Tag Archives: Public education

Marx was Right—Partly

According to René Scheu in the NZZ.

Die zehn «Massregeln» für die «fortgeschrittensten Länder», in die das «Kommunistische Manifest» mündet, lesen sich aus heutiger Sicht wie ein sozialdemokratisches Programm, dem auch viele softbürgerliche Politiker sogleich vorbehaltlos zustimmen würden. Starke Progressivsteuer, Geldmonopol der Nationalbank, Zentralisation des Transportwesens, nationale Industriepolitik, Verstaatlichung des Bauernstandes und unentgeltliche Erziehung aller Kinder gehören längst zu den Errungenschaften avancierter Wohlfahrtsstaaten – damit sind wohlgemerkt bereits sechs der zehn Punkte erfüllt….

Marxens Kritik zielt nicht auf den Unternehmer und Eigentümer als solchen, sondern auf den Bourgeois, der auf der faulen Haut liegt und auf Kosten anderer lebt. …

Der Verfasser des «Manifests» ist kein Moralist, sondern ein geradezu passionierter Ökonomist der ersten Stunde.

And according to The Economist:

  • Modern “capitalism” often reduces to rent seeking: The Economist mentions “corporate bureaucrats”, “management consultants”, “professional board members”, “retired politicians (who spend their twilight years sponging off firms they once regulated)”.
  • It is global (WEF).
  • It has a tendency towards monopoly (Google, Facebook, …).
  • It yields an army of casual workers (gig economy).
  • But Marx overestimated poverty and underestimated reform.

Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx and his Environment.

Inequality in Switzerland

In a paper, Reto Föllmi and Isabel Martínez document trends in income and wealth inequality in Switzerland over the last 100 years.

Daniel Hug reports in the NZZaS (figures below taken from NZZaS).

Data (World Wealth and Income Database, based on tax records).

Some findings:

  • Income inequality has been rather stable and is modest …
  • … although social mobility as reflected in educational attainment is low.
  • Income inequality at the very top has increased.
  • The top 1% of income recipients earn at least CHF 300 000 annually (net income before tax), the top 0.01% at least CHF 4 million.
  • Wealth is distributed much more unequally. The top 1% own roughly 40%, slightly more than in the United States and twice as much as in France and the UK.
  • The wealth distribution is more equal if retirement savings in the second and third pillar are accounted for. PAYG funded pensions (first pillar) also contribute towards reducing inequality after taxes and transfers, much more so than taxes.

Schools in Sweden

An OECD report proposes measures to slow the decline in the performance of school children in Sweden. They include (pp. 8-9):

… setting clear and high expectations for all students, building on current curriculum goals with a focus on developing core skills and enhancing skills for the 21st century.
…ensure a better disciplinary climate and teaching and learning approaches that respond to diverse student learning needs, including low and high performers.
Improve the access of disadvantaged families to information about schools and support them in making informed choices. In addition, introduce controlled choice schemes that supplement parental choice to ensure a more diverse distribution of students in schools.

Universities

The Economist featured a special report on universities. Some elements:

On the value added of university education (see this article):

Employers are not much interested in the education universities provide either. Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management interviewed 120 recruiters from American law firms, management consultancies and investment banks. Their principal filter was the applicant’s university. Unless he had attended one of the top institutions, he was not even considered. “Evaluators relied so intensely on ‘school’ as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms…but because of the perceived rigour of the admissions process,” Ms Rivera wrote. After the status of the institution, recruiters looked not at students’ grades but at their extracurricular activities, preferring the team sports—lacrosse, field-hockey and rowing—favoured by well-off white men.

On rankings (see this article): More than 50 of the top 100 universities (according to the Shanghai ranking) are located in the US. Switzerland has the highest density of these institutions per capita (6.2 top universities per 10m people, next is Sweden before the Netherlands).

On public and private funding (see this article):

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