We Need Factories for Making Products and Not for Making Jobs

Why is the taxpayer responsible for their failure to complete the degree and the obligation to bail them out?

 

I used to work in the high tech industry and spent lots of time outside of the USA in US company offshore facilities and/or offshore outsourcing contractors. One thing I came away with from my travels, mostly to Asia, and this is going back 30 years, was how focused they were about becoming major players in the world marketplace. One thing was most had English language studies in school, most were extremely proud of their accomplishments and abilities, and although they could have fun at dinner/drinks each night, during the work day there was no monkey business. All technical workers had college degrees as did many of the manufacturing workers. It was easy to see even back then that if the USA did not get it's act together we would get our asses kicked! No surprise what is happening today.

Speaking of China, I read once that considering only the honor students in public schools in China, the best and the brightest, was a greater quantity than all kids in public schools in the USA. Another sign that the USA with our failing schools, and our myriad other reasons for doing poorly, that again we will get our asses kicked!

Of course there is no panacea in China or elsewhere, but when speaking of manufacturing, or the US competing in global markets, the US is falling farther and farther behind. In the USA our problems stem from our laissez-faire culture, our sorely divided nation, and IMO a serious lack of interpersonal retrospection with no goals for improvement. The US model is ask for higher pay, more benefits, more time off, for less productivity...

 

I think with certain subjects it's justified. There is a general social benefit to having the most talented people study particular subjects. I hate the idea that someone with an IQ of 150 studies law. What a waste. If we could sponsor the tuition fees of research scientists, for instance, that might persuade talented but poor people to upskill in a way that benefits everyone.

 

You missed the first bit (no doubt due to ideological blindness, if not deliberately)

Those who do complete a four-year degree often do so only after taking out crushing levels of student debt.

Therefore education should be free, paid for by progressive taxation, by those who have achieved considerable wealth, and who will not experience said taxation as a crushing burden. Alongside a private sector appreticeship system to ensure the quantum of non-degree-level workers required by society.

The issue of failure to complete a degree, once started, is complex but ancillary to my chief points above.

 

I think that the more salient point here is that the degree is only necessary because employers require it. Even though it doesn't remotely approach training a student for future work, the point of the thing is to show how dedicated the worker will be to their employer - willing to destroy a portion of their own lives and freedom for the "privilege" of working there.

 

Yes, I haven't heard it expressed quite like that, but perhaps so.
There are jobs where the degree education is required, but for most it is just to signal intelligence and commitment, neither of which apply to wealthy students.

Also connections, if you attended Ivy League or Oxbridge or both

 

Non-Sequitur. Having invested in the education is a good motivator to complete it else choose another course from the getgo.

 

Yes, of course, the Ivy League is always a shortcut to the top - but you'd almost certainly have to be born into the Ruling class to go there.

The only jobs that "require" a degree are Medical, Engineering, and Law, in which the trade school needed for accreditation requires the 4-year degree. Again, not because of any value in the 4-year degree itself, but because someone wants it. Would a gifted high-school grad succeed in Medical School? Maybe so, I really don't see why not.

 

Its just to maintain exclusivity

 

Exactly, and to prove a willingness to submit to the system.

 

Because it is the "right thing to do".

The more people are educated, the more they are employed at better jobs, and therefore the more they spend. The more Demand in the economy, the more jobs there are - and better paying jobs.

(Whether people get paid more or much more depends upon net-in-the-pocket after taxation. That is altogether another subject.)

It's as simple as that. (Take a course in EC101 ... ?)

 

OH so the highest earners should get government subsidies because they spend more now?

And I have taken economics classes apparently you haven't else you wouldn't spout such nonsense. You would also know that demand side economics has proven a failure.

You still have not justified why the $20 and hour plumber should pay for the education of someone who is going to make millions more than they during their lifetimes. The purpose of seeking a higher education is to make more more so pay for your own higher education.

 

We certainly need better economic education. For instance, your absurd notion that spending creates more jobs and thus more wealth. If what you say is true, why do jobs need to be created first? The governemnt can just spend trillions in order to stimulate demand and the jobs will follow.

 

Once again you are not addressing the main point

Those who do complete a four-year degree often do so only after taking out crushing levels of student debt.

What part of that don't you understand?

No the highest earners should pay just sufficient, non-burdensome tax to enable free education, consistent with the student's potential, which is sensible, smart policy to realise the community's desire to maximise its creative and productive potential, as Lafayette and Latherty have pointed out.

 

Actually if humans were rational, non-instinct-directed beings, a supra national IMF (central world Bank) would oversee national governments to do just that. There is plenty of necessary work to employ the c.4 billion available workforce, to achieve the maximum pace of sustainable development that is desirable to achieve a shared quality of life, including aspects of living that go beyond mere production and consumption of goods.

[In the absence of war, there is no shortage of resources that would prevent the engagement of everyone of working age, in productive participation in the economy, thereby simultaneously eliminating the need for welfare and the existence of poverty. A smart species would achieve this before setting out on the exploration of space].

 

If spending creates wealth, why are the jobs needed? Just cut everyone a big, fat check.

 

1.Work (jobs) are necessary to improve (sustainable) increases in the quality of life, including and beyond mere production and consumption.

2.There is no need to limit employment based on availabity of money, since resources exist independently of money.

[You are confusing money with wealth.
Real community wealth = natural resources + applied intelligence; money is merely a facilitator ot exchange between workers with different tasks. Every task engaged in increasing the community's quality of life has above-poverty-level 'value'].

 

So it's a moral issue, not an economic one. Jobs are good because people like themselves better. Religionists make the same argument about religion.

No, I'm not. In fact, that's the point I'm getting to. Spending money does not create wealth.

Does more money equate to more wealth, then? That seems to be the underpinning of your argument. If people were just given work to do, we'd all be happier. In order to generate wealth from those jobs, they must be given money. That's your argument in a nutshell. If money is not wealth, as you state and I know, then neither of those two things are actually true.

 

Not a moral issue. People want to work because they see the prospect (have goals, a vision, a desire) to improve the quality of life for themselves and the community around them in which they must reside.

But education certainly creates wealth, especially when the student happens to be a Gates, turned businessman, whose 'wealth' is easily measured, or an Einstein (discoverer of priceless, potentially life-enhancing scientific truths that will themselves lead to yet more undiscovered scientific truths; Einstein's contribution to 'wealth' creation is less easily measured than Gates's contribution, but is potentially massively greater, measured over time. (Einstein himself did not experience this wealth, as measured by money, during his life).

No. In my formula: community wealth = natural resources + applied intelligence, money is merely a facilitator of this "applied intelligence" activity, which could even occur in the absence of money if there was another way of directly rewarding/sustaining workers.

I believe I have demonstrated that the true 'value' of work cannot and ought not be reduced to mere monetary terms, and since the resources exist to accomodate universal above-poverty-level participation in the economy, then morality and reason demand an economic system that can achieve just that, in order to maximise quality of life on the planet.

Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe HG Wells.

 

Absurd is it? In an economics forum?

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes (a key economic theoretician) proposed to Roosevelt to STOP cutting the budget and start borrowing to spend on government infrastructure. This mollified somewhat Depression Hardship that could have been worse. It was the massive spending on WW2 that finally put an end to the Great Depression.

When the Great Recession hit the US in 2010, Obama acted quickly with his ARRA spending of more than $830B that spiked an exploding unemployment rate at 10%, from which it began to lower. When he asked a Replicant HofR for more such spending in 2011, their response was the idiocy of "Austerity Budgeting".

What happened for four more lonnnnggggg years? See that in this BLS infographic for the answer:

From 2010 to 2014, as one can see, NO NEW JOBS WERE CREATED! Finally, all by itself Americans started spending again, and job were created once more.

Try to remember, this is an Economics Forum ...

 

First of all, I teach economics.

Secondly, I am "spouting economic thought" as it exists today. You have amply demonstrated no historical perspective on the matter of economic theory - especially Stimulus Spending that works to recover from recessions.

For the same reason that the plumber pays taxes to support public secondary-schooling. The country found out a long, long time ago, that higher education makes for a better economy where more people are better off with their lives.

Once again we are in a situation where the poorest off are also those lacking education. See here:


I expect nevertheless that such a lesson is lost on you.

Moving right along ...

 

THE WAR ON POVERTY

I share your convictions regarding war, but I don't see much of a solution. War as we once knew it (WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam) is probably old-hat. As is the present "war" against ISIS that organizes armies to fight one another.

If anything, what we must fear as a nation is not "invasion" - which the attack on Pearl Harbor had brought home strikingly to the American public in the 1940s - but some bomber somewhere taking out a group of people.

That's not "war" really, just political violence. It's scale is far more reduced, and its objectives are not always simple. (It seems anybody with a grudge in the US can take out a group of people with a machine-gun bought at a local store. The very notion of which is abhorrent in most of Europe where automatic-weapons are banned but people do get their hands on Kalachnikovs.)

The "war" in the US I keep harping about is the one declared-and-forgot a long, long time ago. It is the War On Poverty. We've not won it, far from it. We've not even put up a good fight!

Not when more than 40 million American men, women and children must eke out a living below the Poverty Threshold, whilst at the other end the 0.1% obtain 20% of the Nation's Total Wealth.

Uh, uh. Those are the conditions for a Rude Awakening - and I can't imagine why Americans put up with it. Nobody in Europe would.

So, I guess we could agree on that one ... ?

 

And I pity your students with what I see coming out of colleges these days.

Ahh no that theory failed starting in 2009 while demand side succeeded in 1996 and 2003.

We're talking higher education and the earnings gains. It is asserted the college education grants an extra million in lifetime earnings, so pay the tution out of the extra earnings instead of demanding others pay it for you.

And thanks for making my pint here



Of course your position is just a little self serving is it not?

 

Do you actually believe that someone who is fundamentally incompetent can make it to the top just because they have enough "smarts" for an Ivy League degree. My long time in business tells me that such simply not so.

I've seen first-hand these people fail just like anyone else. It is only a question of time.

PS: Donald Dork has a university degree, but it was the 40 megabucks he inherited from his father that set him on the right path. That he is a keen negotiator is recognized and he knows how to build "brand name". Both are obvious. But running a presidency is not like building a brand-name. The guy is going to fail at the job, and we, the sheeple, will pay the consequences ...

 

That's a moral issue, not an economic one. You want to give them jobs because they will, allegedly, feel better. Not because it improves economic results.

If people are doing busy work that doesn't produce real value, then they aren't going to see an improved quality of life.

People who want to educate themselves will attain it. That doesn't even require spending much, if any, money. Especially today, where so much is given away at no cost on the internet.

You're getting off track and into an area where economic calculation would be controlled by central planners.

Why should that be up to you, rather than the person who is doing the work?

Got it. You need to shove your morals down our throats, and to do that you need the police powers of the state and it's power to control money. It's not "a better world" that you want; it's your vision of it.