An Empirical Introduction to Youth is a Billion Dollar Book
An Empirical Introduction to Youth is a Billion Dollar Book
If society paid a me a billion dollars to write it, and implemented its recommendations, society would profit
Federal, state, and local governments provide $764.7 billion or $15,120 per pupil to fund K-12 public education each year. Woah! Where does all that money go? It’s not like students get paid $11/hr, but this comes out to the equivalent of paying each student $11/hr to go to school!
High school is 4/13 = 30.8% of K-12 education time. If we assume that each year of education costs the same amount (this is not true, high school has way higher opportunity cost and takes more resources), we calculate that federal, state, and local governments together spend $235.5 billion on high school each year.
The total amount of taxes collected by state, local, and the federal government each year is about $5.4 trillion. This comes out to about $15,500 per person per year. 235.5 billion / 5.4 trillion = 4.4%, so if the recommendation in my book were followed, which is to abolish the high school, the average person would save $670 per year, or $56 per month. Not bad! That’s about the difference between someone getting heat or freezing all winter. In other words, some people are freezing so that high school can be funded. If instead, An Empirical Introduction to Youth were followed, society would save $235.5 billion in just one year and over $2 trillion over just 10, not to mention the downstream effects on the economy of the new productive apprenticeship system that would replace it! And we haven’t even discussed downsizing the university system.
If, from each person’s yearly savings, just half a percent of those savings, about $3, were garnished from each person just once in order to pay the author of the book that created the vision and proved the vision for this massive societal improvement, the author would make about a billion dollars. In reality, society would profit by giving the author $2 trillion over 10 years — just a billion is a fraction of the improvement to society that the author has allowed for.
An Empirical Introduction to Youth is a billion dollar book.
Joseph I am a fan of your work, and am in the process of writing my own book on a similar topic (reform of high school), except I went epistemelogical (about how we collect data, our sources) vs empirical and overview. Looks like you beat me to the punch: a lot of the empirical data I would have needed to collect is in your An Empirical Introduction to Youth. I've worked as a math tutor for 18+ years, and currently tutor students in high school and college. Let me know if we can connect. I agree, this is a billion dollar concept.
gib sub plx