There’s other ways to do that that don’t include forgiving debt of college graduates with good paying jobs. Have the income based repayment plans discharge the debt at the end of 10 or 15 years of payments – not just for teachers or civil servants, for everyone. Don’t make those plans so draconian that missed payments ruin your progress. Make the debts dischargable by bankruptcy. But the problem with student loans aren’t the loans themselves, but that the cost of college has increased dramatically. In large part because of the unlimited nature of student loans.
But for the love of god, don’t forgive ikes’ med school debt! COME ON!
How is this different than all the jobs already being lost to automation, which will only continue at an ever increasing rate? I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that unemployment rates are deceptive at best when many are working 2 jobs because they can’t make it on one job’s slave wage salary. We’re going to continue losing jobs. There’s no way around it. But keeping coal mines and the oil industry in business is no reason not to look towards clean energy. We should be leaders in new innovative technology and not let other countries get the jump on beating us at clean energy
Maybe I’m being naive, but many in Odessa, TX could find work on wind farms or in the solar industry and even if they can’t, it’s no reason to stubbornly cling to outdated technology. For the record, are you against the Green New Deal? Are you against eliminating dependence on fossil fuels? I can’t imagine you are, but want clarification on what your position is here
I’m against government policies whose goal is ‘creating jobs’. Jobs are a byproduct of work needing to be done and get paid the market rate depending on conditions on the ground where they are getting done. If it were up to me the government would employ fewer people who were drastically more effective.
See in my view the bigger an organization gets the more waste it generates. This is counteracted by economies of scale up to a point where that hits diminishing returns (and that point is trending down not up) and there is a minimum organizational size to do any given project. As organizations get larger and become entrenched institutions they start to exert an almost gravitational pull and force every counterparty they have to comply with whatever terms they feel are good for them, which means that large entities are pretty much strictly a negative externality to be managed not encouraged. Once you get to a certain level of bigness government institutions are significantly superior to private institutions because they don’t have a profit motive (although random powerful government officials building personal fiefdoms remains a major problem). That’s most of the reason why truly huge projects that require huge organizations are better in government hands than private hands…
But any time it’s possible to keep the size of organizations down that’s good for society. So the goal being to directly employ people working for any specific entity is almost always a mistake no matter how well intentioned. You do a project and it organically requires workers until the job is done, and then the project is over. Many government projects last for decades obviously, and that’s fine, but the work required should create demand for workers not the other way around.
One of the key things the government needs to do is make sure that private power/wealth doesn’t get too concentrated, and we’ve failed miserably at that. We need to take a bunch of that wealth and redistribute it to normal people so that they can do productive stuff with it. The solution is to tax the rich and give the cash out to everyone else, not to tax the rich and use the money to tell people what to do.
The government is for large scale projects that are in the public interest, setting rules (and enforcing them… every rule should be almost entirely complied with or it shouldn’t be on the books), and preventing any private entity from getting too goddamn big and redistributing the money from that task back to the median household.
I don’t want to derail the thread with a huge debate on governmental roles. I’ll just say that afaik the government currently massively subsidizes the fossil fuel industry in terms of R&D and other aspects as it is (if I’m wrong, someone will point it out). I know this to be the case with the pharmaceutical industry. No one is saying infrastructure and green energy jobs can’t come from private sector companies, but the overriding goal should be to become less dependent on the fossil fuel industry and take away their lobbying power. Your take on not wanting the government to be some big institution that controls jobs seems no different than their current role now seeing as how large of an iron grip the fossil fuel industry has on the government now in terms of regulations and the economic sector, etc. imo
Oh make no mistake I’m for ending every form of subsidy for fossil fuels and instituting a revenue neutral carbon tax that g to radually scales up to 200/ton over the next 10-15 years.
I just know that’ll hurt a lot of normal people and I want to deal with that with direct payments to them, and really everyone.
I absolutely love basic research funding. It’s hard to determine what the roi for any given research project will be and the timeframes are long so private industry sucks at it, but it’s one of the most important macro drivers of productivity growth.
Ugh, this is where the capitalism in me rears its ugly head. There’s a reason why there’s no shortage of cures for erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness, but rare serious diseases go untouched or are priced out of reach of those who really need it. There’s a bigger market for the former. It’s also why we’re so far behind the curve in clean energy. I think you underestimate what small companies are capable of innovating. They just can’t because the big companies lobby for regulations that beat down and stymie competition
Okay, I’m done for now. I’m sure my views on this are not popular here
I think you mean overestimating and you’d be wrong. I think very little of private basic research. Businesses don’t fund research into stuff that isn’t going to generate an obvious and tangible ROI. I basically don’t even believe in private pharma research at this point.
A research or infrastructure is exactly the kind of large project that does much better in government hands than private hands. I’m also kind of a huge critic of the patent system as well fwiw. Most patents are an example of some private individual being granted a government monopoly on mostly public funded research.
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I think you mean overestimating and you’d be wrong. I think very little of private basic research. Businesses don’t fund research into stuff that isn’t going to generate an obvious and tangible ROI. I basically don’t even believe in private pharma research at this point.
Pharm research is a complicated topic, and there’s a great blog written by a guy named Derek Lowe (In the pipeline) that talks about it - he’s been in the field forever.
Basic basic research from what I understand comes out of places like the NIH, and they’re pretty good at what they do - but there is only a VERY tenuous relationship to that kind of research and the stuff that Pfizer/etc. does. Big pharm has blown gazillions of $$ on Alzheimer research (for example) and they’ve been setting stacks of hundreds on fire for a decade or so with nothing (actually probably less than nothing) to show for it. So yeah, Viagra is a safer drug to market, because it’s a pretty simple chemical fix for a problem. Alzheimer’s, not so much - After 20 or so years of serious research, AFAIK they haven’t even agreed if the plaque tangles in the brain that you find at autopsy are the cause of the problem, or just along for the ride.
Also, if you’re a small company with a good idea, Pfizer doesn’t have some evil bureaucrat that they own somehow regulate you out of business - they happily buy you up, you cash out, and life goes on. That’s actually the dream for a lot of small pharm/biotech companies - cashing out. In 2018 Pfizer had $53 BILLION in earnings - they got plenty of cash to buy up anything promising.
You’ll get no disagreement from me here. I attended public schools in good and bad areas growing up… and the differences were spectacularly unsubtle. I went from this school for freshman year, to this school for the front half of sophomore year, to this school which is weirdly massively overrated, for the back half of sophomore year… and it was a ton of whiplash to say the least. I of course went to a new school for Junior year because my dad was basically a grifter lol.
The educational disparities in this country are incredibly real though. It’s why it’s way better to be born middle class anywhere in the world vs poor anywhere in the world.
Dude the Alzheimer’s drugs they currently sell are barely a notch above sugar pills. What part of the medical industry do you actually think is the problem wrt cost that we could cut tomorrow and be fine? Please be specific… because from where I’m sitting you sure seem to always be the guy coming in to tell me that I’m not being fair to one part of the medical establishment or another.
You know more about all of this than me, but I’m starting to seriously suspect you’re in no danger of being unbiased about it.
Not sure how true this is in California. The schools in rich areas are quite restricted on what they can spend. The PTA in my district spends a lot, but they can’t spend it on core academic stuff. I know a case where a parent tried to pay to hire a new teacher (the whole salary) and could not do it. I don’t think spending per pupil really varies that much.
There are other things that need to happen to remove problems in areas with less money than just spending. (Busing might be one, but not if you want to win elections)
Nah, we’re not communicating. Problem with this sort of format.
Drug companies have a lot to answer for, or more properly the idiot politicians that allow stuff like “no negotiating drug prices for Medicare” sort of stuff. That stuff is completely crazy, and it’s EXACTLY what they use their captive politicians to prevent.
It’s true that Pfizer et al do very little basic research, but they do TONS of stuff that doesn’t pay off - primarily because the costs are so stinking high. It costs tens to hundreds of millions of $$ to do large scale studies for some drugs - and on average 5 out of 5000 potential drugs make it to human testing. One of the five hit the market. The other 4,999 - sunk cost, thanks for playing.
Now you can game the system, like they did with prilosec to prevacid - basically tack on a hydroxyl group to a drug that you already know works, and you have another stretch of patent protection for your drug - and I blame docs for moving their patient off the generic to the new drug, but that’s another topic.
You guys convinced me. But I still see nothing wrong with using public money as long as the public shares in the benefits and wealth created. Unlike the way it is now where we fund R&D for fossil fuel and pharma only so they can get rich and control our politics at the expense of the public who funds them
This is important, and all schools should be decent schools, but the contrarian in me says that real educational attainment is an ideology and a disciple, and nothing matters more in predicting success than 1) the number of books in the home and 2) a family emphasis on the importance of education. Now, 2) can be a big deal, and it can lead to success, but it can also be a trap. My parents didn’t push me in education but I was interested and pushed myself in my way (took 7 AP classes and did academic competitions but grades were pretty blah). Still, I set myself up where I was ready to buckle down and excel in college, which I did. What I disliked, however, was seeing many of the “dumb” smart kids succeed, mainly as a result of coming from solid families and doing what they were supposed to, then graduating from med, dental, law school or whatever. These are the “winners” in any study on educational attainment, but I felt that most were frauds in a way. They were replacement level who could have been replaced by other students at worse schools if they “got with the program.” No real point here, and it’s mainly just my Skalanskism talking.