Back to school :D

[Bluhman]

It's not free but it's a lot cheaper.

In more ways than one.

[HobomasterXXX]

It's not free but it's a lot cheaper.
Kinda like going together with your friends to buy something. If you divide the cost among many it will be very little for lots of people.

Except you make random people off the street pay for what you and your friends are buying.

[Prpl_Mage]

If 1 million people pays 1 dollar each for something that costs 1 million dollars for example a school -  it's gonna be way more efficient than having the school pay 1 million dollars by itself.
Everyone can afford to pay one dollar, few will be willing to part with a million dollars.

It's also worth mentioning that our schools are government owned as well so it's for everyone and not just the ones who have the money.
If schools are expected to have the latest equipment, computers, teachers and all that they need to pay a lot for it. And the students / their parents are the ones who have to pay for all that if you live in a place of capitalism.
So you could say that even some of you pay for what other students are using and not just what you. Like lab equipment, sport equipment and so on.

[Bluhman]

Yeah, public schools in the US are tax-paid, which everyone pays. What that basically means is that there is no real quality control for schools in any part of the US, which means some public schools can be pretty crappy, unless you specifically pick out a high quality public school district (which my parents were like obsessed with doing) or have the money to burn to go to a quality-controlled private school.

The point I guess is that there is no country/government that uses completely all capitalism or all socialism (maybe the latter, but that might just be a generalization of what I was taught about communist russia and china back as a high school sophomore.) For things like video games, T.V. models and channels, and movies, capitalism is used to ensure that the highest quality amusing stuff is the most profitable and successful, whereas for things like water supply, roads, and electricity, it's "socialist" or government owned and paid by everyone's taxes, since a huge majority of the people use these resources, and imagining capitalist roads (competing roadways you have to pay for to drive on) would just be silly (the downside being that there's little quality control or preference, so you might have to deal with things like potholes in your roads, crappy traffic lights, questionable tap water, or power outages. In which case, if that's getting annoying, the best thing you can do is find others who agree that is annoying and start a petition to get your local government to fix the problem). And sometimes, like for school, you've got a choice.

The thing with Scandinavian schools, it seems, especially for higher education, seems to be that it's all government paid, whereas even for our public higher education, there is some tuition to pay. On one hand, this encourages more people in Scandinavia to uptake high education; in theory, that would make more members of the society capable of achieving higher statuses in the country and being more successful. The problem is that the schools are not quite as well funded, which depends strongly on how high the taxes are. As Prpl noted, the teachers basically are working for free/very low wage (similar to how teachers work for public schools in our 1st and 2nd level education), and without pay as an incentive, it sometimes can be hard to find people willing to take up jobs in those universities and teach with zeal. Here, in the US, I've attended a public university (halfway across the country in SoCal, which sort of defeated the purpose of taking it up, since the cost was still the same as your typical private school) and even then, there were some teachers that were good at picking out interesting topics, making new fields of research and study interesting to students (That was probably just UCSB being a party school, but whatever). You still have to pay to go, and might not even make it that far with the money you've got, but the people working there are determined to make it a learning experience.

I can't say much for Scandinavia in terms of how their university classes work or how they are to experience. Since I will never be able to experience that, nor will Prpl probably be willing to give up something free to see what an American university is like, it's a bit hard to compare quality, and the matter of whether purely government paid universities are better or worse than the tuition we have to pay as students is purely up to ones opinion. Since my parents are apparently rich as ****, We seem to fly with the latter.

I'll probably correct some of the erroneous information above after I check stuff. Also, Probably everyone already knows the **** I've just said. So I don't know.

TL;DR version:

Fully tax-paid higher education:
+ Pretty much everyone is encouraged to go and become better educated
- Possibly a lower quality education due to low-paid professors

VS

Partial or full tuition with Public/Private US Colleges:
- You have to pay an arm and a leg to get in and show them you're capable
+ You learn a lot of interesting stuff from professors paid heartily to teach or research

[SaiKar]

If 1 million people pays 1 dollar each for something that costs 1 million dollars for example a school -  it's gonna be way more efficient than having the school pay 1 million dollars by itself.
Everyone can afford to pay one dollar, few will be willing to part with a million dollars.

Okay, 1) everyone paying 1 dollar is like a model of gross inefficiency, since it takes a million more effort to make sure that everyone paid the right amount and sent it in at the right time and all that.

But more to the point, no matter how much you spread the costs among the population, the prices are the same. So if you pay high tuition now you have to have a lot of money upfront but then you're done. Or if you pay low or no tuition now, you get your education for free, but you're paying the higher taxes for the rest of your life. The $1 a million times argument makes the second way sound awesome since nobody expects $1s to add up to much, even over a lifetime, but it's not like tuition in the states is a million bucks, so it's kind of misleading like that.

[fruckert]

Did a "back to school" topic seriously turn into a debate about economics?

[Archem]

What the hell is wrong with us?

[Bluhman]

Commit suicide now with me.

[Valiere]

Plus, I very sure that living in Sweden leads to a much easier and happier life than in the US.

The US consistently ranks worse than other industrialized (first world) nations in terms of poverty, inequality, life expectancy, infant mortality, high school dropout rate, etc. etc.

Regarding happiness, I think this map says it all. It's based on the Happy Planet Index. The happiest countries and bright green; the least happy are brown. That's right, we're down there with Russia and sub-Saharan Africa.

There are a number of reasons for this, but economic debate aside, I think the facts speak for themselves: what we're doing right now is not working. The more -- gasp! -- "socialist" countries are actually much better off than we are.

[Bluhman]

There are a number of reasons for this, but economic debate aside, I think the facts speak for themselves: what we're doing right now is not working. The more -- gasp! -- "socialist" countries are actually much better off than we are.

Environmentally. The HPI seems to be more of a measure of countries' ecological footprint.

As such, the HPI is not a measure of which are the happiest countries in the world. Countries with relatively high levels of life satisfaction, as measured in surveys, are found from the very top (Colombia in 6th place) to the very bottom (the USA in 114th place) of the rank order. The HPI is best conceived as a measure of the environmental efficiency of supporting well-being in a given country. Such efficiency could emerge in a country with a medium environmental impact (e.g. Costa Rica) and very high well-being, but it could also emerge in a country with only mediocre well-being, but very low environmental impact (e.g. Vietnam).

So what that's saying is that the US is really shitty at conserving the environment. And that is no secret.

Wait, what the hell does this have to do with going back to school!? I'm not an economics or ecology major! Dammit!

[SaiKar]

We're actually dead last still? I'm not sure I believe that. I work in industry and there are some ridiculously obnoxious disposal regulations for chemicals and stuff. I have a hard time believing 3rd world countries follow the waste disposal laws we have here.

[Archem]

I'd think they don't have as many (or as bad) environmentally unsafe products showing up.

[Bluhman]

There's still the 250 million or so motor vehicles driving around the US today, only a few of which are hybrids or other enviro-friendly stuff, probably because many people want to hold on to their valuable cars for as long as possible. I honestly can see us going uphill in the future, but the shear size of heavy industry and volume of cars and cattle and other pollutant creating things certainly explains the US's crappy HPI rank on that map. For me, at least.

[Valiere]

Yeah, you're right about the HPI, Bluhman. Now I'm surprised Sub-Saharan Africa is so terrible in that regard. How could they possibly be all that damaging to the environment?

Here's another list of the happiest countries based on a gallup poll:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gallup-table.html

The US finishes a much more respectable #14, but the top 5 is still dominated by the Scandinavian bloc. Denmark is #1. Not a surprise, we Danes are pretty amazing.

[MissingName]

Leaving for college on Thursday.