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John Clement wrote:
Actually experiments in psychology show that that the human species is builtHmmm...it is certainly the case that predators are often found in co
to cooperate. Indeed cooperation appears to be stronger than competition.
operative
packs: lions, wolves come to mind. We are usually considered the top
predator...
My personal prejudice is that women are in general MUCH better at
cooperating
while the male propensity is for competing.
Most countries have government supported higher education and they do scoreHmmm...encouraging an industrial environment where Japanese line workers
higher on tests, if one pays attention to that sort of thing. The Japanese
have an extremely strong cooperative society, and took over American ideas
of both education and economic production. They implemented them very
successfully and essentially drove our auto makers into the ground.
are encouraged to make product improvements, and are required to attempt
to resolve production line quality issues in the available walk time, or
else stop the line, makes a stark contrast with the ethos at some other
US car plants where parts were placed in door panels expressly to annoy
the new owner and where stopping the line was effectively a firing
offense. This is not cooperation: it is management (for the long term)
So the idea of government supported higher education is not far fetched,Hmmm... in the US, it is not necessary to be a knee-jerk conservative
except the knee jerk economic conservatives would oppose it in the US.
radical in order to have a strong distrust of government activity. It
goes with a pervasive US distrust of intellectuals. Mention IQ to
teachers and see the uproar! As though there is not a range of talent
skill or propensity for almost any human endeavor.
It is against this ethos, that people can support the idea of better
education for kids with well-heeled parents, in place of the more
talented (measured in any sensible dimension) students who are the
offspring of poorer parents. And it is here that one can see the
greatest possible extremes of rewards provided by our splendid
capitalist system:
The average physician grossing a quarter million on up (but that is
stale data) - are they really so much superior to the teachers who
inhabit this list? Or about the upper reaches of bankers: people who are
brought face to face with the incomes of such folks - $100M per year
etc... CEOs versus mail-room workers...
But for me, the greatest sadness is about the impoverished women who
must return to work in two weeks after parturition, for pressing
economic need.
Should we be surprised that American neonates have poorer life expectancy
than most first world kids? - being more comparable to third world
residents.
Why SHOULD they get prenatal care, vitamins and physican attention if
they cannot afford it?
Still, the folks who rail against such obvious inequity get the last
laugh, if that's what it could be called, when they notice that the
chances of the well-heeled going bankrupt and impoverished from medical
bills in the US grow apace, as they grow old.
Brian W,
(fresh from flying his plane this evening, though neglecting his horse,
and his sailboat more so....)
It
is worth debating on its merits without ideological bias. Even Adam Smith
said that free markets do not always produce socially desirable outcomes.
There is probably a wide range of possibilities for governmental control vs
free market economics which will probably work well, with the extremes being
the worst solution. Just think at one time we had private fire fighters
competing in cities. The result was that if you called the wrong company
they would let your house and neighboring houses burn down. I suspect that
most of the people on this list are actually on government "dole" because
they work for state or public schools, or have research funded by the
government. Virtually all basic research is funded by the government now,
with private money going into only research with a relatively quick payoff.
Incidentally the "socialistic" Germans are among the top patenters! They
had social security in the 1800s!
So the topic of governmental support for higher education should be
discussed rationally not ideologically.
John M. Clement
Houston, TX
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