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The Center for American Progress reports
Prospective students in the United States who can't afford to pay for college or don't want to rack up tens of thousands in student debt should try their luck in Germany. Higher education is now free throughout the country, even for international students. Yesterday, Lower Saxony became the last of seven German states to abolish tuition fees, which were already extremely low compared to those paid in the United States.
German universities only began charging for tuition in 2006, when the German Constitutional Court ruled that limited fees, combined with loans, were not in conflict the country's commitment to universal education. The measure proved unpopular, however, and German states that had instituted fees began dropping them one by one.
"We got rid of tuition fees because we do not want higher education which depends on the wealth of the parents," Gabrielle Heinen-Kjajic, the minister for science and culture in Lower Saxony, said in a statement. Her words were echoed by many in the German government. "Tuition fees are unjust," said Hamburg's senator for science Dorothee Stapelfeldt. "They discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany."
[...]Free education is a concept that is embraced in most of Europe with notable exceptions like the U.K., where the government voted to lift the cap on university fees in 2010. The measure has reportedly cost more money than it brought in. The Guardian reported in March that students are failing to pay back student loans at such a rate that "the government will lose more money than it would have saved from keeping the old £3,000 ($4,865) tuition fee system."
[...]learning German might be the best financial choice an American high school student can make.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 16 2014, @11:29PM
What are you, 14, 15?
45.
I guess you weren't alive when the attitudes were different and some of the crap that flies now in business was taboo (and could actually ruin you if you got a reputation).
I hate to interrupt your nostalgia wank, but that fantasy has never been true.
From the perspective of a properly managed economy, technology certainly does offer leisure time for everyone.
There's never been a "properly managed economy".
That can be accomplished either through leadership wanting to do the right thing, leadership fearful of the consequences of doing the wrong thing too much, or through a popular uprising when too much of the wrong thing has been done for too long.
None of the above.
The fundamental reason people don't work less is because they don't want to. And if you actually tried to force people in your society to work less, then your society will be overtaken an exploited by societies that don't do that. Kind of how the US is being overtaken and exploited by China to give a contemporary example.
And I find it interesting how the fundamental problem, a huge increase in the supply of human labor has led to all these rationalizations and blame displacement. It's the fault of the rich that US labor is no longer competitive with Chinese labor or that labor-saving technology had unintended consequences. But by all means, let's have that "communist" revolution, destroying the competitiveness of our surviving labor even more, and dig the hole deeper.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 17 2014, @09:06AM
The fundamental reason people don't work less is because they don't want to.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! That's a knee slapper!
I don't find these crazy people who go around asking for another 12 hours on Sunday and could they please miss a few more of their kid's special events. There are people who are forced to work more hours to make ends meet, but I'll bet they wouldn't complain one bit if their pay was doubled and they were cut back to 30 hours a week.
There are solutions to the problem of slave wages in China, it just takes someone willing to solve (rather than exploit) the problem.
Automation is improving daily and will naturally result in there being less and less for human workers to do. We can either make the needed adjustments to our economy and celebrate or we can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and have ourselves a dystopian nightmare. Which would you like to see?
The economy is not some all powerful god whose bidding we must do or suffer the consequences. It is a creation of man and can and should be made to serve all of us.
As for the communist revolution, it's not a choice for me or you to make. Either adjust the economy to serve the majority or the revolution WILL happen for better or worse.
For the record, I believe that a working system will include a well regulated market, not a central committee. If things are left to a revolt, who knows what we might get.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 17 2014, @10:15AM
I don't find these crazy people who go around asking for another 12 hours on Sunday and could they please miss a few more of their kid's special events.
I do see them all the time.
There are solutions to the problem of slave wages in China, it just takes someone willing to solve (rather than exploit) the problem.
The exploitation is the solution.
Automation is improving daily and will naturally result in there being less and less for human workers to do. We can either make the needed adjustments to our economy and celebrate or we can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and have ourselves a dystopian nightmare. Which would you like to see?
You do realize that automation is getting a huge boost because it's such a pain in the ass to employ people in the developed world? This is another bit of blame displacement. Automation would be much less popular, if it were easier to employ people in the developed world at reasonable wages. And the "needed adjustments" have been made to developed world economies for decades. It just results in a large class of unemployed and probably unemployable people. Defeat snatched from non existent victory every day.
My view is that developed world labor just isn't that impressive compared to labor in China and elsewhere in the world. Rather than crippling developed world economies for the next few decades, I think the better approach is to bite the bullet. Accept a large, immediate pay cut, eliminate the obstacles to employment (including the government-based social safety net) and move on. Your labor just isn't worth that much. We can realize that now and move on or we can realize it in half a century when developed world countries are no longer developed world.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 17 2014, @04:57PM
You missed the point entirely. Automation isn't the enemy. It is a highly desirable state of affairs. Ideally it takes over every last job in the world. We can either make the necessary adjustments to our economy to allow for that and for the long transitional stage where a growing number of jobs are automated away or we can keep our economic system as it is now and be on the road to a dystopian hellhole.
If we do the latter, some time in that trip to hell the people will rebel.
You seem to be cheering for the hellhole. But you're forgetting something. If everyone takes a big paycut, who's going to buy the stuff? What would happen is a massive expansion of the welfare and food stamp programs OR people would start sacking grocery stores for food.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 17 2014, @09:22PM
Automation isn't the enemy. It is a highly desirable state of affairs.
My point is that the various policies intended to protect the developed world worker from Third World competition have the unintended and generally undesired consequence of fostering automation (as well as encouraging employers to move their labor to the developing world). They're advocating policies that hurt themselves.
It is a highly desirable state of affairs. Ideally it takes over every last job in the world.
Except for two things: the people who wanted to work but no longer can (which is just about everyone) and economic expression (the economic equivalent of genetic expression). If you no longer change anything economically except perhaps as a money sink to consume stuff, then you're ripe for removal from the economy just as genes which no longer cause in change in the organism or the world (and hence, can't contribute to the survival of the organism) are ripe for removal from the organism. If we look at the real world, people who don't work long term are either wealthy enough to not have to, or SOL poor who just can't find work to make ends meet. The unemployed humanity is far more likely to fall in that latter category (post-scarcity is IMHO not going to happen) and thus, marginalized. Eternal marginalization is extinction IMHO.
Even if complete automation is a desirable end state and can be achieved without huge suffering, it strikes me as a bad idea to deliberately hurry it along unintentionally without a plan.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:47AM
So you recommend an economy based on forced makework? (yes, if it can easily be done by machines but isn't, it's makework).
Note that I didn't suggest banning all work, just that we inevitably MUST at some point make work unnecessary to have a living. I say must since inevitably at some point machines will work cheaply enough that no human being could hope to compete. That's not to say that hand-crafted goods and one-offs are without value. I imagine people might turn to those to earn social admiration. There is also invention and improvement on machine made goods. Some of which might go into production.
Given the inevitability, we can follow your do-nothing plan and have grinding poverty for the masses or we can actually engage the brain and gain a better lifestyle for all.
As an aside, the human genome contains many many genes that haven't actually been expressed in a million years. They do no harm, so there is no drive to expunge them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 18 2014, @03:16PM
I say must since inevitably at some point machines will work cheaply enough that no human being could hope to compete.
It hasn't happened yet. And how will you afford to purchase goods made by this amazingly cheap labor? There is this very generous assumption that someone will give you enough wealth or purchasing authority indefinitely to get everything you want, just because. My point is that there's no reason to expect that to exist for the long term in the absence of providing something of value in return. Labor is the big thing of value that humans provide. At that point where you no longer can get resources for free, you buy what you can afford, which will be produced with the default cheapest option, human labor.
As an aside, the human genome contains many many genes that haven't actually been expressed in a million years. They do no harm, so there is no drive to expunge them.
That's an opinion. Nobody really knows enough about the genome to either say what gets expressed nor how long it takes for a genome to get removed when it doesn't. And genes may not be the only thing on chromosomes. Just because something looks like a gene doesn't mean it is.
What we do know in a mathematical sense, is that if a gene no longer has the ability to express, then it can exercise no control (in the weak sense of being able to change outcome, not necessarily in a good way) over its eventual fate. It has no opportunity to help the organism survive and reproduce.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 18 2014, @06:06PM
It hasn't happened yet, but you yourself claimed that it IS happening and I agree. You don't get to do an about face when your argument works against you.
As for how will I afford goods once it happens, now you're making my point for me. The answer is that if we follow your plan, I won't and neither will you. The owners of the machines won't care because they got theirs and to hell with everyone else. Labor is on it's way to becoming practically worthless. That's a GOOD thing if we allow it to be. As for the rest, why would you want to begrudge your neighbor something that costs you nothing?
We may need to make denying someone something that costs nothing a crime.
That's an opinion. Nobody really knows enough about the genome to either say what gets expressed nor how long it takes for a genome to get removed when it doesn't.
You seemed satisfied enough with our state of knowledge when you thought it supported your point by analogy. But then I had to go and get all facty with it...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 20 2014, @02:13PM
It hasn't happened yet, but you yourself claimed that it IS happening and I agree. You don't get to do an about face when your argument works against you.
My view is that it is possible to disincentivize most human behavior. That is perhaps the only point of agreement that you refer to above. There's no reason to disincentivize the employing of people in useful work. Rather than blather on about the inevitability of automation, how about just getting out of the way and letting us decide when automation is better than human labor rather than making it better via substantial disincentives to use human labor?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday October 20 2014, @04:14PM
Because you want to pay them a starvation wage and replace them when the succumb and I find that deeply distasteful to say the least.
The funny part is you think you can continue charging 1st world prices when everyone is paid 3rd world wages.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:02AM
Because you want to pay them a starvation wage and replace them when the succumb and I find that deeply distasteful to say the least.
The funny part is you think you can continue charging 1st world prices when everyone is paid 3rd world wages.
Then prices will go down. It's not magic. A vast amount of industry and commerce has fled to the developing world and so many clueless people just complain about the rich/lucky - not the fact that the developed world is no longer competitive in so many areas and chooses to make itself even more uncompetitive. Similarly, they complain about automation while simultaneously making that particular situation worse.
Now, they want to preserve current standards of living without providing a means by which it can occur? Too bad. I see that demand failing just as hard as all the others.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:32AM
Sounds like you want it to fail rather than fixing the situation. Your the guy who when the situation is tense and there's a call for solutions you just keep repeating "we're doomed, we're doomed". That won't help, you know.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 22 2014, @03:30PM
Your the guy who when the situation is tense and there's a call for solutions
Fuck "calls for solutions". None of these "solvers" have truthfully answered the basic question, "is it better to do my solution or to do nothing at all?" The thing that got missed here is that developed world wages would have declined whether or not we did anything about it. That's basic supply and demand in action. But by aggressively punishing local employers (by adding to the bureaucracy and costs that the employer has to endure), the developed world has collectively made their side worse off. That's the sort of anti-solutions that are being "called for" here. The real "solution" as I see it is to rub their noses in it each time they do that.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:02PM
We're doomed, we're all doomed! That's it, Game Over man. Now go do yopur duty and live in 3rd world poverty in a 1st world nation because that's the only solution. Now if you'll excuse me, it's money counting day./..
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 17 2014, @02:30PM
If people truly WANT to work, then why do we have to pay them to be there? Why do we have to mandate what hours they are in the office?
People don't want to *work*, people want to *be productive*. There's a big distinction there though. People want to choose what they work on, and when they do it. Currently most people do not have that choice. They work on whatever their boss gives them, and they work whatever hours they're told to be in the office.
I may be drifting a bit off topic now, but there's this classic argument that socialism could never work because if you pay everyone the same they'd all slack off and nothing would get done. But as we both agree, people obviously WANT to get stuff done. So the question becomes, have we raised efficiency to a sufficient level that everything that needs to be done could be done purely on a voluntary basis? I'm not sure that we're there yet, but we *are* getting close. There's a fair bit of talk about shifting to a four day work week lately. A lot of people used to work 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. Now we're at 8 hours for 5 days, and may soon move to 8 hours for 4 days. And I think when we reach a universal 3 or 4 day work week, the concept of 'work' will start to collapse. With two days off, most people spend them just trying to relax and catch up with friends. But a constant 3 or 4 day weekend I think is the sweet spot where you'll start to see a surge in people really seeking more work. Largely volunteering. And then you have a feedback loop -- the more work being done voluntarily, the less paid labor required.
And yes, rising efficiencies WILL eliminate labor demand. Eventually. So far the increased efficiency has largely been eaten by increased consumption. But while there's no reason yet to believe there's any real limit on increasing automation and efficiency, there certainly is a limit to the amount one human being can consume. You can't eat fifty cheeseburgers a day (not for long anyway...); nobody is going to be buying a new laptop every day. Here in the US we've already got people who have purchased so much crap they have to rent storage space outside their home for it! We are *already* near the limits of increasing consumption, at least in the industrialized western world. In fact, I think we passed that point a while ago, we just hide it by devoting massive amounts of resources towards repeatedly bombing then rebuilding foreign nations.