Reddit reviews The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

More the same then different: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JSSAH8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

>The country is one of the richest in the world, so apparently it is working.

Debatable, since that standing hasn't really changed at all since the high taxes went into effect.

>If in scenario 2, everyone has higher child mortality, obesity, suicides, alcoholics, homeless, crime etc. I would rather have scenario 1

There really isn't evidence of that either. Plenty of countries manage high inequality and low social strife. The important thing is that nobody is desperate and everyone has opportunity. Everyone doesn't need to have equal amounts of luxury.

>Yes, in the the US it is higher, but what will the wage be after we cut out average spending on education and health care?...In Denmark we get paid to study.

Firstly, it's insanely easy to get paid to study here too (I got about $2000/month plus all tuition from the government). We just expect you to give something in return. GI Bill is way more generous than any European program too. I am open to expanding the GI Bill to other forms of federal service for those unable to serve in the military for medical or ethical reasons, but I honestly think making people give something in return for the money will make them value the education more and take it more seriously. You could even say Denmark does the exact same thing as the US, they just don't give you a choice about whether you join the military.

As far as the dollar figure, those are pretax wages, so the difference is much starker when you look at disposable income, where Denmark is below the OECD average. As far as US healthcare and education spending, even if you add the ~9% of the GDP going to private healthcare and education expenses to total tax revenue it's still a much smaller percentage of GDP. This is ignoring things like the way the US heavily subsidizes the social democracies of Western Europe in at least two ways. US military power through NATO allows western Europe to spend less on defense than they otherwise would, and the USA's massively inflated drug prices stimulate and fund medical research for the entire world. If you don't believe that here is Scott Alexander's summary of the evidence:

>1. Golec & Vernon (2006) say that as a result of European drug price regulation, “EU consumers enjoyed much lower pharmaceutical price inflation, however, at a cost of 46 fewer new medicines introduced by EU firms.”

>2. Eger and Mahlich (2014) find that among pharmaceutical companies, “a higher presence in Europe is associated with lower R&D investments. The results can be interpreted as further evidence of the deteriorating effect of regulation on firm’s incentives to invest in R&D.”

>3. Kutyavina (2010) finds that “brand-name pharmaceutical firms characterized by large R&D expenditures decreased their R&D efforts post 1993 threat [to regulate drug prices] relative to firms that did not engage in as much innovative R&D”.

>4. Acemoglu and Linn (2004) find that “We find a large effect of potential market size on the entry of nongeneric drugs and new molecular entities”, which I think is supposed to generalize to mean that the more money they expect to make the more research they do. I will count this as half a study since the connection is not explicit.

>5. Danzon & Epstein (2008) analyze price regulations and new drugs invented in 15 countries and 12 drug classes, and find that “If price regulation reduces drug prices, it contributes to launch delay in the home country.

>6. Troyer & Krasnikov (2002) find that “the empirical relationship between pharmaceutical industry revenues and pharmaceutical industry innovation is estimated, allowing for an exploration of the impact of the Medicaid rebate program [which regulated drug prices somewhat]. Using the empirical results, the opportunity cost of the Medicaid rebate program is found to be as high as four new drug approvals annually. Given the increased interest in a Medicare drug benefit, regulators should be aware of the hidden cost of price regulation for pharmaceuticals.”

>7. Vernon (2005) finds that “I simulate how a new policy regulating pharmaceutical prices in the US will affect R&D investment. I find that such a policy will lead to a decline in industry R&D by between 23.4% and 32.7%. This prediction, however, is accompanied by several caveats.”

>8. Golec, Hegde, and Vernon (2009) find that “Results show that the HSA [a bill to regulate drug spending in the US] had significant negative effects on stock prices and firm-level R&D spending. Conservatively, the HSA reduced R&D spending by about $1 billion even though it never became law.”

>9. Santerre and Vernon (2006) use drug demand data to simulate various regulatory regimes, and find that a certain price regulation policy they test, continued over twenty years, would have cost gains of $472 billion (!) but also “have led to 198 new drugs being brought to the US market” (!!). They note that “Therefore, the average social opportunity cost per drug developed during this period was approximately $2.4 billion. Research on the value of pharmaceuticals suggests that the social benefits of a new drug are far greater than this estimate. Hence, drug price controls could do more harm than good.”

Actually, the prescription drug debate is a perfect proxy for this debate as a whole. While price controls sound like an amazing idea, and make things better for poor people in the short term, they also have a negative impact on research and discovery. In the short term poor people can afford more medicine, but in the long term fewer new drugs are discovered, meaning that in the future rich and poor alike are dying sooner or dealing with more illness than they otherwise would. Those expensive prescription drugs eventually become generics that everyone can afford, but price controls mean that you prevent future rich and poor people both from benefiting in order to keep present rich people from having something that present poor people can't.

As a Rand study said:

>Regulatory approaches that reduce pharmaceutical revenues may generate modest consumer savings in the best cases, but risk much larger costs as decreased innovation leads to reductions in life expectancy.

It smacks of crabs in a bucket, and seems a poor way to run a society.

>Which country has the highest opportunity of doing what they want to do? The country where everyone can get any education they want or the country where everyone has access to education if they have at least XX$ to pay for school?

Anyone who wants to go to school here can. Anyone who wants to get paid for school here can, but most don't want to give the service asked. I'm fine with leaving that a personal choice, whereas in Denmark you are forced to serve in the military, but then get free education.

>The money used to subsidise schools and higher education comes back to the people, because schools make people work more efficiently, you get better services, you see less crime etc.

The US has higher numbers of college graduates than Denmark, so maybe the causation doesn't work so cleanly.

>All those people who want that believe that the unemployed search for jobs they want 4 times less than what they actually do, that they spend their money worse than they do, that they like being unemployed more than they do, that they care about society less than they actually do. This bias is a huge mess politically. Longterm-unemployed people are miserable. It destroys them not to be part of society.

You are giving lots of numbers, but how much time have you actually spent with the underclasses. I've lived in 12 different states all over this country, at every possible socio-economic level (well, everything upper middle class and below). I've spent a lot of time with the lower and under classes. I was homeless in Hawaii, lived in a trailer park in the rural midwest, my wife's family is desperately poor black folks from South Carolina, I've worked quite a bit with both rural and urban poverty. I have yet to get to know anyone who isn't complicit in their poverty. Yes, you can argue that the culture they were raised in and the role-models they had doomed them to a life of poverty and you can't really blame them for following in the footsteps of their elders. That doesn't change the fact that in every case they are making decisions that directly prevent them from rising out of poverty, and just handing them a middle class life won't change those basic behaviors or incentivize improvement. I'm all for maintaining a basic level of subsistence, and improving and equalizing the education system to try to break the cycle of poverty, but you'll never meet a group of people less sympathetic to your arguments than people who were born into poverty and worked their way out of it.

On population levels you can see the forces at work that keep people in shitty situations, and we can take population level actions to try to mitigate that. It's already super easy for poor people to go to school free here though (it's middle class kids with the big loans). The change needs to happen at elementary levels, and once again money doesn't even seem to be the deciding factor. There actually isn't all that much correlation between money spent and education outcomes here. Instead schools tend to suck when the percentage of poor kids is too high, regardless of spending. This is probably because of the toxic peer groups created, since outcomes are determined by peer groups more than parenting or education.

This is one of the theses of The Nurture Assumption.