Sort of, only in theory does it remove these laws. In practice the US still subsidizes it's agriculture. This has an enormous effect on how trade relations work between the US and 3rd world countries. In theory, one can speculate with the dollar. In reality, just about all of the wealth in the world is propping the dollar up. It will see some fluctations, but it won't do anything remotely close to what happend in Argentina. When all else fails, we can prop up the dollar with our WMD's. It's not likely that any other OPEC countries will be switching currency like Iraq did in 2000.
As far as waiting for equilibrium in the markets, I wouldn't hold my breath. About the only thing that seems to bring markets back in line is government intervention. Left alone markets tend to increase the differences in wealth and poverty over time. The people that advocate unrestricted markets know this, which is why they advocate it. If you aren't wealthy, then you should understand this and advocate the opposite. I certainly wouldn't wait for things to even out. That's exactly what the WTO and it's backers are counting on.
First, let's not fool ourselves, free trade is not causing a fairer distribution of resources. The wealth differential in both 3rd and 1st world countries (especially America) is increasing, not decreasing. The reason the middle class is doing so poorly is because free trade is simply robbing the industrialized nations middle classes of the spoils that they normally received from economically dominating the 3rd world. Now all those spoils are moving to the upper classes. Free trade certanily isn't creating a middle class in 3rd world countries. It's doing the same thing over there that it is in the 1st world. It's creating enormous wealth alongside massive amounts of poverty.
I agree that there are natural constraints with resources that will soon relegate the SUV to the garbage dump. As Americans, we need to learn how to do more with less. However, other resource constraints, such as housing, food, medical care, technological, are more artificial, and if anything. Getting more people involved in a global economy should produce MORE software, MORE innovation in technology that doesn't use a lot of resources, MORE doctors, etc.
In America, we have plenty of land, a perpetual surprlus of labor, a perpetual surplus of food. On the other hand, we have artificial shortages of medical schools, shortages of education, shortages of housing, etc. Our economy is doing a terrible job matching needs with abilities, needs with desires. I think that this only compounds the constraints that are now being imposed on our resources.
So, in a certain sense, you are correct, we will need to learn to do more with less. On the other hand, the idea that we need to settle for a lower standard of living in the process doesn't hold much water.
We CAN do a lot more with less. If we all just used segways, or maybe even bikes, and lived a bit closer together, and combined that with public transportation, we could drastically reduce fuel consumption. Our transportation system is one of the most stupid, inefficient "designs" that I could think of. The engineering of it is purely idiotic. You drive around 4,000 pounds of metal to transport a 120 lb. person. Gee, I wonder if we're wasting any gas when we do that? Yes, there is room for more efficiency, that is for sure.
Most market advocates will say that we'll solve this problem because markets foster innovation. I think that's pure nonsense, it's just that we're doing things so backasswards, that how can we do anything BUT improve? If anything, peak oil may end up doing us a favor in the long run, by causing the market to raise the price of oil to a sane price.
It certainly doesn't look like we can count on the market to save us. But, maybe when we come close to using it all up, maybe then market prices will start to match the true worth of this precious resource, and we'll start seeing real innovation.
Actually, getting people to sit there and be bored for 8 hours a day without rebelling is a tough task. It generally takes about 12 years to get a human being to behave in this way.
I know you aren't being serious. But, setting that aside for a moment, if I really were effective, more would be happening than merely getting flamed on slashdot. There's plenty of history that shows what happens to people when they are too effective, as in Martin Luther King, Malcom X, etc. Part of the solution to this is of course realizing that we need to avoid the cult of personality that gives one leader all the power. That's why people like Chomsky can't stand being given all the credit when he gives a lecture. The only reason people like Noam can do what he does, is because large groups of people support his work, and he has repeated that fact over and over. Understanding this is part of how we fight the illusion that we need great leaders (or the US military for that matter) to come save us.
Also, the majority of people are already discontent. There's a reason you get slow service at your local McDonald's. They know they're getting screwed. They just haven't figured out what to do about it, yet.
Yes, this is definitely an issue with markets. Markets tend to promote what is called a speculative bubble. What happens is that if enough people buy that good, not out of need, but because they believe the price will go up, then the price in fact does go up, but not because the good is more valuable. It goes up because more people are buying it. Think of it as a positive feedback loop. This ends up creating gross price inflation. The other problem is that, the more prices inflate, the more potential speculators are created, eventually even regular homeowners get in on the game. Eventually the price comes crashing back down, often in one moment of punctuated equilibrium. Often times, it will swing back the other direction. Markets are known to produce this effect.
Believe it or not, this isn't the worst effect of markets, it's just the effect that is hurting yourself at the moment. If you want to understand what is really going on, and change things, you need to stop focusing only on how this is affecting you, and try to develop a global understanding of how markets work. If you think what you are going through is bad, then imagine what people living in Argentina go through when a bunch of assholes go in and start speculating with their CURRENCY. One day 3 dollars will buy you a loaf of bread, the next day, it's worthless. This has bankrupted more than a few 3rd world countries. Then our corporations go in and start buying up all of their land and factories at rock bottom prices, no guns necessary.
The problem with what you are describing is that speculation tends to reward those with enough money to ride out the speculative bubble. It hurts those who actually have a need for a certain good, but not enough money to afford the inflated prices. It hurts them even worse if they mistakenly get caught up in the speculation, thinking somehow that speculation will make them rich. Speculation only makes those with the majority of wealth richer, it doesn't make people without the resources to ride the following depressions rich. Playing with markets in this way is one way that the rich rob the poor.
Finally, I would advise holding off on buying a house for a couple of years. We are in the midst of a housing bubble. It will fix itself eventually, and a lot of people will get burnt. If you want to play the market, buy a bunch of gold, or short the shit out of Fannie May. I'd suggest the 2nd option, since I think they are part of the problem.
Why not allow people to move whereever they want, and force the corporations to stay inside national borders? Wouldn't this be a more sensible approach to "globalization"? Instead we allow corporations to move wherever they want, and lock people up inside borders.
Is the idea of a person even a concept in your theory of economics? Or, in your theory, are people invisible, with the focus on profits, raw materials in one end, and manufactured goods on the other side? It's something to think about, when a theory allows for certain things to remain invisible, it tells you a lot about what the creator of that theory thinks is important. That's why our economy is said to be in a "recovery" while most people continue to do worse. Our economists don't have a concept for people in their theory, the measurement is of profits. So, if profits are up, but lots of people are starving, then it's still a recovery. This should give you insight into what classical economics is all about. It's a theory designed to decrease one's understanding of what is really going on.
Take a look at how they view corporate workplaces. According to them, raw materials go in, and consumable goods come out. They fail to notice that people go in, and people come out. People come in energized, they go out, exhausted. They might come in with two arms, and come out, perhaps with one. Economies transform people, and mold and shape them. They might come in humble, and ready to help the world, and go out the other side, a jaded, arrogant CEO. The problem is, if our concept of economic institutions doesn't measure the effects of those institutions on people, the air, the envionrment, etc., then our theory will hide all of the negative effects of corporations. Not to mention, that if we fail to take into account all of the effects of our production institutions, then prices will be grossly distored.
What exactly does a globalized economy mean, when people aren't allowed to usurp barriers that corporations can pass through like thin air? Can we call that a globalized economy?
Try doing this in the real world, where an Indian can live on 10% of the salary of an American. It's not reasonable to expect people to somehow be able to work ten times as hard. There are limits to how hard people can work.
I agree that as Americans, we are being hypocrites by whining about our own problems if we don't at the same time address the problems of the 3rd world that we allow our corporations to exploit. Isolating ourselves, and focusing only on ourselves and our own needs is exactly what makes us so easy to exploit. There is another reason that we shouldn't allow corporations to take over 3rd world countries, it robs their citizens of the opportunities to control their own destiny. Further, the solution to this problem is not to write our congressman, and it's not inside any one country, the solutions lies in joining together with those who are being oppressed outside our country.
The problem of corporate globalization, as well as it's solution, lies outside the borders of any single nation state. It's time for us to realize this fact.
Anyway, I'm sure you're sick of my posts, but, I'm a bit bored today. The thing to remember about private schools, is that as long as they have a release valve, they can't really make any claims about efficiency. The release valve for private schools is the public school system. Did your school really allow everyone to attend? How did they do that? I'm serious, how did they teach mentally challenged children? Remember, that those costs are lumped in with public school budgets. Would the parents of such a child choose to send them to your school or a public school? I'm asking because, if those parents preferred to send that kid to a public school, then that would mean the public school would foot the bill. These are important things to consider. It's really not fair to talk about this stuff until we get an accurate picture of what is happening.
If a student is too precocious, too gifted (I almost got sent to public school because they didn't feel like they had the resources for me, seriously), a behavior problem, learning disabled, etc., then the school sends that student off to public school. The reason why is because keeping that student would drive their costs through the roof. That is one of, if not THE primary reason that they have stricter policy than public schools. Sure, they would love to help everyone, but they know their limits. I'm not saying that these schools aren't successful, of course they are, and part of the reason why is because they get a nice subsidy from the public school system, that generously tackles the problems that private schools are unwilling, or unable to handle.
Ok, I'm done rambling. Feel free to respond with a much shorter comment if you want. I know, others, including me usually have more of a life than I've had today.
I agree that learning to read is essential. That's probably the one area where I would agree that having a good teacher can make a world of difference. After that, a lot of it comes down to persistence. Before we get to learning how to read, a lot if merely depends on interaction. We are all self-taught when it comes to essentials such as language, walking, etc. As long as we get enough opprotunities to interact with live human beings when we are young, we can learn these essentials (unless we are disabled in some respect). Reading is the crucial area where we really do need help. After that, a good book should be able to teach a persistent student what they want to know.
I got a laugh thinking of this one. I'm just trying to imagine what would happen to my Catholic grade school if it were transported to East St. Louis. Now, you would keep the surrounding community exactly the same, spend exactly the same amount on security, etc. Force them to let everybody in, just like the public school. I'm just wondering how long it would have taken for the school to get covered in grafitti, and burned down. How long would it take for the nuns to flee the area back to the nice suburbs. How long would it take for the budget to be broken in an attempt to educate problem children.
I think that what private school advocates would learn from such an experiment is, "Holy Shit! Educating poor people is expensive." Communities that are poor tend to have a lot of anger over the way their lives turned out, and that anger tends to get taken out on things that are seen as being too clean, too perfect, too elitist. Many of the worst students cost ten times as much to educate as the best ones. You can sit me in a room with a book, I'm cheap. A kid that's suffering from malnutrition and from child abuse is going to require a lot more resources. That's why I get so annoyed when people mention that their test scores were higher, and they did it at a fraction of the cost. This is what you SHOULD expect. Better students are cheaper to teach. One mentally retarded student can set your budget back by an astronomical amount, and pull your test scores down quite a bit also. Not mention violent kids, who might destroy property, or need psychiatric intervention. Even the most subtle forms of discrimination, even geographical, can have a huge impact on a school's bottom line.
The other problem with violent kids is that they frustrate many teachers, so that you have less teachers that you can pick and choose from. This also gives private schools an edge. There is a reason that they are willing to work for less at private schools. The important thing to keep in mind is that many of the behavior disorders are not the kid's fault. A lot of them come from broken homes, suffer severe neglect, aren't fed a proper diet, etc. Again, dealing with this is EXPENSIVE. I saw this at the head start that I worked at. And remember, these are the ones that come from relatively good homes.
Treating a school like a business is a great way of ignoring many social ills, shirking our minimal responsibility of at least attempting to provide equal opportunity, if not equal outcomes for equal effort.
The school didn't bus. We had no bus. Kids came from all over town, from all over this area of the state. We weren't the only show in town, we were had sister schools that had the same policies.
What exactly does "came from all over town" mean? Did they fly in? Did they ride their bike 20 miles? Probably not. This indicates that they were driven. I hate to break the news to you, but many of the kids in head start's parents couldn't afford to send their kid across town, because they didn't have cars. You are bragging that you didn't have a bus. Don't you understand? A bus is how poor people get around. Most of them don't have cars. Second of all, any parent who drives their kid halfway across town cares quite a bit, and is willing to go to considerable expense to get their kid to school. There are poor people with this much motivation, but unfortunatly many of them don't have the means(i.e. a car). And, even less fortunate, many poor people don't have the motivation to send their kid halfway across town. That was my original point, was that the kid in head start actually had it pretty good compared to some kids, whose parents may not see any value in education. When people are that poor they tend not to have a lot of hope, and often times will blow what little money they have left on vices. Finally, I would be surprised if a completely destitue area like East St. Louis, MO, could support a school like yours. So, that would end up creating a large geographical area that extremely poor people would have to traverse in order to get to your school. While it might be possible for a working class guy to drive his run-down pickup truck to the school every day, it's a different story when a family can't even pay rent, much less afford a car.
Maybe they should have had you guys do service projects, then you could have seen first hand what I'm talking about.
How was the code of conduct at your school? Would they spend resources on students with behavior problems? I know that my Catholic grade school wouldn't. If a kid showed enough problems, he was expelled and sent to the public school so that they could deal with him. That's been my entire point, is that it doesn't take as much money to teach kids if you are allowed to throw kids out when you want. If they would work with children with behavior problems, then you'll have my attention.
I never said they ate out of garbage cans. The reference to trash was talking about the insides of where they live. Haven't you ever watched an episode of cops, or any show for that matter where the cops are called to the scene and have to enter into some of these rundown shacks? Many of them aren't exactly clean. As far as living on crackers, bread, water, or whatever else, that's not uncommon at all. In a perfectly sane world, a mother of three living on $8000 and food stamps would feed her kids as healthily as we can. But, we live in a capitalist economy, where even our rich can be maxed out, spending on things they don't need. The same is to be expected of our poor. The reality is that most of them blow what little they have left on vices, or if they don't do that, it gets used up during an emergency, and then they have next to nothing to feed their kids with.
Very, very little of what we are taught is actually remembered. The entire approach to education is known to produce the predictable result that most of it will be forgotten within weeks of the final exam. We know this, this isn't some obscure fact. Anyone who has ever been through the process, even you, know this. When I was arguing with my girlfriend about the purpose of medical school, she was very proud of how much she had to "learn" in that first year. What she described was a frenzied, year long cram-session. The results of this are predictable, she remembers only bare outlines of what it was that she was forced to cram. Keep in mind, she's a good student, a true believer, someone that applies herself diligently. Think about what happens to the guy that sets himself to learning it, rather than getting the highest grade. That guy was me, my grades suffered, but I learned a bit more, because I wasn't studying for test, I was studying for the sake of understanding the material. Even I forgot quite a bit of it. Or, think about the person who just doesn't care, for that person it's a complete waste of time.
I'm not saying that there isn't any value in school, but that the approach is known to produce results that are far less than desireable. It's well-known that boot camp style education, such as the style used in law school and medical school isn't a very good method of educating people. People often forget quite a bit of what they are supposed to learn. It is, however, a good test of one's willingness to fit into a system. It's also an excellent way to indoctrinate people. Once you put someone through something like that, you know that they won't turn around and try to destroy the lucrative monopoly that makes many of those in the medical profession millions. And, once systems such as these are set up, whether in the military, your local fraternity, graduate school, local cult, church, or medical school, the people that get through it will many times have a genuine belief that it's the right way to do things. Even if, as in the case of my girlfriend, they hardly remember a thing.
In regards to your first comment, that's simply not true, at least not in the majority of cases. Unless your school somehow had a source of funding that allowed it to accept all it's students for free, it would necessarily have to have some cutoff for financial aid in order to survive. That would seem obvious to me. Requiring people to pay money for something that is otherwise available for free would be a powerful tool for separating by class. Even if your school was supported by a Parish that had a lot of money, the demographics of the surrounding area would also act as a filtering mechanism. In other words, unless your grade school took steps to bus kids in from the other side of town, it's not likely that they are as "diverse" as you claim that they were. So, chances are that if the kids attending this school lived around a Parish where people could afford to donate enough money to keep a school running free of charge to all students, would indicate that the area was doing fairly well and as a result that people in that area tended to make more money.
Let's move on to your second comment. 12.5% of US households live below the poverty line, with the majority of those households being (single) women and children. This data isn't hard to find, just go to the US census bureau's website. So, if we take.125 and multiply by 270 million, I'm afraid that it happens more than we want to admit. Also, remember that our measure of poverty is ridiculously low, at around $9,000 per year or less. So, if you make $9500 a year, you're not living in poverty. If you make $500 a year, or 0, for that matter, then you are. If you extrapolate out just a bit, to a reasonable standard of poverty, for example, anything below 18,000, then you're talking about significant chunks of our population. Keep in mind that a higher percentage of this includes kids. So, around 17.5 percent of children, or one in 5 live at or below poverty. Again, take roughly 0.2, and multiply by the number of children living in the US. Just take a trip to the bad areas of town. Just about every major city has one, if you're willing to look. Or, in some cases, they live in rural areas as close as an hour outside of Atlanta, for example, if you're talking about the Southern US. These are places where running water and electricity don't exist, where homes consist of shacks and trailers on stilts, etc. They do exist, but they're easy enough to ignore if you want. I'm being lazy tonight, so I'll just give you one link, but there's lots of data if you want to look. http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/26/news/economy/pover ty_survey/
In regard to your third sentence, it's never completely one way or another, no one is entirely self-educatiing. But, I think that in the majority of cases, self-education "sticks", while compulsory education is largely forgotten. Clearly I've benefited from being given resources, such as educational tools at a young age. But, I was extremely shy, I never did learn much by interacting with others, and my parents weren't extremely educated, so at a pretty young age, I knew more than most of the people that I ran into, not because I was that smart, but because I had limited exposure to other geeks. But, I do agree that being given tools to learn with at a young age, such as radio shack electronics projects at age 4, certainly made a big difference, as did exposure to science programs such as Nova on channel 9, etc. I learned algebra by reading "teach yourself physics" in 6th grade, and working out the math in my head. It was hard, but I stuck with it. I learned calculus mainly by working through the problems. I dozed off and skipped most classes. Working through the problems is in fact how I think most people learn, at least if they want to learn it in a way that they won't forget next week. I don't think that most students learn much from classroom lectures. Classroom lectures are suited for a very particular kind of student, and the rest usually just suffer in sile
I'd say that you are looking in the wrong areas. Most private schools have mandatory entrance exams. I know mine did. It's fairly easy to take a bright student from a healthy background and teach them, than it is to work with kids whose parents don't give a shit, or who have mental deficits in one or more areas.
One part of my Catholic high school education (also taught by Jesuit priests) was community service at the local head start. Imagine my surprise when I found out one day that one of the kids got a haircut for his 5th birthday. That's it, that's all he got. It was something to think about for a middleclass white kid who never really had seen poverty. Then, years later, when thinking about it some more, the thought occured to me, that this kid was actually not the worst case scenario. It only requires 2 seconds of thought to realize that it takes quite a bit of effort for his parents, who are probably very poor, and working several jobs to make ends meet, to take him to the local head start every day. So, he was actually one of the ones that had it good. Others, well, they might spend their childhood running around in garbage, playing with trash, living on crackers and water and whatever else their parents feel like giving them. Now, I'd like to see your Catholic school take one of THOSE kids, many of whom are suffering from severe malnutrition, and get them to have an SAT score 150-200 points above average. That's just something to think about.
I'm practically self-teaching, just stick me in a room with a book and I'll figure it out, no instruction necessary. It's not a big acheivement to take someone like me and give me a high school education. I'd say that's the primary reason that private schools do so well. If you forced them to deal with the same problems that public schools routinely deal with, I suspect that it would break their budget and they would end up with much worse results than public schools.
It would seem to me that the argument that the US is spread out is a pretty weak one unless you are talking about the most remote areas where the backbone doesn't reach. Any major city that is already hooked into the backbone should have similar hurdles networking the city as any other city. I don't see why New York City's sardine packed population is any less dense than South Korea's major cities. So, we have no excuse for why our major cities are not networked better than they are.
As far as rural areas go, yes, that is a problem. However, with the amount of bandwidth that a single fiber can carry, it just doesn't make sense that it's taking us this long to get networked. Telephone networks required quite a bit more work to set up, and they managed to do it.
My observation is that it's a matter of lack of initiative and capital expendetures by companies that are too busy investing overseas and offshoring workers to be bothered with America. That explains the difference in dense areas like NY.
squealing shrieking Special Magic Voodoo Marx Incantation, magically, kid, Year Zero nightmare (Pol PotRead some history sometime, Gibberish. Nothing you can do about that except kill them. Satanic Foreign Rentiers, Satanic Foreign Rentiers, Big Bad capitalists, dictatorial left-wing control, fantasies, unable to comprehend, The Evil White People Fucking Everything Up. Nonsense. stupid. dumbass. you object to economic freedom just as fanatically as you object to all the others. Dumbass, your implied belief that Marxism is "rational". All those people doing as they please, nobody taking orders from you. Here we encounter the source of my conviction that you're an idiot: The doctrine of malign equivalency. bug-eyed undergraduate squawking probably merits, dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.
Those were the words that I thought were interesting. I just thought that they were worth highlighting. I think that they were actually some of the more convincing parts of your argument. It would go something along the lines of:
1. Make irrelevant statements that distract from the main argument, aren't backed up by fact, etc. 2. Punctuate with insult. 3. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Of course, most of your arguments fall apart without the insults. There isn't much there. However, I will take a moment to address the malign equivalency part of your argument. If the Soviet Union started talking about how bad the Nazis were when their crimes were pointed out, would we take them seriously? Of course not. I don't think that we're as bad as the Soviets, at least not inside our borders. But, that's an awefully, pathetically low standard that you've set for us. I think we're capable of better. Unless you believe that being better than the Soviet dungeon is a great accomplishment. Also, I never said the Soviet Union was prosperous compared to the US, I was comparing them to Brazil, which is a fair comparison, since both Brazil and former USSR were in the same spot economically in 1910. Comparing a country that was barely 3rd world status in 1910 to the US isn't exactly fair. Finally, and this is the final part of my argument, I said that even though they were propserous for a while, it wasn't an argument for them. Please pay attention.
I'll dig up my resources later tonight so that we can compare notes. It's been a while since I've researched this. Until then, do you have any links to your data?
>Those third-world "sweatshop" workers chose what they're doing, because the alternative (subsistence farming) is worse. It sucks to be them, but without capitalism it would suck to be them even more.
Who gets to decide what the "alternatives" are? In this case, the power isn't in the hands of those making the "choice" but those who decide what the "choice" is.
>Starvation, you say? Sorry, but big bad capitalist agribusiness has boosted food production well beyond any levels that were even remotely conceivable 100 years ago. That's who's feeding the world these days.
Ahem, you mean government subsidized agribusiness. A business that, with government funding, is able to destroy any competition by artificially lowering prices. It's easy to win when you break the rules...
>Are you aware that farmers in the third world routinely go out of their way to buy GM seed on the black market, in spite of the bans imposed by corrupt local governments?
I'm aware of a lie in the form of a question when I see it.
>It's more productive. They want to grow more food, sell more food, eat more food, and have a better life -- the only people who object to them having a better life are kleptocrats in the third world, and affluent leftists in the first world.
I have yet to hear anyone, anywhere object to people having a better life, even if they secretly wish that it were so. I agree, they want to grow more food, but are run out of business by state subsidized US agribusiness. Thus leaving them the "choice" of working as wage slaves.
>The "global system" you're talking about is pure fantasy in any case.
I'm not sure you're talking about. I'm not sure what you think I've been reading, or what you think my ideas are.
>What you've got is a global non-system. People do as they damn well please (that's what you object to, right? Your fix is necessarily a centralized, dictatorial system).
I disagree, and I don't think you could prove this if you wanted to. As far as people doing what they please, I think that you must be living in a bubble if you think that people just do whatever they want. I don't think you can find a case of that anywhere. Even in relatively industrialized societies, choices are constrained by a number of factors. In less industrialized societies, choices are constrained to an even greater extent, with more choice given to those with more money, of course.
>Corrupt, kleptocratic third-world governments interfere with the growth of private businesses. They grant monopolies. They demand spectacular bribes and kickbacks. Government interference is harmful far more often than not. Look at the Pacific Rim. Compare Hong Kong and Taiwan to the PRC.
Compare Taiwan to any 3rd world country. They're doing extremely well, partially because they ignored the advice given to them by the US, which was to open their markets and avoid subsidizing them. Instead, they chose to subsidize their markets, and build them rationally, which is exactly how the US built their industry.
It really depends on what you are looking at. You can find corrupt governments, and then you can find responsive ones. You get rid of the corrupt ones and try to create ones that are accountable.
You are also conveniently ignoring the fact that part of the reason that these governments stifle their own private industries, is because there is intense pressure from multinational conglomerates to open up the borders to "trade". Part of the reason corrupt governments stay in power is because of US military industry. Brazil doesn't manufacture machine guns, or tanks, or helicopters, we do.
>And by the way, Stalinism didn't only "not work" for the millions shot or starved directly; it didn't work for anybody else either.
If you want to deny history you can. Their economy did very well until about the 1960's. If it hadn't produced anything, or wasn't able to keep up tec
All of these systems "work". We just need to ask who they "work" for, and what we mean by "works". The Soviet Union "worked" if all we care about is rapid industrialization, but can we say that it worked for the millions that were shot by Stalin and erased from history? No. Fascism "worked" if all we care about is bringing a country out of depression, but did it "work" for those in the concentration camps? No. Capitalism "works" for the CEO's, the Bill Gates, Ken Lays, etc., but does it "work" for the millions of homeless, the approximately 30% who live below the US poverty line, or, since we're talking about a global sytem, the millions of 3rd worlders working in sweatshops to boost corporate profits? The answer again, is no.
Considering they want from about the same stage economically as Brazil was in 1910, and went from that to superpower status in about 30-40 years, yes, it worked. Fascism also worked great economically, pulled Germany out of their slump, as did government management of US industry in the 1940's. In fact, part of why we had a boom during the war years, is because government finally stepped in and took over. That's not an argument for any of the above systems. In fact, the reason I included fascism, is so that hopefully you will realize that just because a system is economically viable does not mean it's just.
However, the idea that the Soviet Union failed because the economic system couldn't work is a myth. It was enormously successful from an economic standpoint. It's the most dramatic tale of rapid industrialization that our history has. For the sake of comparison, take a look at Brazil, which has been languishing under capitalism for decades. And Brazil has a lot more going for it than Russia, like a warmer climate, more resources, just to name a couple of things. Even after the collapse, and corruption that has followed their breakup, they are still light years ahead of Brazil in terms of technology.
Again, none of that means that Communism is desirable. If every time one tries a system, no matter how utopian and egalitarian it claims to be, he ends up with a brutal dicator in charge, then obviously it's horrible system. That's Communism, not what Marx wrote about in Kapital.
The same can be said for capitalism. If, every time we try, we end up with enormous extremes of wealth, corruption, oppression, ever increasing police presence, dwindling opportunities for the majority of people as entire industries are cordoned off and monopolized, unemployment, starvation, control that goes into the hands of a few, effectively handing control of our working lives over to a dictator/CEO, etc., then we can say that it's a bad idea. And, that's if we're talking about the success story, which is America. If we really want to get a true picture of capitalism, we should look at it's failures, such as the majority of South America, many of whom have religiously followed the doctrine given to them by the US and the IMF, only to have their economies shattered. That's capitalism, not what you read in Adam Smith.
It's a function of accountability more so than monopoly. Government has been set up (over a period of time) so that it's not nearly as accountable as it should be. Most public subsidy has been put under the label of defense, to remove public scrutiny. Without any scrutiny, or accountability, it's true that government will become less responsive. On the other, government is very accountable to the corporations and elites that finance quite a bit of the electoral campaigns, so naturally, government is very responsive to them.
It's a tough problem to solve, and it's hard to say where the corruption begins and where it ends. Obviously, the more someone is right that the corruption is with government, the more they are wrong, since corruption in one sector will affect and shape other sectors of society. It will affect the way business is run, the way school is taught, the way kids are raised, etc. The same goes if someone believes that corporations are the root cause of all our problems, or racism, or hierarchy, etc. The more right you are, the more important it is to look at other areas to see the effects that one sector has had on others.
I know there are problems with our government. But, you don't fix the problem by taking control from the band of raving psychopaths in government and handing it over to the raving psychopaths that are better known as corporations. Corporations are antisocial by their very nature, and must not be allowed to dictate public policy. They care about profits, and that's all they care about. Our government, on the other hand, can be pressured, and can change. Governments are not necessarily all bad, and the definition of government is vague enough that if one doesn't like something about his government, then he can change it.
Corporations, on the other hand, are by their very definition, by the very rules with which they are defined, a horrible way to organize a society. The idea of creating an institution with no accountability, except for the accountability it has to it's shareholders to make a profit, dooms corporations to exceedingly antisocial and immoral behavior.
Building computers that aren't needed by most of the population, consuming huge amounts of resources, so that those who do need them can get them, that's efficiency. Government could fund the research without having to use all of the resources necessary to market and sell the crap to people who don't need them. Using our current model, we are creating a huge waste of effort, by producing products that many people don't need. Yes, better and better technology should be made available, but only to those who want it. In our current system, that's an impossibility, as soon as a large enough share of people stop upgrading, then the whole R&D 2 year lifecycle business model goes in the shitcan, and innovation will come to a standstill.
The economics of the processor industry are different than they were 30 years ago. Fabs cost billions, without volume, this industry will collapse. However, government could keep things going, and not view a lack of volume as a waste of resources. Governments don't have to think quarterly.
As far as drug research goes, 99% of it is paid for by the government. That last 1%, which includes the very expensive market barrier known as FDA approval, is what the drug companies pay for. They invest very little in the actual reasearch. They're getting (slightly) better, but not much.
Without government, there wouldn't be welfare. Extending that, without government, it's safe to say that quite a bit of research just wouldn't get done, because businesses, which are bound by very short term fiduciary responsibility wouldn't want to (or be able to, for that matter) pay for it. Or, if they did invest, it would be put into things like rogaine before it was put into research for a medication that could save the lives of 10,000 people. This is the way corporations behave, unfortunately. They are psychopaths, and definitely not to be trusted to make sane public policy decisions.
My whole point with the time idea, was that it seems that people are putting their intution on hold, and trusting "science" more and more. If we wait for science to prove that time is moving forward, something our intution can tell us immediately, then we might be waiting until the end of time. Things in the political and moral realm are often way too complex to apply science to, this is where instinct and intuition should be trusted.
The problem is that quiie a bit of what is being pushed as science is nothing more than politics repackaged as science. It's a party line masquerading under the prestige of objectivity and rationality. And, if one isn't careful, he'll be waiting the rest of his life for science to solve problems that he should know better than to ignore. Science is a tool, it's really a horrible one at solving social problems in my opinion. I think the fact that science is such a horrible tool for solving social problems is why it's preferred by elites. It lends a certain callousness, and yet at the same legitimacy to their treatment of the issues, and helps justify their actions. They can claim to be doing something about hunger in the world, after all, they're studying what makes the homeless such losers in the first place. And, as far as the losers that are trying to help them, well, they just have more blood flowing to their amygdala. Of course...
"Knowing" and proving are very different. My point about the time question was that time could be going in reverse, and we wouldn't know it. Our perception wouldn't change. All the laws of physics would still hold true, etc. The equations would still balance out.
If the entire universe were synchronized to some kind of clock that reversed direction every couple of billion years, such that everything reversed itself, we wouldn't know the difference. I know, it's a goofy idea, but the point is, you really can't "prove" that time is going forward. The laws of physics certainly don't require time to be going forward. We just assume that it is, based on certain perceptions.
Again, it's a goofy idea, not intended to be taken too seriously, just food for thought.
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Sort of, only in theory does it remove these laws. In practice the US still subsidizes it's agriculture. This has an enormous effect on how trade relations work between the US and 3rd world countries. In theory, one can speculate with the dollar. In reality, just about all of the wealth in the world is propping the dollar up. It will see some fluctations, but it won't do anything remotely close to what happend in Argentina. When all else fails, we can prop up the dollar with our WMD's. It's not likely that any other OPEC countries will be switching currency like Iraq did in 2000.
As far as waiting for equilibrium in the markets, I wouldn't hold my breath. About the only thing that seems to bring markets back in line is government intervention. Left alone markets tend to increase the differences in wealth and poverty over time. The people that advocate unrestricted markets know this, which is why they advocate it. If you aren't wealthy, then you should understand this and advocate the opposite. I certainly wouldn't wait for things to even out. That's exactly what the WTO and it's backers are counting on.
First, let's not fool ourselves, free trade is not causing a fairer distribution of resources. The wealth differential in both 3rd and 1st world countries (especially America) is increasing, not decreasing. The reason the middle class is doing so poorly is because free trade is simply robbing the industrialized nations middle classes of the spoils that they normally received from economically dominating the 3rd world. Now all those spoils are moving to the upper classes. Free trade certanily isn't creating a middle class in 3rd world countries. It's doing the same thing over there that it is in the 1st world. It's creating enormous wealth alongside massive amounts of poverty.
I agree that there are natural constraints with resources that will soon relegate the SUV to the garbage dump. As Americans, we need to learn how to do more with less. However, other resource constraints, such as housing, food, medical care, technological, are more artificial, and if anything. Getting more people involved in a global economy should produce MORE software, MORE innovation in technology that doesn't use a lot of resources, MORE doctors, etc.
In America, we have plenty of land, a perpetual surprlus of labor, a perpetual surplus of food. On the other hand, we have artificial shortages of medical schools, shortages of education, shortages of housing, etc. Our economy is doing a terrible job matching needs with abilities, needs with desires. I think that this only compounds the constraints that are now being imposed on our resources.
So, in a certain sense, you are correct, we will need to learn to do more with less. On the other hand, the idea that we need to settle for a lower standard of living in the process doesn't hold much water.
We CAN do a lot more with less. If we all just used segways, or maybe even bikes, and lived a bit closer together, and combined that with public transportation, we could drastically reduce fuel consumption. Our transportation system is one of the most stupid, inefficient "designs" that I could think of. The engineering of it is purely idiotic. You drive around 4,000 pounds of metal to transport a 120 lb. person. Gee, I wonder if we're wasting any gas when we do that? Yes, there is room for more efficiency, that is for sure.
Most market advocates will say that we'll solve this problem because markets foster innovation. I think that's pure nonsense, it's just that we're doing things so backasswards, that how can we do anything BUT improve? If anything, peak oil may end up doing us a favor in the long run, by causing the market to raise the price of oil to a sane price.
It certainly doesn't look like we can count on the market to save us. But, maybe when we come close to using it all up, maybe then market prices will start to match the true worth of this precious resource, and we'll start seeing real innovation.
Actually, getting people to sit there and be bored for 8 hours a day without rebelling is a tough task. It generally takes about 12 years to get a human being to behave in this way.
I know you aren't being serious. But, setting that aside for a moment, if I really were effective, more would be happening than merely getting flamed on slashdot. There's plenty of history that shows what happens to people when they are too effective, as in Martin Luther King, Malcom X, etc. Part of the solution to this is of course realizing that we need to avoid the cult of personality that gives one leader all the power. That's why people like Chomsky can't stand being given all the credit when he gives a lecture. The only reason people like Noam can do what he does, is because large groups of people support his work, and he has repeated that fact over and over. Understanding this is part of how we fight the illusion that we need great leaders (or the US military for that matter) to come save us.
Also, the majority of people are already discontent. There's a reason you get slow service at your local McDonald's. They know they're getting screwed. They just haven't figured out what to do about it, yet.
Yes, this is definitely an issue with markets. Markets tend to promote what is called a speculative bubble. What happens is that if enough people buy that good, not out of need, but because they believe the price will go up, then the price in fact does go up, but not because the good is more valuable. It goes up because more people are buying it. Think of it as a positive feedback loop. This ends up creating gross price inflation. The other problem is that, the more prices inflate, the more potential speculators are created, eventually even regular homeowners get in on the game. Eventually the price comes crashing back down, often in one moment of punctuated equilibrium. Often times, it will swing back the other direction. Markets are known to produce this effect.
Believe it or not, this isn't the worst effect of markets, it's just the effect that is hurting yourself at the moment. If you want to understand what is really going on, and change things, you need to stop focusing only on how this is affecting you, and try to develop a global understanding of how markets work. If you think what you are going through is bad, then imagine what people living in Argentina go through when a bunch of assholes go in and start speculating with their CURRENCY. One day 3 dollars will buy you a loaf of bread, the next day, it's worthless. This has bankrupted more than a few 3rd world countries. Then our corporations go in and start buying up all of their land and factories at rock bottom prices, no guns necessary.
The problem with what you are describing is that speculation tends to reward those with enough money to ride out the speculative bubble. It hurts those who actually have a need for a certain good, but not enough money to afford the inflated prices. It hurts them even worse if they mistakenly get caught up in the speculation, thinking somehow that speculation will make them rich. Speculation only makes those with the majority of wealth richer, it doesn't make people without the resources to ride the following depressions rich. Playing with markets in this way is one way that the rich rob the poor.
Finally, I would advise holding off on buying a house for a couple of years. We are in the midst of a housing bubble. It will fix itself eventually, and a lot of people will get burnt. If you want to play the market, buy a bunch of gold, or short the shit out of Fannie May. I'd suggest the 2nd option, since I think they are part of the problem.
Why not allow people to move whereever they want, and force the corporations to stay inside national borders? Wouldn't this be a more sensible approach to "globalization"? Instead we allow corporations to move wherever they want, and lock people up inside borders.
Is the idea of a person even a concept in your theory of economics? Or, in your theory, are people invisible, with the focus on profits, raw materials in one end, and manufactured goods on the other side? It's something to think about, when a theory allows for certain things to remain invisible, it tells you a lot about what the creator of that theory thinks is important. That's why our economy is said to be in a "recovery" while most people continue to do worse. Our economists don't have a concept for people in their theory, the measurement is of profits. So, if profits are up, but lots of people are starving, then it's still a recovery. This should give you insight into what classical economics is all about. It's a theory designed to decrease one's understanding of what is really going on.
Take a look at how they view corporate workplaces. According to them, raw materials go in, and consumable goods come out. They fail to notice that people go in, and people come out. People come in energized, they go out, exhausted. They might come in with two arms, and come out, perhaps with one. Economies transform people, and mold and shape them. They might come in humble, and ready to help the world, and go out the other side, a jaded, arrogant CEO. The problem is, if our concept of economic institutions doesn't measure the effects of those institutions on people, the air, the envionrment, etc., then our theory will hide all of the negative effects of corporations. Not to mention, that if we fail to take into account all of the effects of our production institutions, then prices will be grossly distored.
What exactly does a globalized economy mean, when people aren't allowed to usurp barriers that corporations can pass through like thin air? Can we call that a globalized economy?
Try doing this in the real world, where an Indian can live on 10% of the salary of an American. It's not reasonable to expect people to somehow be able to work ten times as hard. There are limits to how hard people can work.
I agree that as Americans, we are being hypocrites by whining about our own problems if we don't at the same time address the problems of the 3rd world that we allow our corporations to exploit. Isolating ourselves, and focusing only on ourselves and our own needs is exactly what makes us so easy to exploit. There is another reason that we shouldn't allow corporations to take over 3rd world countries, it robs their citizens of the opportunities to control their own destiny. Further, the solution to this problem is not to write our congressman, and it's not inside any one country, the solutions lies in joining together with those who are being oppressed outside our country.
The problem of corporate globalization, as well as it's solution, lies outside the borders of any single nation state. It's time for us to realize this fact.
Anyway, I'm sure you're sick of my posts, but, I'm a bit bored today. The thing to remember about private schools, is that as long as they have a release valve, they can't really make any claims about efficiency. The release valve for private schools is the public school system. Did your school really allow everyone to attend? How did they do that? I'm serious, how did they teach mentally challenged children? Remember, that those costs are lumped in with public school budgets. Would the parents of such a child choose to send them to your school or a public school? I'm asking because, if those parents preferred to send that kid to a public school, then that would mean the public school would foot the bill. These are important things to consider. It's really not fair to talk about this stuff until we get an accurate picture of what is happening.
If a student is too precocious, too gifted (I almost got sent to public school because they didn't feel like they had the resources for me, seriously), a behavior problem, learning disabled, etc., then the school sends that student off to public school. The reason why is because keeping that student would drive their costs through the roof. That is one of, if not THE primary reason that they have stricter policy than public schools. Sure, they would love to help everyone, but they know their limits. I'm not saying that these schools aren't successful, of course they are, and part of the reason why is because they get a nice subsidy from the public school system, that generously tackles the problems that private schools are unwilling, or unable to handle.
Ok, I'm done rambling. Feel free to respond with a much shorter comment if you want. I know, others, including me usually have more of a life than I've had today.
I agree that learning to read is essential. That's probably the one area where I would agree that having a good teacher can make a world of difference. After that, a lot of it comes down to persistence. Before we get to learning how to read, a lot if merely depends on interaction. We are all self-taught when it comes to essentials such as language, walking, etc. As long as we get enough opprotunities to interact with live human beings when we are young, we can learn these essentials (unless we are disabled in some respect). Reading is the crucial area where we really do need help. After that, a good book should be able to teach a persistent student what they want to know.
I got a laugh thinking of this one. I'm just trying to imagine what would happen to my Catholic grade school if it were transported to East St. Louis. Now, you would keep the surrounding community exactly the same, spend exactly the same amount on security, etc. Force them to let everybody in, just like the public school. I'm just wondering how long it would have taken for the school to get covered in grafitti, and burned down. How long would it take for the nuns to flee the area back to the nice suburbs. How long would it take for the budget to be broken in an attempt to educate problem children.
I think that what private school advocates would learn from such an experiment is, "Holy Shit! Educating poor people is expensive." Communities that are poor tend to have a lot of anger over the way their lives turned out, and that anger tends to get taken out on things that are seen as being too clean, too perfect, too elitist. Many of the worst students cost ten times as much to educate as the best ones. You can sit me in a room with a book, I'm cheap. A kid that's suffering from malnutrition and from child abuse is going to require a lot more resources. That's why I get so annoyed when people mention that their test scores were higher, and they did it at a fraction of the cost. This is what you SHOULD expect. Better students are cheaper to teach. One mentally retarded student can set your budget back by an astronomical amount, and pull your test scores down quite a bit also. Not mention violent kids, who might destroy property, or need psychiatric intervention. Even the most subtle forms of discrimination, even geographical, can have a huge impact on a school's bottom line.
The other problem with violent kids is that they frustrate many teachers, so that you have less teachers that you can pick and choose from. This also gives private schools an edge. There is a reason that they are willing to work for less at private schools. The important thing to keep in mind is that many of the behavior disorders are not the kid's fault. A lot of them come from broken homes, suffer severe neglect, aren't fed a proper diet, etc. Again, dealing with this is EXPENSIVE. I saw this at the head start that I worked at. And remember, these are the ones that come from relatively good homes.
Treating a school like a business is a great way of ignoring many social ills, shirking our minimal responsibility of at least attempting to provide equal opportunity, if not equal outcomes for equal effort.
One more thing to think about...
The school didn't bus. We had no bus. Kids came from all over town, from all over this area of the state. We weren't the only show in town, we were had sister schools that had the same policies.
What exactly does "came from all over town" mean? Did they fly in? Did they ride their bike 20 miles? Probably not. This indicates that they were driven. I hate to break the news to you, but many of the kids in head start's parents couldn't afford to send their kid across town, because they didn't have cars. You are bragging that you didn't have a bus. Don't you understand? A bus is how poor people get around. Most of them don't have cars. Second of all, any parent who drives their kid halfway across town cares quite a bit, and is willing to go to considerable expense to get their kid to school. There are poor people with this much motivation, but unfortunatly many of them don't have the means(i.e. a car). And, even less fortunate, many poor people don't have the motivation to send their kid halfway across town. That was my original point, was that the kid in head start actually had it pretty good compared to some kids, whose parents may not see any value in education. When people are that poor they tend not to have a lot of hope, and often times will blow what little money they have left on vices. Finally, I would be surprised if a completely destitue area like East St. Louis, MO, could support a school like yours. So, that would end up creating a large geographical area that extremely poor people would have to traverse in order to get to your school. While it might be possible for a working class guy to drive his run-down pickup truck to the school every day, it's a different story when a family can't even pay rent, much less afford a car.
Maybe they should have had you guys do service projects, then you could have seen first hand what I'm talking about.
How was the code of conduct at your school? Would they spend resources on students with behavior problems? I know that my Catholic grade school wouldn't. If a kid showed enough problems, he was expelled and sent to the public school so that they could deal with him. That's been my entire point, is that it doesn't take as much money to teach kids if you are allowed to throw kids out when you want. If they would work with children with behavior problems, then you'll have my attention.
I never said they ate out of garbage cans. The reference to trash was talking about the insides of where they live. Haven't you ever watched an episode of cops, or any show for that matter where the cops are called to the scene and have to enter into some of these rundown shacks? Many of them aren't exactly clean. As far as living on crackers, bread, water, or whatever else, that's not uncommon at all. In a perfectly sane world, a mother of three living on $8000 and food stamps would feed her kids as healthily as we can. But, we live in a capitalist economy, where even our rich can be maxed out, spending on things they don't need. The same is to be expected of our poor. The reality is that most of them blow what little they have left on vices, or if they don't do that, it gets used up during an emergency, and then they have next to nothing to feed their kids with.
Very, very little of what we are taught is actually remembered. The entire approach to education is known to produce the predictable result that most of it will be forgotten within weeks of the final exam. We know this, this isn't some obscure fact. Anyone who has ever been through the process, even you, know this. When I was arguing with my girlfriend about the purpose of medical school, she was very proud of how much she had to "learn" in that first year. What she described was a frenzied, year long cram-session. The results of this are predictable, she remembers only bare outlines of what it was that she was forced to cram. Keep in mind, she's a good student, a true believer, someone that applies herself diligently. Think about what happens to the guy that sets himself to learning it, rather than getting the highest grade. That guy was me, my grades suffered, but I learned a bit more, because I wasn't studying for test, I was studying for the sake of understanding the material. Even I forgot quite a bit of it. Or, think about the person who just doesn't care, for that person it's a complete waste of time.
I'm not saying that there isn't any value in school, but that the approach is known to produce results that are far less than desireable. It's well-known that boot camp style education, such as the style used in law school and medical school isn't a very good method of educating people. People often forget quite a bit of what they are supposed to learn. It is, however, a good test of one's willingness to fit into a system. It's also an excellent way to indoctrinate people. Once you put someone through something like that, you know that they won't turn around and try to destroy the lucrative monopoly that makes many of those in the medical profession millions. And, once systems such as these are set up, whether in the military, your local fraternity, graduate school, local cult, church, or medical school, the people that get through it will many times have a genuine belief that it's the right way to do things. Even if, as in the case of my girlfriend, they hardly remember a thing.
In regards to your first comment, that's simply not true, at least not in the majority of cases. Unless your school somehow had a source of funding that allowed it to accept all it's students for free, it would necessarily have to have some cutoff for financial aid in order to survive. That would seem obvious to me. Requiring people to pay money for something that is otherwise available for free would be a powerful tool for separating by class. Even if your school was supported by a Parish that had a lot of money, the demographics of the surrounding area would also act as a filtering mechanism. In other words, unless your grade school took steps to bus kids in from the other side of town, it's not likely that they are as "diverse" as you claim that they were.
.125 and multiply by 270 million, I'm afraid that it happens more than we want to admit. Also, remember that our measure of poverty is ridiculously low, at around $9,000 per year or less. So, if you make $9500 a year, you're not living in poverty. If you make $500 a year, or 0, for that matter, then you are. If you extrapolate out just a bit, to a reasonable standard of poverty, for example, anything below 18,000, then you're talking about significant chunks of our population. Keep in mind that a higher percentage of this includes kids. So, around 17.5 percent of children, or one in 5 live at or below poverty. Again, take roughly 0.2, and multiply by the number of children living in the US. Just take a trip to the bad areas of town. Just about every major city has one, if you're willing to look. Or, in some cases, they live in rural areas as close as an hour outside of Atlanta, for example, if you're talking about the Southern US. These are places where running water and electricity don't exist, where homes consist of shacks and trailers on stilts, etc. They do exist, but they're easy enough to ignore if you want.
So, chances are that if the kids attending this school lived around a Parish where people could afford to donate enough money to keep a school running free of charge to all students, would indicate that the area was doing fairly well and as a result that people in that area tended to make more money.
Let's move on to your second comment. 12.5% of US households live below the poverty line, with the majority of those households being (single) women and children. This data isn't hard to find, just go to the US census bureau's website. So, if we take
I'm being lazy tonight, so I'll just give you one link, but there's lots of data if you want to look. http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/26/news/economy/pover ty_survey/
In regard to your third sentence, it's never completely one way or another, no one is entirely self-educatiing. But, I think that in the majority of cases, self-education "sticks", while compulsory education is largely forgotten. Clearly I've benefited from being given resources, such as educational tools at a young age. But, I was extremely shy, I never did learn much by interacting with others, and my parents weren't extremely educated, so at a pretty young age, I knew more than most of the people that I ran into, not because I was that smart, but because I had limited exposure to other geeks. But, I do agree that being given tools to learn with at a young age, such as radio shack electronics projects at age 4, certainly made a big difference, as did exposure to science programs such as Nova on channel 9, etc. I learned algebra by reading "teach yourself physics" in 6th grade, and working out the math in my head. It was hard, but I stuck with it. I learned calculus mainly by working through the problems. I dozed off and skipped most classes. Working through the problems is in fact how I think most people learn, at least if they want to learn it in a way that they won't forget next week. I don't think that most students learn much from classroom lectures. Classroom lectures are suited for a very particular kind of student, and the rest usually just suffer in sile
I'd say that you are looking in the wrong areas. Most private schools have mandatory entrance exams. I know mine did. It's fairly easy to take a bright student from a healthy background and teach them, than it is to work with kids whose parents don't give a shit, or who have mental deficits in one or more areas.
One part of my Catholic high school education (also taught by Jesuit priests) was community service at the local head start. Imagine my surprise when I found out one day that one of the kids got a haircut for his 5th birthday. That's it, that's all he got. It was something to think about for a middleclass white kid who never really had seen poverty. Then, years later, when thinking about it some more, the thought occured to me, that this kid was actually not the worst case scenario. It only requires 2 seconds of thought to realize that it takes quite a bit of effort for his parents, who are probably very poor, and working several jobs to make ends meet, to take him to the local head start every day. So, he was actually one of the ones that had it good. Others, well, they might spend their childhood running around in garbage, playing with trash, living on crackers and water and whatever else their parents feel like giving them. Now, I'd like to see your Catholic school take one of THOSE kids, many of whom are suffering from severe malnutrition, and get them to have an SAT score 150-200 points above average. That's just something to think about.
I'm practically self-teaching, just stick me in a room with a book and I'll figure it out, no instruction necessary. It's not a big acheivement to take someone like me and give me a high school education. I'd say that's the primary reason that private schools do so well. If you forced them to deal with the same problems that public schools routinely deal with, I suspect that it would break their budget and they would end up with much worse results than public schools.
It would seem to me that the argument that the US is spread out is a pretty weak one unless you are talking about the most remote areas where the backbone doesn't reach. Any major city that is already hooked into the backbone should have similar hurdles networking the city as any other city. I don't see why New York City's sardine packed population is any less dense than South Korea's major cities. So, we have no excuse for why our major cities are not networked better than they are.
As far as rural areas go, yes, that is a problem. However, with the amount of bandwidth that a single fiber can carry, it just doesn't make sense that it's taking us this long to get networked. Telephone networks required quite a bit more work to set up, and they managed to do it.
My observation is that it's a matter of lack of initiative and capital expendetures by companies that are too busy investing overseas and offshoring workers to be bothered with America. That explains the difference in dense areas like NY.
squealing shrieking Special Magic Voodoo Marx Incantation, magically, kid, Year Zero nightmare (Pol PotRead some history sometime, Gibberish. Nothing you can do about that except kill them. Satanic Foreign Rentiers, Satanic Foreign Rentiers, Big Bad capitalists, dictatorial left-wing control, fantasies, unable to comprehend, The Evil White People Fucking Everything Up. Nonsense. stupid. dumbass. you object to economic freedom just as fanatically as you object to all the others. Dumbass, your implied belief that Marxism is "rational". All those people doing as they please, nobody taking orders from you. Here we encounter the source of my conviction that you're an idiot: The doctrine of malign equivalency. bug-eyed undergraduate squawking probably merits, dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.
Those were the words that I thought were interesting. I just thought that they were worth highlighting. I think that they were actually some of the more convincing parts of your argument. It would go something along the lines of:
1. Make irrelevant statements that distract from the main argument, aren't backed up by fact, etc.
2. Punctuate with insult.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Of course, most of your arguments fall apart without the insults. There isn't much there. However, I will take a moment to address the malign equivalency part of your argument. If the Soviet Union started talking about how bad the Nazis were when their crimes were pointed out, would we take them seriously? Of course not. I don't think that we're as bad as the Soviets, at least not inside our borders. But, that's an awefully, pathetically low standard that you've set for us. I think we're capable of better. Unless you believe that being better than the Soviet dungeon is a great accomplishment. Also, I never said the Soviet Union was prosperous compared to the US, I was comparing them to Brazil, which is a fair comparison, since both Brazil and former USSR were in the same spot economically in 1910. Comparing a country that was barely 3rd world status in 1910 to the US isn't exactly fair. Finally, and this is the final part of my argument, I said that even though they were propserous for a while, it wasn't an argument for them. Please pay attention.
I'll dig up my resources later tonight so that we can compare notes. It's been a while since I've researched this. Until then, do you have any links to your data?
or Vietnam, for that matter...
>Those third-world "sweatshop" workers chose what they're doing, because the alternative (subsistence farming) is worse. It sucks to be them, but without capitalism it would suck to be them even more.
Who gets to decide what the "alternatives" are? In this case, the power isn't in the hands of those making the "choice" but those who decide what the "choice" is.
>Starvation, you say? Sorry, but big bad capitalist agribusiness has boosted food production well beyond any levels that were even remotely conceivable 100 years ago. That's who's feeding the world these days.
Ahem, you mean government subsidized agribusiness. A business that, with government funding, is able to destroy any competition by artificially lowering prices. It's easy to win when you break the rules...
>Are you aware that farmers in the third world routinely go out of their way to buy GM seed on the black market, in spite of the bans imposed by corrupt local governments?
I'm aware of a lie in the form of a question when I see it.
>It's more productive. They want to grow more food, sell more food, eat more food, and have a better life -- the only people who object to them having a better life are kleptocrats in the third world, and affluent leftists in the first world.
I have yet to hear anyone, anywhere object to people having a better life, even if they secretly wish that it were so. I agree, they want to grow more food, but are run out of business by state subsidized US agribusiness. Thus leaving them the "choice" of working as wage slaves.
>The "global system" you're talking about is pure fantasy in any case.
I'm not sure you're talking about. I'm not sure what you think I've been reading, or what you think my ideas are.
>What you've got is a global non-system. People do as they damn well please (that's what you object to, right? Your fix is necessarily a centralized, dictatorial system).
I disagree, and I don't think you could prove this if you wanted to. As far as people doing what they please, I think that you must be living in a bubble if you think that people just do whatever they want. I don't think you can find a case of that anywhere. Even in relatively industrialized societies, choices are constrained by a number of factors. In less industrialized societies, choices are constrained to an even greater extent, with more choice given to those with more money, of course.
>Corrupt, kleptocratic third-world governments interfere with the growth of private businesses. They grant monopolies. They demand spectacular bribes and kickbacks. Government interference is harmful far more often than not. Look at the Pacific Rim. Compare Hong Kong and Taiwan to the PRC.
Compare Taiwan to any 3rd world country. They're doing extremely well, partially because they ignored the advice given to them by the US, which was to open their markets and avoid subsidizing them. Instead, they chose to subsidize their markets, and build them rationally, which is exactly how the US built their industry.
It really depends on what you are looking at. You can find corrupt governments, and then you can find responsive ones. You get rid of the corrupt ones and try to create ones that are accountable.
You are also conveniently ignoring the fact that part of the reason that these governments stifle their own private industries, is because there is intense pressure from multinational conglomerates to open up the borders to "trade". Part of the reason corrupt governments stay in power is because of US military industry. Brazil doesn't manufacture machine guns, or tanks, or helicopters, we do.
>And by the way, Stalinism didn't only "not work" for the millions shot or starved directly; it didn't work for anybody else either.
If you want to deny history you can. Their economy did very well until about the 1960's. If it hadn't produced anything, or wasn't able to keep up tec
All of these systems "work". We just need to ask who they "work" for, and what we mean by "works". The Soviet Union "worked" if all we care about is rapid industrialization, but can we say that it worked for the millions that were shot by Stalin and erased from history? No. Fascism "worked" if all we care about is bringing a country out of depression, but did it "work" for those in the concentration camps? No. Capitalism "works" for the CEO's, the Bill Gates, Ken Lays, etc., but does it "work" for the millions of homeless, the approximately 30% who live below the US poverty line, or, since we're talking about a global sytem, the millions of 3rd worlders working in sweatshops to boost corporate profits? The answer again, is no.
Considering they want from about the same stage economically as Brazil was in 1910, and went from that to superpower status in about 30-40 years, yes, it worked. Fascism also worked great economically, pulled Germany out of their slump, as did government management of US industry in the 1940's. In fact, part of why we had a boom during the war years, is because government finally stepped in and took over. That's not an argument for any of the above systems. In fact, the reason I included fascism, is so that hopefully you will realize that just because a system is economically viable does not mean it's just.
However, the idea that the Soviet Union failed because the economic system couldn't work is a myth. It was enormously successful from an economic standpoint. It's the most dramatic tale of rapid industrialization that our history has. For the sake of comparison, take a look at Brazil, which has been languishing under capitalism for decades. And Brazil has a lot more going for it than Russia, like a warmer climate, more resources, just to name a couple of things. Even after the collapse, and corruption that has followed their breakup, they are still light years ahead of Brazil in terms of technology.
Again, none of that means that Communism is desirable. If every time one tries a system, no matter how utopian and egalitarian it claims to be, he ends up with a brutal dicator in charge, then obviously it's horrible system. That's Communism, not what Marx wrote about in Kapital.
The same can be said for capitalism. If, every time we try, we end up with enormous extremes of wealth, corruption, oppression, ever increasing police presence, dwindling opportunities for the majority of people as entire industries are cordoned off and monopolized, unemployment, starvation, control that goes into the hands of a few, effectively handing control of our working lives over to a dictator/CEO, etc., then we can say that it's a bad idea. And, that's if we're talking about the success story, which is America. If we really want to get a true picture of capitalism, we should look at it's failures, such as the majority of South America, many of whom have religiously followed the doctrine given to them by the US and the IMF, only to have their economies shattered. That's capitalism, not what you read in Adam Smith.
It's a function of accountability more so than monopoly. Government has been set up (over a period of time) so that it's not nearly as accountable as it should be. Most public subsidy has been put under the label of defense, to remove public scrutiny. Without any scrutiny, or accountability, it's true that government will become less responsive. On the other, government is very accountable to the corporations and elites that finance quite a bit of the electoral campaigns, so naturally, government is very responsive to them.
It's a tough problem to solve, and it's hard to say where the corruption begins and where it ends. Obviously, the more someone is right that the corruption is with government, the more they are wrong, since corruption in one sector will affect and shape other sectors of society. It will affect the way business is run, the way school is taught, the way kids are raised, etc. The same goes if someone believes that corporations are the root cause of all our problems, or racism, or hierarchy, etc. The more right you are, the more important it is to look at other areas to see the effects that one sector has had on others.
I know there are problems with our government. But, you don't fix the problem by taking control from the band of raving psychopaths in government and handing it over to the raving psychopaths that are better known as corporations. Corporations are antisocial by their very nature, and must not be allowed to dictate public policy. They care about profits, and that's all they care about. Our government, on the other hand, can be pressured, and can change. Governments are not necessarily all bad, and the definition of government is vague enough that if one doesn't like something about his government, then he can change it.
Corporations, on the other hand, are by their very definition, by the very rules with which they are defined, a horrible way to organize a society. The idea of creating an institution with no accountability, except for the accountability it has to it's shareholders to make a profit, dooms corporations to exceedingly antisocial and immoral behavior.
Building computers that aren't needed by most of the population, consuming huge amounts of resources, so that those who do need them can get them, that's efficiency. Government could fund the research without having to use all of the resources necessary to market and sell the crap to people who don't need them. Using our current model, we are creating a huge waste of effort, by producing products that many people don't need. Yes, better and better technology should be made available, but only to those who want it. In our current system, that's an impossibility, as soon as a large enough share of people stop upgrading, then the whole R&D 2 year lifecycle business model goes in the shitcan, and innovation will come to a standstill.
The economics of the processor industry are different than they were 30 years ago. Fabs cost billions, without volume, this industry will collapse. However, government could keep things going, and not view a lack of volume as a waste of resources. Governments don't have to think quarterly.
As far as drug research goes, 99% of it is paid for by the government. That last 1%, which includes the very expensive market barrier known as FDA approval, is what the drug companies pay for. They invest very little in the actual reasearch. They're getting (slightly) better, but not much.
Without government, there wouldn't be welfare. Extending that, without government, it's safe to say that quite a bit of research just wouldn't get done, because businesses, which are bound by very short term fiduciary responsibility wouldn't want to (or be able to, for that matter) pay for it. Or, if they did invest, it would be put into things like rogaine before it was put into research for a medication that could save the lives of 10,000 people. This is the way corporations behave, unfortunately. They are psychopaths, and definitely not to be trusted to make sane public policy decisions.
public subsidy, private profit. public risk, private rewards.... public billions, private gravy trains...
My whole point with the time idea, was that it seems that people are putting their intution on hold, and trusting "science" more and more. If we wait for science to prove that time is moving forward, something our intution can tell us immediately, then we might be waiting until the end of time. Things in the political and moral realm are often way too complex to apply science to, this is where instinct and intuition should be trusted.
The problem is that quiie a bit of what is being pushed as science is nothing more than politics repackaged as science. It's a party line masquerading under the prestige of objectivity and rationality. And, if one isn't careful, he'll be waiting the rest of his life for science to solve problems that he should know better than to ignore. Science is a tool, it's really a horrible one at solving social problems in my opinion. I think the fact that science is such a horrible tool for solving social problems is why it's preferred by elites. It lends a certain callousness, and yet at the same legitimacy to their treatment of the issues, and helps justify their actions. They can claim to be doing something about hunger in the world, after all, they're studying what makes the homeless such losers in the first place. And, as far as the losers that are trying to help them, well, they just have more blood flowing to their amygdala. Of course...
"Knowing" and proving are very different. My point about the time question was that time could be going in reverse, and we wouldn't know it. Our perception wouldn't change. All the laws of physics would still hold true, etc. The equations would still balance out.
If the entire universe were synchronized to some kind of clock that reversed direction every couple of billion years, such that everything reversed itself, we wouldn't know the difference. I know, it's a goofy idea, but the point is, you really can't "prove" that time is going forward. The laws of physics certainly don't require time to be going forward. We just assume that it is, based on certain perceptions.
Again, it's a goofy idea, not intended to be taken too seriously, just food for thought.