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MattG comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: polymathwannabe 11 August 2015 01:24PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 05:47:37AM *  2 points [-]

A portion of a student's first two years salary (say, 10%) should go to the people who taught them the hard skills necessary to get that job (relative to how much those skills are needed on the job)

Details;

Companies could use relative importance testing to figure out which skills they valued to which degree, and teachers could keep track of which skills they taught students, and use standardized microdegrees to prove they had taught those students those skills.

immediate prerequisites would get say, 3% of the that 10%, and pre-pre-requisites would get 3% of that. So that when you get all the way to their kindergarten teacher who taught them all how to count, he's getting only a tiny fraction of that salary (but of course, almost ALL his students will be using the skills he taught, so he might still make a decent amount from it)

Rationale: -Teachers have a HUGE positive externality in that they don't capture MOST of the economic value they create. The best teachers not only teach the material - they foster a deep love for what they teach, and may cause their pupil's to take on careers related to what they teach.. This incentive scheme captures that distinction, which I believe is a huge criticism right now of incentive schemes based purely on standardized testing.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 12 August 2015 06:29:16AM *  6 points [-]

Here are some perspectives on education:

  • Education of an individual provides expected benefits to that individual. He or she will have better career opportunities than if he or she did not receive that education. Therefore, the cost of education should be borne primarily by the individual, for instance in the form of debts that must be repaid.
  • Education of an individual provides expected benefits to the whole society in which that individual lives and works. He or she will be capable of greater productivity, which will have positive but diffuse externalities for a very large number of people. Productivity increases, however, accrue mostly to the wealthier members of society. Therefore, the cost of education should be borne primarily by the public in general, for instance in the form of tax-funded grants, but these should be funded by progressive taxes on income or wealth.
  • Education of an individual provides expected benefits to the individual's future employers, as workers with particular skills are scarce and obtained on a competitive job market. When an educated person is hired (and thus removed from the job market for the moment), there are fewer educated candidates available to the next employer. Therefore, the cost of education should be borne primarily by employers of educated workers, for instance in the form of a payroll tax; or a payment to the educator from the employer.
  • Education should not be modeled as a future economic benefit to particular parties, but as a duty of society to its own next generation, based on the benefit of past education: to a first approximation, everyone has received benefits that would not be possible without oneself and one's fellows and predecessors having been educated; therefore, everyone bears responsibility to pay it forward, proportional perhaps to the benefit that they themselves have received.
Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 06:46:00AM 0 points [-]

I'm primarily concerned with how to create a system of incentives that make people want to provide better education. I think all of these perspectives have something to offer to that, but other than the third (for which I already have ideas around) do you have any concrete proposals for incentivizing better education?

Comment author: richard_reitz 12 August 2015 12:24:39PM 0 points [-]

See Appendix B here and a long, rambly, unproofread fb post I don't entirely agree with (it's a stream-of-consciousness, get-an-unrefined-idea-on-paper-so-it-can-get-revised thing) here.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 06:36:30PM *  0 points [-]

Yes, I broadly agree with both of those. Thanks for the links.

Comment author: Romashka 12 August 2015 06:20:13AM 0 points [-]

But what would the student do, if he goes from the stipend of 60$ per month to the salary of 32? (And he cannot quit.)

Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 06:40:57AM *  0 points [-]

I suppose he would cut down on expenses? If a worker cannot live for two years on 90% of their salary, it's probably not a job they should be taking given their lifestyle

Comment author: RichardKennaway 12 August 2015 08:07:44AM 1 point [-]

I suppose he would cut down on expenses? If a worker cannot live for two years on 90% of their salary, it's probably not a job they should be taking given their lifestyle

If they're living on 90% of their salary, and you take 10% away, now they're living on 100% of their salary. Should they still be able to live on 90% of that? And 90% of that?

The point of living on 90% is that you still have the 10%.

So now the tax means you have to seek a job at 111% of what would have been enough. Best of luck with that.

The best teachers not only teach the material - they foster a deep love for what they teach, and may cause their pupil's to take on careers related to what they teach.. This incentive scheme captures that distinction

The incentive that this produces for the students is to earn more money to stay in the same place, and for the teachers to teach whatever subjects will earn more money. Say goodbye to anything being taught that doesn't translate into earning more money. It replaces teaching to the test by teaching to the bank balance.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 06:26:21PM *  1 point [-]

I will simply point out that people and the economy seem to have adjusted perfectly well to income tax to respond to your first point.

I don't think that it incentivizes people to stay in the same place. The only people who it incentivizes to stay in the same place are people who expect to get less than a 10% raise from a promotion or new job AND stay at their new job less than two years. And if companies wanted those people, they would make up the difference. To be fair, it does disincentivize career change... but only marginally more than career change is ALREADY disincentivized.

I think that teaching to the bank account is probably not the optimal strategy. but I do believe it provides orders of magnitude more social value than the current system. As someone who works with liberal arts graduates to help them find their jobs, I think it's a travesty that liberal arts is as big as stem, even though the expected value and amount of jobs from a liberal arts degree is vastly smaller than STEM.

What I think you're really getting at is externalities - there are some high paying jobs that are bad for society, and some low paying jobs that are good for society. But in my philosophical view,, that's the role of the government - to tax away negative externalities of jobs, and subsidize positive externality jobs. This proposal would make that process way more effective, because those taxes and subsidies would be felt by the teachers

Comment author: Viliam 13 August 2015 08:25:39AM *  1 point [-]

As someone who works with liberal arts graduates to help them find their jobs, I think it's a travesty that liberal arts is as big as stem, even though the expected value and amount of jobs from a liberal arts degree is vastly smaller than STEM.

The typical defense of liberal arts education I read online is: "But liberal arts education has nonzero value, therefore we must preserve it exactly as it is now!" Usually done by describing a strawman world with zero liberal arts education, and showing that something of value is lost. For example, in such world people would keep doing science, but would completely lose their ability to verbally explain why doing science is a good thing.

Ironically, I think the success of this type of argument is itself another argument against too much purely liberal arts education.

EDIT: Now that I think about it more, I think there is a huge hypocrisy involved. People who are successful at math but fail at e.g. philosophy are describes as losers, a kind of pathetic half-humans. On the other hand, successful philosophers who fail at math... what, is there any problem as long as they can provide a clever philosophical argument why they are still high-status? (What exactly is the lesson here? Being high-status is better than being right or being useful, I guess, and clever arguments are still the best road to high status in the eyes of masses.)

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