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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   29562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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There are often problems that are made worse with more money.

There are generalizable circumstances that cause this to happen, and those circumstances often apply to government organizations but not exclusively to them.

  1. Principal agent problems. The money is being spent by an agent on behalf of someone else, and either due to conflicts of interest or lack of knowledge the money is spent in a way that actively harms the principal.
  2. Information gaps. The consumer and producer are not easily able to judge what is good spending vs bad spending in terms of solving the problem. This can cause money to be spent on costly or ineffective signalling items.
  3. Crowding out good money. A working market with a working and functioning incentive system can be thrown off by injections of cash from a misaligned actor. Producers go chasing the extra cash while not caring as much about the original consumer. And consumers do less research than they would if it was their own money being spent. This happens in medical insurance all the time.

I think student loans are actively harmful to many of the people involved.

I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed. Right now they suffer from all of the above problems.

I appreciate your response and recognize that these are issues that plausibly arise from more funding from non market parties.

I won't debate your points as I agree they are likely the case in some respects, I will only quibble on the point that none of these issues imply that stopping this funding would improve or leave the same the education level of the population. We might be spending money inefficiently, we might be issuing loans in a way that is net financial negative for some students, and we may be throwing off the private market of education, but those are all things you can do while still raising the education level of the population, and indeed goals like that are why we as a society trust the government and not the market for some things.

At this point, it becomes about how much extra money you want to spend for how much education, which is a much harder question, so I'll leave it there.

Higher levels of education is only good if education is mostly capital formation. But if it is mostly signalling then it is doubly wasteful to subsidize it. From personal experience I'm inclined to think of it as mostly signalling, the econ literature apparently agrees with me.

Can you point me to the evidence you're referencing? My impression of the stats was that higher level education at college/university has a quite large lifelong earnings benefit.

i suppose this could still be just signalling that gets them into a higher earning network of like-minded signallers, but if we are trying to change this economic framework we would somehow have to also disincentive businesses from hiring based on this signalling. And that does not seem like an easy ask to me.

Sheepskin effects.

It's the finding that someone with 3.9 years of college education and no degree earns significantly less than someone with 4 years and a degree.

You don't have to ask anything of business. Just stop subsidizing a signalling game.

It's a bit like handing out stools at a concert so people can see over the crowd better. It's self defeating.

Hmm, I see what you mean but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. For example, (correct me if I'm wrong) I think we may agree that medical school teaches valuable and necessary skills to being a doctor, and is not predominantly a signalling game. However, literally no one will hire a person as a doctor if they made it all the way to final exams and then quit. The signalling is part and parcel with the actually valuable education.

Edit: and if we stopped subsidizing students to go through medical school, I don't think that would make any difference to the above.

There are different degrees with different levels of capital formation vs signalling.

Even with technical degrees that seem very useful my experience and the experience of those I know is that half of it is useful to someone but 80-95% is still mostly useless to any individual because those careers require specialization.

The student loan program is mostly indiscriminate, and graduate and doctorate degrees are often funded in other ways.

I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed.

Effectively making the university co-sign the loans seems like a good idea; there are numerous practical problems (e.g. if the student voluntarily drops out or transfers, who is responsible?) but in general it seems OK. But making them a percentage of post-college income owed is giving universities a way to capture nearly all the value of the education, and it worsens the problem of lucrative degree programs subsidizing financially worthless ones.

If the college is going to reap the benefits of a lucrative degree program it might be incentivized to encourage them more.

A college that graduates a bunch of engineers that can go on to make 6 figure salaries is going to be better off than a college that creates a bunch of underemployed barristas.

With the way student loans currently work the university is getting the price of tuition and on campus amenities, and those costs are similar between different degrees. But the cost of teaching the more lucrative degrees is often more expensive, usually because professors that teach it have the option of better private industry jobs, so they command higher salaries at the university.

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