is in the past 5 years. If enrollments had grown from 1970 to 2000 in line with the results of the 1970 census versus the 2000 census, they would've been 124,000 in 2000, which is not that much lower than the actual 141,000 (that's only a 15% growth in enrollment rates over 30 years).
This could additionally be influenced by any number of schemes which increase both the size and number of college loans, e.g., government-guaranteed loans resulting in higher willingness to lend than might otherwise occur. Such subsidies (be they real or perceived) would tend to result in higher tuition rates for private schools, and lower subsidy amounts for state schools.
Well yeah, but that was my point: that state funding of the UC system is in decline. Among other things, that leads to students paying higher tuition and graduating with much higher debt than their parents did.
I think the author is mistaken. You see, what happened in years past is that they "took out a loan" to pay for now with the promise that they'd pay it later. However, later has come and now those that benefited the most can't understand why those that have to pay for it need to tighten their belts. None of us want to stop paying for it but we've learned what they haven't: you have to live within your means.
My father said it best, "I had it great, you're screwed. Thanks for paying for it."
They didn't take out a loan, though--- the generation of Californians he's talking about (pre-1970s) built a bunch of infrastructure while also balancing the state budget.
"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff."
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! When this fails to happen it usually because of artificially erected barriers to entry in an attempt to capture rent for a select few. And just who are loading up teachers "with more and more mindless administrative duties"? Taxpayers? Who benefits when it is increasing difficult to acquire the "skills" necessary to become a new teacher?
He doesn't really provide any unique insight besides blaming all of society's ills on tax cuts. Food has gotten cheaper, electronics have gotten cheaper, why has our government gotten more expensive!?
As technology improves we should expect costs to decline.
Only if you assume labour isn't the prime mover. Assuming that technology improvements help education at all (I'm skeptical -- I learned more about logarithms in math by using an abacus than I did using a calculator), we would ideally want education quality to increase, not decrease. Therefore, we should probably assume costs will stay approximately the same percentage over the years.
One thing I've been thinking about lately is education as related to teacher salaries. In general teacher salaries are pretty poor, but they've always been pretty crappy. However, the civil rights movement has had a big impact since the 50's and there's a big difference. Teaching was and is a female dominated profession -- what's interesting are the opportunities for women since the civil rights act. Now, instead of teaching, the brightest women are more likely to hold more prestigious, higher paying jobs that were previously reserved for white men. In effect, it's as though we were placing a restriction on women that said "If you're smart you can work -- but you can only work as a teacher." I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes, but it seems like it could make quite a bit.
Yes, but they get great fringe benefits (early retirement, defined benefit pensions) and easy hours. The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work). The underpaid teacher is a myth.
You think that teachers have easy hours? Have you ever known any teachers?
When you just look at hours in the classroom it doesn't look that hard. But add in the time for grading and preparing classes, and you find that teachers work long hours.
The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.
In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.
I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class.
But I'll certainly take your 2 secondhand anecdotes and some random internet guy over a scientific survey done by the BLS.
Incidentally, your random internet guy is pretty obviously exaggerating. He claims 30 min putting grades into the computer. If he has 40 students in his class, then it takes him 45 seconds to type one number into a spreadsheet! (Entering grades took me 3-4 minutes back when I had students.)
[1] Postdoc, actually. A moot distinction for the purposes of this conversation, but I'm not into self aggrandizement.
I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class.
I'll echo this: I'm a grad student in English lit and entering my third year. I've taught Engl 101, 102, and 109 (the honor version); the first year I taught, I spent a lot of time in preparation, thinking about activities, and so on. My second year, somewhat less. Ditto for this year.
That isn't to say I'm not changing things from year to year, because I am, but the big hurdle is at the beginning.
The differences between teaching secondary school and higher education are like night and day. I say this as someone who was definitely a little shit in middle school.
Teachers are only paid for days they work. But school districts are allowed to take that pay and stretch it out over a year.
Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.
Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.
Salary is time traded for money. Teachers trade 10 months for a certain amount of money, while most other professionals trade 12 months for a greater amount of money. The calculation I propose accounts for this.
It seems like it would be testable, at least: where do today's teachers stand vis-a-vis their non-teacher classmates? Where did they stand 50 years ago?
"As technology improves, we should expect higher quality teachers for less cost" --- if and only if we know how to use technology to increase instruction quality. I contend that we have almost no idea about that.
He is right to blame all of California's ills on tax cuts. They and Oregon have had the worst abuses of the proposition system of all the states. Both used to be prosperous with balanced budgets, but had sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less.
The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!).
Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.
What tax cuts are you talking about? My California state income tax bill (or sales tax) certainly hasn't gone down in recent years. You might be right, but your comment is seeded with anecdotal examples that seem politically partisan ("sneaky?"). "I know a guy who" isn't the best way to prove a point. Instead, numbers showing tax revenue and spending would help illustrate how the financial ills are caused by lower taxes, instead of spending problems.
Property taxes. Income tax and sales tax has had to rise in response. Unless the income tax rate is highly progressive, the net effect is a more regressive tax system.
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets?
Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.
Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.
> There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition.
Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.
We have no way to control for all of the variables. There are so many factors to why education costs are so inflated, the relative effect of technology on the cost is impossible to determine.
Teaching is a weird beast. Computational techniques have improved, but we haven't improved educational techniques much beyond "smaller class sizes" and "online lectures."
We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.
Smaller class sizes weren't an anomaly, larger class sizes were. Going through school the sizes increased from 18, then 20, then 30 when I graduated. My brother (2 years behind me) was at 35 and in demand classes (Math, English, and ESOL) were pushing 40.
It doesn't matter how much technology you through at the problem, teaching 40 kids is unsustainable. Teachers burn out, students lose focus, and it only takes 1 bad student to ruin class cohesion.
"As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! "
Because teachers are technology...?
Also, fun fact here, being "loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff" is partially due to those lower budgets.
An article like this without a single reference to the impact and influence of unions is absurd, like trying to explain the workings of the solar system without invoking the concept of gravity.
California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.
As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period.
It's common knowledge that the founders of the United States favored the separation of church and state because they didn't want government interfering with freedom of religion by telling people what to think.
At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches.
If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think?
We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice.
To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!"
-Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco
"In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget."
Even in good times that's a lot for a school that will only house 4200 students. That's almost $140k for every student it holds. I wonder how long it's going to take for students going through it to generate enough economic activity to cover it.
It’s from an essay of Mark Twain’s* where he talks about how people’s opinions depend on their social situations – where they get their money from, who they talk to, etc. (Corn-pone was a staple food.) It’s a little like the famous Upton Sinclair line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
So I take nazgulnarsil to mean that the author’s position is a trivial function of who pays him.
I think that this is somewhat disingenuous for the reasons noted by others, but also the failure of the writer to acknowledge that colleges and universities have embraced business models and focused on revenue generation in ways that distract from the core mission.
I hate to say this but while most of the guilt should be borne by fat-cat administrators, faculty are greedy whores who are easily divided and conquered.
He bashes the older generation for not spending enough to support the government. Then he excuses them by talking about how they work 2 jobs just to put food on the table.
So it looks like state spending rose from 11% of total income in 1977 to 14% today. And total income usually grows slightly faster than the economy (economic growth = change total income - change in the price level). Thus state spending has been growing faster than incomes rise, faster than inflation and faster than the economy has been growing.
It should be noted that government is expected to get relatively more and more expensive because it's most of it's duties are of the service type. Services like schools, public transport, health care generally defy automation but costs still rise to stay on par with other industries. As the costs of other products become lower, expect to pay more for services.
> on expenditures growing faster than inflation and faster than the growth of the economy
I can buy that they've grown faster than inflation, but have they indeed grown faster than the growth of the economy? I haven't been able to dig up good data on what CA state expenditures were as a percentage of state GDP in, say, the 1960s. (They're currently around 24% of state GDP, if you can find something to compare that to.)
Incidentally, the document you linked doesn't appear to cover most of the actual budget; it's the kind of fake official budget that's passed every year, which currently covers about 1/4 of actual spending. This site has better estimates for the past 20 years, but doesn't go back past 1992: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=19...
I will admit I'm reading into things a bit by assuming that he's not advocating cutting government back when he says things like "your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph." That doesn't sound like a fiscally-conservative libertarian to me.
If he believes in refocusing the priorities and perhaps even seeing a net spending drop while ending up with more education spending, I would consider that defensible and the numbers I produced can certainly support the position that there is some room for rethinking here. If he believes this should manifest as yet more money given to this government, no, I don't think piling more money on is the solution. That's why I'm looking at the total income for the state rather than exactly focusing on the exact amount dedicated to the worthy tasks. It is only one part of the story.
Great candor, great article. Displays some very critical perspectives that people often miss, they want safety, they want good roads, they want good education for their kids, etc, and still not pay the taxes that enable these things. One has to invest now, for a better future.
But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer.
The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues.
Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level.
The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization.
Manhattan Project cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value).(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) It employed more than 130,000 people. Many labs and plants built in 1940s for the project are still in use today.
We have just spend $760 billion on so-called stimulus. The money is gone, and nothing to show for it.
That's how bloated gov't works nowadays, in CA, federal, and all other states. And the letter is calling for more of this!
I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so. At the very least, we might not be un-paving roads.
The raise in taxes might actually have the effect of decreasing the tax base by being the point at which people leave the state. Michigan has a lot of years with a strong Detroit. Now, they have to look at getting new industry and/or belt tightening. It looks like they went for the "in your face" version instead of reducing staff in the counties.
(edit: reply to _delirium, not sure this might be out of order, oops)
As you mention, those stats are only for the UC system (no source), but leave out a whole chunk of other relevant data. The author is addressing what he believes is the decline of public educaiton in general in California, not just UC.
Some people outside CA may not understand that the UC system (University of California) is only one part of the public college and public education system in California.
As far as colleges, California also has substantial state funding for a lot of other non-UC California state colleges (CSU, California State University -- 23 campuses compared to 10 UC) and community colleges.
Of course, additional funding goes to non-college education as well, and grants that people receive who attend private colleges and schools.
Also future liabilities and pensions which are not included on budget.
So my point being--just focusing on your UC stats is misleading.
1. How about the whole California state college system?
2. How about community colleges, vocational education?
3. How about other forms of public education?
4. How about all education grant totals made with public dollars?
5. Also while you are at that, how about adding in future liabilities/pensions which are not included in the yearly budget?
I wrote three comments and erased them all before posting. Let's try #4:
This thing bugs me in a greater sense than simply the issues or people involved, and here's why: you're paying this guy to petition his students to pay him more. Strip away all the (real) problems and politics and all of that, and you end up with some guy you write a check to who is doing his best to a) call you a slovenly idiot, b) get you to spend more on him and his projects, and c) use his position as educator to influence his students to advance his causes.
He may be exactly correct. I don't think he is, but whether he is correct or not doesn't matter. Even if he is 100% accurate in everything he says, it's a conflict of interest. We simply can't have people on the public dole who also are political activists -- even in their spare time. I wish there was some way around this quandary -- the military has higher standards but we still see them getting dragged into various political fights. We have scientists who are activists, teachers who are promoting dissent, and public sector unions who are playing politics with public funds.
Again, it's not that I disagree with their politics or efforts. It's that we cannot self-stimulate. The money that comes from taxpayers cannot be caught into a feedback loop to promote even more money coming from taxpayers. The people we entrust with various public functions cannot also be using the stature we give them to score political points.
The only exceptions to this are political appointees, whose sole purpose is to play politics and be party hacks. For the rest of them, I am concerned that this is a really bad thing that is only getting worse and worse over time. I really hope some of these professional organizations can come up with appropriate ethical standards. It's like I read the other day: it used to be that scientists told you what "is". Now they tell you what we need "to do". (It was accompanied by an interesting graph from Lexis-Nexis with the frequency of the words "science says we must" which is rising exponentially in popular media.)
Aside from the specific politics in this case, the trend here is not good at all.
According to the comment thread, the state population increased from 15 717 204 in 1960 to 36 961 664 in 2010, which figures I assume are from the census.
My own calculations: that's about 1.7% population growth per year on average (1.017^50 * 15717204 ≈ 36 500 000) so we can interpolate the population in 1966 as 15717204 * 1.017^6 ≈ 17 400 000. That gives a state tax burden of roughly US$1610 per person in constant 2010 dollars. The 2009–2010 tax burden is US$3200 per person.
Therefore, at least over the 1966 to 2010 time period, if these figures are correct, then far from being the victims of an "enormous cheat" or "terrible swindle" in which state taxes were cut to the bone by a generation supported by state taxes, necessitating massive cuts in public services, state taxes per capita have nearly doubled during that period, adjusted for inflation using the CPI.
Some other possibilities were suggested in the comment thread:
• Maybe the CPI isn't the right deflator to use, because most of the state's revenues go to education and health care, not vegetables and beef, and these services have inflated in price much faster than the CPI. However, this doesn't rescue the "terrible swindle ... walking away from their obligations" claim.
• Maybe O'Hare isn't referring to public services as they were provided in California during the 1960s but during some earlier period, such as the 1940s. Prof. O'Hare, can you clarify your claims?
• Maybe most of the tax money is being wasted on unproductive things such as prisons, managers and administrators, or legislators, rather than being spent on productive things like public education and road maintenance. In this case, there is a "terrible swindle", but the perpetrators are not the voters or the taxpayers but the employees of the government.
• Maybe much of the high standard of living some decades ago was paid for by externalities. For example, power plants might have been less expensive to operate before the EPA was established, K-12 schools might have had higher quality when economic opportunities for women outside of them were sharply limited by institutionalized sexism, US military power might have kept the prices of many raw materials artificially low, and unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels might have kept the prices of energy and asphalt artificially low. As some of these externalities have been internalized, taxes would have to rise. For example, to attract the best and brightest women to teaching in K-12 education, the way we used to in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd either need a massive propaganda campaign about the nobility and importance of teachers (comparable to the one we have about soldiers), or we'd need to pay top K-12 teachers US$200 000 a year or more — with a credible commitment to continue to do so for half a century into the future.
So, on the face of it, the numbers don't seem to add up to support your claim. Can you help out with that?
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.
—Socrates
These kind of education articles are fucking stupid and only help fan the flames on all sides of deeply flawed ideologies. Beating this dead horse is so common that I've learned to tune these from out when NYT, NPR, etc run these formulaic education scare pieces.
The flaw is that you just can't compare apples to oranges and expect any kind of meaningful conclusion. In this case, it's cross correlating some super high dimensional manifold from 1964(or whenever) comprised of easily hundreds of thousands of variables, against a similar large manifold(2010). There are just too many totally different variables between then and now for it to be a fair comparison at all.
Sure, each side sees what it wants in whatever tiny slice of the data they choose to use. Blame the Mexicans, no blame the Rich, no blame the Liberals, no blame Reagan, ad infinitum.
And this guy, a professional in higher education, wants to step out on a far limb to make some grandiose claim about the status of California education.
I am more fearful of him ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning than I am of any of his exaggerated, inaccurate conclusions.
You know what? More likely than not, the world will keep going the way it has been, people, kids, and education will keep improving, albeit incrementally, and there is not going to be some apocalyptic doomsday in the future of public education in California, or anywhere.
In summary, he's basically following the same pattern so many old people follow: somewhere along the way they lose touch with reality, with the youth, get stuck in their ways, and believe the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and all because of some imagined flaw in the entire youth population. Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations. Bollocks!
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.
> ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning ...
In the letter he does mention "Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other" so maybe it is a little tongue-in-cheek and maybe he is looking for a valid intellectual push back...
Nonetheless, your comment regarding fruit is most apt, as in my eyes, the very nature / focus of academy seems to have changed - from one of developing thinking skills to one of developing people skilled in a certain type of thinking.
This (in my opinion) is the thing that let me down most while I was studying - instead of learning how to approach solving problems, the focus seemed more on learning how to solve certain problems, which I believe will make certain degrees (by year graduated) more-or-less obsolete as the problem domain has shifted on, which may in turn lead to a decline in technological advancement as we'll run into new problems without a clear understanding or process of approaching these situations.
Of course, my view is but one data point in many many thousands, and I studied at Canterbury University in New Zealand.
>Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations.
I don't think this is an accurate description of the article at all. The author is specifically arguing that his generation has violated the social contract that they used to their gain, leaving the current, younger generation holding the bag.
He's not saying "goddamn kids these days"; he's encouraging the upcoming generation to fix what their parents (his generation) have screwed up so that the generation after them doesn't end up shackled in the same way or worse. In fact, he's encouraging them to engage their parents ("they still vote") to help them in fixing things.
The professor doesn't adequately quantify what has gone wrong due to a generation's alleged lack of paying it forward. Generalizations like "failing infrastructure" and "less spending on schools" do not exactly get the fire started in my belly - because I don't see anything glaringly wrong with those items. And, maybe this old man's view of a failing infrastructure is a result of something petty like a crack in the sidewalk directly outside of his house.
And, maybe his generation has spent less time worrying about cracks in sidewalks and potholes in roads because they were investing in things that are now more foreign to an older person. Like biotech, wireless tech, green tech, etc. (I'm sure there are better examples)
BTW - I just used the term "old man" to add impact to my statement. I love my older generation and the insights they bring.
I agree with you on many of your points. I would have to say I agree with you that the world will keep on improving, but to say that there aren't at least a FEW flaws with California's financial system and educational is not very conducive with the evidence.
I can't find a reasonable human being that can agree with the pension system for state employees (I am actually unsure if it applies to teachers), which has to be the biggest money whole I could ever conceive.
Also, I am not sure of the statics, but it is no secret that LA public schools are some of the worst in the country. In the intercity schools anyway. However, I do agree with you that the author doesn't prove his point of declining schools, nor does he prove that increased funding will make them better. He offers this poor anecdote that is obviously politically self-edited.
It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation. Which seems to have a strong connection a child's educational success. I don't believe the author intended to go beyond anything other than his experience with his students, which by admissions filtering are hypothetically better than the over student.
Btw, loved the Abe Simpson quote. However, this situation triggers another famous entertainment quote in my mind.
Reporter: "Mr. Norris, how does it feel to have your career not be taken seriously by a younger internet driven generation of 'joke-sters?'"
>I can't find a reasonable human being that can agree with the pension system for state employees (I am actually unsure if it applies to teachers), which has to be the biggest money whole I could ever conceive.
The issue with pensions is that everyone used to do it. Private and public sector both. It's just easier for the private sector to declare bankruptcy and throw away their obligations. Pensions themselves are a giant scam to steal money from future generations. It isn't a failure of government or the public sector. It's a failure of one generation to consider their children or grand children.
The only people who ever thought pensions are a good idea are old or already retired. You're unlikely to meet a person like that.
>It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation.
The Leave It to Beaver household never existed. What makes you think home life has degenerated in the last 50 years?
I didn't mean to criticize all pensions. Just the State of California's where you can retire and make 90% of your PEAK income for rest of your life. It is simply an unsustainable amount given how much the public sector workers make. There was a case a few weeks ago of a police chief from a small town in California who was going to earn ~$900,000 a year in retirement. It is purely ridiculous.
HOMELIFE
I don't think that has degenerated that much. I do think that we see the population of people who are dysfunctional emotionally, socially, and intellectually is growing at a faster rate than those who socially responsible.
I do not have numbers to quote here, but is it unreasonable to assume that main factors that determine children per generation, period (in years) of a generation, and survivability of said generation.
One could argue that survivability is a huge factor when it comes to inner city youth. Gang violence, malnutrition, high infant mortality rate, ext. However, in terms of the total population it is very small.
However, we have a real division in class since the dawn of birth control in our country. One where people wait to have children and build a career and what-not. And another where people do not. There has also been a steady rise in teenage pregnancy. This creates a separation in the rate of a generation.
We can assume that the number of children born per family are close to equal. But the truth is that families that are poorer typically reproduce more. Or maybe, the families that reproduce more are more poor. Or it could be that the people who have more money, have less children.
This all doesn't mean much until you throw in a little human psychology. Given that most family dysfunctions are generational (alcoholism, sexual abuse, ext) and that these dysfunctions are commonly tied children who have poor education scores in poor families. You quickly begin see an inflation of emotionally damaged people, who just quite frankly don't have emotional resources to invest themselves in an education. Every once in a while, you get some that power through, but the human condition only permits so many.
However, why the kids in functional families systems are screwing up in school? I have no idea. If I had to guess, I'd say that the way our brains learn have been changing rapidly since the invention of the internet.
Or it could be that the people who have more money, have less children.
I don't have real numbers, but it also seems like the very rich also have quite a few children. Super rich financial people in NYC have loads of kids, almost like a hobby. I've met super rich guys here who have 8 kids with 3 different wives. It seems to have a lot to do with whether or not your kids are going to effect you negatively economically. Super rich? Who cares... Super poor? who cares. Middle class or even sort of rich? Kids are going to make your life a financial headache.
Shows that poorer households on average have more children.
However, it also shows that that population is shrinking in unison. Relatively.
However, addition graphs on the website show how many dysfunctional households there are in poor communities. Which have been growing, so I stand by the original argument.
> The issue with pensions is that everyone used to do it. Private and public sector both.
No, everyone didn't do it. At its peak, which was decades ago, 30% of the private sector was covered by pensions and many of them were pretty crappy. Pensions are now fairly rare in the privat sector.
OT: When quoting the Simpsons TV show why don't people credit the writers instead of crediting the fictional character.
If someone quote "If music be the food of love, play on ..." then they credit Shakespeare (rightly or wrongly) not the fictional Duke Orsino of Illyria.
Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflation?