animefan

The same wikipedia article goes on to say

[these academies] are to be distinguished from the Western-style university which is an autonomous organization of scholars that originated in medieval Europe and was adopted in other world regions since the onset of modern times

Is this a serious comment? Do you believe that there is literally a "guy who invented college".

I think that progressives (especially Chomsky) overstate the role of hard power/money in politics. Or perhaps they understate the role of soft power. E.g. the progressive movement in the West is driven by a relatively small group of academics and journalists. It is notable how many social sciences professors are self-professed Marxists. I don't see this in a conspiratorial way (as some do), of Marxists seeking to push an agenda. But rather, the core of the progressive movement are people who think that both the economic, and also the political and social realm, are characterized by power, domination and oppression. If you don't believe this about economics, it's much harder to believe this about the rest.

I don't buy it. Any academic presentation of a subject includes the limits of current knowledge. Maybe this is not emphasized enough, but it's a matter of extent, not a qualitative refusal to acknowledge ignorance.

A great example is that mainstream academic economists are very open about not being able to explain why monetary stimulus works. At one point (maybe this goes back to Keynes or even further) people attributed it to sticky prices. But current research cannot come up with a reasonable mechanism based on sticky prices that would explain the magnitude of the effect of monetary policy. Currently people accept that what we observe on the macro level cannot be explained on the micro level.

Bankers like their cash flow, but they also have to compete with other bankers. My claim (and the claim implicit in the article) is that people will get an actuarially fair rate for their education. And given this, they will not pay back more (on average) than if they paid up front, or if they took out a loan under a competitive loan market. I don't think your parody of how bankers think makes sense. Our economic system is not perfect, but it has a certain logic to it, and refusing to engage with that and instead making up nefarious motives, is not productive.

Generally "efficient" means maximizing social utility, which in practice for economists means GDP [0].

I agree that there are benefits to an educated population (in spite of disagreeing with the progressive bias in university education). But you are wrong that "efficiency" is meaningless or means "making us all incrementally more efficient at doing whatever it is precisely that we're already doing". Efficiency means increasing the size of the "pie" so that however we choose to divide it up, there is more pie to go around. We could divide the GDP from the year 1800 as evenly as we liked and not reach the standard of living of 2015.

[0] and no, the broken windows fallacy does not apply here, no one is trying to literally maximize GDP, but GDP represents the kind of thing that economists care about.

yes I think more colleges should be built, or existing colleges should expand.

Charitably, that would read "the government already has enough information to collect payments anyway, so it might as well do this, but should let private industry do the rest". Personally I don't think this is an appropriate use of the information the government has, or the government's power. In Australia they do it this way, but the government also does the loans. However your critique lacks substance as it ignores the legitimate reasons why some tasks are more appropriate for the government, and some for private industry, and repeats the tired old "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" schtick.

Both equity and debt have an element of moral hazard, and both provide some incentives to make the efficient choice about whether to get an education. A student taking on a loan for education (Australian style or otherwise) might make themselves worse off if their future income change from education is sufficiently low.

In my opinion, returns to college education are so high that the focus should be on having as many people go as possible, not on selection the efficient subset.

There is nothing in the article that suggests that the bank would be entitled to anything but a fixed share of your income, female or otherwise. In theory [0], if women on average earned less than men because of taking time off to raise children, then they would have to pay a higher percentage of their future income for their education. But on average they would pay the same total amount (in an efficient market). I'm not sure why you think this would be unfair. This would not differ from the present market where women and men also pay equal amounts for education.

[0] Personally I don't think that selling equity in oneself would ever be possible for practical/legal reasons. As mentioned in another post, the only thing that comes close is Australia's higher education loans.

That is pretty much it. I would guess that most people pay back their debt in the end, so it is not entirely equity-like, it is more like a mix of debt and equity (the interest rate is below market, so lower income people end up paying back less in net-present-value).

I guess this is the economically efficient solution. The main problem is that it needs to be administered by the government, for practical reasons as well as adverse selection. In Australia it also happens that the top 5 universities are of roughly equal quality, and the next 5 are not far below, so that a one-size-fits-all approach makes sense (there are no good private universities in Australia). I don't see how this system could work in the US where there is such a wide range of qualities in universities.

That's not clear at all. Education fees have gone up, but it's not clear that the cause is student loans (and the subsequent increase in demand for education), and even if they did, we would expect at least some increase in education as a result of loans that allow more people to get an education. Should people who have the cash up front be expected not to compete?

But I think the main difference is a shift in jobs where higher education becomes a requirement, and this is not just because of competition among employees, but because the supply of jobs is changing. Low skill jobs are moving offshore or taken by (sometimes illegal) immigrants who can live more cheaply. In order to obtain the (higher) standard of living of today's America, people need to create more value which requires more skills. A perfect example is the IT industry. Company's like Google create huge amounts of value[0], and employees who contribute this are rewarded.

[0] no, not selling ads, but the service that people use in exchange for the micro-payment of viewing an ad.

I guess there are two possibilities.

1. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses compete with each other. In this case, increasing safety standards in a uniform way, will not change profits since the costs can be passed on to consumers.

2. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses are competing with other forms of transport. In that case, imposing more safety standards will result in less business being done by truck, and more by other means. As long as these don't have worse safety issues, this would be a good thing.

You are right the revenue is a meaningless figure in both cases.

In almost all cases knowledge of copy-on-write doesn't have to be widespread because it is equivalent to value semantics.

It is only because they were using a buggy dll (which for non-matlab users, is custom native code that matlab calls against using a FFI), that the expected semantics of matlab were violated.

In the context of that sentence, I was referring to the bonds bought by open market operations, which are primarily US government bonds and would not include private label subprime RMBSs.

The kind of close-to-risk-free bonds bought in open market operations are all fundamentally the same because they simply move money from one point in time to another.