As others have pointed out, reducing education to "moar money!" is simplistic.
Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? Maybe we should instead focus our efforts on helping the unemployed and underemployed already in the US get training and jobs.
Cheaper Bay Area housing only helps people in the Bay Area. There's a whole lot more to the United States. Wouldn't a better policy be to try to make it so businesses in Detroit, or Buffalo or any other dying city can be as successful as those in Silicon Valley?
Reducing regulation: the old cry of business owners everywhere. Regulation can be good. Sam uses the example of drug companies, and yes, bringing new drugs to market is expensive. But the consequences of screwing up or literally deadly. See the example of Vioxx. Isn't one of the rallying cry of hackers right now Net Neutrality? How do we think that's going to be accomplished outside of regulation? Isn't the lack of regulation (not calling broadband Title II) what got us into this mess?
And to not be only critical, here's what my policy for growth and innovation would be:
1) Decrease the income gap between the rich and the poor. This isn't just about raising wages for the poor, but also decreasing wages (via taxes or maybe just straight up regulation). I'm not suggesting that we pay everyone the same: it should still be possible to become rich. But the current difference of ~4000x between a full-time minimum wage job and the top earners is obscene. Decreasing the income of the super rich will not really hurt them, and businesses would be better off reinvesting that money in making improving the business, or the whole country would be better off spending that money on social services. Increasing the wages of the poor and middle classes will help them immensely. Too many people live paycheck to paycheck, where a single illness can destroy their lives by forcing them into payday loans or credit card debt that becomes impossible to get out of. These debts are a drain on the economy, and forces a large portion of the US population into wage-slavery. Our goal should be to have no one living paycheck to paycheck, giving folks the ease of mind and comfort so they have an opportunity to innovate a=instead of just struggling to survive.
2) Increase the social safety net. This includes everything from improving and expanding government sponsored health care, to improving government sponsored retirement, to expanding government cash payments to individuals (either through welfare expansion or some sort of basic income). The theory behind this is that innovating (doing a startup) is giant risk most people aren't willing to take. And unless you're independently wealthy, it's a risk most people shouldn't take. Found a startup, get a cancer: you're bankrupt. Work for a startup that that doesn't have a retirement plan and doesn't pay market wages in hope of the IPO payoff, and they go bust: there goes a big portion of your retirement, hope you like working till you're 80. Increasing the safety net means people will be more willing to take risks, and some of those ricks will pay off, driving innovation and growing the economy.
A lot of the article reads like some SV industry lobbyists' talking points (seriously lacking in clarity of perspective), but this particular quote make me really balk:
"Though it would take a lot of careful thought, it might produce good results if regulators were compensated with some version of equity in what they regulate."
Oh, yes, let's institutionalize some conflicts of interest that are in your personal favor, Sam.
I do somewhat agree with what he said about education and pure research though: those are indeed investments and should be treated as such.
Also, @ecopoesis: I don't think immigration reform and getting current residents jobs are at odds the way you're implying they are (I somewhat agree with Sam Altman's view on this issue).
>Are there any studies that show [immigration] would help growth?
Immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3].
"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat....
> Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth?
I don't have a source handy, but I believe studies have shown that immigration does indeed help economic growth with the vast majority of that growth benefiting the immigrants themselves.
How much of the economic growth is simply due to adding more participant the the economy vs innovating new markets?
When you start normalizing for factors such as inflation and population growth, US economic growth in the past couple of decades ends up being very low.
> Very low growth and a democracy are a very bad combination.
Why? It would be interesting to see a justification for this.
Very low growth and capitalism are a problematic combination if you believe Piketty, in the sense that the combination can become poisonous for democracy and many other values of the enlightenment.[0]
But I don't see how democracy is necessarily incompatible with very low growth (or even a shrinking economy). Note that I still believe growth is a good thing regardless of this (unlike some people especially from an environmentalist bent), but it irks me when statements like this are thrown around with an unjustified air of authority.
Other than that, sama really misses the elephant in the room, which is plain old macroeconomics. This is more of a problem in Europe than in the US, but bad macroeconomic beliefs are pretty pervasive within the political elite, to the point where the same person will wring their hands asking for how to enable growth, but refuse to listen to what mainstream academic economists are saying (let alone heterodox academic economists).
[0] With the typical rate of growth below the typical rate of return on capital, society necessarily becomes more divided by wealth and poverty.
Democracies generally don't live within their means. That's because elected officials know that voters demand more services than they're willing to pay for.
Democracies have gotten away with this by inflating past debts away (in effect, paying for debt via growth). But in a low-growth world, many more western democracies are going to end up like Greece.
Yes, that seems to be where sama is coming from. On the other hand, I suspect that this is again one of those truisms that may not really be true at all.
Consider that in Europe (and to a lesser extent also in the US), mainstream academic economists have essentially been begging politicians to spend more, as that is what the macroeconomic models have been advising them to do for the last few years. And yet there has been a lot of austerity.
This really clashes with the idea that elected officials simply give in to demands by voters. The story is obviously more nuanced than this simple truism.
Add to this that it is unclear what "living within their means" even means. If you look at it in terms of physical goods and services available, then of course they are living within their means, because living beyond means at the level of a society is physically impossible.
You could then clarify your definition to encompass something like "being on a sustainable path into the future", but again, if you evaluate that in terms of physical reality a fair evaluation is probably that democratic states are on average better at preserving resources etc. than states with other forms of government.
The cynic in me would say that the whole "democracy and low growth don't go together" is really code for "democracy and low growth and the kind of unequal society I like don't go together",[0] because of course democratic voting outcomes will demand fairness in the sense that if a belt-tightening across society is necessary, the belts of those at the top have to be tightened the most. So: democracy, low growth, unequal society: pick any two out of three, but you can't have all three at once.
[0] Though I assume most people talking about these issue are not consciously aware that there even is a distinction.
Business people often mistake their success in one area as a validation of all their ideas. There is a kind of, and I really don't mean to sound condescending or accusatory, naïve optimism about the motives of other members of their class. Getting rid of regulations on the production of medicine, but focusing on regulating AI...a subject which has recently been in vogue among the digerati...kind of illustrates how radically divergent the priorities of that political cohort are from the middle class.
Student loans! Nothing is more profoundly affecting young American's ability to innovate after they've left school, than the growing, crushing debt from student loans.
It's the primary reason that I've moved out of the US for the last several years. I didn't want to waste all of my 20's and 30's, never being able to take sufficient time off to build the innovation that I want to exist.
On the flip side, not having this debt while working in the US is a huge relative advantage for recently-immigrated foreigners.
* All else being equal. As in, explaining to people here why e.g. a $70,000 / yr salary in the US would be much more attractive to them than it would be to me, with >$100,000 in high interest student loans. And all often is nearly equal in the US - as long as you speak English and can get the visa without the company's help.
- The disparities in education levels in the US are primarily a product of parenting styles, not the school system. Having a better school system would obviously be good, but it's probably not possible to improve our school system enough to overcome the contribution (or lack thereof) from parents.
- We currently have a teacher retention problem, which may be more important than the problem of not being able to fire bad teachers with tenure. Roughly 50% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, and that's after investing a substantial amount of time and money to get the relevant masters degree and certifications. While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons. So any system that makes it easy to fire bad teachers may well end up creating a system with a higher ratio of bad teachers to good teachers.
I agree that the root of most of America's problems revolve around education, but spending more money on education isn't going to fix (or even ameliorate) our problems unless it is deployed very judiciously. (And it may well be possible to improve the school system by spending less money than we spend currently.)
But we don't have a lack of teachers. Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working conditions?
> While it should be easier to fire bad teachers, the problem is that in places where it's easy to fire bad teachers, good teachers often end up getting fired for political reasons.
That's true of any job, though. What makes the teaching profession special in this regard?
> Couldn't retention just reflect poor compensation and bad working conditions?
Absolutely.
> That's true of any job, though.
Not really. In most jobs you can get fired due to internal company politics. But there aren't a lot of jobs where the general public can force your boss to fire you for, say, being insufficiently racist.
The problems with education are well-documented—teachers make far too little, it’s too
difficult to fire bad teachers, some cultures don’t value education, etc. Many of these
are easy to fix—pay teachers a lot more in exchange for a change in the tenure rules, for
example—and some issues (like cultural ones) are probably going to be very difficult to fix.
As another HN'er has pointed out, teacher pay or funding is absolutely not the issue. Per rayiner:
The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.
> Sometimes the government people ask “Would you ever move YC out of the US?” with nervous laughter? I really like it here and I sure hope we don’t, but never say never.
Hah. :) No you won't. Or, not that you won't, rather, it seems beneath you guys to say something like this. Of course you would, and should move out of the US if it proves to be a profitable decision, it just seems a little underhanded to use it as a political bargaining tool to get your aims. But I understand now that this is how the game works, so I guess I'm undecided about how I feel about this.
You are right. If impoverished areas aren't counted the US actually ranks quite high in education compared to other countries. Its inequality that stems from the historical precedents you mention that determine outcomes.
> The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight.
The inner city is definitely a problem, especially when concerns about crime and safety get in the way of basic education.
But perhaps the worst off, regardless of race, are people who live out in the country, probably because they are consistently the most impoverished people in the nation. I see all kinds of pilot programs in D.C., NYC, and so on. I don't generally see them in Winona, Mississippi. And it's universally agreed that small town Mississippi is a rough place to get an education.
I say all that to say that the conversation here and elsewhere really miss the mark for a huge chunk of struggling Americans. Cheaper housing is great, sure. But cheap housing isn't the problem for people in rural areas. Access to affordable broadband internet sure is, though.
Analysis of the PISA results has revealed some other
interesting facts. One is that higher teacher
salaries dominate small class size as a factor in
high PISA scores. This is a reassuring finding
because it suggests that secondary school education
can be improved at no net increase in cost, since
higher teacher salaries are offset by larger
classes—if class size is raised in proportion to
increases in teacher salaries, there is no net
increase in the school’s cost, and there should
actually be a reduction in cost in the long term
because a reduction in the number of classrooms
reduces the size and therefore cost of a school even
if each classroom is larger
That seems to indicate that paying teachers more does help.
"Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth."
I'm going to leave aside the issue of high-skilled immigration for moment and talk about Sam's addendum of "immigration more generally."
Low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America have not yet shown evidence of assimilating into the American mainstream. Income and educational attainment is still much lower, the communities are still segregated, etc.
So there are two possibilities:
Possibility 1) It will be just a matter of time before they assimilate, just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate.
Possibility 2) For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult. It is even more so when there is a fluid border with Mexico, and the U.S. no longer does the same sort of cultural imperialism it did in the early 1900's in order to assimilate immigrants. Thus long term, assimilation will not occur. Long term, the U.S. will end up looking a lot like Brazil, with a white overclass, a brown helot class, and a black underclass. Technology growth will slow as it becomes low status for the educated white overclass to do real work. Political corruption will grow as voters will vote as tribal blocks, and votes are determined by buying the votes, rather than making good policies for the nation.
I don't want to get into an argument about whether 1) or 2) is more likely. But I will argue that there is at least a 5% chance that 2) is true. If 2) is true, it would fundamentally change the character of the U.S. in a very negative way.
If we slow down immigration, and 1) turns out to be right, then we can always let more immigrants in later. If we accelerate immigration, and 2) turns out to be true, it cannot be undone. Not ever. Thus even if there is a 5% chance that 2) is right, it makes sense to slow down third-world immigration, until we can prove that assimilation will occur.
You bring up good points -- but reading that quote again,
> "Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth."
That's not justice. Sam complains about discriminating on country of birth, but yet he's discriminating on class/merit/competency. If we have The VC's way of doing things, we're not going to increase immigration for people who really fairly deserve to be here -- the gays getting prosecuted in Uganda, the atheists fighting for life in Saudia Arabia, you're advocating getting folks here who are most likely doing well in their home places. Let me tell you, the rockstar engineers in India, China, etc. are usually from the upper classes in India, China, etc., if they don't come here, I assure you they will be able to find nice-paying jobs there and remain in the upper class tier.
I've added a sentence to make it clear I was talking about "immigration more generally"
As for your point...
Anyone who gets on a moral high horse about "discrimination" is going to end up in web of contradictions before long. Virtually every human institution is based on "discrimination", and much of that discrimination is going to be at least partially based on factors such as innate ability, geography, or genetic distance. Families and kinsmen treat family members differently than outsiders (you don't let anyone off the street into your home). Local community members discriminate against carpet baggers and tourists. Software companies discriminate against people not smart enough to write good code. "Elite" colleges are elite because they discriminate based on class, character, and aptitude. Etc. Etc.
> just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate ... For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult
In early America, the Irish and Italians immigrants were not considered white, like the British and Germans were. They assimilated across racial lines and joined the "white race". And, indeed, many more races will in time. Incidentally, Mexicans were considered white for about 70 years until 1920.
The usage of words has shifted, but my point remains. The genetic/ethnic/racial difference between Irish and British was much, much less than that between the British and Black Africans. So my point remains that it may be much more difficult to assimilate across very large ethnic/racial differences.
Question for Sam about the issue of high-skill immigration: Does YC have any sort of tracking of the number of engineers blocked from going to YC companies because they could not get a Visa? Could Sam write an essay with some anonymized examples of what happens when a skilled worker is prevent from working for a YC company? This kind of first-hand evidence can go a long way toward convincing other people of your point.
The Bay has picked the first and the last. I also get the sense -- though I don't live there -- that the people protesting the explosion of rents and house prices are the same people who insist that nothing too tall or big be built and that every new construction be subjected to a whole slew of restrictions around how "green" it is, how it will "impact the local community," etc.
While these concepts aren't bad in and of themselves, when applied at the civic scale in this way they typically just provide opportunities for obstructionists who want to keep prices high. So in the end it ends up being a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance -- in this case greens and preservationists with slumlords and banks working hand in hand to keep rents and costs high.
Activists of virtually every political persuasion tend to be horribly naive about the ways their interests and concerns can be twisted to serve agendas they may not otherwise support.
I'm glad he specifically mentioned the cost of housing. This is the main reason I've moved away from the Bay Area and currently live in Chicago (Oak Park, just west of the city). ($300-400K gets you a nice 3BR/2Bath single-family detached house with a yard near good schools near public transportation and 10 miles from downtown.)
I realize this is an essay, and I realize that it intentionally takes the normative over the positive, but there really needs to be some [citation needed] tags all over the place. There are always some liberties that can be taken when you speak from a position of authority, but this is like listening to a presidential debate. If you are trying to influence the policy and not the election, you need to be able to influence people that can read past your authority and posturing.
I've really liked a lot of what I've read from Sam since he has taken the reigns, but I really don't like the jingoism in the immigration language.
The United States needs to stop trying to be "the greatest nation in the world", and we need to participate in a globally and locally aware economy.
I'm certainly not against all immigration, but the problem is, an essay like this is better used to support that argument than to make any substantive change to education. I started training for my craft at 12 years old, under the direction of my grandfather, who was the Director of Engineering at one of the largest research institutions in the world.
Having all that going for me, he still used the fact that my poor, stupid parents had to ask him for help to cover the cost of raising me to discourage me from developing the skills that actually made me employable - he was adamant that I become Microsoft certified instead of learning Linux. A bit of a tangent intended to illustrate the american exceptionalism, the greatest generation. This old fart wanted me to work with Windows, and work for the NSA, at 15. For friendship, mentorship and often employment, foreigners were my greatest resource, in their home lands, over The Internet. Why do all the "smartest" and "best" need to live here, on land that's already stolen?
It's been a great struggle over the past 21 years to continue educating myself and to find opportunities to cover my living costs that wouldn't forcibly detract from what I would learn. I lived in SF for nearly ten years under the poverty line, sometimes working for entrepreneurs for under minimum wage.
People in the Bay Area tend to stop looking for workers in the US when they reach Fremont, sometimes when they reach the end of their own driveway.
Totes respect and thank you for your poignant correction.
[EDIT: this has to be the randomest rant in response to a grammar correction of all time, but I was surprised to find no ideological responses at all, and I wanted to pontificate ;d]
I read at college level in elementary, but I think it's easy to see how that might also lead to having some softened edges, because education was rarely available to me when it was relevant.
I assume this to be true of most people, I think there is one thing people resent about tech that is kind of a revenge of the nerds thing, and part of that to me is like, look, even colleges didn't have room for a lot of the nerds.
Where the hell do you go if you are a poor, chronic nerd who can't get into college?
Obviously, I assume my experience with this to be acute compared to a similarly talented person who is not white.
There are a lot of smart people in the USA. I know it is important for us to be a place where some smart people who would be oppressed to migrate, as we are a nation of immigrants.
I adamantly think we should look to the children of immigrants who pick food, clean homes, offload ships, plumb toilets, fix elevators, etc.. before we look to foreign adults.
I strongly feel the USA economy will be the most healthy in a world where people in other parts of the world have a healthy local economy and a proportionate ability to ours to participate in the global economy.
I think global information economy makes more sense than global economy which tranfers things like food between continents, while creating harmful pollution.
If there is American Exceptionalism, I think it should make what is supposed to be right about the west present everywhere, without military force, but instead by empowering the working class to become knowledge workers.
And we should stop absorbing into western culture what is inherent to fascism.
"If I had to take a company public, I’d love to only have my shares priced and traded once every month of quarter."
sorry, that's a bit non-sensical. The enormous uncertainty associated with lack of transparent pricing would lower both private and public market equity valuations. We want prices to be as transparent as possible
>A third change would be something to incent people to hold shares for long periods of time. One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years.
"However most empirical studies find that the relationship between [Financial Transaciton Tax] and short-term price volatility is ambiguous and that "higher transaction costs are associated with more, rather than less, volatility"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Effe...
Regarding education, do the people who need it the most (underutilized adult workers) clearly understand how to pursue it? Do they understand the costs, benefits, risks, and rewards? I doubt it.
Policies should emphasize the of dissemination information that ties education to opportunity. That way people can make informed decisions (e.g. 'if I do these things, spend this much money, spend this much time, then I can expect to make this much money, in these metro areas').
Maybe education is partly a design problem? What if education was just easier to plan for, obtain, validate, and apply?
"Public companies end up with a bunch of short-term stockholders who simultaneously criticize you for missing earnings by a penny this quarter and not making enough long-term investments."
"Target a real GDP growth rate. You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it."
I can't fully express what I dislike about these two statements, they just seem conflicting. Perhaps suggesting some of the Tea Party-ish coddling the "job creators" and punishing the "welfare mothers."
Also, reducing entitlement spending but increasing spending on teachers will somehow improve education numbers, even though a large percentage of lowest scoring students are also those who most rely on things like welfare to get by. There's a pretty direct correlation between being poor and doing poorly in schools.
> It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world.
As the internet increases parity in education globally, immigration reform will become even more important for the US to retain its edge, as people born outside the US will comprise a larger percentage of the world's best entrepreneurs.
As an immigrant trying to fix education, #1 (fix education) and #3 (education reform) ring especially true for me, but it's also fascinating to think how closely-tied the two are.
The fairness angle (regarding immigration) is kind of strange. If the country was actually concerned about "fairness" for non-citizens, it would have had a substantially different foreign policy over the last 50 years.
"Don't deserve special right because I was born here....". Uh, ya, that is kind of the definition of a citizen of a sovereign country. At least until the emergence of an enlightened global citizenship system (eventually inevitable, and I for one will welcome the day...).
Here we go again on the immigration thing. Very disappointing. It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. That benefits businesses and, in turn, VCs.
Two things, specifically, irritate me about Paul's and Sam's argument in favor of immigration reform.
1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" My (and others') opposition to immigration reform is based on a desire to stop the ever-progressing tilt of power and leverage towards businesses and away from labor. To suggest that we are scared of competition (or worse) is offensive.
2. The idea that there aren't enough engineers to go around is simply not true. I know several capable engineers (myself included) who have struggled to find work because companies (a) want you in a tech hub already (b) seem unwilling to train someone from 90% to 100% to do the job and (c) want to pay as little as possible. It feels lazy. "We really don't want to relocate and train folks, so let's just change the immigration laws."
I don't mind immigration if its universal for every profession, lawyers, accountants, doctors, vcs, accelerators, financial people etc etc
Most immigration reformers only want very specific immigration for their specific industry. Which kind of highlights whats its really about, AKA Price of labour. That i don't agree with.
If it increases supply universally, that's good because income is relative. If it increases supply to screw a specific group, then no.
I also think in the end, they will bite themselves in the butt. Software development will end being seen as a mediocre commodity job, anyone decent will move into other professions.
Regarding your contention that there is a large class of qualified engineers who are somehow unable to find work, I just don't buy it.
If the reason they can't find work is because employers are unwilling to offer relocation, why on earth would those employers be pursuing the even more costly and complicated relocation of foreign workers? In general, I genuinely think there is a domestic talent shortage. Of the talented developers I talk to about new opportunities, a majority are overseas—if we could bring them in easily, we'd readily do so (and pay them market rate). But the visa process is so tenuous and expensive at this point that it's incredibly challenging for startups to even consider that route.
Moreover, I'll put my money where my mouth is. You say you're a capable engineer. If you email [email protected] and convince me of that, I'd be happy to offer (a) relocation, (b) training in our stack, and (c) NYC market salary.
> I'll put my money where my mouth is. [...] market salary
That's his point though. Salaries should rise. If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more, or get creative.
I'd like to buy AAPL shares at last year's market rate, but I'm having a hard time finding any takers.
> If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more, or get creative.
We actually pay slightly above market. Not dramatically, because that would be untenable for VCs and business stakeholders, but incrementally—over time, that's how prices should increase.
I'm not sure which positions/skills you are hiring for but are you saying you can't find any talented developers at any price?
I consider myself an experienced and well rounded developer that is happy with my current position but I'd still jump ship if the price were right and I'm pretty sure I'm not unique.
>It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down.
This thesis statement is overly reductionist. In fact, immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3]. Therefore, every argument you make against immigration is actually for it (as pg and sam campaign for).
You say "in fact" but the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable. They are academic models that are at the same time, grossly simplified and grossly over-complicated, that have all sorts of debatable assumptions, with the whole thing being obfuscated in academicese, thus making any sane evaluation of the logic completely impossible. Did you actually read these papers? Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why?
>Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why?
No I didn't read them fully.
>Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why?
Yes! Because they are the most cited papers on the topic of wages and immigration (I believe citations to be the best metric we got for quantifying consensus amongst experts). I also learned about them from sources I trust (e.g., The Economist, econ blogs). I'm sure we both agree immigration and wages are very complex issues and I believe we should consult the academic consensus before deviating from it. I'm not saying they're right, but we better have a good argument if we say otherwise.
>the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable
Please realize you're calling me out for citing the-most-highly-cited peer-reviewed economic articles. In your other comments in this thread (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagree with my argument) you cite nothing, but rather present your personal views and, perhaps, a false dichotomy. Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).
EDIT: Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.
"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat...
The quantity of citation, within an echo-chamber, means nothing to me. Academia is in its own world, and it is very easy for academic papers to become increasingly divorced from reality, since there is no mechanism for overall accountability. This is common across many institutions throughout history, such as with scholasticism and the Catholic Church. Also, academia is highly politicized, and people cite what they believe they want to be true, and rationalize after the fact. The process of becoming an academic is now so fraught and grueling, that only people who buy into the overall methodology and way of thinking will go to grad school and join the mandarinate. So quantity of citation among the same group who all share the same biases, is not proof of anything.
I lost my respect for academic papers in college when taking a political science course. We were reading these absolutely absurd mathematical models of how bureaucracies made decisions. Having interned in various parts of government, I found the whole thing absurd. Bureaucracy is actually very interesting, there are many great books on the topic, there are many great memoirs that can aid in understanding what goes on. But we were reading none of them. I told my professor as such, and she had no defense, she said that was just the way political science was done. The entire field was completely divorced from reality, and producing nothing of actual value to someone who wanted to learn about bureaucracy. They were in their own bubble of citing and building upon each other's esoteric models that had nothing to do with how the world actually works.
Further reading since then, in reading many economic papers, then comparing what happens in the real world, in reading computer science papers, and then seeing how divorced it is from real world problems, has only reinforced my view.
Academia does produce some good stuff. But there are a lot of bubbles of useless paper-writing, and a lot of politicized research. So now I only trust output that I have verified or that has been widely replicated by people outside the bubble.
As for this paper in particular, it makes some big assumptions - that immigrant labor is an imperfect substitute, that natural resources don't matter, that increasing immigration will increase the amount of capital, etc. If I adopt the same assumptions, I am sure I could construct a mathematical model to replicate the author's results. But all those assumptions are very dubious, and yet the author spends little time justifying them. So this paper adds nothing to the debate over immigration, because it does not justify its assumptions, and it is these assumptions which are the core of the issue.
Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).
Citing useless/irrelevant articles that you have not read and verified yourself, and claiming these articles are "facts" when they are really interpretations and models that hinge on layers of debatable assumptions, is much worse than citing nothing at all. (I didn't leave citations on my comments because I'm providing interpretations for people who already share the same facts and background knowledge, if you don't share the same facts, you can ask for citations on particular statements, but I may not have time to actually hunt them down at the moment).
Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.
Umm, this is simply the Economist parroting the point of the Euler-er, the Economist is not adding value. Periodicals like the economist are written by journalists who generally have little life experience or domain expertise. They went straight to journalism out of college, and so they default to just accepting academic papers as being the authoritative word, because they do not know better.
Thank you for the well-thought-out reply. On the other hand, I don't know whom I should cite to convince you if I can't cite generally well-respected academic articles and periodicals. If you want me to make a strong, free-standing argument, I believe it would take many more words than would be warranted in small comment section of a news site.
You can cite academic articles, but only do so if you can personally vouch for them being good, rather than just relying on the echo chamber of citations. Because if I follow your link, and look at the paper, and find it is the typical esoteric nonsense, in which the key assumptions are completely hand-waved away, then I will be annoyed.
It's been frustrating to see this cross-talk between the two "camps" on the immigration issue. You're right, the most common criticism of PG's (and now Sam's) stance on immigration reform has been that it would be used to depress domestic wages for software engineers, and they keep not addressing that directly, which makes it easy for critics to continue beating that particular drum. (Some other people, including dang at the top comment in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572, have rebutted that aspect of the call for immigration reform.)
And perception is part of the problem too. On one side, you have some VC and incubator people saying there just isn't enough talent domestically, and on the other, you have people who say they are talented and looking for work and not getting anywhere.
We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. PG's essay really didn't help matters; there needs to be something written with some specific ideas, some on-the-record statements from hot companies that can't find talent, and a direct response to the critics on the wage issue, at the least. Something that would meet the desired standards for long-form content submitted to HN if it didn't come with a recognizable byline.
I'm still on the fence on this thing. California is the leading exporter of agriculture in the U.S. in part because of a huge, cheap immigrant labor force. That helps to keep the cost of food low, which benefits a lot of people and benefits California quite a lot overall. It also keeps the cost of agricultural labor low. It's pretty unlikely that that is the sort of immigration that PG and others are agitating for, but without any specifics, that's only an assumption.
> We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform.
I don't know. I'm not a pollster, but simple and easy immigration for skilled workers (doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc.) is pretty popular. Likewise, background checks for employment, voting, and a few other things are pretty popular. Generally open borders and expansion of flawed programs (like H1B) have mixed popularity at best.
The problem is that politicians that are pro-background-check and pro-skilled-immigration. Just like in a lot of issues these days, I feel like there's a lot of consensus around a middle ground, but partisans on both sides are loathe to actually approach that middle ground.
For all the talk of ending racism in the Valley they have blinders when it comes to hiring and would rather have more immigration than fix the problem by training and hiring the poor minorities that are citizens.
I agree that companies should hire more innately smart people and then train them for their niches. I think the charge of racism is a bit of a leap in this context.
> 1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?"
Actually, the quote is:
> I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth. Other than Native Americans, all of our families are fairly recent immigrants.
...and the factor not considered here is legacy. Including Native Americans, many Americans have fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and even some female relations who fought and possibly died in U.S. uniforms, partly for their families. And it's a general point. Your grandmother might have founded the local library. Your great uncle might have built the local rec center as part of the Lions Club.
So you don't deserve special rights for being born in the U.S. Your predecessors left you with special privileges through various forms of sacrifice over the years.
To be clear, I'm very pro immigration, especially when it comes to bureaucratic nonsense (H1B), but I think a lot of people are (ironically) missing an entire cultural perspective on this issue.
I don't view point 1 as phony: it's not written in the language of a direct attack, and it's fair that you have other concerns but it's also a very legitimate concern that the accident of birth has a huge factor on people's life outcomes and the current policies magnify this. While correlation is not causation it's also true that the US's highest periods of growth corresponded to its most open innovation policies.
2. There are category issues here. Sam and Paul tend to e focused on early stage start-ups -- often you have one employee on a platform and you need them to have solo-ownership of that technology stack -- you simply can't train someone because you don't have someone senior to them on that stack. As you get larger, the cost-benefit of changing changes, but it's still important to take on training in manageable sizes: many companies are hiring 30 engineers with 4 junior positions -- maybe they can get that to 8/30 but I think if you inject too much inexperience in a culture you get too many problems in the code base. Some of the biggest bottlenecks to hiring juniors are other engineers: no one wants to do excessive overtime as a salaried work because they are training someone -- anyone who has on-call time wants to be confident it's going to be rare that they are responding to crisis and this tends to result in not wanting to put out fires from certain categories of mistakes.
The other issue is that for training to generate a good return on spend for company, employees need to stick around, and furthermore if their value was negative or less than salary during the training they need to stick around at below market rate for their current skills. Good juniors tend to grow at incredible rates, justifying $20K/year but it's hard for companies to effectively budget and act to retain these people.
The net result of high turnover and environments that are poor for training is to bias towards seniority: it seems a bit backwards to fix this by restricting talent so aggressively that start-ups are forced to hire more junior people -- they already have significant risk without having inexperienced people solo entire platforms.
1. Companies who value innovation and what to get the best talent possible. Money is not really an issue, its all about talent.
2. Other companies are just using immigrants to cut costs. Immigrants here on a work visa do have somewhat less leverage than a US citizen worker when negotiating salary.
I don't mind increasing immigration, but lets fix the existing H1B system first. Notice how none of these "increase immigration" posts by VCs talk about removing the ties between people and their employer? Of course not, because companies (and thus VCs) benefit from employees not being able to freely change jobs
Sam says "It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world." but he also says, "I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending, actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars in the future."
So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you can spend money to improve it.
It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there is nothing else I can do.
The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes.
So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to "max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on?
Learning consists of four components:
1) book learning
2) practice
3) mentorship/coaching
4) motivation to do the above 3 things
As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself. Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money.
Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of "spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than they did in school.
So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way.
If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the amount of money it spends producing it.
It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole.
Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it.
Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the expense of transitioning to a art based economy.
One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years.
I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5% transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of the market?
The issue is that most Americans don't have enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education. Nor do they have the other basic skills necessary to be able to be functional adults.
The issue is that most Americans don't have high enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education.
Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Americans don't have enough literacy ability to benefit from the best free online education. Well, yeah, if you define the best as the advanced stuff then that is true by definition. There is plenty of free basic education material out there too. The core of math literacy is just lots of drilling on multiplication tables and such, which does not cost money at all.
I don't see you addressing my central point. For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck? Every American already gets many, many years of quite expensive schooling trying to teach the basics. Reading and textbook material for teaching the basics is not, and need not be, expensive. So either a) schools are grossly incompetent at actually teaching or b) schools are being asked to do the impossible, and are hitting up on innate cognitive limits in the average person (or maybe a bit of both).
> For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck?
Sometimes, but not always. It also depends on your definitions. E.g. when kids aren't able to learn because they show up at school having not eaten anything for two days, is the problem that parents don't have enough money to feed their kids, or is it that schools don't have enough money to feed the kids? And this example is actually a significant issue -- right now if schools are running up against the cognitive limits of Americans, it's in large part because a huge percentage of Americans have had their cognitive limits artificially lowered by external societal dysfunction. E.g. in addition to malnutrition, look at all the kids with high lead exposure, premature birth, health problems caused by poverty and shitty parenting, etc.
If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.
As others have pointed out, reducing education to "moar money!" is simplistic.
Reforming immigration only seems good at lowering employer costs. Are there any studies that show it would help growth? Maybe we should instead focus our efforts on helping the unemployed and underemployed already in the US get training and jobs.
Cheaper Bay Area housing only helps people in the Bay Area. There's a whole lot more to the United States. Wouldn't a better policy be to try to make it so businesses in Detroit, or Buffalo or any other dying city can be as successful as those in Silicon Valley?
Reducing regulation: the old cry of business owners everywhere. Regulation can be good. Sam uses the example of drug companies, and yes, bringing new drugs to market is expensive. But the consequences of screwing up or literally deadly. See the example of Vioxx. Isn't one of the rallying cry of hackers right now Net Neutrality? How do we think that's going to be accomplished outside of regulation? Isn't the lack of regulation (not calling broadband Title II) what got us into this mess?