Actually, I think you have to go back further. My grandfather, a poor kid from west LA, went to UCLA and then UC Berkeley as an engineering student back in the late 1930s / early 1940s.
He learned Latin in high school (think inner city kid learning Latin). Grew up with all the airfields in LA and mechanical engineering seemed like the thing, I guess. So despite being interned (he was a Japanese American) he went on to be a very successful engineer and eventually businessman (owned his own hydraulics company, etc.).
It's arguable that a lot of this happened because of a golden age in California's educational system. Same thing with my parents. I've met them and they're idiots -- but at least my father benefited greatly from UC Berkeley (he's a philosophy professor).
I think PG is right to question what exactly is going on. But there really was an extraordinary investment in higher education (for whatever reason) in the early- to mid- 20th century. And arguably, that affected a lot of things which we Californians take for granted.
I think what the OP is trying to say is that our attitude about public education has changed. It was irrational, the level of investment that was made into higher education pre-1980s (both raising and allocating funds). And today's set of challenges may require a different emphasis (e.g., charter schools, leaner campuses, more online learning, etc.) -- but that generous spirit that, afaik, built California into a great state -- that's not worth overlooking.
Pensions without appropriate savings represent a huge drain on the government that "suddenly appears" (after 30+ years).
Personnel costs rise not just with inflation but with the completion from the local job market. Unfortunately for the state it can't reduce benefits when times get tough.
Pity you had to use such crude language while making your point. I'd like to see these figures per state. And then I'd like to see the percentage of the budget over time that is allocated to locking up citizens.
Wow, I had to reread it at least 5 times before I noticed it. "Fucked" for some reason is much less offensive to me than other forms like "fucking"... not like that is extremely offensive either, but "fucked" doesn't even seem at all bad.
I think it's a safe bet that anyone who finds themselves this deep in a site like HN is either an adult, or a kid with parents who give him/her a lot of freedom.
sigh Totally unexpected down-modding :) At the time I left this remark the commenter had only like 3 or 4 points and I was afraid that his use of the word "fuck" was causing his pertinent info to get overlooked. So I was trying to steer people towards this salient info regarding incarceration rates. I am not in the slightest bit offended by the language :) I was afraid others might be and was trying to offset that behaviour and I get modded down to the flames of hell and those who reply to me get tons of karma.
For fuck's sake, where's the justice? Anyway, the dudes now got over 30 points so maybe my heroic effort did not go in vain. On-topic: unjustly locking up a whole swathe of your citizen's has got to be a drain on resources. Compare US incarceration rates to most Western European countries and think about the consequences for a while.
What's also missing from the picture is the comparative advantage that the US had in the fifties compared to the rest of the world (with Europe in shambles after WW II). Today it's a lot harder/more expensive to have the best educational system now that the others are doing a decent job again.
It has not more than doubled. Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them.
Population in 1960: 15,717,204
Population in 2010: 36,961,664
$28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person
$119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person.
And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not everything. The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.
It is fashionable to be anti-government, but the the numbers don't seem that bad to me when you look at the whole picture.
I did actually look at the population numbers but, inexplicably, just did a mental guesstimate rather than getting out my calculator or trusty paper. I apologize: it seems my mental guesstimate was on the wrong side of 2.
The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.
I would assume that the government is disproportionately likely to spend on these categories. So isn't this another way to illustrate inefficiency? If there's a correlation between government being a customer, and prices rising while the quality of the end product drops, that sounds like one more argument in favor of lower spending.
Those sectors are also much harder to automate, relative to the rest of the economy, since people want individual attention from doctors and teachers. So as the cost of everything else drops thanks to improved automation and technology, the proportion of our wealth that we spend on necessary but less-automated services increases.
(There's a term for this effect, but I'm having trouble finding it again.)
Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) [...] involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. [...]
Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time because productivity gains come essentially from a better capital technology. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.
That sounds like you're taking a favored conclusion and arguing backwards.
How many people have health insurance in the US?
How many of those are government employees? (Answer: far less than half)
Is the government running health insurance? (Answer: no).
EDIT: Wasn't trying to get too political on this. I just find the argument "the government buys some health insurance, so that's why it's expensive" outrageously unpersuasive.
I can't speak for California, but certainly here in Australia, there's been one factor increasing the cost of higher education: the rise of a managerial class within universities, who cost plenty but whose contribution to education and research is questionable.
It'd be almost impossible to quantify - and it is probably only one of several factors - but the take-home point is that increased spending isn't necessarily an indicator of better education.
I am non-faculty/research staff at a state school in the US. I agree. Faculty positions get cut or shifted to adjuncts and lecturers while managers who spend most of their time managing other managers keep getting their 5%.
Absolutely the same case in California. Along with other corporate giveaways and general waste. And no one willing to take responsibility for getting rid of it -- they're too busy making deals with the beneficiaries.
It's from a ca.gov domain, so I'm not sure it gets much more authoritative.
You can do your own analysis, but one snapshot would be 137B total spent in 2000-1 to 200B total spent in 2010-11. I chose to include federal funds on the grounds that for the topic in question, that would seem the relevant measure since a lot of those federal funds lately have been for public services, the topic in discussion. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl shows the inflation rate across that time frame as a 1.27 multiple, vs. a 1.46 multiple in California spending.
You can make the numbers somewhat worse by using 2009-2010's expenditures of 221B; how fair you think that is is up to the reader, I guess. Given that our author probably still thinks that's not enough, arguably that would be a more fair demonstration of what is still apparently not enough money.
So I went ahead and did a calculation of my own: revenue by all taxes per capita in the state of California between 2005 and 1964.
All following figures are from US census data:
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 1964: $2182.85 (helpfully provided by the 1964 census).
Total revenue from all taxes 2005: $146,692,000,000
Total resident population of California, 2005: 36,250,000
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 2005: $4,046.68
1964 number is also adjusted using the CPI calculator
I'd just like to point out to people reading this (since one commenter already said something then deleted his comment), that I am actually very liberal. I strongly believe in the fundamental role of the government in the welfare of the nation and I also strongly believe that we should be taxed for the money that's needed to make that happen.
HOWEVER, what I will never do is frame statistics or data just to fit my argument better. I was curious about this statistic (I don't really believe this tiny bit of data is really evidence for any drastic response) and decided to do the grunt work with the past US census data to satisfy my curiosity, whatever the results.
Also, the US census papers look way better in 1964 than they do in 2005. I think the 2005 documents may have a more legible typeface but it certainly makes me go "ugh." The margins are very bad in the '05 docs, too.
I think you should be looking at revenue by taxes as a % of GDP, rather than in $ terms. Real GDP per person is much higher in CA today than in 1964. Did government spending increase relative to the size of the economy? Or decrease?
I think that's a good point. The increase should be compared to the increase in GDP, the increase in the workforce (women working) and a number of other variables. I'm swamped as it is, maybe you want to do those calculations? ;)
Those nominal budget figures vary widely from the actual budgets, though, and how much varies year to year. For example, the 2009 nominal budget is indeed $119.2b, but 2009 state revenue and expenditures are somewhere around $450b. I suppose an interesting question would be whether on versus off-budget spending was a similar or different ratio in 1965.
So is the implication that the state has grown much more wasteful in its spending over the last few decades?
If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)
Pension and health care outlays are not exogenous givens. The economy is not some external entity which government passively receives prices. Likewise the recession is not some external thing that can be waited-out like a hurricane. Our actions, and particularly those of that blunt club called government, entirely affects what emerges from the market making up the economy.
That's easy to say, but what specifically do you suggest they do about it? Given where we are right now (and setting aside CA's ridiculous laws regarding how they can reallocate their budget), what would you change to free up hundreds of billions of dollars without raising taxes?
Take over healthcare and beat back prices? Hey, I'm all for it, but I think that's gonna cost more in the short term.
I'm pretty sure that's working as intended. Might be better off loosening restrictions on how health care providers operate so they can work it out themselves.
On a more serious note, there isn't one solution. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to spend less and bring more money in. It took this country, and that state, a few decades to get into that mess. It will probably take just as long to get back to the prosperity the 40's and 50's were known for.
Sadly, the US Gov is going to make it worse. Go look at the budget for Indian Health Service versus the number of people served, then expand that to cover all Americans. For a bonus, check the level of service compared to the private sector.
It probably would have been cheaper to allow people to have real personal health savings accounts and provide a "last-resort" insurance that pays everything over some amount ($100K perhaps). That last bit probably would bring down premiums because of a max risk.
Looking for answers in such macro terms is probably not an effective response to the problems posed in the article.
What would likely be more effective would be data on changes in teacher salaries over time, changes in administrator salary over time, etc.
This makes a huge difference in the argument if for no other reason than that the increase in revenue over time has been due to increased services (not necessarily relating to the betterment of the state or its educational systems) rather than the deepening of the pockets of existing services in 1964.
1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)
1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)
2008-2009: $144B ($145)
2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)
Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled.
You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less.
I feel the urge to get out numbers here, but it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.