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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   4089 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When it comes to the building of "parallel institutions" as a political strategy, what would a monarchist parallel institution in a modern, democratic society look like (other than either a 24/7 ren faire or a mafia syndicate)?

Buy land somewhere in the middle of nowhere and organize a town there. Never sell the land to your citizens, just "rent" at a pittance, but with rules attached. Maybe don't rent either--require buy-in to the company that owns the land. There are all sorts of rules against rent discrimination, but as far as I know no rules that you must not discriminate when seeking "private investment." So long as you retain ownership of the land it remains legally possible to control immigration (decide who you allow to live there), and when worst comes to worst you have a good enforcement mechanism to kick people out.

At this point your best defense is illegibility. Do really legally weird, technically complex things that judges won't understand and have no business ruling on. Use blockchain smart contracts as much as possible. Build tenuous chains of trusts managed by corporations owned by nonprofits owned by churches. Generally, make it quite difficult to classify what you're doing according to existing laws, thus forcing your enemies (and enemies will arise if you succeed) to either force strained interpretation of existing law or sponsor the creation of entirely new laws in order to target you. Ideally the whole thing takes place in a sympathetic jurisdiction (right now, Texas would be best, then probably Florida) where even explicit government rulings against you are not necessarily enforced.

Try to use dollars as little as possible (another reason to rely on crypto). They can be confiscated or inflated away.

The nice thing about such a circumspect strategy is that it's not coup-complete. Your resistance will generally scale with your organization. If you act fast you can have thousands of people living in your town before the federal government realizes anything must be done about it. Attract (and filter for) the right kind of people and the benefits of such a town will speak for themselves.

I'm no monarchist but I do think such "parallel" societies will become necessary soon. I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist. I think many others feel the same and have reasonably resilient jobs or skills that can handle a move to the middle of nowhere to get such a community started.

I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist.

Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.

Private schools' main benefit is selection effects, but they select based mostly on income. You're paying out the nose just to be among other people who can and are willing to pay out the nose. This is a problem because while income is correlated with IQ it's not a particularly strong correlation, and you'll still end up with plenty of slow kids in class who drag the rest of the class down.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead. I expect you'd pretty quickly have elementary school kids doing college-level tasks (to the extent "college-level" means anything) if they're allowed to set the pace rather than letting it be set by the slowest rich kid in the neighborhood. Given a group of kids 2 standard deviations above average (so 5% of all classrooms) you should probably be entirely done with high school before 9th grade using only half-days.

Private schools are definitely the best existing solution, besides maybe one-on-one private tutoring, but they're insufficient. They don't get the outcomes they should be getting. And the things I mentioned (challenging education, intelligent peers, sensible mental health policies) aren't the only benefits of living in a sane jurisdiction, just the most salient.

I think this used to be called "Gifted and Talented" programs when I was in elementary/middle school. I don't know if they still exist.

Even if they don't explicitly point this out, language immersion programs have a similar functional effect for ensuring your kid has higher-than-average-quality peers (and, if your kid is legitimately over-performing, it's a great distraction). They're also less likely to be targeted by progressives because it's not a sciences/excellence thing.

Yeah, I was in one and it was utterly insufficient. The peers, at least, were great, but the curriculum was still quite slow. Still better than nothing, but a long way from what's needed.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead.

Isn’t this just selective public schools like those in some big cities like NYC where the student body is like 75% Asian?

If it is I'd like to learn more about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_high_schools_in_New_York_City

How much do you pay for that though? Seems like a humongous cost.

Cheaper than building your own Galt’s Gulch?

If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.

Possibly.

If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?

My understanding is that private schools are commonly cheaper per student than public schools. And somehow have smaller classes. Public schools are wild profligates with our tax dollars.

I have never found a serious source for this in aggregate (probably publication bias), but I have a suspicion that outcomes correlate negatively with funding. It's not hard to look and see that the districts that spend the most per student tend to also be the worst performing overall.

Some of this is higher costs in urban areas, and frequently bad districts can have some really good magnet schools. And I'm also not really of the opinion that this means cutting funding would improve outcomes.

I mean, is it overpriced? Education is just expensive and we don’t see it up front with a public school because the government pays the bill. Indeed, Catholic schools typically cost less than public schools spend.

One of the Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque, NM is) Republican Party’s big talking points is that the Albuquerque Public Schools district’s total budget is poorly spent by government.

Divided by pupil, the cost is a few thousand dollars more per year than tuition at Albuquerque Academy, the swankiest of our two prep high schools and the one with the biggest, showiest campus. At that price, we should be turning out Silicon Valley/Harvard/MIT-level high school grads, but we’re not.

If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.

I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.

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Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.

That seems likely. But then where does the money go? Higher salaries? Marginal improvements in materials?

You could imagine a private school which gets 90% of its performance from <90% of its dollars. In a public city, it has to spend the extra dollars on inefficient stuff to keep the poors out. In this gated community, the gatekeeping is done, so it’d be able to stop spending.

I suspect distinguishing which dollars are which is nontrivial.

To a lesser extent this is true of housing in general. I think plenty of people would be happy living in much smaller houses/apartments if they were sure they could do so in a good neighborhood with other successful, like-minded people.

It makes me wonder about the legality of constructing some kind of "landshare" where people need to literally buy their way into the community. Most of the money would be going not towards the land they're buying, but some kind of community trust holding an index of stocks. This way you still get the price gatekeeping without the inflated land prices.

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