To be honest, I don't know much about homelessness in Japan besides what little I've read online, and what I actually see in public (and considering how much I walk around different places, I do see a lot of places). Anyway, I suspect this is probably another case where America spends a ton of money on stuff, but does so poorly and with bad effect. Just look at healthcare: the US spends far more per person than any other country, but outcomes are pretty lousy on average because it's so unequal and because treatment costs a fortune compared to anyplace else. I'm sure many other spending comparisons between the US and other nations are similar. How much money has the US spent on high-speed rail in California without getting much done?
I don't know what your point is, but the USA also spends tenfold on infrastructure per km with vastly worse results, and has the highest spend on healthcare per capita, with one of the worst outcomes in the developed world. So just spending more doesn't mean much.
It's not a monopoly, it's a baseline. Like the postal service or Medicaid. You're always free to choose the non-government option if it suits you better, but the government option guarantees that there is something reasonable on offer for the 10% of people that corporations deem "unprofitable". Old people, sick people, poor people, rural people. It doesn't have to be great, it just has to provide this now-essential service for those who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
> it's a baseline. Like the postal service or Medicaid
I think the interstate highway system might be an even better example. An absolutely essential part of business infrastructure and personal lifestyles, built and maintained largely at government expense, yet hardly anyone is asking for it to be torn down or privatized. Not even the parts that have tolls. (Yes, there are a few who suggest this, but even by right-wing/libertarian standards they're considered a bit crazy.) Just as anyone with a driver's license can drive on an interstate, anyone should be able to participate in the internet. It's not that much of a stretch from there to saying they should be able to participate fully, which means being able to host sites or apps. It doesn't have be be completely free of cost (see: tolls) but should be freely available and run for the public good. That's no crazier than the interstates.
The danger of course is that this turns in to a subsidy for the private interests. If they can avoid serving the unprofitable because the government will pick up the slack, then tax payers are paying for the service of that 10% and private business gets all the profit from the rest.
Either you need industry charges to cover that cost to government, or a mandate that they can't ignore expensive customers.
Maybe, but more targeted than that. You could tax health insurance companies to pay for a public system, or you could put a surcharge on phone bills paid directly by the consumer to subsidise service to rural users.
There are lots of options each with their own trade offs.
Even if it's a monopoly (not strictly required), nationalisation means the nation becomes the only shareholder, and the profits are directed to the growth of the nation rather than the business.
Apps are probably not the right target for that, but Amazon might well be — it has expanded to the point it needs its own delivery network because government owned post isn't enough in certain countries.
It would be a massive pain to do this well, certainly more than would fit into a comment box like this. And not just because it's a multinational, and different governments will have different opinions about the process of nationalisation.
Because they'd operate at cost, which is wildly out of alignment with what the market will charge you for a CPU cycle.
I'd bet that <10% of what you pay for an EC2 instance is hardware acquisition and labor and electricity. The other 90 is in support of the never ending zero-sum game that is fighting over market share.
Compare it to municipal internet, in which you usually pay less to get more because you can fire the marketing department.
"Residents can work up to an average of 80 hours per week. The aforementioned general surgeons work an average of 60.78 hours. Meanwhile, orthopedic surgeons work an average of 54.17 hours per week, and plastic surgeons operate just under 50 hours per week."
I wasn't talking about farmer cooperatives. Worker cooperatives are owned and run by the workers, thus the name. Certainly some cooperatives are not worker cooperatives.
How many have even tried it? Companies are profit-seeking but that doesn't mean they will automatically make correct profitable decisions at every juncture. They're led by humans who generally make small conservative changes based on intuition. We see companies languish, stagnate, and miss critical strategic opportunities all the time.
Poor management is endemic. Managers are for the most part trying to maximize their ego/status. This means having their "underlings" grinding away (preferably in view) for as many hours as possible. That this situation is bad for the company doesn't matter since management is the one executing the poor decisions.
I think there is a change of attitude with a shorter work week. If I am working 9-5 at the same place everyday, I basically live there. It is easier to decide to take more breaks because there is no Friday to relax or get chores done or go to appointments. I take every other Friday off and it helps me focus more at work. I schedule all my weekday appointments for Friday (as much as I can). Monday thru Thursday I can push a little harder and be a little more focused because I know I have Friday (or a week from Friday) to take my dog to the vet, me to the doctor, or whatever else I need to do. I would love a real 4 day work week.
I have bad news for you. Those workers who demand 40% wage increases and 32 hour work weeks will be "easily replaced" by auto factories in the South who have right to work laws.
> Different workers in different nations have different cultures and compete with each other for a scarce supply of buyers.
This is a description of the status quo of capitalist competition, but is not a fact of nature. We can arrange our economies to work in cooperation with one another, rather than in competition. Competition is used specifically to depress all worker wages for the benefit of the ownership class, and we do not have to accept that at face value.
well, the unions pushed for wage requirements in the auto industry within the USMCA (NAFTA2) and required Mexico to (effective) legalize unions alongside lots of other rights enshrining measures. So Mexican workers benefited greatly from the work of these unions.
As someone in the UK, I can buy a subscription to Amazon Prime Video, or not, I can buy a subscription to Netflix, or not. I can pay for a BBC licence so I can watch iPlayer, or not.
I can watch free TV on ITVx or Channel 4 switching a subscription for adverts.
That's not strictly true, there are plenty of streaming services that come out of the UK but they are tailored for the UK market; BritBox being the most prominent.
The parent was making a jibe at the TV License which is mandatory if you own a tv or "streaming capable device" (because the BBC can stream now.. sigh).
The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students.
"Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior."
I can pretty confidently tell you that for every student admitted to Harvard with 1430 SAT there are at least 10 more students out there who were rejected with at least as much score. SAT score and grades are merely a necessary condition to get in, but they haven't been sufficient in a very long time.
The original study does address whether ALDC applicants are "as good" as typical applicants -
> Overall, our
results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they
had been treated as a typical applicant.
And on athletes -
> Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission
even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average
rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip
But the article doesn't deal with whether recruited athletes as a category are diverse. Probably, they are diverse and these statistics mean something remarkably different from the knee-jerk narrative in the article and many comments here.
Article doesn't, but the study it's based on does. Recruited athletes are less-diverse than the general applicant pool:
> For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories.
My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.
You're looking at a misleading data point on two levels.
First, note that the 75.5% figure in that table includes Hispanic/Latino people, which not all sources will -- importantly the study I was quoting doesn't include these under "white", so we can't compare those numbers. There's a different row in your table that excludes those to get 58.9% white. This alone gets us back to the ALDC group being disproportionately white.
Second, it doesn't matter if 75% of the US population is white, but rather what percentage of the college-admission aged US population is white. (Not that people outside of the 17-23ish bracket don't apply to Harvard's undergraduate program, but I suspect that they do so in insignificant numbers.)
It says that in 2021 amongst 18-24 year olds, 52.8% were white. Thus the ALDC group is even more disproportionately white than the whole-population number would make you think.
I don't feel like that's too surprising. There is that saying "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." It reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0
Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians.
I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.
There's not what's happening. What's happening is (made up numbers, relative proportion a true)
1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit.
1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit.
Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.
This is an important point. I do agree wealth and access to privileged resources are too concentrated, but it's silly to assume that the child of two Harvard graduates, due to education, genetics and preference, wouldn't be a better candidate for Harvard than a random person
I think the argument is the opposite... they start with one or more orders of magnitude of qualified applicants in excess of capacity. and to meet DEI goals, only X% of those accepted can be white anyway. how they actually pick from the qualified applicant pool is fairly arbitrary to begin with. so as long as whatever on-campus KPIs they track for the legacy-admit population are the same, why does it really matter?
I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work.
if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.
So these schools have goals to increase diversity but they want to preserve their culture? Those are competing goals. Eliminating legacy admissions would be a lasting increase in diversity.
I don't see those two as mutually exclusive, prima facie, unless you see "culture" as a euphemism for "perpetuating white supremacy". it certainly can be, but it can also be things like haverford's honor code, which only works when a critical mass of students find it meaningful. or it can be totally innocuous traditions like u chicago's annual scavenger hunt. elite schools can accept being each other's close competitors, but they can't accept being indistinguishable substitutes for their +/- 1 peers on the us news leaderboard.
Legacy admissions have a close to zero chance of increasing diversity. The entire point is that people who are just like former students get preference. By definition it's the opposite of a program to seek out those who have a different life experience than the status quo.
No, it won't. Plenty of legacy admits are "diverse" now. And with increase of standards from banning affirmative action, legacy status will be the best chance of many from "diverse" backgrounds.
Do you have data supporting your claim that "plenty of legacy admits are diverse"? By definition the legacy admissions are very similar to previous attendees. You need to explain how that would increase diversity.
You brought up diversity, so what kind do you mean? Going forward, post affirmative action, just by test scores and gpa almost all students admitted at top schools will be asian or white. But there have been five decades where significant numbers from other races have attended these top schools and their kids and siblings can benefit from legacy admissions. (For example, this year ~15% of Harvard freshman were Black) Legacy admissions will absolutely increase this kind of diversity. If you get rid of it, it may further slightly benefit asians over whites, but I am not sure this increases "diversity".
Just test scores and GPA have never been the only factor and never will be. For example universities aren't looking for robots who are just good test takers. I'm surprised you're speaking on this subject but seemingly haven't done the homework and aren't aware of what existing practice is and what the ruling still allows.
Going forward almost nothing will change in outcomes. The ruling said universities are allowed to use a student's life experience of racism as a factor. Harvard already highlighted this in their public response to the ruling. That's not race but it is a very strong proxy for race isn't it?
Legacy admissions can only maintain the status quo so there will be no increase in diversity if legacy admissions continue. To increase current diversity levels you would have to put some effort into it. The status quo rarely changes organically when it comes to gaining or losing power.
"legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted
It totally is an official thing or was when I applied. Statistics on legacy vs non-legacy admission rates and how legacy status was factored (the nature of the advantage you got varied by school) in were readily available when I was applying to schools.
Whats the distribution look like though? I can generate you two datasets that have the same average but different distributions to the point that a small minority of one dataset would qualify for admission if they were combined.
"On average, LDC applicants (that is, excluding athletes) are stronger than typical applicants. However, the average LDC admit is weaker than the average typical admit, suggesting an admissions advantage for LDC applicants." (p.3 of http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf )
If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.
That says 4 companies control 65% of the retail market. That is not a monopoly and there are many other grocers that consumers can shop at, like Amazon, Whole Foods, Safeway. Trader Joe's or the many other regional specialty ones.
