You're correct that, in most European countries, universities (or the country-specific equivalents) are intended for academics, but those schools are very different from US colleges*. The US inherits from the English tradition of the Liberal Arts, which was at its zenith when the first US colleges were founded. Such programs were created to teach rich boys to comport as lords in exchange for patronage, and it is still an important shibboleth of the merchant/professional class. In English-speaking countries, a post-secondary education is, and always will be, aspirational; reducing supply in a vacuum will only exacerbate the current pricing/prestige problem.

(* Broadly, the US offers a single Liberal Arts-based college education. Germany has separate Universitäten and Fachhochschulen, which award academic and vocational degrees, respectively. The latter is most similar to US colleges, although both offer much more focused programs than US schools. I don't think Germany has a direct equivalent to the English tradition, which tends to be "well rounded" in a very useless and expensive way.)

The only way Sanders could be the nominee is if Clinton is indicted, and even then I'm sure they won't give the nomination to him. The major problem Sanders would face would be the attacks directed at his party, rather than at his persona. I can see it now: The Democratic Party, the party that is corrupt, that tried to cover-up an enormous national security violation, bla bla bla.

Hillary as the nominee makes it even easier to sell that idea. I have a strong feeling that this will be a close race resulting in a Trump win.

It also hits home for those that didn't have the "opportunity" to go in the first place, to those that have children & don't want to risk everything in order for them to receive a decent education, & to those that want to live in a society where there are fewer stupid people.

The thing that cracks me up the most about the Democratic race is that Sanders is running on so many of the principles that liberals have professed to subscribe to, yet so many of these persons are willing to abandon their beliefs in favor of a candidate they imagine to be more pragmatic, regardless of whether or not said candidate's bull**** tell is when their lips move.

This just goes to prove that the majority of Democrats, like Republicans, don't give a damn what the perceived "best candidate" believes, does, or says.

Of course. Political parties have two goals: raise money and win. They only profess an ideology when it serves those two goals, and almost never follow it.

When you vote for a party candidate, you are not voting for personal representation. You are voting for an employee of a high-revenue corporation which shares precisely none of your interests.

But it's the people who allow this to go on. It's amazing how stupid large masses of people can behave, ignoring their cognitive abilities.

Is it really the people's fault? You probably don't like Nestle or PepsiCo, but I bet you've eaten something made by each of those companies today and not even realized it. Don't underestimate the reach of large organizations with a profit motive to deny you choice.

The fact is, most pragmatic, experienced, electable candidates will choose to join a political party. It's a great bargain for them: they get access to a lot of support and brand name recognition. If you want to vote for a candidate who isn't pragmatic, experienced, or electable, you're "free" to do so.

I'm not educated in economics (beyond econ 101 bull**** 5 years ago), so would you mind elaborating on this? I'm truly curious what the driving forces at play are. It seems intuitive (lol @ thinking layman economic intuition is at all correct) that immediately it would cause a large problem, but would things not equilibrate to a point where we exist in a society wherein everyone is sufficiently educated for their appropriate jobs? In other words, what would the short term effects be that exacerbate the problem, and how would things evolve in the longer term such that the problem wouldn't go away?

Perhaps the question I'm asking is ill-posed, since I haven't detailed what I "think" this "sufficiently and appropriately educated" society would look like and maybe the "problem" isn't well defined. I'd say economics is one of the gaping holes in my knowledge I really need to begin to plug.

Covering tuition at a state school isn't going to drastically change the picture for too many people. If you can afford to not work for at least four years, and support yourself, a few loans for in state tuition aren't that big a deal. The huge amounts of debt you see are for room and board, food, and going to an out of state school because it's way cooler than living near your parents.

Sanders assumes that the cost of picking up the tab for tuition is simply the total spent by individuals for tuition at public colleges. This conveniently ignores the fact that if this really does cause enrollment rates to rise, this number will obviously go up as well. Which is really freaking dishonest, since that's the whole point of the proposal. It also creates weird incentives at the state level funding level, and disproportionately rewards states with the most money to spend on college. It will likely cause colleges to make certain profitable majors very easy in order to inflate enrollment rates with idiots who aren't interested in getting an education. I suspect that this is already done, but the huge amount of federal funding would be a strong incentive to scale it up further.

Finally, it further reinforces the idea that people who can't wait for four years to enter the workforce are "stupid people" and should forever be discriminated against for low skill jobs that pay well, even though many college graduates don't actually use anything that they studied. Not to mention many degree programs at public colleges are just as easy and worthless as high school.

The plan is either incompetent to an astonishing degree, or just dishonest. If "making college free" is something we want to do, there are ways it can be done. Sander's plan, like most things he comes up with, is low effort garbage.



Oh, certainly it could be done. However, his suggested implementation is the kind of moronic nonsense that I would expect out of a college freshman. It's vague, and where it has details they are poorly thought out, and would probably exacerbate many of the problems they try to fix. This is why I hate Sanders. He stands for the non-ideology of one liner policies, which don't need to make sense, because the only reason anyone would disagree them is if they are immoral and hate the poor. It's anti-intellectual and anti-thinking. He is a self-righteous prick who seems to believe that moral umbrage is the same as coherency. Both he and Trump are in the business of selling the idea that problems are simple, and the general perception of your peers is all the information that is necessary to form a worthwhile opinion. It's everything terrible about politics turned up to 11.

I think you should take into account that people seeking nomination rarely elaborate on their proposals, because it would simply be used against them. The more you talk about your plans, the more your rivals will use them against you, even (or especially) if it's a good plan.

The government should provide free education for people who work full time jobs and want to get an education allowing for flexible schedules. For instance, someone who works at a factory with rotating shifts every 1-3 weeks could never get a degree in law or engineering, unless there is a program for people like them that allows you to rotate schedules accordingly. This means that there would need to be 3 different schedules during the day in order to accommodate everyone.

I think that you may lack imagination when it comes to thinking about the variables involved for the unfortunate. I don't think that the number of people that would find not working for four years, living at or near home with their parents, or taking out a significant loan (assuming they can get one) nearly unimaginable, is statistically negligible.

I didn't go to university & I don't think that I'm stupid, though I'm certainly ignorant on most topics. Some of the dumbest people I know are university graduates. I think that if an educational institution is doing a satisfactory job, its graduates should be better off in some way than those who didn't attend. I recognize that this is often not the reality of these institutions, but I think it should be. I don't think that we'd be better off as a society if primary & secondary education weren't mandatory. I think that we'd be better off if community college &/or university were. It doesn't matter if public colleges are satisfactory, to a person trying to position themselves for a rewarding & stimulating career, because a four year degree is often required, regardless of whether or not it's justified given the state of these institutions. My idealistic approach to thinking about this may not be pragmatic, & maybe that's why I find Sanders persuasive, but I tend to form my opinions based upon how I think things should be & not necessarily how they are. Maybe Sanders & I have naiveté in common, but it's difficult to not want a better world, instead of exactly the same one, if not worse.

The only plan I'm aware of is the one on his website & while I'd agree that it's vague in comparison to Clinton's, the major points are nearly identical. I don't think that purposely being vague, because hardly anyone is going to read the details anyhow (they're just going to hear about it through the media filter), is the same thing as having terrible ideas. I wouldn't not vote for Clinton because of her College strategy. I guess that I just find it silly that so many people make assumptions about Sanders' command of the issues because of his populist approach/rhetoric, but when pressed over the years, I haven't seen him fail to demonstrate his competency.

Oh my god, what a big subject. I'm on a train/at work, so forgive the jargon and bulletpoints.

- PSE is aspirational: yes, we are wasting human capital when Walmart requires undergraduate degrees, but nobody actually wants to work for Walmart. Students get degrees to compete for good, secure jobs.

- Imperfect information: government, universities and industry are intentionally dishonest about employability and income. Contrary to popular belief, most university students do carefully consider majors in terms of employability. It's very difficult to make a good choice, though, when accurate information isn't available. For example, we "know" there is a huge demand for MDs, government says so, they get paid a lot of money, and they're celebrated in our culture. All of the economic signals are there, and a ton of students enroll in premed programs in response. But what they don't advertise is that there is "demand" because the med schools are artificially constraining the supply of MDs to drive up their own wages. So 99.5% of premeds will fail to get into med school, and enter the workforce with a worthless bio sci degree.

- Humans are really bad at probability. Really, really bad. There are whole books on why people buy lottery tickets. Investing a lot of time and money on a long shot big payoff is baked into our brains.

- Universities abuse sunk cost fallacy: this is another human psych exploit. When students struggle they are encouraged (required) to switch to a different, less employable program. The rational choice is to drop out, but because they have sunk so much time and money into university, they feel they should finish it.

- PSE has a real payoff: something like $1-$1.2 million expected payoff over lifetime, on average. This isn't uniformly distributed, of course (see above points). Even a 10% success rate would make it a rational choice.

- PSE is a Nash equilibrium: as long as rational employers value credentials, it is an affine scaling of the prisoner's dilemma.

- It is socially important for self-identified middle class people.

- Demand will not decrease until the above points are addressed.

- Decreasing supply (making university more exclusive) without decreasing demand causes prices (tuition, rent) to increase in general.

- PSE pricing is based on expected sustainable debt service rates, not real demand based on present ability to pay. This is another human psych thing. People don't think of debt in terms of total cost, they think of it in terms of being able to afford payments. Pair that with highly available, low-interest/government-guaranteed debt, and you get a serious pricing problem.

- Decreasing supply would exacerbate the generational income gap. Employers value irrelevant credentials. They shouldn't, but they do, so we need to look at the reality here. If degrees are more common among current workers than future workers, it will increase our average value relative to new entrants. This would be a long term problem.

Those are the big points. There's more to discuss here. Like the hideously classist tints of "sufficiently educated" and "appropriate jobs" (I doubt most people would agree with either designation, if given). Or like the fact that this whole thing is only really a problem because capitalists have outsourced human capital development to the government, instead of doing it themselves like they used to. However, none of that really fits into the template of "why restricting supply won't work".

When has Sanders ever demonstrated competency? He is vague, yes, but the few details he provides are dumb. They don't hint at a better larger plan, they are indicative of a plan that was never further developed. Sanders expresses himself in terms of simplistic self-righteousness, and he hasn't made a more developed version of his ideas available for scrutiny. You can argue it's a campaign strategy, but it shows what he thinks is important. Ideological coherency doesn't have a place in his platform.

[/COLOR]

That's really one of the problems with politics. People focus on what they want, and they assume that the people they vote for can make things that way by passing a law. Designing social systems is hard. I think if we spent less time arguing about pros and cons of the version solutions, and worried more about doing a good job on the execution, we'd be in better shape.

What do you mean by this? He's had a long senate career, seems pretty competent to me.


Did you just vaguely criticize vagueness?


Aren't we talking too far here? I don't see the other campaigners offering any more detailed plans, nor do I see a lack of "ideological coherency". He seems to be passing the same progressive line he always has.


I think if we worked on the legal and political structure of the society and economy, we'd be in better shape. Voters have always been horrible. That's one of the interesting things you'll find in ancient Athenian society and the problems they had in democracy. It's nothing new and not curable, but you can remedy the symptoms to where the disease seems to disappear.

It's virtually the entire generation; people working ****ty service or retail jobs with no sense of future. The amount of young people who's income goes to supplement their baby boomer parents is quite large.

"Ideological coherency doesn't have a place on his platform" seems like a weird thing to say about Sanders when he's the candidate who is by far the most coherent in his ideologies. The general idea of what he would push for as POTUS is also clear for all to see and compares quite favorably to the platform containing such things as "build a wall to keep illegals out and make Mexico pay for it" and "get the jobs back from China and such". There are a bunch of details available on the platforms of each candidate, on websites like [url]www.isidewith.com[/url]. Also with Sanders, because he is so consistent over a very long time, you can look at his voting record and infer from that what his policies tend toward as there is no indication those tendencies would change if he became president.

In campaigning, however, a lot of the details are put aside to make way for communicating a message that voters can readily absorb. Sanders has his "the rich are getting richer and the middle class is dying so let's fix that" which is a clear message that serves his campaign. Trump's "Make America great again (by keeping out suspect foreigners, bringing back jobs and just plain WINNING)" is also a clear message, mind. Hillary's message seems the vaguest to me, but I suppose she appeals by being the seemingly moderate choice in between Trump and a democratic socialist.

Not that Sanders even has a shot at the nomination at this point, so whatever.

Hillary Clinton's message is "Whatever you like, yeah, I'll do that."

What I find perplexing is that if we're to take that in earnest (which most people rightfully wouldn't), this is actually an incredibly positive trait to have in a politician.

I've always been somewhat baffled by the negative reaction to a politician changing their position on an issue. The United States is a representative democracy, which is founded on the basic principle that we elect knowledgeable individuals to form policy in our stead, as it can generally be assumed that large cross-sections of the electorate are really, really stupid. The idea behind it is that as opposed to voting on specific issues, we vote for an individual that we think would be most qualified to address those issues in a way that can actually be implemented, and in a way that adheres to the constitution.

At the end of the day, think of it as a failsafe of sorts. We'll use the current nomination process of the candidates as an analogy, because it not only serves to demonstrate why this sort of system exists, but how it is also flawed in a way that can yield negative results.

On one hand, you have the Democratic nomination system, which awards delegates based on a series of convoluted small elections of sorts, as well as the general opinion of a number of individuals who - in theory - will support the candidate that their constituents support. This is the general idea, and it has led to the likely nomination of a person who is not as well-liked and thought to be less competent than her primary opponent. Why did this happen? The party itself apparently believes that Bernie Sanders is not a pragmatic choice, and that belief likely isn't too unrealistic. Consider the result of electing Barack Obama. Despite the policies he's implemented being moderate-at-best, for his entire presidency he's been called a pinko commie, and the electorate has assembled some of the worst congresses in the history of the republic based purely on promises to stop him in his tracks. What the hell do people think Bernie Sanders would face if elected? Do you really think he would be able to implement any of his policies? It really doesn't make any difference what the majority of Americans think. It makes a difference as to how they vote, and congressional districts are so well-insulated against change at this point that it's really hard to imagine a congress liberal enough to actually cooperate with him in a way that provides any real results.

Don't get me wrong - I love Bernie Sanders, and I think he's got the best platform of any candidate in the race, but electing him essentially does nothing but send a message. Now, that's 100% a message that needs sent, because this whole "We do things the American way, even if it sucks" attitude isn't getting us very far, but you've got to consider both the long-term benefits (which in the case of a Sanders presidency would be extremely positive) and the short-term drawbacks (which would be considerable). Yes, it's all well and good to support a politician who advocates wholesale changes across the board to problems that have extremely obvious solutions, but the unfortunate reality is that the United States is a country where a significant portion of the citizenry is convinced that solutions that would benefit them are a bad idea on ideological grounds. It's bizarre, but it's very clearly based on personal pride. One of our political parties has indoctrinated their base to believe that even if something is godawful and catastrophically broken, that if you're able to survive it on the most basic level, then it's really fine and we need to focus on more important things like killing terrorists and preventing abortions.

Regardless, the democratic nomination process yields the result that it does because its engineered in a way that prevents the electorate from doing something really, really stupid. Again, don't get me wrong. Bernie Sanders is great, but Hillary Clinton would probably be more capable in office, and that's what the election boils down to. It's selecting a person most capable of running the goddamn country for the next four years, not the person that you know will argue endlessly with congress because they won't allow them to implement their policies. It's still mainly in the hands of the voters, but the superdelegates are there for a reason. I'm not saying electing Sanders would be stupid, but I get the reason why the system works the way it does, considering...

On the other side of the fence, you've got a system that technically has a similar power to say "No, that's really stupid," but has to simply outright go against the voters when the convention rolls around in order to do so. Could the republicans just nominate someone else? Hell yes they could, but it would be catastrophic for the party, and they know it. Their base is predominantly insane, and this is an uncomfortable truce that they've been working with for decades. It's just that at this point, it's blown up in their faces and they have no choice but to nominate someone absolutely terrible.

So, when democrats are complaining that their nomination process is yielding Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders, and they want to know why, the answer is simply "Donald Trump. That's why."

The irony here is that people like Wookie would be happier with this election cycle if the Republican Party was more like the Democratic Party.

Oh, and to address the point that I brought up at the beginning of that post:

A politician changing their views to mirror that of their base is exactly what a politician is supposed to do. I don't give a rat's ass what Hillary Clinton thinks. I care what she will actually do. Will she actually follow through on the things she's changed her position on? Probably not, but adapting to the desires of the electorate isn't a bad thing on a basic level. I get why people don't like it, but at the end of the day we're talking about a job, not a discussion at a family gathering or some bull****. It's her job to execute the will of the voters in her party. Changing her positions to reflect theirs is exactly what she *should* do.

That being said, she's shady and dishonest, so yeah, **** her.

Just saying.

Conflicts of interest.


The Democrats are backed by Wall Street; Bernie Sanders publically opposes Wall Street. The intraparty politics are not comparable to Barack Obama's campaign.


He actually has pretty good ratings right now. He has higher average ratings over his presidency than Bush Jr. and Reagan.


He would face the same things all presidents do, and I fail to see why he wouldn't have any influence in congress. At the very least, the role of president is more than just his influence on legislation.


This is a serious problem, yes.


More like it's based in outright lies and sunk cost mentality.


This may have been more salient in 1996. Trump's rhetoric is pretty populist. The largest concerns virtually everyone has is jobs, money, education. They're just misinformed about where these things come from.


There's nothing constitutional regarding political parties. We shouldn't mistake party politics for national politics. The DNP doesn't want to back Sanders because the DNP has interest in serving his opponents. There's no evidence to suggest Clinton would be a better president than Sanders.


Republicans aren't insane. If someone spends fifty years lying straight in to the ear of a person, who's responsible for the crazy **** the person believes? Lies and distractions are necessary when neoliberal policy rolls around. Most Republicans are probably decent, normal people, they just happen to have a mind full of carefully crafted propaganda that was almost literally forced into their minds through television and social pressure.


[strike]I disagree. It's not protected the people from themselves, it's protecting moneyed interest from populism.[/strike]

Nevermind, I think I misread this.

This. I read an article recently that described the millenial generation as the most educated generation in history. While this claim can be backed up with statistics showing more people are attending university than ever before, it means nothing. Our population is larger; naturally more people are going to school. It's more accessible than ever before, but people attending university and earning degrees does not mean they are learning a damn thing. While completing a 4 year program (which, when I was attending college actually took 5.5 years on average to complete) does demonstrate an ability to stick with something, it does nothing to prove that an individual is actually skilled.

Yeah, Reid... Please don't make this mistake of thinking that I'm defending any bit of what I said there.

Trust me. You're agreeing with me.

Yeah, I misread your sarcasm. Agree with you completely.

Strange election.

On one side, you have a candidate neck deep in crooked real estate deals, who gets paid to perform for live audiences, hawks nonsense ghostwritten books, and has been involved in about a dozen harebrained get rich quick schemes.

And on the other side, you have Donald Trump.

I'm excited to see what insults Trump and Clinton say to each other, but that's about it

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/google-working-closely-with-hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign-julian-assange-34780998.html

http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/

Probably true. Who really knows.

It's true. Schmidt is a slimeball. He's incredibly active in US politics and basically operated Google as a de facto extension of the Department of State. DC blueblood ****head who would probably be a senator today if he weren't born high up on the autism spectrum.

Not to mention, he is guilty of participating in a cartel, and conspiracy to suppress wages. He belongs in prison.

Do you think Julian Assange is right about most things?

I'm really thinking the United States technocracy surveillance terror state might be bigger world threat than Donald Trump is with a worthless wall.

I've been saying this for years, and people think I'm crazy, but I'll say it again: Google - Larry Page, really - is the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in all of human history. They are unlike any other group that has ever existed. They have near total power to shape your world view, they spy on you and sell your information to anybody who wants it, they have unlimited ability to destroy your reputation and banish your company to obscurity, they have the money and prestige to manipulate highly placed government officials in exchange for favors. They wield these powers openly and indiscriminately. And all of these powers, the whole Google empire, is built upon tax evasion and illegal anticompetitive business practices: a wage-fixing cartel, dumping Android, limit pricing ad clicks above what the market could bear, tying and exclusive dealing on Android via its (secret) license agreement, arguably dividing territories with Baidu. To make things even worse, PageRank was, if not plagiarized then certainly not novel even at the time, and only achieved profitability because they got a sweetheart deal on bandwidth for being a Stanford spinoff, which no other company could have ever gotten, putting to bed the idea that they were successful because capitalism works.

Tell us what you really think.

Disclaimer: I work at Google

Hey, they don't call it the new Microsoft for nothin', you know?

Oh, he is certainly consistent. By ideologically incoherent, I mean his ideology simply doesn't make any sense, in that he has clearly not put any real effort into meaningfully thinking out his position. He gets so hung up on his own sense of moral superiority, that his actual policy implementations are a convoluted mess of perverse incentives and highly suspect factual claims. If he were capable of being satisfied with using his political momentum to try and move the democratic party in a diction that he thought was better for the country, he could have done that. But instead he's fighting an obviously loosing battle because he's not willing to accept a reality where he can't be personally aggrandized as the icon of social change. The reason I can't stand him is that he's an egotistical ass who puts himself before his cause, while he judges everyone else for being ideologically immoral.

Obi_Kwiet, I know it's been a really long time since the Democratic Party has had a progressive candidate, so you probably don't know this, but that is how progressives have to do politics. There are too many ideas and too many advocates to rally a base behind a platform, you need to rally them behind a person.

And Clinton is a ****ty amoral neoliberal. Who else were the progressives going to rally behind?

No minced words here. I haven't liked Google for years but I haven't heard about most of what you said. Looks like I'll add more to my summer reading list.



It's okay, Sanders lost.

Hillary Clinton's win truly is historic, though. The United States has been doing a lot lately to show the downtrodden and underprivileged that they can get ahead, even make it all the way to the presidency, regardless of their race, their gender, or their history.

Eight years ago, you showed that a black man can be elected president.

Now, a repeat felon.

When visiting family, I saw a copy of People magazine had an article about why women should vote for Hillary. The gist of the argument was, "I remember when women couldn't open their own bank account, so if you're a woman and don't vote Hillary, you have internalized misogyny." I doubt the writers, nor the target audience, could grasp the irony in telling women they must vote a certain way to be liberated.

Point being, there's something symbolically important about electing underprivileged people; but, that does not take precedence over policy. And as long as Hillary continues her wreckless warmongering in the Middle East, such as her campaign to remove Gaddafi, which was a direct cause of ISIL proliferating in Libya, I'm cynical about her entire progressive platform. She'll be more progressive towards Americans, sure, but she'll still promote policy that causes much more severe suffering elsewhere.

Democratic Party doesn't do progressive anywhere; legal pot is bread and circuses for college dorm socialists.

Well, they'll keep federal funding to Planned Parenthood. I guess not being regressive counts as progressive in 2016.