Looks like you started writing before I deleted - sorry about that. I had claimed that oil wealth aside, countries with high per-capita GDP all had those socialized services. Yet most examples I could find had populations smaller than NYC, and obviously didn't serve as adequate comparisons.
It seems there are way too many variables to look for clear examples. We certainly can't look at the industrial revolution for examples of what will make a prosperous society - wealth creation then relied mostly on optimizing physical manufacturing, not intellectual products, as it does now.
It seems there are way too many variables to look for clear examples.
Indeed. The social science method of finding truth through regressions is an intellectually bankrupt exercise.
My overall views are these:
a) I suspect that developed countries (the U.S. in particular) over invest in the money spent on education
b) developed countries over invest on the time spent in school
c) the quality of the time spent in school sucks, and could be much improved
I don't believe the above because of social science regressions. I believe it because I am a software engineer, and I can mentally add up the time it took me to learn the skills I have now. It does not require 16 years of full time schooling to become an engineer. For example, when I put my mind to it, I was able to learn enough calculus to pass the AP tests in about 50 hours total.
I know that many peers who were fully productive - either doing software, carpentry, or even C.A.D. design for an architectural firm by early high school. We may need in a knowledge economy, but perhaps 1% of jobs need more than a year or two of secondary schooling to do them effectively.
d) The primary problem of the urban poor youth in America is not lack of schooling, but lack of discipline. We could spend one quarter what we do on schooling in D.C., but make it many times more effective it we simply re-imported pre-1970's discipline. Note that old school discipline was not abandoned because it did not work, it was abandoned because of disastrous court decisions that basically made teachers unable to control their own schools. The lack of discipline means that kids do not learn, and that when they drop out they do not even have a good enough attitude to get a job in skilled labor.
I'll gladly agree that we could be spending our educational budgets better. Everything else seems ery uncertain - yes, I could have learned to do my job in a fraction of my schooling, but there are many things in my schooling that have nothing to do with my current job, yet which I value immensely (probably more so than my directly employable skills, even). As a matter of fact, I spent most of college avoiding (as much as I could while getting the degree) practical CS, precisely because I knees learning it on my own would be a lot better use of the time. Instead, I tried to focus on things to which I'd have limited exposure in my career - Shakespeare, writing, theoretical mathematics, etc.
It seems there are way too many variables to look for clear examples. We certainly can't look at the industrial revolution for examples of what will make a prosperous society - wealth creation then relied mostly on optimizing physical manufacturing, not intellectual products, as it does now.