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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3834 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.

I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.

IIRC Catholic schools spend the same as charters for better results(how much of that is selection effects is an interesting question- Catholic schools avoid idiocy like the whole word method so it’s probably not 100%). So delivering education for that price point is definitely doable, public schools do a lot of cost disease.

Secular private schools are expensive probably in part because they’re funding things like chefs in the cafeteria and public-school quality athletics complexes. I’m not sure the difference can fund galt’s gulch- I think you can make a private club gated parallel society compound in the middle of nowhere, but it’s going to entail a big drop in standards of living or a wealthy(like billionaire tier) outside backer.

Well, there are all sorts of costs/benefits to moving out to the middle of nowhere. The real price of doing so isn't the cost of building a fence or housing or whatever, it's the price of moving away from any large center of commerce. Transplant a few thousand people directly from NYC to Podunk and even after improving their housing substantially you'll have hundreds of millions of dollars left over to build whatever else needs to be build, including a school.

Other prices, such as tuition, are also inflated by this--teachers need a place to live, after all. Taxes will be lower. Food will be cheaper. Everything will be better except for the one thing that keeps hundreds of millions of people from doing this--economic opportunity.

So yeah, if everyone kept their same incomes and bought in to such a society, I think you could build and run a comparable private school for a fraction of the price, but the "if" is certainly no settled matter.

One of the costs of middle of nowhere living is lower incomes.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We're talking about whether you can fund a Galt's Gulch for the price of a private school. I think you can, but you probably need to make it much cheaper, because the people funding it will be taking pay cuts to move out and participate in the project.

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