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Strategies & Market Trends : John Pitera's Market Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (3981)	6/4/2001 1:07:12 PM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 33421

On tuitions, it seems to me that state university tutions in the US are subsidized while tutions are as high as they are at some private universities because of among other things the students who pay subsidize the brigth ones on scholarship. But basically, a place like Harvard hardly has to charge tuition to anyone given their assets, but you wouldn't want to just give away a luxury product because people equate high quality and high price. Many other private universities aren't in such a good position. Fr various reasons the cost of education has been rising faster than inflation but the universities aren't making profits for shareholders, they're non-profits. Donations are partly subsidzing the cost. Personal saving is low in the US because of the way the accounts are computed (the saving is happening primarily in the corporate sector and increasingly so as dividends have fallen) and in an ageing society the retired will be dis-investing at a high rate relative to a younger one. Too much does seem to be spent on health care relative to say Canada and Australia (you don't want to emulate Britain) but the US is richer than both those two countries supposedly. The future social security burden may turn out to be a problem with higher taxes to fund it. Benefits are generous compared to Australia say which has also moved to compulsory individual retirement saving/investing. What we will see is a bigger gap in wealth between the old and young, mainly due to high property prices, though the young will eventually have the big houses when they are old and inherit them, unless they move to the mid-west and other cheaper regions to buy property when young. Here there seems a difference in "typical western culture" to that in the non-mainland Chinese community for example which seems to see more sharing of resources across generations within a family on the assumption that the younger members will look after the older ones later on. Maybe it's just an unfortunate outcome of "economic development". Many better off westerners won't even give the wealth to their children when they die...