What economic approach would actually work?

[a completely inoffensive name]

What does the Soviet army in WW2 have to do with economic policy?

[Gilrandir]

What does the Soviet army in WW2 have to do with economic policy?

It all started with this:

Since this is a site about war games, I'll post the obvious. An economic model that keeps your homeland out of the dustbin of history is what works. I suppose that would be "Darwinian Economics". A nation with an economic model that is less than optimal would adapt less well to its environmental threats, i.e. competing nations' economies, and become extinct. The free market economy of the U.S. became a directed economy under central authority during WW II to survive. Agrarian Tsarist Russia of 1914 would not have survived as well as industrialized Stalinist Russia of 1941 did. Both Japan and Germany enjoy a better economy today from peaceful expansion than they ever had under autocratic domination. On a grand scale, governments fiddle with free enterprise and central planning to reach some Goldilocks zone where enough wealth is generated to pay for social, environmental and industrial expansion. Depending on the type of government, the livelihood of the citizens is encouraged to achieve this or they are simply enslaved either by regulation or literally. Total capitalism or total socialism requires total autocracy, so (mostly) free nations are left with an economic stew of competing models. Free market capitalism has the best feedback loop. If your friend saw a movie that sucked, most likely you will spend your money on a different movie. Under total central planning, everyone must watch all the movies whether they suck or not, because they have a deep moral lesson and the masses must be indoctrinated...blah, blah blah. What works is some form of capitalism so that we don't produce biplanes with jet engines and a mix of central planning authority so that the jets we do make follow safety, environmental and buyer-beware regulations.

[Sarmatian]

There was no hope for the thread the moment WW2 was mentioned.

With pain in our hearts we inform everyone that Thread has died after a brief and sudden disease called WW2 derailment, that developed into a most severe case of Soviet Performance. Rest in peace, Thread, and know that you are not alone.

[Gilrandir]

So let's make it official: any reference to WWII and Bible should be considered a felony and the person bringing them into discussion should be suspended from discussion on September 1 (for WWII) and for seven days (for Bible).

[Seamus Fermanagh]

So let's make it official: any reference to WWII and Bible should be considered a felony and the person bringing them into discussion should be suspended from discussion on September 1 (for WWII) and for seven days (for Bible).

And for discussing WW2-era Bibles?

[Gilrandir]

And for discussing WW2-era Bibles?

Life-long expulsion.

[Montmorency]

Some interesting ground floor points from an article about university admissions:

There is no fair way to create a meritocracy. This is because the notion of “merit” is itself loaded with unfair premises. People will always have differing life histories, capacities, and opportunities, and so any assumption that those who “rise to the top” of a competition have superior deservingness will be false. That doesn’t mean that everyone is equally qualified to be a surgeon or a structural engineer or a social worker, or that there should be no evaluations to make sure the people who have certain jobs can do them. Instead, it means that we can never conclude that people got those qualifications did so because they “earned” it more than others, and we should be skeptical of any idea of a “fair competition.”

[N.b. Elsewhere this has been taken to argue that leftists believe that neither "equality of opportunity" nor "equality of outcome" are either desirable or achievable. The old Marxian maxim "From each...to each..." is considered the best standard]

For the left, that’s important because it leads us to the conclusion that while some people may be better suited to certain jobs, the fact that they are better suited does not mean they deserve more compensation or social prestige than everybody else. Egalitarians don’t believe everybody should be the same, we believe that nobody is worth more than anyone else. That’s why we don’t just support having the “equal opportunity” to win a competition and get more than other people, we believe that life shouldn’t be competitive and that, to the extent people are measured, it should be against their own abilities rather than other people’s. (“From each according to his ability…”)

This is one of the differences between liberalism and leftism: liberalism argues for the least bad of several bad options, while leftism insists on having a better set of options.

I can't help but feel purely ambivalent.

How do I Mention everybody without looking gauche?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

On education specifically:

It’s the talk about “powerful ways” to “distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack” that troubles me. My concern is about what happens to the rest of the pack! As my acquaintance Patrick Conner put it, the difference between meritocracy and socialism is “I don’t want everyone to have a fair shot at the 15% of non-shitty lives, I want everyone to have a decent life.” Instead of arguing for the least-unfair version of the brutally competitive war of all-against-all that is the contemporary college admissions system, the progressive case should be that we ought to have an actual fair admissions system.

In other words: just admit everybody. The whole “competitive” nature of undergraduate admissions is absurd to begin with, and the very fact that students are sorted according to “merit” is socially corrosive. Let’s face it: college isn’t like brain surgery or social work. People’s lives aren’t in your hands. Instead of finding the “top ten best people” we should be selecting “anyone who has proved they are capable of doing the expected work.” Competitive admissions are as irrational as grading curves. With a grading curve, only X percent of the class will get As on their papers, even if every single person in the class wrote an excellent paper, which forces you to start making silly and arbitrary distinctions in a contrived effort to pit the students against each other. The better way to grade is by developing a standard independently and giving students a qualification if they meet the standard. Here’s the admissions parallel: everyone who shows themselves capable of doing the work required of a Harvard undergrad is marked “qualified” for Harvard and allowed to apply. There are a limited number of places, of course, but those places will be filled by selecting a random group of students from among all of those marked “qualified.” You might still get a very low percentage of applicants admitted because space is limited, but it won’t be because those applicants have been deemed worthier, it will be because the lottery happened to favor them.

My vision of universities is as a place where anybody can come and learn, so long as they can do the work.

We should always be clear on what the goal is: a world in which we don’t all have to fight each other all the time, where we can work together in solidarity rather than having to wage war against our friends for the privilege of having a good job. There is no reason why everyone shouldn’t have equal access to the highest-quality education, and in a properly organized society it would be perfectly simple to provide it. We don’t need “best” and “worst” universities, ranked from top to bottom, we just need “universities,” places where people go to explore human knowledge and acquire the skills that enable them to do things that need doing. Progressive education means an end to the illusion of meritocratic competition, an end to the SAT, and the realization of a vision of equal education for all.