msellout

Note that at the most-selective universities there does appear to be a relationship between selectivity and education ROI.

The trouble with linear methods is that they often fit to the bulk of the population and have poor fit at the extremes.

What effect do you think that has?

If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.

If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.

Good point. That's why it's likely the youth and the not-yet-born will pay a higher percent of their lifetime incomes in taxes while probably receiving less benefit. Americans have a history of voting wealth transfers to themselves from their grandchildren.

> some people "pay for more than they use."

The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.

> It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"

A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.

Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.

The author excluded roads financed by gasoline tax from the analysis. I don't remember reading about sales and income taxes in the article, but perhaps those are in the same category.

More variant pricing will better distribute usage. The unfortunate effects on the poor can be negated by a sales tax paid back to all citizens equally as a lump sum.

Yikes. Yes, of course technology is driven by human preferences. But, No, humans must occasionally accept that certain habits are not sustainable given current and near-future technologies.

I'm often annoyed when reading reports that use percentages instead of the actual ratios. For example, "2 out of 3" is much better than "66.7%".

Did you recover any money? How difficult was the process?

The buyer of non-voting shares is betting that eventually the company will start a dividend or share-buyback program, or that there will be a subsequent buyer that will pay more than the current price.

A chart of growth rate might have a peak, but a chart of the thing that is growing is more simply modeled as a sigmoid that has an initial exponential growth portion, then a logarithmic portion which ends in a plateau.

I asked a guy who had taken four startups to IPO how it was he seemed to work such reasonable hours while other entrepreneurs worked much longer. He said he assumed they were mostly doing trial and error, while he had a better sense of what to do.