[Hokusai]

> The cost is low for the student but it's pretty high for the taxpayers.

That is a supposition that proves to be false. The same happens for health care. To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that.

Also, I would like to notice, that for European tax-payers it is an investment. That money spend in education brings back way more money that what the original cost was. So, to just talk about "cost" misses the point.

> bouncing in and out, not bothering to finish it or prolonging it till their thirties, etc.

Not true. I have never been in a classroom where anyone was above thirty, probably no one was over their 25 anniversary.

But, that is my personal experience. Can you provide some data about that? I have not been able to find any statistics to confirm your statement.

[twic]

Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside.

[JamesBarney]

Americans are over 300 million people, and like Europe we are not homogenous.

And many Americans believe European healthcare, education, and infrastructure are far superior to the U.S.

The problem is that despite Europe being far more efficient at health, education, and infrastructure spending it also has a wide range of policies. So it's difficult to determine which policies are driving the increase in efficiency and which aren't.

[coredog64]

There’s no such thing as “European healthcare”. European countries (and I’m going to ignore Brexit and include the UK) approach provision of healthcare in a unique way. For example, the UK has the NHS, Switzerland has insurance mandates, and France has strict regulation of private insurance companies.

[mschuster91]

Yet all of Europe has one thing in common: people don't go bankrupt over surgeries because 99.99% of people have an insurance.

[JamesBarney]

Yeah this was my point.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

What does homogeneity have to do with anything?

[JamesBarney]

>Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside.

Treats Americans like they all have the same beliefs, i.e. homogenous.

[DoofusOfDeath]

Please refrain from nationalist slander. It's unproductive and against site rules.

[seibelj]

Europeans are utterly unable to create new global enterprises at the rate of America and China, apart from a few odd balls like Spotify. Different places optimize for different things, for better and worse.

[vkou]

> Europeans are utterly unable to create new global enterprises at the rate of America and China,

Having a homogeneous, single-language, single market of 350 million, and 1.4 billion people, respectively, is an enormous competitive advantage that Europe cannot replicate, without doing away with sovereignty and brainwashing ~80% of its population.

And despite all that, the quality of life of the average European is pretty good.

[seibelj]

Counterpoint - Israel. Tiny country, unique language, way more success in tech and VC per capita than Europe.

[vkou]

And how much success does it have making things sold to consumers? (Which is where the common market is most important.)

I don't think I have a single thing in my home made by an Israeli brand (And I don't use Waze, and either way, it's Google's now). I have quite a few European-branded items, though.

[plafl]

Europe is a collection of small countries. It's not coincidence that the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, is the most populated country. And since this is going quite off topic here is some wild idea: let's keep just a fraction of the current universities, like say 5 or 10%, force talent in Europe to concentrate in a few places, force mixing across nations. Actually this is already encouraged somehow but let's be more brutal. Just thinking out loud maybe an stupid idea.

[srtjstjsj]

Whose fault is it that Europe has many small countries instead of being dominated by Germany the?

If the EU hadn't stopped its continent-scale genocidal domination, it could be on par with USA and China for linguiatic and economic unity.

[justinmeiners]

Europeans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that things they pay a percentage of all income earned, over their entire life, are not free. It's incredible to watch from outside.

[sushid]

CAs tax rate when you factor in federal tax is comparable to the EU and we get none of the benefits.

[dragonwriter]

> CAs tax rate when you factor in federal tax is comparable to the EU

Nominal rates might be, but tax burden is not. California tax burden is well under 15% GDP, and federal collections in the state are a tiny bit higher than state tax revenues, together still under 30% tax burden. EU overall tax burden is over 40% of GDP.

[srtjstjsj]

How do these numbers look when you count health care/insurance cost for CA instead of only for EU?

[dragonwriter]

> How do these numbers look when you count health care/insurance cost for CA instead of only for EU?

Then you are counting the cost of the thing you are complaining about not getting for your supposedly-equivalent taxes in order to try to justify the claim that the taxes are equal.

[danielheath]

Count school fees and student debt too - public schools in most of the EU are good enough that you don’t have to go private the way the US does.

[rlanday]

30% federal plus 15% state is also higher than 40%, isn‘t it?

[KMag]

GP is saying 15% state plus 15+epsilon% federal < 40%

[justinmeiners]

I agree, that state is a mess. I happen to live in state with low taxes and affordable school.

Perhaps the european model is better overall, or perhaps there are other complications. Regardless, the debate is not "free" vs "pay private companies". Both models have costs and benefits.

[sushid]

Which state is this? Just curious. Most of us in the Bay Area are here due to our jobs, not because we love the place.

[morei]

I think they are well able to image that, but it's paid as part of income taxes so the hit when they're not earning isn't as catastrophic.

Also, consider that EU tax collection is comparable (and often lower) than US tax collection, despite not EU not having to separately pay for education and health...

[justinmeiners]

I don't disagree. I am not making a judgement of which is better overall, just that neither alternative is free, or even close to that.

[sudosysgen]

When you consider the totality of costs, inside and outside taxes, European healthcare and education is significantly cheaper for comparable or better outcomes.

[justinmeiners]

See other comments. That may be the case, but it's wrong to frame it as "free" vs "paid".

[sudosysgen]

I'm not framing it as free vs paid. I'm framing it as public vs private. The public sector just does some things better.

No one in Europe is under the illusion that public services are free. This is a complete strawman. But they are much more cost-effective than the alternative, a lot of the time, and provide universal services to everyone and help maintain the social fabric of a society.

[dnautics]

> That is a supposition that proves to be false.

To date, that may be true. But give it a few decades. With the GI bill and the immediate post-war boom the US is arguably ahead of Europe in terms of the "college access for all" mindset, and cost of college only really became near the turn of the millenium (note that college debt is a "millenial" issue) and unbearable around 2005-2010 or so; so US colleges have had a bit more time to hone the fine art of rent-seeking.

[JamesBarney]

> Also, I would like to notice, that for European tax-payers it is an investment. That money spend in education brings back way more money that what the original cost was. So, to just talk about "cost" misses the point.

How do they know this is the case at the margin? The analyses I've seen of this is usually [benefits of education] = [# of college grads] * ([avg. college grad salary] -[avg highschool grad salary])

Which has two large fundamental issues. One that college grads are differently from highschool grads in ways besides education, and probably the people most likely to go to college are the ones that would benefit from it the most.

Not to mention several posts have talked about how much better educated Europeans are despite the U.S. spending significantly more money on education than any large European country.

[UrsaMedius]

The Swedish report "Education and Economic Development - What does empirical research show about casual inter-relationships?" https://www.regeringen.se/rapporter/2005/12/ess-20054/ asks a similar question and starts its conclusions as follows:

"Our results are potentially contradictory. On the one hand, we have shown that the best studies which used variations in education between countries and regions – here we consider recent studies to be more reliable – indicate that there are no strong external effects from education. On the other hand, we have pointed out that there is strong evidence that education leads to improved health and life expectancy, politically more active citizens, lower crime and possibly that the children of educated persons become more productive. One explanation for these seemingly contradictory results may be that the favourable effects of education are not sufficiently strong to have an impact on economic development. It is also possible that the traditional measure of GDP is too narrow (and perhaps insufficiently stable) to capture the favourable effects."

[AdrianB1]

> To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that.

There is a major flaw in this argument: mixing incentive with potential. Yes, governments have the potential to be more efficient due to scale, but there is no incentive to do it. Smaller for profit institutions don't have the economy of scale, but have the incentive to be very efficient. In the end, private institutions need to be extremely efficient to compete with the free state colleges in Europe, while free state colleges have zero motivation to improve and compete, their money is a given.

[galaxyLogic]

> while free state colleges have zero motivation to improve and compete

Couldn't this argument be extended also to primary schools? Shouldn't they too be profit-maximizing businesses? Or are they already?

[Kbelicius]

This would be a valid argument if the only incentive for human action was money. Since we know that to be false makes your argument invalid.

[DINKDINK]

>To have a centralized state sponsored education or health care system allows it to be more efficient that smaller for profit institutions that have incentives to increase cost to the students as their profit depends on that.

An institution whose survival depends on profits is incentivized to...reduce costs, not increase them. All profits are, are the difference between what is consumed and what is produced. Either your argument is: institutions who produce more than they consume are bad or a service provider ("centralized state education") can be granted a monopoly to the service and will, more efficiently, produce the service. Typically monopolies charge monopoly prices (bad for everyone except the monopolist), if the granted monopoly has its prices legislated to address these concerns (the case in Europe), it must sacrifice either on {cost, quality, quantity, quickness of delivery} of the product.

If you really do think that monopolized industries outperform markets with "wasteful profits" you might study the history of the CCCP and democratic welfare states.

The market manipulation that started in US education is a result of price fixing -- the price of education is a molested price: service purchasers don't select on electing a provider based on cost because that market price has been pushed up by government-secured debt to which a party cannot default on (otherwise know as selling yourself into slavery). Since producers have less competition on price, they compete on quality, quantity, and quickness. It's the same issue that resulted in the FAA price-setting airline tickets - airlines couldn't compete on cost so they had an ever increase set of luxury options to attract customers.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation#Civil_Aer...

https://fee.org/articles/the-effects-of-airline-regulation/