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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Education was better and significantly cheaper some 70 years ago, before the educationalists and administrators started multiplying. Have you seen that CATO graph of how spending per pupil rose 250% in the US since about 1970, inflation adjusted? Outcomes did not change at all. It's clearly possible to do much better, for much less. I can't find the CATO graph but this is just as good: https://housingtoday.org/animated-chart-of-the-day-public-school-enrollment-staff-and-inflation-adjusted-cost-per-pupil-1970-to-2018/

Japan does healthcare and public transport pretty well. I know their demographics are very different to US demographics. But it is possible in principle to have an efficient, effective health and transport system. It just depends on what other priorities policymakers are prepared to sacrifice.

One of the main drivers of the increased cost and reduction in efficiency in education is progressive sentiments of expanding education access. Most of the students progressives care the most about should be dumped into the workforce at 13. Not being willing to do that drives cost and other stupid trends in education like grade inflation and the reduced value of a HS diploma.

Significantly reducing the school leaving age specifically for the lowest IQ and least functional students seems like it has easily foreseeable and terrible social engineering effects. The thing about kids who are not future engineers because they aren't college material which everyone seems to forget, including politically incorrect HBD enthusiasts, is that they're people who aren't future engineers because they aren't college material. 80 IQ teens with bad values having less supervision and more freedom is in fact a bad thing, and sure that's a little bit unfair to 120 IQ teens who could easily be done with secondary school at 15 or 16 but have to drag out highschool by another two years, but warehousing bright teens unnecessarily causes a lot less damage than having unsocialized dumb adolescents entering their peak criminality years with nothing to do.

If we lived in a world where even poor people mostly had intact families teaching good values in a culture that supported that kind of thing it might be different, but we don't and no one seems to know how to get there on a societal level. 80 IQ single moms are by and large not going to suddenly become fundamentalist Christians raising their kids with the beliefs that hard work is a sacred value from God, honesty and rule following bring rewards, sexual promiscuity is immoral and low status, drugs are evil, etc. And fundamentalist Christianity is more or less the only subculture in America today that has any success with low IQ people, so it's not as if I picked an absurd example.

So, on one hand you are admitting its basically just a prison of sorts, but on the other you want to concentrate the lil inmates there and also subject their brighter peers to forced interaction with them.

You are assuming that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career, and I'm not so sure that's true. We live in a broken society and it seems like lots of these kids would just do drugs and hang around gangs.

Yes there's lots of not-terribly-bright but not actually bad kids around, and lots of them would benefit immensely from expanded school to work programs or Germany-style tracking into apprenticeships. But you'll notice those are well supervised situations where they don't have unlimited freedom to make their own decisions, because making their own decisions and handling freedom is not something teenagers tend to be good at.

that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career

This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).

is not something teenagers tend to be good at

>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so

>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait

>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise

>confused_nick_young.jpg

You don't actually need much money if you're living with your parents(and even if average teens are gainfully employed, most people don't want to rent to them) and petty crime that gangs will introduce them to is a pretty natural progression from begging.

I totally agree that getting 16 year old boys who aren't doing well in school onto the construction site instead is at least worth trying in most cases. I do think, however, that getting them to actually do this is really really hard and that the normal incentive structures of American society would lead to the opposite results from a mass program of pushing the bottom quintile of students out of class.