DISQUS

Also, as another NZer, a lot of NZ land is very hilly and remote, so unless you go to the really heavy-capital investment of terracing the hillsides it only makes economic sense to raise sheep.

But most European countries are ones whose identity arises from the arbitrariness of who married who (eg the ascension of the Scottish King James VI to be King of England as well was the result of his grandmother being English royalty) or who managed to win a war at the right time. And why is Canada a different country to the USA? Why is Texas part of the USA and not Mexico?

The magic ju-ju man in the sky has a surprising tendency to change his beliefs when the people on the ground want him to change, so that doesn't strike me as reason to believe in no growth. Morocco is changing and developing.

I will also note that the bearded blokes do not derive their sole claim to authority from the Koran, not as long as the police and the army follow their instructions. Guns are a pretty strong claim on authority, even without any religious backing at all.

And what right do you have to assert what words the mullahs may use, with or without authority? If I was a mullah I'd cock a snock at you and go on using whatever words I thought were right.

What is your definition of human rights?
To quote Wikipedia: the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled".
Do we have a right to a traditional way of life? When has a way of life gone on long enough to become traditional? Are efforts to stop the Norwegians and Japanese from whaling a violation of their human rights because they have a traditional right to a way of life? Do people have a right to vaccum-cleaner mechanised fishing methods, even if they destroy the fishing stocks?

The NZ government introduced individual transferrable fishing quotas to manage the rights to fish that were common by tradition. Was that a violation of human rights?

Water rights often cause conflict. Say that upstream communities in a river have always had a right to 10,000 cubic metres of water for their farming, but climate change means that river levels are running low and they are taking too much water. Is changing their rights to water a violation of human rights?

Let's say an organisation wants to build a power station to supply a hospital with electricity, thus increasing access to healthcare in the local community. The options boil down to a hydro-run system, affecting water use, or a thermal station removing a main source of drinking water, or no power station (it's not windy enough for wind power). Is making those tough decisions a violation of human rights? In that situation, how do you avoid not violating someone's rights?

How about the world gets serious about climate change, and massively cuts back on coal use, thus throwing coal miners' traditional way of life into disarray in the name of the environment? Is that a violation of human rights?

Is there some special reason to favour a minimum living wage legislation, when many people earning the minimum wage are teenagers or otherwise not dependent on it, and many poor people can't work at all, as opposed to a minimum income subsidy paid to keep people above a poverty level? Is someone who advocates a universal basic income rather than a minimum wage really advocating a policy of violating human rights, or are they just disagreeing about how to do things?

Human rights are great if they can be applied to everyone, but it doesn't strike me that they're great ways to manage problems of resource allocation (property rights have far more advantages).

But we don't know what are the institutions that create the conditions under which opportunities to create wealth are maximised. It strikes me as entirely possible that even the richest country in the world has not achieved institutions that can maximise wealth.
Furthermore, the institutions that appear to create wealth quite plausibly vary from culture to culture, eg history in some countries might mean that a political settlement can only be stable under institutions that are just not needed in countries with a different history. For example, Northern Ireland apparently has undergone streneous efforts to keep the police force balanced between Protestants and Catholics, a matter which the rest of the Anglo-speaking world doesn't appear to worry about. But how do we know? Balancing the police force may impose costs relative to those in societies that don't have to worry about it, but still be necessary to avoid another round of wealth-destroying terrorism in Northern Ireland - in other words the benefits might outweigh the costs in the case of Northern Ireland. So we can't look to cross-country comparisons to tell us what institutions generate wealth in any particular case. So reasonable people could easily disagree about what institutions are required in a culture to generate wealth, let alone what insitutions are required to maximise it.

And if we can't agree on how to implement a right, what's the point of declaring it a right? What's the point in declaring that I, or a government, has a moral obligation to do something if there's no broad social consensus on what that something is, and no remotely objective way to say whether or not someone is actually meeting their moral obligation to provide such a right?

Negative rights do generate hard cases where it's not clear where the obligations lie (eg people who want to exercise their freedom of speech to disrupt funerals), but positive rights seem to me to be all hard cases.

By many, literacy is no longer seen as merely the ability to ‘read and write’, but instead to make sense of the world through wider competencies and abilities.

Is this a good thing? Does not redefining the word literacy to cover more topics merely lose us specifity? What's gained by redefining "literacy" as something wider than reading and writing?
For centuries there have been ways for making sense of the world that are more than merely the ability to read and write. For example, maps (useful for navigation), technical drawings (used by engineers), the conventions of mathematics (eg what the equal sign means), the command of speech-making skills or oratory, the scientific method. I think all of these are very valuable, but I don't see what is gained by redefining literacy to include all of them and anything else you can think up.

And I have some doubts about some of the claims, for example you quote Kress in 1998 as saying "The problem is that, until recently, ‘visualisation [was] seen as an unproblematic kind of ‘translation’ from one semiotic mode into another - as a simplistic kind of translation from one language to another’ "

Kress doesn't say who was seing this as an unproblematic kind of translation, but this view was certainly not true of specialists in graphic design. I took a high school exam in technical drawing in NZ in 1992 and the course had been offered for decades. My engineering university programme included as a compulsory course more technical drawing, and particularly good examples of visulisation have been admired for decades - for example the first diagrammatic map of the London Underground (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map). And I note that Harry Beck drew on previous mapping experience. If all of society regarded visualisation as unproblematic, why so much emphasis on teaching it, and on teaching it in university engineering schools?
Of course there may have been people in society who regarded it as unproblematic, and it may be that those people are the ones who Kress was referring to. But when it comes to *anything* in education you can always find someone in society who thinks it's dead simple, either because they are a natural at it or because they don't know anything at all about it. Merely referring to the uninformed doesn't tell us much about society.

And I am curious about the comment by Tyner that visual literacy shouldn't be separated from information literacy or media literacy. Does he provide in his report more detailed explanations of why he thinks this is so? In high school my English teachers were supposed to teach us visual literacy, but the gap between their knowledge and the feedback they could provide and that that my graphic design teacher was providing was vast. For example the graphic design teacher could list all the different distortions introduced by various projections onto paper, and expected us to be able to identify them to, the English teachers never even used the word projection. How does Tyner address this?

Interesting post. Some niggles - is there a myth that learning to read is over by third grade? Or if there is, does this myth have anything to do with joining the literacy club? I can understand why you might worry, but I think it is a universal problem with any complex idea at all that people can easily simplify the idea and then believe the simplification without being quite aware that they are doing so. I suspect that if everyone saw reading as a lifelong endeavour there would still be a proliferation of myths, perhaps different myths, but still the same fundamental problem.

And, while comprehension is definitely always important with reading, I can see how kids can spend time focusing on just decoding - we only have limited brain power and when you are learning something new it is time to focus on that. I found when I was learning Latin and doing a translation I had to take a first stab at translating the passage and then re-read it to see if the passage made sense - I couldn't both translate and read for meaning at the same time, I didn't have the working memory. Kids can and perhaps should practice comprehension with oral stories while they are in the initial stages of learning reading.

Incidentally, I don't think I'm a very courageous reader, and I'm very sure that I'm not a purposeful nor strategic one. Instead I wander around randomly picking up information. Am I now disqualified from the Literacy Club?

I haven't watched the video. And I support gay marriage. But I do note one mistake in the comment.

Marriage is not a purely private interaction. Marriage is fundamentally a public matter. Marriage is the way that society identifies whether or not a family link has been forged between two people (or more generally, more people) even if they are not blood relatives. The whole point in getting married is to make that link clear to society. And traditionally the reason that society cared was that it was a way of determining which man was responsible for which children and thus bringing social pressure to bear on men who shirked their fatherly duties.

Furthermore in every modern society that I know about, who the state recognises as married or not married has legal implications. Examples include inheritance laws and next-of-kin laws. Take a case where a person is in a coma, their flatmate claims that they are married, the parents say no marriage ever took place, and the flatmate and the parents differ sharply about the best course of medical treatment. This is not a purely private interaction - the staff at the hospital need to know whose instructions to follow.
Or take a case where a rich old man hires a live-in housekeeper. After his death of natural causes, the housekeeper claims that they were secretly married and as such she is entitled to the wife's share of his property. His children say this is nuts, no such marriage ever took place. The decision by the courts as to whether the marriage existed is not a purely private interaction, the executor of the estate needs to know where the assets should go (although there's a certain risk that the decision will be moot if all the inheritance will go on legal costs).
Furthermore, legal rights are often given to those who are married, such as tax laws (for example, under NZ law on the one hand you can transfer any amount of money you like to your spouse without paying gift duty, on the other hand if you hire your spouse to work for your company for a ridiculously large amount of money which saves you a lot on taxes IRD will investigate in the way they would for a close blood relative but not for a stranger). Immigration laws also differ. These laws could be changed of course, but at the moment their existance means that marriage is not merely private.

Look at it another way, if marriage is purely a private interaction, why would anyone care whether the state legally recognised same-sex marriages?

So lyca, to summarise we don't know how society can be changed to reduce crime. Under circumstances, I'm rather going to pass on feeling guilty or the idea of collective responsibility, I don't see any point in it.

I think Loury does; I believe his main point over the years is that racial problems are really problems of economic inequality, and that the solution is more egalitarian redistribution.

I am here only discussing Loury's opinion on crime, as that's what he wrote about in the essay in question. If egalitarian redistribution leads to a reduction in crime he should show us the evidence.

Lyca - thank you for taking the effort to answer me.
On your points - so if the sociology view is right, then presumably non-segregated neighbourhoods should see less crime than segregated ones. Can you point me to studies looking at comparing similar neighbourhoods?
Because I can think of another causal relationship - an increase in crime can cause a neighbourhood to detoriate as people become less open to their neighbours. Those who can afford to move away. Those who are left have less money for home repairs, producing crumbling porches, unkept yards, etc. And if your neighbour's house looks like a shack, what's the point of keeping your place up, the effect on your property values is reduced. Businesses install bars on their shopfronts, the place becomes more threatening, more people move away, the schools become more violent, so people withdraw their children from it, etc.
I grew up in a neighbourhood that became more crime-ridden during my childhood. I don't think the process is as simple as segregation => crime, it can be that crime => segregation.

As for not knowing what to do - aarrgghh, I hate this - I get told that I'm collectively responsible but no one appears to know what I should do. What's the point of experts writing articles going on and on about collective responsibility without pointing out the way I can discharge my share of the collective responsibility? Do they just want me to feel guilty with no other purpose?

As for urban school reform - what effect does that have on crime? I'm in favour of improving schools, the curriculum Direct Instruction has a good research base of improving learning for disadvantaged kids. But how well does that play into reducing crime?

Some would say we also need a better social safety net in general

It impresses me absolutely zero that some people would say something. You can find people who will say anything. What's the *evidence* that a better social safety net will reduce crime?
I'm a NZ citizen. The expansion of the social security net in the 1970s occurred at the same time as an expansion in crime. Correlation does not prove causation of course, I am not saying that the expansion of the social security net caused the expansion in crime, but it rather argues against a better social safety net causing a reduction in crime.

3)I think you're being a little harsh. Loury and Lott are professional policy experts. Their job is to talk. We're doing the kind of talking that citizens should do. It's not such a bad thing.

But if all we do is talk, then it's rather pointless. That's what I thought you were referring to - that Loury as a liberal prefers only talking.

As for Loury finding it natural to believe in collective social responsibility, perhaps then I would be better off reading something by someone who really struggled to believe in collective social responsiblity. Sometimes the best teachers are not the ones who are naturally good at a subject but the ones who had to learn it the hard way as they're the ones who know what problems other learners can have with the subject. Loury's article shows some massive blind spots that just scream at me that he's not someone who has really thought about his topic from another point of view (eg his failure to even mention the victims of crime). Can you recommend anyone who argues in favour of collective social responsibility for crime without naturally believing in collective social responsibility in the first place?

We can also do something about the hard problems, particularly de facto residential and school segregation.

Why do you believe that this will have an impact on crime? Given that most people commit crime against people who live near to them, wouldn't ending residential and school segregation merely mean that the victims of crime become more ethnically diverse?

While I'm all for racial equality, I'd prefer it to be in the form of everyone not being robbed, murdered or raped, rather than equal portions of each ethnic group being robbed, murdered or raped.

We can talk about social injustice, or collective injustice, or a collective responsibility for the problem of crime and incarceration.

We can talk about all sorts of things. But how does talking about your list of 3 things actually help? Let's say I'm collectively responsible for the problem of crime and incarceration. What do you expect me to do? And why do you think that thing will work?

Loury, as a liberal, finds this natural and pretty easy to justify.

I think this is a general problem for people of all political persuasions, it is easier to talk about something than to actually do something. While I am harsly critical of Dr Loury, I don't think it's fair to single out liberals as committing this fault. Indeed, I'm doing this myself - talking not doing - but at least I'm willing to admit that I don't know how to prevent crime and I don't go around self-righteously castigating society for failing to do some unspecified things to prevent crime.

I always find it incredible that people can write so self-righteously about how society treats criminals, and never mention for a moment about how criminals treat society. Or, to avoid reifying society, how crimes affect the people who have crimes comitted against them. Of course there are victimless crimes. But there are also many victimed crimes, and the poor and the powerless tend to be over-represented amongst the victims.
He says:

. We can become self-righteous, legalistic, ungenerous, stiff-necked, and hypocritical. We can fail to see the mote in our own eye. We can neglect to raise questions of social justice.

I am amazed that someone can write that, and yet still remain so blind himself to the rudiments of justice - that the poor do not deserve to be murdered or raped or robbed any more than the rich. The victims of crime don't even get the briefest mention of sympathy from Dr Loury.

I should say that I do agree that we should treat criminals with some sympathy and basics of humanity, and consider the costs to society of their punishment. But not at the price of forgetting about their victims.

This incredible mental block Dr Loury apparently has makes me wonder what things I am being so foolish about myself.

I haven't lost my job, but I can't think of much that I want right now. Is there anything in terms of investment goods that it's a good idea to spend on?
(By investment goods I mean ones that make money. Not art, or jewellery or other things that merely cost money to ensure and may, possibly, one day, be worth more than you sold them for).

I deserve next to nothing of the economic value of this blog (if it has any)

Isn't it possible that you only get next to nothing of the economic value of this blog, if you get any?

It strikes me that many people in society only get next to nothing of the value they created. For example, when I was a child I was prescribed probably life-saving antibiotics. This cost my parents about $30 for the doctor's visit and maybe $20 for the antibiotics. Okay, this was quite a few years ago, but still this money was trivial compared to what I have earned so far in my adult life, let alone the non-monetary value of my life (my parents seem to be glad I'm alive). Yet the doctor and the receptionist at the doctor clinic, and the pharmacist who handed over the medicine and the guys who delivered the medicine to the door and so forth only got paid peanuts for that particular peice of life-saving work.
And the farmers who provide the food that keeps me alive also typically get paid trivial amounts compared to the value to me of not feeling hungry.
Now the reason that I can buy food and antibiotics at such a trivial percentage of my life-time earnings is that many other people also benefit from antibiotics and food, so farmers, doctors and the shareholders of pharmaceutical companies can take advantage from economics of scale and make a comfortable living despite that they don't get much of the consumer surplus that they create. And of course doctors and the shareholders of pharmaceutical companies benefit from farmers' food production, and in many countries farmers can benefit from doctors and antibiotics. So society as a whole benefits far more from these surpluses.

Now this is not true of every task. If I buy a painting for $100 direct from the artist and only get $120 worth of pleasure from it, and guests to my home only get a further $20 of value, and the artist only paid $10 for the materials, the artist is clearly getting a majority of the benefit rather than society as a whole. But even in the frivolous arts and literature the creator of the work does not necessarily get a majority of the value - for example a blockbluster writer like J. K. Rowling sold millions of books, but much of the value she created went to subsidising the fixed costs of all the books publishers produce that aren't blockblusters and a lot went to all the people who piggybacked on the pleasure she created (eg people involved in the Harry Potter movies, and subsidising all the movies made about books that don't earn what the producers paid to the original writer, producers of official Harry Potter merchandise, and the people who created and sold the materials fans of the book use to produce their own fanwork, eg stage makeup to draw the Potter scar on your kid's forehead), and also many of the fans of the Harry Potter works appear to get a great deal of pleasure out of them beyond the money they paid, and also whatever value society gets from the practice many kids got in reading skills.

So the idea that we only deserve a small part of the value we create implies that we should tax at a higher rate only those people who can gain the lion's share of their value, which on the whole implies people working in areas where there aren't significant gains to scale. Relative to existing practice, We should shift the tax burden away from the creators of easily-replicable value, such as authors and film-makers, to the creators of original non-replicated works (like theatre actors or live musicians or artists who earn large amounts of money from selling original works like Damien Hirst). We should tax people more the less valuable their efforts are to saving life or improving its quality (eg speech therapists should be taxed more than ER nurses) and the more their work depends on their individual skills compared to making use of the diverse products produced by others (eg nannies should be taxed more than aluminum refiners as aluminimum refining depends on a high level of capital and manufacturing costs so a lot of the value aluminium refiners create goes to the creators of the inputs.)

Or, going back to my original point, the more people who read your blog, the less we should tax you, as it implies that whatever gain you get is mostly going to you. The more people who read your blog this implies the more value you are creating for society, either for people who believe they gain directly from your wisdom, or for people who enjoy having their ideas challenged by an intelligent mind even if they don't agree with you, or for people who love shooting down incredibly stupid ideas and find your blog a rich source of said ideas. Very popular bloggers are probably only getting next to nothing of the economic and non-economic value of their blogs, even if they gain vastly from it on a personal level.

Congratulations!
My one piece of wedding advice - if you decide to have a big photo of all your guests, have the photographer up high looking down on the guests, not the guests arranged on steps above the photographer.

The idea that standardized tests are a good measure of anything besides how well students take standardized tests is absurd.

For an absurd idea, it's generated a lot of research:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id...
http://epm.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/...
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_...
http://www1.istation.com/en/corpsite/research/p...
http://www.readnaturally.com/pdf/RFBATechnicalD...
http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available/etd-073...

There is no reason to believe that just because a standardised test measures something that the measure is valid. But, a standardised test can be validated, and if it is properly valid then of course it measures things other than how well students take standardised tests.

How many of you take a standardized test every day at work and are paid based on the results of that test?

Actually my husband does this about once a week, he's not paid on the results of his test, but the company's finanical rewards are tied to his results. He's an engineer.

Of the best and the brightest students we've had in the past ten to twenty years, many of them went into investment banking because they were taught for years that the most important measure of success is money.

I don't believe you. Hollywood movies and TV have been teaching for years that family and friends are far more important than money. I think the students went into investment banking because they decided, for themselves, that they wanted money, despite the propaganda of the media and schools.

Why? Is it because they had bad teachers? Is it because they were perhaps taught to work within a system and to not question it, particularly not to question it if it led to greater profits, the holy grail of our society?

Or, alternatively, it's because humans have a tendency to do something that produces rewards in the short-term, but every now and then turns out to be really risky. After all, humans often drive cars despite the risks involved in that.

As for teaching time - the results of Direct Instruction curriculum I discussed above shows that it's possible for a school to track the progress of every single kid at the school and adjust their practice based on it - this however is not just about teachers, it's about the whole of the school.

How many 55 year old snowboarders do you see?

My mum. Well, she's 60 now, but close enough.

Derek, Jeffrey's argument was that parents don't gain in wealth if their children are better educated. This was a flat out assertion, he didn't restrict it to short-sighted parents.

You also appear to assume that the relevant factor in education spending is the quality of the teacher, not the quality of the school. However, there is a lot of evidence that the quality of the school in terms of the principal and the quality of the students attending it matter greatly. See for example http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/esp/esp95toc.html Hedonic studies of housing prices imply that people are willing to spend more in at least some cities for access to better quality public schools (though measuring the quality of the schools :

http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?0609543
http://ideas.repec.org/a/jre/issued/v18n31999p3...
http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/labor/lap04/s...

People may or may not be short-sighted about their retirement (I spent my teens and early twenties studying and travelling, rather than saving for my retirement, and I don't regret it), but many parents are willing to spend on their children's education.

As for the dowry, I don't understand what you are trying to say. If no parent cares about their children's financial future for that child's sake, then why would the culture think it very bad to not provide a dowry? Especially in a culture that devalues women relative to men? And I am well aware that the dowry comes from the bride's parents, that is why I was talking about daughters in the comment you responded to.

How do you decided whether to go for better teachers, better administration, better curriculum, or better textbooks? ... Some mixes will help students, some will be neutral, and some might make things worse. How do you choose?


Well one possibility is that you perform a big study trying a variety of different interventions, and including control groups, and you see which interventions perform the best. That's what Project Followthrough did. And what the results from that imply is that teacher quality is not independent of school quality.

Having a massive variety of variables that affect outcomes is an extremely common occurrence in the real world. Take building a wind turbine (if you have moral objections to wind turbines, please substitute another engineering project of your choice). The materials you need in your wind turbine need to be both strong enough to stop the wind turbine from falling apart in high winds, and light enough that the wind turbine can operate at much lower wind speeds. You need to chose a site for wind turbines with good wind speeds, and also one that you can get access to install the wind turbines on a suitably strong base. The gearing inside the turbine in the engine needs to control the frequency of the electricity despite variable wind speeds. You need the tranmission connections from the turbines to wherever the power goes, which come with their own host of issues. Once you have installed the wind turbines you need a sufficient maintenance schedule to keep them operating. How do you choose the mix? Well, manufacturers pull this off all the time.

Another example is medicine. While of course individual patients have managed to survive actively-bad medical care, overall outcomes are improving by the healthcare system getting a lot of things right. If a patient is wrongly diagnosed, then that's generally bad for the care (this happened to me). If the patient is rightly diagnosed but the doctor prescribes the wrong drug, then that's generally bad. If the right drug is prescribed but the pharmacist dispenses the wrong drug, then that's generally bad (this happened to my Dad). If the patient picks up an infection while at the hospital then that's generally bad. The healthcare system needs to get a lot of things right. Often of course they don't, but it's hard to imagine that they could improve outcomes just by going for one factor.

If we are to have effective schools we can't just focus on one thing, we have to find a mix that works. Which we have. Now we face the problems of getting schools and school districts to implement it.

so the fact that low-income kids did better under one curriculum doesn't say much without knowing more about those kids.

Why not? This was a large project. From the link I supplied in my previous comment, 9,255 students were evaluated in the schools that received interventions, and 6,485 in the control schools.

Finally, I don't doubt that educational reform can help students, but lets not oversell it.

What are you talking about? What have I said that was overselling?

I am really surprised. I point out the example of an educational reform that has shown to be effective at improving the educational outcomes of deprived children. You don't say "Oh, that's great!" or "Oh, that sounds positive, but I have a few questions." Instead you worry about overselling? What am I missing here?

Will, one issue bothers me here. Gladwell says

Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.

This scares me a bit. After all, teaching is not like sports. The teachers are teaching real students, and if those students have an incompetent teaching their education really suffers. If the incompetent teacher happens to be the very first teacher the kids get, so the kids are not properly taught to read, then the kids' education is going to be harmed for the rest of their careers. Even if the kids eventually run into a teacher who can correct their reading problems, there will still at least have been a year lost of learning vocabulary and practising reading skills, and in all the other subjects that depend on reading and a year is a big issue for a five-year old. Furthermore, bad teaching creates problems for all the future teachers, who then having to cope with a variety of levels of educational quality.

There will always a learning curve in teaching, as in any other skill, but on the other hand students do need some protection. Would you go to a doctor whose competence was not judged before they were let loose on patients for the first time? Would you drive a car which was only judged based on performance in the real world, and not on a testing track first?

Trainee teachers should have opportunities for real-world practice, properly supervised. But we should be assessing their skills before they start their jobs, at least to filter out the really bad ones.

I don't doubt that parents prefer a better education for their kids, but I do doubt whether they're willing to fork over the money necessary to purchase that better education when it comes time to do so, regardless of whether that education is financed via taxation or trade in the private market.

Look at the fees charged by private schools some time.

And if it is taxation, I doubt even more the willingness of other individuals to sufficiently finance the education of other parents' kids.

I am interested in seeing if I can alleviate your doubts. After all, education spending strikes me as an incredibly popular political programme, one with strong support from the general public. But before I can do so, can you please define what you mean by "sufficiently finance"?

There are two problems with the words "sufficiently finance" without further definition. Firstly, there is far too much information out there in the world for any one person to learn it all given the maximum human lifespans so far recorded. We could spend all our spare resources on education (beyond those necessary to support human life), and yet everyone would still have something more to learn. But I do not think that is what you mean by "sufficiently finance" as that would imply no spending on health care or sewage systems or water quality or scientific research or civil defence or art or tasty food or warm houses.

Secondly, "sufficiently finance" assumes that if we spend more money we get more education out the other end. However, the education sector is notorious for the lack of correlation between spending and outcomes. See for example http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5e0da2e-65c2-11dc-9f... . I believe that the main problem with education policy is how to improve the effectiveness of existing spending. However, people in the education sector who would benefit from extra spending have a tendency to always claim that more money would improve matters, without ever stating what this quantity of money is.

So I would feel much more confident of alleviating your doubts if I knew what level of spending you think would "sufficiently finance" kids' education.

No one benefits in wealth gains if their children are better educated

This is wrong. Better educated people on average earn more money than non-educated people. (There are many exceptions, of course, but this holds true as a general rule). In many cultures it is extremely common for parents to be supported in their old age by their children, including in Western cultures until relatively recently. Therefore parents did gain financially from their children's wealth. And even in Western culture nowadays I know many examples of children giving money to their parents. I also know many cases of children paying for medical care for their parents, while this may not be an example of a weath gain strictly speaking, I do think that the prospect of better health care provides an incentive for better education.

And note that this analysis assumes that parents only care about their own wealth. However there is ample evidence that parents care about the wealth and happiness of their children in and of itself, even if the parent never gets any financial benefit directly. For example, in those cultures where a dowry is a common marriage tradition, why would any parent provide a dowry unless they cared about their daughters' happiness and future prosperity?

GU - you miss several other factors:
The quality of the curriculum.
The quality of the school administration.
The quality of the textbooks.

There was a big education study called Project Followthrough, which looked at whether low-income kids could be taught better by trying a variety of different school reforms. It found one curriculum that was successful - Direct Instruction, was successful in bringing low-income kids' educational performance up to the performance of middle school kids.
See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summa...

The Direct Instruction curriculum consisted of the following main features:
- A set of lessons in reading and mathematics, written and field tested to provide unambiguous, clear and conscise explanations of all the skills necessary for reading and basic maths.
- The set of lessons also provided many opportunities for the teacher to seek feedback on how the kids were understanding the lesson (the general rule was that the students should be providing a response ten to fifteen times per minute), and to reshape the lesson based on that feedback.
- the high rate of student responses also meant that the kids had many opportunities to practice the skilsl they learnt.
- Kids starting at a Direct Instruction school would be tested on their existing knowledge in maths and reading, and be placed in the lesson sequence based on their performance, so a kid who already knew how to write their name would be placed later in the reading sequence than a kid who started school not knowing their alphabet. A kid could and often was placed in different lessons in reading and maths.
- Every teacher at the school taught reading and mathematics at the same time. Kids were divided into groups of 5 to 7 students all at the same point in the lesson sequence. The teacher would spend the session working with these small groups in turn, while an aide supervised the remainder who were doing more independent work. In one school there wasn't money for the aides so every adult at the school was roped in for this bit with reading.
- Kids' placement in the sequence was often reviewed, so the kid who started not knowing the alphabet could wind up surpassing the kid who started knowing how to write their name, if they happened to be a faster learner.

Some sample DI lessons are available at http://www.specialconnections.ku.edu/cgi-bin/cg...

Teacher quality is affected by far more than the individual teacher. There's also the support that surrounds those teachers.

I do not deny the importance of teacher quality. There are super-teachers out there who can succeed with shoddy curriculae, no textbooks and despite an unsupportive administration. And there is the odd teacher who should not be anywhere near any children, no matter how good the curriculum. But, when it comes to educational reform, Project Followthrough shows that we shouldn't just be thinking about teacher quality vs student quality, school quality is at least as important.

Braindraining authoritarian countries would be a great way to insure that they remain authoritarian and continue abusing their citizens, Garrett J.

Have you ever studied history? The Berlin Wall was put up by East Germany, the authoritarian state, to *stop* its citizens leaving. The collapse of the Berlin Wall was followed shortly by the collapse of the East German state. Stalin actually killed or sent to the gulags millions of his fellow citizens, particularly amongst the more educated (eg university professors, the Red Army officers), and yet he died in office after having managed to expand Soviet power across much of Eastern Europe. Mao Zedong killed millions of people and had a swipe at the educated with the Cultural Revolution (sending them off to re-educated camps) and he died in office.

You meanwhile have not cited a single case of an authoritarian country collapsing because its citizens didn't leave.

Before you start laughing at Wilkinson's expense, I suggest you spend a bit of brainpower on your own theories.

How would braindraining foreign countries enrich their local despots? The local despots would have less people to rule over, so at first analysis to me the despots would be worse off. If you want to convince me that the despots would be bettter off with less people, you'll need to do some explaining.

As for the idea that people have obligations to stay in foreign countries, why? Why not say that those of us who were lucky enough to be born in rich countries have an obligation to move to foreign countries to make their lives better? How does being born in a country create an obligation to stay put?

And if you've left a country to *escape* a foreign despot, why would you be interested in following that despot's instructions in your new country? I can't recall many cases of the people who fled to the USA from Communist Russia in the 1920s seeking to install Communism in the USA.

sus - in the case you describe, I actually feel sorry for those kids. Whatever their parents are giving them, it doesn't include the ability to stand on their own two feet, and write their own uni papers. My parents didn't buy me a car or a condo or a credit card, but at least I got enough of an education at school to get a degree without relying on my parents doing the work, and I can get jobs without my parents' help - things the young people you describe lack. (And of course, since I actually had to learn the material for my degrees, I have enough information stashed away in my head to allow for hours of mental occupation). I think you are wrong in asserting that these kids had everything. They strike me as seriously lacking.

Others, because of financial situations and/or geography did not. Do they not deserve a chance?

Well, there's a problem of scale here. We can't expect an entire society to function like the family in your example does, some people actually need to learn how to do things directly. Do you want every one in the country to be able to get through medical school with their mum doing all the work? What happens when mum drops dead - who will train the next generation if no young person ever needs to do their own work at university?

People say that it's due to lack of education that some folks don't succeed, yet they don't want to extend any help to those who are not in a position to get that education.

Who, exactly, are these people who don't want to extend any help to those who are not in a position to get that education? Government spending on schools strikes me as one of the most popular forms of government spending there is, and as stated above, scholarships are a common form of private charity.

I also note again that the 2 young people you describe are not apparently getting an education, instead their mum is.