Oh, I'd never say there aren't lots of factors. As another person pointed out, culture is a factor too. The US seems to have been in a cultural decline for much of the last 100 years.
You can't make direct comparisons, absolutely.
But, you can make an argument about incentives and that's what I'm doing.
When government is in control you have no choice. You are forced to pay for it and you get what they decide you get. You can't opt out.
When things are privately financed you have choice. Every company has to keep its shareholders, employees and investors happy. They have to do all this and compete well, and that's not easy. But their incentives are more in line with each of those constituencies.
When it comes to government I find little alignment-- even elections have been completely compromised, and I'm not just talking about the rampant election fraud that's been going on since 2001 (when Gore won the election) but is not talked au tanymore-- I'm talking about how the system of elections is set up to deny anyone but the two parties a meaningful chance, and within the two parties their selections at high levels are not really democratic either. (Remember the Nevada republican convention that was cancelled to keep the Ron Paul delegates from voting for him?)
I am making a generalization... but I think history is on my side.
Look at the degree inflation in the USA and the rampant debt that kids are graduating with and yet they can't repay because they can't get good jobs.
That's a distortion that has messed things up... and you would't have it if there was no "free money" of subsidized loans and the consequent incentive to pursue a degree program that would result in you being able to pay back the loans.
By the other hand, education is probably the best thing in socialism. I'm from Southwest Europe and I know some russians living here that sent their kids to study in their home country, Russia. They say that subjects for 9th grade here, are learned during 6th in Russia. Is very common in my country that kids from Eastern Europe that still made some schooling there are the best students in their class/school.
Making a fast analysis, historically, US colleges are/were full of professors from communist countries..
If that's true, why has it produced such incredibly mediocre end results across the world?
Outside of an extremely small number of countries, socialism-tilted education systems have been complete failures at leading to superior results for people, economy, innovation, and so on.
Or you could make the argument that sometimes the good parts of socialist education systems has compensated for the crappy economic system and the capricious dictatorships.
The Soviet Union could not have produced the science and engineering it did without very good education -- in certain, protected pockets. A lot of it was ideological crap but if your university students arrive on the first day with a basic knowledge of calculus, you can teach them proper physics right away.
> The US seems to have been in a cultural decline for much of the last 100 years.
Can you explain what, exactly, you mean by this? Looking back 100 years, I can't help but see an enormous amount of improvement in culture, at least in terms of the tangible impact of culture on the lives of people living in the USA.
I he think the regards the creation of a federal income tax as the beginning of the end of the American experiment, going by comments in some other threads.
You can't make direct comparisons, absolutely.
But, you can make an argument about incentives and that's what I'm doing.
When government is in control you have no choice. You are forced to pay for it and you get what they decide you get. You can't opt out.
When things are privately financed you have choice. Every company has to keep its shareholders, employees and investors happy. They have to do all this and compete well, and that's not easy. But their incentives are more in line with each of those constituencies.
When it comes to government I find little alignment-- even elections have been completely compromised, and I'm not just talking about the rampant election fraud that's been going on since 2001 (when Gore won the election) but is not talked au tanymore-- I'm talking about how the system of elections is set up to deny anyone but the two parties a meaningful chance, and within the two parties their selections at high levels are not really democratic either. (Remember the Nevada republican convention that was cancelled to keep the Ron Paul delegates from voting for him?)
I am making a generalization... but I think history is on my side.
Look at the degree inflation in the USA and the rampant debt that kids are graduating with and yet they can't repay because they can't get good jobs.
That's a distortion that has messed things up... and you would't have it if there was no "free money" of subsidized loans and the consequent incentive to pursue a degree program that would result in you being able to pay back the loans.