
Policy for Growth and Innovation - gatsby
http://blog.samaltman.com/policy-for-growth-and-innovation
======
ecopoesis
What an incredibly naive view of the world.

As others have pointed out, reducing education to "moar money!" is simplistic.

Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there
any studies that show it would help growth? Maybe we should instead focus our
efforts on helping the unemployed and underemployed already in the US get
training and jobs.

Cheaper Bay Area housing only helps people in the Bay Area. There's a whole
lot more to the United States. Wouldn't a better policy be to try to make it
so businesses in Detroit, or Buffalo or any other dying city can be as
successful as those in Silicon Valley?

Reducing regulation: the old cry of business owners everywhere. Regulation can
be good. Sam uses the example of drug companies, and yes, bringing new drugs
to market is expensive. But the consequences of screwing up or literally
deadly. See the example of Vioxx. Isn't one of the rallying cry of hackers
right now Net Neutrality? How do we think that's going to be accomplished
outside of regulation? Isn't the lack of regulation (not calling broadband
Title II) what got us into this mess?

~~~
j_baker
> Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there
> any studies that show it would help growth?

I don't have a source handy, but I believe studies have shown that immigration
does indeed help economic growth with the vast majority of that growth
benefiting the immigrants themselves.

~~~
datasage
How much of the economic growth is simply due to adding more participant the
the economy vs innovating new markets?

When you start normalizing for factors such as inflation and population
growth, US economic growth in the past couple of decades ends up being very
low.

------
nhaehnle
_> Very low growth and a democracy are a very bad combination._

Why? It would be interesting to see a justification for this.

Very low growth and _capitalism_ are a problematic combination if you believe
Piketty, in the sense that the combination can become poisonous for democracy
and many other values of the enlightenment.[0]

But I don't see how democracy is necessarily incompatible with very low growth
(or even a shrinking economy). Note that I still believe growth is a good
thing regardless of this (unlike some people especially from an
environmentalist bent), but it irks me when statements like this are thrown
around with an unjustified air of authority.

Other than that, sama really misses the elephant in the room, which is plain
old macroeconomics. This is more of a problem in Europe than in the US, but
bad macroeconomic beliefs are pretty pervasive within the political elite, to
the point where the same person will wring their hands asking for how to
enable growth, but refuse to listen to what mainstream _academic_ economists
are saying (let alone heterodox academic economists).

[0] With the typical rate of growth below the typical rate of return on
capital, society necessarily becomes more divided by wealth and poverty.

~~~
nostromo
Democracies generally don't live within their means. That's because elected
officials know that voters demand more services than they're willing to pay
for.

Democracies have gotten away with this by inflating past debts away (in
effect, paying for debt via growth). But in a low-growth world, many more
western democracies are going to end up like Greece.

[http://www.economist.com/node/21561932](http://www.economist.com/node/21561932)

~~~
nhaehnle
Yes, that seems to be where sama is coming from. On the other hand, I suspect
that this is again one of those truisms that may not really be true at all.

Consider that in Europe (and to a lesser extent also in the US), mainstream
academic economists have essentially been begging politicians to spend more,
as that is what the macroeconomic models have been advising them to do for the
last few years. And yet there has been a lot of austerity.

This _really_ clashes with the idea that elected officials simply give in to
demands by voters. The story is obviously more nuanced than this simple
truism.

Add to this that it is unclear what "living within their means" even means. If
you look at it in terms of physical goods and services available, then _of
course_ they are living within their means, because living beyond means at the
level of a society is physically impossible.

You could then clarify your definition to encompass something like "being on a
sustainable path into the future", but again, if you evaluate that in terms of
physical reality a fair evaluation is probably that democratic states are on
average better at preserving resources etc. than states with other forms of
government.

The cynic in me would say that the whole "democracy and low growth don't go
together" is really code for "democracy and low growth _and the kind of
unequal society I like_ don't go together",[0] because of course democratic
voting outcomes will demand fairness in the sense that _if_ a belt-tightening
across society is necessary, the belts of those at the top have to be
tightened the most. So: democracy, low growth, unequal society: pick any two
out of three, but you can't have all three at once.

[0] Though I assume most people talking about these issue are not consciously
aware that there even is a distinction.

------
sudioStudio64
Business people often mistake their success in one area as a validation of all
their ideas. There is a kind of, and I really don't mean to sound
condescending or accusatory, naïve optimism about the motives of other members
of their class. Getting rid of regulations on the production of medicine, but
focusing on regulating AI...a subject which has recently been in vogue among
the digerati...kind of illustrates how radically divergent the priorities of
that political cohort are from the middle class.

------
solve
Student loans! Nothing is more profoundly affecting young American's ability
to innovate after they've left school, than the growing, crushing debt from
student loans.

It's the primary reason that I've moved out of the US for the last several
years. I didn't want to waste all of my 20's and 30's, never being able to
take sufficient time off to build the innovation that I want to exist.

On the flip side, not having this debt while working in the US is a huge
relative advantage for recently-immigrated foreigners.

~~~
happyscrappy
Not having that debt should give foreigners a huge advantage whether or not
they come to the US, but that does not seem to be the case.

~~~
solve
* All else being equal. As in, explaining to people here why e.g. a $70,000 / yr salary in the US would be much more attractive to them than it would be to me, with >$100,000 in high interest student loans. And all often is nearly equal in the US - as long as you speak English and can get the visa without the company's help.

------
Alex3917
> Fix education.

\- The disparities in education levels in the US are primarily a product of
parenting styles, not the school system. Having a better school system would
obviously be good, but it's probably not possible to improve our school system
enough to overcome the contribution (or lack thereof) from parents.

\- We currently have a teacher retention problem, which may be more important
than the problem of not being able to fire bad teachers with tenure. Roughly
50% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, and that's
after investing a substantial amount of time and money to get the relevant
masters degree and certifications. While it should be easier to fire bad
teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers,
good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons. So any system
that makes it easy to fire bad teachers may well end up creating a system with
a higher ratio of bad teachers to good teachers.

I agree that the root of most of America's problems revolve around education,
but spending more money on education isn't going to fix (or even ameliorate)
our problems unless it is deployed very judiciously. (And it may well be
possible to improve the school system by spending less money than we spend
currently.)

~~~
humanrebar
> We currently have a teacher retention problem

But we don't have a lack of teachers. Couldn't retention just reflect poor
compensation and bad working conditions?

> While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in
> places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up
> getting fired for political reasons.

That's true of any job, though. What makes the teaching profession special in
this regard?

~~~
Alex3917
> Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working
> conditions?

Absolutely.

> That's true of any job, though.

Not really. In most jobs you can get fired due to internal company politics.
But there aren't a lot of jobs where the general public can force your boss to
fire you for, say, being insufficiently racist.

------
pen2l
Good essay, but one small nitpick:

    
    
        The problems with education are well-documented—teachers make far too little, it’s too 
        difficult to fire bad teachers, some cultures don’t value education, etc.  Many of these 
        are easy to fix—pay teachers a lot more in exchange for a change in the tenure rules, for
        example—and some issues (like cultural ones) are probably going to be very difficult to fix.
    

As another HN'er has pointed out, teacher pay or funding is absolutely not the
issue. Per rayiner:

Judge Posner on such comparisons: [http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-...](http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-
performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html)

More numbers: [http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-
abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-
scores-usa.html?m=1)

The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not
convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a
wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city
Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white
flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go
to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.

> Sometimes the government people ask “Would you ever move YC out of the US?”
> with nervous laughter? I really like it here and I sure hope we don’t, but
> never say never.

Hah. :) No you won't. Or, not that you won't, rather, it seems beneath you
guys to say something like this. Of course you would, and should move out of
the US if it proves to be a profitable decision, it just seems a little
underhanded to use it as a political bargaining tool to get your aims. But I
understand now that this is how the game works, so I guess I'm undecided about
how I feel about this.

~~~
sudioStudio64
You are right. If impoverished areas aren't counted the US actually ranks
quite high in education compared to other countries. Its inequality that stems
from the historical precedents you mention that determine outcomes.

~~~
hellbannotifier
Looks like you've been hellbanned. Replying here because it's the last comment
of yours with a serviceable reply link.

------
bokonist
" _Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-
skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter
of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be
born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth._ "

I'm going to leave aside the issue of high-skilled immigration for moment and
talk about Sam's addendum of "immigration more generally."

Low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America have not yet shown
evidence of assimilating into the American mainstream. Income and educational
attainment is still much lower, the communities are still segregated, etc.

So there are two possibilities:

Possibility 1) It will be just a matter of time before they assimilate, just
as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate.

Possibility 2) For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is
much more difficult. It is even more so when there is a fluid border with
Mexico, and the U.S. no longer does the same sort of cultural imperialism it
did in the early 1900's in order to assimilate immigrants. Thus long term,
assimilation will not occur. Long term, the U.S. will end up looking a lot
like Brazil, with a white overclass, a brown helot class, and a black
underclass. Technology growth will slow as it becomes low status for the
educated white overclass to do real work. Political corruption will grow as
voters will vote as tribal blocks, and votes are determined by buying the
votes, rather than making good policies for the nation.

I don't want to get into an argument about whether 1) or 2) is more likely.
But I will argue that there is at least a 5% chance that 2) is true. If 2) is
true, it would fundamentally change the character of the U.S. in a very
negative way.

If we slow down immigration, and 1) turns out to be right, then we can always
let more immigrants in later. If we accelerate immigration, and 2) turns out
to be true, _it cannot be undone_. Not ever. Thus even if there is a 5% chance
that 2) is right, it makes sense to slow down third-world immigration, until
we can prove that assimilation will occur.

~~~
pen2l
You bring up good points -- but reading that quote again,

> "Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-
> skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a
> matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened
> to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of
> birth."

That's not justice. Sam complains about discriminating on country of birth,
but yet he's discriminating on class/merit/competency. If we have The VC's way
of doing things, we're not going to increase immigration for people who really
fairly deserve to be here -- the gays getting prosecuted in Uganda, the
atheists fighting for life in Saudia Arabia, you're advocating getting folks
here who are most likely doing well in their home places. Let me tell you, the
rockstar engineers in India, China, etc. are usually from the upper classes in
India, China, etc., if they don't come here, I assure you they will be able to
find nice-paying jobs there and remain in the upper class tier.

~~~
bokonist
I've added a sentence to make it clear I was talking about "immigration more
generally"

As for your point...

Anyone who gets on a moral high horse about "discrimination" is going to end
up in web of contradictions before long. Virtually every human institution is
based on "discrimination", and much of that discrimination is going to be at
least partially based on factors such as innate ability, geography, or genetic
distance. Families and kinsmen treat family members differently than outsiders
(you don't let anyone off the street into your home). Local community members
discriminate against carpet baggers and tourists. Software companies
discriminate against people not smart enough to write good code. "Elite"
colleges are elite because they discriminate based on class, character, and
aptitude. Etc. Etc.

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

------
api
What I keep saying about SF's housing crisis is that it's this:

"Economic growth, affordable housing, NIMBYism, pick two."

The Bay has picked the first and the last. I also get the sense -- though I
don't live there -- that the people protesting the explosion of rents and
house prices are the same people who insist that nothing too tall or big be
built and that every new construction be subjected to a whole slew of
restrictions around how "green" it is, how it will "impact the local
community," etc.

While these concepts aren't bad in and of themselves, when applied at the
civic scale in this way they typically just provide opportunities for
obstructionists who want to keep prices high. So in the end it ends up being a
kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance -- in this case greens and
preservationists with slumlords and banks working hand in hand to keep rents
and costs high.

Activists of virtually every political persuasion tend to be horribly naive
about the ways their interests and concerns can be twisted to serve agendas
they may not otherwise support.

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

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

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

------
justizin
I've really liked a lot of what I've read from Sam since he has taken the
reigns, but I really don't like the jingoism in the immigration language.

The United States needs to stop trying to be "the greatest nation in the
world", and we need to participate in a globally and locally aware economy.

I'm certainly not against all immigration, but the problem is, an essay like
this is better used to support that argument than to make any substantive
change to education. I started training for my craft at 12 years old, under
the direction of my grandfather, who was the Director of Engineering at one of
the largest research institutions in the world.

Having all that going for me, he still used the fact that my poor, stupid
parents had to ask him for help to cover the cost of raising me to discourage
me from developing the skills that actually made me employable - he was
adamant that I become Microsoft certified instead of learning Linux. A bit of
a tangent intended to illustrate the american exceptionalism, the greatest
generation. This old fart wanted me to work with Windows, and work for the
NSA, at 15. For friendship, mentorship and often employment, foreigners were
my greatest resource, in their home lands, over The Internet. Why do all the
"smartest" and "best" need to live here, on land that's already stolen?

It's been a great struggle over the past 21 years to continue educating myself
and to find opportunities to cover my living costs that wouldn't forcibly
detract from what I would learn. I lived in SF for nearly ten years under the
poverty line, sometimes working for entrepreneurs for under minimum wage.

People in the Bay Area tend to stop looking for workers in the US when they
reach Fremont, sometimes when they reach the end of their own driveway.

~~~
ojbyrne
s/reigns/reins/

~~~
justizin
Totes respect and thank you for your poignant correction.

[EDIT: this has to be the randomest rant in response to a grammar correction
of all time, but I was surprised to find no ideological responses at all, and
I wanted to pontificate ;d]

I read at college level in elementary, but I think it's easy to see how that
might also lead to having some softened edges, because education was rarely
available to me when it was relevant.

I assume this to be true of most people, I think there is one thing people
resent about tech that is kind of a revenge of the nerds thing, and part of
that to me is like, look, even colleges didn't have room for a lot of the
nerds.

Where the hell do you go if you are a poor, chronic nerd who can't get into
college?

Obviously, I assume my experience with this to be acute compared to a
similarly talented person who is not white.

There are a lot of smart people in the USA. I know it is important for us to
be a place where some smart people who would be oppressed to migrate, as we
are a nation of immigrants.

I adamantly think we should look to the children of immigrants who pick food,
clean homes, offload ships, plumb toilets, fix elevators, etc.. before we look
to foreign adults.

I strongly feel the USA economy will be the most healthy in a world where
people in other parts of the world have a healthy local economy and a
proportionate ability to ours to participate in the global economy.

I think global information economy makes more sense than global economy which
tranfers things like food between continents, while creating harmful
pollution.

If there is American Exceptionalism, I think it should make what is supposed
to be right about the west present everywhere, without military force, but
instead by empowering the working class to become knowledge workers.

And we should stop absorbing into western culture what is inherent to fascism.

------
vasilipupkin
"If I had to take a company public, I’d love to only have my shares priced and
traded once every month of quarter."

sorry, that's a bit non-sensical. The enormous uncertainty associated with
lack of transparent pricing would lower both private and public market equity
valuations. We want prices to be as transparent as possible

------
bdcs
>A third change would be something to incent people to hold shares for long
periods of time. One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on
every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a
graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to
10% for shares held for 5 years.

"However most empirical studies find that the relationship between [Financial
Transaciton Tax] and short-term price volatility is ambiguous and that "higher
transaction costs are associated with more, rather than less, volatility"." \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effect_on_volatility)

------
ap22213
Regarding education, do the people who need it the most (underutilized adult
workers) clearly understand how to pursue it? Do they understand the costs,
benefits, risks, and rewards? I doubt it.

Policies should emphasize the of dissemination information that ties education
to opportunity. That way people can make informed decisions (e.g. 'if I do
these things, spend this much money, spend this much time, then I can expect
to make this much money, in these metro areas').

Maybe education is partly a design problem? What if education was just easier
to plan for, obtain, validate, and apply?

------
ojbyrne
Feeling some dissonance:

"Public companies end up with a bunch of short-term stockholders who
simultaneously criticize you for missing earnings by a penny this quarter and
not making enough long-term investments."

"Target a real GDP growth rate. You build what you measure. If the government
wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it."

I can't fully express what I dislike about these two statements, they just
seem conflicting. Perhaps suggesting some of the Tea Party-ish coddling the
"job creators" and punishing the "welfare mothers."

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

------
gautambay
> _It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want,
> for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world._

As the internet increases parity in education globally, immigration reform
will become even more important for the US to retain its edge, as people born
outside the US will comprise a larger percentage of the world's best
entrepreneurs.

As an immigrant trying to fix education, #1 (fix education) and #3 (education
reform) ring especially true for me, but it's also fascinating to think how
closely-tied the two are.

------
jqm
The fairness angle (regarding immigration) is kind of strange. If the country
was actually concerned about "fairness" for non-citizens, it would have had a
substantially different foreign policy over the last 50 years.

"Don't deserve special right because I was born here....". Uh, ya, that is
kind of the definition of a citizen of a sovereign country. At least until the
emergence of an enlightened global citizenship system (eventually inevitable,
and I for one will welcome the day...).

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

------
fivedogit
Here we go again on the immigration thing. Very disappointing. It's as simple
as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down.
That benefits businesses and, in turn, VCs.

Two things, specifically, irritate me about Paul's and Sam's argument in favor
of immigration reform.

1\. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you
xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for
jobs?" My (and others') opposition to immigration reform is based on a desire
to stop the ever-progressing tilt of power and leverage towards businesses and
away from labor. To suggest that we are scared of competition (or worse) is
offensive.

2\. The idea that there aren't enough engineers to go around is simply not
true. I know several capable engineers (myself included) who have struggled to
find work because companies (a) want you in a tech hub already (b) seem
unwilling to train someone from 90% to 100% to do the job and (c) want to pay
as little as possible. It feels lazy. "We really don't want to relocate and
train folks, so let's just change the immigration laws."

~~~
morgante
Regarding your contention that there is a large class of qualified engineers
who are somehow unable to find work, I just don't buy it.

If the reason they can't find work is because employers are unwilling to offer
relocation, why on earth would those employers be pursuing the even more
costly and complicated relocation of foreign workers? In general, I genuinely
think there is a domestic talent shortage. Of the talented developers I talk
to about new opportunities, a majority are overseas—if we could bring them in
easily, we'd readily do so (and pay them market rate). But the visa process is
so tenuous and expensive at this point that it's incredibly challenging for
startups to even consider that route.

Moreover, I'll put my money where my mouth is. You say you're a capable
engineer. If you email morgante@cafe.com and convince me of that, I'd be happy
to offer (a) relocation, (b) training in our stack, and (c) NYC market salary.

~~~
nostromo
> I'll put my money where my mouth is. [...] market salary

That's his point though. Salaries should rise. If you can't find an employee
at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more,
or get creative.

I'd like to buy AAPL shares at last year's market rate, but I'm having a hard
time finding any takers.

~~~
morgante
> If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market
> rate and you need to pay more, or get creative.

We actually pay slightly above market. Not dramatically, because that would be
untenable for VCs and business stakeholders, but incrementally—over time,
that's how prices should increase.

------
bokonist
Sam says " _It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any
subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world._
" but he also says, " _I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of
the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on
education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending,
actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars
in the future._ "

So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even
more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you
can spend money to improve it.

It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can
spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once
I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper
lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there
is nothing else I can do.

The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend
enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is
literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes.

So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to
"max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on?

Learning consists of four components:

1) book learning

2) practice

3) mentorship/coaching

4) motivation to do the above 3 things

As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost
infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you
only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they
have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself.
Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and
rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money.

Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of
"spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on
schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor
mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know
got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than
they did in school.

So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That
would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe
spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on
the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people
could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way.

 _If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the
amount of money it spends producing it._

It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the
grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to
fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole.

 _Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government
wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it._

Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that
as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities
of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of
GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government
policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the
expense of transitioning to a art based economy.

 _One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded
(and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate
that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held
for 5 years._

I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5%
transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is
there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of
the market?

~~~
Alex3917
The issue is that most Americans don't have enough literacy (including math)
ability to benefit from the best of free online education. Nor do they have
the other basic skills necessary to be able to be functional adults.

~~~
bokonist
_The issue is that most Americans don 't have high enough literacy (including
math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education._

Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Americans don't have enough literacy
ability to benefit from the _best_ free online education. Well, yeah, if you
define the _best_ as the advanced stuff then that is true by definition. There
is plenty of free basic education material out there too. The core of math
literacy is just lots of drilling on multiplication tables and such, which
does not cost money at all.

I don't see you addressing my central point. For the Americans without basic
abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck? Every American already gets many,
many years of quite expensive schooling trying to teach the basics. Reading
and textbook material for teaching the basics is not, and need not be,
expensive. So either a) schools are grossly incompetent at actually teaching
or b) schools are being asked to do the impossible, and are hitting up on
innate cognitive limits in the average person (or maybe a bit of both).

~~~
Alex3917
> For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck?

Sometimes, but not always. It also depends on your definitions. E.g. when kids
aren't able to learn because they show up at school having not eaten anything
for two days, is the problem that parents don't have enough money to feed
their kids, or is it that schools don't have enough money to feed the kids?
And this example is actually a significant issue -- right now if schools are
running up against the cognitive limits of Americans, it's in large part
because a huge percentage of Americans have had their cognitive limits
artificially lowered by external societal dysfunction. E.g. in addition to
malnutrition, look at all the kids with high lead exposure, premature birth,
health problems caused by poverty and shitty parenting, etc.

~~~
bokonist
_It also depends on your definitions._

If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should
advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead
exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.

