Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/economic-recovery

by rams • 18 years ago

73 111 18 years ago

philip.greenspun.com

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

"Nobody has ever made a compelling argument for how having unionized teachers helps students. Nor has anyone ever made a compelling argument for how having tenured teachers helps student performance. Our country's best performing schools (all of them private) have non-unionized teaching staffs. We can't afford to experiment with unionized teachers anymore. The government created the right for public employees to unionize and it can remove that right very quickly if it has the political will.

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 There wouldn't be a problem with 'failing schools' anymore because parents would have withdrawn nearly all of their kids from such a school and the building would end up being taken over by a new school with new management."

Hear. Hear.

mixmax8• 18 years ago

Denmark has unionized teachers, and has a long history of public schools. Danes have invented C++(Bjarne Stoustrup), Turbo Pascal, C#, Dephi (Anders Hejlsberg) and Ruby on Rails (DHH). For a country with a population half of New York I think that's pretty impressive. I can't help to notice when working with foreigners that Danes have a much better knack at understanding a problem domain and coming up with creative solutions. This is widely accredited to the system of public schools that encourage all students to help each other, argue about possible solutions and come up with the best one.

Prrometheus11• 18 years ago

The suburbs outside Arlington county near DC have great public schools as well. They regularly send their students to Ivy League schools and many go on to become CEOs and Senators.

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

gruseom• 18 years ago

If we're listing the great Danes (sorry) of comp sci, let's not forget Peter Naur - Algol 60 and BNF.

russell2• 18 years ago

Well Denmark has it easy. It's full of Danes. We have lots of new immigrants and people climbing up from underclasses which don't have a tradition of educational excellence. That part of the solution will take time.

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

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

I'm considerably more familiar with countries that have great innovation and great economic growth without unionized teachers. So how do we tease out the effects of unionization? What kinds of contracts do the teachers have in each country, and what kinds of choices do the parents have if the local school down the street isn't helping their children learn?

See Choice of Schools in Six Nations

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

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

laut• 18 years ago

PHP too (Rasmus Ledorf).

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

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

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

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

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

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

- another Dane who left Denmark.

pelle5• 18 years ago

I also have to point out being Danish myself that the Danish education system is under heavy attack in Denmark as being uncompetitive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hellblazer• 18 years ago

Wondering what possible expertise Greenspun brings to this arena. Worse, this post of his is just a long list of assertions without any references, supporting material or backup. I guess we're just supposed to accept on faith that he knows what he's talking about.

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

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

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Presumably, we're just meant to go look all these things up at the Cato Institute.

hank7774• 18 years ago

Based on the article posted here on rent control the other day,it does indeed seem as though greenspun uses the same unsubstantiated assertion strategy for building arguments as does the cato institute. I guess I have to give him credit for being no worse than folks that get paid to write this crap.

joshwa• 18 years ago

"Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice" - Paul Buchheit

gcv• 18 years ago

You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics. You know, the "dismal science." It is the discipline in which the introductory books outline the basic rules. Supply, demand, production possibilities curves, all that sensible, good stuff. It all makes sense --- experts in economics should be able to wisely guide nations and markets, right?

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

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

DaniFong• 18 years ago

I think that the dynamics of the latest bubble burst had more to do with psychology, sociology and the moral questions of old than economics, and increasingly people are viewing it that way. What we're dealing with is to a large extent an emotional phenomenon. Trust has flown out, fear has arisen, panic has set in, assumptions are being reanalyzed, and blame is being placed.

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

"You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics."

I've asked this question recently here on HN,

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

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

rsheridan63• 18 years ago

There are references, supporting materials, and backup. Read the article again.

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

chadmalik2• 18 years ago

....bringing up a good point which is: why are people like Lawrence Summers, Paulson, Bernanke etc. expected to get us out of this mess when they CREATED it?

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

gaius4• 18 years ago

I would love to see Greenspun and Paul Graham battle in rhymes to settle once and for all who is the one true PG.

akd• 18 years ago

Greenspun goes by "philg"

sutro• 18 years ago

It would be like Jesus versus Santa in the original South Park. "There can be only one."

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

mixmax8• 18 years ago

Public economic policy is a hard problem, and with all Respect to Philip there are a couple of points from the list of promises to business managers that are somewhat contradictory.

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

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

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

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

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

metaguri• 18 years ago

Spot on. Many of Greenspun's points make intuitive sense and thus seem like a good argument on their own, but they are quite incompatible. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

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

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

Prrometheus11• 18 years ago

>"I'm not sure if there are empirical analyses to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). "

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

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

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

bokonist• 18 years ago

I'm not sure if there are empirical analysis to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now).

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

Prrometheus11• 18 years ago

I don't think it matters as much how great a percentage of the GDP government spends, so much as how it is spent. Is the government spending money in ways that produce net positive social return? This becomes much harder as the absolute size of the bureaucracy grows. It is harder to manage a multi-trillion dollar budget than it is to manage Sweden.

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

mixmax8• 18 years ago

You're hinting at a very interesting problem here: The absolute size of bureaucracy.

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

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

"Besides empirical studies show that a good education system requires considerable public investment, and thus a larger percentage of GDP spent on government."

Citations to the studies, please?

pelle5• 18 years ago

Good analysis. One point though about Sweden. Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government.

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

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

mixmax8• 18 years ago

Interesting comment that points to why economics is such a hard disciplline: Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government. - So does this indicate that small government is a cause for successful Swedish companies? It might, but since you can't recreate the experiment you will never know for sure, all you know is that there is a correlation. There are probably many other things that could have caused these particular companies to be successful. The Swedish system of education is one.

hank7774• 18 years ago

These are nothing but assertions of fact which are really unsubstantiated opinions. It is striking to watch people engage in this level of intellectual onanism.

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

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Here's a choice quote, just so you know where he's coming from philosophically:

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

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

sokoloff2• 18 years ago

You need to recognize that he's coming from an aviation background, where multi-million dollar awards against parts manufacturers for pilot-judgment accidents were routine, and in fact did chase businesses (both manufacturers and service centers) out of the business as they couldn't afford liability insurance.

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Isn't extremely high liability insurance costs a structural part of the aviation industry? I'm sure many of the same forces drive companies away from the nuclear power industry.

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

akronim• 18 years ago

I think this needs to be read under the same terms as his blog - "A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…". Of course it's up to you to decide which this is...

mdasen• 18 years ago

The problem with his argument is that it rests on the American economy having a realistic chance of collapse that at least equals if not exceeds that of the Great Depression. "With 20 or 30 percent of Americans facing a realistic probability of losing their jobs" - I don't think that's realistic. We've seen worse unemployment rates in my state within the past decade. We haven't even hit the problems of the early 80s. So, it's premature to assume that we're going to see a massive collapse that sees unemployment at 25-35% as he suggests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prrometheus11• 18 years ago

This is a fluff article. Tempting fluff that causes everybody to come to the comment section and offer up their preconceived ideas. But fluff is fluff, even if it's tasty.

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

rsheridan63• 18 years ago

Do you have any actual problems with the article that would rate more than a DH0 response? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Prrometheus11• 18 years ago

I am not insulting Phil Greenspun. But do you know how many personal political manifestos are on the internet? What are the chances that this one will be more valuable than average?

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

tptacek15• 18 years ago

Can we not use shorthand from a blog post where well-established terminology already applies? Almost any fallacy you'd like to point out in someone else's argument here is better explained in the Nizkor list.

preview• 18 years ago

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

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

Brushfire• 18 years ago

The successful public schools are successful based on parents almost exclusively. Where I'm at, the township schools that surround the cities public schools are dramatically better. The people that live in these areas as a whole have more money and more time to commit to their childrens education, and they value education more.

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

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

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

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

"The 'good' schools would then be overrun with perspective students, requiring a selection procedure to determine who to accept."

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

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

I'm not sure he's doing enough about entitlements. Even if taxes were lowered and the social security age pushed back a few years, we're still going to be eaten alive in 20 years, or so it appears to a lot of people.

mhb• 18 years ago

When school children start paying union dues, that 's when I'll start representing the interests of school children

Albert Shanker, AFT President

newt0311• 18 years ago

Which just goes to show why the AFT is an idiotic idea to begin with.

fizzer98• 18 years ago

His ideas about schools and education are incomplete. One reason we have teacher's unions is to help avoid good teachers being fired due to ignorant complaining noisy parents (and students). And by the way, even with unions a female student can ruin a male teacher's career with a simple "he touched me" lie.

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

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

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

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

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

yummyfajitas4• 18 years ago

"Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?...get rid of the fucking standardized tests. "

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

fizzer98• 18 years ago

Greenspun seemed to be talking about public high schools, and that's what I was talking about as well.

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

jbert• 18 years ago

"eliminate government-owned housing so that these properties can be returned to the tax base and used to their full potential"

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

vitaminj• 18 years ago

He's got some good ideas, but most are politically intractable.

chadmalik2• 18 years ago

The word "debt" appears way too little. The word "credit" isn't even in the article. The whole mess we're in is because of borrowing from the future via a debt bubble to escape deflation after the dotcom/telecom bust of the early 2000's. I think Greenspun needs to read up a bit more on whats really happened.

trominos• 18 years ago

Every single piece of Philip Greenspun's writing I've ever read has seemed (to me) to be a massive collection of assertions with absolutely no logic backing up any of them.

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

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

aaronsw• 18 years ago

Wow, this article is so wildly ignorant of the basic economics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

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