Week 48

James Mulvale

Welfare state programs [..] have been premised on a growing economy where everyone gets a slightly bigger piece of the pie. Those days are over, we have to think about steady-state economics, we have to think about redistribution of wealth. I think basic income gets us partway towards that goal.

Interesting point

U still need government-funded universal healthcare of course bcz citizens need govs bargaining power, but BI can do lota good.

So once the current circus is over the new political leaders can start constructing this system.

Scott Alexander

Do you think that modern colleges provide 18,000 dollar/year greater value than colleges did in your parents’ day? Would you rather graduate from a modern college, or graduate from a college more like the one your parents went to, plus get a check for $72,000?

(or, more realistically, have 72,000 dollars less in student loans to pay off)

Was your parents’ college even noticeably worse than yours? My parents sometimes talk about their college experience, and it seems to have had all the relevant features of a college experience. Clubs. Classes. Professors. Roommates. I might have gotten something extra for my $72,000, but it’s hard to see what it was [...]

This can’t be pure price-gouging, since corporate profits haven’t increased nearly enough to be where all the money is going. But a while ago a commenter linked me to the Delta Cost Project, which scrutinizes the exact causes of increasing college tuition. Some of it is the administrative bloat that you would expect. But a lot of it is fun “student life” types of activities like clubs, festivals, and paying Milo Yiannopoulos to speak and then cleaning up after the ensuing riots. These sorts of things improve the student experience, but I’m not sure that the average student would rather go to an expensive college with clubs/festivals/Milo than a cheap college without them. More important, it doesn’t really seem like the average student is offered this choice.

Right

NYT

We need to start asking which public goods universities are producing and whether government support gets Americans more of them. Taxing graduate students is a crude, destructive mechanism for extracting goods from academia because it would diminish both scientific discovery and the size and scope of the educated public that has been improving our country for generations. The current plan for taxing endowments does not address the problems that rightly drive citizen fury: soaring costs, educational inequality and schools’ resistance to change.

To address these issues, universities must bring new proposals to the table.

Yes