"If the product kills someone with a salary of $50,000 per year and 20 working years remaining, that is approximately $1 million in liability. [...] Punitive damages must be eliminated."

Somehow, I'm just having a hard time believing that the challenges we face are due to businesses not investing because they're afraid of transit union strikes, or businesses not building products because of our failure to adopt a Rand-ian strategy for valuing human life.

Regardless, I can hold both thoughts in my head at the same time: that we need punitive damages to ensure that companies don't factor in predictable loss-of-life liability into their business plans, as they do with many other liabilities, and that we need to consider whether punitive damages are out of control. Greenspun apparently can't.

Granted, that's only one case, but how many $500 carbs does that company have to sell to cover $53mm in exposure? How many more times than the tiny market for those carbs (that engine is no longer in use in a production aircraft)? I've left explicit instructions to my family that if I should pass crashing my airplane, that they are not to sue my maintenance facility or anyone else in the aviation industry. I hope that never comes to pass, but if it does, I wouldn't want to be part of perpetuating this ridiculousness.

First, liability is clearly a structural disadvantage of the aviation industry. But that doesn't make it a crisis for business in general.

Second, the story you've cited seems not to be a clear cut case of tort abuse. The plaintiffs built a case around an FAA finding that implicated the carb, they were armed with a record of unanswered complaints about the same carb part, and the carb company staged an ineffective defense, blaming ice, oil changes, and pilot errors in ways that were apparently easily refuted.

Third, even if this was a clear-cut case of tort abuse, it doesn't really answer my argument. I concede that tort abuse is an issue. I just think it's ludicrous to respond to it by eliminating the concept of punitive damages. Companies really do factor predictable liabilities into their business plans. Look how every health care organization handles HIPAA.

I don't think punitive damages should go to the victim. I do think punitive damages are worthwhile. It's not any one person's fault, it's the fault of the organization as a whole. The organization as a whole should suffer as i would suffer if i did something similar.

1) world's lowest percentage of GDP (among developed nations) spent on government; only with a low spend will investors have faith that taxes will stay low - This has the consequence of bad infrastructure, an uneducated workforce, less investment in basic sciense which lays the ground for innovation and high-tech industries, etc. A country like Sweden has a high percentage of GDP spent on government, and yet it has managed to create companies such as Saab, Ikea, Ericsson, Electrolux, Hasselblad, Hennez and Maurtitz, Mysql, Volvo, etc.

2) corporate governance that relieves investors from worry that profits will be siphoned off by management - This is one of those things that sound easy but turn out to be extremely hard. History shows that when you try to protect investors from fraud, mismanagement, etc. all you get is more red tape and, bigger government and make things harder for small companies. Sarbannes Oxley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act) was an attempt to solve this very problem and it turned out to be a disaster.

3) world's best school system and best educated workers - America has a long way to go here. The problem is that it takes many years to get educated workers: You start in kindergarten and get educated workers 15 years later. Besides empirical studies show that a good education system requires considerable public investment, and thus a larger percentage of GDP spent on government.

4) world's cheapest transportation system and one that is virtually free from uncertainty caused by congestion - again this requires substantial public investment, and is a long term commitment. You will have to spend a good amount of GDP on infrastructure and will only reap the rewards after a decade.

I have to admit that this reads a bit like when you hear politicians talk about technology - it is apparent that their understanding of the domain is not very deep.

Sweden's current face of big government didn't start until the 60s when all the companies except Mysql were already large.

For more see Johan Norberg's writings on this: http://www.johannorberg.net/?page=articles&articleid=45

The economist Mauricio Rojas wrote a very detailed analysis of the Swedish Economy and the Welfare State throughout history, which is available here: http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665891.pdf

I haven't read the full report yet, but it looks very interesting.

We have to be careful about the education as being treated as the golden ticket for growth. I believe a combination of good primary education and a strong research culture is of vital importance to growth, but without the right infrastructure for entrepreneurs it wont do anything.

Just look at all the people educated to the nth degree in failed communist economies to see what I mean. Also see the reoccurring debates here about the value of higher education for an additional counter point to education.

Sweden by the way were pioneers in using School Vouchers, something that the Democratic party in the US is heavily against.

The United States has a large amount of military spending and redundant bureaucracy, so we have high taxes and low social benefit. For example, the US is usually either #1 or #2 in the world in the amount of money spent per pupil in public schools, and yet the results are not good.

It seems ( I have no data to back this up) that the efficiency of bureaucracy decreases exponentially with it's size. This is obviously a bigger problem for large countries such as the US. There are advantages to size (setting the global agenda, advantages in areas where absolute amounts of money matter (for instance military - your military is twice as good if you spend twice the money no matter how large your population. Roughly...) . , etc.). Whether these advantages outweigh the disadvantage of a large bureaucracy I don't know.

There is something to be said for the design choice of federalism; pushing all possible decisions down to the smallest unit of population effected. However, our government has moved away from this since the Roosevelts time in power.

European Commission that basically runs European Union (500M people) has just around 25,000 employees [1].

This is tiny. Just to get an idea about the scale: New York City (8M people) government employs 250,000 people (though to be fair, I have no idea who is included in this total) [2].

EC seems to be doing something very right. They offer very good working conditions (pay, holidays, benefits, security), so they are able to attract good people. There is a tough competition for these civil servant jobs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City

Because they are massively, massively corrupt.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_co...

"For nine consecutive years the EU court of auditors has refused to sign off the budget. The numbers are huge. The annual EC budget is around ¤100 billion (£65 billion). The auditors cannot clear 95 per cent of that. We simply cannot tell what is happening to that money"

Or to put it another way, if this is true, it means that they are able to run real EC functions with just 5 billion Euro budget. That would quite efficient indeed.

My whole point was about low ranking civil servants that do the bulk of the nitty-gritty administration work and that all must pass through a highly selective competitive exams (1 in 29 applicants [1] cf. Harvard's 1 in 14 [2]).

And for these people, from my limited anecdotal evidence I got impression that they are indeed efficient, at least for bureaucracy standards.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSO

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard#Admissions

For example, http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/investorrelations/... shows that Transport for London (buses, trains and underground) alone employs about 18,000 people (and probably quite a bit higher now).

I've seen this commercially, too: large company buys small-medium company because it's good for both companies, even though it's demonstrably bad for employees and products of both. It's a tail-wags-dog situation.

What I was talking about is what economists call a true public service. This is a service that doesn't diminish in value when you add more users - a light tower is the classic example: The lighttower is as good a service to a ship whether it is the only one using it or there are a thousand others. Webpages are another good example.

Large countries have an advantage here: It costs the same to build a lighttower whether you are the US or Lichtenstein.

The military might have been a bad example though...

I really like your point #1, and it's the most important. I'm not sure if there are empirical analyses to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). It lifts the whole economy up on its own, and makes it more competitive in the world, which is very important re: Greenspun's comment about today's globalized world being very different compared to the 1930s.

As for the rest... those are nice to haves, but I think that lowering taxes to encourage foreign investment is an asinine comment. There will be low investment in the next few years, as he comments, if there is a poor political and economic environment for it, not if there are unfavorable tax conditions. Investors are sitting on mountains of cash right now; if the government creates policies and programs that incentivize people to put that cash to work (i.e. government/private sector co-sponsored infrastructure projects) then they will.

Most people don't get this point, but the US spends A LOT of money on education, more than most countries. "More money" is the easy answer, the one that politicians like to use. But I don't think the returns of spending more federal money on the current educational system are positive.

Here is a chart comparing US education spending with the performance of its students on international math tests. I don't think you can look at stats like this and say "more money" is the answer.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/features/issues/charts/Ed_K...

There are fundamental incentive problems with public monopolies. When you have a group of dedicated, wealthy, involved parents, these negative incentives can be overcome. However, the system fails your average person, and it surely fails those who need the most help even when a lot of money is spent on them.

Those of us who advocate market reforms simply want the incentives of the system to be a help, rather than a hindrance. But we're radical right-wing nazis who hate children and eat puppies, so I don't think our plans are going to be implemented any time soon.

Also, it's funny that we are characterized that way in the United States, when such right-wing countries as Sweden and the Netherlands already have universal school vouchers that can be spent on private schools.

The fact that DC's money is misspent does not automatically mean that the problem isn't money. And sure, one good way to raise money for the DC school system would be to streamline their administration.

It is easier to look at a particular district and point out what they are doing wrong (cronyism, graft, etc.) than to build universal policy that improves the system as a whole. "There are a thousand people cutting branches for every one striking at the root", and all that.

I'm not engaging with the rest of your argument.

That would be my main argument. Then I wandered a bit.

For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school districts are teaching overcrowded classes in doublewide trailers and spending their own money on books and classroom supplies. And then I think your argument is awfully abstract, counterintuitive, and unpersuasive.

Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options.

Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up.

For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range.

If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on.

So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is:

(A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer.

(B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?".

There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork.

If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.

There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons:

* very large amounts of work to take home

* having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes

* if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong

* the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching.

Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.

My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher.

I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs.

My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off.

For reference:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary...

That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid.

We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher".

We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels:

top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table)

etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners).

I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much.

As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.

That criterion has the same problem with education as it does with charitable organizations: it decouples money spent from results achieved. Maybe the answer to more effective schools and charitable organizations is better administrators who can only be recruited with competitive salaries. If that's the case, using that criterion would force schools and charitable organizations to hire less capable administrators in order to get enough funding.

Edit: just to clarify I didn't want to come across as calling you a right-wing Nazi baby killer and hope that I didn't in the original post.

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying that you did. I was just commenting on my frustration with the general state of public debate in the United States. People who support market-based policies are generally vilified right now. I think it is just a hangover from the Bush presidency, since he is widely disliked and supports market policy in his speeches. Debate will probably become more reasonable when he is gone.

I'd go further and say you don't even need the wealth -- just dedicated and involved parents. Success will flow from that. Trouble is, it's a vicious cycle: the kids who need the most help often have the least dedicated and involved parents.

People claim that private schools are better than public for all sorts of reasons, but I think the main reason probably is that the parents who care enough to put their kids in private school usually also care enough to be dedicated to and involved in their child's education.

So what is it? I wonder if it's a cultural thing. I remember how important it was during high school to not be seen as a "nerd". In Italy, my friends can't really relate to that sort of mentality - it doesn't really exist there like it does in the US. Doing well in school is basically seen as a good thing. Maybe it's not foremost in everyone's minds, but it's not something to be derided either.

The empirical analysis is all decidedly negative. The U.S. dramatically increased education spending in the past thirty years with nothing to show for it. On a local level, pretty much every study of increased school funding has shown no impact. From my experience, formal schooling has very little value add on top of what kids learn from their parents, on their own, and on the job.

Citations to the studies, please?

"How good a job would you do at your company if customers were required by law to buy your product? That's the situation faced by public school management today. It would be illegal for a 14-year-old not to attend the local school, unless his or her family can scratch up a huge tuition payment for a private school. We need to set a deadline by which every American family has the choice to send children to a school other than the local one. There wouldn't be a problem with 'failing schools' anymore because parents would have withdrawn nearly all of their kids from such a school and the building would end up being taken over by a new school with new management."

Hear. Hear.

But where do all these people you mention live now? On the other side of the Atlantic.

Another success story is Skype, which was founded by a Dane and a Swede. Did they decide to start the company in Denmark or Sweden? No, it's a Luxemborg company.

Denmark has a history of a relatively free economy. In the 1960's the government was smaller than in the US. And the biggest companies in Denmark today were founded a long time ago. Before the welfare state in Denmark grew really big. Maersk, the biggest container shipping company in the world, for instance.

Today the average child born in Denmark is going to be a net cost to the Ponzi scheme called the welfare state. So it's an unsustainable system. I think the country is still coasting on the culture and work ethic of the previous generations. But the work ethic is deteriorating now that the welfare state has been around so long there are families where the parents have always lived from welfare and never really had a job.

It still "works" despite the big government, not because of it. Also, it could be worse, Denmark is #11 on the Economic Freedom Index. It is easy to start a company, there are relatively few restrictions on investment etc. But - the taxes are very high. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cf...

Denmark has something a similar to Milton Friedmans idea of a school voucher system, where you can put your kid in a private school and you'll get a subsidy from the state. So you kind of get the taxes paid for government school back and the private school gets the money. The parents just have to pay a smaller fee to the private school in addition to the government "voucher money". There is no good reason why government should run the school. But they do. Some of them are private though. So if you think Denmark's school system is so great, maybe you should support getting the government out of schools in the US.

- another Dane who left Denmark.

While not as bad now, there was a time when the word "udenlandsdansker" (Danish emigrant) was synonymous with traitor when used by Danish politicians.

The way I look at it is that my parents paid 70% taxes when I was going through the educational system, so I could go through the educational system. I have also paid plenty of Danish taxes myself to put other peoples children through school.

While I have great love for my country, I am not indebted nor indentured to it.

We already went through a period in Danish history http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stavnsbånd (in Danish) where men between 18 and 36 were forced to stay and work for the local land owner.

I do not think there is a need through law, guilt or propaganda to enforce a new version of this indentureship.

There are many reasons to stay in Denmark, but there are also plenty of good reasons for entrepreneurs and other over achievers to leave:

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2007/07/01/silicon-vikings...

I'm thinking of moving away myself, if it wasn't for the good friends and beautiful girls I would have gone already.

Just heard the argument I thought I heard so many times before.

And I hate whiners...

Btw. are you ever in Copenhagen?

Solution: NO welfare AT ALL to anyone who doesn't complete their education. And backdate it to the 70s.

I'm too lazy to google it right now but I remember Danish test results being amongst the worst in Europe.

That said I think Denmark has good enough education and improving it is the least of our problems.

Denmark has had several high profile people in Computer Science. What is interesting is that they have almost without exception been forced to find a home outside Denmark.

Danish culture is very conformist. And it's IT culture doesn't disappoint here. J2EE with Struts and the Waterfall Development model is still seen as cutting edge. Mainframes (proof that we were advanced a few decades ago) are still in wide use in even relatively small companies.

I know lots of great Ruby, Python etc programmers there, who are frustrated beyond belief at the lack of momentum for such languages there. I keep preaching to them to start companies.

The funny little secret about the Scandinavian model is that at least for Denmark and Norway it has essentially been funded by North Sea Oil. Most Danes don't even know this, but it is reported every year by the ministry of finance. They have also been hit really hard by the recession and I'm not sure how they are going to do with lower oil prices now.

Edit: Let me clarify. Denmark has a small homogeneous well educated population. I would expect that the parents take an intense interest in their children's education resulting in high achievement. In contrast in California we have a much more diverse population with a large proportion of recent immigrants. The parents are not well educated themselves and the kids are struggling because of poor English. This makes it difficult to have a high achieving school system. Sure wealthy communities have excellent schools and can attract the best teachers, but the poorer districts can't. This is not a racial or ethnic problem; it's economic.

I don't see what either example has to offer a diverse, sprawling nation of 300,000,000 people where school unions often block any education reform proposal that is not "more money for schools".

See Choice of Schools in Six Nations

http://www.amazon.com/schools-nations-Netherlands-Belgium-Br...

(published as a United States government document in the 1980s) for more information about Europe than I know personally.

Let's start at the beginning. Depressions are caused by a slight increase in people's preference to hold onto cash, which causes a downward spiral where the economy slows and then people want to hold onto cash more.

The first thing you try to do in this instance is increase the money supply, but we've gone as far as we can go on that -- the Fed has sent the interest rate to zero and it can't go any lower.

So, as Keynes said, the second thing you try to do in that scenario is let government spending pick up the slack and take advantage of the productive capacity that isn't being used on anything to get the economy moving again.

Greenspun claims this won't work because "a lot more globalized today and there is much more competition among countries." First, we've only recently caught up to the levels of international integration we had during the first wave of globalization, starting in 1870. Second, countries don't compete with each other. The fundamental well-being of a country is determined by simply its domestic productivity. What would we be competing for?

He seems to suggest that we're competing for international investment dollars. But then why do you think government investment won't work? Why is international investment this magical thing we must attract to start businesses?

He claims that Japan's huge fiscal stimulus proves stimulus doesn't work. But in Japan, stimulus did work -- when it was tried. As the leading scholar wrote: "the 1995 stimulus package ... did result in solid growth in 1996, demonstrating that fiscal policy does work when it is tried. As on earlier occasions in the 1990s, however, the positive response to fiscal stimulus was undercut by fiscal contraction in 1996 and 1997."

See http://mediamatters.org/items/200812220005 for more.

Which is kind of how we got into this cluster F in the first place, isn't it?

Thinking that your experience in specialty X translates to great insights into specialty Y is a known FAIL. Greenspun needs to operate with the minimum debate rules that he'd demand from someone making equally blatant assertions about electrical engineering or web based computing.

Then, the intermediate-level books and classes teach you that some of that intro-level supply-demand stuff is pretty wrong. It only operates under all sorts of unrealistic conditions, kind of like equations in high school physics which disregard friction. So intermediate econ outline all sorts of complications which supposedly help in the real world.

Then, in the seminar-level classes, you learn that none of the intermediate-level theories really ever worked except by accident, and no one who tries to predict or model real-world economic conditions agrees on anything.

I've asked this question recently here on HN,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683

so I'll follow up in this thread. What would you recommend someone read who wants to learn something more about economics?

And are you saying that we got into this cluster F by listening to Phil Greenspun, or other amateurs? It seems to me that the well-paid "experts" in finance and the media deserve most of the blame rather than internet people shooting their mouths off.

Things WILL get worse as our political system is unwilling to punish incompetence and the people who predicted this stuff would happen aren't being listened to now that its obvious they were right.

1) The existence of expensive cities without rent control doesn't tell us anything about the effect of rent control on rent (cities can be expensive for lots of reasons unrelated to rent control), unless you do a study comparing roughly equivalent expensive cities, some with rent control, and some without. The author didn't do that -- he compared cities with rent control, to cities without, and found that cities with rent control are more expensive. This was bad experimental design.

2) His measurements found that the distributions around the median were different for expensive cities vs. inexpensive ones. But it doesn't really matter that he was comparing the shapes of the distributions, and not their medians, because one can reasonably expect that expensive cities will have a larger contingent of really expensive homes than inexpensive cities, even without the effect of rent control. For that matter, rent control might be the only thing giving the expensive cities a stock of inexpensive housing at all!

Again, for a proper experiment, the author needed to compare equivalently priced cities, varying only the factor of rent control. He didn't do that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zudtoD-4vyo

Albert Shanker, AFT President

Some of those assertions turn out to be correct, of course. But in terms of quality of discourse, Greenspun is roughly even with your average internet troll.

I guess it's ironic that this post is itself completely unfounded. But it's like 2:00 and I'm really tired and it astonishes me that this blog post could get so much support here, so I'd just like to get this ball rolling and see if any of you agree with me.

I don't see what I would gain from reading Greenspun's opinion on economic policy matters that I wouldn't get from reading Hayek, Friedman, or Keynes, or modern empirical arguments from places like Cato. What comparative advantage does Greenspun have here?

I read through the first page or so, it didn't seem like it was going to offer any new or interesting ideas. And that's fine. Phil can post his opinions on his web page all he wants. It's a free country. I just don't think it should be the #1 story on the front page, or that it will engender good discussion.

Smart parents will do their best to send their kids to private schools, but the less fortunate kids will get stuck in public. If it were even easier/cheaper to send your kids to private, then there would be an even greater separation between the kids who's parents care and the kids who's parents don't give a damn (the haves and have-nots).

The answer isn't to make more private schools, the answer is to fix public schools. And the problem with public schools is not the teachers. The teachers are working within a system that is broken. Rather than go into the details, here's a quick example: you're a teacher. You cover the material in class. You're inventive, dynamic, clear, withit, the whole nine yards. You assign homework on the material, go over the homework, and then give a quiz (on that material). Students fail because they didn't study and don't care (and this stems from most parents not giving a shit about school as long as their kids are out of the house and having some fun in sports). You go over the quiz in class, and give a test later in the week (on the same material). The students fail because they don't care and didn't study. You have a choice: do you fail a bunch of students and bring down a shitstorm of parent complaints and administration complaints? Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?

If you fail a bunch of students, administration will claim that you're a bad teacher. You'll have constant visits by "guests" (from administration) in the back of the room evaluating you. Parents will complain loudly that you're inept. Everyone will turn you into a scapegoat. If you're not tenured, you're gone.

Let me give you a hint: teaching is just a job, like any other job except that you're helping kids and so you try to go the extra mile if you can. But it's still just a job, and its not worth all the shit you get to make it rigorous if no one else is doing it, if you get no help from administration, and if you in fact get severely punished for it.

You want to fix education? Let the teachers teach, and let them fail students who fail. And for Pete's sake, get rid of the fucking standardized tests. They turn education into color-by-numbers.

Standardized tests are the solution to the first problem. This is what we do at both NYU and Rutgers (with intro classes), and it works quite well.

Standardized testing is just a race to the bottom. As soon as everyone agrees upon the standardized test, anyone who teaches anything outside of the box at all gets punished because an hour spent on something that's interesting and happens to catch the students' fancy on a given day is one less hour spent preparing them for the standardized test.

As far as the race to the bottom, standardized testing prevents it. The race to the bottom is what you described; make your test easier than others to avoid problems with whiny parents/students. A standardized test puts a floor on how far down you can go.

The standardized tests are part of what's broken in the system. Also part of what's broken is that there are enormous forces preventing teachers from failing students who actually fail.

a) there are standardized tests

b) students are passing anyway because of the enormous forces on teachers

If the standardized tests from a) determine the grades, then how is b) possible? How can pressure on the teachers cause a student to pass if the teachers are not the ones assigning grades?

When there's a state-mandated standardized test in, say, science, administration immediately jumps on it and says, "Ok! Now we know what our science tests should look like!" and in turn, science teachers must all toe the line, give tests that look just like the state standardized test, and teach to those tests. If Mr. A's students score lower than Mrs. B's students (and administration looks very closely at these test results), [sarcasm] then Mrs. B must be the better teacher! [/sarcasm]

Students "pass" their own class's chapter tests, partly due to teachers just passing them for the reasons previously explained, but also partly because they've been prepped and groomed specifically to pass the test.

Students "pass" the state-wide standardized tests partly because that's what they've been prepped for, and partly because of the nature of standardized testing. Think about it: if everyone does poorly on a state-wide standardized test, the state administrators making the test assume they've made it too difficult, and so water it down. Makes sense also because they want their state to compare favorably with other states. But regardless, what they want is that bell curve. They want it bad. They want to point to the districts on the low side of the bell curve, tell them to improve, and believe they've done something useful.

In turn, local districts want their own bell curves. They want to point to teachers with students on the low side of that bell curve, eliminate them (or otherwise reprimand them), and believe that they've done something useful.

Then net result of all this for the students is that they become pretty good at passing standardized tests but not terribly good at critical thinking. In class, teachers will hear over and over again from students, "will this be on the test?". The students crave bytes of information that sound like a multiple choice question with the answer attached, because that's the sort of thing that leads to success on tests.

So the chapter tests aren't standardized.

As I said, "standardized tests" and "race to the bottom" are incompatible.

Perhaps the current standardized tests are a poor measure of performance. On this matter, I can't comment without seeing the tests. From what you describe, they sound easy to game. If that is the case, then fix the tests.

I can't see any reason why standardized tests would be worse than non-standardized ones. Due to economies of scale (more data, you can hire a statistician to help, and test designers have time to work on i) and a decent selection process (don't put the worst teachers in charge of designing the test), I see compelling reasons why standardized tests would be better than the average individualized test.

Additionally, teachers do not have the ability to "race to the bottom". Perhaps the floor set by the tests is too low, but eliminating the floor entirely won't fix that.

The state standardized tests are pretty long, but not long enough to make all your tests from. Teachers have to give tests every few weeks (partly because students will forget things after too long, but also because the administration demands assessments, assessments, and more assessments). So what happens is, some chapter tests are standardized. The students do ok on these, since they've been prepped over and over for them. However, teachers need to make their own tests too, of course, and these were the ones I was originally referring to (where, if you require critical thinking, too many students fail).

> Perhaps the current standardized tests are a poor measure of performance.

They are a good measure of how well students perform on standardized tests.

> I can't see any reason why standardized tests would be worse than non-standardized ones.

Good teachers know how to ask good questions. Sometimes those questions change depending upon the students, any extra/different material covered in class, and so on. Regardless, good teachers can ask students to perform critical thinking and can tell if the student can really do it or not -- but it takes time. Administrators want lots of assessments. So many that good teachers will drown under all the grading if they are making students do real critical thinking and providing detailed assessments of it all.

> Additionally, teachers do not have the ability to "race to the bottom".

The forces in place now are resulting in bad patterns. Patterns like good teachers leaving, and the only ones staying are the ones willing to play the game and do all the assessments. "Race to the bottom" means teachers becoming robots who

* cover the required material ("electricity is movement of electrons!"),

* assign homework on it ("what is electricity?"),

* quiz on it ("is electricity, a. movement of protons, b. movement of neutrons, c..."),

* review it ("does everyone remember what electricity is?")

* test on it ("what is electricity? a. movement of electrons b. ..."),

then move on to the next topic. That's what standardized testing gets you and why it's a race to the bottom: find teachers who can shovel the most of that to the most students in the shortest amount of time and get the highest scores.

The net result on teaching staff is that the ones who teach critical thinking skills eventually tend to get washed out of the system. Teaching critical thinking skills is harder, the skill is harder for students to acquire (they have to work for it!), it takes more time, assessment is less cut and dried, and there's less payback visible on those standardized tests.

I agree with these statements. However, there are many public school systems in the USA that are successful. Why? That is the right question to ask.

The education problem is much more complicated than simply giving parents and students the choice of school to attend. The "good" schools would then be overrun with perspective students, requiring a selection procedure to determine who to accept. And so, the rest of your life will be determined at earlier ages by some standardized test. The top few percent get the good education while the rest scramble to get what they can. That is not a better solution and does not fix the problem.

Clearly, the issue is more complicated than choice, but choice is a step in the right direction. But if we are to do choice, we much also do vouchers, so that the public tax money can go to public schools or to private schools. This process will eliminate the teacher union qualms stated by the article naturally, as people filter into private schools or functional public schools.

The best schools will be more competitive, yes. How is this any different than the rest of life? We use merit based systems for university and graduate schools, and on some level for job placement. Why would it not work in lower levels? I maintain that with choice, and vouchers, more private schools would pop up to cater to the excess supply of fantastic students, if such a surplus exists.

The real problem with this whole equation, just like in healthcare and other government services is the problem of the extreme low class. Parents have more of an impact, and without good parents, smart children may never become good students, which would prvent them from participating in the meritocratic system described above. I can find no good solution to deal with the parents who do not value education over all else, and this is the real crux of the problem.

Are you saying that no other school could learn anything from the better schools? The "good" grocery stores don't have to sell admission tickets, because other grocery stores learn their techniques in a free market.

In terms of government spending, there are some areas that we should scale back, but government spending doesn't hurt economic growth unless it's simply spending for consumption. If it's spending for investment (such as improvements in infrastructure, education of future generations, etc.) it doesn't harm economic growth. The few trillion we're spending overseas in military jaunts will hopefully get a huge cut in the next administration.

Pensions need a complete overhaul. The problem is that people want pensions that are written as "you get x% of your final salary each year for the rest of your life plus health insurance". That's a nebulous liability. If you want to pay an insurance company to take on that liability, you can't afford it and governments are the only ones that won't go bankrupt paying it (since they'll just push the burden onto future generations). Towns and cities are getting hit by this bad. It is my belief that the government should provide for you as long as you live - BUT the government should be providing for you at a very low rate. Any luxuries you want are your problem. If you want to be able to pass your house to your kids, you better have saved up to cover your retirement or you can reverse mortgage the house and when you pass, the house goes to the bank. I do believe that government must provide for its citizens. It should not provide a middle-class lifestyle. It can't. It's definitionally impossible to provide everyone with a middle-class lifestyle or better.

Likewise, health must be re-understood. First, we love new things in America more than anywhere and as such we demand new (even if it isn't better). For example, there is no evidence that Nexium is better than Prilosec (both made by AstraZenica and Nexium being an isomer of Prilosec), but Nexium is newer and under patent and Rx and costing many times more. And so many people go for it because the cost is likely to be the same to them (via insurance). People aren't price-sensitive in medicine. I don't want people depriving themselves of treatment, but Rx allergy medicine is often near identical to what you can get OTC today. However, many go for the Rx because it's just as cheap (for them). It's wasteful! Incredibly! Similarly, new treatments are expensive and then come down in price (much the same way computer technology works). Blu-Ray players cost $1,000 a couple years ago. Now you can find them for under $300. The problem is that we won't tell someone, "sorry, that treatment is really new and we just won't cover it until it gets cheaper". The questions is: how do we enable people to get the latest treatments as soon as possible without causing costs to be enormous? And there might be trade-offs that no one wants to make. We also need to become a more fit society. No matter how much efficiency we put into our healthcare system, we will pay a lot more than anyone else because we are a really unhealthy people. We need to change that. Now! I hate suggesting that a monetary incentive be in there, but that's what does it for people. No environmental or congestion plea could stop SUVs, but $4 gasoline did in a couple months. If you tried to sell one, you were getting nothing for it. Part of the issue here is what health problems are a person's fault and what aren't? We like to think of weight as a person's problem. Smoking definitely is and it's time smokers paid more in group insurance policies. Weight is hard. You definitely have some control over it, but then again, you have some control over cancer as well (from sun block to eating well and having regular screenings). I don't want to propose anything because I think it's all crap, but we need to loose the weight or stop complaining that health care costs too much.

As he mentioned, liability reform is important. Every time you buy anything - from an x-ray at the hospital to a DVD at Target - you're paying for liability insurance on top of the product's price. Insurance is expensive because, while one can mostly calculate out things with fun actuaries, you need to keep quite the pad in case you're under with your calculations.

I'd disagree that we don't want to increase spending - at least temporarily. What keeps a market economy going is stability. With instability, we hoard. In the short term, we need people to feel like there is stability so that they act normally. If that involves the government putting some money out there, so be it. A lot of the suggestions are great in the long-run, but I think the next 12-18 months are important too.

I'm not as anti-union as he comes off, but to an extent unions are biting the hand that feeds them. No, not the companies they work for. Rather, the market force that drives up wages: automation. Workers can only be compensated (at maximum) at their rate of production minus costs (like hiring and administration). If the production of the average worker in a union doesn't go up, neither can wages or benefits. In fact, benefits might slip if the cost of such benefits outpaces inflation. Right now, we're seeing a very anti-automation union stance. Europe and Asia are starting to use more capital per worker than the United States. Americans are great workers, but you just can't compete en-masse if you put yourself at such a huge capital disadvantage. I like unions EXCEPT for their anti-automation stance. Restricting capital kills businesses.

In terms of education, I think we need more informal education. How much have we all learned on this site? Wikipedia? We're seeing the opportunity to really get knowledge out there and to interact more efficiently. Heck, those online chat things that businesses employ for support are a great source of inspiration. They allow one employ to deal with several customers at once. And unlike a classroom, you don't have the issue of interrupting a lecture to ask. And that knowledge could be gone over and made into an FAQ-like structure for a topic.

In terms of labor markets, we're plenty deregulated. American businesses already see incredible freedom here. Minimum wages are very, very low. I'm not someone that goes around saying that the poverty line is set 3x too low (that it should be 30k for a single person rather than 10k), but I'd really rather not see wages fall at the lowest end. I'm a single person living in walking distance of the T (subway) in Cambridge and live off $15k per year for everything (except this year which saw a shiny new MacBook Pro). I'm not depriving myself of anything I want, but I don't just spend to spend. I don't regularly eat out, buy drinks at bars, spend lots on random expensive things, whatnot. Still, people need a certain level.

Similarly, I think affirmative action is in my best interest in the long-run. It's annoying as hell. Heck, even most African-Americans surveyed are against it. However, underclasses are bad for a society. Underclasses cause friction and havoc that take money from me. People who think a system is stacked against them try to go around it. PG commented a few days ago saying, "Markets interpret social engineering as damage and route around it." If there is one thing I want, it's that people work inside the system. Plus, it's inherently unfair that some people are the decedents of historically discriminated people and, well, I am as well, but they're people that are seen in a good light in modern America which gives me an advantage. But beyond the unfairness, giving people stuff gives them things to loose. That's good for me because the more you have to loose the less chance you're going to do something stupid to me.

I really want to applaud Dr Greenspun for offering his knowledge to others freely. It's wonderful.

Would the government really make more ongoing income from taxes on rent rather than rent? That seems unlikely.

I dont mind people making arguments that are reasoned and carefully successively built. But to just start with one opinion, pretend it is a fact, and then build another assertion on top of that is a bit much. I do not believe that you have to have a degree in economics to opine about economics, but whatever your arguments are, at least make them as arguments as opposed to "I am smart so everything I say must be true" style pronouncements.