Jun 21 2011: "Education" has at least four functions that are often at odds with each other. A lot of the "problem" with education comes from focusing on the functions that have lost out to other functions.
The four functions:
1) Networking for the upper classes,
2) Socialization,
3) Holding queue for the workforce,
4) Education (learning).
Networking has always been a feature of "higher education." It's the first intersection of your law career (for instance) with someone who will someday be a Supreme Court Justice. It is why there are "Ivy League" schools. There's an entire vetting process where good schools lead to good schools lead to good schools, and it's a political process that has very little to do with learning.
Socialization applies to the masses as well as the upper classes. School is where we get indoctrinated into the mythology of American exceptionalism, the virtues of work, the free enterprise system, the superiority of democracy to other forms of government, etc. Again, this has little to do with thinking skills -- in fact, it's deeply threatened by independent thought, and not infrequently by facts.
The holding queue function has been growing for over a century, and dramatically in the last thirty years. It presents itself as a credentialing process, but the truth is that we need more people in school for longer periods because there is no work for them. The credentials are generally worthless. This has nothing to do with education -- it's a lottery. Buy your degree and wait for someone to call your number.
I put education last because in any conflict with the other three functions, education loses.
May 22 2011: A comment on jobs: I know very few people who have obtained jobs through a blind application process, and those who do have to work at it for a long, long time. I have never once obtained employment through that process.
What seems to be the way jobs are actually landed is knowing someone who knows someone who recommends you for a position. It's the people network.
My first position was through a friend I'd met in high school, who recommended me for a new opening on a project. He and I later started a business. When that failed, he sold the software to a guy who started calling me with technical questions, and then hired me. When I started to do contract software, I got jobs through people I'd met over the years.
I tend to think this is the "normal" method of finding work.
This is one very compelling practical reason to stick to doing what you like to do, in places that you like to be. You will tend to meet people with similar interests, likes, and needs, and they will become your "network" of job leads. If you enjoy what you spend time doing, you are much more likely to make a good impression in the first place, and it is more likely to lead to work that you find enjoyable.
This starts as early as grade school, continues through high school, and is especially rich in college. The really nice thing about this is that, if you remain natural about it, it's actually fun in and of itself.
May 22 2011: That's fair, but it begs the question: what do people who "value" a resource more highly use to PAY for their inflated valuation of the resource?
This gets lost in the shell game of largeness. It's hard enough to follow three cups, much less seven billion cups.
I use the red pen/blue pen example. Let's say student A has red pens, but likes blue pens, and student B has blue pens, but likes red pens. There's an obvious win-win scenario here (meaning a non-zero-sum game, or "creation of wealth") if the two students simply exchange pens. But if they both like blue pens, the student with the red pens has nothing to trade with. So how does he "pay" for the blue pens the other persons has? Obviously in something that he has, that the other person values more highly than he does.
The end result is a creation of "satisfaction wealth" by redistribution of resources. This economy will never end because people's tastes and desires change all the time, so it will be like the fixed set of Christmas gifts that change hands every year as people give away the gift they got last year. But I don't see the traditional economic wealth creation in this.
To use your Nike example: what do the Nike employees DO with the money they get for their swoosh? They buy a TV so they can watch the 20-something jocks play soccer. Is this what we mean by "creation of wealth?"
May 12 2011: Maxime -- Debra had posted something just before my response above that involved the students videotaping their antics, distributing it on the web, and then getting paid through PayPal. My response was addressed to that.
The students can interact with each other in any imaginable way, physically, mentally, psychically, you name it. They just can't interact with the outside world. Except to order pizza and beer.
The point was to simplify the global economy to illustrate its closed nature. We can't trade with space aliens. So these college students can't sell videos to the outside world.
As Addison points out, a global economy is a very complex system. There are even potential opportunities for self-organization and what might be called "phase transitions" to higher-order homeostatic systems, though I'm not sure the global economy has the right mix of components for that. However, it is certainly complex enough for people to become very confused about what is really happening, and for other people to tell stories that hide the elephant in the room. That's why I wanted to reduce the complexity to a house full of college students.
Tell me more about this idea of creating wealth from benevolent actions.
May 12 2011: So if wealth is valuation of resources, then you cannot increase wealth without increasing resources. Is that correct?
So let's make the simple model a bit more interesting. Let's add a basement. No one lives down there (it's cold and damp), but there's all kinds of "stuff" stockpiled. Old phonograph records. Vintage dresses. A bag of pirate gold. Galileo's telescope.
One of the enterprising students figures out how to wrap pizza around the end of a stick and burn it, and uses this makeshift torch to go down in the basement and bring up vintage dresses. He cuts them up and makes -- curtains! A novelty for which the other students will pay a premium in chore points. But his first load only made one set of curtains. So he goes back to the basement, brings up more dresses, and makes more curtains.
Resources are increasing every time he brings up a load of dresses, so wealth would increase.
I've seen this way of describing wealth creation, and we use it a lot. Clear-cutting a forest, topping a mountain for coal, drilling and then fracking for oil. But this illustrates the problem with this model: the basement has a limited number of dresses, the earth has limited resources.
Now we can make this a really BIG basement, maybe even bigger than the house, but it isn't infinite. We've worked under an economic model of "resource development" that has relied upon the sheer vastness of earth's natural resources, but we've become so efficient and rapacious as a species that we are actually managing to empty the basement. To drink the entire ocean, as in many old tales.
Which illustrates that in this case, at least, we are simply doing faulty accounting with a zero-sum game. We have a set of markers in the game that we don't count -- those are our undeveloped resources. When we put them into play, we pretend we "created" them. We didn't. We moved them around.
May 12 2011: First, thank you for engaging in this topic.
I think I understand inflation and deflation, and it's a direct result of the zero-sum nature of resource wealth in this system. The value of all chore points will (overall) exactly equal the value of all resources. If you put twice as many chore points in circulation, they become half as valuable (inflation). If someone hoards points, the remaining points in circulation become more valuable (deflation). At some point during deflation, everyone starts hoarding their chore points, and you end up with a "liquidity crisis." So your central bank issues more chore points, devaluing the stockpile of the principle hoarder (which pisses him off) and relieving the liquidity crisis. They call this "quantitative easing."
I also understand that all the chore points will redistribute themselves according to supply and demand. Stereos are popular today, tomorrow it will be bongs, the next day beer steins. Chore points and goods will flow around all over the place.
This still doesn't answer (for me) the question of how wealth can be created. I still see a zero-sum game.
There are only so many working stereo parts in the house, so many bongs, so many beer steins. You can convert beer steins to bongs, but not to stereos. You can convert bongs back to beer steins, but it doesn't work so well, and you need to use stereo parts to fill the holes you drilled. Working stereos become scarce, so the price goes up until it becomes too expensive for anyone, and they stop fixing stereos.
May 12 2011: So I have a question, Sam. Do you ever hit a wall in your attempts to empathize?
You mentioned on a different thread that you don't try to empathize with sociopaths, and that's understandable. But I'm wondering how much of your experience of empathy is conditioned by the fact that you deal mainly with students in an academic setting in the eastern US, who (as you put it) have middle-of-the-road responses.
Colorado and much of the west is badly fractured -- we have a lot of prevalent and very extreme views out here, almost all of them far-right. Read any of the rhetoric of Arizona's Sharron Angle (from the 2010 elections), and you get a pretty accurate snapshot of what large groups of people out here passionately "believe." She isn't just a nutcase -- she's a true representative.
I simply can't cross that divide.
By comparison, I find it easy to empathize with (get into the head of) a terrorist. After all, The Terrorist has been part of our popular culture for a long time in the icon of the "vigilante." Batman. Any Clint Eastwood movie. These guys don't file grievances and restraining orders -- they beat the shit out of the "bad guys," who are usually protected by power and wealth and civic standing. They terrorize evildoers, and large numbers of Americans relish seeing that terror (so say the box-office receipts).
May 12 2011: I suspect I may be pointing out an elephant in the room.
But I'm posing this as a question, because if this isn't an elephant in the room -- if it really IS possible to create wealth -- I'd really like someone to explain it to me in terms that I can understand.
May 12 2011: Remember, the premise is that they have no contact with the outside world. They could make videos for each other, and buy and sell them from/to each other, but there is no "outside world" to interact with (other than the pizza guys, and I added them only to avoid the complications inherent in making this a Biosphere III sustainability project). Until we have trade with space aliens to whom we can sell internet videos, our global economy is stuck with the "twenty students" (plus the population growth through pizza guys).
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A comment on Conversation: Is the generation in education getting less intelligent than the ones before them or smarter?
The four functions:
1) Networking for the upper classes,
2) Socialization,
3) Holding queue for the workforce,
4) Education (learning).
Networking has always been a feature of "higher education." It's the first intersection of your law career (for instance) with someone who will someday be a Supreme Court Justice. It is why there are "Ivy League" schools. There's an entire vetting process where good schools lead to good schools lead to good schools, and it's a political process that has very little to do with learning.
Socialization applies to the masses as well as the upper classes. School is where we get indoctrinated into the mythology of American exceptionalism, the virtues of work, the free enterprise system, the superiority of democracy to other forms of government, etc. Again, this has little to do with thinking skills -- in fact, it's deeply threatened by independent thought, and not infrequently by facts.
The holding queue function has been growing for over a century, and dramatically in the last thirty years. It presents itself as a credentialing process, but the truth is that we need more people in school for longer periods because there is no work for them. The credentials are generally worthless. This has nothing to do with education -- it's a lottery. Buy your degree and wait for someone to call your number.
I put education last because in any conflict with the other three functions, education loses.
A reply on Conversation: How can a talented teenager prepare himself for a scientific career? What do you scientists recommend? (Personal experiences, please).
What seems to be the way jobs are actually landed is knowing someone who knows someone who recommends you for a position. It's the people network.
My first position was through a friend I'd met in high school, who recommended me for a new opening on a project. He and I later started a business. When that failed, he sold the software to a guy who started calling me with technical questions, and then hired me. When I started to do contract software, I got jobs through people I'd met over the years.
I tend to think this is the "normal" method of finding work.
This is one very compelling practical reason to stick to doing what you like to do, in places that you like to be. You will tend to meet people with similar interests, likes, and needs, and they will become your "network" of job leads. If you enjoy what you spend time doing, you are much more likely to make a good impression in the first place, and it is more likely to lead to work that you find enjoyable.
This starts as early as grade school, continues through high school, and is especially rich in college. The really nice thing about this is that, if you remain natural about it, it's actually fun in and of itself.
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?
This gets lost in the shell game of largeness. It's hard enough to follow three cups, much less seven billion cups.
I use the red pen/blue pen example. Let's say student A has red pens, but likes blue pens, and student B has blue pens, but likes red pens. There's an obvious win-win scenario here (meaning a non-zero-sum game, or "creation of wealth") if the two students simply exchange pens. But if they both like blue pens, the student with the red pens has nothing to trade with. So how does he "pay" for the blue pens the other persons has? Obviously in something that he has, that the other person values more highly than he does.
The end result is a creation of "satisfaction wealth" by redistribution of resources. This economy will never end because people's tastes and desires change all the time, so it will be like the fixed set of Christmas gifts that change hands every year as people give away the gift they got last year. But I don't see the traditional economic wealth creation in this.
To use your Nike example: what do the Nike employees DO with the money they get for their swoosh? They buy a TV so they can watch the 20-something jocks play soccer. Is this what we mean by "creation of wealth?"
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?
The students can interact with each other in any imaginable way, physically, mentally, psychically, you name it. They just can't interact with the outside world. Except to order pizza and beer.
The point was to simplify the global economy to illustrate its closed nature. We can't trade with space aliens. So these college students can't sell videos to the outside world.
As Addison points out, a global economy is a very complex system. There are even potential opportunities for self-organization and what might be called "phase transitions" to higher-order homeostatic systems, though I'm not sure the global economy has the right mix of components for that. However, it is certainly complex enough for people to become very confused about what is really happening, and for other people to tell stories that hide the elephant in the room. That's why I wanted to reduce the complexity to a house full of college students.
Tell me more about this idea of creating wealth from benevolent actions.
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?
So let's make the simple model a bit more interesting. Let's add a basement. No one lives down there (it's cold and damp), but there's all kinds of "stuff" stockpiled. Old phonograph records. Vintage dresses. A bag of pirate gold. Galileo's telescope.
One of the enterprising students figures out how to wrap pizza around the end of a stick and burn it, and uses this makeshift torch to go down in the basement and bring up vintage dresses. He cuts them up and makes -- curtains! A novelty for which the other students will pay a premium in chore points. But his first load only made one set of curtains. So he goes back to the basement, brings up more dresses, and makes more curtains.
Resources are increasing every time he brings up a load of dresses, so wealth would increase.
I've seen this way of describing wealth creation, and we use it a lot. Clear-cutting a forest, topping a mountain for coal, drilling and then fracking for oil. But this illustrates the problem with this model: the basement has a limited number of dresses, the earth has limited resources.
Now we can make this a really BIG basement, maybe even bigger than the house, but it isn't infinite. We've worked under an economic model of "resource development" that has relied upon the sheer vastness of earth's natural resources, but we've become so efficient and rapacious as a species that we are actually managing to empty the basement. To drink the entire ocean, as in many old tales.
Which illustrates that in this case, at least, we are simply doing faulty accounting with a zero-sum game. We have a set of markers in the game that we don't count -- those are our undeveloped resources. When we put them into play, we pretend we "created" them. We didn't. We moved them around.
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?
I think I understand inflation and deflation, and it's a direct result of the zero-sum nature of resource wealth in this system. The value of all chore points will (overall) exactly equal the value of all resources. If you put twice as many chore points in circulation, they become half as valuable (inflation). If someone hoards points, the remaining points in circulation become more valuable (deflation). At some point during deflation, everyone starts hoarding their chore points, and you end up with a "liquidity crisis." So your central bank issues more chore points, devaluing the stockpile of the principle hoarder (which pisses him off) and relieving the liquidity crisis. They call this "quantitative easing."
I also understand that all the chore points will redistribute themselves according to supply and demand. Stereos are popular today, tomorrow it will be bongs, the next day beer steins. Chore points and goods will flow around all over the place.
This still doesn't answer (for me) the question of how wealth can be created. I still see a zero-sum game.
There are only so many working stereo parts in the house, so many bongs, so many beer steins. You can convert beer steins to bongs, but not to stereos. You can convert bongs back to beer steins, but it doesn't work so well, and you need to use stereo parts to fill the holes you drilled. Working stereos become scarce, so the price goes up until it becomes too expensive for anyone, and they stop fixing stereos.
All zero-sum. Where is wealth created?
A reply on Conversation: How might a person step into the shoes of an "anti-American terrorist" and NOT be labeled "anti-American"?
You mentioned on a different thread that you don't try to empathize with sociopaths, and that's understandable. But I'm wondering how much of your experience of empathy is conditioned by the fact that you deal mainly with students in an academic setting in the eastern US, who (as you put it) have middle-of-the-road responses.
Colorado and much of the west is badly fractured -- we have a lot of prevalent and very extreme views out here, almost all of them far-right. Read any of the rhetoric of Arizona's Sharron Angle (from the 2010 elections), and you get a pretty accurate snapshot of what large groups of people out here passionately "believe." She isn't just a nutcase -- she's a true representative.
I simply can't cross that divide.
By comparison, I find it easy to empathize with (get into the head of) a terrorist. After all, The Terrorist has been part of our popular culture for a long time in the icon of the "vigilante." Batman. Any Clint Eastwood movie. These guys don't file grievances and restraining orders -- they beat the shit out of the "bad guys," who are usually protected by power and wealth and civic standing. They terrorize evildoers, and large numbers of Americans relish seeing that terror (so say the box-office receipts).
But how can one empathize with Sharron Angle?
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?
But I'm posing this as a question, because if this isn't an elephant in the room -- if it really IS possible to create wealth -- I'd really like someone to explain it to me in terms that I can understand.
A reply on Conversation: What does the term "wealth creation" mean?