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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33683 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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You have to account for all the surplus value they generate that gets captured by their employers, landlords, and uncompetitive or exploitative local industries like food.

I have a hard time appreciating this POV. It sounds pleasant but how is this quantified?

Example: a family of 4 moves to my town, attracted by affordable housing. Dad works full-time delivering pallets of sugar water for $20/hour. Mom picks up DoorDash shifts while kids are at daycare school for some extra bucks. So, lets say their household income is $45,000/year.

Their two kids consume approximately $6000/month in public school funds alone, or $72,000/year. That's just going by their kids in school.

Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school, to say nothing of all of their other socialized costs (roads, police, fire, sanitation, etc)? Am I looking through the wrong lens here? Because I can't see how society is ever ahead in this scenario.

Public schools spend a lot, but it doesn’t cost anywhere near $6000/month. The American average is more like $1000/month.

Now I’m not claiming that lots of lower middle class families are good for the city budget. But public school costs are only about half their family income(Catholic schools could get the job done for a third, if you’re looking for a benchmark of ‘how much of that is just the government spending more money because it can’).

Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical. I don't know if all things equal out in favor of them producing positive value, but I do know that it's tricky calculating such things and that your own calculations have so far neglected crucial points.

Also I don't think your numbers for the cost of schooling are correct. I thought there was an article on the original SSC saying the annual cost per student is 10k or something.

From https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

The average district spends $12,000 per pupil per year on public schools (up to $30,000 in big cities!)

My $3000/month number is is computed it from my local district's 2025 budget statement. We're not even a big city.

Note schools in general bullshit the number into being about half of that by telling you what the program expenses are, but they're not telling you about total costs like grants to build them shiny (or shitty) buildings that are depreciating. You have to dig more to calculate that.

Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical.

Do we? OK, the state will spend $360,000 per kid just to put them through school alone (again, not counting CHIP, and other social costs), and one of them will perhaps be employable enough to get their own sugar water delivery job for $40,000/year for 40 years while the other takes half of that time off to look after their future kids who repeat the cycle. Then they start drawing retirement benefits and maybe cost $10k/month in health care for the last 1-10 years of their life.

This isn't a total accounting but I'm not seeing obvious upside here.

Yeah, i suppose if you're living somewhere with high inefficiency and waste the numbers will be extremely negative for all but the upper echelons of society. My model of modern society is that much of its value is produced by machines (capital) which only require skeleton crews of mechanics and engineers to maintain, and that asides from those specialists and the capitalists who own the machines, most other people are superfluous. On the other hand, democracy provides a brutish sort of power to those superfluous people, and thus they are able to extract value beyond what their economic potential would otherwise command. So the attempt to internally partition countries along these class lines could be seen as a class warfare attempt to undermine democracy.

Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school

Yes. While this may be the price tag, there is no way in hell it takes $6000 per month to teach a single child. For this money you could literally hire a governess for each child (well, +/- the sudden spike in demand for teachers), and operating at scale is supposed to make things cheaper.

It's not reasonable to substitute some idealized, hyper efficient cost for what education actually costs. Could it be cheaper? Obviously. But $6k a month (or whatever) is what it currently actually costs.

As a side note, you are right about "for that much money you could ___", and that's why taxes are collected at gunpoint.

Relax. It's only $3000 month per kid. It's $6000 per month for two kids.

Isn't that still a decent salary for a governess?

Yes, I didn't like public school to begin with but learning how ludicrously expensive it actually is is what radicalized me on homeschooling.

While public schools are mostly run by functionaries who are their jobs as being about spending as much money as possible as inefficiently as possible and think the rest of society exists solely to serve that goal, education is also just expensive. Eyeballing Catholic schools near me, tuition for one kid is about $6500/yr at schools attached to working class parishes(upper middle class ones list tuition as ‘it depends’, which probably means it’s subsidized for all but the very wealthy)- with subsidized tuition for subsequent children(presumably this subsidy is paid by the Catholic Church, either at the parish level or by the diocese). My local school district spends just under $10k/yr per kid, not counting capital improvements(Catholic schools don’t either, so this is a fair comparison). So by that comparison about 35% of public school spending is overspending. Charters in my state get about $10,000/yr, with an additional $1,000/student in years with construction going on at the school, so more like public schools.

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