“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

- Good Will Hunting

edit: btw, speaking of libraries, copyrighteousness is destroying our society

Of course, Good Will Hunting is wrong.

Receiving education isn't about learning. At least not primary. It's about getting a piece of paper at the end.

Public libraries and free internet resources are one argument in this direction. Another: professors are usually more than happy for you to sit in on lectures, even if you don't pay any tuition.

That's a bit like asking healthy people. You'll get answers ranging from things like exercise to homeopathy.

Answers from people can be used to suggest avenues for investigation, but shouldn't make you fund expensive stuff outright. (Assuming here that homeopathy is obvious nonsense, that people still swear by.)

And, of course, public libraries and documentaries don't have to just produce good effects. In order to justify public funding, you'd need to do a whole cost-benefit analysis and look at opportunity costs.

So look at what you get from public libraries vs libraries financed from private charity _plus_ whatever other good things the public money saved could do (including just outright giving it to poor people).

I deliberately picked public libraries here as a provocative examples. I suspect they might actually pass the cost-benefit test without too much contortion of metrics and data.

I am much less sanguine about the bang-for-buck of publicly financed opera houses, theatres and symphony orchestras, which Germany is quite fond of. And of course, publicly financed radio and TV broadcasters.

Without US public broadcasting, I and countless others would have grown up on GI Joe instead of Mr. Rogers.

Further, I generally strongly oppose charity as a component of future plans (leaving aside whether charity is good or necessary in the present). We should never be building society such that it depends on the funding whims of rich philanthropists.

Sure, there should be some kind of analysis of benefits, but some things simply have to exist for a society to be a society, because without them, the loss of their intangible and second-order benefits will cause a society to implode Idiocracy style, and nobody will know why.

And I am suggesting we should do careful cost benefit analysis, instead of just assuming that our favourite pet causes will surely come out ahead.

On top of cost-benefit analysis, you will have to explain to everyone whose life trajectory was meaningfully improved by a resource what alternative path you are providing so that future people can also find their way to a better life.