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