im a professional economist ama about the limits of policy :/
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(ii) Education! Education is a fucking mess. It's likely that all else equal, the price of education for undergraduate students has increased wealth inequality in the United States. But it's not obvious to me that better funding from the state would have fixed this. :c
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You can view direct and indirect support for student tuition as subsidies to students; but the thing about subsidies is that they're never completely "captured" by the immediate recipient. In the case of education, schools can respond to students having more money . . .
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by increasing tuition, and getting a slice of the pie for themselves. Direct funding by the state for schools doesn't solve this problem either. Organizations have an infinite capacity for burning money, and when you shovel more into them without some mechanism . . .
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to control costs, there's no reason to expect to get much for your investment. A second issue is that school, as a tool for increasing productivity (and so expected wages), may be more useless than not. You can get one side from
@bryan_caplan's _The Case Against Education_, or -
check out
@nickchk's feed for a more optimistic take. (Nick, grats on the handle change!) There are other issues floating around with schools--say, student preferences for job status and amenities vs simple wages (why not just be a plumber? pay's great!)--to the point that . . . -
in aggregate I'd argue you should deep uncertainty about the relationship between schools and societal income, or at least about the likelihood that a simple policy change like "feed more money into tuition support" affecting millennial job prospects much. :(
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Wow. Thank you for such a comprehensive & nuanced answer to my question. Ironically, it made me realize that there are no solitary answers to anything in economics lol
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HA yeah unfortunately :/ Thanks for hearing me out!
End of conversation
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