The second, in my opinion, represents a misunderstanding of why the (likely STEM) college degree has become the defacto gate to employment. Academic curricula, by design, focus far less on skills and masteries that are directly marketable and instead focus on building a foundation in a given field from which students can build on later (in either employment or higher studies and research). In my experience, the first 6 months to two years of many technical jobs is exactly the apprenticeship you're alluding to. However, they are being subsidized by the employer, not the taxpayer. Given the investment being made in new hires, the focus on cheap (from the employer's perspective) general signals to basic competence (like the ability to complete a degree at a university that already invests heavily in selecting for the best candidates) becomes a logical position to take.

I say all of these things, but unfortunately can't offer a solution. So long as the risk in a new hire is so one sided, I can't see the situation changing.

I come from an academic family (both parents had doctorates and one had a law degree), and I can appreciate the effect education has on one's ability to cross skill boundaries, read between the lines of empty rhetoric, and so on.

We already subsidize higher education to a significant degree. Perhaps if we incentivized high school graduates with state-subsidized apprenticeships that build into a tuition account (like social security, or a civilian GI Bill), people can still receive higher education with an assurance that they are a productive member of society in the first place. Sure, it raises the bar for entry if you don't have rich parents, but do we really need more indebted baristas with English degrees?

I feel like you're making a value judgement here that isn't entirely fair. The biggest shock to me after graduating (with a degree in Electrical Engineering degree suma cum laude from a top 5 engineering school) is how much a crock of utter shit the much spouted "STEM shortage" was. Not only are there plenty of graduates, the actual duties involved in the over whelming majority of the available jobs could be done by next to anyone.

When your indebted baristas are just as qualified for highly lucrative positions like enterprise software engineering it's a cultural problem not an individual problem.

As an aside, the smart companies are using this to make bank. I work in enterprise software for a major financial institution and these liberal arts majors are a gold mine. They spend the same amount in training that they would on any fresh hire but, because of lack of opportunities available for humanities graduates, can lock them into lower starting salaries and stricter performance metrics.

I feel like it's only a matter before the rest of technology catches up and realizes how much money they are leaving on the table by only hiring people that can code a red-black tree on the white board to develop their CRUD apps and maintain their databases.

Most people don't think much of it but people who cut hair, do HVAC work, plumbing, electrical, washing cars, running funeral homes, etc will be in demand until the thing they work on no longer exists. The only real barrier here is people willing to try to do it themselves to save money but that doesn't create competition so much as just removes a single customer.

Now, I don't blame entrepeneurship or technology for that, but it's not so simple to just change your personality to fit the economic imperatives of the day, and I simply don't desire to spend all my time as a disruptive wealth maximizer. The whole 'software is eating the _____ industry' mindset is the technological equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture - it's not a sustainable strategy for the population at large, and we're seeing that reflected in many countries by the drift towards electing increasingly radical politicians of both left and right.

PS: 65 - 18 = 47 years. Just how many bricklayers do you need with 45 years experience and back problems?

But a corollary of my version of "Spoon!" is that skills matter, too. They're how you know the important details from the unimportant ones, and how to manage the important ones. The only way to get that kind of skills is by experience. To use your own example, have you seen the difference in efficiency and results between someone who's just been shown how to lay bricks and someone with 45 years of experience? Or even better, a team with someone with 45 years experience to tell the others when they're not doing it right?

Judging by the brickwork on my house, the answer to your question is "More than we have now."

  A master architect and a master mason

  Back in 1891, when the Citizens Bank building was under 
  construction, there were two essential people on the job 
  site. One was the architect. I imagine that the architect — 
  someone who clearly cared about water management details — 
  visited the job site regularly. The project was also 
  blessed with the presence of a master mason — perhaps a 
  recent immigrant from Italy — who knew how to sift sand and 
  wield a trowel. Both of these people oversaw the work of 
  others, and both insisted that every worker on the job site 
  needed to adhere to high standards of quality.

  The results of their work included the impeccable mortar 
  joints at the Citizens Bank building.

So, you can easily end up with vastly more people with 25+ years’ experience than <5 years’ experience. That's not a problem for programing or electricians, but for highly physical skills your body breaks down and you don't need 3 supervisors for every worker. For some jobs older workers are simply worse.

Now, with a solid general education these people can move on to less physically demanding work, but trying to plan out the economy 40 years into the future is a bad idea.

That seems to be false in practice.

Otherwise as I said in a different post you end up handing out medical disability early retirements to lots of people which is extremely expensive.

Old dogs might not learn new tricks, but people can.

Y Combinator and, to a lesser extent, the better coding bootcamps, are trying to solve this problem and I feel we should be supportive of that and encourage more of those initiatives (and I'm not looking to start another subthread about the effectiveness of coding bootcamps, but merely pointing out that they are an attempt to solve the problem of mentorship at scale).

Trades also are inherently focused on a single area. Plumbers can't just pick up a rig and start pressure welding.

PS: Back in WWII we had job training programs that worked and worked quickly. http://militaryhonors.sid-hill.us/honors/images/dothejob.jpg Today, we have a surplus of workers.

Compared to arts and science degrees with substantial debt loads, years of no applicable experience, and a high probability of employment outside your field, the economic model of trade schools seems significantly better.

You are associating two things that have gone together in the past (guild-like systems and apprenticeships) - that don't necessarily need to go together. I am, well, very American in my personal attitudes towards unions. (Okay, maybe I'm a little more tolerant; I don't have a problem with unions in general, I just know they aren't for my personality.)

I've worked in the field for the last 20 years without a degree, and I've been educated, largely, by things that could be called apprenticeships or internships; jobs where I got paid little to do IT work or programming, usually with some, but not very much supervision. Sometimes it was an official-ish internship, sometimes they just wanted an IT guy and didn't want to pay more than minimum wage. I personally didn't see too much difference between the two types of jobs. It was pretty great socially, too; I'd credit it with being one of the major forces that got me out of high school without physical harm or a record. It was really neat being a 16 year old kid who everyone treated like, well, a 16 year old kid (meaning some species of especially disgusting mud) - and then to go to work for three hours a day in an office where nobody else was below 45, where they treated me as a human; a human who could do adult work.

From the age of fifteen I worked at a local computer store, then later some county offices... by the time I got out of high school (in '97, and yes, I know just how lucky I got) I had just a few more months of low-paying work (phone tech support, that time) before I got my first programming gig.

Just because of my personality at the time, I don't think I could have functioned in an official union setting. It took me more than a decade before I could accept that sometimes you need to follow rules that you disagree with, and sometimes... sometimes when you learn more, you start to agree with those rules. I mean, I guess that's what most people do in college, learn how to "play the system" - But the capitalist free-for-all worked really, really well for me; I didn't have to play the system. I could do my work, tell my boss what I thought, and if that caused enough problems, I could get another job.

I'm not saying that it's the best system for everyone; just that it worked really well for me... and there's no way I would have made it in an organization with standards and rules like a union, and unions have very different values; To this day, the idea of working at the same place for a decade seems really weird to me. Some of this, I'm sure, has to do with the fact that I came of age during the first dot-com, and I know how much "loyalty" you are going to get from the company you work for... but some of this is that I really do value the freedom of being able to walk, with two weeks notice, of course, with almost no consequences.

Now, I do see some benefits of unions; in airlines, my understanding is that they've been able to capture a lot of the value (for the workers) that would otherwise have been profits for shareholders. This is not happening in the computer industry. Sure, we get paid pretty great compared to plumbers or mechanics or what have you (I mean, plumbers or mechanics who don't own a company) but compared to the industries we enable... we capture a pretty small portion of that value in terms of salary.

Still, I do really well in the "perceived merit" system we have now, even though all my statistics are terrible or non-existent. No certifications, no degrees, lots of time as a contractor, I've run my own business, etc, etc, - I think like so many others in the computer industry, I feel like a more objective scale is going to rate me less highly than the current system, and I have no evidence that a union could, in fact, obtain more of the surplus value for the workers.

I'm talking about all of the existing tiers of education, with the early school being the most important. And the very fact that all the shit like "practical skills" and "employment prospects" are starting to corrode even the primary school is extremely worrying.

Maybe it's not what you are saying, but what I hear (and I think this is likely commonly heard) is "formal education makes you better" in the same way that a British person of 100 years ago might have said that being of good birth makes you better.

At that point, it sounds to me mostly like a class division, e.g. your parents had the time and money to educate you in ways that won't provide returns in terms of your own income.

I mean, I'm not saying that's what you are saying or even what you meant to say. I'm just pointing out what it sounds like to a group you probably have little contact with.

Further, as someone who is a fan of things like history and philosophy, aside from, well, being more entertaining to me, I don't think you can form a coherent argument that a person like me who knows a lot about the history of philosophy is "better" than a person who knows a lot about the history of, say, American Football or ice hockey.

I mean, it's a cultural marker, that's for sure; I'm much more likely to want to be around the philosopher than the sports fan, but is the philosophy fan better in any meaningful sense? I'm going to say no.

Any kind of education (unless it's a cargo cult education) makes you better, that's the entire point of it.

> "better" than a person who knows a lot about the history of, say, American Football or ice hockey.

Sports are good for education - and they're not practical and not earnings-oriented. How many of those who had a passion for sport in school went into a professional sport?

I am not opposing sport, STEM, music, arts, whatever else - I'm opposing an emphasis on any "practical skills" in general.

>I am not opposing sport, STEM, music, arts, whatever else - I'm opposing an emphasis on any "practical skills" in general.

So what standard do you have for "better"? Do you have any standard for "better" or "good"? would memorizing random strings of numbers, then, make a person "better"?

That very role of education I was talking about is preserving the accumulated knowledge of our civilisation. As it grows, an amount of general education everybody must withstand grow too. And instead there is a disgusting trend of simplification.

I would prefer to see a civilisation of polymaths rather than a civilisation of narrowly trained craftsmen.

If you think that doing things gives you a more narrow education than taking classes... I suggest you spend more time with people who do things.

I know it first hand.

> I suggest you spend more time with people who do things.

I do things. I know how narrow specialisation is and how it tends to narrow further with experience.

My original point, that you sound like an elitist when you start going on about how much better education makes you in impossible ways, still stands. If you want to sound that way, it's fine.

Problem is corporations don't want that.

The corporate attack on education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA

I remember one column where mojo said (paraphrasing), "I see a lot of people going to film school, learning everything they can about making movies; cameras, lighting, props..."

"Problem is, when they get out of school, they know everything about _how_ to make a film, but no clue what to make a film _about_."

The value of a liberal arts education is the world of stuff you don't know you don't know. You get exposed to a wide range of topics, and you never know what might catch your eye and reach deep inside of you, to your core, beyond technical mastery of a skill.

As an entrepreneur, having empathy and a deep understanding of the humanities is extremely useful throughout your personal journey.

http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmp...

Also, the Internet makes it easy to learn random things about different topics, it's not very good at guiding you through topics that you didn't know to investigate. It's also not able to force you to study topics you don't want to, or take an entire class worth of material instead of a single Wikipedia article.

I think the point is that given two people that learned a course (say computer science), with one learning formally at a university and the other learning through a combination of sources on the internet, and they both end up with roughly the same knowledge and competence - the one who went to university is likely to have more options open to them.

A system that requires that kind of money to "certify" people of their skills is unfair as it blocks off the chance of certification for a large population of citizens. (-Certification here is one that is accepted by other members of society such as employers).

True, but that misses the point. If you expecting to gain a well rounded education, where you learn about many things that you otherwise wouldn't have, then relying only on you're intellectual curiosity will not work for most people I've met. Yes, for the rare auto-didact, they will dive deep on their own time into many different subjects, but in my experience most people I've known (even liberal arts majors) would never look beyond the confines of their chosen area of study.

I can't remember how many times in high school and college I heard classmates grumble about "after I graduate, when will I ever need this". In high school (for me) it was mostly aimed at math classes (I grew up in a very blue collar area where the high school had something like 10% of their students going on the college). They were happier learning history or having to read cliff notes on some novel.

But in college it was usually people in one major complaining that they had to take the "wider world" requirements. Though actually I heard it the absolute most from fellow music majors that had to take a physics class on acoustics.

The reality is so many people see college solely as job prep, and that is a very strong part of what it can do, but (and this is kind of the point of the article) it can function in many other ways. I'm a counter example. I've spent something like 15 years in college. I have two bachelors (philosophy and english), an MFA (creative writing) and and working towards a PhD (math). But I work in computers, and not only do I not have a CS or related degree, the only computer class I ever took was a "wider world" class I had to take (and ironically I groused about it, because I'm already a programmer and manage a staff of programmers and DBAs)

People who can translate tech into basic human terms as well as business terms can demonstrate considerable value. And that value goes both ways. One might be selling the tech, and another might be taking the human value perception, linking that to basic needs and communicating back to the team what is worth what. Considering an expensive feature? Will it pay off? Opportunity costs on something like that run very high, as do the risks and rewards.

1) your parents have money

2) you are lucky/skilled enough to make a living off a Humanities degree

Most people are not like that and a Humanities degree is a terrible choice.

There's no self-discovery when your own survival is at stake.

You can get an engineering degree at a liberal arts college, they just make you take some philosophy/arts/&c. courses also. There is enormous value in this, because people are humans, not merely workers. Liberal arts colleges should do a better job in getting their students technical skills also, though.

In my engineering degree (University of Toronto), we had about 4 free electives and humanities courses over the whole degree. I believe there would have been a lot more value in having more free electives whereby students could take more courses in the humanities (or for those not so inclined, whatever other topics that interested them).

That said, I agree with you. When I took my liberal arts courses, I felt like I was learning something or using a part of my brain that I didn't in my Computer Science courses. I could never really tell what it is, unfortunately, but I liked it.

Sure - you should have told the British to stay the fuck away from the Indian subcontinent.

Instead of taking them as granted and designing education around them?

Education is quite cheap in Europe for example -- to the point of a few thousand dollars per year or less plus living expenses (which can be near zero if you live with your parents as lots do).

One of the most beautiful concepts in Finance is Future Value: 1$ a year from now doesn't have the same as value as it does right now.

They have no practical skills or affinity for the profession they are trying to enter (I've heard more than a few say they would prefer working in IT after getting a "CS degree" because "programming is hard and boring").

IMO the problem comes from "government programs to fill demand from IT sector" and the converting college to high school 2.0

When I went to college you actually had to pass entrance exams and people avoided technical colleges like plague if they actually weren't interested in them - this is still true for top colleges in EU - but the trend of pushing college as a ticket to a comfy office job obviously doesn't result in a bunch of highly skilled professionals (reduced standards to allow greater number of graduates) and gives you a bunch of people who have high expectations and no practical skills - so you get angry kids on the streets.

I see where you're coming from, but don't share the moral condemnation.

Why shouldn't they be angry?

Wanting to be merely decent/half-good at a job and make a living is fine by me -- and it's the way it has worked before (which is why the expected it to hold for them too).

If only the top deserved jobs, then either we'd need the whole population to have top skills (not really doable even if possible), or just give jobs to a 10% or so.

Besides, it's not most jobs are for anything really useful in the grand scheme of things. If you leave out some vital services, most of it is empty bureaucracy, redundant services, etc.

Actually the point at which you can productive in the fields they are trying to enter (programming in this example) is so much higher than what colleges require to pass - this is the disconnect between modern "diploma mills" (government sponsored in this case - to prop education numbers and make voters happy) and historic college model. There is a shortage of programmers around here and around most EU - but of the kind that can actually be productive, not the kind that completed their 3 year degree (by attendance) and now want a well paying 9-5 job.

I only mention it, because I was caught (in the USA) in a bind when I had a stock option and had to pay AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), one of those things designed to hurt the rich. But I didn't have any money - just those options. And they had a lock-out (I couldn't sell them).

To accomplish 'massive taxes on super-rich' you'd have to create a bank-balance tax (like a property tax). And the rich would just invest in stuff then (real estate etc).

Its not simple to design taxes.

Which you could also tax -- property taxes.

http://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-on-high-taxes-2012...

Among other reasons: because it is government and the legal system which makes amassing and maintaining large fortunes possible; being poor without organized society is easy to achieve, being rich is a possible only with the order imposed on society through law. Therefore, it makes sense for the rich to be taxed not merely proportionately to their wealth, but disproportionately so.

Which is true in a sense -- though then you've organized society around your interest, and established yourself as the arbiter of law -- but not really an argument against the rich bearing disproportionately the cost for government.

If someone's at the poverty line, you shouldn't take any money. If someone's making 8+ figures, they'll be almost as well off even if you take half.

If your society thinks this is OK, then, yes, you can. Which, when it comes to taxes, it does. There's no natural ("god given") law saying your neighbor has more right to something that others do. It's a societal contract.

Let's put it another way: if your kids are starving, and your neighbor has food for 20 people in a family of 4, can you go there and get some food from him because you need it more than he does?

Even while still calling it stealing, most people would, if not justify, then at least excuse that.

Why not question property itself? Isn't that a social construct too, the fact that we allow some people to have more than others? We are all born naked anyway -- and it's not like it's always (or even often) the more hard working or the more beneficial to the rest that get the most money.

You don't get to steal things because that's not an equitable way to redistribute wealth, but the government might tax the rich neighbour and use the money to provide free public transport.

You have to tax someone, so let's distribute the burden. Everyone feels a mild impact instead of a flat percent that crushes poor people.

Unless you think we shouldn't tax anyone, then I can't help with understanding.

Any given alternative to taxation might be worse, though. It also might be better. There are a lot of ideas that already failed, and a lot that haven't yet been tried.

But none of the potentially better schemes can possibly work when you already accept taxation as axiomatic.

Of course, this doesn't mean that there is no value in attempting to determine a method of taxation that is least unfair. But given the variance in individual tastes, you may have to combine multiple models of fairness to come up with a reasonable basis for comparison.

If your tax scheme takes as much money from a person as it is possible to take without causing that person measurable harm, you're obviously going to be able to take a lot more from rich people than from poor people. But then, as everyone would end up with the same standard of living, you disincentivize excellence. So maybe you use a model drawn from psychological experiments with respect to reward-seeking behavior, and you give accomplishment above and beyond the lowest common denominator diminishing returns. Maybe someone who produces twice as much gets twice as much as their reward, but someone who produces ten times as much only gets five times as much reward. The studies on lever-pushing rats suggest that this would still work. Someone might even produce twenty times as much for only six times the reward.

I can see very few alternatives. Either you believe that no government is necessary, or you believe that government can operate without money, or you believe that government can create the money it needs to operate (with minimal negative effects), or you believe that government can raise sufficient money from something other than taxes. (But if they raise money from anything other than voluntary contributions, it's pretty much a tax. I would consider tariffs to be taxes, for example - they're just a tax on foreign trade rather than income or property.)

From what I recall of your posts, I think you take the first position - that no government is necessary. I strongly disagree, but here I will limit myself to saying that there is no evidence of this being possible. (Yes, there are plenty of examples of people cooperating without government being involved. Cooperating to the point that no government at all was needed anywhere in society? Not so much.)

Government is not strictly necessary. Government can operate without the same currency as is used in the non-government markets. Government can fund most of its core functions by creation of fiat currency. Government can be run on sources of revenue other than taxation.

(Some of these implicitly assume a certain definition of "government". Some people might say that an organization that does not tax is not a government. Others may define the "governmentness" of an organization by different criteria. My definition allows for governments that cannot or do not tax.)

That doesn't necessarily mean that any system that demonstrates such possibilities would be subjectively better than anything already seen in practice. So far, I am aware of no controlled experiment that has tested any those hypotheses. It might not even be possible to run one. Sometimes the answer to a yes-no question is "I don't know [yet]."

I have no knowledge of the truth of the hypotheses. I don't know whether a taxing government is objectively necessary or not. The anecdotal historical evidence suggests that it is not, but also that any society that lacks a government tax is eventually undermined and overwhelmed by a society that has a tax. The tax funds warfare, either as military, economic, or both. If you don't contribute to professional soldiers or financiers voluntarily, your people get conquered, assimilated, indebted, or enslaved, and have to do it anyway.

Aside from that, in most cases, it is reasonable to reason from a point where you assume one or more untested or untestable statements to be true, but you should be aware that you are not covering the entire problem space.

Assuming that taxation is necessary, it should be possible to say that there exists a system of taxation that is most fair among all systems of taxation. But you cannot then say that is the fairest possible system, because you have not even investigated any system that does not employ taxation.

So if you cannot imagine any such system for the purposes of comparison, your lack of imagination may indirectly be making the world less fair than it could be.

There is near infinite human demand. Maybe it really is infinite, and that's probably a great side discussion. Let's just say it's really large.

People want and need stuff. This is a constant.

But, there is demand backed by dollars, and demand that isn't.

Where we don't tax in a way that helps to maximize the real dollar demand, we don't value ourselves as people well enough to fund our real potential as a developing society, nation, whatever.

For our economics to work, we have got to be able to trade on the demand presented to us. What good are AD driven models delivered to a society with few liquid dollars to make the response to those ADS meaningful? What good is collecting a bunch of data on people without being able to go back and deliver something meaningful to them and get dollars in return?

Some of this can be addressed by making it cheaper to live, thus freeing dollars to fund innovation and reward those who advance us, but there are limits to that, and those limits can be artificially low when people do not have enough to present meaningful demand. I just read somewhere recently that there is basically nowhere in the US where a person can make it on less than something like $14 / hour. This varies a little, but it's fine for discussion.

When they make, say $9, they require external help to meet their basic needs and wants are largely off the table. We end up using taxes to help them get by, and they are not able to contribute back in a meaningful way. We can say that they, and their labor isn't valued well enough to present a net positive. They cost us. They cost themselves.

The people making lots of money need to get it from somewhere, right?

Our money system is debt based too. There is as much money as people can borrow realistically. When people aren't valued well enough to present plausible risk, they quite literally can't borrow and that means money isn't created that would have been otherwise.

How the taxes are structured impacts this, as does what we pay them.

In a macro sense, the number of people falling into the bucket I'll call "tepid to minimal demand", has risen from some 40 percent of us to a little under 60 percent. Wages have been flat for a considerable time, and we've also shifted away from new job creation paying "family wages" and more toward service, basic type jobs. By percentage today, far more basic wage type jobs are created than ones that pay more, in simple terms.

This has directly impacted the demand these people can present to the economy as well as their ability to take risk and or fund bigger purchases. We've innovated too, which means they can get by on less, and that's good, but there is a very strong argument for us also leaving a lot of potential on the table by keeping it all as lean as we have.

Above a certain point, say $100-200K / annual, gains are steady, and at the top, gains are significant. For most people, it's flat, or for unlucky ones a decline or very significant cut.

And here's an example:

Entertainment dollars, just to pluck one out of the air. People in the tepid demand brackets typically have what they have for entertainment. Say it's $100 a month, just for grins. That money gets spent, unless they can't for some reason like getting sick or needing to replace / repair something, because entertainment is a basic need and want like food is. Good food is a want, sufficient food is a need.

Buy a DVD, video game, new music album, see a movie, go somewhere for the weekend, buy something for a hobby, etc... all basically compete! For our growing lower tier of people, which are the majority of people, a big game release may well come at the cost of a couple of movies, or that new toy for the hobby. Everyone in that niche must advertise and differentiate to maximize their share, and overall growth comes from population growth, and the upper tiers of people.

Most notably, the real volume growth is left on the table! Those people just can't do more, so it's spent each month, month over month.

Now, the common piracy argument is that infringement is equatable to a lost sale! They say billions are "lost" as opportunity costs due to piracy. But, the reality is the money coming from these lower tiers is more or less constant, again with very tepid growth due to basic factors, like population, etc...

Because we don't value people well enough for them to fund entertainment, those billions simply do not exist! In fact, we find increasingly clever ways to differentiate entertainment and package it in ways that allow for more entertainment choices being possible to more finely divide up the dollars, and give the market some fluidity and the people in that market more choice.

Say that the need for entertainment isn't matched by dollars. The overflow is self-entertainment, infringement, trade with friends, etc...

If we could somehow prevent infringement, people would simply get less entertainment per dollar, and or overflow would mean they would do other things, if they have time for those other things. This would force people to really max out their entertainment dollar potential, but that's not much. Some growth would happen, but those billions in lost sales due to competing or infringing entertainment options just aren't there.

(BTW, this is one argument for the basic income. Move most labor related dollars into a more disposable / risk friendly spending tier for this lower income bracket. Basic needs get locked in, and their labor funds luxury or innovation opportunities allowing for some serious and meaningful economic growth.)

Take two scenarios then, given this one example. There are others and they play out in similar ways, but this is long enough already...

If we structure taxes to bias toward people who can pay taxes without their meaningful life choices being impacted, that investment can lower the tax burden on those who are impacted. Say that, results in most people in the "tepid demand" tier ending up with $200 for entertainment!

That's huge! Suddenly, there are billions, though realistically that money will compete with a lot of other things, but there really is some additional dollar potential out there for entertainment, just not double. Infringement may go down, or it may not, and I submit it won't matter. What will matter is more of their demand is backed by real dollars which translates into growth for those at the top supplying and profiting from entertainment. They now can present more of their wants and needs to the economy as demand backed by dollars.

Or, perhaps they can now get some credit, and apply that income to larger or more purchases. Growth there too. New money = new growth.

The other impact is wages. When those are higher, and growth can lead to higher wages, the same sorts of dynamics apply. People end up with more liquid dollars and or credit that they can use to make their demand meaningful.

When that demand is meaningful, or maybe actionable is a better word, market effects translate that into growth and innovation opportunities we all benefit from.

In simple, human terms, we move people from choices like buying something they want or keeping the lights on. Those choices are rough, and undesirable on a human level, which is one reason for progressive tax structures. But the other one is economic.

How we compete with other nations, the quality of our infrastructure, education of our people, innovations we can fund, military, etc... depend a lot on how we value ourselves as people and what that value means in terms of real, actionable demand as opposed to costs. Moving people from presenting as a net cost to a net positive economic contributor to demand is very highly desirable, if we also value growth and a rich market in which to profit from, and as a nation, compete globally with.

Getting back to that rich neighbor. They probably got rich doing business and meeting demand somehow and profiting by doing that.

That money comes from real demand presented by people able to present it in the economy. It's longer term foolish to ignore that reality in much the same way it is to say, continue to plant crops and harvest without also returning important nutrients to the ground to avoid it being sucked dry and unable to produce well in the future.

You seem to be saying that people who make money in the arts should be taxes more than people in other lines of work. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood what you're saying?

Sure, let them. I don't see how this is achieved by increasing taxes on them - general income taxes go to a broad variety of causes.

Why not? Just because her popularity gives her a good way to print tons of money doesn't mean she's more valuable than anybody else doing honest work and getting 1/1000 as much per year.

Her wealth doesn't mean much with respect to the value of her product -- it's just a temporary perk because of people not being able to pirate books that easily yet (because they don't enjoy reading on screens, private printing is not very efficient or cheap, and not everybody has a Kindle).

Much greater authors living before the copyright + typography era never made a dime off of their masterpieces.

That only makes my argument stronger, not weaker - if she's exactly the same member of the society as everyone else, she should still pay the same percentage as everyone else.

The rest of your statements are nonsensical. She provides something that I want, so I trade my money for her product - the "quality" of the product has absolutely nothing to do with it. Just like I trade my time for my employer's money.

So who exactly should decide how much something costs? Do you think the author should not control how much a copy of their book costs?

No. I think competing publishing houses should print the book in different prices (any price each publishing house wishes), with a percentage of sales going to the author, and the market decides how high or low it goes. In the end, if not allowed to form a cartel, all publishers will reach a stable-ish price (differing only for different qualities of each edition, e.g. paper quality, hardcover, etc).

Else, it's like we limit a reproductible work in an artificial way as if it was an one-off item, by granting sole pricing rights AND absolute control of its sales to the author.

Obviously they shouldn't.

Besides more writers are just as poor or even more than "ordinary workers" (and most of them are also ordinary workers, and do writing as a side-job).

This time, crickets. Now there is no class consciousnesses, no faith in politics, no collective action of any kind. Something is very different, I don't know what.

To really mobilize the general public, the distractions from the pain will have to subside or the pain itself must grow.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-Reece-C...

-MLK, I've Been to The Mountaintop, last speech the night before assassination

On the other hand, people first and foremost want survival, they want to find a modicum of success in this new world economy. Liberal arts students know all too well how their prospects compare to those of others who chose CS, finance, statistics, etc. Just listen to the bitter kids on npr who rag on the new economy. They feel left out, and they are right, they are falling behind. Their professions of choice are not as prestigious any more.

She can make these claims being an exception at the top. Most people following her would probably feel disappointed at their achievement, if they were to follow.

Higher ed is not like it was 100 - 200 years ago where the idle children of the rich could explore their fancy ideas about civilization and humanity. Most people just want to be employable, that is all.

Also, I'm not ready to consign the bulk of the country to a life of labor. Instead of, for instance, exploring what makes us human. Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?

200 years ago the privileges of the elite were much more permanent and resilient than they are now. And even if this is false, the university was much more exclusive back then. Meaning it was a much more elite elite.

The great flowering of universities as colleges of liberal arts -- and of scientific research in general -- happened a lot later, generally in the 1870-1970 period.

History is another planet, populated by fascinating aliens.

History is a lot of planets, populated by diverse aliens.

(And yes, I have a CS degree. Oddly, it didn't teach me anything useful about participation in civic life or how to understand the ethical implications of a proposed course of action.)

Finance has something of a stranglehold on society, that is why there isn't more arts and civics. House prices, cost of living these all translate into either work really hard to support yourself and your family (this goes for both males and females, it's rare to see a family have kids where only one parent goes out on a daily basis for a paycheck) or end up on the fringes of society (either living on hand-outs or some way of living hand-to-mouth for as long as you're not generating income).

Now personally I don't mind the hard work, but with all the productivity gains and the number of people that are simply rich you'd expect that the spoils would be more evenly distributed but that very much depends on which part of the planet you are looking at and which demographic for a specific location.

Arts and civics are to some extent a huge luxury, in times long gone by the artists would have patrons, wealthy people directly supporting one or more of their favorite artists by commissioning works. Today such artists still exist but the 'big money' in the arts is in the media (and it has a much shorter shelf life than say a work by Michelangelo, otoh we all agree on that because his works made it to our time and are considered masterpieces, chances are there was plenty of mediocre work done in his time too).

I highly doubt the majority of the population is interested in answering questions such as 'what makes us human', and I think that one of the bigger problems with blue collar jobs disappearing (and possibly being replaced by basic income or other forms of hand-outs) is that there is satisfaction in work, the knowledge that you don't depend on others for your bread and butter and the idea that you're a productive member of society. For me at least there is great value in that and I feel better because of it, much better than if I would receive some kind of stipend just because I exist. Probably that's because of how I was raised and maybe a generation that was not raised with that particular work ethic would have a smaller problem (or none at all) with receiving funds even though nothing of value was produced.

Workhouses and prisons are now country wide, we call them 'the third world', and if and when we reach income parity I suspect production will shift back to 'local' because of reduced shipping costs.

And students aren't interested in 'what makes us human'? I know quite a few students, and its a very large part of their makeup. They are young and relatively ignorant and college can be a wonderland of discovery.

Or it can be training, a boring trudge from High School to a job.

We, you and I probably not. But plenty of others do work extremely hard. Quite probably not as hard as the people that farmed the land or worked in cotton mills 200 years ago, but still, pretty hard.

The danger is to see this stuff through a personal lens, the world is a very large place and life has gotten a lot more complicated requiring ever higher levels of education to partake in the spoils.

It's like the Douglas Adams bit, 'Many people were rich, and nobody was really poor, at least, nobody worth speaking of' or something to that extent.

There is poverty, it's real, and quite a few people work hard to extremely hard to escape it and yet they can't seem to achieve 'escape velocity'. And not exactly everybody goes to college either.

On a side note, I think many fail to recognize what "liberal education" means. I've seen the concept attacked by some right/libertarian friends merely for having the word "liberal" in it!

Computers are easy. People are hard. A liberal education helps recognize and come to grips with this.

Many are happy to simply quote levinas, Foucault, deleuze or badiou, etc.

Robinson, who has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including her current position at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, identified a troubling trend in higher education today.

Acedemics and hackers alike tend to idealize their choices, and often turn a blind eye to those that don't fit their chosen educational or business model.

Also, "self-discovery" works only for those that have the luxury to explore without the pressures to support themselves or their immediate family.

There's no one solution that applies to everyone. Some need "self discovery" but can't afford it, some need job training but are pressured to obtain a degree solely for the prestige.

I'd like to hear from voices without extensive skin in the game. This includes the other extreme, such as successful business people who advocate against higher education simply because that's the route they chose.

This is by no means ad hominem. That would be more "Robinson is a mean person so whatever she says is worthless".

Questioning someone's biases is an entirely valid line of argument.

Not every writer or artist is embedded in academia. Robinson's point is that we as a culture are becoming more utilitarian, and therefore losing any sense of the importance of the arts. Certainly, she is most interested in the university setting, but I think her critique applies outside of the academy as well.

Liberal arts is supposed to be about passing down and building upon wisdom and culture gained over thousands of years.

Instead, at most universities, it's an uncriticized and unaccountable platform for instructors' personal agendas. Political agendas are common, but it's more than that: it's about self-promotion and self-aggrandization.

And the education is more confusing than enlightening. Vague, unintelligible jumbles of keywords pass for brilliance and depth.

I've had really good teachers in liberal arts, and they are amazing. But unfortunately that's the exception rather than the rule.

In other words, fix the liberal arts, and then maybe more people will appreciate them.

The article reeks of bland arts prejudice -- that it is more noble to be the "educated" artist writing verse about how ghastly a problem must feel like, and then write something even more verse about how dreadful it is that so few read or understood your beautiful words, than the "merely utilitarian" person who understands how to analyse the cause of the problem and is equipped to design and create a means to fix it.

There is nothing inherently less "prepared for citizenship or democracy" about an engineer. And neither, in these design-intensive times, do they necessarily understand humanity or social ills any less than an artist writing about them.

Your "merely utilitarian" person is not equipped to understand (much less solve) the causes of the problems that she describes. That's her point entirely.

I disagree, to say the least.

If everyone were an engineer, that probably would not be such a terrible thing, but if everyone were a novelist, that probably would.

Now, once that society is constructed, all of the other stuff is nice to have, but I would not describe those things in morally imperative terms like that.

Unless we respond to this, our human side, our efforts will always fall dead. We can't construct a society that doesn't acknowledge our humanity and expect that people will want to live in it.

Oughts and shoulds are the foundation on which rationality in decision-making is founded, but cannot be reasoned to or empirically tested without assuming an axiomatic ought or should to start with.

Indeed, this dichotomy is one of the problems. There's no reasons "real world training" is mutually exclusive with liberal arts. There's no reason we can't teach you to be a mechanic and let you read Chaucer.

Her argument is that it's inherently democratic and leveling to teach the humanities to all students.

Moreover, the humanities contribute to a stronger democracy, whether it's through the development of empathy, or whether it's in the ability to read an argument and understand the writer's point (such as in this article).

And it is the poor students, particular though push into pre-professional degrees, that miss out on this sort of education.

You need to go to liberal arts college to be prepared for citizenship and democracy? Really? If by the time you get to college you're not interested in "humanities", you're very unlikely to get interested after being forced to listen to some mediocre lectures. And make no mistake, that's exactly what the wast majority of students will get.

I would like to know what "original" means here, other than "what I think it should be". Harvard was set up primarily to train clergy. The University of Pennsylvania seemed to teach pretty much everything from the start (if I remember my reading correctly). I would very much question whether Thomas Jefferson had the democratization of privilege in mind when he founded the University of Virginia.

There is a lot of talk about how good it is to do this- yes, of course. But there is little talk of whether it is possible or how to make it possible. Comprehension of, say, math: that's something that can more-or-less be measured by a test. How do you measure someone having the attitude of a free thinker? Until practicalities are talked about, I can't see any of this as anything but posturing. There should be pushes for investigation like CFAR does.

This many not be the type of watering she is referring to but if you are interested in helping people gain marketable skills I can say from experience it is very rewarding. I recently posted my availability as a mentor in the software job category on Craigslist ($35) and have found 3 great people that are financially poor, but rich in work ethic and motivation.

We have only connected via email, but have already started to make great progress towered their goals. Many of us on this site have great knowledge that might be taken for granted. If people don't have experience many employers will not give them a chance. Being a bridge between the job at Walgreen's to their first industry job is a joy to be a part of.

1) More and more people are attending 4-year colleges due to inflation in expectation without necessarily any fundamental change in demand for skills which means 4-years colleges are increasingly forced to perform the roles previously filled by vocational schools and community colleges.

2) As our understanding of the world increases and our technological capability expands, more and more things are brought under the umbrella of STEM. A lot of what counts as science (social sciences, for example) for example would have counted as liberal arts going back a few hundred years. Even much of computer science as we know it today would've fallen somewhere between math and philosophy. Study of languages at one point was an extremely liberal-artsy pursuit, but Linguistics is a quantitative discipline with strong connections to math and computer science. Likewise political science had its roots in political philosophy and humanities but now it's a discipline strongly influenced by statistics, economics and even game theory.

What is being argued here is that there should be more to an education than a vocation. The purpose of a higher education is to make one a thinking, learned human being. It doesn't matter if you're Knuth when it comes to CS, if you don't have a working knowledge of history and philosophy and political theory, you're uneducated.

Another theme I see is that people have to earn a living so they must learn ONLY STEM. That's false for 2 reasons. The first is that one can do non-utilitarian study in philosophy, for example, while also learning CS to get a job. It is also wrong because it is a reflection of the high cost of an American education that forces people to think about "return on investment". That is the very notion that is being criticized here! Education should not calculated solely in economic terms because there are social returns to it.

The fact of the matter is that it is absolutely disastrous - morally and culturally - to uncritically accept the views of our neoliberal system. The humanities and non-utilitarian education helps you examine the system. That's what ultimately makes the world a better place.

Tell that to Pearson and the rest of the private education industry. They are legally obligated to view education in economic terms over social returns. Effectively infiltrating and subverting public education.

Allowing for just the possibility of non-financial rewards of an education shows how shallow our "return on investment" culture is. When we see no value in learning about art, philosophy, history...what does that say about our values?

[0] http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/

The debate from their perspective is simply that you only seem to see value in learning about art in education if someone else pays for it for you, but not enough to pay for it yourself.

The question of "the value of your education" can never win the argument against privatisation/optimisation of education, because the more "value" there is the more the consumer ought to be willing to pay for it.

The reasons for keeping education largely public and unoptimised are outside of that -- avoiding competition on price (richest-student wins), that the lecturers have a by-product that is useful to society (mulling problems where we don't yet know whether they have value or not and the market cannot price them), getting students from multiple backgrounds to bounce off each other (avoid social silo-isation by discipline) etc.

It's a lot harder to deal with, but it isn't somehow excluded from the purview of economics.

It's probably even necessary to make economic considerations when it comes to education. Given limited resources, choosing to put them towards things that return more value probably makes sense.

You should really try to see this from a non-monetary, non-utilitarian perspective.

For example, if your desired outcome is self discovery, some education based on indoctrination probably isn't going to work very well. That's a silly example, but choosing between methods and selecting the one that best delivers the result you desire isn't real distinguishable from making an economic choice.

I don't know how to make you stop thinking in a utilitarian way. There are other philosophies, you know?

I responded to the juxtoposition here: There is no reason to apply economics to education. "Value" is not only monetary.

I'm not insisting that you view education through the lens of economics, I was pointing out that what you said about value was not an argument against economics (because economics doesn't care about what form value takes).

You keep looking for a word other than value to describe this thing that you think should happen because then I can't point out that you can analyze it economically, but this is not a way to argue that education should not be analyzed economically, it is a misunderstanding of economics (it was really clear when stated as "Value" is not only monetary, but "we should do it just because" is still an imputation of value...).

Is she complaining that universities stopped being indoctrination machines and do their actual job as to create professionals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...

It seems to me quite obvious a that the waning of liberal [2] education is a bad thing. But these fashionable leftist laments miss the point and fail to recognize some obvious causes of their own making.

In Kirk's time as now, the motivation to gain immediately marketable skills is a strong one. The difference is that elites like Robinson see such motivations as base and immoral, whereas Kirk saw them as deceptively un-utilitarian.

To the degree that ROI is a driver, the decline in general ed is certainly accelerated by massive price inflation of that last few decades. But there's another reason. The fact is liberal education in most American universities has become a shoddy product. In many, it's become quite illiberal.

This is not abstract for me. I recently helped my son decide on a college. It came down to two: School A, a school that's focussed on more practical topics such as business and engineering. Scarcely one-fifth of the coursework is general social sciences and humanities. And School B, an old and venerated bastion of liberal ed. Both are top 40 national universities.

Now, we had already weeded out all the schools that have entirely thrown over the western cannon for ideologically driven grievance-based curriculum. In other words, our list was pretty small. The last step in our decision process was to visit School B. I was hopeful because I want my son to go deep into great ideas, for the very reasons that Kirk gives.

Then came the orientation. Announcement: we have a new core curriculum.

Wha...?

Students, it turns out, will no longer choose from among courses in history, philosophy, literature, phycology, economics, etc. Now they will all be funneled through a few newly developed "integrated" courses. Courses where Greek classics are compared with Harry Potter. Classes that focus on the dying American Dream. Courses where science and history are now a branches of climate change activism.

No thanks. School A please.

This is what the market looks like when it's working.

[1] http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/the-inhumane-busi...

[2] It's worth pointing out that "liberal" here means classical liberal, which is nearly the opposite of "liberal" in the context of American politics.

No, it doesn't, though if you squint really hard you can see a very loose connection between the "liberal" in liberal education and the classical liberalism.

> which is nearly the opposite of "liberal" in the context of American politics.

No, its not. Both "liberal" and "conservative" in contemporary American political terms have roots in classical liberalism (and both have elements that are hard to reconcile with it).

Original post:

It's worth pointing out that "liberal" here means classical liberal, which is nearly the opposite of "liberal" in the context of American politics.

I'm assuming by "classical liberal" you mean the ideology that arose in the 18th Century? Because liberal education is not that either. It is in fact orthogonal to modern American political liberalism. Liberal arts are the areas of study appropriate for a free human being (as opposed to a serf).