Reason Round Table: A weekly discussion group for thoughtful, curious people
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Raise the Floor or Shatter the Ceiling? Policy makers and ethicists have differing ideas about how to best spend our collective time and money: is it better to invest in "raising the floor" or "shattering the ceiling"? Prioritizing the bottom means focusing on universal baselines, like shoring up community clinics, funding remedial public education, and ensuring basic social safety nets so that no one falls through the cracks. Maximizing the top suggests that focusing funding on elite performers, cutting-edge tech hubs, and highly specialized universities yields the kind of massive breakthroughs that ultimately pull the rest of human progress forward. Given that resources are necessarily limited, which approach is preferable?
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-advantaged-benefit-society.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/case-gifted-education