Sam says "It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world." but he also says, "I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending, actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars in the future."

So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you can spend money to improve it.

It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there is nothing else I can do.

The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes.

So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to "max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on?

Learning consists of four components:

1) book learning

2) practice

3) mentorship/coaching

4) motivation to do the above 3 things

As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself. Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money.

Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of "spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than they did in school.

So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way.

If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the amount of money it spends producing it.

It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole.

Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it.

Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the expense of transitioning to a art based economy.

One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years.

I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5% transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of the market?