Film your Marxist Professors

[yyy]

@finley

It’s not so much the fact that it’s wretched that bothers me. Lots of places are wretched. What irks me is that the gov’t spends such an astounding shitload of cash on making it wretched.

I’m afraid we’re going around in circles and will soon be back to the UK and all other OECD countries spending less on healthcare than the US but getting better results, and so on. Is the UK really the world’s poster child for welfare inefficiency?

@yyy

There isn’t really such a thing as “no system at all”. There’s always a system. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that. I’m grumbling about value-for-money.

Oh, sure. Charity-as-bandaid is a system. Even anarchism, to the extent that it can exist, is a system of sorts. So why did Victorian Britain – and every other country that chose to modernize, from the Far West to the Far East – insist on statism? It couldn’t possibly be because, overall, it’s less craptastic than disorganizaed quasi-libertarianism with a super-rich oligarchy surrounded by super-sized slums. Not a chance.

Of course there’s a relationship, but like most things it’s a circular one, not a unidirectional this-causes-that. Education drives a demand for education.

Or to put it another way, people are less likely to demand things they don’t know are possible/plausible. That doesn’t mean those things are not useful when administered by the state.

@Wikiland

Percentages of the population with no schooling varied greatly among LEDCs in 2000, from less than 10% to over 65%. MEDCs had much less variation, ranging from less than 2% to 17%.

Notice the overlap in those bands. A failure rate of 17% is pretty damn high considering that all of those MEDCs must be spending a fair bit of GNP on State education, whereas 10% is acceptably low considering State investment in LEDCs must be close to zero. As I said earlier, neither State-funded nor privately-funded education will necessarily produce a good outcome; all I’m asserting is that State-funded systems that fall at the shitty end of that statistic (towards 17%) should either be fixed, or shut down so that the money can be spent more productively.

I can think of two other explanations for the overlap. Notice how they rearranged the 1st-2nd-3rd world division into a more-less division. Which countries went up a level, and which down, and does that really make a better comparison? I would look into it if I had time.

Also, education tends to be a devolved function in federal systems, so within one country you can have significant variation. For example, right now in Ontario, public school teachers are freaking out because they don’t know what they’re supposed to teach next month, because they don’t have copies lying around of the 1990’s health curriculum that the newly elected government promised to revert to (to save a vocal minority of parents from the tyranny of – among other things – letting their children learn about puberty before it happens instead of after, because they think that’s what God wants), which they’re now claiming they’re not actually going to revert to, but they still haven’t come up with a new version to replace it with… Meanwhile in the rest of the country, the kids may be confused, but at least the teachers know what’s going on. Oh, and in “New France”, in addition to the usual human biology stuff that kids in most countries learn, they’ve added love to the curriculum. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, but the point is, no system is perfect, and there are systems within systems, and overall, societies with more state education do better than those with less.

You’re saying, in effect, if you see someone’s head underwater, don’t interfere.

No, I’m saying if you see someone’s head underwater, you’d better make damn sure you know what you’re doing, or they’ll drag you underwater too.

So, the end of civilization will be caused not by giving women the vote, nor by allowing Protestants and Catholics to marry, nor by decriminalizing this or that, nor by letting postmodern philosophy be taught in universities, nor by any of those things that we used to hear would cause Armageddon, but by trying to improve the condition of those at the bottom of the heap. Got it.

As JP is fond of saying, life is suffering; and as other popular wags have noted, suffering expands to match the means of alleviation. In other words, if you take away from people the normal trials of life, which have satisfying and fairly well-understood solutions, they will invent different ones, which don’t.

Ah, the normal trials of life… I’m loathe to put words in your mouth, so I’ll just register a high degree of cynicism here and leave it at that.

However, the current form of the British Welfare State is dedicated to first creating and then treating a chronic “disease” … not unlike the NHS, curiously enough. Its purpose, surely, should be to head off only an acute occurrence?

Today’s lesson: never treat a chronic condition when you can treat an acute one instead.