You can't "work your way to the top" in capitalism.

Sputnik, Spurious:

Okay, I give. If you believe that there isn't an issue I won't continue to badger you with it. It just seems curious to me that the OECD, the EPC, and other organizations that have studied the issue do foresee problems. But I’m sure you guys know better.

Spurious, I know you want everything to be a competition between Europe and the US but in regards to this issue the US is a welfare state. Yes, the public debt is an issue; yes welfare delivery in the US is messed up, yes some things seem to be working better in some European countries. What I’m trying to figure out is how throwing more money at the issue and giving big government more control over what they are already fucking up will resolve the issues. Because in the US that’s what providing more welfare support means. We’ve disagreed on the issue before but I do not see the solutions that work for small countries like Denmark and Finland scaling up to resolve US problems on a national level.

I’m interested to find out how the EU will handle things as its organization grows to look more like the US. Will member states be able to retain the autonomy needed to manage local problems with the efficiency and clarity that proximity affords, or will federal control overwhelm the states the way it happened in the US? Will they get the support they need from the EU, or will they be left to fend for themselves, or worse will funds be diverted for larger EU policies putting drains on productive local economies to support others? Will the EU be able to get its underdeveloped countries up to par with the others? What will be the effect of this on the more prosperous nations? As these questions get answered the EU may be able to provide direction for the US. It’s going to require some innovative politicking and creative solutions, hopefully it will generate some useful ideas.

~Raithere

 

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It is not so much a question of size, but question of making quality education available to all (who can benefit from it).

In US, the local community funds the local schools, so many talented brains are underdeveloped, because they are in people who live in poor neighborhoods (and often also have the wrong color of skin or Spanish as their native tongue, etc.). By the time these kids are adults, they have learned how to survive making little or even negative (selling dope, doing crimes, etc.) productive contribution to society. They did not learn what they should have and now that machines, not men dig ditches, etc are not able to contribute much positively. (wash dishes, clean buildings etc jobs that pay much less than the other alternatives they learned.) Part of what they did learn is how to exploit the cash that is being "thrown at the problem."

Some large countries, like Japan, and China are offering education widely to the masses and are rapidly advancing. They will not have the US's welfare problems, but China has still a long way to go in many other social areas. Even in education, although China’s progress has been fantastic, the masses started very far behind western standards, so it will be a few years before they surpass the US in educated brain power. China is building 50 university centers, staffing them professors from all over the world, and in a few years will have them operating at "Harvard or better levels."

If you live in a country where a good primary education is only for the financially well off, you will have many problems, especially if it is a democracy. That is the fundamental problem of the US, not that it is large country.

 

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Scaling up the system of Finland is no problem since it works with small areas with exactly the same social setup, that work independently of each other.

The independent action cuts away the bureacracy, and the smilar setup equalizes social conditions.

This system is maintained in the different areas of the country, the sparsely population north and east and the urbanized area focusses on Helsinki. In the north there are some special setups to deal with distances, but the principle remains the same.

However, I quite agree you couldn't transport the social system of Finland to the US overnight. I've seen the bureacracy in the USA in action and it is a humongous beast. Similary you couldn't put the Finnish system in place in the netherlands overnight because of exactly the same reasons. The bureacratic tradition is also too strong there.

I do not believe that size is a problem though in theory. The main problem is history. The bureacrats have accumulated power over the years and they are not going to give it up. Politicians are served by the bureacracy. They form also a large part of their voting audience. Bureacrats execute the policies dictated by politicians according to their own insights. Politicians come and go but they stay. It would be political suicide to fire the lot of them and start with a clean system, although it is the best approach regarding what's best for the people in the long run.

I don't think there are easy solutions for this problem. Basically the voting public has been stimulating the problem, whether they realize it or not.

 

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I believe that most of the problems are a function of the size and range of disparity in the US. This makes it difficult to come up with comprehensive plans on a national scale and often even on a state level. Local governments and school boards often do a much better job when they take control, revise organization, involve the community, and update teaching strategies.

The unnecessary complexity of Federal and State organization and gargantuan bureaucratic administrative red-tape make it even more difficult. Poor planning, coordination, and delivery rather than a miserly unwillingness to spend is the crux of the problem.

While agree with you that we’re not doing well enough with education, consider: Overall the US ties in second place in spending for education. But if you break it down, we rank 12th or even 14th for spending for K-12 education (1); most of the money goes to higher education (higher profile, state level). Which begs the question, how do you get into college if your primary education sucked?

(1) http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/1990_bp_shortchanging.pdf

~Raithere

 

Especially the latter. The types of systems that work in Scandanavia depend not so much on their relatively small populations as on the very high degree of social solidarity present in said countries. This is crucial for programs that require high levels of taxation. And it's hard to see America ever getting to a point where conditions would support a Scandanavian-style social welfare system. MAYBE in Canada, but not the US...

 

You either rely on the fact that everyone else's primary education sucked (in which case you're no worse off), or you start off at a community college and then transfer to a 4-year school.

Also, a big portion of that "higher education" spending consists of things other than 18-to-21-year-olds attending 4-year university programs. There's a bevy of Associate's programs, trade schools, technical certifications, etc. America has just switched from a manufacturing economy to a service economy over the past 20 years; consider the masses of people that needed new education to start new jobs once the old factories moved away or closed down. Also, mothers going back to school once the kids get a bit older (women going to work has been the main factor in household income growth in America for some time now). Higher education is also more expensive per-pupil than primary education, because the instructors must be better-qualified (and so command a higher wage).

 

And what is the cause of this "high degree of social solidarity" ?

Answer:

Their uniform and high quality education system. - You will not find rat infested etc. schools even in the poorest neighborhoods of a Scandinavian city, but that is the norm in the US. All the libraries of all Scandinavian schools have many good books, visual education aids, etc. - not just those in rich neighborhood as is true in US schools. Etc.

I, like most middle class Americans, considered the quality of the local school by far the most important factor in choosing where to buy a house when my children were about to start school. - Many Americans cannot do this and remain trapped in rat-infested schools for generations. - A great loss for America and the fundamental source of most of America's problems.

My Norwegian wife's free university education (in Oslo) came with the "string" that she had to teach one year wherever the government wanted her to. Thus, she had to be fluent in all three different versions* of the Norwegian language. - I mention this as most erroneously presume that being a small country "uniformity" is assured. In many ways the local communities in Norway's until recently isolated valleys are more different than in the US. The people living in Bergen (cod fishermen, artists, oilrig workers etc.) are different from those in factory and business Oslo and those in the interior valleys differ from both even more. Etc. etc.
-----------------------------------
*I forget one of their names and cannot spell correctly any. One is called "Ricksmal," one is "New Norsk" and third is ???? I think this third is the one most closely related to that the Vikings spoke, and never died out during the several hundred years that the Danes and /or Swedes ruled Norway. The city dwellers languages assimilated and were greatly transformed by these occupiers. After Norway became independent country, the academic types got part of the population to speak "New Norse," which they created, instead of the language of the conquers. - Thus, three or four million people speak three related, but definitely different, languages!

Being small is NOT the cause of the "high degree of social solidarity" - Uniform, quality education is.

That is also why Scandinavians have the highest quality of life (unless measured by how many cars, size of your TV, or other artificial material indexes, not really related to “quality of life”.), longest life expectancy, etc. in the world. By “quality of life” I mean the things that some CEOs who are earning more than million dollars/year chose when they move to farm Maine go sailing, paint their own shed, etc. On a typical winter day (not very cold because of the Gulf Stream, but snowing) you will find many Norwegian families get on the train with their skis and then soon get off to ski back home, cross country. IMHO - that is “quality of life.” and a high salary in NYC, etc. is not.

I enjoy living in Brazil even though when driving in the smaller cities, I must wait for the cows to pass etc.

 

It's kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. Did the social policy create the social solidarity, or does it merely reflect the underlying society? Of course, the answer is very complex, with each component affecting the development of the other. Certainly, we would expect societies with high solidarity to exhibit minimal inequality (and so have very uniform school quality). Likewise, we'd expect that an effective social (and specifically educational) policy would tend to increase solidarity (and decrease inequality). However, it's certainly NOT the case that Scandanavian states started out with societies comparable to modern America and then transformed them into their current states simply by imposing a particular educational policy.

I'm not convinced that there are a lot of broad social policy lessons for present-day America to be drawn from Scandanavia. To take another example, notice that the great majority of states with high degrees of social solidarity also exhibit a policy of mandatory military service (all Scandanavian countries have this, along with Switzerland, Germany, South Korea, etc.). This is the sort of policy you'd expect in a state with high solidarity, as it fits with the egalitarian social contract. However, it's not at all clear to me that instituting mandatory military service in the United States would improve social solidarity. To paraphrase: just because states with high solidarity tend to exhibit a particular policy doesn't mean that transplanting that particular policy to another state is an effective means of building social solidarity there. A parallel example: instituting elections can actually be one of the *least* productive ways of moving a country towards (liberal) democracy.

 

well howdy mr pesimist.
it all depends on your attitude towards life,I'll leave you to your whining with one advice:
If you think something is impossible you'll make it imposible!

 

I am having some trouble following your POV, which is unusual as you are normally clear. I make my POV clear I hope. It was that not long ago (by social evolution time scales) Norway was very diverse; Citizens of Bergen hardly considered themselves to be Norwegians, etc. Certainly as diverse as the US is today, but I was NOT saying: “Scandinavian states started out with societies comparable to modern America” so no need for you to refute that. They gave women the right to vote, long before that happened in the US, etc. (Women adding greatly to the diversity, even having lead the country. (Most recent one was an Md. She is now high in UN health services, perhaps the director of it, etc.)

Agreed.

I think it would. Certainly it would make a difference if the sons of the rich were equally likely to be in Iraq now as are the sons of the poor. You often come up with good data I am to lazy to search for. I will bet (and let you check) that Blacks in Iraq are at least twice the percentage they are in US as whole. Effectively US has an "avoid solidarity" military policy and a universal draft would reverse that (as well as make it less likely the powers that be, would send young men off to fight.)

Again I agree, but I was not speaking much of "social policy" - more of UNIFORMITY in education (as contrasted to the US's "good schools for the rich" / "poor ones with rats for the poor" lack of UNIFORMITY. I do not think that is US "social policy." It is just the natural consequence of local funding of the schools.

I do not follow your POV here or understand how this relates to the subject, which was: Whether or not one can work their way to the top. I think the answer to that strongly depends on whether or not your parents were rich in the US and as a result, idiots like Bush, make decisions to send the poor into wars etc, and some good brains in poor and/or black bodies develop cleverly ways to injure, rather than help, the US, etc.

 

It might not be a common occurrence, but I know a Russian immigrant who came to the USA about 20 years ago with nothing. She started working at a beauty shop doing nails.

She now owns two Spa-like businesses. She is not a millionaire, but is affluent enough to take cruises, buy expensive cars, pay college tuition for two children.

Before I retired, I worked for a man who started with nothing but a college education and became a mult-millionaire, owning businesses in Florida, Pennsylvania, Switzerland, & England.

Gates & various others have made fortuenes in the computer industry starting with little or no money.

It might be difficult and uncommon, but it is possible to make huge amounts of money without having rich parents. It is certainly much easier to become the owner of a small, but profitable business without having a lot of capital.

Those who moan about inherited wealth and rich parents as the only way to make it are lazy jealous bums.

 

This is what I am referring to by local autonomy and I agree insofar as it is an organizational difference. But I do believe that bureaucratic overgrowth is a function of size that is very difficult to prevent, consolidation of power is the rule unless it is guarded very jealously. And often it’s the very guarding that drives bureaucratic growth as forces implement rules and regulations to maintain control. Indeed I feel this is the main problem in the US as each governmental segment attempts to retain control through additional legislation.

Not to knock the accomplishment but Finland’s population is a bit over 5 million and Helsinki’s is a bit over 550 thousand living in 686 sq km. NYC alone has a population over 8 million living in 830 sq km. Try stuffing all of Finland's population into the city and you'd have a fair comparrison. How can size and density not be a factor?

I agree with you about everything here except what I said above about size. I read an interesting article a while back that brought a good argument that the bureaucracy is really the controlling factor regarding most of these issues. I’ll see if I can find it… but it was a while ago.

~Raithere

 

I disagree. Despite the apparent attitude in the US towards social programs when you consider what is being spent the US is fairly competitive in most areas. We're just not getting the same results which indicates to me a more intrinsic problem. I think you'd see a big change in attitude, what you call solidarity, about such programs if the results are different. But it doesn't make much sense to be for more spending and more taxes when what is in place doesn't work.

~Raithere

 

Not my point at all. My assertion is that we need to focus on primary education which is being ignored. It makes no sense at all to try to level the playing field after the fact. We should be making sure that everyone starts off with an excellent primary education. The higher education would then tend to itself. The need for it would be far less as well.

I find the need for higher education students to take general, low level, liberal arts courses as part of their core curriculum ridiculous. The only reason for this is that our primary and secondary schools are doing a crappy job. A University student should have no need for basic math, history, English, or science. They should already have that under their belt. That Universities need courses in the fundamentals of these subjects only proves to me that their previous schooling is inadequate.

~Raithere

 

Not true, I have a zillion dollars.

 

I doubt that. You have time and inclination to reserect a thread dead for more than 9 months to only say that!

I am glad you did. (Caused me to read Raithere and Dinosaur's thoughtful and informative comments, which I had missed.)

I am a case in point of what you claimed to be. (Not zillions, but a couple of millions, which is not bad considering I was always just on salary from John Hopkins University and while still undergrad at Cornell, so poor that had to work for my meals and could not always get bus fare to go home for Thanksgiving.)

 

The apparent argument, that the US cannot adopt clearly superior early-age educational systems because we lack the political wisdom, general educational level, societal institutions, and social competence to implement and administer them, is - - - - - interesting.

I guess, like a third world country taking baby steps toward democracy, the US will just have to be patient with itself. First world health care and educational systems are not attainable in one jump, starting from the US level of sophistication ?

 

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "make it big". I choose to travel, living in other countries, do low-paying research and teach at university (unfortunately on contract to boot - no tenure.... :bawl: in the hopes that I do good research, see and live in other cultures and hopefully get tenure

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I could have easily went to professional school such as Law school, med, dentistry, and easily made a lot more money. But then my life would have been so boring as to boarder on dreadful. I think many people have no f*cking clue what to do with their lives so instead of living a little and trying to figure it out they do with makes them money or what their parents did or what their parents expect of them. Thus, making it "big", is the only goal in life. As big is never big enough it's enough to keep them going until they finally die not having attained anything.

That's why a lot of petty people are in very high places. In the effort to make it "big" they can more than easily excuse stepping on someone else to get there.

In the end most end with ash in their mouths - or so I think.


As to the people with a LOT of cash. I know many - they are no more happier then anyone else. Actually a lot are unhappy as they can afford to isolate themselves from other people, while poor people will out of necessity seek assistance from other people, make friendship and find some happiness.

 

You can do all that and still "make it big financially" if you can see financial developments coming before most.

Speaking of tenure, which I never even tried for, do you know about the "oyster transformation" it often causes?

If not and I fail to get back here and tell you, PM and I will post here.

 

Yeah I lost it all to gambling.