Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents.
People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
This view seems to be common, but I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well by having a middle class that is not just productive, but truly educated. It’s weird and it has problems, but it’s also wonderful, and we should not try to sever the two so we can more “efficiently” crank out credentials.
That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner
The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war.
America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
America's post-war strength was built on unusually strong education. After the war, America had far more schooling overall than other countries. It was one of the many factors that made America a powerhouse in the 50s and 60s.
Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who are essentially the gold standard reference here, show that the US became the richest nation precisely because it led the world in mass education (first universal high school, then mass higher ed), not in spite of it.
>> America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people.
High-education countries don't look like basket cases. Among 25-64 year olds, the countries with the highest tertiary attainment shares are: Canada (64%), Japan (56%), South Korea (53%), USA (50%), and the Nordic countries hovering around similar rates. These are some of the richest, most technologically advanced societies in the world. If "credential worship" made a society brittle and unproductive, you'd expect these places to be obvious failures.
India's problem is not too much college. It's that gross tertiary enrollment ratio is only 33%, below the world average. The development-econ diagnosis of India is actually the reverse of your claim: too many people with too little quality education, especially basic literacy, numeracy and foundational skills, plus a small highly-credentialed elite at the top.
>> The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
The GI bill massively expanded college. Half of all college students in 1947 were vets. It is widely credited with building the post-war middle class. The IQ meta-analysis you cite explicitly says the drop in average student IQ is a mechanical result of more people going to college, not evidence that universities got worse. The researchers in fact explicitly say this.
+1 outstanding rebuttal w/ facts and data-backed insights, thank you for that
Hmmm, I don't see the outstanding part of the rebuttal. While it raises real evidence, it doesn't address the elephant of overeducation. The cited countries, for example, are faltering in myriad ways that their electorates have decidedly reacted against; enormous education sold to too many, falling far short of its promises.
Like many of us here, I've been overeducated and I'm against overeducation. "Not letting your education get in the way of your learning" summarizes that view, which I think use to be a tenet of the hacker ethos underlying this forum.
"The cited countries, for example, are faltering in myriad ways"
... as if higher education is somehow to blame, or conceivably capable of preventing countries from having any problems? Your comment provides not a shred of evidence that "overeducation" is even connected to said problems, let alone the "elephant". Respectfully, the burden's on you there.
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Part of the problem with the way India wants to be seen is those that go to IIT, etc., get into white collar jobs that elevate them well above the norm in India want to ignore the rest of the country. Abject poverty.
The US has severe issues as well, but many countries that want to be seen for their techonological advancement want to hide the less successful parts of their communities.
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> High-education countries don't look like basket cases.
They are all low fertility countries.
High fertility countries are doing great, obviously. If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.
Breeding out of control and over consuming the earth's resources is for basket cases.
> be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
Or China, Japan, Korea…
I see very little evidence for this abundance of American "common wisdom". If anything, America has always had a deeply anti-intellectual vein running through it, whether it was the Scopes monkey trial, the Know Nothing Party or what you see in the present political scene. Higher education, especially the affordable kind at public universities, has been a bulwark against the paranoid delusions that often dominate societies that revere superstition and "common sense" over reason, empiricism and humanism.
The Know Nothing Party had nothing to do with anti-intellectualism per se. It was a secret anti-immigration party whose members were required to say they “knew nothing” of the group if asked.
Huh? Little evidence? Prosperity in America was built by millionaires that drove 20 year old white pickup trucks (because base color was $100 cheaper). They were very "common wisdom". Almost all had to understand and operate within the commodities markets(where reason and empiricism meet head first with humanism and human behavior), head multi million dollar organizations, negotiate multi million dollar deals, and tried to build multi-generational (not next quarter) businesses.
And every one I knew made sure their children went to University and were educated, because they understood it's value. So did every farmer, factory worker, bus driver. Their kids didn't understand the value, they just new they had to go. Just like todays kids don't understand the value. I don't think that's changed, other than parents aren't forcing life choices on their kids.
You are either very young and only exposed to the modern Audi driving millionaires, or had zero interaction with the actual industrial/ag/creative space/inventor America pre 2008/pre MAGA brainworms. But these people used to exist and were building blocks of this country AND local communities (unlike their zero community loyalty replacement leased Audi millionaires).
Don’t climb that ladder and eat that food! We will beat you!
>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.
That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.
Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.
That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.
There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
> There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.
The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.
My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.
To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.
now how much of it was good investment, and how much of it was just plain advantage due to that?
It is hard to separate those two to verify either - that is my point.
> maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.
I will give full credit to the golden generation of Americans and the generation before that. They built America on true merit and efforts. However, maintaining the position was easy for the boomer and subsequent generations - break the Bretton-Woods agreement and shatter the gold standard after the USD obtained the throne of the world's reserve currency. This enabled the US to print infinite amounts of money and pile up unlimited debt and use the cash to sponsor any investment, any amount of social-security, buy anything and have the largest defense budget - so they can stomp anyone they want, heavily sponsor "regime change" - and still have relatively low inflation. The rest of the world just needs to grin and bear it.
As a non-American, I am really hoping for de-dollarization and fully independent payment networks completely separated from the West. The Russia-Ukraine war and Trump sanctions has gotten us around 10% of the way there. Only then shall one see the real effect of that $33 trillion debt.
I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans.
Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
> in terms of raw productivity
In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.
Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?
You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.
This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
> In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
The piece you're missing is that the man has to pick between 10 indistinguishable men with backhoes, of which some unknown percentage are charlatans who will dig a hole, put some pipes in it, then disappear with the money. The original man will now have a puddle of human waste next to his house, no septic system, and be $20k poorer ($10k+ in cleanup, then $10k to someone to build an actual system).
Regulation ensures that the charlatans can't operate and that everyone who pays $10k for a septic system actually gets one that works for decades. This also protects the original man's neighbors who also suffer when his property develops a cesspool. Regulation also protects against well-meaning but incompetent operators, who are also common when regulation is weak or non-existent.
There is still $5K more _economic_ value created, in that +$5K went to people who might otherwise be jobless. They'll in turn spend that money at businesses in the private sector, reaching more people, and so on. If the man with the septic tank runs a coffee shop, he will see extra value from more coffee sales.
The extra taxes paid by all will (theoretically) improve the schools, roads, military, and services. The regulations will (theoretically) decrease the risk of poisoning ground water and injuring someone, which adds even more value to the local community.
The distinction is just that the septic tank is twice as expensive in the developed country. But that money can lift people out of poverty. The exception is when the company owner is hoarding the majority of the money tax-free instead of paying it to people who will spend it.
>There is still $5K more _economic_ value created, in that +$5K went to people who might otherwise be jobless. They'll in turn spend that money at businesses in the private sector, reaching more people, and so on. If the man with the septic tank runs a coffee shop, he will see extra value from more coffee sales.
That's the grade school analysis and in reality we are all poorer for it.
If ten people pay $5k to avoid getting a substandard service that has a 1/10 chance of happening and will cost $20k to remediate if it does that is a massive loss to the overall economy because that money otherwise would've been spent elsewhere else.
This isn't just septics, it's every widget and service. And it's not just a government and tax problem (though those cases are frequently most flagrant). Private industry requirements cause the same problems.
Ahh the bad high school maths take, which doesn't account for the risk.
People don't just build 1 thing for a house nor can they afford a $20k failure.
If you take Fred who saves up $10k for a major purchase for his house each year.
If there is a 10% chance of a failure, then Fred will have a 53% chance of bankruptcy in 7 years.
You can't run an economy where everyone is bankrupt.
Calling out people for “bad high school math” when you can’t even write a coherent sentence is pathetic.
A man saving 10K per year goes bankrupt if he doesn’t spend it productively? That’s what you’re trying to say?
And in some areas it's even worse than that - construction quality for housing can be very poor. You basically need an independent building inspection to not get scammed by poor quality construction.
So instead of a man with a backhoe we should instead hire 10 men with spoons?
The person who wanted the septic tank almost certainly would spend that $5k somewhere else if he had it. Except in that circumstance he would spend it on something that he thought provided him value, instead of overbearing regulation.
As someone with a septic tank, I'd rather spend more on a system that won't fail and won't kill anyone. I'd grumble while paying so much but I'd still do it. Just like I'd rather pay more for a car from the over-regulated EU than one for half the price from a country with no safety or quality regulations.
I realize I don't speak for the more cash strapped population, and I agree that overbearing regulation can be a problem. The problem is not regulations themselves, which save lives, but the perverse execution of new regulations in countries like the US (often written by market leaders to cement their moat, with the power of lobbying.)
This is a wild take imo. Yes, I am sure there there are definite cases of overreach and I generally sit squarely in the libertarian camp but most permits, studies, etc are there for a reason. Maybe you have lived in a developing nation but I have and I can say you are at much higher risk of death because of the lack of oversight. The number of commercial building fires, risky electric installations, lack of common code is highly dangerous.
I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance.
As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory.
The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
It comes down to the amortized cost of insurance vs amortized cost of not. Say nothing about how incentives get fucked all to hell by breaking things across many parties (principal agent problem) and the money distorts things.
And this isn't just insurance. Just because someone who work is being made for by law or by rule says that their work output reduces the failure rate from X to Y doesn't mean that the cost of their work when applied to everything isn't a massive loss compared to just not paying for that and cleaning up the mess X times instead of Y times.
You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
Costs to clean up a mess from an underregulated industry can be bigger then the whole industry causing it. This is not even untypical.
Examples: Leaded gas, tobacco, CO2 emissions, dam breaks, reactor meltdowns, air pollution (really pollution in general; river/groundwater contamination for your septic tank example)...
If you underregulate, you end up with frequent cases where not even imprisoning and dispossessing everyone remotely involved/culpable is gonna get you sufficient compensation; this is extremely undesirable.
Companies are frequently gonna steer towards such scenarios, too, because they can allow them to externalize costs.
Compare against the typical OCED nation, US spending ~18% gdp on health, about ~8% higher than OECD average, i.e. 2T+ rent extraction per year for net lifespan that is statistically worse than OECD average. 6 months of US excess health spending buys you entire HSR system in China that's frequently being panned as overbuilt and wasteful. Meanwhile look at recently built Brightline Florida, with ~120 deaths per billion passenger km, normalize that to EU, JP, PRC HSR billion passenger km, you'd get 15k, 50k, 310k fatalities per year. Imagine PRC losing Cincinnati every year due to rail deaths. Now Brightline extra dumpfire execution but just to highlight at some point there's too much red tape, and red tape doesn't always buy you value. Sometimes the system is so broken and you end up the worst of both world quadrants: high cost rent extraction & less than first world outcomes because the accumulation of redtape itself is leading to substandard outcomes. AKA premium medicore. Extra worse in some sectors when it's not simply opportunity cost inefficiencies, i.e. you lose on something else. A sclerosic money flow recycling maximizer can also makes the thing it's pumping money into worse than expected.
You can build as many electric cars as you want, it's not going to resolve 8 hour workday or the cost of living crisis or the housing crisis. All of that is a social coordination problem, and the tools to resolve that will emerge from the humanities and the finance industry, not hard engineering.
Furthermore, people want those white-collar jobs you detest, and not everyone is inclined to R&D as this forum might think. The real problem is how technological progress has not been properly applied to improving white-collar productivity as opposed to just filtering, funnily enough of which this very thread is about regarding university.
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Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities.
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.
If all US internet companies stopped existing tomorrow the world would be no worse off for it.
The internet infrastructure is great. Networking hardware is great. Private internet companies built on top of it? Big whoop
The big whoop is the 100s of billions of dollars of revenue that flow to American internet companies from the rest of the world every quarter (and the high profit margins on that revenue—much higher than the margins of say Foxconn or DJI).
And that money would stay in their countries respective economies and everyone would be better off for it. Maybe someone would start a local alternative. It would be used productively instead of on ads that make everyone’s lives worse.
I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage.
Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.
I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)
Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more.
However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).
Another major feature of Risk (more or less whatever side rules you're playing with around alliances and so forth) is the role of the cards which pretty much dominate everything else in the endgame.
Yep, and the endgame can last for hours longer than the rest of the game. That's when the remaining players get to argue and hate each other,
Actually, Alaska and the West Coast were attacked during the war — but only relatively lightly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood
That last one, in which a Japanese sub bombarded Santa Barbara, played a role in the later Japanese internment by escalating fears of an invasion.
When was Pearl Harbor attacked by Japan?
Now, when did Hawai'i become a state?
And when and by whom was their king deposed?
> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Uh, which country again was it?
(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.
But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
Your arguments are irrelevant at best and whataboutism at worst because the Japanese were specifically attacking the US Navy as they saw it as a threat to their own expansion plans - which were far worse than anything the US did, even compared to the worst parts of Native American policies (which were very, very bad). The Japanese saw Hawaii as a US territory to attack. Whether or how Hawaii became a US territory is a complete non sequitur in the context of World War 2.
There's nobody outside of hardcore Japanese nationalists that see any of their actions as countering US expansionism.
Hawaii was a US territory as was Alaska (which was also attacked). As is Puerto Rico today.
An occupied territory, sure. The Japanese only attacked the occupiers (USA). They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Kingdom
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
On geopolitical scale, you either need to have big guns or big friends. No one has any true right to any land. If you don't have the foresight to recognize that, you probably don't have a place in the future.
This isn't even something only cold imperialist superpowers adopt. Hawaii itself was populated with warring chiefdoms that were killing each other and taking land for centuries before a bigger fish showed up. Small fish happily eating smaller fish but then are upset when they get eaten...
> They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities
Well they had zero issues going after the native peoples in all the places they conquered (or even their own country, the stuff they did in Okinawa…). They just didn’t have enough bombs in Hawaii.
Let me guess you also don’t think the Japanese killed, hurt, raped or did anything else bad to a single Filipino, right? Because they never hurt any one except the occupiers…
> Uh, which country again was it?
Hawai'i became a territory of the United States on April 30, 1900. It had been US territory for 40 years. One can point to the US doing bad things to make that the state of affairs, but it was decidedly US territory for a long time at that point. It seems you need to learn history, or you're just being willfully obtuse about things.
The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
>The US was also much more unified at the time
Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy"
If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant.
We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the short term. They certainly don't have a military option to use against that grouping. At least not one that hasn't already been used in the case of Russia and failed to coerce them into cooperating.
America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.
Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.
So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
> You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age
As you said Ukraine’s demographic situation was quite horrible before the war. Very few people in their 20s. Hence the conscription age being 27 earlier in the war. They lowered it to 25 later (which is kind of the inverse of what happened historically in other wars).
Russia had way more manpower, then the cannon fodder from North Korea and the foreign mercenaries. Russia can afford even 1:1.5 or 1:2 casualty rates (of course they have other concerns and seemed to be very politically unwilling to send actual conscripts there and the pool of willing volunteers is not infinite).
> As you said Ukraine’s demographic situation was quite horrible before the war. Very few people in their 20s
This is a perfect situation for waging war. Young people are prone to rebellion and overthrow the authorities that send them to war.
> Hence the conscription age being 27 earlier in the war. > seemed to be very politically unwilling to send actual conscripts there
It is exactly because of that reason. The younger the people, the more dangerous they are for the government.
When would the real death tolls be revealed? When Ukraine does a census?
Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
Do you think Ukraine has more casualties than Russia? Or is it simply that Ukraine had a smaller population to begin with?
Probably not but it’s unlikely to be that massively different, Ukraine wasn’t that much less willing to engage in “meat grinder” style tactics earlier in the war. Even 1:1.5 rate would be pretty horrible given the demographic disparity.
For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukraine alone).
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
> Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues
The scariest thing is that even in the best-case scenario, this may no longer be possible. Even before the war, Ukraine's demographics were dire, then young people left, and no matter how the war ends, there's no objective reason for them to return.
China hasn't started a war since the 1970s.
They're doing a good job as belligerents against the Philippines.
- [deleted]
Okay, as Devil's Advocate, you could say the same about the US. It was unable to conquer Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.
This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
I'd also add that the Vietnamese LOVE the US.
Despite what the USA did in its invasion of Vietnam, not because of it.
Vietnamese are trying to not forget their history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Remnants_Museum
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
Vietnam had such massive population growth that there are very few people who even remember the war. On the other hand China was pretty much always ingrained into their “national consciousness” as a permanent massive threat.
I never really looked into it, but it looks like the vast majority of Vietnamese were born after the war so US culture and trade are way more important contributors to opinion. Vietnamese are some of the most pro-US people in the world.
America is on a isolation downward spiral.
Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.
In March 2022 Russia occupied 27% of Ukraine. They have now lost much of their artillery tanks and then army and now control 19% of Ukraine while their oil refineries blow up, and recently tankers. I'm not sure the conquest is going quite to plan.
Some would dispute the "downward" part there.
Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense.
Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions.
At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
I don't see much evidence that's the US wants to defend the world from authoritarians. Some of their closest allies are authoritarian countries.
Expansionist authoritarians, which in the post war world was communists.
Why would the world need defending from non-expansionist authoritarians?
Maybe. They seem to actually like expansionist authoritarians now. Evidence being the Russia Ukraine peace effort.
"strong economic and strategic motive" behind Afghanistan? They did it to get Bin Laden basically.
America are like a slightly corrupt and violent world police.
So they invaded Afghanistan to grab a Saudi national hanging out in Pakistan?
Mostly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#US_invasion_and_Is...
Apparently the invasion was Oct 2001 and Bin Laden hiked over into Pakistan in Dec 2001
I think it had something to do with 9/11 being an act of war from Afghanistan against the US. Nations are responsible for the actions of groups inside their borders against other nations.
It was not an act of war since Afghanistan didn't have an official government - in practice the Taliban ran things - but the attacks were carried out by the Al Qaeda which was spread over the Middle East. The Taliban might have been sympathetic to it but they were not actively supporting them or had any official collaboration with them.
Acts of war are between nations, not between governments.
I hope you see where the problem with this is - the US had an enemy in a supranational organization, the Al Qaeda, which resided in many countries including Afghanistan.
The government of said country was unfriendly but not actively hostile to the US and on good terms with AQ, but not outright allies. This could've been said to apply between many Middle Eastern governments and radical groups at the time.
The US decided to invade, and antagonized the formerly unfriendly Taliban to become actively hostile.
The US managed to temporarily win over the Taliban but failed to permanently displace them.
AQ leadership, including Bin Laden moved out of the country almost immediately.
The 'war on terror' went on almost without end, then Bin Laden was killed a decade later, in a different country the US didn't declare war on, thanks to US special force action.
While AQ got weaker, ISIS got stronger (honestly I don't follow ME insurgent groups that closely, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a rebrand/reorganization in part).
So the US-initiated invasion totally failed to reach its stated result while leaving a huge collateral in its wake.
> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Yeah, it wouldn't be a bad bet to wager this is going to be a Pyrrhic victory for Russia.
Unfortunately, yes. USA is doing everything but openly support Russia at this point too. It could have been different if Ukraine got proper support, but instead it is being undermined.
Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
I think we may be at peak Trump though which will limit his power to bail out Putin. The midterms won't go well, the Epstein stuff is embarrassing, the Republicans are starting to get unruly.
It's going to be a very long 12 months though.
> They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship led by the communist Putin. As if communist dictators care. Look at North Korea, it's just the results of an unremarkable year.
Putin is a lot but he is not a communist.
I think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda.
But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.
This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.
I don't agree on the Russia Ukraine motivations. Ukraine is not part of NATO and was not going to become part of NATO. There were already two NATO countries bordering Russia near Moscow and St P if NATO had wanted to invade which they had no thoughts of doing. Russia lies constantly on this stuff. I think they basically regarded Ukraine their land as part of the Russian empire they were restoring.
It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. If Mexico agreed to this, it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them under some whimsical pretext (drug gangs probably) and overthrew their government to prevent this. In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was where we were willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation over it, and that was an even lighter weight version of this event since there isn't even a land route from Cuba to the US obviously!
But in this scenario would you think Russia deploying weapons in Mexico is a precursor to them invading? Or that the US would be worried about that? Obviously not. Neither was Cuba. But it gives an adversarial power a tremendous strategic edge, while you get less than nothing out of it since it reduces your 'power' in the relative strategic balance of countries.
> It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
The problem with pretending this analogy is relevant as a justification (or at least an "other people would have one the same thing" argument, which isn't really a justification to start with) of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (besides the fact that it relies on dubious assumptions about a counterfactual) is that the only reason Ukraine resumed its long-abandoned pursuit of relations with NATO was a direct result of the invasion by Russia in 2014.
Ukraine had been striving repeatedly to join NATO until 2010. That's when Yanukovych, who generally leaned more East than West, took power. Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions under his leadership and re-affirmed themselves as a neutral state. Then he was overthrown, in an action directly backed by the US with John McCain, Victoria Nuland, and others literally on the ground in Ukraine giving speeches and riling up protesters come rioters, almost certainly with further black ops organizing going on behind the scenes.
Following Yanukovych's successful overthrow figures favorable to the US/UN/EU, including those hand picked by Victoria Nuland in her leaked conversation, ended up in power. In fact the person Nuland hand picked for Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was one of the authors of Ukraine's initial formal request for a membership action plan from NATO.
Can you tell me that you genuinely think that if Russia hadn't annexed Crimea (which happened after all of the above) that Ukraine would have chosen to stay "neutral" in this context? And I put neutral in quotes because what does that even mean when one bloc is driving the successful overthrow of democratically elected leaders and hand picking new ones? Imagine Lavrov et al were on the ground encouraging pro Russian protesters to topple the Ukrainian government (alongside comparably likely black ops organizing behind the scenes), they ended up successful, and then leaders hand-picked by him end up in power. Is that somehow still just Ukraine deciding their own fate?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
There's a huge problem with this narrative. The Russian government's public tender database shows that they ordered the production of campaign medals for the invasion of Crimea months before any of this happened. Oops.
It would be a very foolish idea, because it's no longer the Napoleonic era. Concentrating your forces close to adversary's border makes them easy targets for destruction by long-range artillery and airstrikes. The Finnish chief of defence forces recently made the same remark when the Russians moved their weapons closer to Finland for intimidation: "It only makes them easier for us to destroy."> Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
Not at all. The Cuban missile crisis was only about nuclear missiles. The USSR continued to provide a large number of conventional weapons to Cuba, including submarines and fighter jets, until it collapsed in 1991, without any of your invasion fantasies coming true.> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis wasSee this photo: https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/11312641
It is a Soviet-built MIG-23 fighter jet carrying Cuban insignia. MIG-23 first flew 5 years after the missile crisis and the first batch was delivered to Cuba in 1978.
I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted.
It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.
> military alliance with Mexico
Ukraine never did that.
> it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded
Very unlikely.
Also Mexico wasn’t never exactly that aligned diplomatically and politically with the US to begin with.
Russia on the other hand views that it has some inherent right to subjugate and dominate all of their neighbors and turn them into puppet states if not outright annex them.
> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis
In fact this is outright drivel. The US hardly viewed Russia as their actual opponent before 2014-22. Remember Romney- Obama debate (and Obama generally bending over backwards to appease Putin most of the time).
> Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico ... it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them
Not this shit again. It's always the identical boring talking points from the Moscow trolls.
> Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands
Russia (i.e. Putin but also Russians in general) wanted to rebuild their empire from the beginning. Anything else is just an excuse.
> interests between them and the West
Of course this conflict has been mostly one sides till the 2014, with Obama and Merkel bending over backwards to appease Putin.
Also the implication that Russia has some God given right over dominion of half of Eastern Europe is a bit appealing..
> our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
That is a very Ruso-Imperialist mindset. A society pretty permanently stuck in the 1800s politically and psychologically… e.g. Germany, France, Britain were somehow able to step over their ambitions and are doing relatively fine (even without having millions of foreigners subjugate)
Thank you for repeating Russian propaganda. But the truth is that Ukraine is sovereign nation and has every right to decide their future and give a fuck about Russia feelings. Russia is the aggressor and blaming anything on NATO is laughable propaganda.
"... the truth is that Ukraine is sovereign nation and has every right to decide their future..."
In all honesty, would you hold that argument if Mexico decides to host Russian or Chinese troops?
> In all honesty, would you hold that argument if Mexico decides to host Russian or Chinese troops?
Ukraine wasn't hosting foreign troops (except Russian troops, some of whom were were the spearhead of the invasion) when the Russo-Ukrainian war started with the Russian invasion in 2014.
(They did start hosting some that were involved in training and advisory assignments after the war started and before the major escalation in 2022, but those can hardly justify the war which started with the 2014 invasion.)
In all “honest” how is that relevant when Ukraine never did that nor was US willing to deploy their troops there to begin with. To what end? Not a single US administration between 1990 and 2022 was particularly antagonistic or expansionist towards Russia..
> Russia will conquer Ukraine
Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.
This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:
Are you expecting Ukraine to ultimately buckle and collapse if the war of logistics continues for long enough?
It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
Russia is on the same spiral, but further ahead. They're going down together. The US has some chance of pulling out of the nose dive, but it's slim.
They may or may not take Europe and Ukraine with them.
China is better placed to survive, but has its own structural issues.
>Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
They have been moving across Ukraine at a literal snails pace.
That is how attrition war works. Until it doesn’t.
> evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength
What kind of evidence? US is not destroying countries because its citizens don't want it to, and are generally not willing to pay the price for it.
If "the US" actually wanted, it could kill every inhabitant of continental Europe within less than a decade in a conventional war; the price in American lifes would be very high, but the outcome (without external intervention) seems pretty certain to me (speaking as a European).
>The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength.
The US military's "ability" is very contextual - for instance, the US could easily obliterate Iran with a MIRV or two, but for various geopolitical reasons they choose not to. Likewise, the US navy is of limited use against Iran due to the literal mountain range between their only coastline and the bulk of their landmass (and population), much of which is quite mountainous.
If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys. And the "various geopolitical reasons", on examination, includes possible outcomes like the US being pummelled through the stone age and out the other side, or more mild ones like New York being flattened. It isn't really much of an option in any foreseeable scenario where their goose isn't already being cooked.
So yes they are scary, but they aren't that scary relatively speaking. We've left the brief era where the US could exert military supremacy over the globe and it is ambiguous who has the "best" military among the major powers [0]. Militarys are generally a tool for self-destruction anyway so the term is a bit ambiguous, most of the big empires fall because they get too enamoured with military solutions over economic and diplomatic excellence.
[0] Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
Re: US military quality, it's both. Massively corrupt jobs program on the weapons acquisition side, combined with an incredibly effective devolved leadership structure on the logistics and combat side. Tested frequently over the last few decades. The bet in favor of them is that the weapons corruption gets sorted out once it really needs to be.
> If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys.
What a nonsense. Really, if we're assuming a nuclear war then the remainder of the sentence no longer has any relevance.
Note that even the idiot in the Kremlin has been given reasons enough to consider that one off the table no matter how much he might want it (assuming he still can).
First strike is a non-starter for every sane country, so you better hope that sanity lasts long enough to get to the '.' at the end of your sentences. Because if it does not the best you can hope for is live near ground zero.
> Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
If you're aware of any American gear that has not performed in the last 12 months then maybe you should report it rather than to resort to 'just asking questions'.
So far all of the recipients seem to be fairly happy with the deliveries and most nations would quake in their boots if the USA set their sights on them with intent to punish, bar none, and to suggest otherwise is seriously ignorant.
> If you're aware of any American gear that has not performed in the last 12 months then maybe you should report it rather than to resort to 'just asking questions'.
I'm not thinking of anything specific, but if you want to talk gear it is notable that US gear has failed to stabilise the front-line in Ukraine so it obviously isn't that amazing. I'm reading fairly consistent reports that the US has lost the manufacturing base to compete against the Russians [0] and Asians [1].
Compare that to the nominal spending figures [2] and the official figures for how strong the US is appear to be overstating their ability to actually win in a conflict. The money spent doesn't seem to be going in to creating a strong military as much as overcoming deficits in their ability to produce stuff.
And "questions" in the plural generally means someone asked more than one question. It's "just asking a question" in the singular.
[0] https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/06/09/russia-outguns-nato-p...
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
> China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help
Sure they’d win a land war on the continent. An amphibious invasion of Taiwan opposed by the US navy and air force would be a but trickier.
> undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
To a large extent voluntarily.
I think you’re burying the lede there: this hypothetical war would be fought in Asia because China is completely incapable of projecting force to the North American continent. Without that ability to credibly threaten America China could not possibly win a war against it.
The conflicts which superpowers have withdrawn from have been against occupied nations which were in no position to ever become a future threat, this would not be true in a conflict with China, as China could conceivably develop the ability to project force and would be certainly motivated to do so during or after a real conflict.
> the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength.
Only if Geneva enters the equation.
> the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
What is India doing on this list?
India has been gently aligning [0, 1] with the Russia-China bloc that the US has been encouraging to form over the last couple of years. Nothing crazy but that looks like undermining the US to me. It certainly isn't supporting US policy and the US has been trying to pressure them over it without much success.
[0] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/explained-ahead...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/16/india-joined-belaru...
It's not undermining, it's asserting/showing off their independence. India doesn't want to play for anyone's team, so they play on everyone's team. It's a reminder to all sides that they are not an automatic partner to be taken for granted.
The US is the second largest manufacturing power, the largest economic power and the largest military power, but those things aren't even what makes it a scary threat.
There are things that make up the US that vastly increase its potential for self-organization when it is given an organizing principle. Yes, dynamism has taken a hit over the decades, but there are also a lot of aimless purposeless people right now that do have an appetite for purpose if given one.
Major modern countries today have red lines defined that they won't cross in order to keep the peace. Russia says don't attack Moscow or otherwise attempt to replace their government or they will nuke you. Nukes do change the structure of future wars between nuclear powers, which might actually make some aspects of it less extreme.
If Ukraine had nukes, they could have a red line like, "If you keep hitting hospitals and schools, we will nuke you. Powerplants and railroads we understand, but if you show us with your actions that you have no mercy for the weak and innocent, we will end you." Instead, they have nothing of the sort.
All the US has to do is wait for the enemy to make catastrophic moral failures and it's game over, because it rallies the people, the companies, the innovative talent, the allies, etc to reject it with force. It crystallizes the purpose.
We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
India is far more US aligned than with China, regardless of tensions. Neither North Korea nor Russia trust China, but they are forced to deal with it despite the buddy-buddy optics.
Failing to benefit from so many possible optimizations at the basic strategic level in their local region, any confidence in a favorable outcome for the CCP seems misplaced. Their failings probably cascade down into the other levels of preparation as well.
“Forcing our allies to become more independent” is a HILARIOUS way to say “we’re destroying our allied relationships, reducing our intelligence capabilities and the chances that they would form a coalition with us in any armed conflict”.
I’m just imagining someone getting a divorce saying they’re “teaching their spouse the value of independence”.
Why are you trying to rephrase something I said to mean something it doesn't? That's not what I said. We're not destroying our relationships and we're not ditching our allies. I think you're too caught up in the politics and rhetoric.
> We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Translation: we are getting rid of our allies.
It does not make sense for a country to pay another country their "fair share" for military protection. That is literally why the American Revolution happened. Americans fought a war on behalf of the British and were thanked for their service with enough taxes to destroy the local economy. The push to make the colonies pay for "their war" drove the colonists to turn their guns inward and start shooting British regulars.
To be clear, it's one thing for NATO to tell countries to actually meet their 2% targets. But that is not what the current administration is doing. What it's actually doing is disrespecting them and foisting costs upon them. That is not how you run a military alliance.
> We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
So our government is advancing the cause of energy independence by... what, exactly? Trying to shut down as many solar and wind projects as possible? Renewables (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear) are the best path towards energy independence, if not abundance, that we have. The current administration is bankrolled by Saudi oilmen whose only plan for energy independence is to shout "drill baby drill".
Meanwhile China is churning out solar panels like it's no tomorrow. This has some interesting effects. Like, there's parts of Africa that are just now getting reliable access to electricity because they can buy cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries. Renewables can be provided at basically any scale and can work without infrastructure. Which is making the current American governing coalition shit their pants because they're all oilmen. The American military is built to run on oil. And oil is going away.
> Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
I'll give you that China is bad at making friends. However, for their hegemonic goals, they don't necessarily need big American style alliances. They just need America's allies to look the other way while they steal Taiwan.
We're not getting rid of our allies, but it's long past time that they invested more in the common defense and it's important that they do, because it could be a valuable contribution to deterring war. Focus less on the soundbites. Yes there's messy dealmaking happening, but there's what's said and then there's what actually ends up happening.
Solar and wind are only okay, but they aren't reliable and subsidizing them mostly benefits China since they are by far the major supplies. Yes, it creates American jobs, but those people could be doing more important jobs without creating a foreign energy infrastructure dependency. I don't think we actually care that Africa has solar panels from China, except that it makes them energy dependent on them and increases foreign trade in Yuan. It's more of a way to create Chinese jobs, which is a huge priority so they end up with an oversupply.
Traditional nuclear has potential, but the costs, extreme complexity and lengthy lead times hurt the scalability. The newer fusion projects are interesting and I'm hopeful, but even if they work they take forever and are hard to replace quickly once they're up. It's more likely that we'll have a variety of all of these things.
There have been advancements in geothermal that are amazing, cheap, quick, less encumbered by supply chain risks and require way less land so we should see that scale out over the coming decades.
We do also have abundant oil which helps to reduce inflation and exporting it can offset some oil instability in the market. Yes, oil is eventually going away and that is why a renewable energy push was important, but a lot of oil remains untouched. The US military could also operate for years on just oil reserves and can get priority access to it. It would make plenty of sense for major countries to set aside oil for strategic and military purposes long after it stops being used for general transportation.
As for Taiwan, it is fair that dependency on exports from China can cause countries to tow the line, but it would mostly be optics with nothing preventing other forms of support. Also, the pain of losing Chinese exports in many ways would be less than the pain of an expanding China that goes unchecked, so I think those influences are only strong up to a threshold.
Good point — I hadn’t thought about it from that angle. Thanks for sharing the insight.
> We're not getting rid of our allies
Give Trump a few more months then? The USA has shown itself so far be unreliable, and if not quite an enemy also not quite an ally while demanding 100% loyalty the other way around. This obviously will not hold, you can not combine those two and expect a static situation as the outcome.
An ally's reliability is relative. And relatively speaking, the United States is a very reliable ally.
I mean to what are we comparing America's reliability? To the reliability of the European Union? Which calls Ukraine not just an ally but also its shield, and then pays Putin more money than it provides aid to Ukraine. And this after we've been paying 50 cents per kwh for decades, while talking about how we're moving away from oil dependence and toward green energy.
Could China attack US? Why would US try to attack China in asia? Not an expert but that feels like losing proposition. I think people confuse proxy wars with wars. US is under no threat of being actually attacked.
You could ask the same question about Japan attacking America but they did do it.
If they think conflict is inevitable then they may well feel they will get an upper hand by moving first.
It counts as an attack, but how close was US to actually being taken over? Usually when you fight a war the real risk is that you cease to exist as a country. I know nothing about war strategy, but seems to me US is in a great position as long as you get along with Canada and Mexico.
old chinese proverb: Suffering is living, happiness is death(生于忧患，死于安乐)
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Military action is an extension of politics.
US politics do not support all out war against foreign nations at this point in time hence the half wars.
This goes for most first world nations.
> And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
With respect, Russia is being decimated (literally, at least the "big fortresses" that Russia has been gnawing at for months such as Pokrovsk have insane loss rates) by Ukraine's army who are mostly using donated shoddy Soviet-era remainders and decades old Western surplus.
If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
India is different but they're at least a democracy that's reasonably worth calling it that (despite Modi doing his best to dismantle it). I don't see any attempts of India to project power anywhere other than in its immediate neighborhood (i.e. the border disputes with Pakistan and China). They're no threat.
> If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/in-cnas-led-taiwan-wargame...
https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...
Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
> Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain.
I didn't know about this. Can you share a link?
The US military is as clueless as any other (except those two) about combat in the age of disposable drones.
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You cannot keep a good military for very long when you enter the economic decline stage, this has been proven by every empire in history.
100x and yet it only took a couple of decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
I’m supposed to be scared of the military who has spent the last 80 years losing wars against nations a fraction of its own size? The US couldn’t “seize” afghanistan in two decades, what makes you think it could “seize nearly every country on earth in days”?
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
>things are seriously politically messed up
I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice...
The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college.
What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me.
The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities.
By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals.
A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school.
A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail.
And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information.
This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
The chemistry department teaches culture? nonsense.
It gets incidentally taught whether it's on the syllabus or not.
Everything humans do is about culture. (Not to be confused with the arts.)
Nonsense. Universities are just part of culture, it's tiny and most people do not participate and only receive the "products" coming out of universities. Culture is a broad concept and very region specific, it is not tied to academia. Universities have influence on culture but that's pretty much it.
Universities are supposed to teach valuable skills and knowledge. Outside of STEM fields they are increasingly failing at that task. Relativism is in full force and we are in the "post-truth" world largely because university produced some of the most garbage theories you could think of.
And universities have no business inserting themselves into moral arguments, otherwise it is basically a state sanctioned religion. But this is basically the problem, universities have become the ideological arm the power in place, exactly like it was when the Catholics dominated Europe and gave legitimacy to kings. Unsurprisingly there have been complaints of "neo-feudalism" which is just a repeat of the middle-age, that happened after the rise of Christianity, when universities were de facto Catholic institutions.
> but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
Passive-agressive much ? Instead of attempting cheap low blows, maybe you can go through the trouble of explaining.
Morals can guide you for science and engineering choices but the whole point of those fields is that they shouldn't be limited by morals. I think you are confusing ethics and morals but it also seems like you are just arguing for some form of censorship.
>The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
Vapid narcissism is an inherent human behavior and doesn't have much to do with universities but is largely linked to consumerism. I guess you could say that people go to university for credentialism in order to get a good pay to finally express their vapid narcissism. But the universities have nothing to do with the process and just a middle point in route to the goal. Which is basically the argument: credentialism is nonsense and cost a lot of money for no good results. If universities would be successful, one could easily argue that vapid narcissism should be going down actually but instead you get just another marker of uselessness. As for the MBAs, they can't be that big of an influence in the universities, it's mostly about bachelors and masters; why even bring this up ?
> DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
DEI take its roots in universities, via feminism, gender studies and all kind of social sciences bullshit. Those fields were created precisely to fill the ranks because it was statistically impossible to have enough people clearing the bar for the hard studies even if they had wished to expand capacity. It was just a way to make people pay for a piece of paper that is supposed to give them legitimacy even though what happened is nothing short of endoctrinement.
Of course the universities are a vector of it, they created the dysfunction out of ideology and greed. It is just some a proto-religion that is trying to establish its authority. Nothing can tell you that better than the divide between the university "educated" women, voting left and the common man being either right-wing or closer to the center. Historically women are often the first followers of new religions (just go check who is doing new age bullshit) and they constituted the majority of early followers of Christianity.
So DEI was hardly a response, it was the result of a new religion that has no name trying to cement itself in the establishment. But it can only work if the men play along and so far the sentiment has been quite negative to say the least.
> Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem
This applies to any consulting. Normally you want to solve a problem, because there's another thousand of companies that need similar problem solved. You don't get many people coming into a company with an immediate "I'm going to try to not improve anything" plan.
> The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse".
This is seriously weird even as a misrepresentation. The extreme left is for changing diversity overall rather than just "give me a job". (If we actually go extreme left, it would be closer to "we've got enough resources for everyone to not need jobs to survive" anyway)
The overproduction issue is interesting, but it really didn't need the exaggerated caricatures as examples.
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school
Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2
There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
Sure, there are real issues with cost, debt, and credential creep, but that does not change the basic point: the expansion of education itself was a net positive for decades. The problems we have now come from financing, policy choices, and a labor market that shifted under globalization. Blaming education levels for broader economic or social trends just mixes up the cause and effect.
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s
You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then.
But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%.
Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing.
Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor.
However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family.
That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
>While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s
I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?
There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though.
I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
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Depends how you measure, surely. They had less TVs and computers and prepackaged food, the same amount of sunlight, and more freedom (as measured by average income to rent ratio).
Not true, the share of income going to living necessities has steadily dropped. Even not true for sunlight - the air quality was so much worse that you couldn't see much of the sun anyway
It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.
That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc.
In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.
Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.
> Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process.
It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn.
If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?
Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Of course there are. Many drop out due to poverty and family/community strife, or mental health challenges.
But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
> It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn.
You are confusing obedience and willingness to jump through hoops with the motivation to learn. People largely don't need school to learn most things. I would argue that most good learners actually hate school. It would be challenging to self-teach your way to advanced math/physics but that does not concern the vast majority of education. Being motivated to learned is deeply linked to having a reason for learning. I actually wouldn't trust people who were too industrious at school for careerist reasons because it mostly means they are able to tolerate bullshit and rote learn without much pushback on nonsense. STEM is somewhat immune to this because you need at least some form of understanding to solve actual problems but plenty of field have a legitimacy issue resulting from this effect. Notably the medical field is full of hard working idiots and most of the social sciences are infested with ideological parrots. Allegedly it is supposed to select for conscientiousness but since I have faced specialised doctors who schedule 2 interventions when it could be done in one for billing purpose, I would argue it's mostly self-interest or a very perverted form of conscientiousness.
> If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?
Someone having a specific diploma doesn't mean he is actually competent in practice. It is just more likely that he isn't absolutely terrible, but that's mostly risk edging. It's funny you take that example because a while ago there was a news in France where an architect had sentenced because he practiced without the required diploma. The guy was 60 and he had designed some big building, even for the public market (his mistake); he had learnt on the job with a mentor and never got around finishing the school curriculum. Le Corbusier famously didn't have any formal architectural training yet seventeen of his projects are on UNESCO list. So I dunno, personally I would hire Le Corbusier regardless of his training if I ever could afford it but the point is that everyone should be free to choose for themselves, not the powers that be of the education establishment.
> Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation?
Yes, it doesn't mean anything, just that they got bored with education system or had some other problem. Two of the most valuable companies were founded by drop outs, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (not high-school, but first year of college is basically the same). If it was just a problem of competence, you could have some sort of certifications for most things, where one could take an exam to prove that he knows what he is doing. But this doesn't happen because it is about enriching a specific class, restricting access to high level jobs to people who will submit to the dominant ideology. Most certifications/exams have a specific education level/diploma as requirement for entry. This is just supply control in favor of the most fortunate. You just cannot reduce ability and motivation to the willingness/capacity to submit to the education system.
> But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
That's the whole point of a business. Assume risks to merit the potential payoff. Why do you think the cost of job training should be assumed by the public when they will not get any of the private benefits generated. On top of that, the issue is clearly a disconnect between what is needed in the market and what type of curriculum has been sold in universities so it's clearly not working. In any case it seems insane to me that you are arguing for the isolation of training risks for the benefits of business. What is need is relaxed employment regulations, so that if it doesn't work out, it is not too expensive for business to let go of poor prospect. In an healthy labor market, people would find jobs and the required training much easier. Schools are just a way to offload the cost to the private individual at best or to the public at worst. That's just bad, business have no reasons to exist if they are just to leach of public benefits, might as well go full on communism at this point.
People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.
> Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.
Correlation-only is sloppy analysis.
The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem.
But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight.
The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family.
Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem
Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
> when partisanship has to be disguised.
The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Langbert notes:
> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.
Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su...
> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”
Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep...
> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
> The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities
Yes - and? Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poets, small Business owners, baristas , farmers, CxOs, software engineers tend to lean one way or another on average. The battle is not to establish political neutrality everywhere, but selective against universities because the staff & students leans left. I'm yet to hear conservatives complain about the political bias in the Fraternal Order of Police or the FBI.
Looking at history, every nascent autocracy takes aim at independent intellectuals, like clockwork. First to be neutralized is the opposition, then the press, then the intellectuals in higher education.
> I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
There are plenty of conservatives interested in anthropology; there’s no reason to think they’ve self-selected out of the pool, so then we have to consider if conservatives enter the field but are exposed to new ideas such that none remain conservatives for long (this seems unlikely), or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives; this is far more likely as they have been explicitly stating that this is what they are doing for decades now.
This theory is further corroborated by where you see this bias; it’s the least pronounced in quantitative, technical fields (mathematics, engineering, chemistry), and most pronounced in fields that are almost completely qualitative.
I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out.
By comparison, is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?
> I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out.
What about an explicit roadmap?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming
> is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?
I’m not sure I understand your question. I would presume if people are self-selecting out of any organization it’s because they believe it isn’t a suitable place for them, and if this division is along party lines then politics is likely to be the cause of that belief. In either case, if the FBI skews conservative, I would guess that this was due to internal gatekeeping, not self-selection, and I think the history of the organization supports that assertion.
> What about an explicit roadmap?
I'm not sure what you're pointing at in the links: I don't see any "explicit roadmap" to exclude mainstream conservative thinkers from professorships documented there. The main examples seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about.
> In either case, if the FBI skews conservative, I would guess that this was due to internal gatekeeping, not self-selection, and I think the history of the organization supports that assertion.
The FBI very dramatically skews conservative compared to the American base, and I think it is a conspiracy theory level claim that the explanation is that the FBI is deliberately keeping out mainstream-left-leaning people from being agents.
It's always very attractive to believe that there's some shadowy cabal explicitly and deliberately controlling the strings to the outcomes that you don't like, when in reality it essentially is never the case. The reality is always far messier, and nearly all bad things stem from complex emergent systemic outcomes with no X-Files Smoking Man at the center of it all.
Any claim of an affirmative explicit decision for the bad outcome requires exceptional justification, because it's just such an appealing thing to want to believe and its almost never true.
> The main examples seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about.
I’m pointing you towards the trends; you aren’t going to find documentary evidence stating: “We didn’t hire this guy because of his voting history” because a) it’s illegal and b) it’s very unlikely these biases are coordinated between institutions. The Long March article is instructive because the departments where the bias is strongest are all frequent washout degrees for critical theorists.
> It's always very attractive to believe that there's some shadowy cabal explicitly and deliberately controlling the strings to the outcomes that you don't like, when in reality it essentially is never the case.
I never made any assertion as to the existence of a “shadowy cabal” nor any other organized concert. This is an inane attempt to make my claims look ridiculous because you can’t refute them on their own merits. To wit:
> I think it is a conspiracy theory level claim that the explanation is that the FBI is deliberately keeping out mainstream-left-leaning people from being agents.
If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy? Because that’s what we are talking about here. Note that you have not accurately represented my claim: There is no FBI-style organization in my model that is coordinating the exclusion; it’s intentional, but happening at a local level, not as part of a centralized effort.
I may have misinterpreted "explicit roadmap", to be that implied a directing/organizing entity that is coordinating the exclusion of right-leaning people from professorships, versus your reply here clarifying you mean something different.
> If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy
Yep, I would. I think we are in the world where FBI agents are skewed as dramatically to the right as university professors are skewed left (which is to say: very). I don't believe either one as the deliberate exclusion of interested individuals from those positions based on their voting records, but instead more likely that both are self-selection and direct correlation to political views effects even when it's too such an extreme degree.
It's the same effect as theater having way more queer people in it than football, which is also not due to any conspiracy.
> or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives
What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research? While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
> What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research?
DEI has likely had a minor influence. In the articles I linked above, the bias towards liberalism is weakest among Asians, then whites, and then strongest among blacks and Latinos. I don’t know what the racial composition of professors looks like, so this is just a hunch.
The primary mechanism would be to simply avoid hiring those who fail to signal that they are sufficiently liberal, and avoid funding research that would reach illiberal conclusions. I can’t point you to any evidence of this besides the paper I linked above, but which seems more likely:
1) Republican opinions just so obviously conflict with the study of communications that there are zero professors of communications who are registered Republicans.
2) Democrats took control of these positions and did not care to invite anyone who didn’t signal that they were ideological fellow travellers?
> While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
Being interested is not the same as being competent.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Brexit. Anti-vax campaigns. Anti-masking. Racism. "Lowering corporate taxes makes everyone richer."
All delusional, all emotionally motivated, all predictable failures with terrible consequences.
I've seen this exact claim in the NYT and it doesn't hold muster.
You're just othering.
The organizations we're talking about aren't diverse, inclusive or representative.
Nor is conservativatism a Western only thing.
This is a conservative problem.
Conservatives are split into 2 groups. Conservatives who are in it for the money and conservatives who are in it because they don't know any better.
College professor is not a well paying job for the level of skill required nor is it a job that someone who isn't very knowledgeable could do. That excludes most conservatives from the position.
> Conservatives are split into 2 groups. Conservatives who are in it for the money and conservatives who are in it because they don't know any better.
An inane assertion made without evidence.
> nor is it a job that someone who isn't very knowledgeable could do
So why is the bias the worst in the least rigorous fields?
Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itself.
> We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects.
The people you’re pretending to be harbingers of truth believe that men can get pregnant.
> or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic.
So why is the bias the strongest in the least rigorous fields (communications, anthropology, music) and weakest is the most rigorous (mathematics, engineering, medicine, physics)?
Well they can. Some transgender men can get pregnant AFAIK.
This bias might be strongest in humanities because of self selection - conservatives think those are useless, but can see the utility in engineering - among other reasons.
> We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias
And yet they are far from that. Lots of finger-in-ears, "la-la-la-I can't hear you" behaviour from universities in US/west past decade for sure.
Speaking of fingers in ears…
That happens in conservative circles too. But instead of 4 years, Americans like myself are stuck with 40 years of business indoctrination from pro-business and conservative “leadership”.
The same leadership, by the way, that largely insisted on college degrees in the first place.
> Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power
To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues, which is so much worse.
This is not true. Whole conservative departments do well and exist. Moreover, whole ideologically pure christian conservative universities exist. Literally kicking off students for "infractions" that go against evangelical orthodoxy.
Some people got off due to sexual harassment not being as cool as before, history and sociology started to study women and minorities. The problem is that conservatives see that just existing as a threat. If the history is not biased their way, they feel like victims.
Being segregated into different universities is exactly the thing you need not to happen, and your attitude is the exemplification of the problem. Who is going to feel welcome if their concerns are blindly maligned as prejudiced and in bad faith by default?
It is not like liberals would created religious colleges. Religious colleges were created by evangelicals and they have rules that explicitly punish things like "woman having male visitor" or "being gay" or "not being religious". If what you want is ideological purity of evangelical Christianity, then yes, you have to create own institution. Which is exactly what conservatives did.
Because it is extremely valid for other institutions and students to NOT be subject to the above. They were not kicked off other universities and less radical Christians still go there. Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough. These conservatives do not want to share space with other nor to welcome anyone except those who are as conservative as them.
Your argument is typical "up is down and down is up" reversal. Conservatives want to create their own segregated spaces, because places that accept and tolerate non conservatives are just not acceptable to them. Somehow that is framed as problem with those other places not accepting conservatives (meaning not punishing non conservatives enough).
> Religious colleges were created by evangelicals and they have rules that explicitly punish things like "woman having male visitor" or "being gay" or "not being religious".
Which is dumb, but we're talking about the major schools everybody knows that used to have ideologically diverse faculty and don't anymore, not the ones of lesser influence founded by Baptists to begin with.
The point of freedom is that other people are allowed to be fools without requiring you to be, not that everybody be required to choose which major brand of zealot they have to be.
> Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough.
The issue is this:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire-2...
It's people saying "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" completely oblivious to the fact that freedom of speech literally is the thing where we don't punish people for speech. And then punishing people for expressing controversial/unpopular/heretical ideas.
This is nonsense though.
When academics were pushed out of Soviet and Chinese universities they had to leave to other locations or stop being productive.
The fact they can set up their own schools is a plus in the USA.
The disparate impact is clear.
> When academics were pushed out of Soviet and Chinese universities they had to leave to other locations or stop being productive.
That is not what happened with Soviet nor Chinese academics. They did not started new ideologically pure universities. Maybe you should read more on history rather then making up an alternative one.
Moreover, these "new" universities are not run by academics.
> The disparate impact is clear.
The only disparate impact is affirmative action for conservatives. In fact, most universities you complain about are run by rich and conservative boards. They make decisions to please rich and conservative donors.
But, they accept gay, women are treated more equally and that is something conservative christians cant stomach.
Reading comprehension is a good thing to have.
Go back and try again.
The numbers we're talking about don't agree.
More equally as in some animals are more equal than others
The "old" universities aren't run by academics either.
And conservatives aren't necessarily Christian
The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing.
It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost.
Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally?
The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r.
The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.
Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
>You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.
"I love the poorly educated"
~our current president.
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that.
So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
What specifically are you calling revisionism? I don't see anything in their post that's tied to these numbers.
They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.
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Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?
The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.
Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though
are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).
A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to"
When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers.
I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
It's about who you know not what you know is sadly true.
Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes…
China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room.
The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also.
One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly wealthy to choose this model if an equivalent was available without all the features that most of the world has abandoned. The US system would already have been in trouble years ago if it didn't have a government license for being the safest, more reliable way to immigrate into the US. Get rid of the F1 practical training to work visa pipeline, and see many US institutions in serious economic trouble. We can keep trying to keep it working as-is by pushing other people's money into the expensive vacation environment, but without major subsidies, we are already seeing more people realize that the risks are way too high when you have to get loans to attend. There is no idealism separate from economic incentive in institutions that charge 60K per year, plus often a whole lot more for mandatory on-campus housing, without financial aid.
But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
> Most of the world has severed the two
Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.
Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.
Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.
These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.
Envy of the world due to network effects and inertia, not due to any inherent superiority of our model. There are some good parts of our model, don't get me wrong, but they do not explain the status of the US system at all.
I don’t see how you can be so confident in that. It’s not at all straightforward to tease apart all the factors.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades
The benefits of the U.S. university system aren’t generated by average people taking a debt-financed 4 year vacation. They are generated by the same subset of people who would still be attending university even in a scaled down system that sent far fewer people to college.
In your view the benefits of university are that rich people go there? Did I somehow completely misunderstand?
No, the benefits of university are from smart people who can earn enough during summers to pay reasonable tuition if schools weren't set up as four-year vacations with lavish amenities. When I went to Georgia Tech, in-state tuition was about $2,400 per semester, or about $20,000 over four years (in 2024 dollars). It was a spartan, 1970's experience--like European universities often are today--but it was quite affordable for students who could earn that much at summer internships. And it's not just for engineers. My wife put herself through the University of Iowa, studying business and german literature, in 5 semesters by nannying.
And do you know who is responsible for the increase in tuition at Georgia Tech? The legislature and governor of the state of Georgia. State appropriations for higher ed and the tuition rates at Georgia Tech are set exclusively by the state government and its appointees on the Board of Regents for the State University System, not by university administrators in any way.
It’s unpopular to say, but a disproportionate amount of value is of course derived from people who are both educated and have immediate access to resources to fully exploit that education as well as the risk tolerance to innovate in the process, and the social status to build strong trust and social bonds with other similarly prepared people…so although it pains me to say it, yes?
It is certainly plausible that the most benefit to society comes from people that are both educated and empowered.
Whether the cost of that empowerment > the burden outsourced to society, well, that is another discussion.
Perhaps more on point, because I definitely think we can find examples of this in practice, it’s perhaps more truthy and also more actionable to say that college provides its optimal outcomes when it serves people who have intrinsic gifts that are empowered by knowledge. Sometimes these gifts are resources, but often these gifts are cognitive brilliance. Either one is like oxidiser for the fuel of knowledge, but especially brilliance when given resources.
I’m pretty sure that for the majority of college graduates, aside from its social signalling value, the amount of their secondary education that directly benefits them in their life could fit in a couple of years of summer school or a year of community college.
A quarter million dollars in debt is a tragic price to pay for a couple thousand dollars of educational utility. A system that requires a social signal 100x more costly than the value it represents is externalising that cost onto everyone, and the only benefits flow to financiers and the moneyed class.
Aside from educational titles (as opposed to capabilities) society is generally sensible regarding the cost of symbols vs the reality they facade.
We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment.
It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
> We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment. It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
This is a fantastic analysis.
All of that said, if we don’t provide a solid foundational high school education that covers basic science, math through fundamental calculus, a decent overview of world history, literature, art and culture, then we are not only wasting the precious time of our children, we are also doomed to be an ignorant and brutish people.
As it is, high school education in the USA today only assures what used to be the 8th grade level when I was in school.
It’s ridiculous that we have bacslid to the point where we waste 4 years catering to the lowest common denominator.
Solid vocational education should be offered as an alternative to high school from grade 9 forward. We need to understand that for every professor there’s someone that will never be able to manage anything beyond rudimentary tasks. For every banker there will be someone who drives a broom.
We do those that are less gifted a disservice by failing to give them useful tools for their future too.
Agreed.
From European perspective US system is a joke. All built on even bigger joke of high school. Which fails to teach students what they need in general education. And thus you get some weird "general" education irrelevancy being part of degree. Not to even mention how Master's level is not the standard most aim towards.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world
Where in the world have you polled?? because this is categorically opposite to my experience discussing the US college system
I dunno, google any university ranking and you will find the top ten has many from the US?
I don’t know any such rankings which measure envy, I’m afraid. It’s all based on numbers of papers published, etc.
Do you think people in other countries envy the us college system based on rankings? If so I strongly recommend a trip abroad and striking up a few conversations with prospective or enrolled students. In my experience the topic of cost and non dischargeable student loans comes up often. Rankings very rarely.
University rankings have pretty much nothing to do with how well they teach students, only their research output. And good researchers aren’t automatically good teachers ( and vice versa).
google, lol, marketing doesnt make a university good.
>Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket.
And they also severely restrict who can attend university. Of course this is a non-starter in the current US political environment.
In my country the only restriction for university is that you have a highschool diploma.
Getting into the medical faculty is harder because the government does pay for everything and training doctors is expensive- for those the university picks the best and brightest.
The government also has programs in place to send out students to Harvard and MIT as the future elite of the nation.
The education system to be envied by the rest of the world is Norway's model.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades
Citation needed on both counts
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? It's very easy to read uncharitably without further elaboration and reads pretty delusional as is.
The US made a big shift from public financing via grants to public financing via loans. During the same period there was a ton of information/propaganda disseminated about how much more lifetime income college grads made vs high school grads. The companies making these loans are doing very well.
If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.
The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipeline. I know of one major state university whose entire financial existence depends on visas from a few companies in Hyderabad.
Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.
True, but with respect to the university visa system at least it is pretty vague. The ICE stuff is not targeting Chinese and Indian uni students.
> Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities
Worst financial crisis at any university was probably caused by himself at his own scam Trump University, long before he become president.
> have created financial crises at most universities
Those multi-billion dollar endowments are fine man, don't worry about them, they're not running out.
I'm not talking about Ivy schools. I mean regional state and private schools that educate the majority of people who attend college. These do not have multi billion dollar endowments unless you are summing them all up.
At 4% a billion dollars yields 40 million per year, if you have 1000 staff that's 40k each, barely pays a salary.
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It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons).
That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.
Colleges used to be much more affordable even though they covered liberal arts and engineering together.
Are all colleges unaffordable? Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts? Maybe this isn't universal, maybe it's just that prestigious colleges all have strong liberal arts programs, either out of tradition or because it's required for being seen as prestigious.
Liberal arts courses arguably are still helpful for building general language and reasoning skills.
On the whole though, it does seem strange that I paid the same for a graduate level stats course and a freshman history course, even though the former taught me about five times as much.
Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.
One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.
But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.
I did too, but still managed to gain a lifelong appreciation for live theatre.
> Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts?
15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.
If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.
> It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons).
Like a car in the United States, outside of perhaps five metro areas?
That's not for societal reasons, that's for practical reasons. People want to be able to get around.
By contrast, many people don't want to be forced to take classes unrelated to their desired area of study.
It is for societal reasons, in that some societies devote significant resources to ensure that people can "get around" without private vehicles, and others do not. It is also for societal reasons in that the distribution of, for example, grocery stores, dictates that people doing desired/necessary work in rural areas generally need to travel significant distances in order to obtain food.
What do you suggest people were trying to buy, instead of cars?
The post is saying that you are forced to buy a car everywhere except five metro areas.
In addition to the point made by rjsw in this subthread .... food.
Everything's a societal reason from some angle. We've probably tilted a bit too hard towards college as a universal path, but I think the median college-degree-required job would still tell you that they're trying to find people who value education and learning for its own sake. The best doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. are the intellectually curious ones who don't see education as a burden.
You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances.
I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years.
We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.
I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself.
Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always leeway for students to chart their own path to success, it never really felt like Asia or Europe's systems where they place you in a bucket early on and thats it you are in there for life.
I graduated with an Engineering degree in the early 2010s and let me tell you, I really did do the bare minimum in a bunch of classes. It led me to tinker with junk computers that the school discarded which led me to dedicated school space in a lab to experiment which led to my first job and general success. Looking back not studying harder led to more trouble later on but the path still worked out because I jumped at some opportunities due to that path. If I were in asia, I would have probably not even be admitted or permanently weeded out after my first academic probation warning instead of being a decently successful software developer.
> Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen
Before that people dreamed of becoming a hollywood actor. It was the number one desired career for years. The bar is much lower for trying your luck at being a successful influencer than becoming an actor. The end result will be the same, many will try and flame out and then go do something else.
>Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
You sound like you are thinking of the 1990s as your context. These days after movies the The Social Network, one of the most desired careers is in software development. This goal requires people to expend much more effort than prior generations pursuing other desired careers and many more kids are doing it! Techies are the boss now.
I definitely like the flexibility our system provides. I changed majors a couple times before I found what I could tolerate (can't say it's a passion). I do not think the kids today are as comparable to the kids of yester*. I think in past, people desired those things in a day dreamy way, but knew it wasn't realistic. They also knew they'd get disciplined for poor grades; perhaps even harshly. We just culturally have really relaxed on being stern parents and I feel we have transitioned to wanting to be friends with our kids. That's a great thing too but it needs a balance IMO, there are advantages to being stern. But we're a nation of lazy parents who have high expectations of teachers, but don't pay them, and won't even help them out at home by being a parent and taking responsibility for our kids. (My rant on this topic is too verbose for HN but I firmly believe it's lazy parenting at the core of how we view education systems performance/lack of)
> Techies are the boss now
I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today. The normalization of tech has opened it up to average joe's that wouldn't have touched it back then due to the social stigma it had. This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech. But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is. Social norms, bullying, cliques have all changed but being a teenager in a group setting isn't yet a democratic affair.
> I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot.
Yep, it's all about status, money and power chasing. Nothing taught me this more than getting an iPhone before everyone else in France (wasn't yet available, imported). Before that I had weird phones and proto-smartphone that costed as much but nobody cared. But the iPhone was cool and desirable and automagically I became more desirable. Before that nobody gave a shit about my technology interest and it wasn't for the lack of trying to discuss it at large.
>I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today.
Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.
>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.
Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.
If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.
> But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is.
Always hard to know what’s universal, but I think the inclusion of video games on this list represents a genuine shift. When I was growing up only the other studious kids would talk with me about video games. We understood it to be an intellectual hobby because we were analyzing how to achieve things instead of just passively consuming.
Then sell it to doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Those fields aren't really the issue.
It's an interesting combo, but after working for a decade in higher ed, there is a real division and enmity between the liberal arts and sciences and the "career" programs. The latter is seen as an illegitimate degree mill. The former as a freeloader that does not pull its weight financially. It is an uneasy partnership of convenience.
It’s absolutely an uneasy partnership. But my goodness the benefits of having rubbed shoulders with people studying forensics, entomology, philosophy, pure math, and agriculture were enormous. If I had gone to a school composed exclusively of engineers and other careerists, how much narrower would my world have been? And bringing in ideas from other areas of study has been so powerful in both my life and my career.
I had the impression that liberal arts students were highly profitable for universities, because they had no expensive labs.
It depends highly on logistics like class size. Many programs brag about small class sizes, which are great for students but anathema to university bean counters. These programs often try to subsidize the small program specific courses with huge gen ed courses, making the whole student body effectively subsidize these underperforming programs. Real nasty fights occur over which courses to include in the gen ed program because every department wants a piece of that pie to prop up their poor numbers. And this dynamic is definitely much worse in humanities.
Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.
It's insane to me having to contemplate how much more of a simple cog in the machine I would be mentally, intellectually, etc. had I not been exposed to sciences for the sake of knowledge and had only been trained on the job and some day tossed out as not useful anymore...
That would be the definition of alienation for me.
> I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive.
For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
If you can't prove knowledge gained, would that not indicate that the pursuit was fruitless?
Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint.
If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.
"if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.
Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, however, is not. It's the foundation of the scientific method.
There's an obvious lack of logical rigor to jump from someone pointing that out to framing it as proving an untruth.
A is true if evidence B supports it ≠ A is only true if evidence B supports it.
But you can only claim A is true if B. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke around an unknown.
The real issue is we've largely abandoned the public university from a funding standpoint. Now the costs of a public institution is beyond the ability for many Americans to pay. The unstable job market has led many to believe the risks outweigh the rewards.
This comment would make more sense if more than ~38% of the country had a college degree. Can you really make the argument that college is truly a middle class concept if not even half of the populations has a bachelor's degree? I guess if you include community college which has really helped to serve the downtrodden get on their dream paths then I guess it makes more sense?
Middle class doesn’t necessarily mean average or median class, but rather some life style bar where you aren’t struggling even if you can’t afford many luxuries. In India, for example, the middle class is small (definitely not average!) but growing.
Having a college education could totally be an indicator for middle class even if most people didn’t have one.
The middle class is something in between the capitalist class and the working class, it's badly defined.
If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working.
I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income.
Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
IMO Middle Class = PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in Marxist terms. They are the members of the working class (they have to work or they will starve, go homeless, etc) but are highly compensated because they are essential to functioning of the system and have rare skills. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, etc.
There's that Jerry Yang quote:
Middle class is a state of mind
What they crank out today suffers from grade inflation. No longer is 'C' the average grade. Kids and parents who pay over 100k for their diploma all demand above average grades. It's not as bad as presenting a diploma from a Caribbean diploma mill, but they're not what they used to be.
Agreed completely on this. I almost wonder if it’d be more palatable to add a grade above A, like a Japanese style “S”.
Many games already have an S-tier in class/stats/builds, whatever the criteria is. Would be funny if higher ed ripped that off. Life mimicking art and all that.
That already exists, it's called an A+.
American high schools are already doing a form of this, with certain classes earning more than a 4.0 score in GPA calculations. 5.0 is quite common now, with 6.0 and even 7.0 scores on individual classes being possible.
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Academic freedom? Where has that existed in the last 20 years?
That's a very ideological take, especially this part:
> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well
Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.
And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.
A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.
Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
Friend, go to a community theatre production and you will find people engaged in something for which there is no economic incentive. Or learning a new language after retirement. Or playing church softball. There’s more to life than money, and there’s good in the world dollars can’t capture.
We're talking about academia, not hobbies. Academics expect to get paid in both money and social status.
As do churches and community theaters, by the way. They tend to expect donations. If nobody ever donated money they'd shut down.
People don’t want “cheap healthcare,” people want to be healthy.
And people don’t want “job training,” people want to be educated and have a fulfilling life.
Of course college looks too expensive if it is just “job training.” But that is not what college is.
College proved its immense value first, and then because of its obvious value, employers started looking for it. But you’ve let the cart get in front of the horse, by thinking that the value of a college education is simply that employers are looking for it.
This [1] is a graph of educational attainment in the US. And the percent of people into the 60s who had a college degree was in the single digits, with it being near zero in times past. It then started ramping up extremely quickly. The main thing that changed is a lot more jobs started requiring degrees around that time.
If people were genuinely pursuing college for self betterment, then you'd think the numbers would have been dramatically higher in the past, especially back in the day when you could comfortably afford college even on just a part time job. The increase in enrollment also came right alongside sharp increases in cost.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
The problem is there isn’t an alternative for people who want one. I’m self educated and self employed, and yet I’m forced to pay for healthcare I don’t need, and compete against those with the pedigree of an Ivy League.
My issue is these things boil down to class. There should be a legitimate, high quality alternative for those who can’t afford it.
I agree with you in spirit but most people in the US look at college like job training. It’s literally advertised as job training on TV, buses and billboards. Teachers, parents, and media have long been seen as “the way” to get a job.
One of the most disappointing things about college was how little people cared about the liberal arts aspect, where humanities courses were an annoying box to tick.
Teenagers do not understand the true value of things. This is not news and not restricted to the field of education. “You’ll need to get a good job someday” is one of the all-purpose lines adults use when harassing them into making better life choices.
College makes a person more capable in general, which confers long-term competitiveness during a career. That’s why parents want their kids to go to college. And the great thing is it works even if the kid is just checking the box. It works better if they are engaged and enthusiastic, of course.
> And the great thing is it works even if the kid is just checking the box.
Maybe if you limit it to STEM degrees. There are plenty of people saddled with humanities degrees that haber no hope of paying off the loans taken to get the degree, nevermind a job past barista.
No, what I’m saying is that if a kid takes a college writing class and does enough to pass it, at the end that kid will be a better writer. Even if they did not like the class.
I misunderstood you. In that regard, you're totally right!
I think that's the disconnect. When college was more rarified, it was populated by a mix of children of privilege and those who had the talent, ambition and desire to expand their minds. That selection bias was enough to predict future success. When the formula was boiled down to "college=success" it became a system to be gamed. Students scraping and cheating to get admission, schools offering easier degrees. The birth of diploma mills where education didn't matter and student life was non-existent. No wonder the value of college seems so diminished.
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The job training you get at 20 is often obsolete when you're 40. For example, many women of my parents' generation trained for jobs in the textile industry. But eventually the jobs disappeared, as Finland got too wealthy. A bit more abstract education would have made it easier for them to find a new career.
But not too abstract. From my point of view, the weird parts of the American educational system are the high school and the college. Everyone is supposed to choose the academic track. I'm more used to systems with separate academic and vocational tracks in both secondary and tertiary education.
There are certain advantages to having separate academic and vocational tracks, but that tends to lock out late bloomers. Quite a few of prominent US scientists and business leaders didn't have good grades going into secondary school.
Job training is a lot more than learning how to use equipment. It's about showing up on time, dealing with coworkers and being a productive member of a team. That's best learned on the job and is a big reason people don't like new grads. Its like going out on a date with someone that has never had a girlfriend. Let someone else break them in and screen them.
Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace
economies and national policies are complex. only the most straightforward things, like ending patriarchy, wars and modifying interest rates, have firm evidence of causing this or that thing on a national scale. nobody knows if so and so nuanced educational policy really matters in an intellectually honest way.
Plenty of colleges and universities started as job training. The Morrill land grant colleges were founded to study mechanical and agricultural arts, and that was over 150 years ago. Many of those are now the top state schools in the USA.
> People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...
A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.
Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).
Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).
Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.
I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.
> Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...
That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.
I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.
I could concede that the "History or Humanities" elective in the 4th year could include an option for history of computing but I think the rationality of including that course in the first place is partly due to politics and accreditation requirements.
Its also possible that the department wanted to round out the students education by providing something not related to STEM each semester.
Note: these reasons I listed are just a guess based on my experience with the university.
I still find it difficult to justify the placement of this course as a hard requirement because of how the rest of the STEM courses are structured. YWCC 307 is a very fluid course so maybe it can be squeezed in there? Anyway my point is that it is tough and I still feel that way.
> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in.
Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.
> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The uni I went to did, in multiple classes, to the point where you could almost predict the "war story" you were about to be told :D
How has the existence of the computing industry depended on baristas with Women's Studies degrees?
Because the history I know has it being 99% created by men with engineering skills doing paid work for large corporations.
Steve Jobs taking Calligraphy [1] comes to mind
Men and women. Women were heavily involved in the engineering work at the beginning of the industry. The industry only became male dominated in the late 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing
They weren't heavily involved and to claim otherwise is historical revisionism.
Women’s work: how Britain discarded its female computer programmers
Britain once led the world in electronic computing. But when the industry squeezed out female employees, it wrote its own epitaph.
~ https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/02/womens-work-ho...In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. The top-secret codebreaking computers deployed by the British at Bletchley Park worked round the clock to ensure the success of D-Day and the Allies’ win in Europe. At a time when the best electronic computing technology in the United States was still only in its testing phase, British computers literally changed the world. After the war, British computing breakthroughs continued, and British computers seemed poised to succeed across the board, competing with US technology on a global scale. ... Even when electromechanical and then electronic computers came in, women continued to do computing work. They programmed, operated, troubleshooted, tested, and even assembled these new machines. In fact, IBM UK measured the manufacturing of computers in “girl hours” (which were less expensive than “man hours”) because the people who built the machines were nearly all women. Meanwhile, the British government, the largest computer user in the nation, called their computer workers the “machine grades” and later, the “excluded grades”—excluded from equal pay measures brought into the Civil Service in the 1950s. Because their work was so feminised, the government declined to give them equal pay and raise their pay to the men’s rate on the basis that the men’s wage was almost never used. Therefore, the lower, women’s wage became the default market rate for the work. So concentrated in machine work were women that the majority of women working in government did not gain equal pay.They were heavily involved, computing was seen as a female profession. The human computers we had before digital ones were women, and they were very heavily involved until computers became profitable.
Sure, if you don't use the standard definitions of common words you can argue false things. Children know that. It has no intellectual merit and you should stop playing silly word games to try and "win" an incorrect argument.
The computing industry does not refer to people sitting in rows doing calculations by hand.
Betty Snyder, Betty Jennings, Kathleen McNulty, and Grace Hopper were not doing calculations by hand.
I am obviously not saying that the human computers are the same as digital computers, that's your misinterpretation. I was explaining the context that digital computers grew out of, it was a female field. E.g. Mauchley and Eckert designed the ENIAC to be used for the same tasks as human computers were (firing table calculations), and as digital computers were used in this context, the workforce in the eventual digital computer industry reflected that of the human computer context. If you are interested in learning more, there are many books on the ENIAC project. Just pick one, it will mention the women involved. "ENIAC, the triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" is a good general overview which you can read in a day, free online at https://archive.org/details/eniac00scot
If you're particularly interested in the women involved, there is a shorter text available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20151122025204/http://pcfly.info...
Please read a post before you reply to it. Your reply is emotional and not constructive. Nobody is out to get you, I am only interested in weeding out misconceptions about computing history.
Perhaps the people teaching thec purses don't feel qualified to talk about the history?
I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!
"People want cheap healthcare"
This has a lot to do with what a country wants. Many countries show this is possible; the USA prefers a profit-based system where everyone pays a lot.
Funnily enough there is a parasitic vine in Australian rain forests that kills its host and then thrives.
It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside.
Eventually you have a hollow tree.
Sure sounds like a good descriptor for the US healthcare system at least. The hospitals will still be operating and collecting government payments even when most people don't have healthcare. Bunch of empty rooms with beeping hardware everywhere. Meanwhile a bunch of sick and dying people outside the hospitals that are too poor to actually go into them.
Very apt metaphor for the current situation.
What kind of job training should an engineer have? An engineer's job is to understand very complex systems, and to evolve them, to design, to invent. It's very different from a carpenter's job training, because it requires a much larger width of base knowledge, and much less of what can be acquired by just watching others do their thing, and imitating.
Maybe the study tracks of those going to the industry and those pursuing a scientific career could split earlier. OTOH I personally must say that what I've studied for my master's degree, and even what I researched during my further postgrad studies (even though I did not ultimately go for a PhD) ended up being rather useful for my work in the industry.
It wasn't a sufficient job training though; I sometimes think that nothing is, nothing short of an actual job.
Thanks, I thought this was a very insightful comment that helped me think about the problem differently.
I would add, though, that I think "co-op universities" have a good solution. That is, places like Northeastern and Drexel when the undergrad program is 5-ish years and a good portion of that time is working in paid co-op positions. This ensures that students graduate with at least some real-world experience in their field but still get the benefit of classroom study and the full college experience.
Obligatory uwaterloo plug. I didn't even end up graduating after 3 years of compsci but still ended up with almost two years of work experience. Colleagues in my early career were still paying down student debt while I had already paid for tuition out of pocket, not with tax dollars.
Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.
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Liberal arts is cheap and is not why university is expensive. You can get it for relative pennies at a community college.
I’ve studied at university, state college and community college and my best history teacher was at a community college.
University is expensive probably because there is job demand but almost no real downward pressure to keep it cheap. Students can’t provide much pressure and it’s not directly affecting companies that ask for it. A lot of families also carry this “prestige” element that pushes the cost up.
Higher education is very much alive in the rest of the world where we don't pay for it
"job training" at school? Everyone known you learn how to work at work, where first day they say to forget everything you have been taught at school.
It didn't get shoe horned. Before college degrees proliferated, employers had entrance exams and were expected to train people. A supreme court decision found this to be racist. Companies could be held liable so most companies stopped that and demanded a 'fair' credential. Then everyone had to go to college
This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal.
See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.
The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.
Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.
(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
> (My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
This might have been true when the United States was mostly white, and "minority" specifically referred to the black population who was mostly descended from slaves brought to the US mainland pre-1808, or to an even small number of native Americans. Today, when the US population is significantly more ethnically diverse, and "minority" just means "anyone nonwhite, regardless of where they came from or what their family history is", there's a lot more variation in exactly how ability to afford college correlates with ethnicity.
While minority technically means what you said, in practice people only care about those identifiable nonwhite groups who are doing poorly.
The result is that Academia is broadly in support of discriminating against certain identifiable minorities, despite their suffering well-known histories of discrimination. The logic is literally that the current success of Asians and Jews means that they are now in the oppressor class, and so should give up opportunities in the name of achieving equity. The same universities that used to discriminate against Asians and Jews out of simple racism, now wish to discriminate against Asians and Jews because they are trying to NOT be racist.
Many in my generation (I'm in my mid-50s) find this twist absurd beyond belief.
All of this is because academia and educational institutions have a tremendous amount of power this way. They can select for ideological compliance instead of actual competence. And this is a desirable property for the rulers because they can weed out those who are likely to destabilise them if they were able to show a valuable alternate path by example.
Why spend so much money on an "education" if you could become successful by simple being competent. The tech sector was like that at first, but then came the degree requirement and the HR ladies. It was a short run and now they are very mad that some people became successful without needing to bow to the dominant ideology.
You'll occasionally see people point out that requiring a college degree has all the same legal problems as requiring a hiring exam does. And those people are correct in terms of the judgments that impose our terrible precedents. They're all just as negative on degree requirements as they are on performance requirements.
But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.
The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.
I mean we don't need laws like this. Precedents like this are actually dangerous because they make the law ambiguous, opening it up to selective enforcement. Instead the law should just be read as is and courts should not find new discriminations in ones not mentioned by the legislature
and yet ... that's not what the case you referenced says at all. Justia's own summary, from your link:
> Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.
(emphasis mine)
They worked at a power plant, a place where dumb mistakes can cause explosions and kill people. The power plant wasn't racist and hired blacks into the labor department, but because it was just manual labor that department paid worse than the other more technical departments.
When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. And as it's hard to argue that testing isn't needed for people who could cause massive power outages but is for <job X>, that was widely interpreted to ban such aptitude testing for any kind of job.
> When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence.
That's your interpretation. The court regarded the test used the power company as unrelated to the demands of the job. You're welcome to disagree with the court about that (as the company probably did), but don't misrepresent their actual position.
The court regarded the test as unrelated to the demands of the job, despite a large body of research showing that the test is generally predictive of performance on a wide class of jobs, which that job is in.
The bar was set to, "You must have good statistical evidence that this test is applicable to this job." That is an extremely high bar, that very few private companies are ever going to be able to collect sufficient data to establish.
In fact the only organization that I'm aware of which can pass that bar is the US military. Which is why they are allowed to use ability tests in hiring and initial promotions that no private company would be allowed to use.
I didn't claim otherwise. It should however be self evident that courts have no solid basis on which to make such a call. Judges don't know anything about running power plants, hiring employees, or really anything on that matter.
This is why human rights laws are always terrible in practice. They require the courts to make decisions well outside the bounds of their expertise.
> Judges don't know anything about running power plants, hiring employees, or really anything on that matter.
This is why both parties hire the best lawyers they can, and the best expert witnesses, to make the case for their side. We cannot require that every decision in the world be made by experts in the decision domain - sometimes they have to be made by people we've entrusted to make decisions (and in particular, decisions intended to be guided by the law).
>The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education.
Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.
The cause is laid out in your second sentence.
Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.
You're agreeing with them. Keep reading their comment to understand why that didn't matter.
>You're agreeing with them. Keep reading their comment to understand why that didn't matter.
That's as may be, but my point was orthogonal to theirs and not meant as agreement or disagreement.
I agree with your point.
My point was a "don't shoot the messenger".
A politically powerful minority calls ability tests racist because they make minorities look bad. An opposing offensive minority uses those same ability tests as evidence that minorities are simply inferior. Courts ruled that those using the tests should be presumed racist because the results show racial differences.
The result of all of this is a policy, meant to help minorities, that fails them. At great expense to all of us.
And an actual easy to identify factor which sustains racial differences - poor educational policies - is politically off limits to think about. "Because that would cost money."
The resulting mess is in alternating turns absurd and sad.
The courts never banned all entrance exams. Many employers still have entrance exams.
I was told in college that the US system of healthcare being tied to your employer was the result of companies looking for fringe benefits to offer when tax rates were at their highest for the high income group.
However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
It started during WW II when the US government put wage and price controls in place so that companies could not compete for employees by offering higher wages. So they competed for employees instead by offering employer-paid healthcare as a benefit. Then after the war, when the wage and price controls were repealed, the employer-paid healthcare system, instead of going away, kept getting more elaborate.
As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.
Maybe some psychos think of it that way, but no one I have ever met, at least not regarding insurance. Some fringe benefits like unlimited vacation, free lunch, etc, maybe I can agree.
Well maybe it was once prestigious to show off your Aetna card, now its a sign of embarrassment.
I guess todays 'cool perk' is something like free lunch or allowing dogs at work. I think the "Unlimited Vacation" scam has unraveled at this point.
Another way to see it is to ask why a company should be able to reap the labour benefits of their workers and then force other people to pay for their basic needs?
Should your employer be required to pay for your housing, food, transportation, and clothes? Company towns turned out to be a bad idea.
No, but they should of course pay a salary that can cover all that and more. High salaries and high minimum wages is the right solution.
Yes it is true and is sort of the subject of my original post. One of those things I learned in college ironically and is now background knowledge I can't source.
There is indeed a mismatch between the traditional de jure mission of the university and the de facto mission it has today.
What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.
What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.
There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.
The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!
I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).
Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
> People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.
>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
Right, the federal tax code is structured to give advantages to employer sponsored health plans. But it doesn't have to be that way. A better approach would be to eliminate those plans and force everyone to purchase individual or family plans through state ACA marketplaces using pre-tax dollars.
Not sure why the down votes. Severing health insurance from employers would be a huge win. It's just such a massive task that the efforts to address it like Obamacare aren't enough even remotely.
As a Canadian, for all the faults of our healthcare system, the fact that I don't have to stick with a job to maintain healthcare for myself or my family is a massive amount of freedom I take for granted.
You don’t have to stick with your job in the US either, you just have to earn enough money to buy it yourself from healthcare.gov. But that goes for everything, from food to shelter to utilities, etc.
Probably half the jobs in the US don’t pay enough for the employee regularly see a doctor. It might protect them for the $500k emergency heart bypass, but they are not going to be able to afford the $10k out of pocket costs or the ongoing healthcare expenses after they lose their job.
The ACA would need to be changed too, it isn't as generous tax-wise as employer based care. The portion of the premium paid by the subscriber is not automatically tax deductible - they have to itemize or meet certain self-employment restrictions. Many don't, so they are paying effectively with after tax dollars. Its one reason why the ACA rate hikes next year are so brutal.
It matters for early retirees (or these days, people forced out of job some years before they wanted to officially retire). Without self-employment income they can't deduct it, and often for similar reasons they can't itemize. They still get the standard deduction of course, but an person on an employer plan gets that + their cost of premiums, automatically.
Or, just provide 'basic healthcare' as a human right (and service for being taxed) and make ALL plans on top of that luxury services.
Wouldn't you like to STOP the insanity of "picking" a plan every year (or more) and also end the billing nightmare by just making it all single payer (the government of the people, for the people)?
This is entirely due to the employer being involved. I don't have to pick a new auto or home insurance plan every year.
The employer pays a large portion of the employee premiums. As a result the employee is further indentured to the employer because they cannot leave without depriving themselves and family of health care. And it further obfuscates the actual cost of health care. And then the tax code makes this bizarre setup the privileged happy path.
> Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary.
If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:
Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."
> If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
Generally this is done by a TPA (third party administrator). In many ways you can do as you wish, but as insurers have already done the actuarial work, it's generally easier to use a plan and tweak it if desired (like "Give us this plan but pay for 1 massage/week") versus having to figure that out yourself.
> American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:
Health insurance is more insurance than car insurance in the US. There is a legal out of pocket maximum of $17k or so, and networks don’t matter for emergency situations. In fact, people get millions of dollars of healthcare from health insurance whereas auto insurance provides a maximum of $500k after which you have to use umbrella insurance.
Health insurance premiums are not insurance premiums, because legally, health insurance sellers cannot underwrite the health risks. Legally, young and healthy people have to subsidize old and sick, via age rating factor caps (3x and even 1x in NY and 2x in MA), and not being able to price pre existing conditions.
Which means health insurance premiums are mostly a tax if you are healthy and less than 50 years old or so, especially if you don’t plan on giving birth that year.
Auto insurance premiums are insurance, because the insurer is pricing your risk of loss, based on your driving history/driving distance/location/etc.
Sure, but the doctors/medicine/hospitals/liability are not any cheaper.
So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.
Yes, but the same insurance company will screw with your coverage depending on your employer.
My mom's plan randomly denied my medications all the time as a student. My current job's plan always provides coverage.
Both were the same insurance company, but she's in a different field with a more stingy employer.
It's especially fun if your employer is in a field with an aging employee population--like higher ed ironically. The insurer gives the same premium rate to all employees, meaning everyone is in the same risk pool. The old and or unhealthy employees make insurance more expensive for everyone at the employer. I've had situations where the exact same insurance plan cost two hugely different amounts of money after switching employers just because of average employee age differences. Really quite perverse.
Which gives employers incentive to illegally discriminate against older job candidates but good luck proving it at any specific employer.
> Healthcare costs [...] The only difference is with an employer intermediary, [...]
That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.
Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
The intermediary in healthcare makes a significant difference, as, by going through employers and using insurance, the US market is quite fragmented, and there is minimal alignment pushing prices down. The US healthcare provider doesn't get more business by providing a better cost/benefit ratio: It's easier to splurge, and get business via an expensive, comfortable-ish service.
When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.
We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.
I don't disagree with your major points but note that Spanish university course syllabi are determined centrally and are identical across Universities which seems incredibly bizarre to me.
> Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned
While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.
Except of course for technical degrees: those skills are highly transferrable to many real life, money saving skills you can use your entire life (just kidding you will never own a home and would never want to work on your landlords house)
At least the good part about the US situation is that people are still free to choose for themselves. The cost isn't redirected to the whole population at large via taxation. In the EU it's much worse, because the same reality is materialising, but it is still advertised as "free". Of course, this is the path to a form of soft communism and all systems are becoming dysfunctional and unable to create real value at the same time. The "solution" has been to create ever more taxation and even more debt that is to be paid by the next generation.
It seems that the US will course correct but the EU seems to be declining into authoritarianism and proto-communism.
The EU is aggressively neoliberal or liberal-conservative, and that is the reason universities have begun to be more expensive. It's related to austerity, privatization, the aggressive revision of tax codes, and New Public Management.
The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more.
This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
Ah yes, the neoliberal boogeyman.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter. > Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.
Do you agree with that definition ? If so, none of what is happening in the EU is consistent with that description. If not, I'm all hears for what you think it means.
> The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s What constitute the left has mutated and is not called as such anymore. It is now found in the "green" parties and adjacent. The hard left is actually very popular, at least as much as the right wing, but I'll grant you they are becoming less desirable because people are pushing back on the immigration the hard left is very much for that. It is incoherent because it mechanically reduce the power/earning of their supposed electorate but on the other hand it grants them dominating power in key places and they get the votes of the bourgeoisie.
Here is some data on public government spending in the EU. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263220/public-spending-r... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-spendin...
Most of the rich countries are over 50% and approaching 60% very fast. After COVID, spending has increased at an insane rate, via debt creation. It's basically like a poor family using credit to buy an ultra expensive fancy car but I guess that's very austere to you.
It's balsy to pretend that the EU suffer from austerity when the data readily show the contrary. The only tax revisions to be found are to raise them, not the other way around.
To be clear, I'm all for the targeted raising of taxes on the boomers, who got us into this mess. I also think some of the regulations goals are laudable (notably transition to electric everything and building improvements but I disagree that regulation is the way to get there. Considering that the EU economy is basically in the dump, I'll say that the world largely agree with me.
On that same wikipedia page you cite, we have the following on the EU: "The European Union (EU), created in 1992, is sometimes considered a neoliberal organization, as it facilitates free trade and freedom of movement, erodes national protectionism and limits national subsidies."
Ideological rhetoric doesn't change the fact that neoliberalism has taken an even stronger hold in the EU since it's inception. The market is being deregularized, and austerity measures are being implemented.
Reporting a single public spending ratio figure like your source does says nothing. I'll note that Finland is at the top. I'm Finnish, and Finland has been suffering through two right wing austerity governments during the last three election periods. Austerity brings the public spending numbers up, because it stifles growth. Finland has sold off many of it's public monopolies, including the electric grid, the phone network, and energy companies. The current government even tried to sell the waterworks.
Austerity is visible in fewer public support programs, cuts to unemployment benefits, student benefits, etc. This government even went so far as to give the richest Finns a tax break, further deepening the crisis.
You claim that green parties are left. This is sometimes true, sometimes not. In general, green parties in the EU lean liberal (right wing), as is the case in Finland. Maybe you're confusing left wing politics with liberalism again, which is what the previous poster did. This is an american view of politics. Immigration and social values are not left-right problems. These are culture war issues that the conservatives in the US have drummed up.
> where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.
> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.
And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.
It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.
All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.
And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.
Well the common theme of leftist is that they are in complete denial of reality.
This is how you get some dude that will argue with a straight face that EU problems absolutely come from neoliberalism when many of the biggest members are closing on 60% public spending to GDP ratio. I just can't imagine the cognitive dissonance at this point.
I wish it would be simple ignorance or plain stupidity because it would mean that would be somewhat solvable. But they are simply and purely lying and they have been doing it for so long that they don't even know where/what reality is anymore. That's a bit sad when you think about it.
At least the "good thing" is that since they are nothing but parasites, eventually they successfully destroy the host system. Then comes the reality check and for a while the parasites get evacuated.
By the way, HN is infested with Marxist types, which is hilarious considering it is supposed to be a forum for a filthy capitalist endeavor. But this is the way of life of the parasite: identify a valuable target and destroy it from the inside. Find another supply, rinse and repeat.
Ok, you seem to be some type of conspiracy theorist.
I have lived in the EU my whole life, and have always followed politics with an analytical eye. I'm not a Marxist, I just follow politics closely because it is important for my job.
I wish you all the best, but I think you need to get out of whatever social.media sinkhole you got these opinions from first.
Centrally planning? My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private.
Nationalization and regularization are both on the decline. The opposite has happened: privatization of state monopolies and deregulatization.
I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist. What you are describing is liberalism, a right wing political position.
And even the liberal right is losing ground to the conservative right. The EU commission is far more conservative than it ever has been, and hard-right parties are in government in at least six EU countries (see e.g., https://www.politico.eu/article/mapped-europe-far-right-gove...), with conservative governments elsewhere. This is a strict break with tradition, where the extreme right has been excluded from European governments by consensus of other parties ever since the second world war.
Your beliefs are not aligned with reality. I am also personally in the middle of this research money refunnelling, I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies, while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.
> My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private. I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies
Nobody claimed it isn't, but governments trying to pick winners by subsidizing startups is still the same old left wing politics. You don't see the USA spray grants around at the scale the EU does, do you? I'm pretty sure they don't directly subsidize startups at all.
BTW companies are routinely created in the EU specifically to access the 'free money' of grants. The act of offering subsidies creates companies. The profits - if any - will be taxed heavily. They are only partly private. We agree, though, that this is not as extreme as the 100% profit tax that occurs under nationalization.
> I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist.
The EU leadership class all demanded a female EU Commission president before Ursula vdL mysteriously failed upwards into the role without explanation:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/23/eu-leaders-cal...
You are arguing about form and semantics.
Yes the bureaucrats have added a indirection level to shield themselves from consequences and fill the pockets of their friends. This is basically the definition of corrupt communism. Where political figure assign and distribute the work and rewards the commissars who oversee the work. Your head is so far up your ass that you don't even realise that you basically described the Chinese system, which is, guess what, freaking communist.
Feminism is absolutely leftist and is straight from the Marxist playbook. De Beauvoir and Sartre are the parents of modern feminism and are both heavily influenced by Marx. In the Soviet Union the propaganda for equality was extremely strong and women were just considered another regular worker, same as the men. In fact feminists played a key role in the revolution of 1917 and gained suffrage right away. Funnily enough, women complained that they were exploited, because unlike feminist in rich capitalist countries that can afford to give "freedom" to women in exchange for very little work/value, the soviet women were actually required to work, the country being too poor to afford them easy jobs. But you'll tell us how actually it's all liberalism and whatnot, for sure you have a special history we don't know about that contradict every common sources we know about. For sure.
Yes the EU is becoming more right-wing and conservative. This is course correction after decades of left/center-left (and greens) domination. But do you realise that this fact is completely contradictory to your point of view.
The argument is that the EU *was* pushing socialist policies and establishing a soft-form of communism. You contest that, claiming neoliberalism domination but then you admit that right-wing/conservative are just coming into power. I mean it was literally yesterday.
> For the first time, a right-wing majority is emerging at the European Parliament as the European People's Party flirts with groups that would have been considered too toxic to work with in the past. The pivot has given the EPP a choice but also created a headache for Ursula von der Leyen.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/11/15/how-the-epp-us...
A news that was published literally 15 days ago. It cannot be that both the EU was ruled by neoliberals and they are just coming into power at the same. Do you realised how disingenuous you are ? If not this is frightening.
> Your beliefs are not aligned with reality.
No clearly you have a delusional point of view. Even wikipedia that is famously tilting left is basically disagreeing with you on everything. Get a grasp.
> while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.
Of course that's coming. They have ran out of others people money and debt level are unsustainable. But I would also contest you personal anecdote with one of mine, since I know someone who is currently receiving subsidies for a musical concert via EU. So maybe you are just bad a selling your projects on top of having a distorted view of reality. To be honest that would make sense because even the hardest left-wingers are not stupid enough to believe the garbage they sell to the wider populace. They pretend in public but in private they'll tell you about whatever power trip they are currently chasing.
You seem to be getting high on your own supply; that can't be good.
Just read your own text back please. It is full of ideological rhetoric and devoid of calm rational discussion.
Let's just pick out some examples here: "Your head is so far up your ass that you don't even realise that you basically described the Chinese system", "But you'll tell us how actually it's all liberalism and whatnot, for sure you have a special history we don't know about that contradict every common sources we know about", "even the hardest left-wingers are not stupid enough to believe the garbage they sell to the wider populace", "You seem to be getting high on your own supply".
Please calm down and respond to the points I made if you wish to debate me. As it stands you are making incorrect assumptions about my views while hitting random political talking points along the way. It's not really possible to respond to this wall of nonsense, as it barely has any connection to the discussion at hand.
