this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
82 points (94.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
863 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am surprised nobody said 'education'. Every dollar spent there generates two dollars of worth. Educated people have fewer children and pollute less. Educated people don't vote as many morons into power. I sincerely believe many problems of the world could have been prevented with educating everyone involved.
Education, specifically primary and secondary education for girls, is highly effective at reducing poverty. It deserves be highly prioritized for investment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_education
True. Also sex ed and 'life education' like spending advice or household tips for people who struggle to live alone. I'd probably have a board of various teachers advising me on where to spend how much and track the results with studies to be able to correct course.
Depends what areas of education you mean. I think the most important areas people need to know more about in order to better the world as a whole are literacy, numeracy and world issues (war, current politics, climate change, etc).
Spending $100B to make university free would just accelerate a new problem that the world is facing: overeducation. Now it's harder to get a job without a college degree as a minimum, especially above minimum wage, even though the skills gained in the degree are not what is actually in demand or being used in whatever job someone ends up with.
Granted that's mainly a problem in the USA at the moment, and with $100B you could also fund a lot of R&D so people studying STEM end up in STEM jobs bettering the world.
It needs to be heavily targeted towards mandatory education, particularly K-12 or equivalents, and have a strong focus on critical thinking, scientific skepticism, technical literacy, entrepreneurialism, and the methods and models of social programming that are commonly used (how to identify, resist and avoid them).
This will help create generational change which is great for the future, but sadly does nothing to solve the pressing issues we face right now.
I think education on this level even for adults, especially in 'third world' countries, would help alleviate some issues we face today very quickly over the course of a few years.
Why entrepeneurialism?
Agreed. Education does not = academia. I’d argue that right now the incentives for academia for the sake of academia is far higher than for education and learning. There’s something systematic there. I can’t tell where $100B would be the most effective but getting 20 years olds MBAs ain’t it.
Very true...