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Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport? Well, I suppose there's the issue of 'free' in that someone eventually has to pay for it. But in principle, these things genuinely are supposed to be investments. Not investments in the 'doubling down for the tenth time on this shitcoin that's constantly reaching new bottoms like ICP or California High Speed Rail' sense, actual investments that deliver returns. Public transport is supposed to be economical, it's energetically efficient at least. If construction costs are low it makes a lot of sense. Good infrastructure is important for industry too. Education is supposed to improve the quality of the workforce in economic terms, produce sensible, virtuous citizens. Same with healthcare.
Everyone wants those things, they just have a bunch of other goals as well. For instance, it's impossible to have a high-quality public transport system if it's full of drug addicts, or if you bog everything down in so many environmental reviews that nobody can build anything efficiently.
In Australia, about 11% of 5-7 year old boys (and 5% of 5-7 year old girls) are now on the NDIS disability scheme (for things like 'developmental delay' or autism). My source is paywalled. Costs are out of control, 14% annual growth, 35 Billion AUD this year. I fully expect we're causing considerable damage to perfectly normal boys by medicalizing what could easily be ignored. But people (especially the newish Labor government) don't want to look like they're stripping 'care' from people, they don't want some parent of disabled children sobbing on national media. So their response is to chair an independent report that'll come back in October, aiming to reduce cost growth to a mere 8% per year. If I'm reading the article correctly, the minister involved also wants to spend another $730 million AUD on 'capacity building' to reduce costs in the long run. I have very low expectations.
The issue here is that they're not making use of all the options to achieve utilitarian goals. For instance, a utilitarian might very well come to the conclusion that they should just shoot a certain subset of criminals. Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else. Given that there's no 'turn him into a normal person' gun, a utilitarian might say 'shoot him dead', especially if prison is expensive. But what you see as an excessive utilitarian would always ask for more rehabilitation, more programs, more education, or avoid the subject by talking about 'root causes' and then frame them in utilitarian logic. Unless they have a time machine, addressing root causes won't change fully-formed parasitic criminals.
As it intrudes more on them personally, people get less tolerant of crime (consider the San Fran women who are warming to my preferred cut-them-down approach). I think we'd be better off if decisionmakers had more skin in the game. If there was anything in Stalin's Russia like California High Speed Rail, the NKVD would be shooting and torturing wreckers for weeks. While massive purges have various negative externalities, is there no way to punish people for collectively squandering tens of billions of dollars? Prison, a fine? And what about some rewards if things go well? We could even tack a prediction market on here, make politicians buy bonds that pay off if their policy succeeds to show their sincerity.
I conclude with three beliefs:
If you pay for something, you get more of it.
Defeating enemies is a useful alternative to deterring them, especially if they're weak.
Decision-makers and overseers must have an incentive to get things done efficiently and correctly
Yes. For the second two, most of the right plus libertarians. For the first, mostly only libertarians at least until you get to post-secondary, which I suppose doesn't count as "many".
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Drug Dealer Adam is a utility monster, so it's okay.
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They should, because the first doesn't exist, and the latter two are always expensive.
Education was better and significantly cheaper some 70 years ago, before the educationalists and administrators started multiplying. Have you seen that CATO graph of how spending per pupil rose 250% in the US since about 1970, inflation adjusted? Outcomes did not change at all. It's clearly possible to do much better, for much less. I can't find the CATO graph but this is just as good: https://housingtoday.org/animated-chart-of-the-day-public-school-enrollment-staff-and-inflation-adjusted-cost-per-pupil-1970-to-2018/
Japan does healthcare and public transport pretty well. I know their demographics are very different to US demographics. But it is possible in principle to have an efficient, effective health and transport system. It just depends on what other priorities policymakers are prepared to sacrifice.
One of the main drivers of the increased cost and reduction in efficiency in education is progressive sentiments of expanding education access. Most of the students progressives care the most about should be dumped into the workforce at 13. Not being willing to do that drives cost and other stupid trends in education like grade inflation and the reduced value of a HS diploma.
Significantly reducing the school leaving age specifically for the lowest IQ and least functional students seems like it has easily foreseeable and terrible social engineering effects. The thing about kids who are not future engineers because they aren't college material which everyone seems to forget, including politically incorrect HBD enthusiasts, is that they're people who aren't future engineers because they aren't college material. 80 IQ teens with bad values having less supervision and more freedom is in fact a bad thing, and sure that's a little bit unfair to 120 IQ teens who could easily be done with secondary school at 15 or 16 but have to drag out highschool by another two years, but warehousing bright teens unnecessarily causes a lot less damage than having unsocialized dumb adolescents entering their peak criminality years with nothing to do.
If we lived in a world where even poor people mostly had intact families teaching good values in a culture that supported that kind of thing it might be different, but we don't and no one seems to know how to get there on a societal level. 80 IQ single moms are by and large not going to suddenly become fundamentalist Christians raising their kids with the beliefs that hard work is a sacred value from God, honesty and rule following bring rewards, sexual promiscuity is immoral and low status, drugs are evil, etc. And fundamentalist Christianity is more or less the only subculture in America today that has any success with low IQ people, so it's not as if I picked an absurd example.
So, on one hand you are admitting its basically just a prison of sorts, but on the other you want to concentrate the lil inmates there and also subject their brighter peers to forced interaction with them.
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You are assuming that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career, and I'm not so sure that's true. We live in a broken society and it seems like lots of these kids would just do drugs and hang around gangs.
Yes there's lots of not-terribly-bright but not actually bad kids around, and lots of them would benefit immensely from expanded school to work programs or Germany-style tracking into apprenticeships. But you'll notice those are well supervised situations where they don't have unlimited freedom to make their own decisions, because making their own decisions and handling freedom is not something teenagers tend to be good at.
This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).
>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so
>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait
>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise
>confused_nick_young.jpg
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You don't actually need much money if you're living with your parents(and even if average teens are gainfully employed, most people don't want to rent to them) and petty crime that gangs will introduce them to is a pretty natural progression from begging.
I totally agree that getting 16 year old boys who aren't doing well in school onto the construction site instead is at least worth trying in most cases. I do think, however, that getting them to actually do this is really really hard and that the normal incentive structures of American society would lead to the opposite results from a mass program of pushing the bottom quintile of students out of class.
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