Sorry, I didnt want to single you out, your sentence just came pretty suitable my way.
That review article was also not that important to me to find the link.

And Germany (and most of Europe) are going into the direction of the Anglo system, see my post with “Bologna process”. In addition we try to cut school years back to your 12, against the resistance of many parents, especially the educated ones.
Surprisingly few seem to be aware, that a big effect of this is, that folks start working 3 years earlier.

We also put up more afternoon school, in an effort to lose less of the bottom 10 – 20 %, with difficult family backgrounds.

The old way was better for self-propelled people like me, who are best left alone, … well, at least from my perspective :-). Some exams along the way to be enough.

@ novokant 168
I think there are some things, which are much easier learned young.
Languages before age 10. Really difficult math befor 25.
But most people do not really need this later on.

When you take a look, many nobel prize people did their work age 25 – 30, and managed to arrive in the right places for that, which should be these “elite” institutions.
Throughing substantial “social point” delays their way, is not helpful in this aspect.

The system should not be designed for those very few, but somehow permeable.

That most of the system is accessible basically by self selection, and no tuition fees, we keep. It is also clear that going that direction would be difficult in the US.

Finland is running pretty high tertiary ed rates since recently. We will see what comes from that. Certain things also have to be tried long enough on a large enough scale.

And as much as we might fight the “class positioning”. Somehow this will always break through, those mother instincts are a very powerful force : – )

I wasn’t “demanding” anything. I was referring to an existing practice: no US college or univ., as far as I’m aware, admits its undergrad students solely on the basis of grades and test scores.

[Btw, the article you refer to about representation of various ethnic etc groups in the Ivy League appeared in something called Conservative Review, not National Review. Sorry, don't have time to get the link just now.]

The more interesting thing are actually the comments from readers in Scandinavia. They don’t have all year (social) sunshine there either. Pun intented.
I remember feeling the pain, when I looked at unemployment numbers for Finland, mid 1990ties. The EU / Euro is about providing a more level playing field for Nokia vs Apple / Google.

@ hix 132
I think it is better to keep Abitur, as the direct university entry qualification at 30%.
At least 10% can qualify in some other ways.

The TU Munich crammed 1500 starters into a 1100 seat Audimax at my time. It wears off until Xmas. And folks like me actually learned better from books anyways.

Even my cleaning lady takes 9 Euro/hr now, up 50 % from 3 years ago. And since she is not reading this blog, I can say, she is worth it. The first one not cheating on hours written, and diligent, she is in demand, and now thinking about hiring associates. The employment tide is turning with an ageing society. Supply & Demand.

I took 12 deutschmark (6.5 Euro) for math lessons, 30 years ago (this would be 15 dollar today), as a 10th grade Gymnasium.

@ hix 145
We had hard homework, and we were expected to solve them in teams of 3 or 4. The only guy doing it alone, committed suicide, when his prof freaked him out about his PhD thesis. Nothing unusual done, as I heard from people closer to the case, just a little fire to the feet, most of us get sooner or later, but he was alone at home in his head, coming from some god forsaken place, living alone, because his parents had too much money, and over 8 years not socializing, in a million people town as Munich. Cornell (suicide bridge) seemed to be good at attracting this kind of people as well.

According to my finances, I lived 6 years in a 10 sqm dorm room, became speaker, and I carried a universal key for 3 years, willing and able to go into every apartment, if folks suddenly withdrew and did answer the door bell anymore, and then you often faced people with REAL problems, like half of their family wiped out by some bombing in Palestine. Nobody jumped in my house, not on my watch.

Maybe that made me a little harder, when I hear all this whining here

@ 154, 155
I disagree, respectfully

156 If, for example, you work twice more, or two household members work instead of one, and your consumption is up 50%, then, I think, a reasonable person would conclude that living standards declined. I posted a link for you.

I don’t intend to waste an hour watching a YouTube video that may or may not be relevant to the issue. If you think you have evidence that middle class living standards have stagnated or declined, then present it.

For this reason, or that. New drugs, new technology. That’s good, that’s an analysis, albeit without any numbers, but nevertheless.

Here’s an article from the National Cancer Institute describing the advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment since the 1970s:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances-in-focus/cancer

And here’s a study describing the advances in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/26/1/25.full

I single out cancer and heart disease because they are by far the leading causes of premature death and because advances in health care for these diseases are major contributers to the significant increase in life expectancy over the past 40 years. But in fact health care has advanced in virtually all areas.

Let’s see: income, quality and availability of employment, quality and affordability of housing, gross domestic product, affordable (or free) access to quality healthcare, quality and availability of education, life expectancy, infrastructure, political and religious freedom, environmental quality and safety have gone up since the 1970s. Hours of work required to purchase necessities, poverty, inflation, incidence of disease, and cost of goods and services have gone down. Number of vacation days per year has apparently remained stable, but access to paid leave has increased. I see no evidence of a decline in “political stability.” Not sure what “economic stability” or “class disparities” are supposed to mean, exactly, or how the author proposes to measure them.

In other words, by all or virtually all of these measures (most of which are direct or indirect measures of consumption, anyway), standard of living has improved. In many cases, improved dramatically.

So what does Mrs. A.rrived from Somerville, Mass do, to keep her brood ahead of the litter from Mrs. R.edneck from Smalltown, Kansas? When you look at a Campus like Berkeley today, the male US whitey is a small minority. And when I looked at their “student garden” I got a laughing attack, none of them apparently did have any gardening experience.

First thing is to go on to law, and business, but the Tiger Mom (law professor) and the Indians are coming so quickly. Sidestepping into the cultural, social studies is one way to delay recognizing relative social down adjustment.

Sooo, they invented “resume building”, a disease that spreads now all around the world today. Fill the free time of your kids with some “save the world” activities, like “Start a wildlife conservation NGO” (just see Sophia below, you don’t have to make this up!), since you gave up on getting them to look into their math books, or visit test prep schools, like in Asia : – ).

Then they demand “you cant go ‘by admissions solely by grades and test scores. That would be foolish.’”

In former times, when the Irish and Italians arrived in the US, it took them 2 generations to rise from the bottom, and dominating certain areas like the NYPD was certainly helpful.

Today a lot of immigrants to the US go straight to the upper 10%. The engineer department I arrived to in upstate NY, 15 years ago, had 9 people, only one of them the classical male US whitey. He had only a BSc, at least it was from Columbia. I had my PhD already, the guy from mainland China too, the Taiwanese girl did her PhD at Stanford, and I wondered for a while, why the Indian guy, apparently a Brahman, and not exactly the “get your hands wet” guy, ran around with a pager from the local voluntary fire fighters. Until he proudly presented his acception into the Harvard MBA school. Then I understood, he had to collect some social points for that.

Mrs Kim Park in Gangnam_District, Seoul now too very quickly knows what the latest fashion is in resume building.

And the median intelligence Union worker in the suburbs of Detroit doesn’t have a fighting chance to keep up with his formerly exaggerated status.
Bad for him, but good for all those little people, coming from Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, and who also want and get their piece of the cake now.

There will be loser there too. The Tiger Mom to force her daughter (http://tigersophia.blogspot.de/) to play the violin, this is so 20 years behind the curve.
As this recent National review or something article on Jews and Asians in ivy leagues pointed out, the universities are full of asian girls playing piano or violin. Who needs more of that?

That means, that for quite some time, white US folks will be unhappy with their slowly declining social status, some 60 % or maybe more, who run up debt, because they can’t control their spending : – )

One way I think about riot / revolution is, you need some 1/3 severely frustrated to get a riot going (like a Tea Party), but for a real revolution less than 1/3 should be wedded to the old regime. Revolutions are rarely started by those worst off, but by folks losing entitlements at a too rapid pace. The necessary corrections to inflation indexed SSI and similar stuff have to come before/around 2020. What will the 47% say?

Alphaville Kaminska was reflecting on the end of the Roman Empire, and the Diocletian episode before it. The Communist party of China recommends to their functionairies to read Alexander de Toqueville “The Ancien Regime”.
LOL, I will do this now, it is available at project Gutenberg.

In former times, steps like coming from the farm to the city, or getting a degree was associated with a raise in income by about a factor of 1.8, or 1 sigma in the distribution.
You can also see that basically the formal education always went up 1 sigma over a generation of lets say a 30 year length.

First it was some school, then high school, then college, better college, PhD. Typically taken as 1 step per generation.
So nearly everybody who goes down only 1 sigma, that looked in formal school education still the same as their parents.
And with a total factor productivity increase of 2% per year, this comes also pretty close to a stable absolute income. Interesting.

Until a generation ago, we consumed more and more food(agriculture), than industrial output, but now the service of our fellow co-citizens represents some 80%. And since these human hours just don’t scale like the other 2 sectors, it shows and feels, if you get only 10 hrs/week of it, instead of 20.

The grade inflation saturated in the 1970ties. And we certainly don’t need more PhDs, just for status signaling. Their “scientific value” is mostly very thin already today. The objective (not signaling) economic value of longer education is just not there anymore.

Also. So, I’m reading your 148. So, you want to analyze the healthcare consumption and argue that a higher rate of uninsured does not indicate a lower level of consumption. For this reason, or that. New drugs, new technology. That’s good, that’s an analysis, albeit without any numbers, but nevertheless.

But at the same time, when others want to analyze changes in the higher education, you dismiss it, because “the rate of college education has increased”. No analysis allowed here. In the same comment. How come?

The standard of living includes factors such as income, quality and availability of employment, class disparity, poverty rate, quality and affordability of housing, hours of work required to purchase necessities, gross domestic product, inflation rate, number of vacation days per year, affordable (or free) access to quality healthcare, quality and availability of education, life expectancy, incidence of disease, cost of goods and services, infrastructure, national economic growth, economic and political stability, political and religious freedom, environmental quality, climate and safety. The standard of living is closely related to quality of life.[1] [qv]

Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real (i.e. inflation adjusted) income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality, Disposable Energy (people’s disposable income’s ability to buy energy) and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy. It is the ease by which people living in a time or place are able to satisfy their needs and/or wants.[citation needed]

Which is irrelevant to the point that health care for Americans in general, including the middle class, has greatly improved since the 1970s. The increase in the quality and quantity of consumer products and services that Boudreaux and Perry point out has not come at the expense of reduced health care. Health care is enormously better too.

And regarding life expectancy among the poor, it’s not clear from that New York Times article that the recent decline has much if anything to do with health care either. The article states that “the reasons for the decline remain unclear.” Reduced health insurance is one possible cause, but so are higher rates of smoking, obesity and prescription drug overdose.

@152,
This is not a very meaningful statement. Consumption is only a part of what “living standards” means.

What else do you think it means, then? And what evidence do you have that living standards have declined in whatever way you’re talking about, so as to offset the dramatic increase in consumption?