So socialism

[Traitorfish]

Any but the worst parents would teach their kids basic skills in such a scenerio

What do we mean when we say "basic skills"? I could credit that most parents would teach a child to spell their name and do basic arithmetic, but is that really sufficient for the modern world? Do most parents have the ability to bring their children to functional literacy and numeracy? And if the first generation of parents don't reliably have this ability, what will it look like when those kids become parents, and when their kids become parents?

You suppose that people would simply make their own provisions, and that those with means would purchase private education (and charitably we can grant that in this reconfigured world we could plausibly imagine this to represent the most affluent 20% or so of the population, not just the 1%) but it's hard to see how we would have an economy capable of supporting this class of those-with-means if the majority of the population are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

 

[Arwon]

intenet posters humbly presenting themselves as shining exemplars of the benefits and successes of self-education is like a hitherto unknown level of question begging

 

[Gorbles]

A society w unlimited money would be a utopia anyway so its a bit unrealistic scenerio

This is why I limited the money to being available just to public schooling, in this hypothetical.

Any but the worst parents would teach their kids basic skills in such a scenerio

And a benefit of public schooling is that children therefore have an escape (and a way to learn away) from those kinds of parents.

 

[Angst]

What do you mean?

we respond to power relations esp as kids. yes this can be problematic but education is superior to most other forms of learning since you're inherently in a situation where someone is using that relation to teach you things. the internet does not have such relationships ingrained and what you learn is therefore much more arbitrary.

 

[amadeus]

Any but the worst parents would teach their kids basic skills in such a scenerio

Such a scenario would be best avoided: the specialization of labor and comparative advantage make it more practical on the whole to outsource the education of children to schools even if individual parents may be better at teaching their children.

This may have been a practical solution in the past when agriculture or artisan craftsmanship was the source of income for 95% of the population. I don’t see it working today as a dedicated source—I have auto mechanics in my family that learned about cars from my grandfather, but they all still went to public school.

 

[Farm Boy]

Any but the worst parents would teach their kids basic skills in such a scenerio

With what time? With the time, with what money?

 

[El_Machinae]

The model that works is to set a minimum baseline, and then to iteratively improve it over time. This will require fighting the natural tendency of bureaucracies to decay.

And then allow people to supplement, and to fight the urge to kneecap them, but also fight the urge to kneecap the baseline in order to benefit the people who supplement. This is harder to achieve than read, because everybody likes to kneecap.

Nearly all of us grew up in the social experiment where education was provided at free or nearly free levels well-past what you needed to get a job. And we are currently living through the flip in policy, where the citizenry is not quite given enough to make it if they opt out. And this is mostly because there's just more to learn, even if there's also some bureaucratic decay.

 

[Yeekim]

I know there are public toilets out there somewhere that can scar one for life.
Shall we now conclude all public toilets are a failed concept? C'mon.

 

[Angst]

I know there are public toilets out there somewhere that can scar one for life.
Shall we now conclude all public toilets are a failed concept? C'mon.

siderant:
in denmark, drinking in public is legal, but there's a dire need of public restrooms in copenhagen that are open at night.
so people pee in public areas, that is, non-restrooms. bushes and street inlets and such.
and of course that's illegal. and of course you shouldn't.
but from experience, most people do it.
in a way, it's symptomatic of a specific way of thinking. we want all the fun parts of drinking, but the waste parts of it, we'll ignore its existence and criminalize it if it shows up.
i'm not advocating for peeing on the streets here. i'm just saying it's happening, and that we should therefore have more public restrooms, instead of pretending that people don't pee.
and i know it can be said, then, that people drinking in public should arrange for themselves to have access to restrooms individually. peeing in bars or whatever. and i mean, sure, that's the logic of the law. but it doesn't work in accordance with how humans behave. and maybe we should adapt to the latter.

-

same logic goes for "good parents should just be the teachers" in a sense. i mean, yea, that's ideal. you could probably imagine a world where parents are equipped and willing to educate. would be a good world to not need public education. i learned to read before starting school, even, because why not. but maybe one should look at the case at hand - not all parents are good, not all parents have the resources, and even those with good ideals of education and the resources to do it could teach the wrong things.

since y'know. they're not actually teachers. many wash dishes. then they'll be good at washing dishes, it's not a dishonorable or vicious thing to do - but they won't be well equipped if the kids have questions about algebra.

and that's not even going into parents that are absolutely awful. this is the best case scenario we can expect outside fantasy.

 

[Narz]

With what time? With the time, with what money?

It's true we do live society where parents don't have the time to teach their children basic skills

 

[Angst]

It's true we do live society where parents don't have the time to teach their children basic skills

even if they did, i'm not gonna open up another avenue for bad parents to ruin their children's lives.

 

[Narz]

You guys seem confused, I'm not saying parents should be solely responsible for teaching their kids I'm saying public school (in the us) isn't very good & it's not designed w pure benevolent interest of society in mind

 

[Narz]

even if they did, i'm not gonna open up another avenue for bad parents to ruin their children's lives.

What's your solution, moral test otherwise you're sterilized?

 

[Angst]

What's your solution, moral test otherwise you're sterilized?

no. absolutely missed the point.

i said that bad parenting exists and i'm not gonna give bad parents the avenue of teaching to further ruin the lives of people. this means i support public education to remain.

proportionality, please.

You guys seem confused, I'm not saying parents should be solely responsible for teaching their kids I'm saying public school (in the us) isn't very good & it's not designed w pure benevolent interest of society in mind

that's good, and i agree.

 

[Farm Boy]

Having dealt with public education administrators from a position of abject hostility, if I had to weight the incentives of parents vs accredited public employees vis a vie thier interest in the well being of the child, the principles and superintendents don't win.

Isolation is the problem. And we've let many of the greater community avenues for that atrophy and die. We supplanted them with public schools, in many ways.

 

[Hygro]

Grade school sucked but I learned a lot from literature to writing to math to history. Some foreign language… Even a little science despite missing almost all of high school.

Bad classes and teachers were a distraction and sometimes a personal hell but the scholastic and learning material was always rich.

I went to public schools in a well funded district with eager parents so it wasn’t representative of what is, but it was still cookie cutter structurally, most of society can have most of what I had here if we pool resources and make teaching competitive.

The ways we can improve school are really obvious to anyone paying attention, just greatly increase the amount of play, outside time, unstructured time, exploration, and only keep a couple hours for grinding and pushing.

 

[Birdjaguar]

A society w unlimited money would be a utopia anyway so its a bit unrealistic scenerio


Any but the worst parents would teach their kids basic skills in such a scenerio

For the most part, parents teaching their kids rather than schools is just asking for an ignorant set of adults once they are grown.

 

[aelf]

To summarize in a nutshell I'd say the main lesson most of my school's have taught is to be motivated by extrinsic motivators (grades, competition w classmates, teacher approval) and to follow set instructions. These are important skills for worker bees but terrible lessons to be drilled into someone who wants to be an entrepreneur or auto-didact.

And you're an example of which?

 

[Narz]

And you're an example of which?

Trying to be self-motivated but it's not easy

 

[innonimatu]

@innonimatu Collectivism seems to ignore the variety of human needs, especially at later stages of life. State mandated "production" (of services and products) is not able to meet the variety of demand humans desire. Your system will always curtail peoples' wants to those planned by the State. Person A will want to retire to a quiet life in the country after 40 years in the city; Person B will want to take 2 $10,000 vacations a year in distant places. Person C will want to move to be with grandchildren. Now multiply that by a few million other options. The state has a record of being able to meet collective needs (keep the trains running on time) but but fails miserably at meeting individual needs. It is those individual needs that increase the happiness of people and families.

Personal savings are similar to corporate investments but just happen on a different scale. by not consuming now I hope to put off that consumption until later when I can better enjoy it or will need it. Should delaying such consumption earn a saver any reward? (interest) Is there a risk to the saver's delay? (inflation) Is there a cost to the saver? (penalty) Does your system allow private companies? If so, can they save for some future need? Scaled up from personal savers. Where do such savings sit? Do I keep the $10 not spent under my mattress? Does the state just not give it to me? Where does a company keep its money not spent?

Maybe your system does away with money altogether. I don't know. You talk a lot at the macro level, but people don't live at the macro level. They live at the micro level where each transaction is important to them. Can you describe how your collectivism works at the individual level? I work in some factory or service run by the state. How do I plan and pay for the 300 person wedding in Cancun for my daughter? How many different kinds of cars will be available for me to buy? Do I get a benefit from consuming less than average? I could go on. Your socialism is like a big puzzle that you have put all the pieces together, but when that is done, there is no picture. It's blank. The pieces all fit but....

You have perhaps missed my answer, that was also addressed to this. It may be worth repeating. Financial savings are an accounting fiction, that cannot shift any real resource into the future.

The pool of available resources at a given moment: food, housing, infrastructure, human labour, raw materials, is what it is. Financial "savings" do not shift it in time, do not magically expand it. If people save money (or any other form of financial asset) and then all decide to spend savings on resources, the resource pool remains the same. All you get is inflation, and those savings being show as an illusion. And when talking about a social security scheme, how it's sustainable, it's the macro level that is being discussed. This was what I addressed originally. "Capitalization" for social security is a financial scam.

Because, and pardon me laboring more on this, in terms of real resource use a social security system must always balance on the present.

Personal savings may work for you individually if and only if you save more than the others. In that you will later outspend those others in bidding for limited recurses. But collectively - this is a social security system we were discussing - it's a zero-sum game. Look at you example:

Person A will want to retire to a quiet life in the country after 40 years in the city; Person B will want to take 2 $10,000 vacations a year in distant places. Person C will want to move to be with grandchildren. Now multiply that by a few million other options. The state has a record of being able to meet collective needs (keep the trains running on time) but but fails miserably at meeting individual needs. It is those individual needs that increase the happiness of people and families.

You talk about retirees consuming resources. To meet their need for resources, the people in active labour pool must produce those resources at the same time they're consumed. The system must balance. Whether the laborers are "taxed" and those taxes "pay" for the pensions, or the retirees spend "savings" and but resources in the market, the end result would be the same: a fraction of the resources gets spent on retirees. It's just two different ways to organize the transfer of real resources from laborers to retirees going on in the present. Because the vacations you didn't consume 20 years ago are not frozen in time waiting for you in retirement: the workers of your younger age who would have served you have also aged and are also retirees now.

Thus pay-as-you-go versus capitalization is a matter of formal organization about the transfer or resources in the present from laborers to retirees.

What I am arguing is that pay-as-you go is superior for two main, very important, reasons:
1. It more accurately represents reality, preventing fallacious presentations like saving for the future. All transfers of resources happen in the present and are a choice that present society must make. This is always true, it's a material reality. A system that more plainly shows that is superior.
2. Capitalization provides more opportunities to useless rentiers to peddle complex financial structures and siphon off a share of the "financial flows" for their own luxury consumption. Seize a share of the resources for themselves as "necessary specialized service providers" of finance by pretending they're providing supposedly necessary "financial services". Which are always much more bureaucratic and obfuscated than the pay-as-you-go state administered systems.

Capitalization is a system exploited by a parasite class. That is why banksters keep pushing capitalization and trying to cancel pay-as-you-go. A more obfuscated system gives them opportunities to present themselves as necessary middlemen and organizers. They're noy - they're social parasites.