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I never said that children from divorced homes can't do ok. In fact, I said the opposite in my previous post.
Ok, so divorce and being born out-of-wedlock and not having fathers is just fine for kids. We just need to spend more money on public schools. That's the problem. Got it.
Sigh. When did the world get turned upside-down?
i never said spend more. i said, spend smarter. we allocate the resources improperly in many cases. but the bottom line is, people can succeed from being in two-parent homes, single-parent homes, out-of-wedlock homes, divorced homes, etc. that is one part of the equation. and it's a part that can only be controlled by society so much. we can't force people to stay in marriages. we can't (realistically) force people to not have kids unless they are married. but we can address the other parts of the equation, which involves the school system we offer to people. whether they choose to use it as much as they can is up to them. but i personally have witnessed a real-life example of a horrible school that even good parenting, though divorced, could barely overcome. it produced one student (my older cousin) who has a complete lack of ambition to do anything really, but her parents still got her to continue through college and think logically about her options. then the other student has made a pretty good case for himself, entering college next year, despite being a goof-off in high school that got away with a lot of slacking because the teachers thought "his parents expect too much" of him.
takes a lot of great parenting to overcome crappy schools. it takes a lot of good teaching to overcome crappy parents. i have plenty of ideas on how to improve bad teaching, but very few ideas on how to improve bad parenting....
but very few ideas on how to improve bad parenting....
I have a simple, call it crazy, idea. Raise the price of Gas to say $7. That way people will make decisions to live closer and stay closer to work and companies will also put up offices closer people instead stacking them in one downtown. This will save people billions of "commute" hours and some of those hours get devoted to kids. Imagine life some 60 years back. Did people live so far away from where they work as they do now? Cheap gas and cheap cars made people go farther and farther away from each other.
But the good news is that people are working more and more from home, especially those jobs that only require a computer and a phone.
I have a simple, call it crazy, idea. Raise the price of Gas to say $7. That way people will make decisions to live closer and stay closer to work
No, it won't. One major problem with economic incentives like this is that there are economic incentives to be further away from work as well. And those economic incentives far outweigh anything you can do with a gas price increase. For instance, how much would my modest 4 br home cost if it were within walking distance of my office in NYC? The answer is multiple millions of dollars; my house cost less than half a million. The difference buys a lot of gas.
To make things worse, if you do provide economic incentives like that, demand will tend to drive housing prices (both rental and sale prices) near employment centers up even further. And also drive housing prices away from them down, meaning those who already own a home have even less incentive to move. It doesn't take much of a housing price change to offset a large gas price change, so you reach a new equilibrium that isn't much different, except that people are generally poorer.
And then there's the non-economic incentives. How many people working in downtown Newark or Jersey City and have school-aged kids are going to want to live there?
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But the good news is that people are working more and more from home, especially those jobs that only require a computer and a phone.
Careful about calling that good news; if you can work from home in NJ, you can work from home in Bangalore, and it's cheaper to hire there.
And then there's the non-economic incentives. How many people working in downtown Newark or Jersey City and have school-aged kids are going to want to live there?
Careful about calling that good news; if you can work from home in NJ, you can work from home in Bangalore, and it's cheaper to hire there.
I also mentioned that companies too will be forced to relocate. The HQ of the company I work for is actually in some other state. They have about 800 employees in that office. The company moved its office away from a downtown to some nice place about 1 hour away. This was about 6 years ago. Guess what, most of those 800 working there live within 30 minutes, lot of them just 15 minutes away.
About Banglore, it is not that simple. Time difference and quality are big considerations. This day and age of fast moving information, 12 hours lag is a big deal. Only young and inexperienced people will be willing to work in the night. What I mean is that moving jobs to Banglore is not a never ending process. There will be some stabilization (I think it already has stabilized) and the flow of jobs will stop.
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