The college I worked at had a few classes at the prison. I was an adjunct and agreed to do it. None of the tenured faculty would do it. Didn’t really have any support. Did wear a body alarm. One way the body alarm would be activated was if it was horizontal for more than 3 seconds.
I quickly figured out they were mostly there to break the monotony. I threw out the curriculum and did basic graph theory and some logic stuff. I only had one run in with someone. The prisoners treated me decently. I gave them all passing grades and just wanted them to get out of the experience whatever they wanted to get out of it.
I taught a semester in a max security prison. It was described to me as a controlled movement facility. It was an interesting experience and one that stuck with me. That prison was a bad place. Thanks for your anecdote about the former police officer.
Thank you for sharing your experience and bringing these things to light. As Dostoevsky said, you can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners. We are not a free people when we live under the threat of being out into a prison system as barbaric as the one we have.
It’s hard to give meaningful security assurances when the powers involved have nuclear weapons. Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the U.S. Clearly the U.S. is not willing to go to war with a nuclear power over Ukraine. Treaties are only as useful as the willingness of the signatories to abide by them and/or enforce them.
The question is about Putin and his cronies using their power as dictator and oligarchs doing a specific type of stock trade. Nancy Pelosi is neither a dictator or an oligarch and as far as I know has not shorted the market since she’s planning to start a war. Why bring her up?
So you don’t know which situation I was referring to? The fact the Musk accomplished what he did with SpaceX is prima facie proof that he had sufficient power/influence to accomplish the goal.
Look up Wernher Von Braun. A group of people thought Jim Crow was a great idea. A group of BP executives thought it was a great idea to not fix oil leaks in Nigeria and poison a bunch of people. I think you miss the point. People with power in any system can use that power for bad. It’s not the economic system that causes this it’s shitty humans that do.
A person (or persons) with sufficient power/influence decided to pursue space flight and it happened. Which example does the previous sentence refer to?
Isn’t the issue less to do with “communism” than with concentrating too much power in too few hands? It seems to me all political systems tend toward autocracy and the only thing preventing that eventuality are robust systems in place that disperse power.
We can go back and forth and quibble over using the word “murder” as you have and quibble over who ultimately is to blame. I won’t convince you of anything and likewise you won’t convince me of anything. War truly is hell and after the way the Japanese conducted themselves during the war there’s a certain karma involved in terms of them getting the total war they so desired.
War sucks. My dad fought in World War 2. Frontline soldier in Western Europe in Patton’s Third Army. His battalion war book has the names of the dead and many are underlined in red because those are the ones he knew. He was a drunk and abusive and obviously suffered from untreated PTSD.
His division was preparing to transfer to the Pacific when the atomic bombs were dropped. He appreciated that as a result the Japanese surrendered (at least it appeared to be a causal effect from his perspective). Who can possibly calculate the efficacy of the alternatives even in retrospect? It’s easy to criticize after the fact. Are you so certain you’d have decided differently than Curtis LeMay were you in his position?
That’s a seductively simple idea. Using the Emergencies Act to bring to an end of the protests was unprecedented. Without having thought too deeply about it the suggestion to then call for elections seems like a brilliant one. I almost think it should be written into the act. At the surface it makes sense that if the redress of grievances is so disruptive that the Act must be invoked then the cost of invoking it is to call for elections and let the people decide.
If doctors already make more than enough to pay off their medical debt, what would change to make them start accepting lower salaries..
If med school were free then salary required to live at the required standard would go down since the need to service the debt would no longer be there.
The paper calls into question the existence of a supply/demand curve and as such is relevant to all of your points. Supply/demand is not sufficient to describe elasticity of labor in all cases. For example, in the quoted article:
“…concludes that 'wage elasticity is unresponsive (or inelastic) and that very large increases in wages would be needed to induce even moderate increases in nurse labour supply', adding that the 'weak role of wage increases in promoting nurse supply is also supported by recent qualitative studies..”
I misread your original comment regarding uniqueness. I now understand what you meant. The situation for doctors in the U.S.:
It’s a field that requires highly motivated, highly intelligent people to go through the process. There is a high opportunity costs involved due to the 10 - 12 years of required training at little or no pay. A massive debt is incurred to become a doctor. The people entering the field have the talent and ability to do something else that has high pay or is otherwise rewarding.
As such, attracting people into the field must take into account the ability to service the debt. Suppose starting next year all graduating med students were forevermore saddled with a $1 million med school tax upon graduation in form of a debt to the Treasury at 5% interest. Salaries for incoming doctors would eventually have to rise to take this into account in order to attract talent. Clearly the large debt incurred in order to become a doctor has some effect on the salary necessary to attract talent.
It's not like schools decided to charge far beyond what anyone would pay, and later the wages rose to pay for that debt beyond what people could previously pay. It's more that as wages rose, due to demand, school increased prices to capture what the market would bear to provide those skills.
It’s the case that this model of how things work is too simplistic. There’s a dance between the different forces at play. Each of the forces involved evolves over time and they all adjust over time to each other. That is the proper modeling of such things.
Sorry. Yes, Card. Clearly I’m not an economist but I believe within the field is an emerging movement question the traditional iron clad belief in supply/demand being the explanation in labor economics.
One cannot always use the state system. For example, some elective surgeries can’t be done in the state system fast enough for the upper class and then there are those who want vanity cosmetic surgery. I don’t know what the data says but I’d be surprised if private cosmetic plastic surgeons make as much in France as they do in the U.S.
For the record I believe licensed doctors in, say, the EU should be able to practice medicine here without having to do a residency. Though there is a moral consideration in terms of draining the medical talent from countries like Greece, Romania, etc. I believe that med school in the U.S. should be free and that doctor’s salaries could correspondingly go down without decreasing the supply of people wanting to become doctors. It seems obvious to me that having $x in student loan debt is a factor in determining the required starting salary to attract enough talent. I don’t see how anyone can think otherwise. If the debt can’t be serviced easily enough while having a good enough standard of living then these talented people will do something else.
Of course, I could be wrong about everything. There are lots of “obvious” things that aren’t true.
I believe there is a dance between these various quantities. Overall, my claim is that large med school debt does play a role in high doctor salaries. I don’t claim it is the only factor but just that it is a factor. I further claim that if med school was free them doctor salaries wouldn’t have to be quite as high as they are. That is, the same number of people would be aspire to be doctors with med school being free but doctor’s salaries being x% lower.
I said there was a moral aspect to taking medical talent from poor countries. You say that you don’t completely disagree with this. So it sounds like you too believe there is a moral aspect to this issue. Great.
I'm not willing to condemn some poor Pakistani doctor to a life much less comfortable than he could enjoy here AND force US citizens to pay extremely high prices for medical care to protect the incomes of US doctors. If you are, cool.
You assume that I’m opposed to giving licensed doctors in other countries an exemption to going through a U.S. residency program in order to practice in the U.S. You are making assumptions that are not justified by what I have written. There are at times valid reasons to restrict medical talent from easily leaving one country to another and there are times where there aren’t really any valid reasons for doing this. I was responding to your statement, “there are no valid reasons….”
Your argument here is way too black/white given the complexity of the issues involved. Thinking that “…condemning Pakistani doctors…” and “…force U.S. citizens to pay more” are the only or are necessary outcomes to not allowing Pakistani doctors to practice medicine in the U.S. without going through a U.S. residency program is not correct.
I made no claims about uniqueness so I don’t understand your first paragraph.
If debt affected salaries, you'd expect your claim to play out on all fields, which it does not.
This is very much wrong! All fields are not equal. No one should expect motivations, forces at a play in one field to necessarily apply to all fields.
Do you think highly intelligent, highly motivated people would take on hundreds of thousands dollars of student loan debt without an expectation of a high enough salary to service that debt while maintaining a good lifestyle? We are talking about people who could go into just about any field. To be able to attract the talent the salaries need to be high enough to service the debt. Without the debt the salary needed to attract that talent would go down.
My wife’s med school debt is $400,000. She needs the $300,000 salary she has to service this debt while living a good lifestyle. That high salary will last the rest of her life and not just for the few years it takes to pay off her debt. If she had no debt the she’d be able to live the same lifestyle making $225,000 per year.
Personally I think it’s naive to think that the debt level doesn’t come into play when determining the salary needed to attract the labor of highly intelligent, highly motivated people. You really think that in the alternate world where the U.S. had free med school and all else was the same that salaries would be the same?