Will sent this to me. It is so good I had to put it up!
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An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
Couldn't be any simpler than that.
Phoenixes Featured
4 months ago
6 comments:
And it couldn't be any clearer than the story. Great post!
I gave you an award. Come see.
Now, that actually *would* work in a smaller situation where the fates of all were intimately bound together, as with a family, and where the ones-graded could monitor one another and agree in advance as to what they wanted to achieve.
In other words, if a group of five friends wanted to make sure they all got a C, then they would divide up the coursework so certain ones studied for certain tests, and if you got your A on a certain test, you could slack off and fail a different test, done by schedule. Whereas if you got a B on your test, you had to study and get a B on a test where normally you could have slacked off.
But for larger scale groups with no accountability, you're right. Because if one student works hard and scores an A, he knows his score will be swallowed up by the large numbers of those that didn't study at all.
Wow, what a great post. I'm glad you shared it. Never looked at it that way. Holy moly.
That was awesome.
Nope. Couldn't be simpler.
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