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richardhutnik on 12 December 2012
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Kasz216 said:
richardhutnik said:
Kasz216 said:
By the way, I think the real reason school systems are failing is.... like increases in wealth disparity.

It's demographics. Which nobody looks at... instead trying to throw money at the problem, which won't help. See the above chart with real spending, or by just trying to get teachers to work harder. (and not smarter.)

Just for a single example of demographics change...

In outliers Malcolm Gladwell showed that parent participation during summer breaks was possibly the biggest cause for the gap between children's intelligence during when it came to children. Those parents who had there kids do things like go to zoo's museums and do a library reading list far outpaced those who didn't. Regardless of the socioeconomic status.

I will admit i am biased towards such an idea thanks to my own childhood. Since, thanks to my parents, I could read, write, add, subtract and Multiply before I even entered Kindergarten. So I've seen how effective invested parents can be.

I had mentioned, ok yes in a partisan shot, at how things are falling apart.  I believe what you said touches on this.  You get things in motion going bad, and a nation can unravel.  Wealth disparity playing part, but also a symptom of things deeper.  Thing going on now is increasing one family incomes and one parent, and parent working all the time (facing declining wages) and kids not getting attention.  And this leads to bad effects in the future.  And those effects make things get even worse.  It is not a good spot to be in actually.

Actually, wealth disparity is also a symptom of that.  If you look at the data you'll see Individual Gini Coefficent has actually shrunk/stayed the same, while household and Family gini coefficent has increased.


The poor indvidual is actually making a lot more money on average then they have been decades ago.  This is espiecally true if you count non wage income.  (These are both accounting for inflation.)

The issues in the current rise in wealth dispairty are due to two things.

1) There are far more single parent /single person households on the bottom end of the spectrum...

2) The rich are more often marrying the rich.  Meaning it's much harder to "Marry up" out of poverty.  (Due to women in the workplace, the rise of suburbs, gated communities.)

 

Again, this is not to say there isn't a very small 1% or more like .1% that are getting more and more rich.  However, they aren't getting rich off the poor's backs, but at the expense of the lesser rich.

 

I believe what you saw was that households went from one income to two incomes, and then divorce rates went up, so there was one bread winner in the house.  The anything but the upper end flatlined actually, and other costs went up.  Now add globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs.  And the bottom part, has fallen behind, if you factor in inflation.  Globalization and competing with China plays a part.  Most new jobs created are low end retail and low paid jobs.  Stuff more immune to globalization is on low end, if can be done with a lot, or if benefitting from globalization (as in scarce globally) results in these people doing real well.  America has run out of places to get more money to keep up.  Credit cards are maxed out, and the borrow from equity is not there.

We pretty much have infrastructure with colleges at one level, and medical at one level, making costs to survive expensive, and the ability to pay not there.  Currently, I am working a low paying helpdesk at home, and cheating severely to make it by not paying rent while staying with family.  I am going to need to see what happens with my Medicaid.  If I didn't have Medicaid actually, I probably wouldn't of been fixed enough to do a desk job (bad disk = no sitting, thus no desk job).