
A letter to my students - sunkan
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/08/24/a-letter-to-my-students/
======
pg
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?

~~~
patio11
Using state figures and the CPI calculator:

1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)

1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)

2008-2009: $144B ($145)

2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)

Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population
growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled.

 _You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less._

I feel the urge to get out numbers here, but it would be like shooting fish in
a barrel.

~~~
tmsh
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.

~~~
Retric
If you want to see how CA as fucked themselves look at spending on prisons,
pensions, and personnel.

Prisons
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-
clean.svg)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_rate_of_inma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_rate_of_inmates_incarcerated_under_state_and_federal_jurisdiction_per_100,000_population_1925-2008.png))
Just locking up all the bad people sounds like a great idea but it's also
ridiculously expensive and provides little long term benefit.

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.

~~~
igravious
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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_timeline.gif)

~~~
c1sc0
Funny, I didn't notice that bad language at all until I re-read the comment.

~~~
duairc
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.

------
Osiris
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!

~~~
_delirium
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):

    
    
      Year  State funding (2010 $)  Enrollment  Per-student funding (2010 $)
      1965  $1.37 billion              59,000   $23,000
      1970  $1.84b                     73,000   $25,000
      1975  $2.31b                     84,000   $28,000
      1980  $2.75b                     94,000   $29,000
      1985  $3.23b                    108,740   $30,000
      1990  $3.47b                    125,044   $28,000
      1995  $2.68b                    123,948   $22,000
      2000  $3.94b                    141,028   $28,000
      2005  $3.09b                    158,933   $19,000
      2010  $3.02b                    181,520   $17,000
    

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.

~~~
bokonist
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.

~~~
_delirium
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).

------
wheaties
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."

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
patio11
One quibble: those "balanced" budgets included pension guarantees and other
contractual terms offered to state workers (1962: health insurance) which

a) cost "nothing" to just write in the paper -- quite easy to balance

b) were actuarial suicide

c) will never be repealed.

------
abcxyz
"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!?

~~~
Locke1689
_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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_In general teacher salaries are pretty poor,..._

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.

<http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf>

[http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...](http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_benefits.pdf)

~~~
btilly
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.

I don't have any statistics on it, but
[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teacher...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teachers_work)
is in line with the anecdotes that my mother and sister have given me about
how much work teaching is.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
jseliger
_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.

------
ju2tin
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.

------
shmulkey18
Reality check: "The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm:
California taxpayers don’t get much bang for their bucks." <http://www.city-
journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html>

Excerpt:

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.

------
Starchild
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

------
KevinMS
Perfect timing for this

[http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools)

~~~
mkr-hn
"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.

Is there an economist in the house?

~~~
mattmanser
$140k per student? Is the school only going to stay open 1 year then?

~~~
mkr-hn
Last two sentences.

------
nazgulnarsil
tell me where a man gets his corn-pone and I'll tell you what his 'pinions
are.

~~~
shadowfox
?

~~~
celoyd
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.

* [http://books.google.com/books?id=MEX5JlUu60IC&lpg=PA2...](http://books.google.com/books?id=MEX5JlUu60IC&lpg=PA2&ots=Qa8_aEXCbe&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false)

~~~
shadowfox
Ah Thanks!

------
dannyb
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.

------
endlessvoid94
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.

This guy should run for congress.

------
jerf
Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while
babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium):
[http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu...](http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/documents/CHART-B.pdf)

See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second
paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.

~~~
_delirium
> 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...](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1990_2010&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=fy10&chart=F0-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=CA&color=c&local=s)

~~~
jerf
See bokonist's post(s), caveats and all.

------
skowmunk
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.

How does one break this paradox?

------
mudil
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!

PS Great book on Manhattan project: [http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-
Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-
Rhodes/dp/0684813785)

~~~
leot
The reasoning seems to go:

1) The stimulus was supposed to mitigate the effects of the recession, and

2) The recession was still very bad, therefore

=======================

3) The stimulus had no positive effect/was not worth the cost.

Now, who wants to play the game "find the fallacy"?

------
zeteo
That song he links to at the end is quite awesome. I guess this is the
original version

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs>

------
vital101
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.

~~~
protomyth
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.

------
Experimentalist
(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?

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

------
kragen
There's a lot more discussion of this post at the author's own blog:
[http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-
policy/a-letter-t...](http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-
policy/a-letter-to-my-students/)

Here's the comment I posted:

I copied the following figures from the comment at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794>

1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)

1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)

2008-2009: $144B ($145)

2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)

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?

Other comments related to this question include
[http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-
policy/a-letter-t...](http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-
policy/a-letter-to-my-students/comment-page-1/#comment-45779) which seems to
not be using the same facts as the commenter whose figures I quoted above.

The California Budget Project's summary gives a lower number of US$86.8
billion for 2009-10, which is still much larger than the inflation-adjusted
per-capita 1966 number:
[http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budget...](http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budgetmyths.pdf)

------
korch
_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._

—Abe Simpson

~~~
commandar
>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.

~~~
epoxyhockey
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.

------
revoltingx
Hippies pretty much ruined it for everyone.

------
danbmil99
TL, DR: liberal tax & spend is the way O brother! Heed the call and deliver us
from the hideous capitalists!

Oh BTW check out my new startup, we're going to make a ton of money.

