> Scandinavia invests heavily in child development and boosts the test scores of the disadvantaged. It then undoes these beneficial effects by providing weak labor market incentives.
> The U.S. excels in incentivizing educational attainment. The Danish welfare state promotes cognitive skills for the disadvantaged children.
" While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility"
As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise), and therefore makes education hereditary.
> As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise)
It's actually worse than that; Danish equality of opportunity isn't just "meaningless", it doesn't exist (relative to the US). There was a recent study done that indicated that income mobility (after taxes and transfers) in Denmark isn't any higher than in the US. This means that the taxes and transfers aren't actually having much of (any?) effect on equality of opportunity, as measured by the outcomes of the next generation.
The elephant in the room on many such topics is that state policies are a part of the picture, but often a limited part.
It's not just material advantages that child members of a class or subculture receive relative to peers. It's soft education, example and such. A child of a doctors and lawyers extended family is more likely to conform to this pattern than a child of a subculture where this is foreign.
Educational parity and even parental income parity can narrow the gap, but it can't close it. Who your parents are matters, apples fall close to trees.. Pick your cliché
Denmark was rich (by international comparison) and equality was a well established value long before the welfare state. A song written by one of the most popular poets of the time, Grundtvig, in 1820, contained the line "Og da har i rigdom vi drevet det vidt, når få har for meget og færre for lidt." ("We have achieved much in wealth, when few has too much and still fewer too little". My translation does not do the poetic qualities of the original justice, but it's pretty accurate for content.)
Did you look? I literally ctrl-F'ed for "incentive" and found this.
Page 44: 3.5 Welfare Levels and Educational Incentives
It is well established that the economic returns to education are substantially lower in Denmark
and the other Scandinavian countries than in the U.S. (see, e.g., Fredriksson and Topel, 2010;
Harmon et al., 2003) ... As noted in Edin and Topel
(1997) and Fredriksson and Topel (2010), incentives to pursue education diminish as returns
to education decrease and welfare benefits increase.
That's just the first few lines, the argument is hashed out (with references) over the next couple of pages.
Yes, I did look but unless you put a heavy emphasis on the word "partly" the conclusion in the paper didn't seem in line with the abstract.
"The results presented here establish a negative relationship between educational enrollment and the level of public benefits, albeit with two caveats. First, it is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the underlying behavioral parameters—we strongly encourage future research to explore this relationship further. Second, we neither have precise estimates of [...] the disincentives for educational attainment that wage compression and public benefits constitute. Hence, we cannot determine whether the similarities in educational mobility in the two countries occur because the effects offset each other, though we find this to be a plausible explanation given the evidence at hand."
On the plus side, somebody has to work at the coffee shop, and they can earn a living doing so. Plus, said person doesn't feel like he/she should fill a chair in University for 4 years (at somebody's cost) doing something he/she doesn't really care about.
PS - I suppose, "winning" based on my value system.
YMMV - your value system could be more in line with Mel Brooks' History of the World Roman Senate: "F--k the poor!" (vs more like that 1st century jewish guy...)
Ugh. I saw one of the researchers was from University of Chicago (economic "Mordor"), and really struggled not to expect some kind of [Mussolini/Franco/Pinochet-style] "fascism is good" spin on the whole thing.
Slavery is freedom, or some such thing. "Only when 50% of the population is in danger of homelessness will there be incentive to get advanced education". OK, it doesn't say that, but part of the conclusions seem to lean that way: security is bad for educational level, which is an end unto itself???
The premise seems flawed on its face. If people are able to make a living wage and are happy with what they do, why do they need to worry about an advanced education?
Having a better educated populace regardless of how they choose to proceed from it seems like a positive outcome on its own.
Similarly, if a Danish person can have a good quality of life without having to engage in an American-style employment grind, why would they choose to follow that path?
The scope of this paper seems entirely too narrow.
13 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] thread> Scandinavia invests heavily in child development and boosts the test scores of the disadvantaged. It then undoes these beneficial effects by providing weak labor market incentives.
> The U.S. excels in incentivizing educational attainment. The Danish welfare state promotes cognitive skills for the disadvantaged children.
" While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility"
As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise), and therefore makes education hereditary.
It's actually worse than that; Danish equality of opportunity isn't just "meaningless", it doesn't exist (relative to the US). There was a recent study done that indicated that income mobility (after taxes and transfers) in Denmark isn't any higher than in the US. This means that the taxes and transfers aren't actually having much of (any?) effect on equality of opportunity, as measured by the outcomes of the next generation.
It's not just material advantages that child members of a class or subculture receive relative to peers. It's soft education, example and such. A child of a doctors and lawyers extended family is more likely to conform to this pattern than a child of a subculture where this is foreign.
Educational parity and even parental income parity can narrow the gap, but it can't close it. Who your parents are matters, apples fall close to trees.. Pick your cliché
Page 44: 3.5 Welfare Levels and Educational Incentives
It is well established that the economic returns to education are substantially lower in Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries than in the U.S. (see, e.g., Fredriksson and Topel, 2010; Harmon et al., 2003) ... As noted in Edin and Topel (1997) and Fredriksson and Topel (2010), incentives to pursue education diminish as returns to education decrease and welfare benefits increase.
That's just the first few lines, the argument is hashed out (with references) over the next couple of pages.
"The results presented here establish a negative relationship between educational enrollment and the level of public benefits, albeit with two caveats. First, it is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the underlying behavioral parameters—we strongly encourage future research to explore this relationship further. Second, we neither have precise estimates of [...] the disincentives for educational attainment that wage compression and public benefits constitute. Hence, we cannot determine whether the similarities in educational mobility in the two countries occur because the effects offset each other, though we find this to be a plausible explanation given the evidence at hand."
Winning.
YMMV - your value system could be more in line with Mel Brooks' History of the World Roman Senate: "F--k the poor!" (vs more like that 1st century jewish guy...)
Slavery is freedom, or some such thing. "Only when 50% of the population is in danger of homelessness will there be incentive to get advanced education". OK, it doesn't say that, but part of the conclusions seem to lean that way: security is bad for educational level, which is an end unto itself???
The premise seems flawed on its face. If people are able to make a living wage and are happy with what they do, why do they need to worry about an advanced education?
Having a better educated populace regardless of how they choose to proceed from it seems like a positive outcome on its own.
Similarly, if a Danish person can have a good quality of life without having to engage in an American-style employment grind, why would they choose to follow that path?
The scope of this paper seems entirely too narrow.