« X Prize News | Main | Oil splat »
Lots of economic superstars on this blog
That includes Gary Becker, Ed Glaeser, Richard Posner, Bill Easterly and others, read them here, all debating Bill Gates's theory of philanthropy. The outputs will be turned into a book and the project is being run by Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 26, 2008 at 04:15 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
The most hilarious thing is that Melinda Gates is starting a big expensive push for every American student to get a college education ... even though her own husband dropped out of Harvard pretty quickly. Similarly, her husband's generational peers -- Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Michael Dell -- all dropped out of college, too.
If some people are so smart that college is a waste of time for them, couldn't it also be true that some other people are so not smart that college would also be a waste of time for them?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 26, 2008 5:29:06 PM
The Gates Foundation is trying to do serious harm to American children, to prevent many decent kids from graduating from high school just because they aren't smart enough for the University of California.
You may think she's just wasting her husbands ill-gotten profits, but the Gates Foundation is actively up to no good. The Gates Foundation was the main driver behind the Los Angeles school district, the nation's second largest, outsourcing its high school graduation requirements planning to the elite University of California, which only allows in high students who have passed its rigorous "A-G" curriculum of required courses. (The U. of California, by law, is open only to the top 1/8th of California high school graduates.)
A 2005 press release from the Gates Foundation trumpeted:
"In June, the LAUSD board approved a plan requiring all high school students beginning with the class of 2008 to complete a 15-course series, known as the A-G Curriculum, in order to graduate. This is the same requirement for admission to the University of California and California State University systems."
The new A-G Curriculum requirement will mandate two years of foreign language (i.e., Spanish, as instruction in other languages are being phased out in LA).
Obviously, this is intended as a gift to Hispanic immigrants. But it will be another cross to bear for African-Americans, who have never shown much enthusiasm for learning Spanish.
Worse, every public high school student in LA will have to pass not just Algebra I and Geometry to graduate, but also Algebra II.
This just means that a lot of kids who could have graduated from high school are going to go through life as high school dropouts simply because they weren't smart enough to pass Algebra II.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 26, 2008 5:32:39 PM
The real irony is that in his private business dealings, Bill Gates doesn't believe any of the politically correct nonsense Mrs. Gates, creator of Microsoft Bob, is pushing.
Fear of discrimination lawsuits is why Microsoft famously uses IQ-type questions in interviews—such as "Estimate how many gas stations there are in the US"—instead of using written tests, even though Bill Gates is obsessive about IQ.
This is no secret. Rich Karlgaard, former editor of Forbes ASAP, reminisced in the Wall Street Journal about a journey he took with Gates in 1993:
"During that trip, I must have heard Mr. Gates mention ‘IQ’ a hundred times. The obsession with smarts is embedded deep in Mr. Gates's thinking and long ago was institutionalized at Microsoft. Apply for a job and you’ll face an oral grilling that probes for IQ. It is oral and informal because of Griggs v. Duke Power, the 1971 Supreme Court ruling that banished written IQ tests and ‘tests of an abstract nature’ from job applications. But Microsoft knows what it wants. It wants IQ. And Microsoft always has been savvy at getting what it wants."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 26, 2008 5:35:14 PM
Darn. The economic elite has ruthlessly suppressed my opinions through omission yet again!
Looks highly interesting. I'll be reading this closely.
Posted by: Robert Olson at Jun 26, 2008 5:38:55 PM
Steve, are your comments normally just verbatim cut and pastes from your own blog? This is the first time I've ever noticed it, but found that article after googling your point about gas stations and IQ tests.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Jun 26, 2008 6:28:38 PM
Steve Sailer,
Just curious, are you a public school teacher?
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jun 26, 2008 7:30:25 PM
One of the things that great wealth can buy (especially for philanthropists) is instant credibility on matters in which you have no training whatsoever. Warren Buffet is talking about things he thought about "ten minutes ago" and Bill Gates is thinking through stuff "I discussed with Melinda three weeks ago."
Hey, I got an idea I just pulled out of my *ss, and the mass media will love it! What? Hey, where are the scibes? The cameras?
Posted by: M. Hodak at Jun 26, 2008 7:41:25 PM
"Apply for a job and you’ll face an oral grilling that probes for IQ. It is oral and informal because of Griggs v. Duke Power, the 1971 Supreme Court ruling that banished written IQ tests and ‘tests of an abstract nature’ from job applications."
Yep, and since Griggs v. Duke Power doesn't apply outside of America, Gates used IQ tests like crazy to build up his research center in China:
"In working on my book, I interviewed Bill Gates, and he told me that Microsoft opened its third research center in the world in Beijing in 1998... He told me they opened their research center in China by giving IQ tests to 2,000 Chinese around the country, Ph.D.s and engineering students, recommended to them, and out of those 2,000 they basically chose 20 to open the research center in China... Now, what Bill Gates will also tell you is that today the China Research Center is the leading research center in Microsoft."
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Jun 26, 2008 10:00:02 PM
One of my kids was an LA Unified School District student, so I keep up to date on the latest idiocies the Gates Foundation bribes and pressures the nation's second largest school district into doing.
Melinda Gates is a fool, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are hypocrites. But $60 billion gets you a lot of fawning press coverage.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 26, 2008 10:21:14 PM
From the lineup, it looks like the subtitle of the book could be: A conservative critique of Bill Gates philanthropy.
Posted by: Tom at Jun 26, 2008 10:28:39 PM
To believe that intelligence and our place in this world revolving around test scores is simply silly.
Back to Gates, I can really say I don't care about Bill Gates, because in his field and time, success is 90% timing and 10% skill. He's lucky, and too think he's an expert on anything other than software (if even that) is a joke.
So who gives a sh*t what Bill Gates thinks about philanthropy? Its often a tool of the rich, and what I see as a supply of the figurative "opium of the masses" (not religion), especially if used as means to an end.
Posted by: Gunnar W at Jun 26, 2008 11:30:35 PM
@Steve Sailer,
Well I can understand how you might be upset.
Still I wonder whether having more feedback from the University of California wouldn't eventually benefit California public secondary schools. As a California public high school graduate who also attended a University of California school for my undergraduate education, I would say that there were ways that the two schools could have worked together better.
But maybe your problem is not with having colleges give public high schools more feedback on what their students need to succeed, but rather more with the feedback from the University of California?
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jun 26, 2008 11:55:02 PM
"This just means that a lot of kids who could have graduated from high school are going to go through life as high school dropouts simply because they weren't smart enough to pass Algebra II."
So? A HS diploma is only as good as employers think it is, and if you keep the standards low, then it will become more and more worthless relative to a college degree in an age where human capital is creating economic inequality. Those who aren't smart enough to pass Algebra II are screwed anyway, but it'll help those on the margin who are, but wouldn't have taken it.
Posted by: q at Jun 27, 2008 12:35:00 AM
"To believe that intelligence and our place in this world revolving around test scores is simply silly."
What world do you live in? Booming Asian economies all rely on test scores to filter the quality of their students. The US and Canada have done it for years, and it's difficult to argue it hasn't worked. If you're not going to quantify aptitude with a test, how else are you going to do it?
Posted by: q at Jun 27, 2008 12:38:27 AM
Half the students in the country are below average in intelligence. Melinda Gates-style political correctness just winds up hurting people who were born with two digit IQs.
In the LA school district a lot more than half the kids are below the national average in intelligence -- less than 10% of the LAUSD students who enter 9th grade will score above 1000 on the SAT Math+Verbal (that's less than 890 on the SAT under the harder pre-1995 scoring system).
Only about have the kids graduate from high school in the LAUSD now. How high does Mrs. Gates want to push the flunk out rate -- 2/3rds? There are a lot of decent kids who come to school every day and work fairly hard, but they will never, ever pass Algebra II. Why lump them in for life with the losers who don't have a high school degree? What % of jobs today require Algebra II skills? 5%?
Rich smart people shouldn't spend their money making life tougher on not-smart people in order to feel good about themselves.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 27, 2008 3:11:45 AM
This might be off topic, but NCLB legislation mandated that we teach all students. Our school district has interpreted this mean that all students will have four years of a foreign language and four years of math. Both Spanish and math classroom are so packed that students writing on their exams bump elbows with the student next to him or her. When our district passed this graduation requirement, the board members talked about high expectations and closing the achievement gap. That's fine rhetoric, but in practice "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't teach him the backstroke." To require algebra II has a graduation requirement is like teaching a horse to do the backstroke. What the LASD should require, is four years of math with various levels of difficulty to equate talent with task.
Posted by: Mike Fladlien at Jun 27, 2008 8:36:53 AM
Becker's piece should not blur the stark contrast between Milton Friedman's ethos of the primacy of profits and the "stakeholder theory" that is so popular in the academic disciplines of Marketing and Management. For more see:
hhtp://web.bsu.edu/jmcclure/SOCIAL%RESPONSIBILITY.pdf
Posted by: indiana jim at Jun 27, 2008 11:48:53 AM
Speedo is bringing 2500 of its new swim suits to the Olympics and will provide them free to any of the swimmers. The company and its spokesperson are calling it just what it is, good business. This is the type of "altruism" that IS ethical according to Milton Friedman's ethos; of course, it is simply a strategy to enhance Speedo's bottom line. I applaud Speedo for its transparent and aggressive pursuit of profit (for openly explaining that this is not "altruism" it is an advertising "investment"). BRAVO SPEEDO!
Posted by: indiana jim at Jun 29, 2008 9:15:00 AM
一個人背起行囊，離開喧囂的城市，走進清境民宿的懷抱。去體味大自然的清新的原汁原味。在臺灣，只要背離了川流不息的鬧市，到處都有花園般的宜蘭民宿歡迎您，她們就像是自己的家一樣溫馨、舒適。臺灣的民宿都很注重室內設計，豪華的雙人套房猶如五星級賓館的總統套房一般華貴。那兒真是令人流連忘返的地方。
Posted by: 機票 at Dec 8, 2008 10:41:59 PM
thanks for all
Posted by: seks shop at May 18, 2009 7:45:33 AM
porno dvd porno cd porno film
Posted by: porno dvd at Sep 4, 2009 8:38:07 AM
