look at what you are saying. private companys can't do it right but somehow big government will be perfect? have you ever even dealt with a government department before?!?! they are accountable to no one, you have no choice either.
I really hate straw men. I never said government will be perfect.
Sometimes private companies get it right, and sometimes they screw up royally. (Contrary to capitalist theory, the prospect of having their stockholders loose a lot of money doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.)
Sometimes the government gets it right, and sometimes it screws up royally.
If you're dealing with really critical operations where you have a chance to do massive, irrepairable damage beyond the ability of anyone to repair, like nuclear power plants or the aircraft industry -- places where you really must not screw up -- then you need both private companies and oversight by government.
As the WSJ pointed out, both the Democrats and Republicans had cut back on regulating oil rig safety. They let the oil companies do what they wanted. As a result, BP skipped some safety procedures and devices.
BP filled the well with cement, let the cement set, and tested it to make sure it could hold pressure and they could remove the drilling mud.
The tests showed it was leaking and couldn't hold pressure. (According to one of the manufacturers' web sites, the cement works about 90% of the time, but sometimes you have to redo it.) In order to redo it, they would have had to go through an elaborate procedure that would cost a few more million dollars and take a few more weeks (time=lots of money).
So they ignored the tests, removed the mud, and the well blew, killing 11 workers, destroying a $600 million platform, and filling the Gulf with oil.
I'll be looking forward to the hearings and courtroom cross-examinations where the people responsible for that decision will be forced to explain why they did it.
Given the dangers involved to human life, the environment and the Gulf economy, and given the controversy and history of disasters in these platforms, they should have had a government inspector reviewing the critical procedures.
Assuming we had a competent government inspector, instead of a hack political employee, the inspector would have held up progress until they were sure the cement actually was sealing the well. BP probably would have bitched, and the WSJ would have written editorials about government bureaucrats starving America for oil, but they wouldn't have had this blowout.
To answer your question, yes I've dealt with government departments. I've dealt with state and federal government officials in charge of worker safety, nuclear power plant safety, and safety and efficacy of new drugs. In my experience, they were pretty fucking smart. And they were dedicated to public safety.
That was not always true of private industry. Read Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed. Why did American auto manufacturers build cars that they knew would needlessly kill people? I could never figure it out.
I will admit that when the Republicans took over the government, they destroyed the regulatory agencies. And the "new" Democrats like Bill Clinton and Obama aren't much better.
That's true. As long as you have politicians and voters who don't believe government can do anything right, that may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And it doesn't work when their major campaign contributors are the industry they're supposed to be regulating.
The entire PR effort could be replaced with a simple pro-capitalist capitulation: "We screwed up, big time, and unlike the banks, we're solvent enough to pay restitution."
Restitution? You mean paying fishermen, restaurants, hotels, etc. all the money they would have made if the oil spill hadn't hit? What are you going to do -- write off New Orleans and put everybody on the dole?
Unfortunately, if the oil hits the shore, all the money in the world can't clean it up. The best estimates I've seen are that they could clean up 10% of the oil. When the oil coats the plants and mixes with the mud in the wetlands, you can't unscramble the egg. You just destroy a lot of species.
I remember sitting by a lake in New Orleans, and having these big, beautiful fucking birds fly down right next to me. You can't clean up those birds when they're covered with oil. Expert Recommends Killing Oil-Soaked Birds
Capitalism is not such a bad system when the gears are allowed to mesh.
Even after decades of reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page, this blind faith in capitalism leaves me speechless.
As the WSJ reported, both Democrats and Republicans left the oil companies unregulated as they cut out well-established safety management procedures. (BP had higher accident and fatality rate than most.) If you have a well-managed government agency with competent, dedicated safety inspectors riding herd on offshore wells, then you can at least make drilling as safe as possible and maybe safe enough. Without competent government regulation, it's bye-bye birdie.
As a liberal, I am very, very upset with the man I voted for right now. At least Bush was just an idiot with Katrina. Obama seems to be deliberately pandering to Big Oil.
I'm not disappointed with Obama, I never expected any different. Here's a classic article on Obama, from Bill Moyer's journal, with Matt Taibbi and disillusioned Obama fanboy Robert Kuttner http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript1.html During the elections, http://www.commondreams.org/ had lots of stuff about Obama. His legal work in Chicago was to represent clients who were privatizing public housing.
The Democratic Party just takes hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, and follows the interests of their campaign contributors rather than the people who vote for them. (Just like the Republicans.) We saw that in health care. When the progressive Democratic activists ran TV ads to push blue-dog Democrats to support the public option, Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called them "fucking retards" in a White House meeting. Then Emanuel apologized -- to the retarded organizations.
The Democrats lost one election because they kissed off the left, who voted for Nader. Maybe the way to get more respect from the Democratic party is to start voting for third-party candidates again. Do you vote for somebody who calls you a fucking retard? I don't.
Free Speech protections don't include any measures to protect you from backlash from some stupid or defamatory things you say; it simply protects your right to speak freely.
Actually it does. That's the reason why the Supreme Court upheld anonymous speech. (I'm too lazy to look up the case.)
The Constitution protects anonymous writing because the people who wrote the Constitution published anonymous writing.
I don't want to have to go to court to prove that my writing isn't defamatory. I'd rather that they couldn't find me in the first place.
Actually it will. It's known as "chilling effect." If you know that it's possible for your anonymous political speech to be identified, you're less likely to criticize powerful people who can take retaliation against you.
Governments can invest money in education at no charge to the student, in order to increase the economy as a whole. Individual taxpayers can benefit more from that increase than they paid in taxes. Most people believe that this is true of elementary and high school education in the U.S.
The question is, at what point does free education pass the point of diminishing returns for the economy as a whole. European countries seem to believe that it benefits them to educate a substantial proportion of the population to a level equal to our 4 years of college. The social scientists I read in Science agree. They think the GI bill created post-war American success.
My intuition is that those Europeans and social scientists are right. If we increased our educational expenses substantially, and increased our taxes to European levels, and overeducated our population until we had taxi drivers and mail carriers with art history and philosophy degrees, we'd still have an educated population with scientists, engineers and managers that was so much more productive that it would justify the cost of education in economic terms alone. The Scandinavian countries seem to be doing OK.
And in non-economic terms I'd rather be living in a society in which blue collar workers learned art and philosophy.
But that's only my intuition. My intuition doesn't count for much, and neither does anybody else's intuition. The only thing I care about now is facts. I can get that from Science magazine. As one Canadian doctor said, "If it's not peer-reviewed, why are you wasting your time on it?"
Oh, now I see where you're at -- education doesn't promote mobility or job creation, replace public schools with vouchers, eliminate Social Security, cut back government spending.
I started reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page years ago, because they were conservatives who actually had respect for the facts, even when the facts went against them. Now unfortunately, along with the rest of the conservative movement, they've been completely taken over by anti-government ideology and have abandoned facts. The traditional fact-based conservative movement actually has a name for this, "epistemic closure."
So I'm familiar with your fact-free arguments. When someone dismisses the facts in peer-reviewed journals like Science, I know that facts and logic will never convince them.
I rest my case.
BTW, for the record (in the unlikely case that anybody else is following this) you have a complete misunderstanding of what nurses do, and what their educational requirements are. http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos083.htm (more facts) and a complete misunderstanding of what the legal requirements are for decision-making in hospitals. This is a good example of the intellectual methods of conservatives today: just make things up.
I admit that if you buy health care on the free market, you probably won't need Social Security.
Perhaps the reasoning published in a peer-reviewed journal will be acceptable to you. (Although there are some people who will never change their opinions no matter how strong the evidence.)
Science, 26 Sep 2008, 321:1779, Books: Economics: For equality, education matters, Thomas Lemieux.
Book review of The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.
Remarkable growth in US economy during 20th century, inequality declining, defying tradeoff between equality and efficiency. By 1970s, US was richest and most educated country in the world.
But beginning 1970s, "productivity stalled and inequality started growing rapidly." Fraction of Americans completing college level. "Inequality now reaching highs not seen since the Great Depression."
In early 20th century, "rapid technological change was accompanied by stunning gains in educational achievement that provided enough qualified workers to meet the demands of an increasingly technologically sophisticated economy." But now technology is advancing with stagnant education.
"Post-World War II, the G.I. Bill continued from where the high school movement of 1910 to 1940 had left off, opening college to the masses."
But now other countries have caught up. Young Americans no longer have educational advantages over the rest of the world.
To take that a bit farther, there was an article in the New York Times Magazine a year or so ago, which described people who were hearing imaginary voices, knew they were hearing imaginary voices, and were normal and functional in every other respect. Some psychiatrists made the argument that if it doesn't bother them, people like that don't have a problem, and there wasn't anything psychiatrists could do.
It's even harder to explain what benefit there was to admitting somebody like that to a mental hospital for a couple of weeks, unless they have insurance that covers it. In that case there would obviously be a benefit to the person that the insurance company pays.
They took normal subjects, with no history of mental illness, who told the staff at a mental hospital that they had been hearing voices, but weren't hearing voices any more.
You realize that normal healthy people actually *could* be hearing voices if, for example, there was a radio in the next room.
So the experiment was set up in such a way that perfectly healthy people who wrongly thought they were hearing voices could be misdiagnosed.
City College, the GI bill, and Andrew Grove were a special case?
Absolutely. Currently, I gather there are somewhere over a hundred million college graduates in the US plus a bunch more with either an associate degree or a few college courses.
The City college system is a drop in a bucket compared to those numbers. When you are discussing programs that are at best a small fraction of the entire group, then calling them a "special case" is not in the least a stretch.
The CCNY was a small system that produced a large number of Nobel laureates (using Nobel laureates as a proxy for all the other accomplished graduates). They also produced leaders in politics, finance, law, and other fields. Their economic influence wasn't a drop in the bucket. Intel was a major contribution to the U.S. economy. It was replicated in the state university systems of New York and California.
At CCNY, you could walk into your professor's lab and see the research he was doing. You can't do that at a 2-year college with vocational courses taught by adjuncts.
When you have a model that works well, you expand it, not destroy it. But some people oppose public education for ideological reasons.
If you wind up in an emergency room with a heart attack or a stroke, do you want to be treated by a registered nurse who doesn't have a four-year degree?
If a nurse is going to decide on whether to pull the plug on you while you're unconscious, I'd want a nurse who took some philosophy courses.
I can't take this seriously. There's already cut and dry medical "philosophy" that covers this situation. Basically, if I made a "do not resuscitate" document, then they're supposed to pull the plug (by "they" I mean someone with a pay grade above nurse makes the decision to comply with the document). If it's a crisis situation (with lots of injured people), then there is triage where they put me aside while they help someone that can be helped. These things are too important to leave to philosophy.
Boy, if you think the decision on whether to pull the plug is as simple as that Wikipedia article makes it out to be, then you are a walking advertisement for the dangers of a narrow specialized education. If you come into the emergency room unconscious, how can you sign a DNR order? In reality, http://content.nejm.org/cgi/collection/medical_ethics advanced directives are usually useless because there are too many possibilities for any document to cover all of them. These decisions are often made by ethics committees that include nurses.
Suppose a baby is born with a genetic defect and will die right away without resuscitation, and will die anyway after 6 months of painful, expensive treatment. Do you want a right-to-life nurse to impose her own religious beliefs on the couple and take it upon herself to perform resuciation? Or do you want a nurse who has taken a couple of philosophy courses and has had her ideas challenged by someone who believes differently?
Nurses aren't just technicians. They need a liberal arts education to do their job well.
That's a good example of the dangers of downgrading qualifications. If we replace well-educated nurses with 4-year degrees with poorly-educated nurses from 2-year technical schools, we'll have unqualified nurses making bad life-and death decisions. It's important to for a nurse to understand that a medical professional can't impose her own religious beliefs on her patients. I don't think you can teach that lesson in a stripped-down 2-year vocational course.
And the NYT article just repeats the myths. We don't know that college improves salaries or makes better voters. Correlation does not imply causation. The people
City College in New York City was free from its founding up to at least the 1970s. The other parts of the City College system, including Brooklyn College, were also free. They turned out at least a dozen Nobel laureates, and people who created the modern electronics industry, like Andrew Grove, the co-founder of Intel. City College paid for itself with Andrew Grove alone.
A special case.
City College, the GI bill, and Andrew Grove were a special case? I don't think so. CCNY has a whole wall of photos of graduates who were just as accomplished as Andrew Grove.
And who's to say that this system wouldn't have turned out a dozen Nobel laureates and an Andrew Grove even if they did charge money?
Since nobody did a controlled study in which they randomized people to City College or control, we'll never know with absolute certainty.
But most people see a plausable mechanism between educating people in a profession and having them succeed in that profession. CCNY turned out a lot of scientists and engineers when it was free, and CCNY graduates were unusually accomplished.
There's also a plausable mechanism between making college free and having more people attend college: the free market.
I know a lot of people at the margins who couldn't afford to go to college, even if CCNY was free, because the had to work to support their family. I know a kid who had to drop out of Hunter College (a branch of the CUNY system) and get a job when they raised their tuition to about $1,500 a year. His parents couldn't afford it. In the real world, it's really not possible for people in the bottom 2/5 to pay their own way through college.
for education, more is better. There is no diminishing return on education (you also seem to think that all education is equal).
I think that all education is diverse and the people who are taking it are best placed to decide whether it's worthwhile to them.
I've repeatedly seen the estimate that each dollar invested in education returns five dollars to society. That's the number these economists in TFA were challenging.
If it is true, then the point of diminishing returns on education is pretty far down the path -- probably past a 4-year degree. If society gets a 5:1 return on public education, you could afford to include a lot of inefficient education and still come out way ahead.
it simply isn't feasible to have both an industrious society and a society in which everyone is simultaneously putting in considerable effort to learn.
We have a society that just spent $10,000 per capita for the war in Iraq, to prevent Sadam Hussein from threatening us with biological and chemical weapons that didn't exist. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 1% of the population in prison at a cost of $25,000 per year, and another 2% in the parole system. These are basically needless expenses.
So we are obviously a wealthy society. If we were to "waste" the same money by "overeducating" our population instead of putting them in jail or sending them to war, I think it would be a better use of this money.
Such an overeducated society would have some economic inefficiencies, but for all its failings it would be a better society than the one we've got.
It's like having a patient come into the hospital with an infection with some of the symptoms of meningitis. You could give them a lot of antibiotics, and most of the time you'd be overtreating them, but on the whole you'd be catching one or two cases of meningitis that would result in avoidable death or crippling strokes. The downside of overtreating everybody is a lot better than the downside of undertreating them.
The downside of overeducating people is a lot better than the downside of undereducating people.
Here's a closely related question. What level of education should everyone have?
I disagree. The US has a vast and varied private college community precisely because a college education has never been free (except in special cases).
City College in New York City was free from its founding up to at least the 1970s. The other parts of the City College system, including Brooklyn College, were also free. They turned out at least a dozen Nobel laureates, and people who created the modern electronics industry, like Andrew Grove, the co-founder of Intel. City College paid for itself with Andrew Grove alone.
That was the model for the State University of New York, which was almost free, and also produced an enormous educated workforce. SUNY was the model of the California state university system, which also turned out graduates who do an impressive amount of scientific research.
Scientists and engineers still talk about the G.I. bill -- introduced by a Republican -- after World War II that flooded the colleges with returning veterans, as one of the most successful educational programs this country ever saw. http://www.gibill.va.gov/gi_bill_info/history.htm It gave this country a core of college-educated people.
If you believe in the free market, then you believe that the cheaper something is, the more people will buy it. The cheaper you make college education, the more people will get college degrees. Providing free or cheap education will give you a more educated workforce. And our experience with the GI bill, and the European experience today, is that a better-educated workforce is more productive.
An education, especially in a number of nearly useless social studies and liberal arts fields (which IMHO don't give you "mind-expanding" experiences), doesn't necessarily help you get a job that will lift you out of poverty.
If you have to think for yourself in a free-market economy and a democratic society, the best way to do it is with a liberal arts education. (Even if it's just 30 credits out of 120.)
Do you think you can get by in the world with just engineering courses, without ever learning how to read a novel or construct an argument, without knowing whether the Greeks or Romans came first?
Even in technology, the people who succeed are the ones who have a well-rounded education. The people who just have two years of technical courses are the ones who get replaced by outsourcing and unemployed.
People should be able to choose to put as much work into their education as they want. But we have a 2-class society. A 2-year technical education puts you at the bottom. A 4-year liberal arts education gives you a shot at the top.
In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
That's BS.
That's according to the Economist article I linked to. Take it up with them. (I've seen this argued convincingly in many places, for example by Paul Krugman.) There is a risk of downward mobility in the European welfare states, but not like here. In the U.S., the middle class is playing musical chairs. Our inequality (the Gini index) is as great as Brazil.
The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty.
What they have done is eliminated absolute poverty, as in total destitution. There are plenty of poor people about – there is relative poverty – but there is a floor to how low people can go.
That's quite an accomplishment. Every democratic society in the world has been trying to do that, and many of them did. We set that goal in the 1960s. John F. Kennedy was elected on a pledge to eliminate poverty. So was Richard Nixon. We failed. It's a serious failure.
There's a table in the Statistical Abstract of the United States that shows family income of the U.S. population, divided into highest fifth, second-highest fifth, etc. In round numbers -- the people in the highest fifth get about half the income in the country, all to themselves (with a median income of about $120,000, depending on the year). The second fifth gets half of that (i.e. $60,000), the third fifth half of that ($30,000), the fourth fifth half of that ($15,000) and the bottom fifth half of that ($7,500). The people at the bottom are doing very badly. That's like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
I saw the corresponding income distribution for Sweden. It was just like ours -- except it didn't have the bottom two-fifths. They didn't have a significant population of people making $15,000 or $7,000 as we do.
One chance in 5 of earning $7,500 -- that's like playing Russian roulette. A rational person wouldn't want to live in a society that subjected him to risks like that.
There are plenty of people who are doing well right now, earning $50,000, $100,000 a year or more, and with that income, America is a pretty good place to live.
However, a lot of people found out over the last 50 years that the wheel of fortune turns, and it's pretty easy for even a skilled professional to see his whole occupation or industry disappear. For example: secretaries, receptionists, real estate agents, travel agents, printers, factory workers, many kinds of repairmen, many kinds of engineers and programmers.
I've seen numbers in the Wall Street Journal, and most of those people don't bounce back with resourcefulness and hard work. They lose their homes and health insurance, they move in with relatives, they "retire" at 55, they compete for entry-level jobs with high school students.
Of course, anyone wanting to get above the bottom needs to work.
That's the point of the Economist article. The data they cited says that Americans who work hard can't get ahead. Americans believe that hard work and skill produce success. But social mobility is declining, and inequality is growing. Incomes rose for the best-educated workers, but declined for everybody else. The best predictor of success is your father's income. It's harder for the poor to get ahead in the U.S. than in Europe.
You're stating the conventional wisdom, the American myth, but the data contradict it.
That is Good And Proper, how things should be.
I don't see any obvious reason why it's a priori good for some people to be born in wealth and continue in wealth, while other people are born in poverty and continue in poverty.
Welding is a hell of a lot harder than you think it is even now when you can actually see what you are doing when you strike the arc.
I agree with you. There's all kinds of welding. There's easy welding that can be handy around an auto shop. Then there's aircraft welding....
When I saw welding I thought of an article I read in the Wall Street Journal comparing a laid-off worker in the U.S. and a laid-off worker in Germany.
The American worker was really suffering, unable to afford his health insurance, mortgage payments, etc.
The German worker was basically getting his full salary to go on vacation.
The German worker was a welder, and he used his vacation to go to welding school, paid by the German government, to learn advanced welding skills that would be valuable when the recession was finally over.
The German vocational education system is way better than ours.
Going back to that AP story, with the economists who advocated sending American students to vocational schools rather than 4-year colleges -- if they did it as well as the Germans did, that might be acceptable.
Unfortunately the U.S. policy -- give kids government loans and send them out to choose a school themselves in the free market -- doesn't work too well. The latest fiasco was chef schools.
If a 4-year business degree is useless, then how useless is a 2-year business degree?
Original question: Should the government pay for a free 4-year education for every American who wants it and is able to do it? (That's what the City University of New York did up to the 1970s, and they turned out a lot of Nobel laureates and founders of the computer industry.)
I say yes. I think any smart blue collar worker would learn enough valuable insight from a 4-year degree to make it worthwhile. All that math, physics, electronics, chemistry and other science helps you do your job, and it helps you get the next job after you get laid off in this ruthless free market.
And they taught me that scientists should know more than just science. We used to call it a liberal education. A scientist has to know how to write a well-argued memo. (Like those engineers who tried to delay the Challenger launch.) You have to know history, politics, humanities and literature to understand the world around you. A lot of chemists and EEs wound up running businesses. Some of them got involved in politics. There are geologists testifying before Congress right now.
I spent my Freshman year taking math, physics, English, and history. Yeah, I think any plumber or welder or electronics technician who wants that should have the same opportunity.
Yeah, I think that economist was wrong. I think welders should learn history. It makes you a better welder.
I realized after I hit "Submit" that my long-winded screed about prescriptions wasn't really all that on-topic to your post.
It seemed that way. I wish I could share your optimism that doctors are no longer on the take, but the ethical guidelines have too many loopholes. (What do you expect from drug company lawyers?) The drug companies still pay "opinion leaders"/heavy prescribers consulting fees of $3,000 a day, plus travel expenses to the meetings, to give educational lectures.
Since you're apparently in the medical profession, I don't have to spell it out for you. There was one psychiatrist who wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine describing his experience on a drug company lecture panel. (I'm too lazy to Google it, but you know who I mean.) It's amazing how they can use a $3,000 lecture fee to manipulate doctors. They sell out so cheap.
Some doctors are on the take and some aren't, but I've been disappointed in the past when doctors I really trusted wound up selling out. I don't want to name names, because a lot of them Google their names and they'll find out I was talking about them. But most of the time, I read a review article in NEJM and the author discloses consulting fees with all the big hitters. Maybe I'm too romantic about Alexander Fleming.
You've got to read the article you link to a little more closely. Click some of the links and sources you find in the story and not just the Wikipedia summary.
Any sources in particular?
The argument, "If you read the literature you'd see that I was right" isn't too useful.
I never suggested that Marshall and Warren's work, published in 1984, was ignored. I suggested it was suppressed by the drug companies for a decade, until their patents ran out in 1994.
How do the drug companies suppress research by academic researchers in Australia? If they have promising results, they're free to submit it to NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Science, Nature, etc. Are you saying that the drug companies have their tentacles around the reviewers of all those journals?
They can also apply for government grants (even the U.S. NIH).
And their treatment of H. pylori requires antibiotics. So they could even find an antibiotic manufacturer to fund their trials.
Ten years isn't out of the ordinary for an innovation in medicine to be adopted. If their results were adopted too slowly, I would attribute it to the usual exasperatingly slow pace of clinical research.
Although if you know of any evidence that it was actually suppressed, I'm always ready for a good (verified) story.
I think it's a great idea to take a year off after high school and work as a welder if you feel like it.
But I also think college is a great mind-expanding experience, and that everyone should have the opportunity to go to a 4-year college if (and when) they feel like it too. How good a welder can you be if you don't understand basic physics and chemistry? What happens when the welding jobs disappear (as they did in Germany)? What happens when she gets tired of welding?
And everybody should go to a 4-year college without going into debt. Talk about the road to serfdom. $20,000 in debt that you can never discharge in bankruptcy, and that will accumulate exhorbitant interest for years, sounds like serfdom to me.
Up to the 1970s, America used to be a land of opportunity. Free access to college education was a big part of that. Now America is turning into a two-class society. http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15908469 People in the middle will move up or down, and most of them will move down.
Traditionally, a college degree has been the way out of poverty, and the great equalizer. If these economists have data that it doesn't work that way any more, I'll look at it carefully. That's what I learned how to do in my 4-year college. But I wouldn't accept a major reversal of a long-established social goal based on a couple of associational studies.
We just spent $3 trillion on the war in Iraq (according to Nobel-prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz). That's about $10,000 for every American. So we can certainly afford to spend $20,000 or so for a college education for anybody who is capable of it. And the rich are doing extremely well. We can tax the rich to pay for the poor. There's more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote.
If you're middle-class in America today, you're taking a crap shoot, according to The Economist. You might move up. And you might move down. In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy committed us to the goals of sending a man to the moon and eliminating poverty. We sent a man to the moon but we didn't eliminate poverty. There's no excuse for that. The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty. We have whole cities where people can't get out of poverty. If you don't want to just transfer a lot of money from the rich to the poor, the other way to eliminate poverty is to give everyone a good education, and a free college education is a centerpiece of that.
These economists are trying to talk us into giving up on the goal of eliminating poverty and educating our population the way the wealthy European nations do. I don't buy it.
Biochemist Zheng Cui’s had grants and funding while researching cancer, but after he found a very promising approach to fight cancer -- it worked so well that he planed to move to human trials -- all the money dried up.
Popular Mechanics is not the best source for a comprehensive report on new cancer research, but as best as I can figure out that interview he seems to be describing something that's been used for 50 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transplantation
I know about this because I had a friend with leukemia who was looking for a donor with a match. I wanted to join the donor registry myself (not for my friend, which was very unlikely, but because it was possible that somebody somewhere in the world was a match for me) but I was too old.
It would take someone who knows more about cancer immunotherapy than me to explain all the ways treatments like this have been tried before and usually failed, sometimes succeeded.
But the idea of paying $100,000 for an experimental cancer treatment unapproved by the FDA and tested only in mice is enough to raise my eyebrows. The first human study after an animal study is a Phase I study, which is done not to cure but to establish a safe (and unsafe) dose. I can't imagine how he got it through the Wake Forest ethics committee.
Some (publicly-funded) research found that ulcers were actually caused by bacteria not stomach acid, and could be cured with an extremely cheap course of ant-biotics. The drug companies had done some basic research on this and did not publish. There was more than half a decade when drug companies knew that cheap antibiotics could cure ulcers but did nothing about it. It finally took government-funded researchers to publish and within half a year, the anti-ulcer drugs fell off the top ten, and even the top 100 of prescribed drugs.
Depends on the gene and the disease. There are some genes that are closely associated with the disease, and some that are more loosely associated.
That's what the parent meant by "penetrant"; if a gene has high penetrance, it's more likely to express itself, regardless of the environment. If it has low penetrance, you could die of old age and never know you had it.
The BRCA1 gene has a very high penetrance for breast cancer. If a woman has it, she will be very likely (I think 60%) to get breast cancer by age 50 or 60. Women in that situation can avoid breast cancer by getting both breasts removed before that. (That's pretty drastic, but the alternative is a substantial probability of dying of breast cancer). Women with the BRCA1 gene almost always know that they come from families with high incidence of breast cancer.
It's always been possible to use traditional Mendelian inheritance to figure out that breast cancer runs in a family, and that a particular woman has a good chance of getting breast cancer if her mother or sister did. In some cases, those women were faced with a dilemma: Run a high risk (up to 50%) of breast cancer, or have both breasts removed first.
Now women with breast cancer are routinely tested for BRCA1. They tell their results to their relatives. Their relatives can now get tested and find out whether they also have the gene.
If a sister or daughter has the BRCA gene, she can decide whether to get her breasts removed.
If she doesn't have the BRCA gene, she can forget about it. Even though she comes from a family with a high incidence of breast cancer, she has no higher risk than anyone else.
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You must be an economist if you think you can make the parties whole with enough money.
My point is that the damage of the oil spill can't be undone. BP doesn't have enough money to make the parties whole. You can't clean a wetland.
look at what you are saying. private companys can't do it right but somehow big government will be perfect? have you ever even dealt with a government department before?!?! they are accountable to no one, you have no choice either.
I really hate straw men. I never said government will be perfect.
Sometimes private companies get it right, and sometimes they screw up royally. (Contrary to capitalist theory, the prospect of having their stockholders loose a lot of money doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.)
Sometimes the government gets it right, and sometimes it screws up royally.
If you're dealing with really critical operations where you have a chance to do massive, irrepairable damage beyond the ability of anyone to repair, like nuclear power plants or the aircraft industry -- places where you really must not screw up -- then you need both private companies and oversight by government.
As the WSJ pointed out, both the Democrats and Republicans had cut back on regulating oil rig safety. They let the oil companies do what they wanted. As a result, BP skipped some safety procedures and devices.
BP filled the well with cement, let the cement set, and tested it to make sure it could hold pressure and they could remove the drilling mud.
The tests showed it was leaking and couldn't hold pressure. (According to one of the manufacturers' web sites, the cement works about 90% of the time, but sometimes you have to redo it.) In order to redo it, they would have had to go through an elaborate procedure that would cost a few more million dollars and take a few more weeks (time=lots of money).
So they ignored the tests, removed the mud, and the well blew, killing 11 workers, destroying a $600 million platform, and filling the Gulf with oil.
I'll be looking forward to the hearings and courtroom cross-examinations where the people responsible for that decision will be forced to explain why they did it.
Given the dangers involved to human life, the environment and the Gulf economy, and given the controversy and history of disasters in these platforms, they should have had a government inspector reviewing the critical procedures.
Assuming we had a competent government inspector, instead of a hack political employee, the inspector would have held up progress until they were sure the cement actually was sealing the well. BP probably would have bitched, and the WSJ would have written editorials about government bureaucrats starving America for oil, but they wouldn't have had this blowout.
To answer your question, yes I've dealt with government departments. I've dealt with state and federal government officials in charge of worker safety, nuclear power plant safety, and safety and efficacy of new drugs. In my experience, they were pretty fucking smart. And they were dedicated to public safety.
That was not always true of private industry. Read Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed. Why did American auto manufacturers build cars that they knew would needlessly kill people? I could never figure it out.
I will admit that when the Republicans took over the government, they destroyed the regulatory agencies. And the "new" Democrats like Bill Clinton and Obama aren't much better.
That's true. As long as you have politicians and voters who don't believe government can do anything right, that may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And it doesn't work when their major campaign contributors are the industry they're supposed to be regulating.
What's the downside to enlarging participation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_man_month
The entire PR effort could be replaced with a simple pro-capitalist capitulation: "We screwed up, big time, and unlike the banks, we're solvent enough to pay restitution."
Restitution? You mean paying fishermen, restaurants, hotels, etc. all the money they would have made if the oil spill hadn't hit? What are you going to do -- write off New Orleans and put everybody on the dole?
Unfortunately, if the oil hits the shore, all the money in the world can't clean it up. The best estimates I've seen are that they could clean up 10% of the oil. When the oil coats the plants and mixes with the mud in the wetlands, you can't unscramble the egg. You just destroy a lot of species.
I remember sitting by a lake in New Orleans, and having these big, beautiful fucking birds fly down right next to me. You can't clean up those birds when they're covered with oil. Expert Recommends Killing Oil-Soaked Birds
Capitalism is not such a bad system when the gears are allowed to mesh.
Even after decades of reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page, this blind faith in capitalism leaves me speechless.
As the WSJ reported, both Democrats and Republicans left the oil companies unregulated as they cut out well-established safety management procedures. (BP had higher accident and fatality rate than most.) If you have a well-managed government agency with competent, dedicated safety inspectors riding herd on offshore wells, then you can at least make drilling as safe as possible and maybe safe enough. Without competent government regulation, it's bye-bye birdie.
As a liberal, I am very, very upset with the man I voted for right now. At least Bush was just an idiot with Katrina. Obama seems to be deliberately pandering to Big Oil.
I'm not disappointed with Obama, I never expected any different. Here's a classic article on Obama, from Bill Moyer's journal, with Matt Taibbi and disillusioned Obama fanboy Robert Kuttner http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/transcript1.html During the elections, http://www.commondreams.org/ had lots of stuff about Obama. His legal work in Chicago was to represent clients who were privatizing public housing.
The Democratic Party just takes hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, and follows the interests of their campaign contributors rather than the people who vote for them. (Just like the Republicans.) We saw that in health care. When the progressive Democratic activists ran TV ads to push blue-dog Democrats to support the public option, Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called them "fucking retards" in a White House meeting. Then Emanuel apologized -- to the retarded organizations.
The Democrats lost one election because they kissed off the left, who voted for Nader. Maybe the way to get more respect from the Democratic party is to start voting for third-party candidates again. Do you vote for somebody who calls you a fucking retard? I don't.
I wasn't aware that any person had the right to anonymous speech. This is from Wikipedia:
Can you show me anywhere in relevant legislation where it says that a person has the right to be anonymous?
Bakkster just did above.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1659634&cid=32292314
Free Speech protections don't include any measures to protect you from backlash from some stupid or defamatory things you say; it simply protects your right to speak freely.
Actually it does. That's the reason why the Supreme Court upheld anonymous speech. (I'm too lazy to look up the case.)
The Constitution protects anonymous writing because the people who wrote the Constitution published anonymous writing.
I don't want to have to go to court to prove that my writing isn't defamatory. I'd rather that they couldn't find me in the first place.
It won't impinge free speech,
Actually it will. It's known as "chilling effect." If you know that it's possible for your anonymous political speech to be identified, you're less likely to criticize powerful people who can take retaliation against you.
Their other product is candy-coated lead paint chips.
Governments can invest money in education at no charge to the student, in order to increase the economy as a whole. Individual taxpayers can benefit more from that increase than they paid in taxes. Most people believe that this is true of elementary and high school education in the U.S.
The question is, at what point does free education pass the point of diminishing returns for the economy as a whole. European countries seem to believe that it benefits them to educate a substantial proportion of the population to a level equal to our 4 years of college. The social scientists I read in Science agree. They think the GI bill created post-war American success.
My intuition is that those Europeans and social scientists are right. If we increased our educational expenses substantially, and increased our taxes to European levels, and overeducated our population until we had taxi drivers and mail carriers with art history and philosophy degrees, we'd still have an educated population with scientists, engineers and managers that was so much more productive that it would justify the cost of education in economic terms alone. The Scandinavian countries seem to be doing OK.
And in non-economic terms I'd rather be living in a society in which blue collar workers learned art and philosophy.
But that's only my intuition. My intuition doesn't count for much, and neither does anybody else's intuition. The only thing I care about now is facts. I can get that from Science magazine. As one Canadian doctor said, "If it's not peer-reviewed, why are you wasting your time on it?"
I rest my case.
Oh, now I see where you're at -- education doesn't promote mobility or job creation, replace public schools with vouchers, eliminate Social Security, cut back government spending.
I started reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page years ago, because they were conservatives who actually had respect for the facts, even when the facts went against them. Now unfortunately, along with the rest of the conservative movement, they've been completely taken over by anti-government ideology and have abandoned facts. The traditional fact-based conservative movement actually has a name for this, "epistemic closure."
So I'm familiar with your fact-free arguments. When someone dismisses the facts in peer-reviewed journals like Science, I know that facts and logic will never convince them.
I rest my case.
BTW, for the record (in the unlikely case that anybody else is following this) you have a complete misunderstanding of what nurses do, and what their educational requirements are. http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos083.htm (more facts) and a complete misunderstanding of what the legal requirements are for decision-making in hospitals. This is a good example of the intellectual methods of conservatives today: just make things up.
I admit that if you buy health care on the free market, you probably won't need Social Security.
Perhaps the reasoning published in a peer-reviewed journal will be acceptable to you. (Although there are some people who will never change their opinions no matter how strong the evidence.)
Science, 26 Sep 2008, 321:1779, Books: Economics: For equality, education matters, Thomas Lemieux.
Book review of The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.
Remarkable growth in US economy during 20th century, inequality declining, defying tradeoff between equality and efficiency. By 1970s, US was richest and most educated country in the world.
But beginning 1970s, "productivity stalled and inequality started growing rapidly." Fraction of Americans completing college level. "Inequality now reaching highs not seen since the Great Depression."
In early 20th century, "rapid technological change was accompanied by stunning gains in educational achievement that provided enough qualified workers to meet the demands of an increasingly technologically sophisticated economy." But now technology is advancing with stagnant education.
"Post-World War II, the G.I. Bill continued from where the high school movement of 1910 to 1940 had left off, opening college to the masses."
But now other countries have caught up. Young Americans no longer have educational advantages over the rest of the world.
Exactly!
To take that a bit farther, there was an article in the New York Times Magazine a year or so ago, which described people who were hearing imaginary voices, knew they were hearing imaginary voices, and were normal and functional in every other respect. Some psychiatrists made the argument that if it doesn't bother them, people like that don't have a problem, and there wasn't anything psychiatrists could do.
It's even harder to explain what benefit there was to admitting somebody like that to a mental hospital for a couple of weeks, unless they have insurance that covers it. In that case there would obviously be a benefit to the person that the insurance company pays.
Yeah, good citation.
They took normal subjects, with no history of mental illness, who told the staff at a mental hospital that they had been hearing voices, but weren't hearing voices any more.
You realize that normal healthy people actually *could* be hearing voices if, for example, there was a radio in the next room.
So the experiment was set up in such a way that perfectly healthy people who wrongly thought they were hearing voices could be misdiagnosed.
City College, the GI bill, and Andrew Grove were a special case?
Absolutely. Currently, I gather there are somewhere over a hundred million college graduates in the US plus a bunch more with either an associate degree or a few college courses.
The City college system is a drop in a bucket compared to those numbers. When you are discussing programs that are at best a small fraction of the entire group, then calling them a "special case" is not in the least a stretch.
The CCNY was a small system that produced a large number of Nobel laureates (using Nobel laureates as a proxy for all the other accomplished graduates). They also produced leaders in politics, finance, law, and other fields.
Their economic influence wasn't a drop in the bucket. Intel was a major contribution to the U.S. economy. It was replicated in the state university systems of New York and California.
At CCNY, you could walk into your professor's lab and see the research he was doing. You can't do that at a 2-year college with vocational courses taught by adjuncts.
When you have a model that works well, you expand it, not destroy it. But some people oppose public education for ideological reasons.
If you wind up in an emergency room with a heart attack or a stroke, do you want to be treated by a registered nurse who doesn't have a four-year degree?
If a nurse is going to decide on whether to pull the plug on you while you're unconscious, I'd want a nurse who took some philosophy courses.
I can't take this seriously. There's already cut and dry medical "philosophy" that covers this situation. Basically, if I made a "do not resuscitate" document, then they're supposed to pull the plug (by "they" I mean someone with a pay grade above nurse makes the decision to comply with the document). If it's a crisis situation (with lots of injured people), then there is triage where they put me aside while they help someone that can be helped. These things are too important to leave to philosophy.
Boy, if you think the decision on whether to pull the plug is as simple as that Wikipedia article makes it out to be, then you are a walking advertisement for the dangers of a narrow specialized education. If you come into the emergency room unconscious, how can you sign a DNR order? In reality, http://content.nejm.org/cgi/collection/medical_ethics advanced directives are usually useless because there are too many possibilities for any document to cover all of them. These decisions are often made by ethics committees that include nurses.
Suppose a baby is born with a genetic defect and will die right away without resuscitation, and will die anyway after 6 months of painful, expensive treatment. Do you want a right-to-life nurse to impose her own religious beliefs on the couple and take it upon herself to perform resuciation? Or do you want a nurse who has taken a couple of philosophy courses and has had her ideas challenged by someone who believes differently?
Nurses aren't just technicians. They need a liberal arts education to do their job well.
That's a good example of the dangers of downgrading qualifications. If we replace well-educated nurses with 4-year degrees with poorly-educated nurses from 2-year technical schools, we'll have unqualified nurses making bad life-and death decisions. It's important to for a nurse to understand that a medical professional can't impose her own religious beliefs on her patients. I don't think you can teach that lesson in a stripped-down 2-year vocational course.
And the NYT article just repeats the myths. We don't know that college improves salaries or makes better voters. Correlation does not imply causation. The people
City College in New York City was free from its founding up to at least the 1970s. The other parts of the City College system, including Brooklyn College, were also free. They turned out at least a dozen Nobel laureates, and people who created the modern electronics industry, like Andrew Grove, the co-founder of Intel. City College paid for itself with Andrew Grove alone.
A special case.
City College, the GI bill, and Andrew Grove were a special case? I don't think so. CCNY has a whole wall of photos of graduates who were just as accomplished as Andrew Grove.
And who's to say that this system wouldn't have turned out a dozen Nobel laureates and an Andrew Grove even if they did charge money?
Since nobody did a controlled study in which they randomized people to City College or control, we'll never know with absolute certainty.
But most people see a plausable mechanism between educating people in a profession and having them succeed in that profession. CCNY turned out a lot of scientists and engineers when it was free, and CCNY graduates were unusually accomplished.
There's also a plausable mechanism between making college free and having more people attend college: the free market.
I know a lot of people at the margins who couldn't afford to go to college, even if CCNY was free, because the had to work to support their family. I know a kid who had to drop out of Hunter College (a branch of the CUNY system) and get a job when they raised their tuition to about $1,500 a year. His parents couldn't afford it. In the real world, it's really not possible for people in the bottom 2/5 to pay their own way through college.
for education, more is better. There is no diminishing return on education (you also seem to think that all education is equal).
I think that all education is diverse and the people who are taking it are best placed to decide whether it's worthwhile to them.
I've repeatedly seen the estimate that each dollar invested in education returns five dollars to society. That's the number these economists in TFA were challenging.
If it is true, then the point of diminishing returns on education is pretty far down the path -- probably past a 4-year degree. If society gets a 5:1 return on public education, you could afford to include a lot of inefficient education and still come out way ahead.
it simply isn't feasible to have both an industrious society and a society in which everyone is simultaneously putting in considerable effort to learn.
We have a society that just spent $10,000 per capita for the war in Iraq, to prevent Sadam Hussein from threatening us with biological and chemical weapons that didn't exist. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 1% of the population in prison at a cost of $25,000 per year, and another 2% in the parole system. These are basically needless expenses.
So we are obviously a wealthy society. If we were to "waste" the same money by "overeducating" our population instead of putting them in jail or sending them to war, I think it would be a better use of this money.
Such an overeducated society would have some economic inefficiencies, but for all its failings it would be a better society than the one we've got.
It's like having a patient come into the hospital with an infection with some of the symptoms of meningitis. You could give them a lot of antibiotics, and most of the time you'd be overtreating them, but on the whole you'd be catching one or two cases of meningitis that would result in avoidable death or crippling strokes. The downside of overtreating everybody is a lot better than the downside of undertreating them.
The downside of overeducating people is a lot better than the downside of undereducating people.
Here's a closely related question. What level of education should everyone have?
I disagree. The US has a vast and varied private college community precisely because a college education has never been free (except in special cases).
City College in New York City was free from its founding up to at least the 1970s. The other parts of the City College system, including Brooklyn College, were also free. They turned out at least a dozen Nobel laureates, and people who created the modern electronics industry, like Andrew Grove, the co-founder of Intel. City College paid for itself with Andrew Grove alone.
That was the model for the State University of New York, which was almost free, and also produced an enormous educated workforce. SUNY was the model of the California state university system, which also turned out graduates who do an impressive amount of scientific research.
Scientists and engineers still talk about the G.I. bill -- introduced by a Republican -- after World War II that flooded the colleges with returning veterans, as one of the most successful educational programs this country ever saw. http://www.gibill.va.gov/gi_bill_info/history.htm It gave this country a core of college-educated people.
If you believe in the free market, then you believe that the cheaper something is, the more people will buy it. The cheaper you make college education, the more people will get college degrees. Providing free or cheap education will give you a more educated workforce. And our experience with the GI bill, and the European experience today, is that a better-educated workforce is more productive.
An education, especially in a number of nearly useless social studies and liberal arts fields (which IMHO don't give you "mind-expanding" experiences), doesn't necessarily help you get a job that will lift you out of poverty.
If you have to think for yourself in a free-market economy and a democratic society, the best way to do it is with a liberal arts education. (Even if it's just 30 credits out of 120.)
Do you think you can get by in the world with just engineering courses, without ever learning how to read a novel or construct an argument, without knowing whether the Greeks or Romans came first?
Even in technology, the people who succeed are the ones who have a well-rounded education. The people who just have two years of technical courses are the ones who get replaced by outsourcing and unemployed.
People should be able to choose to put as much work into their education as they want. But we have a 2-class society. A 2-year technical education puts you at the bottom. A 4-year liberal arts education gives you a shot at the top.
In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
That's BS.
That's according to the Economist article I linked to. Take it up with them. (I've seen this argued convincingly in many places, for example by Paul Krugman.) There is a risk of downward mobility in the European welfare states, but not like here. In the U.S., the middle class is playing musical chairs. Our inequality (the Gini index) is as great as Brazil.
The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty.
What they have done is eliminated absolute poverty, as in total destitution. There are plenty of poor people about – there is relative poverty – but there is a floor to how low people can go.
That's quite an accomplishment. Every democratic society in the world has been trying to do that, and many of them did. We set that goal in the 1960s. John F. Kennedy was elected on a pledge to eliminate poverty. So was Richard Nixon. We failed. It's a serious failure.
There's a table in the Statistical Abstract of the United States that shows family income of the U.S. population, divided into highest fifth, second-highest fifth, etc. In round numbers -- the people in the highest fifth get about half the income in the country, all to themselves (with a median income of about $120,000, depending on the year). The second fifth gets half of that (i.e. $60,000), the third fifth half of that ($30,000), the fourth fifth half of that ($15,000) and the bottom fifth half of that ($7,500). The people at the bottom are doing very badly. That's like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
I saw the corresponding income distribution for Sweden. It was just like ours -- except it didn't have the bottom two-fifths. They didn't have a significant population of people making $15,000 or $7,000 as we do.
One chance in 5 of earning $7,500 -- that's like playing Russian roulette. A rational person wouldn't want to live in a society that subjected him to risks like that.
There are plenty of people who are doing well right now, earning $50,000, $100,000 a year or more, and with that income, America is a pretty good place to live.
However, a lot of people found out over the last 50 years that the wheel of fortune turns, and it's pretty easy for even a skilled professional to see his whole occupation or industry disappear. For example: secretaries, receptionists, real estate agents, travel agents, printers, factory workers, many kinds of repairmen, many kinds of engineers and programmers.
I've seen numbers in the Wall Street Journal, and most of those people don't bounce back with resourcefulness and hard work. They lose their homes and health insurance, they move in with relatives, they "retire" at 55, they compete for entry-level jobs with high school students.
Of course, anyone wanting to get above the bottom needs to work.
That's the point of the Economist article. The data they cited says that Americans who work hard can't get ahead. Americans believe that hard work and skill produce success. But social mobility is declining, and inequality is growing. Incomes rose for the best-educated workers, but declined for everybody else. The best predictor of success is your father's income. It's harder for the poor to get ahead in the U.S. than in Europe.
You're stating the conventional wisdom, the American myth, but the data contradict it.
That is Good And Proper, how things should be.
I don't see any obvious reason why it's a priori good for some people to be born in wealth and continue in wealth, while other people are born in poverty and continue in poverty.
That's the way economists (like Samuel Bowles) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist)#Inequality_vs
Welding is a hell of a lot harder than you think it is even now when you can actually see what you are doing when you strike the arc.
I agree with you. There's all kinds of welding. There's easy welding that can be handy around an auto shop. Then there's aircraft welding....
When I saw welding I thought of an article I read in the Wall Street Journal comparing a laid-off worker in the U.S. and a laid-off worker in Germany.
The American worker was really suffering, unable to afford his health insurance, mortgage payments, etc.
The German worker was basically getting his full salary to go on vacation.
The German worker was a welder, and he used his vacation to go to welding school, paid by the German government, to learn advanced welding skills that would be valuable when the recession was finally over.
The German vocational education system is way better than ours.
Going back to that AP story, with the economists who advocated sending American students to vocational schools rather than 4-year colleges -- if they did it as well as the Germans did, that might be acceptable.
Unfortunately the U.S. policy -- give kids government loans and send them out to choose a school themselves in the free market -- doesn't work too well. The latest fiasco was chef schools.
If a 4-year business degree is useless, then how useless is a 2-year business degree?
Original question: Should the government pay for a free 4-year education for every American who wants it and is able to do it? (That's what the City University of New York did up to the 1970s, and they turned out a lot of Nobel laureates and founders of the computer industry.)
I say yes. I think any smart blue collar worker would learn enough valuable insight from a 4-year degree to make it worthwhile. All that math, physics, electronics, chemistry and other science helps you do your job, and it helps you get the next job after you get laid off in this ruthless free market.
And they taught me that scientists should know more than just science. We used to call it a liberal education. A scientist has to know how to write a well-argued memo. (Like those engineers who tried to delay the Challenger launch.) You have to know history, politics, humanities and literature to understand the world around you. A lot of chemists and EEs wound up running businesses. Some of them got involved in politics. There are geologists testifying before Congress right now.
I spent my Freshman year taking math, physics, English, and history. Yeah, I think any plumber or welder or electronics technician who wants that should have the same opportunity.
Yeah, I think that economist was wrong. I think welders should learn history. It makes you a better welder.
I realized after I hit "Submit" that my long-winded screed about prescriptions wasn't really all that on-topic to your post.
It seemed that way. I wish I could share your optimism that doctors are no longer on the take, but the ethical guidelines have too many loopholes. (What do you expect from drug company lawyers?) The drug companies still pay "opinion leaders"/heavy prescribers consulting fees of $3,000 a day, plus travel expenses to the meetings, to give educational lectures.
Since you're apparently in the medical profession, I don't have to spell it out for you. There was one psychiatrist who wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine describing his experience on a drug company lecture panel. (I'm too lazy to Google it, but you know who I mean.) It's amazing how they can use a $3,000 lecture fee to manipulate doctors. They sell out so cheap.
Some doctors are on the take and some aren't, but I've been disappointed in the past when doctors I really trusted wound up selling out. I don't want to name names, because a lot of them Google their names and they'll find out I was talking about them. But most of the time, I read a review article in NEJM and the author discloses consulting fees with all the big hitters. Maybe I'm too romantic about Alexander Fleming.
You've got to read the article you link to a little more closely. Click some of the links and sources you find in the story and not just the Wikipedia summary.
Any sources in particular?
The argument, "If you read the literature you'd see that I was right" isn't too useful.
I never suggested that Marshall and Warren's work, published in 1984, was ignored. I suggested it was suppressed by the drug companies for a decade, until their patents ran out in 1994.
How do the drug companies suppress research by academic researchers in Australia? If they have promising results, they're free to submit it to NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Science, Nature, etc. Are you saying that the drug companies have their tentacles around the reviewers of all those journals?
They can also apply for government grants (even the U.S. NIH).
And their treatment of H. pylori requires antibiotics. So they could even find an antibiotic manufacturer to fund their trials.
Ten years isn't out of the ordinary for an innovation in medicine to be adopted. If their results were adopted too slowly, I would attribute it to the usual exasperatingly slow pace of clinical research.
Although if you know of any evidence that it was actually suppressed, I'm always ready for a good (verified) story.
I think it's a great idea to take a year off after high school and work as a welder if you feel like it.
But I also think college is a great mind-expanding experience, and that everyone should have the opportunity to go to a 4-year college if (and when) they feel like it too. How good a welder can you be if you don't understand basic physics and chemistry? What happens when the welding jobs disappear (as they did in Germany)? What happens when she gets tired of welding?
And everybody should go to a 4-year college without going into debt. Talk about the road to serfdom. $20,000 in debt that you can never discharge in bankruptcy, and that will accumulate exhorbitant interest for years, sounds like serfdom to me.
Up to the 1970s, America used to be a land of opportunity. Free access to college education was a big part of that. Now America is turning into a two-class society. http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15908469 People in the middle will move up or down, and most of them will move down.
Traditionally, a college degree has been the way out of poverty, and the great equalizer. If these economists have data that it doesn't work that way any more, I'll look at it carefully. That's what I learned how to do in my 4-year college. But I wouldn't accept a major reversal of a long-established social goal based on a couple of associational studies.
We just spent $3 trillion on the war in Iraq (according to Nobel-prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz). That's about $10,000 for every American. So we can certainly afford to spend $20,000 or so for a college education for anybody who is capable of it. And the rich are doing extremely well. We can tax the rich to pay for the poor. There's more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote.
If you're middle-class in America today, you're taking a crap shoot, according to The Economist. You might move up. And you might move down. In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy committed us to the goals of sending a man to the moon and eliminating poverty. We sent a man to the moon but we didn't eliminate poverty. There's no excuse for that. The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty. We have whole cities where people can't get out of poverty. If you don't want to just transfer a lot of money from the rich to the poor, the other way to eliminate poverty is to give everyone a good education, and a free college education is a centerpiece of that.
These economists are trying to talk us into giving up on the goal of eliminating poverty and educating our population the way the wealthy European nations do. I don't buy it.
Biochemist Zheng Cui’s had grants and funding while researching cancer, but after he found a very promising approach to fight cancer -- it worked so well that he planed to move to human trials -- all the money dried up.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/4273366
Popular Mechanics is not the best source for a comprehensive report on new cancer research, but as best as I can figure out that interview he seems to be describing something that's been used for 50 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transplantation
I know about this because I had a friend with leukemia who was looking for a donor with a match. I wanted to join the donor registry myself (not for my friend, which was very unlikely, but because it was possible that somebody somewhere in the world was a match for me) but I was too old.
It would take someone who knows more about cancer immunotherapy than me to explain all the ways treatments like this have been tried before and usually failed, sometimes succeeded.
But the idea of paying $100,000 for an experimental cancer treatment unapproved by the FDA and tested only in mice is enough to raise my eyebrows. The first human study after an animal study is a Phase I study, which is done not to cure but to establish a safe (and unsafe) dose. I can't imagine how he got it through the Wake Forest ethics committee.
None dare call it a conspiracy!
You just did. But this is /..
There is no money in a cure....
That's why you're better off if your doctor is motivated by the desire to cure you rather than by the desire to make money.
There are such doctors, although that may be difficult for Americans to believe.
There are even American doctors like that.
Some (publicly-funded) research found that ulcers were actually caused by bacteria not stomach acid, and could be cured with an extremely cheap course of ant-biotics. The drug companies had done some basic research on this and did not publish. There was more than half a decade when drug companies knew that cheap antibiotics could cure ulcers but did nothing about it. It finally took government-funded researchers to publish and within half a year, the anti-ulcer drugs fell off the top ten, and even the top 100 of prescribed drugs.
Since this is Slashdot, I'm not surprised to get a confused story, but if anyone is interested here's the Wikipedia entry on what actually happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori#History
Marshall and Warren did win a Nobel Prize for this, so it wasn't exactly ignored. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/index.html
Depends on the gene and the disease. There are some genes that are closely associated with the disease, and some that are more loosely associated.
That's what the parent meant by "penetrant"; if a gene has high penetrance, it's more likely to express itself, regardless of the environment. If it has low penetrance, you could die of old age and never know you had it.
The BRCA1 gene has a very high penetrance for breast cancer. If a woman has it, she will be very likely (I think 60%) to get breast cancer by age 50 or 60. Women in that situation can avoid breast cancer by getting both breasts removed before that. (That's pretty drastic, but the alternative is a substantial probability of dying of breast cancer). Women with the BRCA1 gene almost always know that they come from families with high incidence of breast cancer.
It's always been possible to use traditional Mendelian inheritance to figure out that breast cancer runs in a family, and that a particular woman has a good chance of getting breast cancer if her mother or sister did. In some cases, those women were faced with a dilemma: Run a high risk (up to 50%) of breast cancer, or have both breasts removed first.
Now women with breast cancer are routinely tested for BRCA1. They tell their results to their relatives. Their relatives can now get tested and find out whether they also have the gene.
If a sister or daughter has the BRCA gene, she can decide whether to get her breasts removed.
If she doesn't have the BRCA gene, she can forget about it. Even though she comes from a family with a high incidence of breast cancer, she has no higher risk than anyone else.