[Hellolearning]

A persuite of knowledge is not 'subsidizing their hobbies'.

Its a captialsm valuation nothing more.

What are we as humans if we don't have the resources to educate and learn and be curious?

I really hope the current AI and Robot wave will lead us all to a more 'free' society

[mytailorisrich]

We are free to be curious and to "find ourselves". But why should we expect society to pay for it beyond a certain point? At some point it is indeed "subsidizing hobbies".

As long as things cost something, and a course costs something to create and deliver, the question of valuation in some way is valid. It's not a capitalist issue, it's an allocation of resources issue, which is something universal as long as resources are limited.

Where it works, the free market is great because it transparently shows how people actually value something. That is, it shows how we actually are and what we actually want, not what would be nice in some utopian world.

[knallfrosch]

It's interesting how abstract these discussions are. Countries with free – free for the student, at least – tertiary education do exist and you can use them for comparison.

[mardifoufs]

Surely you know that in those countries, education is gatekept in a different,perhaps even worse way. Sure you don't have to pay to get university education in France. But good luck entering a program you want, or reorienting later in life, after highschool. You end up with a lot of people competing for the sought after degrees, and not ever being able to even dream of "learning what you want" if you messed up your bac exam. And the requirements are very strict and inflexible for those,much more than in the US.

The same thing happens in Germany but in an even more vicious way. You are basically triaged before high school and can only manage to switch with tons of bureaucracy and difficulty. It's gotten better but it's still very much 'your path is set and is almost impossible to change after high school' for most people.

[mytailorisrich]

Yes they do exist. On the one hand this is great but on the other hand it also also generates waste, both in terms of resources and time.

I went to university in France when it was both free (still basically is) with no selection for entry and the amount of waste was huge for no benefit to anyone... well except for official stats because "I'm not unemployed, I'm a student"...

[em-bee]

please elaborate on the waste you saw. i studied in germany and austria and i didn't notice waste. on the contrary, requiring payment would have excluded many of the good students. (entry is limited to qualified students however, so there is some selection. does that make all the difference? i doubt it.)

[mytailorisrich]

> on the contrary, requiring payment would have excluded many of the good students

How? Surely people/families in Germany/Austria, some of the richest countries in the world, can afford to pay something towards education costs... And in fact they do through their taxes, which are needed to pay for this "free" university. [obviously poor families can benefit from bursaries so this is not a relevant argument]

The waste is students picking courses just to do something or just because they are vaguely interested in them (and then they get all the benefits afforded to students, including housing subsidies). And then they give up, or they fail, or once they graduate they realise that it gets them exactly 0 job. So huge waste of resources and time and, as mentioned, sometimes a way to hide youth unemployment.

[em-bee]

Surely people/families in Germany/Austria, some of the richest countries in the world, can afford to pay something towards education costs

rich country doesn't mean rich people. we have high taxes and lower average wages. high rent in cities. in vienna, more than 60% of people live in subsidized housing. none of them could ever afford to pay for university.

and if more than 60% of students need financial support, all we are doing is adding expensive bureaucracy. might as well just make it free instead.

[tonypace]

The difference smells like culture from across the ocean.

[mardifoufs]

It's interesting that you chose Germany as an example of ease of access to the education you want. Maybe if you managed to get into a Gymnasium and didn't fuck up when you were like... 10? Sure. Otherwise yeah, good luck getting into university for the degree you want.

[Hellolearning]

You can actually get a university allowance through your job experience.

You can get Bafoeg (financial support which you get for free) if you have a job degree and go to the BOS to get your university degree that way.

[em-bee]

Maybe if you managed to get into a Gymnasium and didn't fuck up when you were like... 10

not true. there is also the gesamtschule which delays the decision to make the abitur until you are in 10th grade.

40% of students in germany qualify for university (and another 10% for fachhochschule). that is much higher than the university admission rates in the US.

[1oooqooq]

naive. free market shows what generates revenue.

[mytailorisrich]

And what generates revenue is exactly what I described: what we want and value and thus are willing to pay for.

I don't see what's naive there. On the contrary this is absolute realism. And furthermore this goes hand in hand with individual liberty. Alternatives have been tried, and they failed...

[1oooqooq]

oh boy.

[Hellolearning]

Because we as a society are the only reason who holds us back.

We use capitalism to control resources etc. but only thanks to controled capitalism / politics we are keeping pure capitalsim under control (like minimum wage, labor laws etc.).

We could create a new system. A system which determines how many resources we as society can produce on one side and want we need + want on the other side. Than we optimize our system for this.

Which would mean we would get rid of everything we don't need and optimize everything we can.

We don't need thousends of different companies doing simliar things just different with their own overhead. Capitalism needs this to control itself.

[drawnwren]

It’s strange to me that you can’t see the correlation between free markets and their products while simultaneously looking forward to more production from those same markets.

[Hellolearning]

Get rid of all unnecessary things and overhead in our society and we do not have a resource issue.

Focus on automatisation and we don't have a production issue.

Its a man made problem, not some kind of magic rule.

[drawnwren]

I think this is one of those wordcel arguments that sounds nice but probably has no bearing on actual reality.

If we live in a world where human effort has no marginal utility, we also live in a world where human life has no value. If we don't, you're in a world where you're competing with other humans for some set of resources. Regardless of whether you believe that you are competing with them, others are competing with you.

I think competition is perhaps one of the most basic rules of reality.