I never comment on anything but wanted to do so just to applaud your efforts in taking down the NYT elevators piece. Very well done. I would have read this sort of thing in The Nation 20 years ago. Times are changing. . .
Years ago, about 2000, I was discussing with my corporate lawyer friend about what an individual did for a living. He told me this individual was in charge of employee retention for a fast food franchisee. My response: all they have to do is pay them $10 an hour. My lawyer friend responded with: I can’t be paying a buck extra for my value meal. Keep up the good work!
The real energy behind the school choice movement at the local level is minority parents, especially blacks. It is these families whom the public schools have most spectacularly failed. There are simply not enough rich people with children in private schools to make a difference but there are millions of minority parents desperate for a way out. The other impacted group which is growing rapidly are home schoolers. This is a diverse group that includes religious parents, old hippies, and refugees from the Covidiocy. None of these people are rich.
The Public education system has become more about politics and growing employment amongst associated unions. Moreover, DOE regulations and rules have resulted in litmus tests or standardized testing, to which schools teach directly for passing those tests. The results have been an enormous increase in administrative spending and Less actual classroom impact.
A recent criticism of Chicago area schools for poor performance noted a School (Douglas) which has enrollment at a total of 35students(a school that can hold 900). The faculty total 23. The union contract requires 8more faculty to be hired in and the total budget for the school is already at $68,000 per pupil.
Rather than close the costly school and relocate kids, the district wants to increase spending.
Them and the teacher unions. I had professional contacts with home schoolers before COVID but was retired before that so I am not as sure of the demographics of the COVID refugees. Schooling pods became common.
I appreciate some (and not other) of your takes. I'm uncomfortable by the implication that all the positions you disagree with arise from bad faith and bad intentions.
Oren writes: "Our task was thus to improve profit margin any other way. This turned out to include: . . . realigning incentives to further reward workers for strong performance, and optimizing allocation of work hours to improve productivity."
Along those lines Oren might be interested—or, at least, ought to be—in the theory of pure profit sharing under which the zero sum relationship between wages and profits is effectively reduced to zero. By this I mean that labor and capital could agree to split the value added (aka, net product) of a firm or manufacturing facility between them according to a fixed ratio that would be arrived at through a process of collective bargaining. Both sides would strive to maximize the net product.
When combined with a shorter workweek (a family friendly six hour day?) this should result in a significantly increased rate of output per hour for both labor and capital (people can work faster for shorter periods of time than longer, which in fact they would be incentivized to do as long as their wages were tied to their output). Indeed, once the ratio dividing the net product were agreed to, it would result in a cooperative relationship between labor and capital.
Were such practices to become universal throughout an economy , capitalism could turn out to be a kind of socialism (in all but name), which is to say, in all the ways that critics of capitalism care about most. This is illustrated in the second part of this Note on Wages and Prices: https://shorturl.at/MNvvv. Note also the macroeconomic implications once wages are no longer sticky, to which I allude in that second part as well.
In conclusion, I should mention that on the basis of this paper Milton Friedman once described me as "an excellent amateur economist," so I hope Oren will give these remarks the attention they possibly deserve.
I never comment on anything but wanted to do so just to applaud your efforts in taking down the NYT elevators piece. Very well done. I would have read this sort of thing in The Nation 20 years ago. Times are changing. . .
As for the Colby article, it is hard to argue against prioritization and I agree that China is the most dangerous adversary. However, that does not mean war is inevitable. China could simply continue to use their economic power to their strategic advantage much as the US did as recently as the Trump administration. They could also simply subvert Taiwan rather than invade. What would the US do if there were an election in Taiwan where a pro-reunification party won? Given what we did in Ukraine, we could simply launch a coup against the elected government. That would seriously provoke China and might lead to a war as it did in Ukraine. So build up military, mostly naval, but prioritize economic muscle especially in manufacturing. Autarch may not be efficient but it is safe.
Speaking of Ukraine, the policy there is disastrous. The sanctions regime antagonizes powers that we would need in any military or economic conflict with China like India, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and most of the global South. We should simply cut NATO loose and let them deal with Russia on their own. They should be able to do this given the economic and population disparity. If they can't, they are worthless as allies anyway. This is the best case with the worst case being dragged into a nuclear war by NATO aggression. For example, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/latvia-russia/. Latvia is a joke in a military sense but this is meant to provoke Russia and drag in the rest of NATO. The US needs to come to terms that two of the three largest European countries are now run by leftists and the third is flirting with it.
I never comment on anything but wanted to do so just to applaud your efforts in taking down the NYT elevators piece. Very well done. I would have read this sort of thing in The Nation 20 years ago. Times are changing. . .
Years ago, about 2000, I was discussing with my corporate lawyer friend about what an individual did for a living. He told me this individual was in charge of employee retention for a fast food franchisee. My response: all they have to do is pay them $10 an hour. My lawyer friend responded with: I can’t be paying a buck extra for my value meal. Keep up the good work!
The real entitlement problem in America is that of the managerial caste to cheap labor.
The real energy behind the school choice movement at the local level is minority parents, especially blacks. It is these families whom the public schools have most spectacularly failed. There are simply not enough rich people with children in private schools to make a difference but there are millions of minority parents desperate for a way out. The other impacted group which is growing rapidly are home schoolers. This is a diverse group that includes religious parents, old hippies, and refugees from the Covidiocy. None of these people are rich.
The Public education system has become more about politics and growing employment amongst associated unions. Moreover, DOE regulations and rules have resulted in litmus tests or standardized testing, to which schools teach directly for passing those tests. The results have been an enormous increase in administrative spending and Less actual classroom impact.
A recent criticism of Chicago area schools for poor performance noted a School (Douglas) which has enrollment at a total of 35students(a school that can hold 900). The faculty total 23. The union contract requires 8more faculty to be hired in and the total budget for the school is already at $68,000 per pupil.
Rather than close the costly school and relocate kids, the district wants to increase spending.
Thought I read somewhere that the Covid Regime increased the population of homeschooled students something like 500%
The Covid Regime, of course, being pushed by the very rich LibTards who accuse working class homeschool parents of being wealthy and elitist.
Them and the teacher unions. I had professional contacts with home schoolers before COVID but was retired before that so I am not as sure of the demographics of the COVID refugees. Schooling pods became common.
I appreciate some (and not other) of your takes. I'm uncomfortable by the implication that all the positions you disagree with arise from bad faith and bad intentions.
It would seem Mr Cass is more politically oriented than economically principled, at times.
Oren writes: "Our task was thus to improve profit margin any other way. This turned out to include: . . . realigning incentives to further reward workers for strong performance, and optimizing allocation of work hours to improve productivity."
Along those lines Oren might be interested—or, at least, ought to be—in the theory of pure profit sharing under which the zero sum relationship between wages and profits is effectively reduced to zero. By this I mean that labor and capital could agree to split the value added (aka, net product) of a firm or manufacturing facility between them according to a fixed ratio that would be arrived at through a process of collective bargaining. Both sides would strive to maximize the net product.
When combined with a shorter workweek (a family friendly six hour day?) this should result in a significantly increased rate of output per hour for both labor and capital (people can work faster for shorter periods of time than longer, which in fact they would be incentivized to do as long as their wages were tied to their output). Indeed, once the ratio dividing the net product were agreed to, it would result in a cooperative relationship between labor and capital.
Were such practices to become universal throughout an economy , capitalism could turn out to be a kind of socialism (in all but name), which is to say, in all the ways that critics of capitalism care about most. This is illustrated in the second part of this Note on Wages and Prices: https://shorturl.at/MNvvv. Note also the macroeconomic implications once wages are no longer sticky, to which I allude in that second part as well.
In conclusion, I should mention that on the basis of this paper Milton Friedman once described me as "an excellent amateur economist," so I hope Oren will give these remarks the attention they possibly deserve.
I never comment on anything but wanted to do so just to applaud your efforts in taking down the NYT elevators piece. Very well done. I would have read this sort of thing in The Nation 20 years ago. Times are changing. . .
As for the Colby article, it is hard to argue against prioritization and I agree that China is the most dangerous adversary. However, that does not mean war is inevitable. China could simply continue to use their economic power to their strategic advantage much as the US did as recently as the Trump administration. They could also simply subvert Taiwan rather than invade. What would the US do if there were an election in Taiwan where a pro-reunification party won? Given what we did in Ukraine, we could simply launch a coup against the elected government. That would seriously provoke China and might lead to a war as it did in Ukraine. So build up military, mostly naval, but prioritize economic muscle especially in manufacturing. Autarch may not be efficient but it is safe.
Speaking of Ukraine, the policy there is disastrous. The sanctions regime antagonizes powers that we would need in any military or economic conflict with China like India, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and most of the global South. We should simply cut NATO loose and let them deal with Russia on their own. They should be able to do this given the economic and population disparity. If they can't, they are worthless as allies anyway. This is the best case with the worst case being dragged into a nuclear war by NATO aggression. For example, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/latvia-russia/. Latvia is a joke in a military sense but this is meant to provoke Russia and drag in the rest of NATO. The US needs to come to terms that two of the three largest European countries are now run by leftists and the third is flirting with it.