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Donald Trump and Angela Merkel will join 2,500 world leaders, business executives and charity bosses at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland which kicks off on 23 January. High on the agenda once again will be the topic of inequality, and how to reduce the widening gap between the rich and the rest around the world.
The WEF recently warned that the global economy is at risk of another crisis, and that automation and digitalisation are likely to suppress employment and wages for most while boosting wealth at the very top.
But what ideas should the great and good gathered in the Swiss Alps be putting into action? We'd like to know what single step you think governments should prioritise in order to best address the problem of rising inequality. Below we've outlined seven proposals that are most often championed as necessary to tackle the issue – but which of them is most important to you?
- Provide free and high quality education
- Raise the minimum wage
- Raise taxes on the rich
- Fight corruption
- Provide more social protection for the poor
- Stop the influence of the rich on politicians
- Provide jobs for the unemployed
Do you think these ideas are enough, or are there any better ideas to close this wealth gap ? You too can participate and vote for the idea that, you think, works best.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 21 2018, @02:37PM (8 children)
You are of course somewhat right, but...
The problem there is in developing meaningful metrics for performance, metrics that aren't corruptable by political maneuvering, can't be gamed by "teaching the test" and above all: reflect on the effectiveness of the whole educational process turning out productive, or at least not negative social value graduates.
I'd rate those meaningful metrics as "temporally challenging" to develop - no matter how much data you collect, there's not much in the way of clear, meaningful indicators that develop within a short time after the teacher has worked with a student, and by the time the meaningful indicators have developed, it's very hard to trace them back to the specific teachers who made a difference.
I think the best we can actually do is rely on human judgement to rate teachers, and that is an approach fraught with corruption.
When a teacher's base pay enables them to finance, alone, a home with a child, transportation to work, healthcare, etc. at a standard equal to or better than the median students' families in their district, then I would consider the base pay to not be a problem. Until then, we are implicitly stating that we value teachers less than even the middle of the other professions - and that's a great way to send the best performers off to other industries to do better for themselves and their families.
I know too many teachers, and especially classroom aides who are doing much of the important work of education, who are wholly dependent on a spouse's income just to be able to afford food, shelter and transportation necessary to do their job. I grew up in the 70s in a 2 teacher family of 4, and with my father working full time in the day plus 3 nights a week at the junior college, and both working summer school, we had a decent middle class income. Without the extra work, we were in the "only run the air-conditioning when it's >80 degrees outside, and any meat other than ground chuck is a once a month special occasion" class.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @05:40PM (1 child)
Starting with some stats that are from various years 2011 to 2017...
There are 126 million households in the USA. There are 51 million students in public schools. There are about 3,377,900 teachers. Student to teacher ratio is 15 to 25.
We thus need to support a teacher with tax funds raised from about 37 households.
It used to be that women were excluded from many jobs. They were either single or they had husbands to help support them. This meant that the cost of their labor was pushed down. Intelligent women were cheaply available to serve as teachers. This is no longer the case; we'll need to offer decent pay.
We're asking a well-educated person to tolerate a nasty work environment without flex-time. Decent pay for a person with the education we are demanding (often a master's degree) is something like $120,000 per year. It might dip to $100,000 in a really low-cost area, or rise to $180,000 in San Francisco or New York City.
So right there, picking the middle value for income, we need to raise $3,243 per family via taxes. But wait...
That is just salary. The employer pays extra social security taxes. The employer pays for a pension (ought to be a 401K), for health insurance, for life insurance, and for many minor benefits. Teachers need to be managed, so we need to hire management. Teachers need IT support, so we'll need to hire that. Teachers need security forces, so we'll need to hire that.
Granted, we're already paying much of that, so we can sort of subtract out what we already pay. Still, considering the increased taxes and all, we're looking at an additional $3000 on top of what is already paid.
The poor greatly outnumber the rest of us. If you are posting on soylentnews, you are probably pretty well off. Maybe an extra $250 per month is nothing to you. Maybe an extra $70 per week is nothing to you. Well... that doesn't work so well for the poor.
The total pay for teachers really can't go up like that. The only way to pay teachers more is to have fewer of them. We could get pay to be reasonable with about 45 kids per class, but that degrades the working conditions. We'd also have to change all the buildings.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:19PM
Nice stats, and appropriate - since education is financed mostly on property taxes.
Also, the better school districts I have lived in do raise about $5000 per household in annual property taxes. One neighborhood in Miami actually voted in a bond issue, raising their taxes for the next 15 years, to better fund education.
I don't buy the "additional $3000" - assume that the only thing that needs to happen is we take teacher salaries from where they are today up an average of $10K per teacher, that's an additional $270 per household, and I think education is well worth that. Unfortunately, most school boards are elected full of people who vow to "spend the absolute minimum required by law" and thus we get what we've got.
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday January 21 2018, @07:56PM (1 child)
Yeah, I think many folks really have no clue how much "sacrifice" is required in salary to be a teacher today. They hear stories about some fancy suburban public schools in New York in rich areas and teachers with salaries that sound decent if not generous. That happens occasionally, but it's not common.
I taught high school for a few years, and for the first couple years I was in a major urban area in the south. To take a teaching job doing science or math, I was looking at a 40%+ pay cut from from what I could have walked into for an engineering or science job straight out of college with a bachelor's degree in the same geographic area.
And no, for those few years I taught, I didn't even get "summers off" or short hours. Most of the good teachers I knew at the schools I worked with were working at least 8-hour days, and frequently 9-10 hour days. In summers, I did a certification program one year, and in other years I was required to do continuing education hours that took up several weeks, not to mention planning for the following year. It might be possible to get a part-time summer job around those sorts of constraints, but not one that would likely pay very well.
Even for humanities folks, teaching jobs are often a chore for not-too-great pay comparatively. For science or math folks, they could often easily earn double in the "real world" and often a lot more if they are a competent person once they have a little experience. I chose to take a few years when I was younger to devote to this stuff because I was concerned about the horrific teacher shortages I heard about... but then I realized it wasn't really sustainable for me, both economically and psychologically in terms of the stress and amount of work. I toy with the idea of going back to it some day, because I really feel like it's one of the most important things we need in society. But it's hard to make that commitment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:27PM
My mother used to do phone-sales in the summers, cold calling lists of numbers (often lists of educators), to try to sell... whatever. No, it didn't pay well, no she didn't enjoy it, but being a two teacher income household, we needed the money. Remember, in those days cold calling meant inputting 7 digits into a rotary dial... not fun, even before the awkward sales pitch.
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(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Monday January 22 2018, @12:32PM (3 children)
On top of what you say, I would add that the single biggest factor in a child's educational success is still their home environment. So if awesome teacher Alice has a classroom full of kids with safe homes and parents that nurture them and care about education while equally awesome teacher Bob has a classroom full of kids and many have abuse at home, or neglect, or parents that don't care about education or are just dealing with a serious illness or working two jobs to cover costs then Bob's class performance will suck and it won't be his fault.
It's impractical to judge teachers accurately in that situation, unless you want to pay as many monitoring bureaucrats as there are teachers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @01:37PM (2 children)
See, this is my great hope for UBI: that the people who are so inclined to be monitoring busybodies can GTFO of the productive workforce and become freelance contractors, sticking their nose in all sorts of public programs and making sure that they not only meet standards, but continuously improve and adopt best practices. In my impossible utopia, these busybodies would develop an open standards system where they globally share information and self-regulate into politically neutral balanced commentary on all the projects they monitor, from elections to education to healthcare to public works and construction projects, and maybe even the more open aspects of defense.
But, yeah, without an army of low cost auditors with exemplary scruples and standards of behavior, there's not a feasible method that I can see for establishing merit among teachers - it can be done "by feel" but that's always going to be open to cries of favoritism, discrimination, etc.
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(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Monday January 22 2018, @02:07PM (1 child)
I support UBI too, but I think it's still political suicide in the US. The conservatives have been selling the idea that everyone has to work hard for what they get on their own, and everything else is nonsense. So for too many people UBI is an ultimate evil.
The problem is, that ignores context and history. In the present day context, businesses employ people educated in public schools and businesses conduct business partnerships and sell product to people educated in public schools. Businesses need infrastructure - roads, telecommunications, standards - supported by public funding. Businesses rely upon security and safety from police and firefighters. They rely upon the courts to settle legal disputes and help deal with breaches of contract. They rely upon financial institutions that are regulated so they don't collapse and lose all of their financial assets. Success through 'rugged individualism' doesn't exist, everyone is implicitly drawing upon trillions of dollars of public investment to reach their situation. But further and just as importantly, the worker treatment today didn't come just because employees in the 1940s and earlier thought it was fair. It came because of organizing, unions, lobbying, and fighting for better treatment. Strip away those laws, and you don't get a worker utopia. You get the 19th century with 70 hour work weeks for junk pay in deadly conditions, air quality like Chinese cities, people injured at work that have to hope their family can support them.
With respect to education, my understanding is that the countries in the world with the best education outcomes don't spend a lot on teacher monitoring. What they do is spend more on social welfare programs and require better benefits for all workers and parents, so there are fewer kids with a terrible home life.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @02:41PM
Absolutely true, no matter how well framed the UBI presentation is made by those in favor, there will be those who oppose it simply because it is an easy political win to "fight free money to the lazy."
So, I feel like you're talking about Finland, or perhaps Scandinavia at large, and you're right. Due to the harsh winters, I think they have a slightly different view of social welfare there, and they have evolved more quickly to a modern system that addresses more root causes than acute symptoms.
Oh, but now you're on the wrong side of every voter who (even thinks they) had abusive parents but managed to get away from them and have a better life on their own. They did it without namby-pamby social programs coddling them, everyone else who's worth keeping alive can do it the hard way too, am I right? /s
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