Seems legit, do we really have to BREAK the unions to do that? The teacher unions have many legitimate reasons for their existence regardless of some of their negative attributes.
>relax regulations on building factories
Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here? It's not the cost of labor and providing benefits to workers? I can see how the additional costs of creating factories here might make it slightly harder to manufacture things in the U.S., but I find it highly dubious that Apple would suddenly start manufacturing its machines here even if all zoning/health/environmental laws were scrapped.
"Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here?"
While I also have various ideological preconceptions about the source of the economic problems in the US and elsewhere, I would observe that when someone like the CEO of Apple is expressing an opinion about what makes a factory easier to open in China than in the US, someone who has actually been the guy-who-can-say-yes to actual factories for which that decision was actually made, it's probably worth listening to that opinion. Even if you can somehow prove he's objectively wrong on the merits, his perception would still be a useful data point.
On the other hand I wouldn't expect any particular insight into our school problems from him, beyond what any reasonably skilled businessman could present.
There is a good reason regulation makes it more expensive to open factories in the US: our regulations force companies to internalize the negative externalities their businesses create. China effectively subsidizes industry by forcing its citizens to bear the costs of pollution, injuries, etc, inherent in such activities. US regulation forces companies to bear some of these costs (hardly all of them).
In its retrospective study on the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA estimated that the benefit of pollution control over the 20 year period was on the order of $22 trillion. Relative to the "so-called 'no-control' case, an additional 205,000 Americans would have died prematurely and millions more would have suffered illnesses ranging from mild respiratory symptoms to heart disease, chronic bronchitis, asthma attacks, and other severe respiratory problems... the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss and adult hypertension, heart disease, and stroke." Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits."
What's good for business isn't necessarily good for the economy. The things that businessmen push for: deregulation, limitations on tort liability, etc, create more in costs to society then they create in benefits to businesses. Indeed, our measurements of things like GDP are so fundamentally flawed that they encourage politicians to adopt such measures. If a factory's poisonous emissions causes you to have lung problems, that doesn't count against GDP, but when you seek medical attention for those problems GDP goes up!
In theory, sure, a disinterested regulator would ensure that the cost of polluting was higher than the cost of not polluting. (Another solution to this problem is via property right enforcement, by the owners of the nearby polluted properties that share airspace/water table with the polluter).
But in practice the EPA is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to publishing studies on its own cost effectiveness. It exists to increase its budget and scope, just like all other agencies, but has no check on its behavior. Its officials are not elected, cannot be fired, and are effectively invisible to the public. Moreover, opposition to EPA malfeasance/corruption is often caricatured as opposition to clean air and clean water itself.
As an example of regulatory pathology, consider that the EPA is giving grants and instruction manuals to NGOs, telling them how to sue the agency into expanding its powers.
The EPA even tacitly encourages such suits, going so
far as to pay for and promote a "Citizen's Guide" that,
among other things, explains how to sue the agency
under "citizen suit" provisions in environmental laws.
The guide's author — the Environmental Law Institute —
has received $9.9 million in EPA grants over the past
decade.
And, to top it off, critics say the EPA often ends up
paying the groups' legal fees under the Equal Access to
Justice Act.
What's going on? "The EPA isn't harmed by these suits,"
said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during
the Bush administration. "Often the suits involve things
the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and
then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal
cover from political heat."
Most people have never read an expose on the EPA; they think of them as the "good guys" who protect us from the evil polluters. What's funny is that we can see through this kind of logic when the normal police invoke it to justify any action in the pursuit of common criminals, but not when the environmental police do so -- and the EPA is most certainly a branch of the police, with the power to raid, fine, and seize property.
This sounds bad in a soundbite, but this is the way the system works.
Consider this loose example: suppose 2 people get into a fight. One guy really beats up another guy, and the cops are called. If the recipient refuses to press charges, the cops can't do anything.
Similarly, a lot of government agencies can't proactively do something, until someone sues them. By getting sued, they get to act on the complaint, and the legal opinion can be used to justify similar action elsewhere.
There is no nefarious purpose here; it is disingenuous to claim so. Yes, government agencies have issues galore; but by conflating the necessary with the rest, we fail to identify the real problems.
Argh! Why the downvotes? This is the way the government works! A government agency often needs a legal cover to do something; so it asks the citizens to sue them in court, so that it will have the legal cover. It can't sue itself, because it can't be the plaintiff and the defendant at the same time.
> In its retrospective study on the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA estimated that the benefit of pollution control over the 20 year period was on the order of $22 trillion.
$22T/20 years is over $1T/year. US GDP in 1990 was under $6T. US GDP in 1970 was just over $1T.
> the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss
Oh really? Why would leaded gas in 1980 cause more problems than leaded gas in 1950?
> Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits."
Just as the benefits are not limited to the money not spent on medical care, the money spent on pollution controls are not the only costs.
I hear what you are saying, but I think you're mixing units. Since the study is accounting for things that are not accounted for in GDP, It doesn't seem to make much sense to compare the dollar figure reached in terms of GDP. If GDP devalues human health as part of its basic assumptions, an analysis that does not devalue human health will come to different numbers. It's almost a tautology.
It's worth noting that during the Macintosh and NeXT days, Steve was fanatical about building computer factories in California. It was probably a lot of very hard-learned lessons that got him to accept Apple's arrangement with Foxconn.
>>keep schools open until 6
>Sounds great, how do you fund it?
Reduce the "defense" budget. I wouldn't be surprised if you did the calculations and found out that schools could be open 24/7 with minor tweaks to the budget allocation.
It is not a matter of funding, it is only a matter of priorities. Education and research should be first on the list.
I don't have hard numbers, but I wold like to point out that Japanese students spend more days per year and longer hours in school, as well as hours of cram school on top of it for most of them, than Canadian schools, and yet Canadian students overall end up ranked higher on than Japanese students on every ranking I've ever seen.
Canadian schools also spend more than $3000 per student per year on average than American schools.
What American schools need is more quality, not more quantity.
That study seems to draw all its conclusions from inner city / low income. I would submit it is not a model for the rest of the country unless further testing is done in other environments.
story: A couple of decades ago I used to work on grants and educational programs. One group came to ND to give a lecture on risk factors. In Minot ND, they told the crowd that "firearms" automatically means more violence. "It has been proven in studies" they said. One member of the crowd asked how many people in the room owned firearms. The poll came back at about 90% with many (40%) owning 3 or more. No history of violence in that crew. They were all social worker types who liked to hunt or in the case of one, target shoot. I got ahold of their source data for studies and found two things. A specific firearm study was never done and all the data came from CA or NY cities.
The USA is a large and diverse place, I am a little cynical of best practices taken from urban environments and applied to suburban and rural areas without add research and being a little more specific on why stuff seems to be working.
I'd contend communities with a large number of handguns (but no rifles) probably does have a crime problem, it's just likely the guns are a response to it, less than a cause.
Well, ND gun ownership and murder rates by means would seem to make your contention false. ND which has a large number of handguns per capita, had 2 murders in 2008 and both were stabbings.
Its not the guns or any other object, its the conditions and attitudes that make a place dangerous. Dangerous people will use the weapons they have or improvise weapons (IED) if they have none.
You misunderstood my statement I think: I'm saying 1> Handguns with no rifles is a situation you get when people feel they need personal protection, aka, high crime. I'm saying they are an effect, rather than a cause 2> North Dakotans probably have a large number of rifles as well, so don't fit that profile.
A cynical perspective: schools are prisons, and some lower income gang-joining students are criminals. An extra hour in school corresponds to a criminal spending an extra hour in prison instead of out wreaking havoc. The next question is forcing such students to stay in the school to begin with...
I think "schools are places that give people of a certain age something to do without giving them the option of leaving" is a perfectly valid sentiment and a good description of why more 10 - 14 year olds would perform less crime.
Calling them prisons implies the entire population of students would commit said crimes.
I have no idea if the math works as you say but the federal government doesn't fund primary education. That is all done at the local and state level and so it isn't just a matter of tweaking the federal budget (as if that itself was easy).
I think the bigger problem is that teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse. Hard to experiment with new ideas in that environment.
> teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse.
Child from the 80s here. I've had just about every teaching method crammed down my throat through the 90s. This includes more homework, more lectures, socratic desk arrangements, independent study, peer review, group work, class review, and many others I care not to remember. I have never heard any teacher say, "my union asked me to do this." And, usually, it was some teacher or principal working on their MA or Ph.D that had to invent a new teaching method.
So far the only thing that works consistently is listening intently, sitting down quietly and banging out the work, and raising a hand for assistance when your stuck.
And that is how it's been done for 100 years. It may seem calcified to you but the rest of the world uses it while the US tried all types of new-age teaching methods.
I would wager the bigger problem with schools is bad, obnoxious students. The classroom bully that disrespects the teacher, disrupts the students and gums up the educational experience for everyone. They used to be kicked out of school but that became illegal, then they were put in detention, but a chaperone costs money. Now it's left to the teacher to be educator and babysitter to some asshole.
The rest of the world does not teach that way, and particularly the countries that have good results in education -- e.g. Scandinavia -- don't. What's with the American exceptionalism? But (as you also hint at) good teaching methods are just one tiny piece in a much larger puzzle.
In fact if anything, my personal impression is that the teaching method itself is among the least important factors; if everything else is in order, kids are going to learn no matter what teaching method you employ.
Why does everyone defend the unions so much here? They are the reason we have a sub-par education system in the US. Teachers get automatic raises not based on merit and it's very difficult to fire a bad teacher. Until this problem is fixed (which the unions likely won't fix on their own), the other things you try aren't really going to help.
On the issue of manufacturing, there's actually alot of evidence about Chinese wages rising in skilled labor, converging with U.S. wages. The U.S. doesn't manufacture textiles or similar goods like China does, but even those jobs are moving to poorer countries than China.
This article [1] provides a succinct explanation:
"With Chinese wages rising at about 17 percent per year and the value of the yuan continuing to increase, the gap between U.S. and Chinese wages is narrowing rapidly… Products that require less labor and are churned out in modest volumes, such as household appliances and construction equipment, are most likely to shift to U.S. production...Support from state and local governments can tip the balance.”
Both of Jobs' school ideas do not seem to be rooted in a better education, rather keeping kids occupied longer while their parents worked for his or other companies. It could have been a measure against reducing daycare costs or as the way to keep people at work without having to worry about their kids.
I do like his idea about breaking up teacher unions, but I think the root cause of all of that is very low salaries for teachers.
Its a simplistic idea. Principals weren't hired because of their ability to build a successful team of teachers. They are administrators. Why does anybody think they can suddenly (successfully and equitably) cast judgement on teachers? If you want to transform how teachers are hired, managed, and evaluated, to be more similar to a private business, you have to start at the top.
The best teachers I had in highschool all seemed to despise their principals, precisely because they were nothing more than overpaid bureaucrats. The best case scenario was a principal that just stayed out of the way. Of course, it's the system that made them that way. If you let principals actually make performance based decisions, then you would attract a different sort of person to the position.
I agree that principals are a result of the system, and it likely goes even higher to the school districts and superintendent. I doubt instituting a merit-based system can be done effectively without transforming the whole system, from top to bottom. I don't know if that's in the children's best interest, or would address the perceived problems. Small changes to address the cases of real incompetence are probably the low hanging fruit, and don't require radical change.
The text "turning Jobs down on making campaign" isn't in the article. It says "he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential" which makes it sound more like Jobs' issues were the barrier to cooperation.
Well, to be blunt, if you are going to get Picasso to design your logo you _don't_ art direct him. And you try your best not to piss him off. Because he's fucking Picasso...
You don't have to use what he makes, but if you want genius, and why else would you want Jobs and his team to design an ad, you ask politely and then get out of the way.
Edit: Somewhere online I read an article about Jobs getting
Paul Rand (edited from Milton Glaser) to design the logo for NEXT. Can't find with a quick Google search, but it was a fascinating read.
That would explain why my Google search wasn't bearing fruit :)
Edit: the video has the quote I was thinking of, but what I read was an article. From the video (Jobs talking):
> I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’
but it could reduce the drop in productivity the parents have when they leave work to pick them up? (just brainstorming).
OR it can provide for more customized learning/hands on experience for the individual kids.
oh i agree, but if we aren't increasing funding for education, we're unlikely to ever see any change. we as a society don't seem to place education super high on the totem pole come funding time.
7 to 8 hours is probably too much organised schooling, already. However, there's an argument to be made for letting kids stay on the premises in a semi supervised environment after hours.
There's lots of resources available in school which could be useful; you can offer some activities (but please, not an additional 5 hours on top of 7 hours of school), or help with homework (dito), and generally offer an environment that's hopefully more conducive to learning in the broadest possible sense than some of the worst home/street environments.
If you want all schools to be open until six, you need to take it up with each of the thousands of local school boards in the US, along with the many thousands of charter, private, and other independent schools.
The federal government has no policy-making authority w/r/t education in the United States. And if such authority did exist at the federal level, the appropriate place to start would be Congress, not the executive branch.
In reality, of course, you'd never be able to create a universal policy to reflect your particular vision of how education ought to work, and that's a good thing.
Yeah, because an anonymous HN commenter knows more about the state of American education than the guy who ran the company that provided American schools with leading-edge technology for the past 3 decades.
How exactly does selling computers to schools make you an expert in education.
I think it would be better to focus on making schools better rather than just telling students to spend more time at them.
Or have the students there for 40 hours a week, but ban homework. Use the extra time to get it done at school.
Then students will actually do it, and they don't have to worry about it at home anymore. Plus you don't have kids going to school for 40 hours then being expected to do an extra hour of homework at night.
Sounds great, how do you fund it?
>keep school in session 11 months out of the year
Ditto.
>let principals hire/fire based on merit
Seems legit, do we really have to BREAK the unions to do that? The teacher unions have many legitimate reasons for their existence regardless of some of their negative attributes.
>relax regulations on building factories
Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here? It's not the cost of labor and providing benefits to workers? I can see how the additional costs of creating factories here might make it slightly harder to manufacture things in the U.S., but I find it highly dubious that Apple would suddenly start manufacturing its machines here even if all zoning/health/environmental laws were scrapped.
>turning Jobs down on making campaign ads
Crazy. Seriously. David Axelrod is a schmuck.