Some Red State/Blue State Indicia
- Thread starter nsacpi
- Start date
Sure - Along with blowing through a budget for ideological reasons at the expense of native new yorkers.
Lets see it play out more than a few months and see what 'services' are still provided with a large budget deficit.
sturg33
I
Yes subsidizing higher education has proved super valuable!
sturg33
I
K-shape economy is alive and well
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
It sure has. The return is 10% per year of schooling when measured by income. Higher when social benefits are included.
sturg33
I
you have a persistent behavior where you only look at one side the coin.
you look at incomes but never post about costs
Your desire to use averages as if it tells the story for all is amusing....
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
actually a metric like return on investment looks at both sides of the coin
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
i could pick only good or bad returns but that would be cherry picking
Or you could acknowledge that education is really only good for a small subset of hte people that are going to college in terms of earning potential.
For the rest its a debt trap of useless skills for the real world.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
there is a distribution...we could focus on the tails (cherry picking) or the entire distribution
Or we could make the obvious conclusion that 'educated' is not a homogenous population and therefore analytics on the whole population are close to meaningless.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
true they are not a homogenous population
some well-educated people do less well than not-so-well educated people
but that doesn't tell us much about the returns to education
The conentration of studies are all unique populations. Sure you can map them all the higher level groupings like Finance / Accounting / physical sciences / womens studies / theatre
I wonder if these groups would all have different 'average' outcomes.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Outcomes do vary by degree and field. Which is why we subsidize a graduate education in STEM fields to a much greater extent. For example, there are no NSF graduate fellowships in women's studies or theater. There are some positive externalities from the arts but not of the same magnitude as the natural sciences, computer science, math, statistics, etc. So we should subsidize some fields more than others. And we do!
Don't do it by degree (assuming you are differentiating between batchelor/graduate/doctorate).
Just do area of study.
The outcomes are VASTLY different which is why higher education should not only be for a small subset of the population - None of it should be funded by public dollars unless its a high value area of study.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
People with a degree in the humanities on average earn about 20% less than those with a degree in the hard sciences. But they make 40% more than those without a degree. I have no problem with public policy taking those kinds of outcomes into consideration. And public policy does do this to a much larger extent than you realize. The amount of money we spend on scientific research and developing scientists is enormous. And justified by the returns.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
The lifetime present value of extra earnings for humanities majors is estimated at $302,000 for drama, $445,000 for English, $538,000 for history, and $659,000 for philosophy.
Not all of this accrues to the private individual. They contribute taxes from that extra income. Along with that higher income and education come reductions in all sorts of social ills, such as crime.
Not all of this accrues to the private individual. They contribute taxes from that extra income. Along with that higher income and education come reductions in all sorts of social ills, such as crime.
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nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
There is one more point I would make. The humanities and hard sciences are economic complements.
One example from history: the printing press (a hard science achievement) and literacy (a humanistic achievement}. Both supercharged each other.
One from the present: AI and domain expertise. I suspect the complementarity between the two will be even more powerful than that between the printing press and the spread of literacy.
AI can write a mediocre novel with a small amount of prompting. It is going to help human novelists write many more good and even great novels.
Humanities also have an intrinsic value that is difficult to capture with standard economic analysis. Sticking with the example of a novel, the amount of "GDP" generated by a great novel doesn't capture its full value. Novels written hundreds of years ago continue to profoundly affect how we think about all of life's dimensions. They influence the choices we make in ways we are often not even aware. Same for the visual arts. Same for philosophers and theologians and historians.
One example from history: the printing press (a hard science achievement) and literacy (a humanistic achievement}. Both supercharged each other.
One from the present: AI and domain expertise. I suspect the complementarity between the two will be even more powerful than that between the printing press and the spread of literacy.
AI can write a mediocre novel with a small amount of prompting. It is going to help human novelists write many more good and even great novels.
Humanities also have an intrinsic value that is difficult to capture with standard economic analysis. Sticking with the example of a novel, the amount of "GDP" generated by a great novel doesn't capture its full value. Novels written hundreds of years ago continue to profoundly affect how we think about all of life's dimensions. They influence the choices we make in ways we are often not even aware. Same for the visual arts. Same for philosophers and theologians and historians.
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msstate7
Well-known member
Wonder how student loan (20 to 25 year plans) factor in to it