On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Education > has value because of scarcity - someone with a degree can earn more > than someone without a degree because there are fewer people that can > do the jobs they can do. So if most people had a degree, people with degrees would earn less than people without degrees? > We're not talking about whether it is > valuable to an individual for them to have certain knowledge (that's a > pretty easy question to answer - it's clear "yes"), but whether it is > valuable to society (whatever that means) for that knowledge to exist > (that's rather more difficult - I doubt you could reasonable argue > "no", but it is debatable whether the question is well posed). I guess you have to explain the "whatever that means". But anyway, I guess you threw me off by mentioning "academia". I go back to my original answer :). The monetary value of the existence of knowledge is the amount one is willing to pay someone to create (or discover) that knowledge. As someone who used to work in "research and development", I can attest to the fact that there are people who are willing to pay for the creation/discovery of knowledge, even outside of academia and government. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
