From comments: "
neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce
wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana
Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through
cybernetic data aggregation."
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and
creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more
oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and
micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and
hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The
introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age
of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom
but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of
freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so
much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
"... The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood. ..."
Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation
of the NHS. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images M y life was saved last year by the
Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure
to remove a cancer from my body . Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from
the floor. I've just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On
the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff
had objected to a decision by the National Health Service
to privatise the hospital's cancer scanning . They complained that the scanners the private
company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital's own machines. Privatisation, they
said, would put patients at risk. In response,
as the Guardian revealed last week , NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel
if its staff continued to criticise the decision.
The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping
privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech,
promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism
was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a
semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend
on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down,
hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into
public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is
brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and
silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In
his book Bureaucracy , published in 1944, he
argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of
the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social
democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that
could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised –
confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be
reduced to cogs "in a vast bureaucratic machine", deprived of initiative and free will.
By contrast, those who labour within an "unhampered capitalist system" are "free men", whose
liberty is guaranteed by "an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote". He
forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And
those votes become a source of power.
His ideas, alongside the writings of
Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this
country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony
Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of
freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential
services to remain public, and they are right to do so.
If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly,
which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs
– or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised
by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We're not idiots, even if
we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.
So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services
outright, they would subject them to "market discipline". Von Mises repeatedly warned against
this approach. "No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise,"
he cautioned. The value of public administration "cannot be expressed in terms of money".
"Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things."
"Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices." "You cannot
'measure' a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case." They ignored his
warnings.
Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name
of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became
not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control.
Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself.
Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test , depriving
children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling
patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and
persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics . Universities urge their
researchers to
write quick and superficial papers , instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores
under the research excellence framework.
As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the
destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds
of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system
causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania
claims to address.
New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the
public sector. Amazon has patented
a wristband that can track workers' movements and detect the slightest deviation from
protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples' keystrokes, language, moods and tone of
voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the
micro-chipping of their staff . As the philosopher Byung-Chul
Han points out , neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that
reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. "Everyone is a
self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise."
The freedom we were promised turns out to be
freedom for capital , gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has
created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by
managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency
measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no
argument or complaint.
Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at
the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true
that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated
drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian
orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become
overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs
collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with
nationhood.
A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of democracy. The final
restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no separate market
and state, just a totalitarian market state.
This is the best piece of writing on neoliberalism I have ever seen. Look, 'what is in
general good and probably most importantly what is in the future good'. Why are we
collectively not viewing everything that way? Surely those thoughts should drive us all?
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Finally. A writer who can talk about neoliberalism as NOT being a retro version of classical
laissez faire liberalism. It is about imposing "The Market" as the sole arbiter of Truth on
us all.
Only the 'Market' knows what is true in life - no need for 'democracy' or 'education'.
Neoliberals believe - unlike classical liberals with their view of people as rational
individuals acting in their own self-interest - people are inherently 'unreliable', stupid.
Only entrepreneurs - those close to the market - can know 'the truth' about anything. To
succeed we all need to take our cues in life from what the market tells us. Neoliberalism is
not about a 'small state'. The state is repurposed to impose the 'all knowing' market on
everyone and everything. That is neoliberalism's political project. It is ultimately not
about 'economics'.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism. This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism. Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
Nationalised rail in the UK was under-funded and 'set up to fail' in its latter phase to make
privatisation seem like an attractive prospect. I have travelled by train under both
nationalisation and privatisation and the latter has been an unmitigated disaster in my
experience. Under privatisation, public services are run for the benefit of shareholders and
CEO's, rather than customers and citizens and under the opaque shroud of undemocratic
'commercial confidentiality'.
What has been very noticeable about the development of bureaucracy in the public and private
spheres over the last 40 years (since Thatcher govt of 79) has been the way systems are
designed now to place responsibility and culpability on the workers delivering the services -
Teachers, Nurses, social workers, etc. While those making the policies, passing the laws,
overseeing the regulations- viz. the people 'at the top', now no longer take the rap when
something goes wrong- they may be the Captain of their particular ship, but the
responsibility now rests with the man sweeping the decks. Instead they are covered by tying
up in knots those teachers etc. having to fill in endless check lists and reports, which have
as much use as clicking 'yes' one has understood those long legal terms provided by software
companies.... yet are legally binding. So how the hell do we get out of this mess? By us as
individuals uniting through unions or whatever and saying NO. No to your dumb educational
directives, No to your cruel welfare policies, No to your stupid NHS mismanagement.... there
would be a lot of No's but eventually we could say collectively 'Yes I did the right thing'.
'The left wing dialogue about neoliberalism used to be that it was the Wild West and that
anything goes. Now apparently it's a machine of mass control.'
It is the Wild West and anything goes for the corporate entities, and a machine of control
of the masses. Hence the wish of neoliberals to remove legislation that protects workers and
consumers.
by Ingrid Robeyns on December 29, 2019 Some aspects of
academia show great international variation. There is one on which I haven't found any good
data, and hence thought I'll ask the crowd here so that we can gather our own data, even if it
will be not very scientifically collected.
The question is this: if you are a university teacher/professor and your department awards
PhD-degrees, do you get any official time allocated (or time-compensation) for PhD supervision?
If it is part of a teaching load model, how many hours (or % teaching load) is it equivalent
to? Or is there an expectation that you take on PhD-students but that this does not lead to a
reduction in other tasks?
How do international practices of the conditions for PhD-supervisors compare?
In my faculty (Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands), all supervisors together
(which generally are two, sometimes three) are collectively given a teaching load reduction of
132 hours in the year follow the graduation of the PhD-candidate. So your teaching reduction
upon successful graduation of a PhD-candidate tends to be 66 hours. For the supervisory work
you effectively do in the four years prior to graduation, there is no time allocated; so you
effectively do this in your research or your leisure time.
To put this into perspective: most (assistant/associate/full) professors teach 50-70% of
their time, and a fulltime workload is 1670 hours, or 1750 hours if you are saving for a
sabbatical. This can be reduced if you have major managerial tasks (e.g. Head of Department) or
if a large part of your wage is paid by a research grant. So without reductions, we teach about
835-1190 hours a year (this includes the time for preparation and examination, but frankly, one
always needs more than the teaching load models allocate for a given course. And in general
there are no TAs or other support staff to help with the practical sides of teaching).
For writing the grants that are almost always needed to create the jobs for PhD students
(with success rates now around 15%), and for supervising those who in the end do not get their
PhD degree, there is no time put aside for the supervisor/applicants. That time also goes,
effectively, from our research time, or, more realistically, from our leisure time.
Recently, I heard from a British colleague and a Swedish colleague their models for
PhD-supervision, which were way more generous (and rightly so in my view), so thought I'll
throw the question on the table here: what, if any, time-compensation/teachingreduction do you
get for supervising PhD students?
I am not trying to suggest here that without adequate time set aside for doing this work, it
would not be worthwhile supervising PhDs. There are in many cases other forms of rewards for
the work one does as a PhD supervisor. One might be the honor of supervising PhDs, and in most
cases the intrinsic rewards of the supervisory process – the satisfaction of seeing a
young person take their first steps as a scholar, and being able to play a crucial role in this
process. There is , after all, a reason why the Germans call their PhD-supervisor
mein Doktorvater or meine Doktormutter – since yes, there is this element
of helping someone to grow, in a cognitive and professional sense. Professionally, there are
few people who had so much influence on me as my PhD-supervisor, and I am hoping that some of
my (former) PhD-students will think the same at some point in their lives. So it would be wrong
to frame it merely as a burden, since there is the intrinsic value of the rather unique
professional relationship. But that cannot be a reason to not give PhDsupervisors the time they
need to properly supervise, given how severe time pressure in academia is. I see this as a real
tension.
In some academic fields, there may be professional research benefits for the supervisors,
such as becoming co-authors on the publications the PhD-students write under your supervision.
I recently examined a PhD-thesis in medical ethics, and all chapters (being articles published
or under review) had been co-written with several members of the supervisory team. Even raising
the funds to hire the PhD is sometimes seen as sufficient reason to be listed as a co-author.
In the humanities there is no such a thing: we don't put our names on articles of our
PhDstudents, even if we contributed significantly to the development of that piece (rightly so
in my view).
I'm posting this because I am interested in the international comparison in its own right,
but also because of its relevance in discussions on higher education policies which are
currently very intense in the Netherlands, on which I'll write another blogpost
later.
In my part of my university each PhD student earns her supervisors around 60 notional
hours/1600 total per annum, but that's usually divided 5/1 between two supervisors, so that
the person actually doing the work has about 50 hours, so slightly over an hour/week given
annual leave etc. My greatest beef with this is when we admit non-anglophone PhD students.
Since they officially have a level of competence in English as a condition of their
admission, they do not get any extra time for supervision. But in practice, their work takes
much longer to read and you have to put a lot of work into improving their English.
In my faculty (Arts and Social Sciences at Sydney) the primary supervisor gets 40 hours per
year and an auxiliary supervisor gets ten. (There is some flexibility for the 50 total hours
to be divided differently.)
In a recent survey of faculty staff with a response rate of around 30%, most reported
spending longer per primary supervision: the median was 50 hours.
There's actually a growing literature on academic time use. Kenny and Fluck have published
a series of papers based on a large survey of Australian academics. The median reported time
spent supervising a higher degree student per year was 60 hours over all discipline groups,
50 hours for Arts, Law and Humanities. (Kenny and Fluck 2018 'Research workloads in
Australian universities', _Australian Universities Review_ -- and the companion papers on
teaching and admin workloads are also worth googling for the full results over lots of
tasks.)
When we tried to establish a "norm" at the University of York, it turned out that practice
varied widely not only across faculties, but within the arts and humanities and social
sciences. Some departments simply included it in "research time" and gave zero extra time,
others gave a (more-or-less generous) "teaching" allocation. So, I am not sure you can get
any useful comparisons even at an institutional level let alone internationally.
Currently, in the Law School at York, a PhD student – during the period of registration
(i.e., only for the first 3 years) – earns her supervisors around 80 notional hours of
teaching per year. This is split across the supervisory team in proportion to their
involvement.
Many colleagues think this is insufficient, in particular with non-anglophone students and it
can be particularly galling if one is putting a lot of work into the final "writing up"
year.
For what it is worth, I found this very hard to manage when I was Head of Department (and so
responsible for workloads). The issue for me was that in many cases senior colleagues had
several PhD students and (some) junior colleagues none (or very little involvement. This was
back in the day of most students have one supervisor.). Modelling a system where PhD
supervision was "properly" rewarded (that is, where I tried to allocate hours in accordance
to the amount of time it actually took) resulted in a very hierarchical department where
(roughly) senior colleagues did PhD supervision and junior colleagues taught undergraduates.
So, I didn't do it.
For what it is worth (addressing the wider issues of workload), it seems to me that there is
an inevitable gap between a workload system conceived of as a mechanism of "counting" (how
many hours does this job actually take?) and conceived of as a mechanism of "distribution"
(how much work is there to be done and how many people to do it?). Of course, the
distributive principles cannot stray too far from the realities revealed in counting, but it
(seems to me at least) perfectly okay to think that the distributive principles include other
considerations like the "shape" of the department, individual "goals" (having PhD students is
good for promotion at York) and personal development, gender, and so on.
Finally, this problem does not seem to be unique to PhD supervision (the current "hot topic"
at York is how to count/distribute time for research grant writing, which at the moment is
simply included in individual research in most, but not all, departments). York tried to
introduce a workload model across the university and never managed it because departmental
variations were so huge (in everything from whether/how to include teaching preparation time
to how to rank administrative tasks). That said, this may be the result of our particular
institutional history (until recently, we had a very flat structure with only relatively
autonomous departments and no faculties).
In Japan as far as I know there is no allowance at all, and senior staff (the professor who
is the official supervisor) often dump all supervisory responsibility on the most junior
staff. There is also often no limit on how many PhD students the professor can take on (and
dump on their assistant prof). This is particularly bad with masters students, whose theses
are much more time limited and challenging to supervise.
I don't know if it's a general thing but my colleagues in China tell me they are only
allowed a PhD student if they publish above a certain level – PhD students are treated
as a valuable asset you need to struggle to get. (I think they are paid by the uni but don't
quote me). In the universities I know of in China the PhD student has to publish to graduate
(sometimes like 3 papers) so the benefits to the supervisor are obvious.
I'm in public health where publication is relatively easy and quick. I don't know how it
is in other disciplines (but the Japanese professor dumping his responsibilities on junior
staff is quite common across disciplines as far as I can tell).
It's not part of a workload model for us. We're expected to teach 2 classes a semester (8
contact hours a week total), then research, service, and graduate supervision on top, but the
only thing that is specified is the 2 classes. So no compensation for PhD students. In
practice the number of PhD supervisions varies greatly across faculty (as you'd expect), as
does the amount of service work we do (if you're good at it you get asked to do more, if
you're tenured and responsible you generally try to say yes), as does the amount of time we
actually spend on the courses we teach.
As do our salaries, to be fair, which reflect years of service, perceived quality of
research, how much the people elected to the department budget value the other things we do,
and, to some extent, market forces.
What I've described is my own department. There's huge variation across campus, including
variation in numbers of courses we're expected to teach.
Possibly worth mentioning that from what I have gathered expectations of how many courses
we teach have fallen dramatically (across campus) over the past 50 years, and the number of
course releases granted have increased dramatically: I estimate faculty in the humanities
teach 30% less than 50 years ago, and in the sciences 50% less. I imagine this is similar
across public research universities and SLACs.
So, purely anecdotal and from the perspective of a PhD and post-doc in Science at 2
different, fairly well thought of UK Universities (Russel group, etc. etc.).
PhD students are highly valuable. This is because a Masters or summer student are
necessarily short term, and it is difficult to fulfil much breakthrough research (sometimes
you need a few years of banging your head against a wall ). Post-docs are phenomenally
expensive as in the UK as the University charges a huge amount just to have them – e.g.
a rough breakdown (from some years ago, so a little out of date) is to just have a post-doc
(i.e. no equipment, materials, etc.) is in excess of £110K per year. Some 31000 is for
salary, the rest goes to the University to keep the lights on. Having more than a few
post-docs, for all but the most successful labs, became prohibitively expensive.
However, as a PhD most of my time was with my post-docs (in my first year I saw my
professor once, for 1hr, in later years maybe a few times more, so approximately 15 hr over
3.5 years). As a post-doc, the PhD students had regular meetings in a group format once per
month (so, more or less 2-3 hr per month). In both cases it, in principle, was possible to go
and meet the supervisor if you felt the need, but generally speaking your post-doc was the
point of contact on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis.
I've not been a lecturer, so this is very speculative, but my impression is that
supervising PhD students is generally considered a research activity, and thus you are not
budgeted time for it specifically.
Not sure if any of this is useful, but feel free to hit me up for more details if you
think it is useful/interesting.
I taught for 15 years at 3 Dutch universities, 3 years at a Russell Group university in
England, and am now at an Irish university. I did my PhD in the United States. Like the other
posters, I have experienced wide variation in 'compensation' for PhD supervision. One of the
reasons I left my position at a British university was the bizarre (and I thought, unfair)
model for workload allocation. PhD supervision was highly 'compensated', and actual classroom
teaching of undergrads was not. I had colleagues who met all or most of their teaching
obligations with PhD supervision and did not teach undergrads.
I don't know what the best way to compensate PhD supervision is, but there are a couple of
aspects I think need more attention. The first is wide variation in the number of PhD
students in any given department and the rules/norms governing who is (de facto) permitted to
supervise PhDs. Dutch departments have fewer PhD students than UK/Irish departments (for
complicated reasons), and only full (and now associate?) profs are permitted to supervise.
PhD supervision is important for promotion (as it is in the UK and IE), so everyone wants to
do it, but not everyone has access. I am not sure that an activity that is so important for
career progression should be generously compensated.
The second issue concerns co-authoring with a PhD student. I can see the advantages of this
(which Ingrid mentions), but the proliferation of the article-based PhD where the supervisors
co-author all articles is a cause for concern. Again, I am not convinced that a PhD
supervisor should be generously compensated for something (publications) that strongly
advances their own career. And it is not clear to me that the supervisor's contribution to
the publication (in many cases, at least) amounts to more than what would be considered
'normal' PhD supervision in the US, Canada, and many European universities. This makes it
very difficult to evaluate a newly minted PhD's CV, and it inflates the publication list of
more senior academics.
A couple of ideas: 1) cap the number of PhD students that staff can supervise, or at least
cap the number for which teaching points are earned. 2) ensure that all academic staff have
access to PhD supervision.
Private university in Turkey : the basic assumption here is that supervising PhD students and
MA theses takes zero time (although people typically budget an hour per week per student.
The workload allocation for Humanities at the University of Exeter is similar to Chris's
account of Bristol (where I worked previously), though it's more common for the hours to be
divided 70/30, 60/40 or even 50/50 between first and second supervisors, with the latter
playing a much more active role. The biggest difference, however, is that you continue to
receive an allowance when the student is writing up, and even if they're revising after a
first examination, whereas the Bristol practice was, at least, that you get a workload
allowance for the first three years and then nothing for the period which in my experience
often required the greatest amount of work
I haven't – yet – supervised a doctoral student, but I did examine a viva this
year & was surprised to find that this carried no workload allowance at all, which seems
odd given the amount of reading time involved. (Fortunately I wasn't mad busy.)
Former US academic; taught at a few R1 uni's from 80s to aughts.
To echo the doughty Puritan: " the basic assumption here is that supervising PhD students
and MA theses takes zero time."
We had a standard teaching load, and expectations for research and service. But there was
no calculation of supervisory load -- it simply was not tracked, budgeted, or accounted for.
As Harry says above, there were wide disparities from person to person, since some people
attract a lot of grad students and some do not (and some repel them, either for strategic
purposes, or because they are repellent no matter what they try).
No one cared whether you supervised 15 PhD students or zero. Not quite true -- there was
some unofficial awareness among colleagues who thought collegially about things. And you
might get some private thanks or informal kudos for doing more than your share. But there was
absolutely no official account of it. And this was true at all 3 R1s I taught at over several
decades.
That's partly because -- in a Humanities field -- the funding of grad students does not
follow the prof, but the program as a whole. So, Central Admin knows that your department is
training 25 PhDs, because Central Admin has to figure their tuition, stipends, etc. But the
money then flows to your department as a whole, with no closer investigation of who in your
department is doing the work.
The picture must be radically different in the Sciences, where there is literal accounting
of PhD students, since they are supported by the professor's grant-money.
Surely there are other ways to offload work to PhD students one would otherwise have to do
oneself besides getting research recognition for their thesis. How much of that is possible
should also vary across countries. So a comparsion of alocated supervision time only seems a
bit one sided.
As regards co-authorship, my PhD students and postdocs are often keen to include me on the
theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of acceptance. My
impression is that, in economics, the expectation is that the main job market paper will be
sole-authored or else co-authored with another junior researcher, but that others are likely
to be co-authored with the supervisor.
To complicate things further, economics (like philosophy, I believe) works on average
quality rather than total contribution. So, a publication with a student in a journal lower
ranked than my average paper is actually a negative for me.
I assume that "Harry" above is Harry B of the blog. If so, he's showing why comparisons w/
the US on this will be hard, if not impossible. In many countries, there is a weird fantasy
that academics can and should be treated like hourly employees, with "hours" assigned to
things. (This is certainly so in Australia.) Of course, it's a fantasy in that, if it in fact
takes a lot more "hours" to do the things you're assigned, you don't get over-time, comp
time, or paid more. The other down-side is that this system leads, in my experience, to more
micro-managing – being expected to "account" for your time to a much greater degree.
The US system treats academics more like salaried employees – you get paid a certain
amount, you have certain tasks to do, and you must do them (some of them at particular times,
like teaching classes) but otherwise you're not dealing with "hours" for things. The
down-side is that there can be lots of variation in how much work people actually do –
even teaching the same "number" of classes can vary a lot depending on the number of preps,
size, how often you've taught it, if you have TAs, etc., and having more advisees may not
lead to more recognition on its own. The plus side is that less time is spent on being
mico-managed and bureaucratic nonsense. The relevant point here, though, is that it's really
hard to make a comparison like the one asked for between systems where one treats academics
more like hourly employees and the other more like salaried employees.
My wife (a New Zealand academic with confirmation) is allocated a. 24 hours per year for
supervising PhD students. She trusts that the ludicrousness of this number is not lost on
those present.
I am a Professor in an Engineering discipline at a small, state engineering school in the US.
Our workload is departmentally determined. My department is fairly small, ~100 undergrads,
but does quite a bit of research. My nominal workload is 40% teaching, 40% research and 20%
service. This is based on 40 working hours per week. My effective workload is 46% teaching,
8% advising (both undergrad and grad), 23% overseeing my funded research projects and about
25% service. This is more than 100%, which is true for almost all faculty at my school.
Thus, I estimate how much time I spend doing various things and then convert that to
credit hours, as my contract is specified in terms of 18 credit hours of work per semester,
making a credit hour about 2 hours and 40 minutes
In Technological University Dublin (formerly Dublin Institute of Technology), supervision of
a full-time PhD student attracts a time allowance of 2 hours per week (48 hours per annum),
from a weekly teaching load of 16 contact hours for lecturers (18 hours for assistant
lecturers). So, for example, a lecturer with two full-time PhD students will allocate 25% (4
hours) of his / her weekly contact teaching duties to this role.
In my department (at Uppsala University, Sweden) the workload norm is 88 hours per year
supervisory time for the main supervisor and 20 for the assistant supervisor. This time
includes the face-to-face hours, as well as reading, commenting, etc. The split can be done
differently to reflect other kinds of co-supervisory arrangements. This seems very generous
compared to what others are reporting, which is sad, since an average of 1 hour meeting, 1
hour reading per week for 44 weeks in a year would work out as very minimal supervision --
and supervisors typically spend much more time on supervision related tasks than this.
A couple of years ago, I did a survey of the formal teaching duties at polisci departments at
Scandinavian universities for a report published by the Swedish Institute for Labour Market
Evaluation. The survey looked at the formal percentage of teaching duty for senior lecturers
and full professors, and the formal compensation in terms of hours allotted for various
teaching activities (e.g., lectures, supervision at different levels, examination and so on).
We found, first, that the formal teaching duty varied quite a lot across Scandinavian
universities, but that all Swedish universities had less generous conditions than Danish and
Norwegian universities, which came closer to the Humboldtian ideal of unity of teaching and
research.
Second, by multiplying teaching duty and compensation for a standard set of teaching
activities, we found that the consequences for the individual lecturer could be quite
drastic: over a hypothetical career from age 35 to retirement at 67, a lecturer at the least
generous university could have ten whole years more of teaching duty than their colleague at
the most generous university.
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at a US R1 university.
As Matt says, the description in Ingrid's post is totally unlike how things are thought of
at all in US universities. My load is 40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service, which is
standard for tenure-track faculty in my department (and I think across departments here). The
standard teaching load is 3 courses per year (2 in one semester, 1 in the other). However,
there are several exceptions to this: before tenure, faculty are assigned only 2 courses per
year. Also, if you support (with external grant funding) 3 PhD students or post-docs in the
previous year then you only teach 2 courses the next year. Additionally, pre-tenure faculty
are asked to do considerably less service.
Furthermore, there are several additional differences that are relevant. First, and most
importantly, the distinction between "research" and "PhD supervision" does not exist in
science. Effectively all of my research is joint with PhD students, although sometimes they
are not "my" students, but those of my collaborators. Second, not all students are funded by
grants; PhD students can also be funded by teaching. So it's possible to have one or two
students without bringing in funding. Third, there's a strong expectation that training PhD
students is part of the job, you wouldn't get tenure/promotion/etc if you just didn't do
it.
In my institution, you don't get any teaching load reduction, whereas you do get a tiny but
non-zero reduction for supervising a master thesis, or even an undergraduate research
project. I believe that is the norm in France in science in general, and most likely overall.
The logic behind that choice is that supervising a PhD student is supposed to bring its own
benefits: the student will do a lot of lab work for the superviser, the superviser will
cosign the research papers etc.
In math (my own field), there is no lab work to be done and the French tradition is that
papers drawn from the PhD should be signed by the student alone, so the arrangement is quite
unfavorable to us.
On the other hand
So without reductions, we teach about 835-1190 hours a year
Did I read that right? Can you clarify how many hours are counted for one hour in front of
the students? That number looks like madness to me (and I have a heavy teaching load
myself).
"Highly research-active" profs teach one fewer course per year. There is some flexibility
as to how to maintain this designation, but typically you must have at least 2 active
graduate students at any given time (and meet various other requirements).
Going through our standard courseload: if you ignore the other work related to maintaining
status, your first two Ph.D. students are worth about 90 hours/year, and the remainder are
worth nothing.
As regards co-authorship, my Ph.D. students and postdocs are often keen to include me on
the theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of
acceptance.
This is an important point. I agree that it is somewhat dishonest to use your post-grad
students to increase you number of publications. But it should be weighted against the real
difficulties of young researchers to get their papers published. And the fact that sometimes
brilliant papers from them are rejected. Nobody can abolish clan behavior in the academy. And
the "academic kitchen" is pretty dirty, and takes years to understand ;-).
Sometimes publishing oversees helps here, and young researchers should keep this in mind.
For many foreign journals, just the fact that you are a foreigner from a prestigious
university is a plus that weights on the acceptance.
The most depressing feature of the current explosion in robot-apocalypse literature is that
it rarely transcends the world of work. Almost every day, news articles appear detailing some
new round of layoffs. In the broader debate, there are apparently only two camps: those who
believe that automation will usher in a world of enriched jobs for all, and those who fear it
will make most of the workforce redundant.
This bifurcation reflects the fact that "working for a living" has been the main occupation
of humankind throughout history. The thought of a cessation of work fills people with dread,
for which the only antidote seems to be the promise of better work. Few have been willing to
take the cheerful view of Bertrand Russell's provocative 1932 essay In Praise of
Idleness . Why is it so difficult for people to accept that the end of necessary labor
could mean barely imaginable opportunities to live, in John Maynard Keynes's words, "wisely,
agreeably, and well"?
The fear of labor-saving technology dates back to the start of the Industrial Revolution,
but two factors in our own time have heightened it. The first is that the new generation of
machines seems poised to replace not only human muscles but also human brains. Owing to
advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are said to be entering an era of
thinking robots; and those robots will soon be able to think even better than we do. The worry
is that teaching machines to perform most of the tasks previously carried out by humans will
make most human labor redundant. In that scenario, what will humans do?
The other fear factor is the increasing precariousness of wage labor – though this
concern is seemingly belied by headline statistics suggesting that unemployment is at a
historic low. The problem is that an economy at "full employment" now contains a large penumbra
of what economist Guy Standing calls the "precariat":
under-employed people who work less and for lower pay than they would like. A growing number of
workers, seeming to lack any kind of job (and pay) security, are thus forced to work well below
their ability.
It is natural that one would interpret the onset of precariousness as the first stage in a
broader trend toward workforce redundancy, especially if one pays attention to alarmist
predictions of the next category of "jobs at risk." But this conclusion is premature. The
penetration of robotics into the world of work has not yet been sufficient to explain the rise
of the precariat. So far, "cost cutting" in the West has largely taken the form of offshoring
to the East, where labor is cheaper, rather than replacing humans with machines. But
"onshoring" work that was previously offshored will offer cold comfort to workers if machines
get most of the jobs.
ROBO-RAPTURE
According to the first view – let us call it "job enrichment" – technology will
eventually create more, better human jobs than it destroys, as has always been the case in the
past. Simple, mundane tasks may increasingly be automated, but human labor will then be freed
up for more "interesting" and "creative" cognitive work.
In late 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published
Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained , which claimed that as much as 50% of working hours in the
global economy could theoretically be automated; the authors suggested, however, that not more
than 30% actually would be. Further, they estimated that less than 5% of occupations could be
fully automated; but that in 60% of occupations, at least 30% of the required tasks
could be.
In line with the usual mainstream assessment, MGI believes that while there will be no net
loss of jobs in the long run, the "transition may include a period of higher unemployment and
wage adjustments." It all depends, the authors say, on the rate at which displaced workers are
re-employed: a low re-employment rate will lead to a higher medium-term unemployment rate, and
vice versa .
MGI's proposal for massive investment in education to lower the unemployment cost of the
transition is also conventional. The faster the labor reabsorption, the higher the wage growth.
Lower re-employment levels will cause wages to fall, with a greater share of the gains from
automation accruing to capital, not labor. But the authors hasten to add:
"Even if the particulars of historical experience turn out to differ from conditions today,
one lesson seems pertinent: although economies adjust to technological shocks, the transition
period is measured in decades, not years, and the rising prosperity may not be shared by
all."
This assessment is typical, and it has led many to call on governments to invest heavily in
so-called "upskilling" programs. In a
commentary for Project Syndicate , Zia Qureshi of the Brookings
Institution argues that, "with smart, forward-looking policies, we can ensure that the future
of work is a better job." In this view, automation is simply the continuation of the move
toward more, higher-quality jobs that has characterized capitalist growth since the Industrial
Revolution.
History is on the optimists' side. Mechanization has been the durable engine of productivity
and wage growth as well as reductions in working hours, albeit usually with a considerable lag.
Although the Roberts loom cost hundreds of thousands of handloom weavers their jobs in the
nineteenth century, the broader wave of new industrial technologies enabled a much larger
population to be maintained at a higher standard of living.
ROBO-REDUNDANCY
But, according to the second view – call it "job destruction" – this time is
different. The programming of machines to perform ever more complex tasks with ever-increasing
speed, accuracy, precision, and reliability will result in mass unemployment. In Rise of the
Robots , author and entrepreneur Martin Ford addresses the techno-optimists head-on.
"There is a widely held belief – based on historical evidence stretching back at least as
far as the industrial revolution – that while technology may certainly destroy jobs,
businesses, and even entire industries, it will also create entirely new occupations often in
areas that we can't yet imagine." The problem, Ford argues, is that information technology has
now reached the point where it can be considered a true utility, much like electricity.
It stands to reason that the successful new industries that will emerge in the years ahead
will have taken full advantage of this powerful new utility and the distributed machine
intelligence that accompanies it. That means they will rarely – if ever – be highly
labor-intensive. The threat is that as creative destruction unfolds, the "destruction" will
fall primarily on labor-intensive businesses in traditional areas like retail and food
preparation, whereas the "creation" will generate new industries that simply don't employ many
people.
On this view, the economy is heading for a tipping point where job creation will begin to
fall consistently short of what is required to employ the workforce fully. We will soon reach
the stage where the machine-driven destruction of existing human jobs far outpaces the creation
of new human jobs, resulting in inexorably rising mass "technological unemployment."
THE
UPSKILLING MIRAGE
Optimists' response to such concerns is that the workforce simply needs to be trained or
upskilled in order to "race with the machines." Typical of this outlook is the following
headline on a
commentary published by the World Economic Forum: "How new technologies can create huge
numbers of meaningful jobs." According to the author, concerns about "the looming devastation
that self-driving technology will have on the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US" are
"misdirected." Augmented-reality technology, we are told, can create loads of new jobs by
enabling people to work from home. All that will be needed is training of the kind offered by
"Upskill, an augmented reality company in the manufacturing and field services sectors," which
"uses wearable technologies to provide step-by-step instructions to industrial workers."
The author, himself the co-founder of an augmented-reality company, goes on to argue that,
"With the pace of technological progress only accelerating and with increasing specialization
becoming the norm in every industry, reducing the time necessary to retrain workers is pivotal
to maintaining the competitiveness of industrialized economies." There is no mention of the
wages that will be offered to these "upskilled" workers in their "meaningful" new jobs. We are
simply told that they will be relocated to "lower cost areas more in need of job creation."
Only at the very end of the commentary does the author acknowledge that, in fact, "Technology
is a force that has the potential to eliminate entire industries through robotics and
automation, and for that we should be concerned."
The retraining argument should give us pause. In portraying upskilling as the solution to
the labor displacement caused by new technologies, optimists rarely admit that if predictions
about "thinking robots" turn out to be anywhere near true, workers would need to be trained in
technical skills to an extent that is unprecedented in human history.
Moreover, the time it takes to upgrade the skills of the workforce will inevitably exceed
the time it takes to automate the economy. This will be true even if claims about an imminent
deluge of automation are greatly exaggerated. In the interval, there will be under- and
unemployment. In fact, this has already been happening. Although automation is not yet bearing
down on workers to the extent that has been predicted, it has nonetheless pushed more of them
into less-skilled jobs; and its mere possibility may be exerting downward pressure on wages.
There are already signs of the new class structure envisioned by the pessimists: "lovely jobs
at the top, lousy jobs at the bottom."
A more fundamental question is what we mean by upskilling, and what its consequences might
be. Often, heavy emphasis is placed on the importance of better technological education at all
levels of society, as if all people will need to succeed in the future is to be taught how to
write and understand computer code.
As the technology writer James Bridle has shown , this line of argument has a
number of limitations. While encouraging people to take up computer programming might be a good
start, such training offers only a functional understanding of technological systems. It does
not equip people to ask higher-level questions along the lines of, "Where did these systems
come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them
today?" Bridle also points out that arguments for technological education and upskilling are
usually offered in "nakedly pro-market terms," following a simple equation: "the information
economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future."
THE MISSING
DIMENSION
More to the point, the upskilling discourse totally ignores the possibility that automation
could also allow people simply to work less. The reason for this neglect is twofold: it is
commonly assumed that human wants are insatiable, and that we will thus work ad
infinitum to satisfy them; and it is simply taken for granted that work is the primary
source of meaning in human lives. 1
Historically, neither of these claims holds true. The consumption race is a rather recent
phenomenon, dating no earlier than the late nineteenth century. And the possibility that we
might one day liberate ourselves from the "curse of work" has fascinated thinkers from
Aristotle to Russell. Many visions of Utopia betray a longing for leisure and liberation from
toil. Even today, surveys show that people in most developed countries
would prefer to work less, even in the workaholic United States, and might even accept less pay
if it meant logging fewer hours on the clock.
The deeply economistic nature of the current debate excludes the possibility of a
life beyond work . Yet if we want to meet the challenges of the future, it is not enough to
know how to code, analyze data, and invent algorithms. We need to start thinking seriously and
at a systemic level about the operational logic of consumer capitalism and the possibility of
de-growth.
In this process, we must abandon the false dichotomy between "jobs" and "idleness."
Full employment need not mean full-time employment, and leisure time need not
be spent idly. (Education can play an important role in ensuring that it is not.) Above all,
wealth and income will need to be distributed in such a way that machine-enabled productivity
gains do not accrue disproportionately to a small minority of owners, managers, and
technicians.
Imbecilization is a normal historical process where intellectual declines follows the
economic decline of a given empire. There's growing evidence the West is going through the
same process.
A with any composite, complex historical process, imbecilization doesn't happen in a
uniform and linear way. Economics was the first science that descended into pseudo-science in
the capitalist world (after Marx dismantled Classic Economics). Philosophy followed. Erudite
art degenerated after the fall of Modernism somewhere in the 1950s. Human sciences in general
became fragmented and little more than a constelation of esoterism and pseudo-sciences - a
condition they still enjoy today (e.g. the dismembering of History into Sociology, Behavioral
Economics and others).
Meanwhile, the so-called STEM or "Hard Sciences" continued to prosper for some decades,
until they also hit a ceiling in the 1990s. The fall of the profitability of the capitalist
world led it to resort to "financialization" to keep the system going, which resulted in the
most brilliant capitalist mathematicians to be hosed to Wall Street instead to the likes of
NASA. Those MIT mathematicians and rocket scientists created the algorithms Wall Street still
uses today, but they did not stop the 2008 meltdown.
Nowadays, those brilliant STEM minds are nothing more than fraudsters who keep their
careers going by creating meaningless experiments (because they need the funding) only to
publish articles and keep their production quotas or self-censuring bootlickers for Wall
Street and Big Pharma. When they get to work for a big corporation, they are mere architects
of planned obsolescence or patent renewing. There's a new book I strongly recommend all of
you to read:
The Decade in Retirement: Wealthy
Americans Moved Further Ahead https://nyti.ms/34pZAbD
NYT - Mark Miller - Dec. 14
... In 2010, the economy was just beginning to recover from the worst recession and
financial crisis in recent memory. The unemployment rate was high, the stock market was
coming back and millions of workers were worried that their retirement plans were ruined.
Since then, a robust economic rebound has put some Americans back on solid footing for
retirement, but progress has been uneven. Despite the gains made in employment, wage growth
has only recently begun to recover -- and remained flat for older workers. Retirement wealth
has accumulated almost exclusively among higher-income households, while middle- and
lower-income households have only held steady or lost ground, Federal Reserve data shows.
Trends in Social Security and Medicare also are troubling. The value of Social Security
benefits -- measured by the share of pre-retirement income they replace -- is falling, and
the cost of Medicare is rising.
For members of the baby boomer and Gen X generations, the odds of success are mixed. The
Employee Benefit Research Institute has developed a model that simulates the percentage of
households likely to have adequate resources to meet retirement expenses, considering
household savings, home equity and income from Social Security and pensions.
The model shows that the highest-income households have seen their odds of a successful
retirement improve sharply during this decade, and have very high odds of success.
Middle-income households, meanwhile, have seen some gains, but still have only 50-50 odds of
success. And the lowest-income households have seen their retirement prospects diminish
sharply -- among these boomers approaching retirement, their odds of success have fallen
during the decade from 26 percent to 11 percent.
"Retirement prospects improved significantly for higher-income workers who were fortunate
enough to work for employers that sponsor retirement plans," says Jack VanDerhei, the
organization's research director.
Let's consider how the retirement landscape has changed during the decade now ending.
Retirement savings: Up for the affluent
The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 -- and it has more than quadrupled since then.
Most retirement savers did not abandon equity markets during the crash, says Jean Young,
senior research associate with the Vanguard Center for Investor Research. "Some did, but the
vast majority stayed the course."
But the recovery has seen retirement wealth accumulate almost exclusively among affluent
households that had access to workplace retirement plans and the means to make contributions.
For example, Vanguard reports that the average balance for plan participants with incomes
over $150,000 in 2018 was $193,130, compared with just $22,679 for workers with income of
$30,000 to $50,000. ...
So disturbing, and this problem is only going to increase in the US as people realize they
can no longer afford to rent anywhere, and there are millions of Boomers who rent, with no
available affordable housing to move into, and no livable wage jobs (despite education) for
those who would gladly continue working – due to an as yet to be headlined age
discrimination which started during the dot.com boom Clinton/Gore ushered in, and exploded
during Obama's reign. Sickeningly, in Silicon Valley, 35 year olds feel over the hill.
None of the candidates want to even address this rental housing issue (for all ages) with
Federal Tax Policy even? Renters are the only ones who invest major sums of money into
housing, with no equity whatsoever?
Yes, it is the canary growing fainter and struggling for life in the dark gloom of the
coal mine. The most basic human requirement for survival is shelter, after food and water.
Clothing is also in that category. The poor and homeless ( absolutely including the working
poor) at first , when attention started to be given to the " national crisis and (in some
people's minds) and national disgrace", was just, you know, the usual suspects. From hobos (
whom many saw as romanticized free spirits or stubborn old guys) to including the abandoned
mentally ill, drug addicts, criminals, people with "something to hide", teens on the run from
neglect or abuse to? The numbers of people who are essentially w/o shelter is not going to
remain out of sight, out of mind. Now, we know that mothers, fathers, grandparents, children
and grandchildren are homeless. And, if they are not, many are living in what , once upon a
time, poor or desolate housing. Many are living in ,what was once called a boarding house, in
a room with their kids. They supposedly have access to "common areas". This is not people who
often even have more than a casual aquaintanceship with their "landlords". This is not the
"Golden Girls" living the high life in sunny Florida with the owner, who is an adorable
rascal. No doubt, some examples of older, single women housing together is a good fit for
some.
Most older people on limited incomes don't live in a golden fantasy world. Besides young
people not being able to afford outrageous rents, now include the older people. Couple this
with the "reports" that there are people hungry in this country. Age has become no restrictor
on this tragic fact. This can not stand. Trickle down the ,as was mentioned , breads and
circuses in all of their guises. Cheap, junk fast food will become not so cheap when in dire
poverty. Housing is just cold, hearted cash for the owners. Who gets to watch the circuses
and gladiators ? Got cable tv( even if you personally choose not to not the point)? Afford
the cost of any pro sports tickets ? Attend any cultural events that include paying for
tickets? Yep, am not going to include the all American past time of watching a game at the
local pub. Many people can not afford the luxury of the food and drinks OK, it's time to stop
now with my pov. I am fortunate to not be in the above circumstances. Too many are,
though.
God knows what's being planned behind closed doors for this increasing tragedy, the
reality is too clear for Congress not to be aware of it. Meanwhile, I'm fully sure that
amoral predators who are investing in those areas they're betting the homeless will be forced
to dwell and die in, or choose to be euthanized at.
Meanwhile, Congress does absolutely nothing about putting a stop to obscenely biased,
corrupted and deadly in its blatant discrimination AI, which is increasingly decimating
millions of jobs, and virtually tagging people with social scores they'll never get
out from under, no matter how false. This, ever since Obama glibly announced there would be
many jobs lost, and some pain, due to technologyThe Technocracy . A
Bipartisan, Horrid Congress accepted it as a necessary reality.
The only thing missing was a police officer going in after with a drawn gun. When millions
of people were being kicked out of their homes about a decade a go, I saw a photo that won an
award at the time. It showed a cop, with pistol drawn, going into a house that had the family
kicked out from it. Surrounding him was all the left overs from a family's life and it was
very sad.
It is heart rending. Even watching renters who leave before being evicted is heart
rending, they're forced to throw away many belongings, like perfectly good mattresses and
basic necessities. Lived at an apartment complex turned into ratty ass condos for mostly
foreign property 'flippers' who continued renting them out, then 'flipping' them. The
despair, fear, and loss during a huge job downturn was horrid to witness, as many had lived
there over ten years. I was lucky to be on my feet somewhat at the time, no longer.
Every fricking sign, particularly in Silicon Valley, that advertises Apartment
Homes ™ should be torn down and destroyed. The average US renters have
always been treated as second class leechers, I've witnessed it my entire adult life, now
they're being treated even worse.
Thanks Clinton/Gore, Obomber/Biden,
Nanny Pelosi , et al; and we thought that was only the mark of Republicans busy at
work.
Thinking on this subject even more, it occurs to me why the powers that be are so invested
in pitting each generation against the other. An empowered US renters' 'lobby' could be
enormous. It would cross all age – along with race, gender, religion, and geographic
– spectrums. Renters, along with the homeless are increasing in vast numbers of all
ages. The last thing the powers that be would want, is for those vast millions to stick
together against them, and age is the easiest barrier for the powers that be to keep renters
separated by.
Level of talent is another important factor. Especially difficult people are able to succeed in fields which are
absolutely closed for others. Think about the level of competition in middle ages when a single academic position needed to be
waited until previous holder retires. Still it did not prevented rising people like Euler to the top.
You should take the results from Clever.com published below with a grain of slat.
The unjustifiably high cost of college tuition in the US has dragged a whole generation into
debt slavery. The average cost of a 4-year degree in the US is 3x higher than it was in 1990.
Even tuition at in-state schools is climbing more quickly than incomes.
As more people are forced to go into deep levels of debt to afford an education, more
would-be students are being forced to take a hard look and reevaluate the ROI on a college
degree.
And as college tuition continues to outpace wage growth, for a growing number of people, the
answer to 'is college worth it?' is going to be no.
A reporter at
Clever.com did some digging, and tabulated the ROI on different types of degrees: the
bachelor's, master's and doctorate.
Generally speaking, people with at least a bachelor's degree typically earn more money over
their lifetime than those who never attended college, and it's also easier to get a job with a
degree.
But while Americans with a bachelor's degree might be on to something, those who earn a
Master's and PHD-level degrees can't say the same.
While nearly half the population has a bachelor's degree, only 13% of Americans have a
master's or Phd-level degree.
And according to Clever's analysis, many higher-level degrees may not be worth the time and
money that students spend.
In fact, the longer someone spends in school, the more the value of their degrees
diminishes.
Of course, ROI changes depending on the subject that an individual studies. Clever found
that the best bachelor's degrees, unsurprisingly, tend to be in the STEM area: operations
research, petroleum engineering, biological and physical sciences, biopsychology and
gerontology.
Here, the data are showing us something that we find to be very interesting. Namely, that
those who spend more money on a low-ROI bachelor's degree often find their careers to be more
'meaningful' than your average engineer. Does this mean there's an inverse relationship between
spiritual fulfillment and monetary compensation when it comes to ones' career path? Possibly.
But would like to suggest another possible explanation.
The children of America's wealthy often choose low-yield fields like journalism and English,
since they don't face as much pressure to maximize earnings (their parents very often cover the
cost of their education and living expenses) they can enjoy finding 'meaning' in low-paying
careers like being a social media manager or writing for Gawker Media - careers that also don't
require the hard work and dedication required of, say, a mechanical engineer at Boeing.
Economy Adds 266,000 Jobs in November, Unemployment Edges Down to 3.5 Percent
By Dean Baker
The share of women in payroll employment is likely to exceed 50 percent in December.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 266,000 jobs in November.
While this figure is inflated by the return of roughly 50,000 striking GM autoworkers, upward
revisions to the prior two months' data brought the three-month average to a solid 205,000.
The unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent, returning to a 50-year low.
The job growth was widely spread across industries. Manufacturing added 54,000 jobs,
somewhat more than the number of returning strikers. It appears that the sector may again be
on a modest growth path, with the number of jobs up 13,000 from its level three months ago
and 76,000 from its year-ago level. Food manufacturing is providing the bulk of these gains,
adding 19,300 jobs in the last three months and 25,900 over the last year.
Health care added 45,200 jobs in November after adding just 11,900 in October. Job growth
for the two months together falls slightly below the 34,500 average for the last year.
Restaurants added 25,300 jobs, roughly its average for the last year. The high-paying
professional and technical services sector added 30,600 jobs, after three months of weak
growth.
Construction employment remains weak, with the sector adding just 1,000 jobs in November.
Job growth has averaged just 5,600 a month since June. Support activities for mining, which
has been losing jobs since February, lost another 5,700 jobs in November. Employment in that
sector is now down 23,700 (6.6 percent) over the last year. Retail added 2,000 jobs for the
month, but employment is still down 31,400 (0.2 percent) over the last year.
In spite of the strong job growth and low unemployment rate, there continues to be no
evidence of accelerating wage growth. The average hourly wage increased 3.1 percent over the
last year. The annual rate of growth over the last three months (September, October, and
November), compared to the prior three months (June, July, August), was just 3 percent.
Women's share of payroll employment edged closer to 50 percent in November, with the
figure now standing at 49.992 percent, up from 49.977 percent in October. This should mean
that the share will cross 50 percent in December.
The data in the household survey was generally positive. The overall
employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) remained at a recovery high of 61.0 percent for the
third straight month. The EPOP for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54) also remained at its
recovery high of 80.3 percent. The EPOP for prime-age men edged up 0.2 percent to 86.7
percent, a high reached in March, while the EPOP for women slipped 0.1 percentage point to
74.1 percent, which is still a full percentage point above its year-ago level.
The average duration of unemployment spells fell in November, as did the share of the
long-term unemployed. There was a modest increase of 0.1 weeks in the median duration.
Perhaps the most disturbing item in this report was the dip in the share of unemployment
due to voluntary quits from 14.5 percent to 13.3 percent. This is extraordinarily low, given
the 3.5 percent unemployment rate. On the other hand, it is consistent with what we're seeing
with wage growth, which remains modest, and with no evidence of acceleration.
Another discouraging item in the household data is the decline in the share of the
workforce that chooses to work part-time. This fell by 15,000 in November. For the year
average to date, this figure is up by less than 0.5 percent, meaning that it is dropping as a
share of total employment. The share of voluntary part-time employment had increased sharply
after the Affordable Care Act took effect, the recent decline is likely an indication of the
increasing difficulty of getting health care coverage outside of employment.
[Graph]
This should be seen as a mostly positive report. The pace of job growth clearly has slowed
some from its 2018 rate, but with the economy presumably approaching full employment, this
was inevitable. The major downside is that workers seem to remain insecure about their
employment prospects, as evidenced by the low quit rates and the relatively modest pace of
wage growth.
The truth is that good, middle class jobs are very difficult to get. Almost impossible.
You are very lucky being a retiree with Vanguard funds chest ;-)
Recent graduates are in a very bad position, with only graduates from Ivy league colleges
resume not being instantly tossed into waist basket.
McJobs, Amazon warehouse jobs, Home Depot jobs, low level construction jobs (in $15-$20
per hour range), etc are available for graduates. But that's it. Looks like the USA is
looking now like a big amazon warehouse.
People over 50 are actually doomed, if they lost the job, to much lower standard of
living. Even if they are professionals.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial survey of
15-year-old students that assesses the extent to which they have acquired the key knowledge
and skills essential for full participation in society. The assessment focuses on proficiency
in reading, mathematics, science and an innovative domain (in 2018, the innovative domain was
global competence), and on students' well-being.
Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (China)
What 15-year-old students in B-S-J-Z (China) know and can do
Figure 1. Snapshot of performance in reading, mathematics and science
[Graph]
• Students in B-S-J-Z (China) scored higher than the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development average in reading, mathematics and science.
• Compared to the OECD average, a larger proportion of students in B-S-J-Z (China)
performed at the highest levels of proficiency (Level 5 or 6) in at least one subject; at the
same time a larger proportion of students achieved a minimum level of proficiency (Level 2 or
higher) in at least one subject.
What students know and can do in reading
• In B-S-J-Z (China), 95% of students attained at least Level 2 proficiency in
reading, significantly more than on average across OECD countries (OECD average: 77%). At a
minimum, these students can identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find
information based on explicit, though sometimes complex criteria, and can reflect on the
purpose and form of texts when explicitly directed to do so. Over 85% of students in Beijing,
Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (China), Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong (China), Ireland,
Macao (China), Poland and Singapore performed at this level or above.
• Some 22% of students in B-S-J-Z (China) were top performers in reading, meaning
that they attained Level 5 or 6 in the PISA reading test (OECD average: 9%). At these levels,
students can comprehend lengthy texts, deal with concepts that are abstract or
counterintuitive, and establish distinctions between fact and opinion, based on implicit cues
pertaining to the content or source of the information. In 20 education systems, including
those of 15 OECD countries, more than 10% of 15-year-old students were top performers.
What students know and can do in mathematics
• Some 98% of students in B-S-J-Z (China) attained Level 2 or higher in mathematics
(OECD average: 76%). At a minimum, these students can interpret and recognise, without direct
instructions, how a (simple) situation can be represented mathematically (e.g. comparing the
total distance across two alternative routes, or converting prices into a different
currency). The share of 15-year-old students who attained minimum levels of proficiency in
mathematics (Level 2 or higher) varied widely – from 98% in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu
and Zhejiang (China) to 2% in Zambia, which participated in the PISA for Development
assessment in 2017. On average across OECD countries, 76% of students attained at least Level
2 proficiency in mathematics.
• In B-S-J-Z (China), 44% of students scored at Level 5 or higher in mathematics
(OECD average: 11%). Six Asian countries and economies had the largest shares of students who
did so: Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (China) (44%), Singapore (37%), Hong Kong
(China) (29%), Macao (China) (28%), Chinese Taipei (23%) and Korea (21%). These students can
model complex situations mathematically, and can select, compare and evaluate appropriate
problem-solving strategies for dealing with them.
What students know and can do in science
• Some 98% of students in B-S-J-Z (China) attained Level 2 or higher in science
significantly more than on average across OECD countries (OECD average: 78%). At a minimum,
these students can recognise the correct explanation for familiar scientific phenomena and
can use such knowledge to identify, in simple cases, whether a conclusion is valid based on
the data provided.
• In B-S-J-Z (China), 32% of students were top performers in science, meaning that
they were proficient at Level 5 or 6 (OECD average: 7%). These students can creatively and
autonomously apply their knowledge of and about science to a wide variety of situations,
including unfamiliar ones.
01 December 2019Academic Conformism is the road to "1984."
The world is filled with conformism and groupthink. Most people do not wish to think for
themselves. Thinking for oneself is dangerous, requires effort and often leads to rejection by
the herd of one's peers.
The profession of arms, the intelligence business, the civil service bureaucracy, the
wondrous world of groups like the League of Women Voters, Rotary Club as well as the empire of
the thinktanks are all rotten with this sickness, an illness which leads inevitably to
stereotyped and unrealistic thinking, thinking that does not reflect reality.
The worst locus of this mentally crippling phenomenon is the world of the academics. I have
served on a number of boards that awarded Ph.D and post doctoral grants. I was on the Fulbright
Fellowship federal board. I was on the HF Guggenheim program and executive boards for a long
time. Those are two examples of my exposure to the individual and collective academic
minds.
As a class of people I find them unimpressive. The credentialing exercise in acquiring a
doctorate is basically a nepotistic process of sucking up to elders and a crutch for ego
support as well as an entrance ticket for various hierarchies, among them the world of the
academy. The process of degree acquisition itself requires sponsorship by esteemed academics
who recommend candidates who do not stray very far from the corpus of known work in whichever
narrow field is involved. The endorsements from RESPECTED academics are often decisive in the
award of grants.
This process is continued throughout a career in academic research. PEER REVIEW is the
sine qua non for acceptance of a "paper," invitation to career making conferences, or to
the Holy of Holies, TENURE.
This life experience forms and creates CONFORMISTS, people who instinctively boot-lick their
fellows in a search for the "Good Doggy" moments that make up their lives. These people are for
sale. Their price may not be money, but they are still for sale. They want to be accepted as
members of their group. Dissent leads to expulsion or effective rejection from the group.
This mentality renders doubtful any assertion that a large group of academics supports any
stated conclusion. As a species academics will say or do anything to be included in their
caste.
This makes them inherently dangerous. They will support any party or parties, of any
political inclination if that group has the money, and the potential or actual power to
maintain the academics as a tribe. pl
That is the nature of tribes and humans are very tribal. At least most of them.
Fortunately, there are outliers. I was recently reading "Political Tribes" which was written
by a couple who are both law professors that examines this.
Take global warming (aka the rebranded climate change). Good luck getting grants to do any
skeptical research. This highly complex subject which posits human impact is a perfect
example of tribal bias.
My success in the private sector comes from consistent questioning what I wanted to be
true to prevent suboptimal design decisions.
I also instinctively dislike groups that have some idealized view of "What is to be
done?"
As Groucho said: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member"
The 'isms' had it, be it Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Elitism all demand
conformity and adherence to group think. If one does not co-tow to whichever 'ism' is at
play, those outside their group think are persecuted, ostracized, jailed, and executed all
because they defy their conformity demands, and defy allegiance to them.
One world, one religion, one government, one Borg. all lead down the same road to --
Orwell's 1984.
David Halberstam: The Best and the Brightest. (Reminder how the heck we got into Vietnam,
when the best and the brightest were serving as presidential advisors.)
Also good Halberstam re-read: The Powers that Be - when the conservative media controlled
the levers of power; not the uber-liberal one we experience today.
I'm not sure I agree with you about the Medieval Christians having no imagination. Chaucer's
pilgrims were all interesting characters. Perhaps they weren't all brilliant or virtuous, but
they were, as Chaucer created them, all INDIVIDUALS.
I try not to make judgments about medieval Muslims. I simply have had not chance to learn
much about them; so I try not to lump them all together in my mind.
After 1200, Muslims ran out of steam, encouraged & advised by their so-called Thinkers to
conform the Law and thus guarantee their After Life. What is more important: Knowledge or
Faith? Athens or zJerusalem? If your innovation causes you to go astray, discard it.
Due to the negative opinion that some Fathers of the Church expressed in relation to
ancient culture, all-medieval Christianity did not consider the teaching of liberal arts a
priority. Initially, in the monastic and episcopal schools the essential rudiments were
taught to understand the Bible and the chant, leaving aside the "subtleties" of grammar and
oratory. It will not be until the educational design of Alcuino when the liberal arts
became the central part of the curriculum.
I guess I was thinking of the common people, who did count themselves as Christian, and not
the people in the "schools," though some of Chaucer's characters were in the church--e.g., a
prioress, a friar, and so on. But these characters certainly knew how they were "supposed" to
live their lives but clearly weren't living their lives as the church would have them live.
In that regard, perhaps there was a group of Christians who were IN the church. What I am
saying is that almost all people in England at that time were--or at least considered
themselves as Christians. However, they were indeed not living their lives as a member of the
"Borg."
Perhaps, since I am a Protestant Christian, I am also not part of the group of people who
are Christian and who are "accepted" in this Borg-like group.
I often feel dismissed and diminished when my Christian beliefs, which I have held since
childhood, seem not to be worthy of consideration in the discussion.
How long ago was your last academic experience? My understanding is that in the liberal arts
it has basically become a long struggle session. Basically if you are a straight white male
you keep your head down and think in secret, like Winston Smith.
The answer to a lot of this is simple: end all federal funding to any public institution
any part of which has speech codes more restrictive than settled law with regard to the First
Amendment.
Trump could have done this his first day in office, and he actually tweeted about it once.
But no.
Requirements, IMO are 1) a certain amount of intelligence but not all that much 2) some luck
(your supervisor shouldn't die, someone else shouldn't beat you to it, your examiners
shouldn't take a scunner to you or your supervisor) 3, and probably most important,
sitzfleisch: the ability to nail your bum to the chair and plow through it. And, also
important, to know when to stop.
(an absurdly long process in N American it seems, years and years and years. I got mine in
the UK -- write the thesis and that's it)
Liberal Arts education has been made available to the masses: they do not understand it,
appreciate, need it, or can even use it. A very small percentage of mankind is suited for
that kind of education. It is almost criminal negligence to have expanded it so much.
Remember, Weinstein was fine with the anti-white, anti-western, anti-Christian agenda at
Evergreen until it inconvenienced him. Then he learned to his shock that pulling his J-card
would not give him a pass. At which point the pathetic attempt at gatekeeping called the
"intellectual dark web" was declared.
Taleb and Weinstein have had an interesting back-and-forth on twitter lately over the
latter's statement:
"We are going to have to figure out how to govern the Earth. That requires us to agree on
values, ground rules and assumptions. I don't care about private faith. I care that all
populations maintain compatibility with a common belief system that prioritizes no one's
sacred book."
The test for whether Weinstein is lying or not is simple: will he support a global ban on
infant genital mutilation?
Nassim Taleb, of Black Swan fame, talks about this phenomenon in Skin in the Game. He also
writes convincingly, if briefly, about the radical Sunni threat and Americans confusing the
Shia as the global threat. Worthwhile.
The best description of a PhD that I can think of came from a tailor. He had learned his
trade in Germany and, when he was ready to become a master, the local guild gave him a task
-- to make a morning suit from start to finish, every bit done by him. Then they tore it
apart checking everything and decided that he had the ability to be ranked as a master
tailor. That's all a PhD thesis is: proof that you can do the whole research and writing
thing.
However, I believe that of late it has more and more become an exercise in showing that you
are a loyal acolyte of whatever school your supervisor belongs to. I conclude this from
younger PhDs I met at work.
Mine dates, BTW, from 1976 and I am amused to see (everything's on the Net these days) that
there has been a (modest) uptick in demand. But an exercise that, when I started work for the
govt, probably got me more starting money and gave a useful title in a military-dominated
world where everyone had a title. "Doctor" being impressive enough but usefully vague.
All irrelevant these days and no relation, BTW, to Russia (Just as well since most
Russia/Soviet teachers in the English-speaking world seem to hate Russia and all that it has
ever done.)
Dreher's article on the 1619 project of the NY TIMES where there is an effort to re frame
the history of the US in the context of slavery. He quotes World Socialist Web Site's view on
the 'movement'. From the WSWS editorial
"Despite the pretense of establishing the United States' "true" foundation, the 1619
Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a
historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an
electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal "identities" -- i.e., gender,
sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race."
Dreher picks out a part of an interview that relates to the new academic conformity
"The reflection of identity politics in the curriculum is the primacy of cultural history.
There was a time, a long, long time ago, when a "diverse history faculty" meant that you had
an economic historian, a political historian, a social historian, a historian of the American
Revolution, of the Civil War, and so on. And now a diverse history faculty means a women's
historian, a gay historian, a Chinese-American historian, a Latino historian. So it's a
completely different kind of diversity.
On a global scale the benefit of this has been tremendous. We have more -- and we should
have more -- African history, Latin American history, Asian history, than we ever have.
Within US history it has produced narrow faculties in which everybody is basically writing
the same thing. And so you don't bump into the economic historian at the mailbox and say "Is
it true that all the wealth came from slavery," and have them say, "that's ridiculous," and
explain why it can't be true."
I am sad to agree with the points made in this post.
I find it a little frightening to think about what might happen to our country if academia
continues on this course.
However, as a person who dropped out of a doctoral program because it just wasn't in me to
interpret all assigned readings as a Marxist or a totally wacky feminist who feels men and
women might not be of the same species, I just decided not to get a doctorate and dropped out
of the program. I've been happier for it.
Later, I watched as friends, family members, and their various friends and family members
who realized the absolute worthlessness of public education nowadays in NEA controlled
schools turned to home schooling, charter schools, and various other alternate ways of
providing an actual education for their children.
I've met many of the children of these parents and am often quite pleased with the fact
that for the most part they are individuals who can speak and think freely and are happy to
be finding their way in the world doing what they want to do.
I hope more and more parents like these young people's parents break away from the public
NEA option. There are many very good choices for educating our children to become real
individual people who contribute in their individual ways to a vial economy and society.
I am counting on God, Who is Good and Loving to make this current state of affairs
temporary in the long lifetime of this world. I give it to God, as they say, and I do not
mourn my not ever getting that doctorate--a dream I had as a young girl. Not having it
doesn't mean I can't still read and study and think on my own.
Much of what I write could well be considered 'non-conformist', but I've never encountered
any problems in academia because of it. In fact, being a professor gives one the security
which makes one confident enough to be non-conformist. Sweeping generalizations are
unhelpful.
During my years as a student and my years as an adjunct instructor in several undergrad and
community college programs, I also had no problems. I was teaching required undergrad classes
such as research writing and essay writing.
It was easy in those classes to set my own standards. No full professors want to teach
those classes because it requires much time and effort to plan lessons and to grade papers.
For argumentation essays and argumentation research papers it was my right to insist that the
student research all views of the research question they chose, though many students tried
hard not to have to report the opinions they did not like and to have to explain exactly why
they felt that side was invalid.
I was lucky in the fact that when I taught those classes, "political correctness" had not
yet developed a firm foothold in the universities.
I left teaching those classes at about the time "political correctness" was beginning.
The only time I was reported to the Dean was by a student who wanted to research the
question of whether Elvis was dead or not. I told her that if her source list included the
National Enquirer or and other grocery store "news" magazine, I would not accept her paper.
My department chairman didn't laugh at her complaint, but he did back me up and smiled when
he told me he had said she had to follow my rule.
And sadly, the journalism majors were also hard to deal with. They didn't want to research
at all. They felt all they had to do was call people they felt were important sources to
provide quotes for their essays or papers. They didn't feel it was necessary to do any
in-depth research on the issue they had chosen, usually an issue that was important at the
time in the state or local community. It made them angry that I felt they should do some
background research in order to balance quoted opinions.
No. Sweeping generalizations are quite helpful because they express opinions about
behavior in general. As for you, you may have tenure but if you start saying things like,
"Bigfoot is real," you will find yourself largely ostracized. Actually academics prefer
extremely narrow foci for studies because the possibility of conflict among them is thereby
reduced,
As for you, you may have tenure but if you start saying things like, "Bigfoot is real,"
you will find yourself largely ostracized.
You feel the Bigfoot and related para-normal phenomena should matter in Public and
International Affair studies? Since comparable phenomena are reported all over the world? In
the context of what larger topic/theme/course could/should it be considered?
Or are you suggesting a Prof in international relations couldn't even mention privately he
feels Bigfoot is an interesting phenomenon? Suggesting it would get him into troubles no
matter how solid his research in his own field?
I was careful to include a wide diversity of groups in my critique of humanity.
Yes, you were. But you also spent a considerable amount of digital ink on academics more
generally and academia.
All I can say is that I have never in 20 years in academia felt the slightest pressure from
other academics to bend my research or writing to fit their will. Pressure to conform has,
however, come from outside the university - my one experience writing a report for a think
tank did not end well. On the whole, in my own field of study, I find academics much more
reasonable, nuanced, and willing to discuss and consider alternatives, than politicians,
journalists, and think tank types. Of course, that is just one person's experience, and I
wouldn't generalize from it, any more than you should from yours. But there it is.
Once Elora thought of studying Social Sciences in University at Distance...but, after seeing
the cadre of professors, being one a member of CFR who, moreover, got lately involveded in
the Integrity Initiative scandal as a one of the cluster in charge of spreading maledicence
through their columns in MSM on certain respectable colonel they deemed too much pro-Russian
to be head of national intelligence...she certainly desisted...and decided that she would
better learn on her own...
After all, it was "highly likely" he was going to catearme de plano, sin ni siquiera
leer lo que escribo ....only because Elora is so....
It looks like Soylent Green is a not too far off possibility. Washington State has thrown out
the dignity of the human death and subsequent corpse with their Washington State's bath
water. They'll be composting dead human beings like they would compost rotting food or
rotting garbage. With burial or cremation, there is some dignity given to the life of the
individual who life has passed, whereas with composting, they'll be throwing the human corpse
with its decaying fluids and all into basically a sewage pit to rot. With them composting
human dead like a rotting cabbage, basic human dignity will have been cast into the trash
heap. The Elites are now coming out in the open and calling for human cannibalism, and there
could be legislation enacted like what Washington State did with human composting,
legislation to make human cannibalism a reality. And a step further is turning the human
corpse into a palatable food item, which is what Soylent Green was in the movie. The humanity
of that movie thought they were eating vegetable crackers, unbeknownst to them they were
eating their next of kin, or their neighbor down the street. In the movie, garbage trucks
gathered up the dead corpses like they were cord-wood, and took them to a processing station,
much like what the human composting will have -- processing stations.
Remember that Orwell's 1984 was poo poo'd as never happening just a few short years ago.
And the 1973 movie Soylent Green was poo poo'd as science fiction when it was released.
World's First Human Composting Facility is Coming to Seattle in 2021
Academics make easy targets for this crew, but, as noted above, they they are far from unique
in their tribal instincts. The thing that appalled me most after my Vietnam experience (apart
from the fact that William Calley's entire chain of command did not go to prison) was the
discovery of how many people had figured out that our cause was all but unwinnable and how
little influence that discovery had. When the preparatory simulation exercises showed us
consistently losing, the pentagon stopped the war gaming. Etc. all the way through the war.
In fact even the catastrophe they suffered in Tet '68 did not shift the balance in our favor.
John Maynard Keynes made the academics' ultimate response to the notion that people in
more "practical" pursuits are more realistic: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be
quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct
economist."
And no, Keynes was not that much an advocate for academics either: " Education: the
inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."
Because they thought the accords meant that we agreed to let them win the war. That
interpretation doesn't mesh with Nixon's ferocious rhetoric about the Christmas bombing, but
that was the truth. And they were pretty shrewd about that sort of thing.
I can't prove it and they would never say it, but I thought at the time that the Christmas
bombing sent a message that we needed an end to it more than they did. So they reached out
and sure enough we were willing to settle on terms similar to what they had offered in
1968.
That is not to say that they were anything other than horrible brutal people. But they
were not stupid horrible brutal people, and they had the commitment to see it through. And we
did not. It was their country.
I doubt it. The ones I have spoken with about it saw it pretty much the same way at the
time. They spent a couple years hoping against hope that they were wrong - that the US did
have the commitment to see it through. Their hopes were disappointed.
Would that be the ones who fled communism after the NV army invaded the the Republic of
Vietnam or the fine people of the Socialist Republic who brought freedom from the barrels of
all those guns?
"Because they thought the accords meant that we agreed to let them win the war."
No fredw. That's a naive (or simplistic, should I say) thinking. They had no illlusion
like that, they just practiced age old Sun Tzu's teaching. In other words, if you know you
can win with diplomacy why spend the blood and treasure to achieve the same thing?
Demonstrate to your enemy that you are really willing to fight to the end no matter it takes,
and then negotiate the peace to your favor.
This conformism is not only limited to the humanities, it has crept insidiously into the
physical and natural sciences. Pharmaceutical companies can now depend on an endless supply
of conformist Scientists who will advocate for the drugging up of children in order to treat
imaginary first world diseases.
Yesterday, we had a guest Minister at my Unitarian church (I can feel the eye rolls from the
commentariat already....). She has an economics degree from Princeton, a business degree from
MIT, and an M.Div from Meadville Lombard Theological School. She comes to ministry after a
career in high tech and slow food. She is of European and Native American ancestry, and
practices the Hawaiian culture with her Big Island ohana. (Isn't that cultural appropriation?
/snark)
She opened with two sweeping proclamations:
"I am here today to help you all break the habit of referring to Native People in the past
tense..."
"We are standing on stolen land..."
She then followed those with an incoherent sermon, which I hesitate to even try to
summarize.
One of her points was that Governor Bradford, who wrote the famous sermon speaking the
shining city on the hill, believed in the righteousness of his cause, including treating the
Natives as lesser beings. She did note that the Unitarian Church is a descendant of those
original Congregational churches, but she missed the part where we still believe in the
righteousness of our cause, and the right to treat the lesser orders as we wish.
Back to her two opening remarks:
I fully know that there are still descendants of the original settlers of our area still
here.
The particular land where the First Unitarian Church of Providence stands is part of the land
conveyed by deed from the Narragansett tribe to Roger Williams, and the deed is in the
Providence City Hall Archives, signed by the Sachems Cononicus and Miantonomi.
I can hardly think of a better example of the product of group think, where the particulars
of your audience don't matter.
Pat is probably going to toss me out of here for this comment. Conformity and "Group Think"
is a human characteristic that is probably hard wired into our brains. It is not just
academics who are subject to this trait but every group, poliitcal, religious or otherwise.
That is how we got into Iraq. I got a kick out of an article in the Hill this morning about
Trump's trillion dollar annual defcits. The comment section was almost universal in " it was
Obama's fault". There was "group think' at work since anyone who disagreed was roundly booed
and the fact that not a single Republican congresscritter has raised their voice on our
annual deficits when if it was a Democrat President the hue and cry would drown out normal
reporting. Don't get me wrong, the Democrats are not any better but group think is very
widespread.
Contemptibly disrespectful to the brave men who carried out Linebacker II. It would seem
that you were a communist sympathizer. No sympathy for all the Vietnamese who did not want to
be ruled by the communists?
The men who carried out Linebacker II were American soldiers (and sailors and airmen) who as
usual gave it their all. I don't disrespect even Richard Nixon or the military brass who
ordered it. They faced seriously tough problems with no good solutions. I am just reporting
the signalling I perceived with whatever insight I had picked up from a year of interacting
with Vietnamese.
And whatever my words might "seem" to imply, I have no sympathy at all for Communism or
the Dang Lao Dong Viet Nam. But facing them day after day takes you beyond the abstraction of
"enemy". You get some insight into how they interpret the world. I don't claim any real
expertise. I didn't do that long enough to get a really deep understanding. And the people I
dealt with were low level. I am just reporting how I thought they might have reacted to
events as they unfolded. The Vietnamese I knew(both sides) were very logical calculating
people. They wouldn't underestimate the effects of what we did, but they would always be
looking for the motivation behind it.
I was heartbroken for the Vietnamese who put their lives on the line in the expectation
that we would somehow pull it out. We owed them. We copped out on that debt. I don't believe
we could have saved their war, but we should have done a lot better for them when it was
lost.
A couple of years after the accords. US commitment didn't last much longer than that. That
was the point. The accords signaled to many Vietnamese that we were played out. Yes, we had
been there for a long time, but we had come to the point of accepting that we could not have
the outcome we had fought for.
you seem to have missed the fact that between the armistice agreement and the onslaught in
1975 there were two + years. In that period of time they watched and waited until the US
Congress cut off all aid to SVN and then they overran the country.
No sir. I did not missed that fact. I merely disagreed with fredw's opinion about the
reason why the North Vietnamese came to the negotiating table. Vietnamese people are
pragmatic. Being a small country, they always do that regardless of of the situation.
The American people betrayed the Vietnamese, not the military. And truth be told most of
the SVN people were lukewarm participants in their own defense.
I don't see that you are disagreeing with my account of commitment levels. That said, there
were both deeply committed south Vietnamese and many more who put their lives on the line
betting that we could keep them from the bloody hell promised by a Communist victory. We took
that bargain on that basis. Morally, I find it similar to the situation that you have
described for the Kurds in Syria. It could only end ugly.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation that interrogators received was the realization that it
wasn't primarily us the enemy were worried about. Most of their anxieties were directed
toward the lukewarm ARVNs who despite their many many many failings were perceived as the
more dangerous enemy. We were a known (if lethal) factor. We did not represent an alternative
to them. We rarely had the knowledge or understanding of local conditions to be really
effective. The ARVNs did, and suffered four times our casualty rates trying to make their
alternative happen.
This is not a judgement of military or social effectiveness, just an observation of what
their levels of concern seemed to be.
You are mighty certain for someone who was not there. Yes, there were Vietnamese who
fought well and hard but not enough of them. You don't seem to understand that we were there
to help them. We did not run their government, leftist beliefs about that not withstanding.
We did not command their army.
"Not there"? Where was I in 1970? Sure looked like Viet Nam. Sure was hot.
There sure were a lot people speaking tieng Viet Nam. Mine had to improve really fast. I
think you may have lost the thread.
I am sure they were afraid of being turned over to the ARVN who were likely to torture and
kill them if they were in the mood. The NVA and VC main force troops wre just as liely to do
the same. You sound like John Vann who once rebuked me for not loving the Vietnamese. He was
right.
All right granted. The contents of my prior posts are much more present in my mind than in
yours. In any case, I don't see that we actually disagree that much. I think that we just
have different reactions to similar sets of acts. Not my purpose to annoy you for no reason.
Good luck with your roofing. I would probably fall the roof, even when I was young.
We have Fred, Freds, fredw. How many more Fred? " The contents of my prior posts are much
more present in my mind than in yours" Duh! Vann asked why I did not love the Vietnamese. My
answer wa something like "Why should I? I am here to fight a war on their behalf. That does
not require me to love them."
Professors are generally people who prefer the catfights in the academy to actual work in
industry, finance, engineering, etc. does that mean that I generally think they are drones?
Yes, I do.
I received this comment from DMR, presumab;y a member of the professoriat.
"Mr Robinson's remarks are spot on. In my experience most academics worth their salt are
absorbed in their research area however microscopic the focus, and delight above all in
lively exchange of ideas with colleagues and students when afforded the opportunity to do so
in the classroom, at conferences, in published research. Conformism, some of it timid, and
competition, often cut-throat, there certainly are. Who would deny this? But as in any
profession or walk of life they are par for the course. Forty years as a university teacher
encourage me to say that these deformations professionelles are far from definitive, still
less all-encompassing. Most unusually for you, Col. Lang, and pace your vaunted experience on
boards of award-granting bodies/degree committees, your judgements in this instance smack of
personal animus and bespeak an unwarrantedly generalized contempt. I say this with respect
and no wish to annoy." It is a characteristic of the academy that its members wish to be
thought independent thinkers. They are united in that thought. Professor, i will seek to
conform to your "professional" mores. My most personal animus is reserved for social
"scientists.
"... "Employment in the United States has increased steadily over the last seven years, one of the longest periods of economic growth in American history. There are about 10 million more working Americans today than when President Obama took office. ..."
"... "David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimated in a famous paper that increased trade with China did eliminate roughly one million factory jobs in the United States between 2000 and 2007. However, an important implication of his findings is that such job losses largely ended almost a decade ago. ..."
"... It is also worth noting that even though our trade deficit has declined from its 2006 peak (the non-oil deficit has recently been rising again), workers are constantly being displaced by imports. The Bureau of Labor Statistic reports there have been an average of 110,000 layoffs or discharges a month in manufacturing thus far this year. If just a quarter of these are trade-related, it would imply that more than 300,000 workers a year are losing their jobs due to trade. ..."
"... The second point is the wage effect, which can go beyond the direct impact of job loss. The oil market can give us a useful way of thinking about this issue. Suppose that Saudi Arabia or some other major producer ramps up its oil production by 1 million barrels of oil a day. This will put downward pressure on world prices, which will have the effect of lowering prices in the United States as well. This could mean, for example, that instead of getting $50 for a barrel of oil, producers in North Dakota will only get $40 a barrel. This will mean less money for workers and companies in the oil industry. In the case of workers, it will mean fewer jobs and lower pay. ..."
"... This can happen even if there is very little direct impact of trade. The increased supply of Saudi oil may result in some modest reduction in U.S. exports of oil, but the impact on price will be much larger. The analogous story with trade in manufactured goods is that the potential to import low cost goods from Mexico, China, or other countries can have the effect of lowering wages in the United States, even if the goods are not actually imported. ..."
"... Finally, the balance of trade will have an impact on the overall level of employment in the economy when the economy is below its full employment level of output. Until the Great Recession, most economists did not think that trade could affect the overall level of employment, but only the composition. This meant that trade could cause us to lose manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, but these job losses would be offset by gains in Silicon Valley and other tech centers. This could still mean bad news for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs, but the net effect for the country as a whole would still be positive. ..."
"... The Great Recession changed this view, as many economists came to believe that the United States is facing a period of secular stagnation: a sustained period in which lack of demand in the economy constrains growth and employment. In this context, the trade deficit is a major cause of the lack of demand since it is spending that is creating demand in other countries rather than the United States. If we could reduce the annual trade deficit by $100 billion then as a first approximation it will have the same impact on the economy as a stimulus of $100 billion. ..."
"... There is no generally accepted explanation as to why so many prime age workers would suddenly decide they didn't feel like working, but one often invoked candidate is the loss of manufacturing jobs. The argument in this story is that the manufacturing sector provided relatively good paying jobs for people without college degrees. With so many of these jobs now gone, these workers can't find jobs. If this argument is true, then it means that trade has cost the country a large number of jobs even if the economy is back at full employment. ..."
Given his history of promoting racism, xenophobia, sexism and his recently exposed boasts about sexual assaults, not many people
want to be associated with Donald Trump. However that doesn't mean everything that comes out of his mouth is wrong.
In the debate on Sunday Donald Trump made a comment to the effect that because of the North American Free Trade Agreement and
other trade deals, "we lost our jobs." The New York Times was quick to say * this was wrong.
"We didn't.
"Employment in the United States has increased steadily over the last seven years, one of the longest periods of economic
growth in American history. There are about 10 million more working Americans today than when President Obama took office.
"David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimated in a famous paper that increased trade with China did eliminate roughly
one million factory jobs in the United States between 2000 and 2007. However, an important implication of his findings is that
such job losses largely ended almost a decade ago.
"And there's no evidence the North American Free Trade Agreement caused similar job losses.
"The Congressional Research Service concluded in 2015 that the 'net overall effect of Nafta on the U.S. economy appears to
have been relatively modest.' "
There are a few things to sort out here. First, the basic point in the first paragraph is absolutely true, although it's not
clear that it's relevant to the trade debate. The United States economy typically grows and adds jobs, around 1.6 million a year
for the last quarter century. So any claim that trade has kept the U.S. from creating jobs is absurd on its face. The actual issue
is the rate of job creation and the quality of the jobs.
Here there are three issues to consider.
1) The direct job loss – the jobs that were displaced due to imports substituting for domestically produced goods and services;
2) The wage effects – the downward pressure on the wages of workers that retain their jobs that can result from job loss and
also the threat of job loss;
3) The impact of a trade deficit on the level of demand in the economy.
Taking these in turn we now have some pretty solid evidence on some of the job loss attributable to trade. David Autor's work
** found that imports from China cost the economy more than 2 million jobs in the years from 2000-2007.
"Estimates of the net impact of aggregate demand and reallocation effects imply that import growth from China between 1999
and 2011 led to an employment reduction of 2.4 million workers" (page 29).
These are workers who are directly displaced by import competition. In addition, as the article goes on to note, there were
more workers who likely lost their jobs to the multiplier effect in the local economies most directly affected by imports.
The impact of trade with China was more dramatic than trade with Mexico and other countries because of the huge growth in imports
over a short period of time. However, even if the impact from trade with other countries was smaller, it still would have a substantial
effect on the communities affected.
It is also worth noting that even though our trade deficit has declined from its 2006 peak (the non-oil deficit has recently
been rising again), workers are constantly being displaced by imports. The Bureau of Labor Statistic reports there have been an
average of 110,000 layoffs or discharges a month in manufacturing thus far this year. If just a quarter of these are trade-related,
it would imply that more than 300,000 workers a year are losing their jobs due to trade.
Of course people lose jobs for other reasons also, like increased productivity. So the fact there is job loss associated with
trade doesn't make it bad, but it is not wrong to see this as a serious problem.
The second point is the wage effect, which can go beyond the direct impact of job loss. The oil market can give us a useful
way of thinking about this issue. Suppose that Saudi Arabia or some other major producer ramps up its oil production by 1 million
barrels of oil a day. This will put downward pressure on world prices, which will have the effect of lowering prices in the United
States as well. This could mean, for example, that instead of getting $50 for a barrel of oil, producers in North Dakota will
only get $40 a barrel. This will mean less money for workers and companies in the oil industry. In the case of workers, it will
mean fewer jobs and lower pay.
This can happen even if there is very little direct impact of trade. The increased supply of Saudi oil may result in some modest
reduction in U.S. exports of oil, but the impact on price will be much larger. The analogous story with trade in manufactured
goods is that the potential to import low cost goods from Mexico, China, or other countries can have the effect of lowering wages
in the United States, even if the goods are not actually imported.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor of industrial relations at Cornell, documented one way in which the potential to import can
have the effect of lowering wages. She found *** that employers regularly used the threat of moving operations to Mexico as a
way to thwart unionization drives. While most workers are not typically involved in unionization drives, it is easy to imagine
this dynamic playing out in other contexts where employers use the real or imagined threat from import competition as a reason
for holding down wages. The implication is the impact of trade on wages is likely to be even larger than the direct effect of
the goods actually brought into the country.
Finally, the balance of trade will have an impact on the overall level of employment in the economy when the economy is below
its full employment level of output. Until the Great Recession, most economists did not think that trade could affect the overall
level of employment, but only the composition. This meant that trade could cause us to lose manufacturing jobs in the Midwest,
but these job losses would be offset by gains in Silicon Valley and other tech centers. This could still mean bad news for the
manufacturing workers who lost their jobs, but the net effect for the country as a whole would still be positive.
The Great Recession changed this view, as many economists came to believe that the United States is facing a period of secular
stagnation: a sustained period in which lack of demand in the economy constrains growth and employment. In this context, the trade
deficit is a major cause of the lack of demand since it is spending that is creating demand in other countries rather than the
United States. If we could reduce the annual trade deficit by $100 billion then as a first approximation it will have the same
impact on the economy as a stimulus of $100 billion.
From this perspective, the trade deficit is a major source of job loss. Our current trade deficit of $500 billion a year (@2.8
percent of GDP) is a major drag on demand and employment. For this reason, a politician would be absolutely right to cite trade
as a big factor in the weakness of the labor market.
It is worth noting that many economists (including many at the Federal Reserve Board) now believe that the economy is close
to its full employment level of output, in which case trade is not now a net cause of job loss even if it had been earlier in
the recovery. There are two points to be made on this view.
First, there are many prominent economists, such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, who argue that the economy is still well
below its full employment level of output. So this is at least a debatable position.
Second, if we accept that the economy is near full employment it implies that close to 2 million prime age workers (ages 25-54)
have permanently left the labor market compared to 2007 levels of labor force participation. (The gap is close to 4 million if
we use 2000 as our comparison year.)
There is no generally accepted explanation as to why so many prime age workers would suddenly decide they didn't feel like
working, but one often invoked candidate is the loss of manufacturing jobs. The argument in this story is that the manufacturing
sector provided relatively good paying jobs for people without college degrees. With so many of these jobs now gone, these workers
can't find jobs. If this argument is true, then it means that trade has cost the country a large number of jobs even if the economy
is back at full employment.
In short, there are good reasons for a politician to complain about trade as a major source of our economic problems. There
is much research and economic theory that supports this position.
In a bid to end the massive welfare state, the Trump administration is expected to announce
new measures Wednesday that would end food stamp benefits for nearly 750,000 low-income folks.
The new rules will make it difficult for "states to gain waivers from a requirement that
beneficiaries work or participate in a vocational training program," according to
Bloomberg sources.
Republicans have long attempted to abolish the welfare state, claiming that the
redistribution of wealth for poor people keeps them in a state of perpetual poverty. They also
claim the welfare state is a system of command and control and has been used by Democrats for
decades as a political weapon against conservatives, hence why most inner cities vote
Democrat.
House Republicans tried to cut parts of the federal food assistance program last year, but
it was quickly rejected in the Senate.
The new requirements by the Trump administration would only target "able-bodied" recipients
who aren't caring for children under six.
Sources said the measure would be one of three enacted by the Trump administration to wind
down the massive federal food assistance program.
The measures are expected to boot nearly 3.7 million recipients from the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Though it comes at a time when employment is in a
downturn, manufacturing has stumbled into a recession
, and the US economy could be entering a mild recession in the year ahead. As to why President
Trump wants hundreds of thousands of low-income folks off SNAP ahead of an election year while
the economy is rapidly decelerating could be an administrative error that may lead to social
instabilities in specific regions that will be affected the hardest. Then again, no turmoil
could come out of it, and it's hailed as a success during the election year.
The Department of Agriculture estimates that the new measures could save the agency $1.1
billion in year one, and $7.9 billion by year five.
Nearly 36.4 million Americans in the "greatest economy ever" are on food stamps. At least
half of all Americans have low-wage jobs, barely enough to cover living expenses, nevertheless,
service their
credit cards with record-high interest rates . The economy as a whole is undergoing
profound structural changes with automation and artificial intelligence. Tens of millions of
jobs will be lost by 2030. It's likely the collision of these forces means the welfare state is
going nowhere and will only grow in size when the next recession strikes.
Cutting food stamps for low-income folks is the right move into creating a more leaner
government, but there are severe social implications that could be triggered if the new
measures are passed.
And while President Trump wants to slash the welfare state for poor people, his supply-side
policies and bailouts of corporate America have been record-setting in some respects.
Actions by the administration clearly show that corporate welfare for Wall Street elites is
more important than welfare for low-income folks. Perfect Storm: Trump Admin To Cut 750,000
From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession
this is one of the most shameful acts for any president, especially a billionaire. If he
wants to save a billion/year, cut it from military. Or increase staff at SNAP to check for
fraud, but this is really shameful. I think it would've been better to raise tariff on China
and use that money to increase SNAP not decrease it
What's the need in cutting foodstamps? You can take every able-bodied recipient and have
them work a reasonable number of hours per week in a fair exchange. Plenty of work to be had
and you could do it WPA style where those of certain skills could apply them.
And if you want to cut welfare, START WITH CORPORATE WELFARE
This is a positive development in terms of the nuclear family. Women can't just abscond
with the kids and her husband's alimony if she knows she will have to actually get a job to
pay for her own food. I'm sick of paying taxes to support whore women and their bastard
children.
"The Department of Agriculture estimates that the new measures could save the agency $1.1
billion in year one, and $7.9 billion by year five."
Today's Repo operation by the Fed is $70.1 Billion. The $1.1 Billion in annual savings due
to this cut is about 1.5% of what the Fed pumped into the Repo market just today. I'm all for
cutting out the fraud. If you can work, then you should work. Don't work? Don't eat! But our
economy is a Service Sector for the most part now, and the wages suck for a big part in the
Service Sector. Wages overall have been nearly flat for about 30 years. How about we cut the
welfare **** to the banks, Wall Street? That would save trillions not just billions. Typical
DC. Fix problems while ******* over the little people, and continuing corporate welfare all
the while. This **** so needs to burn up!
great... outsource manufacturing, sign new trade deals to off shore more jobs, ramp up the
stock market for the rich, waste trillions on destabilizing other nations, give israel all
they want, print money to infinity, ask for zero interest rate.. and a billion per year to
feed poor people is too much.. Trump is in touch with the little guy
Trump will lose 2020... give the 750,000 guns and ammo and some food and water... and a
map to DC... Soros can provide the buses...
In a bid to end the massive welfare state, the Trump administration is expected to
announce new measures Wednesday that would end food stamp benefits for nearly 750,000
low-income folks
and yet Trump is crying for negative interest rates so the 0.1% can continue getting the
welfare they deserve ?
The new rules will make it difficult for "states to gain waivers from a requirement that
beneficiaries work or participate in a vocational training program," according to
Bloomberg sources.
And... those are actually the OLD rules, which are still on the books, but which Obama
waived by EO. I'm glad 750,00 are being cut from the roles.
Trump Admin To Cut 750,000 From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession
OK, so I have to ask: What recession? Well, the coming one, obviously! So let's logic this
out. You wouldn't cut food stamps IN a recession (political suicide), so what's your
alternative? You're either in a recession or you're on your way to the next one which will
happen eventually, right? So, when would you be able to cut food stamps? I guess never by
that logic.
Despite spending 40 to 60 hours a week picking up riders in his 2015 Subaru Forester, Mr.
Ellenbogen is barely surviving financially. He had to give up his apartment and move into his
mother's condo in Verona, N.J. He relies on Medicaid for health care.
"It's something I'm accepting because I'm in need of money," he said of his Lyft gig. "I'm
capable of better things, but this is what's available to me."
Economists debate how to define this kind of employment, often categorized as
"nontraditional jobs" or "alternative work arrangements," and how to calculate the proportion
of the older work force engaged in it.
Popularly seen as the province of the young, it now provides work for a growing number of
people in their 50s, 60s and beyond.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics includes independent contractors (who may be
self-employed but well compensated) and estimates that 11.4 percent of those aged 50 to 62 have
nontraditional jobs. The Government Accountability Office, using an even broader definition
including part-timers, says the figure is 31.2 percent.
Among workers over 62, economists at The New School's Retirement Equity Lab have found that
9 percent were in "on-call, temp, contract or gig jobs" in 2015; the researchers
believe the percentage has grown since then .
Their study defines nontraditional jobs as those that provide no health insurance or
retirement benefits. "They're probably low-paid," said Alicia Munnell, director of the center.
"Some have erratic schedules."
... ... ...
The majority of those in nontraditional jobs at ages 50 to 62 rely on them for most of their
employment, and their retirement income at 62 is 26 percent lower than that of employees
holding traditional jobs. (Nontraditional jobholders have somewhat higher rates of depression,
as well.)
... ... ...
Nontraditional jobs include food service and retail, as well as gig jobs; among the fastest
growing categories are janitorial work, and personal care and health aide positions. "They're
not easy on older bodies," Dr. Ghilarducci pointed out. "They require a lot of physical
stamina."
... ... ...
Mr. Ellenbogen, for instance, has a master's degree in social psychology from the
University of Vermont. After getting laid off from sales positions and finding a return to
business coaching unprofitable, he became a commission-only sales rep for Home Depot, with no
base salary or benefits.
The company let him go, he said, when retina surgery left him unable to drive for two
months. After he recovered, the only work he could find was with Lyft, where about a quarter of
drivers are over 50, the company reported last year.
Mr. Ellenbogen has searched for jobs on LinkedIn, on Indeed, in local newspapers. The New
Start Career Network at Rutgers University has provided free weekly sessions with a coach.
Nothing has materialized, so Mr. Ellenbogen keeps driving, trying to delay claiming Social
Security to maximize his benefits.
"... As part of the scam, parents would "donate" money to a fake charity run by Singer. The funds would then be laundered to either pay off an SAT or ACT administrator to take the exams or bribe an employee in college athletics to name the rich, non-athlete children as recruits. Virtually every scenario relied on multiple layers of corruption, all of which eventually allowed wealthy students to masquerade as "deserving" of the merit-based college slots they paid up to half a million dollars to "qualify" for. ..."
"... When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. ..."
"... The conclusion of the study? We live in an oligarchy: ..."
The college bribery scandal reveals an ugly truth: our society is unjust, dominated by a small elite. Actress Lori
Loughlin, who has been implicated in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal. Credit:
Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock The most destructive
and pervasive myth in America today is that we live in a meritocracy. Our elites, so the myth goes, earned their places at Yale and
Harvard, on Wall Street and in Washington -- not because of the accident of their birth, but because they are better, stronger, and
smarter than the rest of us. Therefore, they think, they've "earned" their places in the halls of power and "deserve" to lead.
The fervor with which so many believe this enables elites to lord over those worse off than they are. On we slumber, believing
that we live in a country that values justice, instead of working towards a more equitable and authentically meritocratic society.
Take the Operation Varsity Blues scandal. On Tuesday, the FBI and federal prosecutors announced that 50 people had been charged in,
as Sports Illustrated put it , "a nationwide college admissions scheme that used bribes to help potential students cheat
on college entrance exams or to pose as potential athletic recruits to get admitted to high-profile universities." Thirty-three parents,
nine collegiate coaches, two SAT/ACT exam administrators, an exam proctor,
and a college athletics administrator were among those charged. The man who allegedly ran the scheme, William Rick Singer, pled
guilty to four charges of racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and obstruction of
justice.
As part of the scam, parents would "donate" money to a fake charity run by Singer. The funds would then be laundered to either
pay off an SAT or ACT administrator to take the exams or bribe an employee in college athletics to name the rich, non-athlete children
as recruits. Virtually every scenario relied on multiple layers of corruption, all of which eventually allowed wealthy students to
masquerade as "deserving" of the merit-based college slots they paid up to half a million dollars to "qualify" for.
Cheating. Bribery. Lying. The wealthy and privileged buying what was reserved for the deserving. It's all there on vivid display.
Modern American society has
become increasingly and
banally corrupt , both in the ways in which "justice" is meted out and in who is allowed to access elite education and the power
that comes with it.
The average American citizen has very little power, as a 2014
study by Princeton University found. The research reviewed 1,779 public policy questions asked between 1981 and 2002 and the
responses by different income levels and interest groups; then calculated the likelihood that certain policies would be adopted.
A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favor) is adopted only about
18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favor) is adopted about 45% of the time.
That's in stark contrast with policies favored by average Americans:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover,
because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor
policy change, they generally do not get it.
The conclusion of the study? We live in an oligarchy:
our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government
adopts. [T]he preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact
upon public policy.
The belief in the myth of merit hurts the smart kid with great grades who aced his SATs but was still rejected from Yale and Harvard.
It hurts talented athletes who have worked their tails off for so many years. It hurts parents who have committed hundreds of school
nights and weekends to their children. It hurts HR departments that believe degrees from Ivy League schools mean that graduates are
qualified. It hurts all of us who buy into the great myth that America is a democratic meritocracy and that we can achieve whatever
we want if only we're willing to expend blood, toil, sweat, and tears.
At least in an outright class system like the British Houses of Lords and Commons, there is not this farcical playacting of equal
opportunity. The elites, with their privilege and titles, know the reason they are there and feel some sense of obligation to those
less well off than they are. At the very least, they do not engage in the ritual pretense of "deserving" what they "earned" -- quite
unlike those who descend on Washington, D.C. believing that they really are better than their compatriots in flyover country.
All societies engage in myth-making about themselves. But the myth of meritocracy may be our most pervasive and destructive belief
-- and it mirrors the myth that anything like "justice" is served up in our courts.
Despite all this evidence, most Americans embrace a version of the Calvinist beliefs promulgated by their forebears, believing
that the elect deserve their status. We remain confident that when our children apply to college or are
questioned by police , they will receive just and fair outcomes. If our neighbors' and friends' kids do not, then we assure ourselves
that it is they who are at fault, not the system.
The result has been a gaping chasm through our society. Lives are destroyed because, rather than working for real merit-based
systems and justice, we worship at the altar of false promises offered by our institutions. Instead we should be rolling up our sleeves
and seeing Operation Varsity Blues for what it is: a call to action.
Barbara Boland is the former weekend editor of the Washington Examiner . Her work has been featured on Fox News, the
Drudge Report, HotAir.com, RealClearDefense, RealClearPolitics, and elsewhere. She's the author of Patton Uncovered , a book
about General Patton in World War II. Follow her on Twitter@BBatDC.
If conservatives are going to dance the graves of Aunt Beckie, the backlash is going to be big. Sure this is a 'scandal' but it
seems these parents weren't rich enough to bribe their kids in college the right way, like Trumps and Kushner, and probably slightly
duped into going along with this scheme. (It appears the government got the ring leader to call all defendants to get evidence
they participated in a crime.)
Just wait until the mug shot of Aunt Beckie is on the internet and Olivia Jade does 60 minutes doing teary eyed interview of
how much she loves her mother. And how many parents are stress that their kids will struggle in the global competitive economy.
I fully recall the days of getting government computing contracts. Once a certain threshold was reached, you discovered you had to
hire a "lobbyist," and give him a significant amount of money to dole out to various gatekeepers in the bureaucracy for your contracts
to be approved. That was the end of our government contracts, and the end was hastened by the reaction to trying to complain about
it.
Thank you, Barbara Boland, for "The Myth of American Meritocracy" and for linking ("Related Articles" box) to the 2012 "The Myth
of American Meritocracy" by Ron Unz, then publisher of the American Conservative.
The 26,000-word Ron Unz research masterpiece was the opening salvo in the nation-wide discussion that ultimately led to the federal
court case nearing resolution in Boston.
"The Myth of American Meritocracy -- How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?" by Ron Unz, The American Conservative, Nov 28, 2012:
Barbara Boland "While black people make up only 13 percent of the population, they make up 42 percent of death row and 35 percent
of those who are executed."
Ms. Boland: According to the US Department of Justice, African Americans [13 per cent of the population] accounted for 52.5% of
all homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008.
I agree with prodigalson. This is the type of article that TAC should uphold as a 'gold standard'. One reason I read, and comment
on, TAC is that it offers thought provoking, and sometimes contrarian, articles (although the constant harping on transgender BS
gets annoying).
America has always been somewhat corrupt. But, to borrow a phrase, wealth corrupts, and uber wealth corrupts absolutely.
As Warren Buffet says "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning".
I have said it before, and I will say it again. During the next severe financial recession, if the rich are protected and coddled
and everybody else is left to fend for themselves the ARs will come out of the closets when the sheriff comes to take the house or
the pickup truck. My sense is that average Americans have had enough.
Imagine if the digital transfer of money was abolished. Imagine if everybody had to have their money in a local bank instead of
on an account in one of the major banks. Imagine if Americans saw, day after day, armored vehicles showing up at local banks to offload
sacks of currency that went to only a few individual accounts.
Instead, the elites get their financial statements showing an ever increasing pile of cash at their disposal. They see it, but
nobody else does. But, if everybody physically saw the river of wealth flowing to the elites, I believe things would change. Fast.
Right now this transfer of wealth is all digital, hidden from the view of 99.99% of Americans. And the elites, the banking industry,
and the wealth management cabal prefer it that way.
I am amazed by the media coverage of this scandal. Was anyone actually under the impression that college admissions were on the
level before these Hollywood bozos were caught red handed?
No, the meritocracy is not dead; it's not even dying. It is, in fact, alive and well and the absolute best alternative to any
other method used to separate wheat from chaff, cream from milk, diamonds from rust.
What else is there that is even half as good?
Are merit-based systems perfect? Heck, no. They've never been perfect; they will never be perfect. They are administered by people
and people are flawed. Not just flawed in the way Singer, and Huffman are flawed (and those individuals are not simply flawed, they're
corrupt) but flawed in the everyday kind of sense. Yes, we all have tendencies, biases, preferences that will -- inevitably -- leak
into our selection process, no matter how objectively strict the process may be structured, no matter how rigorously fair we try
to be.
So the fact that -- as with most things -- we can find a trace of corruption here that fact is meaningless. We can find evidence
of human corruption, venality, greed, sloth, lust, envy (all of the 7 Deadly Sins) pretty much everywhere. But if we look at the
20M students enrolled in college, the vast majority are successfully & fairly admitted through merit-based filtering systems (which
are more or less rigorous) which have been in place forever.
Ms. Boland tells us (with a straight face, no less) that "The U.S. is now a country where corruption is rampant and money buys
both access and outcomes." But what does that even mean?
Certainly money can buy access and certainly money can buy outcomes. But that's what money does. She might as well assert that
money can buy goods and services, and lions and tigers and bears -- oh my! Of course it can. Equally networks can 'buy' access and
outcomes (if my best friend is working as the manager for Adele, I'm betting he could probably arrange my meeting Adele). Equally
success & fame can buy access and outcomes. I'm betting Adele can probably arrange a meeting with Gwen Stefani .and both can arrange
a meeting with Tom Brady. So what? Does the fact that money can be used to purchase goods & services mean money or the use of money
is corrupt or morally degenerate? No, of course not. In truth, we all leverage what we have (whatever that may be) to get what we
want. That's how life works. But the fact that we all do that does not mean we are all corrupt.
But yes, corruption does exist and can usually be found, in trace amounts -- as I said -- pretty much everywhere.
So is it rampant? Can I buy my way into the NBA or the NFL? If I go to Clark Hunt and give him $20M and tell him I want to play
QB for the Chiefs, will he let me? Can I buy my way into the CEO's position at General Electric, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sprint,
Verizon, General Motors, Toyota or any of the Fortune 500? Heck, can I even buy my way into the Governor's mansion? To become the
Mayor of Chicago? Or the Police Commissioner? No -- these things are not possible. But what I can buy is my presence on the media
stage.
What happens after cannot be purchased.
So no, by any measure, corruption is not rampant. And though many things are, in fact, for sale -- not everything is. And no matter
how much money I give anyone, I'm never gonna QB the Chiefs or play for the Lakers.
She tells us, "we are dominated by a rich and powerful elite." No, we're not. Most of us live our lives making the choices we
want to make, given the means that each of us has, without any interference from any so-called "elite". The "elite" didn't tell me
where to go to school, or where to get a job, or how to do my job, or when to have kids, or what loaf of bread to buy, or what brand
of beer tastes best, or where to go on the family vacation. No one did. The elite obviously did not tell us who to vote for in the
last presidential election.
Of course one of the problems with the "it's the fault of the elite" is the weight given institutions by people like Ms.Boland.
"Oh, lordy, the Elite used their dominating power to get a brainless twit of a daughter into USC". Now if my kid were cheated out
of a position at USC because the Twit got in, I'd be upset but beyond that who really cares if a Twit gets an undergraduate degree
from USC or Yale .or Harvard .or wherever. Some of the brightest people I've known earned their degrees at Easter PolyTechnic U (some
don't even have college degrees -- oh, the horror!); some of the stupidest have Ivy League credentials. So what?
Only if you care about the exclusivity of such a relatively meaningless thing as a degree from USC, does gaming the exclusivity
matter.
She ends with the exhortation: "The result has been a gaping chasm through our society. Lives are destroyed because, rather than
working for real merit-based systems and justice, we worship at the altar of false promises offered by our institutions. Instead
we should be rolling up our sleeves and seeing Operation Varsity Blues for what it is: a call to action."
To do what, exactly?
Toss the baby and the bathwater? Substitute lottery selection for merit? Flip a coin? What?
Again the very best method is and always will be merit-based. That is the incentive which drives all of us: the hope that if we work
hard enough and do well enough, that we will succeed. Anything else is just a lie.
Yes, we can root out this piece of corruption. Yes, we can build better and more rigorously fair systems. But in the end, merit
is the only game in town. Far better to roll-up our sleeves and simply buckle down, Winsocki. There isn't anything better.
"While black people make up only 13 percent of the population, they make up 42 percent of death row and 35 percent of those who are
executed. There are big racial disparities in charging, sentencing, plea bargaining, and executions, Department of Justice reviews
have concluded, and black and brown people are disproportionately found to be innocent after landing on death row. The poor and disadvantaged
thereby become grist for a system that cares nothing for them."
So to what degree are these "disparities" "disproportionate" in light of actual criminal behavior? To be "proportionate," would
we expect criminal behavior to correlate exactly to racial, ethnic, sex, and age demographics of society as a whole?
Put another way, if you are a victim of a violent crime in America, what are the odds your assailant is, say, an elderly, Asian
female? Approximately zero.
Conversely, what are the odds your assailant is a young, black male? Rather high, and if you yourself are a young, black male,
approaching 100 percent.
Mostly thumbs up to this article. But why you gotta pick on Calvinism at the end? Anyway, your understanding of Calvinism is entirely
upside down. Calvinists believe they are elect by divine grace, and salvation is something given by God through Jesus, which means
you can't earn it and you most assuredly don't deserve it. Calvinism also teaches that all people are made in the image of God and
worthy of respect, regardless of class or status. There's no "version" of Calvinism that teaches what you claim.
"... And while I am not as focused on the poverty ve wealth dynamic. this century has revealed something very disappointing that you address. That the elites have done a very poor job of leading the ship of state, while still remaining in leadership belies such a bold hypocrisy in accountability, it's jarring. The article could actually be titled: "The Myth of the Best and the Brightest." ..."
"... They are teaching the elite how to drain all value from American companies, as the rich plan their move to China, the new land of opportunity. When 1% of the population controls such a huge portion of the wealth, patriotism becomes a loadstone to them. The elite are global. Places like Harvard cater to them, help train them to rule the world .but first they must remake it. ..."
"... In my high school, there were roughly 15 of us who had been advanced two years ahead in math. Of those, 10 were Jewish; only two of them had a 'Jewish' last name. In my graduate school class, half (7) are Jewish. None has a 'Jewish' last name. So I'm pretty dubious of the counting method that you use. ..."
"... Regarding the declining Jewish achievement, it looks like it can be primarily explained through demographics: "Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000.[56][57] This, in combination with the comparatively low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s." ..."
"... Jewish surnames don't mean what they used to. And intermarriage rates are lowest among the low-performing and highly prolific Orthodox. ..."
"... A potentially bigger issue completely ignored by your article is how do colleges differentiate between 'foreign' students (overwhelmingly Asian) and American students. Many students being counted as "Asian American" are in reality wealthy and elite foreign "parachute kids" (an Asian term), dropped onto the generous American education system or into boarding schools to study for US entrance exams, qualify for resident tuition rates and scholarships, and to compete for "American" admissions slots, not for the usually limited 'foreign' admission slots. ..."
"... As some who is Jewish from the former Soviet Union, and who was denied even to take an entrance exam to a Moscow college, I am saddened to see that American educational admission process looks more and more "Soviet" nowadays. Kids are denied opportunities because of their ethnic or social background, in a supposedly free and fair country! ..."
"... Actually, Richard Feynman famously rejected genetic explanations of Jewish achievement (whether he was right or wrong to do so is another story), and aggressively resisted any attempts to list him as a "Jewish scientist" or "Jewish Nobel Prize winner." I am sure he would not cared in the slightest bit how many Jews were participating in the Physics Olympiad, as long as the quality of the students' work continued to be excellent. Here is a letter he wrote to a woman seeking to include him in a book about Jewish achievement in the sciences. ..."
"... It would be interesting to know how well "true WASPS" do in admissions. This could perhaps be estimated by counting Slavic and Italian names, or Puritan New England last names. I would expect this group to do almost as well as Jews (not quite as well, because their ability would be in the lower end of the Legacy group). ..."
"... The missing variable in this analysis is income/class. While Unz states that many elite colleges have the resources to fund every student's education, and in fact practice need-blind admissions, the student bodies are skewed towards the very highest percentile of the income and wealth distribution. SAT scores may also scale with parents' income as well. ..."
"... Having worked with folks from all manner of "elite" and not so elite schools in a technical field, the main conclusion I was able to draw was folks who went to "elite" colleges had a greater degree of entitlement. And that's it. ..."
"... My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. ..."
"... The Reality of American Mediocrity ..."
"... The central test of fairness in any admissions system is to ask this simple question. Was there anyone admitted under that system admitted over someone else who was denied admission and with better grades and SAT scores and poorer ? If the answer is in the affirmative, then that system is unfair , if it is in the negative then the system is fair. ..."
"... Harvard ranks only 8th after Penn State in the production of undergrads who eventually get Doctorates in Science and Engineering. Of course Berkeley has the bragging rights for that kind of attribute. ..."
"... There is an excellent analysis of this article at The Occidental Observer by Kevin MacDonald, "Ron Unz on the Illusory American Meritocracy". The MSM is ignoring Unz's article for obvious reasons. ..."
"... Could it be that the goal of financial, rather than academic, achievement, makes many young people uninterested in competing in the science and math competitions sought out by the Asian students? I ..."
"... America never promised success through merit or equality. That is the American "dream." ..."
"... Anyone famliar with sociology and the research on social stratification knows that meritocracy is a myth; for example, if one's parents are in the bottom decile of the the income scale, the child has only a 3% chance to reach the top decile in his or her lifetime. In fact, in contrast to the Horatio Alger ideology, the U.S. has lower rates of upward mobility than almost any other developed country. Social classses exist and they tend to reproduce themselves. ..."
"... The rigid class structure of the the U.S. is one of the reasons I support progressive taxation; wealth may not always be inherited, but life outcomes are largely determined by the class position of one's parents. In this manner, it is also a myth to believe that wealth is an individual creation;most financially successful individuals have enjoyed the benefits of class privilege: good and safe schools, two-parent families, tutors, and perhaps most important of all, high expecatations and positive peer socialization (Unz never mentions the importants of peeer groups, which data show exert a strong causal unfluence on academic performance). ..."
"... And I would challenge Unz's assertion that many high-performing Asians come from impovershed backgrounds: many of them may undereport their income as small business owners. I believe that Asian success derives not only from their class background but their culture in which the parents have authority and the success of the child is crucual to the honor of the family. As they assimilate to the more individualist American ethos, I predict that their academic success will level off just as it has with Jews. ..."
"... All I can say is see a book: "Ivy League Fools and Felons"' by Mack Roth. Lots of them are kids of corrupt people in all fields. ..."
Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University
history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally
collaborated on their final exam.
[1] Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single
incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as "unprecedented."
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America's most prestigious academic institution? In
the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion
of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together
with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible
today, as even America's most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected
former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive
availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.
During
this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources
of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty
years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America's richest 1 percent now possessing
nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.
[2]
This situation, sometimes described as a "winner take all society," leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their
children will reach the winners' circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating
middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides
an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates
of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.
[3] On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas
are handed out. [4]
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class
families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all
arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her
2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her
peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America's test-prep
companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to
their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter
is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.
[5]
Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program,
seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.
[6] Others cut corners in a more
direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were
paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.
[7]
But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions
gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick
envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children
approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is
the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also
the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even
while our national economy has stagnated.
Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price
of Admission , a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every
sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability,
hard-working students who lack any special hook.
In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption
charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.
[8] When we consider that Harvard's
existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of
financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university's honor
for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars
in cash.
An admissions system based on non-academic factors often amounting to institutionalized venality would seem strange or even unthinkable
among the top universities of most other advanced nations in Europe or Asia, though such practices are widespread in much of the
corrupt Third World. The notion of a wealthy family buying their son his entrance into the Grandes Ecoles of France or the top Japanese
universities would be an absurdity, and the academic rectitude of Europe's Nordic or Germanic nations is even more severe, with those
far more egalitarian societies anyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.
Well, legacy programs are alive and well. According to the read, here's the problem:
"The research certainly supports the widespread perception that non-academic factors play a major role in the process,
including athletic ability and "legacy" status. But as we saw earlier, even more significant are racial factors, with black
ancestry being worth the equivalent of 310 points, Hispanics gaining 130 points, and Asian students being penalized by 140
points, all relative to white applicants on the 1600 point Math and Reading SAT scale."
These arbitrary point systems while well intended are not a reflection of AA design. School lawyers in a race not be penalized
for past practices, implemented their own versions of AA programs. The numbers are easy to challenge because they aren't based
on tangible or narrow principles. It's weakneses are almost laughable. Because there redal goal was to thwart any real challenge
that institutions were idle in addressing past acts of discrimination. To boost their diversity issues, asians were heavily recruited.
Since AA has been in place a lot of faulty measures were egaged in: Quotas for quotas sake. Good for PR, lousy for AA and issues
it was designed to address.
I think the statistical data hides a very important factor and practice. Most jews in this country are white as such , and
as such only needed to change their names and hide behaviors as a strategy of surviving the entrance gauntlet. That segregation
created a black collegiate system with it's own set of elite qualifiers demonstrates that this model isn't limited to the Ivy
league.
That an elite system is devised and practiced in members of a certain club networks so as to maintain their elite status, networks
and control, this is a human practice. And it once served as something to achieve. It was thought that the avenues of becoming
an elite were there if one wanted to strive for it. Hard work, honesty, persistence, results . . . should yield X.
And while I am not as focused on the poverty ve wealth dynamic. this century has revealed something very disappointing
that you address. That the elites have done a very poor job of leading the ship of state, while still remaining in leadership
belies such a bold hypocrisy in accountability, it's jarring. The article could actually be titled: "The Myth of the Best and
the Brightest."
I don't think it's just some vindictive intent. and while Americans have always known and to an extent accepted that for upper
income citizens, normal was not the same as normal on the street. Fairness, was not the same jn practice nor sentiment. What may
becoming increasing intolerant has been the obvious lack of accountability among elites. TARP looked like the elites looking out
for each other as opposed the ship of state. I have read three books on the financials and they do not paint a pretty portrait
of Ivy League leadership as to ethics, cheating, lying, covering up, and shamelessly passing the buck. I will be reading this
again I am sure.
It's sad to think that we may be seeing te passing of an era. in which one aspired to be an elite not soley for their wealth,
but the model they provided od leadership real or imagined. Perhaps, it passed long ago, and we are all not just noticing.
I appreciated you conclusions, not sure that I am comfortable with some of the solutions.
Since I still hanker to be an elite in some manner, It is interesting to note my rather subdued response to the cheating. Sadly,
this too may be an open secret of standard fair - and that is very very sad. And disappointing. Angering even.
The shifting social demography of deans, house masters and admissions committees may be a more important metric than the composition
of the student body, as it determines the shape of the curriculum, and the underlying culture of the university as a legacy in
itself.
If Ron harrows the literary journals of the Jackson era with equal diligence. he may well turn up an essay or two expressing
deep shock at Unitarians admitting too many of the Lord's preterite sheep to Harvard, or lamenting the rise of Methodism at Yale
and the College of New Jersey.
Harvard is a university, much like Princeton and Yale, that continues based on its reputation, something that was earned in
the past. When the present catches up to them people will regard them as nepotistic cauldrons of corruption.
Look at the financial disaster that befell the USA and much of the globe back in 2008. Its genesis can be found in the clever
minds of those coming out of their business schools (and, oddly enough, their Physics programs as well).
They are teaching the elite how to drain all value from American companies, as the rich plan their move to China, the new
land of opportunity. When 1% of the population controls such a huge portion of the wealth, patriotism becomes a loadstone to them.
The elite are global. Places like Harvard cater to them, help train them to rule the world .but first they must remake it.
• Replies: @Part White, Part
Native I agree, common people would never think of derivatives , nor make loans based on speculation
First, I appreciated the length and depth of your article.
Having said that, to boil it down to its essence:
Subconcious bias/groupthink + affirmative action/diversity focus + corruption + innumeracy = student bodies at elite institutions
that are wildly skewed vis-a-vis both: 1) the ethnic makeup of the general population; and 2) the makeup of our top-performing
students.
Since these institutions are pipelines to power, this matters.
I rather doubt that wage stagnation (which appears to have begun in ~1970) can be pinned on this – that part stuck out, because
there are far more plausible causes. To the extent you're merely arguing that our elite failed to counter the trend, ok, but I'm
not sure a "better" elite would have either. The trend, after all, favored the elite.
Anyway, I find your case is plausible.
Your inner/outer circle hybrid option is interesting. One (perhaps minor) thing jumps out at me: kids talk. The innies are
going to figure out who they are and who the outies are. The outies might have their arrogance tempered, but the innies? I suspect
they'd be even *more* arrogant than such folks are now (all the more so because they'd have better justification for their arrogance),
but I could be wrong.
Perhaps more significantly, this:
But if it were explicitly known that the vast majority of Harvard students had merely been winners in the application
lottery, top businesses would begin to cast a much wider net in their employment outreach, and while the average Harvard student
would probably be academically stronger than the average graduate of a state college, the gap would no longer be seen as so
enormous, with individuals being judged more on their own merits and actual achievements
Is a very good reason for Harvard, et al. to resist the idea. I think you're right that this would be a good thing for the
country, but it would be bad for Harvard. I think the odds of convincing Harvard to do it out of the goodness of their administrators
hearts is unlikely. You are basically asking them to purposefully damage their brand.
All in all, I think you're on to something here. I have my quibbles (the wage stagnation thing, and the graph with Chinese
vs USA per capita growth come on, apples and oranges there!), but overall I think I agree that your proposal is likely superior
to the status quo.
Don't forget the mess one finds after they ARE admitted to these schools. I dropped out of Columbia University in 2010.
You can "make it" on an Ivy-league campus if you are a conservative-Republican-type with all the rich country-club connections
that liberals use to stereotype.
Or you can succeed if you are a poor or working-class type who is willing to toe the Affirmative Action party line and be a
good "progressive" Democrat (Obama stickers, "Gay Pride" celebrations, etc.)
If you come from a poor or working-class background and are religious, or culturally conservative or libertarian in any way,
you might as well save your time and money. You're not welcome, period. And if you're a military veteran you WILL be actively
persecuted, no matter what the news reports claim.
It sucks. Getting accepted to Columbia was a dream come true for me. The reality broke my heart.
Regarding the overrepresentation of Jewish students compared to their actual academic merit, I think the author overstates
the role bias (subjective, or otherwise) plays in this:
1) , a likely explanation is that Jewish applicants are a step ahead in knowing how to "play the admissions game." They therefore
constitute a good percentage of applicants that admission committees view as "the total package." (at least a higher percentage
than scores alone would yield). Obviously money and connections plays a role in them knowing to say precisely what adcoms want
to hear, but in any case, at the end of the day, if adcoms are looking for applicants with >1400 SATs, "meaningful" life experiences/accomplishments,
and a personal statement that can weave it all together into a compelling narrative, the middle-upper-class east coast Jewish
applicant probably constitutes a good percentage of such "total package" applicants. I will concede however that this explanation
only works in explaining the prevalence of jews vs. whites in general. With respect to Asians, however, since they are likely
being actively and purposefully discriminated against by adcoms, having the "complete package" would be less helpful to them.
2) Another factor is that, regardless of ethnicity, alumni children get a boost and since in the previous generation Jewish
applicants were the highest achieving academic group, many of these lesser qualified jews admitted are children of alumni.
3) That ivy colleges care more about strong verbal scores than mathematics (i.e., they prefer 800V 700M over 700V 800M), and
Jewish applicants make up a higher proportion of the high verbal score breakdowns.
4) Last, and perhaps more importantly we do not really know the extent of Jewish representation compared to their academic
merit. Unlike admitted Asian applicants, who we know, on average, score higher than white applicants, we have no similar numbers
of Jewish applicants. The PSAT numbers are helpful, but hardly dispositive considering those aren't the scores colleges use in
making their decision information.
@Bryan– Getting accepted to Columbia was a dream come true for me. The reality broke my heart.
I'm touched by this. I've spent tons of time at Columbia, a generation ago -- and my background fit fine -- the kind of WASP
background Jews found exotic and interesting. But I can see your point, sad to say. There are other great schools -- Fordham,
where my wife went to law school at night, has incredible esprit de corps - and probably, person for person, has as many lawyers
doing good and interesting work as Columbia.
"There are other great schools–Fordham, where my wife went to law school at night, has incredible esprit de corps - and
probably, person for person, has as many lawyers doing good and interesting work as Columbia."
"Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellsley, an outcome
which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.88″
In the fall of 1990, my parents had me apply to 10 colleges. I had the profile of many Indian kids at the time – ranked in
the top 10 of the class, editor of school paper, Boy Scouts. SAT scores could have been better, but still strong. Over 700 in
all achievement tests save Bio, which was 670.
Rejected by 5 schools, waitlisted by 3, accepted into 2 – one of them the state univ.
One of my classmates, whose family was from Thailand, wound up in the same predicament as me. His response, "Basketball was
designed to keep the Asian man down."
The one black kid in our group – got into MIT, dropped out after one year because he could not hack it. The kid from our school
who should have gone, from an Italian-American family, and among the few who did not embrace the guido culture, went to Rennsealer
instead, and had professional success after.
As a University of Chicago alum, I infer that by avoiding the label "elite" on such a nifty chart we can be accurately categorized
as "meritocratic" by The American Conservative.
Then again, this article doesn't even purport to ask why elite universities might be in the business of EDUCATING a wider population
of students, or how that education takes place.
Perhaps, by ensuring that "the best" students are not concentrated in only 8 universities is why the depth and quality of America's
education system remains the envy of the world.
In my high school, there were roughly 15 of us who had been advanced two years ahead in math. Of those, 10 were Jewish;
only two of them had a 'Jewish' last name. In my graduate school class, half (7) are Jewish. None has a 'Jewish' last name.
So I'm pretty dubious of the counting method that you use.
Also, it's clear that there are Asian quotas at these schools, but it's not clear that Intel Science Fairs, etc, are the best
way to estimate what level of talent Asians have relative to other groups.
I was curious so I google High School Poetry Competition, High School Constitution Competition, High School Debating Competition.
None of the winners here seem to have an especially high Asian quotient. So maybe a non-technical (liberal arts) university would
settle on ~25-30% instead of ~40% asian? And perhaps a (small) part of the problem is a preponderance of Asian applicants excelling
in technical fields, leading to competition against each other rather than the general population? Just wonderin'
Regarding the declining Jewish achievement, it looks like it can be primarily explained through demographics: "Intermarriage
rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000.[56][57] This, in combination with the comparatively
low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s."
Jewish surnames don't mean what they used to. And intermarriage rates are lowest among the low-performing and highly prolific
Orthodox.
Jewish birth rates have been falling faster than the white population, especially for the non-Orthodox:
"In contrast to the ongoing trends of assimilation, some communities within American Jewry, such as Orthodox Jews, have significantly
higher birth rates and lower intermarriage rates, and are growing rapidly. The proportion of Jewish synagogue members who were
Orthodox rose from 11% in 1971 to 21% in 2000, while the overall Jewish community declined in number. [60] In 2000, there were
360,000 so-called "ultra-orthodox" (Haredi) Jews in USA (7.2%).[61] The figure for 2006 is estimated at 468,000 (9.4%).[61]"
"As against the overall average of 1.86 children per Jewish woman, an informed estimate gives figures ranging upward from 3.3
children in "modern Orthodox" families to 6.6 in Haredi or "ultra-Orthodox" families to a whopping 7.9 in families of Hasidim."
These statistics would suggest that half or more of Jewish children are being born into these lower-performing groups. Given
their very low intermarriage rates, a huge portion of the secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews must be intermarrying (more than
half if the aggregate 43% intermarriage figure is right). And the high-performing groups may now be around 1 child per woman or
lower, and worse for the youngest generation.
So a collapse in Jewish representation in youth science prizes can be mostly explained by the collapse of the distinct non-Orthodox
Jewish youth.
Incidentally, intermarriage also produces people with Jewish ancestry who get classified as gentiles using last names or self-identification,
reducing Jewish-gentile gaps by bringing up nominal gentile scores at the same time as nominal-Jewish scores are lowered.
The center of power in this country being located in the Northeast is nothing new. Whether it be in it's Ivy League schools
or the ownership of natural resources located in other regions, particularly the South, the Northeast has always had a disproportionate
share of influence in the power structures, particularly political and financial, of this nation. This is one of the reasons the
definition of "white" when reviewing ethnicity is so laughably inaccurate. There is a huge difference in opportunity between WASP
or Jewish in the Northeast, for instance, and those of Scots Irish ancestory in the mountain south. Hopefully statistical analysis
such as this can break open that stranglehold, especially as it is directly impacting a minority group in a negative fashion.
Doing this exercise using say, white Baptists compared to other white subgroups, while maybe equally valid in the results, would
be seen as racist by the very Ivy League system that is essentially practicing a form of racism.
Yeah, my ultimate goal was to attend law school, and a big part of the heartbreak for me–or heartburn, the more cynical would
call it–was seeing how skewed and absurd the admissions process to law school is.
I have no doubt that I could have eventually entered into a "top tier" law school, and that was a dream of mine also. I met
with admissions officers from Duke, Harvard, Stanford, Fordham, etc. I was encouraged. I had the grades and background for it.
But–and I'm really not trying to sound corny 0r self-important here–what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his
soul? I really don't feel that I'm exaggerating when I say that that's exactly how it felt to me.
The best experience I had while In New York was working as an after-school programs administrator for P.S. 136, but that was
only because of the kids. They'll be old and bitter and cynical soon enough.
At one point it occurred to me that I should have just started claiming "Black" as my ethnicity when I first started attending
college as an adult. I never attended high-school so it couldn't have been disproved. I'm part Sicilian so I could pass for 1/4
African-American. Then I would have received the preference toward admission that, say, Michael Jordan's kids or Barack Obama's
kids will receive when they claim their Ivy-league diplomas. I should have hid the "white privilege" I've enjoyed as the son of
a fisherman and a waitress from one of the most economically-depressed states in America.
The bottom line is that those colleges are political brainwashing centers for a country I no longer believe in. I arrived on
campus in 2009 and I'm not joking at all when I say I was actively persecuted for being a veteran and a conservative who was not
drinking the Obama Kool-aid. Some big fat African-American lady, a back-room "administrator" for Columbia, straight-up threw my
VA benefits certification in the garbage, so my money got delayed by almost two months. I had no idea what was going on. I had
a wife and children to support.
The fact that technology has enabled us to sit here in real-time and correspond back-and-forth about the state of things doesn't
really change the state of things. They are irredeemable. This country is broke and broken.
If Abraham Lincoln were born today in America he would wind up like "Uncle Teardrop" from Winter's Bone. Back then, in order
to be an attorney, you simply studied law and starting trying cases. If you were good at it then you were accepted and became
a lawyer. Today, something has been lost. There is no fixing it. I don't want to waste my time trying to help by being "productive"
to the new tower of Babel or pretending to contribute.
Perhaps only one thing you left out, which is especially important with regard to Jewish enrollment and applications at Ivy
leagues, and other schools as well.
Jewish high school graduates actively look out for campuses with large Jewish populations, where they feel more comfortable.
I don't know the figures, but I believe Dartmouth, for example, has a much smaller Jewish population than Columbia, and it will
stay that way because of a positive feedback loop. (i.e. Jews would rather be at Columbia than Dartmouth, or sometimes even rather
be at NYU than Dartmouth). This explains some of the difference among different schools (and not solely better admission standards).
This is also especially relevant to your random lottery idea, which will inevitably lead to certain schools being overwhelmingly
Asian, others being overwhelmingly Jewish, etc., because the percentage of applicants from every ethnicity is different in every
school. This will necessarily eliminate any diversity which may or may not have existed until now.
I like the lottery admissions idea a lot but the real remedy for the US education system would be to abandon the absurd elite
cult altogether. There is not a shred of evidence that graduates of so-called elite institutions make good leaders. Many of them
are responsible for the economic crash and some of them have brought us the disaster of the Bush presidency.
Many better functioning countries – Germany, the Scandinavians – do not have elite higher education systems. When I enrolled
to University in Germany, I showed up at the enrollment office the summer before the academic year started, filled out a form
(1), and provided a certified copy of my Abitur certificate proving that I was academically competent to attend University. I
never wasted a minute on any of the admissions games that American middle class teenagers and their parents are subjected to.
It would surely have hurt my sense of dignity to be forced to jump through all these absurd and arbitrary hoops.
Americans, due to their ignorance of everything happening outside their borders, have no clue that a system in which a person
is judged by what "school" they attended is everything but normal. It is part of the reason for American dysfunction.
Since they are the pool from which tomorrow's governing elites will be chosen, I'd much rather see Ivy League student bodies
which reflected the full ethnic and geographic diversity of the US. Right now rural and small town Americans and those of Catholic
and Protestant descent who live in the South and Mid-West - roughly half the population - are woefully under-represented, which
explains why their economic interests have been neglected over the last forty years. We live in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic
representative democracy and our policy-making elites must reflect that diversity. Else the country will come apart.
Thus I recommend 'affirmative action for all' in our elite liberal arts colleges and universities (though not our technical
schools). Student bodies should be represent 'the best and the brightest' of every ethnic group and geographical area of the country.
Then the old school ties will truly knit our society together in a way that is simply not happening today.
A side benefit - and I mean this seriously - is that our second and third tier colleges and universities would be improved
by an influx of Asian and Ashkenazi students (even though the very best would still go to Harvard).
I believe that this article raises – and then inappropriately immediately dismisses – the simplest and most likely reason for
the over-representation of Jewish students at Ivy League Schools in the face of their declining bulk academic performance:
They apply to those schools in vastly disproportionate numbers.
Without actual data on the ethnicity of the applicants to these and other schools, we simply cannot rule out this simple and
likely explanation.
It is quite clear that a large current of Jewish American culture places a great emphasis on elite college attendance, and
among elite colleges, specifically values the Ivy League and its particular cache as opposed to other elite institutions such
as MIT. Also, elite Jewish American culture, moreso than elite Asian American culture, encourages children to go far away from
home for college, considering such a thing almost a right of passage, while other ethnic groups tend to encourage children to
remain closer. A high performing Asian student from, say, California, is much more likely to face familial pressure to stay close
to home for undergrad (Berkeley, UCLA, etc) than a high performing Jewish student from the same high school, who will likely be
encouraged by his or her family to apply to many universities "back east".
Without being able to systematically compare – with real data – the ethnicities of the applicants to those offered admission,
these conclusions simply cannot be accepted.
Different expectations for different races should worry traditional Americans.
If we become comfortable with different academic standards for Asians will we soon be expected to apply different laws to them
also? Will we apply different laws or at least different interpretations of the same laws to blacks?
The association of East Asians with CalTech is now as strong as the association of blacks with violent crime. Can not race
conscious jurisprudence be far behind?
Around a millenium ago in England it mattered to the court if you were a commoner or a noble. Nobles could exercise 'high justice'
with impunity. They were held to different standards. Their testimony counted for more in court. The law was class concious.
Then we had centuries of reform. We had 'Common Law'. By the time of our revolution the idea that all were equal before the
law was a very American kind of idea. We were proud that unlike England we did not have a class system.
Today we seem to be on the threshold of a similar sytem of privileges and rights based on race. Let me give an example. If
there were a domestic riot of somekind and a breakdown of public order, the authorities might very well impose a cufew. That makes
good sense for black male teens but makes little or no sense for elderly Chinese women. I can envision a time when we have race
specific policies for curfews and similar measures.
It seems to be starting in schools. It could be that the idea of equality before the law was an idea that only flourished between
the fifteenth century and the twenty first.
"But filling out a few very simple forms and having their test scores and grades scores automatically forwarded to a list of
possible universities would give them at least the same chance in the lottery as any other applicant whose academic skills were
adequate."
They get a lot of applications. I am guessing they chuck about 1/2 or more due to the application being incomplete, the applicant
did not follow instructions, the application was sloppy, or just obviously poor grades/test scores. The interview and perhaps
the essay and recommendations are necessary to chuck weirdos and psychopaths you do not want sitting next to King Fahd Jr. So
the "byzantine" application process is actually necessary to reduce the number of applicants to be evaluated.
I have a friend who went to Stanford with me in the early 80s. She has two sons who recently applied to Stanford. The older
son had slightly better grades and test scores. The younger son is gay. Guess which one got in?
If you were in Columbia's GS school, (or even if you were CC/SEAS/Barnard) you ought to reach out to some of on-campus and
alumni veteran's groups. They can help you maneuver through the school. (I know there's one that meets at a cafe on 122 and Broadway)
CU can be a lonely and forbidding place for anyone and that goes double for GSers and quadruple for veterans.
You ought to give it another go. Especially if you aren't going somewhere else that's better. Reach out to your deans and make
a fuss. No one in the bureaucracy wants to help but you can force them to their job.
Mr. Unz, the issues of jewish/gentile intermarriage and the significance of jewish-looking names do indeed merit more consideration
than they were given in this otherwise very enlightening article.
What would the percentage of jews in Ivy-League universities look like if the methodology used to determine the percentage
of jewish NMS semifinalists were applied to the list of Ivy League students (or some available approximation of it)?
For background: I'm an Asian-American who worked briefly in legacy admissions at an Ivy and another non-Ivy top-tier, both
while in school (work-study) and as an alum on related committees.
Mendy Finkel's observations are spot on. Re: her 1st point, personal "presentation" or "branding" is often overlooked by Asian
applicants. An admission officer at another Ivy joked they drew straws to assign "Night of a 1000 Lee's", so accomplished-but-indistinguishable
was that group.
A few points on the Asian analysis:
1. I think this analysis would benefit from expanding beyond HYP/Ivies when considering the broader meritocracy issue. Many
Asians esteem technical-leaning schools over academically-comparable liberal arts ones, even if the student isn't a science major.
When I was in college in the 90′s, most Asian parents would favor a Carnegie Mellon or Hopkins over Brown, Columbia or Dartmouth
(though HYP, of course, had its magnetic appeal). The enrollment percentages reflect this, and while some of this is changing,
this is a fairly persistent pattern.
2. Fundraising is crucial. The Harvard Class of '77 example isn't the most telling kind of number. In my experience, Jewish
alumni provide a critical mass in both the day-to-day fundraising and the resultant dollars. And they play a key role, both as
givers and getters, in the signature capital campaign commitments (univ hospitals, research centers, etc.). This isn't unique
to Jewish Ivy alumni; Catholic alumni of ND or Georgetown provide similar support. But it isn't clear what the future overall
Asian commitment to the Ivy "culture of fundraising" will be, which will continue to be a net negative in admissions.
Sidenote: While Asians greatly value the particular civic good, they are uneasy with it being so hinged to an opaque private
sector, in this case, philanthropy. That distinction, blown out a bit, speaks to some of the Republican "Asian gap".
3. I would not place too much weight on NMS comparisons between Asians and Jews. In my experience, most Asians treat the PSAT
seriously, but many established Jews do not – the potential scholarship money isn't a factor, "NMS semifinalist" isn't an admissions
distinction, and as Mendy highlighted, colleges don't see the scores.
On a different note, while the "weight" of an Ivy degree is significant, it's prestige is largely concentrated in the Northeast
and among some overseas. In terms of facilitating access and mobility, a USC degree might serve you better in SoCal, as would
an SMU one in TX.
And like J Harlan, I also hope the recent monopoly of Harvard and Yale grads in the presidency will end. No doubt, places like
Whittier College, Southwest Texas State Teachers' College, and Eureka College gave earlier presidents valuable perspectives and
experience that informed their governing.
But thank you, Ron, for a great provocative piece. Very well worth the read.
Hey Ron, your next article should be on the military academies, and all those legacies that go back to the Revolutionary War.
How do you get into the French military academy, and do the cadets trace their family history back to the soldiers of Napoleon
or Charles Martel or whatever?
"Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment,
legacy admissions, and geographical diversity."
Yes, at UCLA, at least up to 2004, Asian and white admits had nearly identical SATs and GPAs.
Further, it just isn't the case that Asians are so spectacular as people seem to think. Their average on the SAT Verbal is
slightly less than whites, their average on SAT Writing is slightly more. Only in math do they have a significant advantage, 59
points or .59 standard deviation. Total advantage is about .2 over the three tests. Assuming that Harvard or Yale admit students
at +3 standard deviations overall, and plugging the relative group quantiles +(3, 2.8) into a normal distribution, we get that
.14% of white kids would get admitted, versus .26% of Asian kids. Or, 1.85 Asian kids for every one white kid.
But, last year 4.25 times as many whites as Asians took the SAT, so there still should be about 2.28 times as many white kids
being admitted as Asians (4.25/1.85).
On GPA, whites and Asians are also pretty similar on average, 3.52 for Asians who took the SAT, 3.45 for whites who took the
SAT. So that shouldn't be much of a factor.
I am a Cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point and generally pretty familiar with trans-national Academy admissions
processes. There's an excellent comparative study of worldwide military academy admissions that was done in the late '90′s you
might find interesting (IIRC it was done by a group in the NATO Defence College) and I think you will find that although soldiers
are often proud of their family histories to a fault, it is not what controls entrance to the officer corps in most countries.
"Legacy" is definitely meaningless in US Military Academy admissions, although can be very helpful in the separate process
of securing a political appointment to attend the Academy once accepted for admission and in an Army career. West Point is not
comparable to the Ivy League schools in the country, because (ironically) the admissions department that makes those comparisons
lets in an inordinate number of unqualified candidates and ensures our student body includes a wide range of candidates, from
people who are unquestionably "Ivy League material" to those who don't have the intellect to hack it at any "elite" institution.
Prior the changes in admissions policies and JFK ordering an doubling of the size of the Corps of Cadets in the '60′s, we didn't
have this problem. But, I digress. My point is, the Academy admissions system is very meritocratic.
I am a Jewish alum of UPenn, and graduated in the late 90s. That puts me almost a generation ago, which may be before the supposed
Jewish decline you write about. I was in an 80%+ Jewish fraternity, and at least 2/3 of my overall network of friends at Penn
was also Jewish. As was mentioned earlier, I have serious qualms with your methods for counting Jews based upon last name.
Based upon my admittedly non-scientific sample, the percentage of us who had traditionally Jewish last names was well under
half and closer to 25%. My own last name is German, and you would never know I am Jewish based solely upon my name (nor would
you based upon the surname of 3/4 of my grandparents, despite my family being 100% Jewish with no intermarriages until my sister).
By contrast, Asians are much easier to identify based upon name. You may overcount certain names like Lee that are also Caucasian,
but it is highly unlikely that you will miss any Asian students when your criterion is last name.
Admittedly I skimmed parts of the article, but were other criterion used to more accurately identify the groups?
The Jewish presence is definitely understated by just looking at surnames. As is the American Indian.
My maternal grandfather was Ashkenazi and his wife was 1/2 Ashkenazi and 1/4 Apache. He changed his name to a Scots surname
that matched his red hair so as to get ahead as a business man in 20s due to KKK and anti-German feelings at the time. Their kids
had two PHDs and a Masters between them despite their parents running a very blue collar firm.
My surname comes from my dad and its a Scottish surname although he was 1/4 Cherokee. On that side we are members of the FF
of Virignia. Altogether I am more Jewish and American Indian than anything else yet would be classified as white. I could easily
claim to be
Jewish or Indian on admissions forms. I always selected white. I was NMSF.
Both my sister and I have kids. Her husband is a full blood Indian with a common English surname. One of my nieces made NMSF
and another might. My sisters kids do not think of themselves as any race and check other.
My wife is 1/4 Indian and 3/4 English. My kids are young yet one has tested to an IQ in the 150s.
Once you get West of the Appalachians, there are a lot of mutts in the non-gentile whites. A lot of Jews and American Indians
Anglicized themselves a generation or two ago and they are lumped into that group – as well as occupy the top percentile academically.
Interesting article with parts I would agree with but also tinged with bias and conclusions that I would argue are not fully
supported by the data.
I think more analysis is needed to confirm your conclusions. As others have mentioned there may be problems with your analysis
of NMS scores. I think graduate admissions and achievements especially in the math and sciences would be a better measure of intellectual
performance.
Now, I didn't attend an Ivy League school, instead a public university, mainly because I couldn't afford it or so I thought.
I was also a NMS finalist.
But I always was of the opinion that except for the most exceptional students admission to the Ivies was based on the wealth
of your family and as you mentioned there are quite a few affluent Jews so I imagine they do have a leg up. Harvard's endowment
isn't as large as it is by accident.
It is interesting that you didn't discuss the stats for Stanford.
Lastly, I think your solution is wrong. The pure meritocracy is the only fair solution. Admissions should be based upon the
entrance exams like in Asia and Europe.
There are plenty of options for those who don't want to compete and if the Asians dominate admissions at the top schools so
be it.
Hopefully, all of this will be mute point n a few years as online education options become more popular with Universities specializing
in graduate education and research.
Ron Unz on Asians (ie Asian Americans): "many of them impoverished immigrant families"
Why do you twice repeat this assertion. Asians are the wealthiest race and most of the wealthiest ethnic groups tracked by
the Census Bureau, which includes immigrants.
A potentially bigger issue completely ignored by your article is how do colleges differentiate between 'foreign' students
(overwhelmingly Asian) and American students. Many students being counted as "Asian American" are in reality wealthy and elite
foreign "parachute kids" (an Asian term), dropped onto the generous American education system or into boarding schools to study
for US entrance exams, qualify for resident tuition rates and scholarships, and to compete for "American" admissions slots, not
for the usually limited 'foreign' admission slots.
Probably people from non-Asian countries are pulling the same stunt, but it seems likely dominated by Asians. And expect many
more with the passage of the various "Dream Acts"
So American kids must compete with the offspring of all the worlds corrupt elite for what should be opportunities for US Americans.
Am I the only one that finds the comparison of Asians (a race) to Jews (a religion) as basis for a case of discrimination completely
flawed? I got in at Harvard and don't remember them even asking me what my religion was.
The value of diversity is absolutely key. I have a bunch of very good Asian friends and I love them dearly, but I don't believe
a place like CalTech with its 40% demographics cannot truly claim to be a diverse place any more.
Regarding the SAT, we do know more than just differences of averages between whites and Asians. We have some years of
score distributions . As recently
as 1992, 1.2% of whites and 5.1% of Asians scored between 750 and 800 on the math subtest. As recently as 1985, 0.20% of whites
and 0.26% of Asians scored in that range on the verbal/critical reading subtest.
On a different form of the writing subtest than is currently used, 5.0% of whites and 3.0% of Asians scored greater than 60
in 1985. We also know that, as the white-Asian average verbal/critical reading gap shrank to almost nothing and the average math
gap grew in Asians' favor, the standard deviations on both for Asians have been much higher than every other group but have stayed
relatively unchanged and have become, in fact, slightly lower than in 1985.
Therefore, Asians probably greatly increased their share of top performers.
@Milton F.: "Perhaps, by ensuring that "the best" students are not concentrated in only 8 universities is why the depth and
quality of America's education system remains the envy of the world."
Hardly. America's education system is "the envy" because of the ability for minorities to get placement into better schools,
not solely for the education they receive. Only a very select few institutions are envied for their education primarily, 90% of
the colleges and universities across the country are sub-standard education providers, same with high schools.
I would imagine you're an educator at some level, more than likely, at one of the sub-standard colleges or even perhaps a high
school teacher. You're attempting to be defensive of the American education system, when in reality, you're looking at the world
through rose colored glasses. Working from within the system, rather than from the private sector looking back, gives you extreme
tunnel vision. That, coupled with the average "closed mindedness" of educators in America is a dangerous approach to advancing
the structure of the American education system. You and those like you ARE the problem and should be taken out of the equation
as quickly as possible. Please retire ASAP or find another career.
Aside from the complete lack of actual ivy league admission data on jewish applicants, a big problem with unz's "jewish affirmative
action" claim is how difficult such a policy would be to carry out in complete secrecy.
Now, it would be one thing if Unz was claiming that jews are being admitted with similar numbers to non-jewish whites, but
in close cases, admissions staff tend to favor jewish applicants. But he goes much further than that. Unz is claiming that jews,
as a group, are being admitted with lower SAT scores than non-jewish whites. Not only that, but this policy is being carried out
by virtually every single ivy league college and it has been going on for years. Moreover, this preference is so pervasive, that
it allows jews to gain admissions at many times the rate that merit alone would yield, ultimately resulting in entering classes
that are over 20% Jewish.
If a preference this deep, consistent and widespread indeed exists, there is no way it could be the result of subjective bias
or intentional tribal favoritism on the part of individual decision makers. It would have to be an official, yet unstated, admissions
policy in every ivy league school. Over the years, dozens (if not hundreds) of admission staff across the various ivy league colleges
would be engaging in this policy, without a single peep ever leaking through about Jewish applicants getting in with subpar SAT
scores. We hear insider reports all the time about one group is favored or discriminated against (we even have such an insider
account in this comment thread), but we hear nothing about the largest admission preference of them all.
Remember, admissions staffs usually include other ethnic minorities. I couldn't imagine them not wondering why jews need to
be given such a big boost so that they make up almost a quarter of the entering class. Even if every member of every admissions
committee were Jewish liberals, it would still be almost impossible to keep this under wraps.
Obviously, I have never seen actual admission numbers for Jewish applicants, so I could be wrong, and there could in fact be
an unbreakable wall of secrecy regarding the largest and most pervasive affirmative action practice in the country. Or, perhaps,
the ivy league application pool contains a disproportionate amount of high scoring jewish applicants.
As some who is Jewish from the former Soviet Union, and who was denied even to take an entrance exam to a Moscow college,
I am saddened to see that American educational admission process looks more and more "Soviet" nowadays. Kids are denied opportunities
because of their ethnic or social background, in a supposedly free and fair country!
But this is just a tip of the iceberg. The American groupthink of political correctness, lowest common denominator, and political
posturing toward various political/ethnic/religious/sexual orientation groups is rotting this country inside out.
"Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just
5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave."
Actually, Richard Feynman famously rejected genetic explanations of Jewish achievement (whether he was right or wrong to
do so is another story), and aggressively resisted any attempts to list him as a "Jewish scientist" or "Jewish Nobel Prize winner."
I am sure he would not cared in the slightest bit how many Jews were participating in the Physics Olympiad, as long as the quality
of the students' work continued to be excellent. Here is a letter he wrote to a woman seeking to include him in a book about Jewish
achievement in the sciences.
Dear Miss Levitan:
In your letter you express the theory that people of Jewish origin have inherited their valuable hereditary elements from their
people. It is quite certain that many things are inherited but it is evil and dangerous to maintain, in these days of little knowledge
of these matters, that there is a true Jewish race or specific Jewish hereditary character. Many races as well as cultural influences
of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish
heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.
Such theoretical views were used by Hitler. Surely you cannot maintain on the one hand that certain valuable elements can be
inherited from the "Jewish people," and deny that other elements which other people may find annoying or worse are not inherited
by these same "people." Nor could you then deny that elements that others would consider valuable could be the main virtue of
an "Aryan" inheritance.
It is the lesson of the last war not to think of people as having special inherited attributes simply because they are born
from particular parents, but to try to teach these "valuable" elements to all men because all men can learn, no matter what their
race.
It is the combination of characteristics of the culture of any father and his father plus the learning and ideas and influences
of people of all races and backgrounds which make me what I am, good or bad. I appreciate the valuable (and the negative) elements
of my background but I feel it to be bad taste and an insult to other peoples to call attention in any direct way to that one
element in my composition.
At almost thirteen I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly
because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvelous and talented people surrounded
by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth. The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all,
but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Most non-Jewish people in America today have understood that. The error of pro-Semitism is not that the Jewish people or Jewish
heritage is not really good, but rather the error is that intelligence, good will, and kindness is not, thank God, a monopoly
of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Therefore you see at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish
people are in any way "the chosen people." This is my other reason for requesting not to be included in your work.
@Rob Schacter – your last point is basically spot-on. The Ivies are fairly unique in the high proportion of Jewish applicants.
History, geographical bias, and self-selection all play a role. I think the overall preference distortion is probably not as wide
as Unz claims, but you will see similar tilts at Stanford, Northwestern, etc. that reflect different preference distortions.
@Leon, two quick points.
1st – the census tracks by household, which generally overestimates Asian wealth. Many families have three generations and
extended members living in one household (this reflects that many of them work together in a small family business).
2nd – most of the time, it's clear in the application (the HS, personal info, other residency info, etc.) which Asian applicants
are Asian-American and which are "Parachute Kids". But the numbers are much smaller than one might think, and the implication
depends on the school.
At Ivies, parachute kids (both Asian and not) tend to compete with each other in the application pool, and aren't substantially
informing the broader admissions thesis in this article. I'm not saying that's right, just saying it's less material than we might
think.
They more likely skew the admissions equation in great-but-not-rich liberal arts colleges (like Grinnell) and top public universities
(like UCLA), which are both having budget crises and need full fare students, parachute or not. And for the publics, this includes
adding more higher-tuition, out-of-state students, which further complicates assertions of just whose opportunities are being
lost.
I will bring this back to fundraising and finances again, because the broader point is about who is stewarding and creating
access: so long as top universities are essentially run as self-invested feedback loops, and position and resource themselves
accordingly (and other universities have to compete with them), we will continue to see large, persistent discrepancies in who
can participate.
When I applied to Harvard College back in 1976, I was proud of my application essay. In it, I proposed that the US used the
Israeli army as a proxy, just as the Russians were using the Cuban army at the time.
Alas, I wasn't admitted (I did get into Yale, which didn't require free-form essay like that).
This, of course, illustrates the point that coming from an Application Hell instead of from central Illinois helps a student
know how to write applications. It also illustrates what might help explain the mystery of high Jewish admissions: political bias.
Jews are savvier about knowing what admissions officers like to hear (including the black and Latino ones, who as a previous commentor
said aren't likely to be pro-semite). They are also politically more liberal, and so don't have to fake it. And their families
are more likely to read the New York Times and thus have the right "social graces" as we might call them, of this age.
It would be interesting to know how well "true WASPS" do in admissions. This could perhaps be estimated by counting Slavic
and Italian names, or Puritan New England last names. I would expect this group to do almost as well as Jews (not quite as well,
because their ability would be in the lower end of the Legacy group).
The missing variable in this analysis is income/class. While Unz states that many elite colleges have the resources to
fund every student's education, and in fact practice need-blind admissions, the student bodies are skewed towards the very highest
percentile of the income and wealth distribution. SAT scores may also scale with parents' income as well.
Tuition and fees at these schools have nearly doubled relative to inflation in the last 25-30 years, and with home prices in
desirable neighborhoods showing their own hyper-inflationary behavior over the past couple of decades (~15 yrs, especially), the
income necessary to pay for these schools without burdening either the student or parents with a lot of debt has been pushed towards
the top decile of earners. A big chunk of the upper middle class has been priced out. This could hit Asian professionals who may
be self made harder than other groups like Jews who may be the second or third generation of relative affluence, and would thus
have advantages in having less debt when starting their families and careers and be less burdened in financing their homes. Would
be curious to see the same analysis if $$ could be controlled.
I would also like to add that I am a late '80′s graduate of Wesleyan who ceased his modest but annual financial contribution to
the school after reading The Gatekeepers.
If I had a penny for every Jewish American I met (including myself) whose first and last name gave no indication of his religion
or ethnicity, I'd be rich. Oh–and my brother and I have four Ivy League degrees between us.
I almost clicked on a different link the instance I came across the word "elite" , but curiosity forced my hand.
Just yesterday my mom was remarking how my cousin had gotten into MIT with an SAT score far below what I scored, and she finished
by adding that I should have applied to an ivy-league college after high school. I as always, reminded her, I'm too "black for
ivy games".
I always worked hard in school, participated in olympiads and symposiums, and was a star athlete. When it came to applying
for college I found myself startled when forced to "quantify" my achievements in an "application package". I did not do or engage
in these activities solely to boost my chances of gaining admission into some elite college over similarly-hardworking Henry Wang
or Jess Steinberg. I did these things because I loved doing them.
Sports after class was almost a relaxation activity for me. Participating in math olympiads was a way for me to get a scoop
on advanced mathematics. Participating in science symposiums was a chance for me to start applying my theoretical education to
solve practical problems.
The moment I realized I would have to kneel down before some admissions officer and "present my case", outlining my "blackness",
athleticism, hard work, curiosity, and academic ability, in that specific order I should point, in order to have a fighting chance
at getting admitted; is the moment all my "black rage" came out in an internal explosion of rebellion and disapproval of "elite
colleges".
I instead applied to a college that was blind to all of the above factors. I am a firm believer that hard work and demonstrated
ability always win out in the end. I've come across, come up against is a better way to put it, Ivy-league competition in college
competitions and applications for co-ops and internships, and despite my lack of "eliteness" I am confident that my sheer ability
and track record will put me in the "interview candidate" pool.
Finally, my opinion is: let elite schools keep doing what they are doing. It isn't a problem at all, the "elite" tag has long
lost its meaning.
The difficulty with using Jewish sounding last names to identify Jewish students works poorly in two ways today. Not only,
as others have pointed out, do many Jews not have Jewish sounding last names, but there are those, my grandson for example, who
have identifiably Jewish last names and not much in the way of Jewish background.
Interesting reading. The article opens a deceptively simple statistical window into a poorly understood process - a window
which I would guess even the key participants have never looked through. I especially appreciated the insights provided by the
author's examination of Asian surname-frequencies and their over-representation in NMS databases.
Though this is a long and meticulously argued piece, it would have benefited from a more thorough discussion of the statistical
share of legacies and athletic scholarships in elite admissions.
Perhaps, though, it would be better to focus on increasing meritocracy in the broader society, which would inevitably lead
to some discounting of the value of educational credentials issued by these less than meritocratic private institutions.
It is precisely because the broader society is also in many key respects non-meritocratic that the non-meritocratic admissions
practices of elite institutions are sustainable.
Despite the very long and detailed argument, the writer's interpretation of a pro-Jewish admissions bias at Ivy-league schools
is worryingly flawed.
First, he uses two very different methods of counting Jews: name recognition for counting various "objective" measures such
as NMS semifinalists and Hillel stats for those admitted to Harvard. The first is most likely an underestimate while the latter
very possibly inflated (in both cases especially due to the very large numbers of partially-Jewish students, in the many interpretations
that has). I wonder how much of his argument would just go away if he simply counted the number of Jews in Harvard using the same
method he used to count their numbers in the other cases. Would that really be hard to do?
Second, he overlooks the obvious two sources that can lead to such Asian/Jewish relative gaps in admissions. The first is the
different groups' different focus on Science/Math vs. on Writing/Culture. It is very possible that in recent years most Asians
emphasize the former while Jews the latter, which would be the natural explanation to the Caltech vs Harvard racial composition
(as well as to the other stats). The second is related but different and it is the different group's bias in applications: the
same cultural anecdotes would explain why Asians would favor applying to Caltech and Jews to Harvard. A natural interpretation
of the data would be that Jews have learned to optimize for whatever criteria the Ivy leagues are using and the Asians are doing
so for the Caltech criteria.
Most strange is the author's interpretation of how a pro-Jewish bias in admissions is actually put into effect: the application
packets do not have the data of whether the applicant is Jewish or not, and I doubt that most admission officers figure it out
in most cases. While it could be possible for admissions officers to have a bias for or against various types of characteristics
that they see in the data in front of them (say Asian/Black/White or political activity), a systematic bias on unobserved data
is a much more difficult proposition to make. Indeed the author becomes rather confused here combining the low education level
of admissions officers, that they are "liberal arts or ethnic-studies majors" (really?), that they are "progressive", and that
there sometimes is corruption, all together presumably leading to a bias in favor of Jews?
Finally, the author's suggestion for changing admittance criteria is down-right bizarre for a conservative: The proposal is
a centralized solution that he aims to force upon the various private universities, each who can only loose from implementing
it.
Despite the long detailed (but extremely flawed) article, I am afraid that it is more a reflection of the author's biases than
of admissions biases.
Both the article and the comments are illuminating. My takeaways:
1) Affirmative action in favor of blacks and Hispanics is acknowledged.
2) Admissions officers in the Ivy League appear to limit Asian admissions somewhat relative to the numbers of qualified applicants.
3) They may also admit somewhat more Jewish applicants than would be warranted relative to their comparative academic qualifications.
The degree to which this is true is muddled by the difficulty of identifying Jews by surnames, by extensive intermarriage, by
changing demographics within the Jewish population, by geographic factors, and by the propensity to apply in the first place.
4) (My major takeaway.) White Protestants and Catholics are almost certainly the sole groups that are greatly under-represented
relative to their qualifications as well as to raw population percentages.
5) This is due partly to subtle or open discrimination.
6) I would hypothesize that a great many of the white Protestants and Catholics who are admitted are legacies, star athletes,
and the progeny of celebrities in entertainment, media, politics, and high finance. White Protestant or Catholic applicants, especially
from the hinterlands, who don't fit one of these special categories–though they must be a very large component of Mr Unz's pool
of top talent–are out of luck.
7) And everyone seems to think this is just fine.
The inner and outer ring idea seems to me an excellent one, though the likelihood of it happening is next to nil, both because
some groups would lose disproportionate access and because the schools' imprimatur would be diminished in
value.
The larger point, made by several respondents, is that far too many institutions place far too much weight on the credentials
conferred by a small group of screening institutions. The great advantage of the American system is not that it is meritocratic,
either objectively or subjectively. It is that it is–or was–Protean in its flexibility. One could rise through luck or effort
or brains, with credentials or without them, early in life or after false starts and setbacks. And there were regional elites
or local elites rather than, as we increasingly see, a single, homogenized national elite. Success or its equivalent wasn't something
institutionally conferred.
The result of the meritocratic process is that we are making a race of arrogant, entitled overlords, extremely skilled at the
aggressive and assertive arts required to gain admission to, and to succeed in, a few similar and ideologically skewed universities
and colleges; and who spend the remainder of their lives congratulating each other, bestowing themselves on the populace, and
destroying the country.
This article is the product of careful and thoughtful research, and it identifies a problem hiding in plain sight. As a society,
we have invested great trust in higher education as a transformative institution. It is clear that we have been too trusting.
That the admissions policies of elite universities are meritocratic is hardly the only wrong idea that Americans have about
higher education. Blind faith in higher education has left too many people with largely worthless degrees and crushing student-loan
debt.
Of course, the problems don't end with undergraduate education. The "100 reasons NOT to go to grad school" blog offers some
depressing reading:
The higher education establishment has failed to address so many longstanding internal structural problems that it's hard to
imagine that much will change anytime soon.
"I believe that this article raises – and then inappropriately immediately dismisses – the simplest and most likely reason
for the over-representation of Jewish students at Ivy League Schools in the face of their declining bulk academic performance:
They apply to those schools in vastly disproportionate numbers."
Here's the problem with that point. What Ron Unz demonstrates, quite effectively, is that today's Jews simply don't measure
up to either their Asian or their White Gentile counterparts in terms of actual performance when they get into, say, Harvard.
The quite massive difference in the proportions of those groups who get into Phi Beta Kappa renders this quite undeniable. What
is almost certain is that policies that favored Asians and White Gentiles over the current crop of Jewish students would create
a class of higher caliber in terms of academic performance.
If indeed it's true that Jews apply to Harvard in greater numbers, then, if the desire is to produce a class with the greatest
academic potential, some appropriate way of correcting for the consequent distortion should be introduced. Certainly when it comes
to Asians, college admissions committees have found their ways of reducing the numbers of Asians admitted, despite their intense
interest in the Ivies.
One way of understanding Unz's results here might be not so much that today's Jewish student is far less inclined to hard academic
work than those of yesteryear, but rather that others - White Gentiles and Asians - have simply caught up in terms of motivation
to get into elite schools and perform to the best of their abilities.
Certainly among members of the upper middle class, there has been great, and likely increasing, emphasis in recent years on
the importance of an elite education and strong academic performance for ultimate success. This might well produce a much stronger
class of students at the upper end applying to the Ivies.
It may be that not only the Asians, but upper middle class White Gentiles, are "The New Jews".
I don't always agree with, Mr. Unz, but his expositions are always provocative and informative. As far as the criticisms of
his data set go, he openly admits that they are less than ideal. However, the variances are so large that the margin of error
can be excused. Jews are 40 TIMES more likely to be admitted to Harvard than Gentile whites. Asians are 10 times more likely.
Of course, it could be possible that Jews, because of higher average IQs, actually produce 40 times as many members in the upper
reaches of the cognitive elite.
Given Richard Lynn's various IQ studies of Jews and the relative preponderance of non-Jewish and Jewish whites in the population,
however, whites ought to have a 7 to 1 representation vis-a-vis Jews in Ivy League institutions, assuming the IQ cutoff is 130.
Their numbers are roughly equivalent instead.
Because Ivy League admissions have been a hotbed of ethnic nepotism in the past, it seems that special care should be taken
to avoid these improprieties (or the appearance thereof) in the future. But no such safeguards have been put in place. David Brooks
has also struck the alarm about the tendency of elites to shut down meritocratic institutions once they have gained a foothold:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-elites-stink.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
Clannish as the WASPs may have been, they were dedicated enough to ideals of fairness and equality that they opened the doors
for their own dispossession. I predict that a new Asian elite will eventually eclipse our Jewish elite. Discrimination and repression
can restrain a vigorously ascendant people but for so long. When they do, it will be interesting to see if this Asian cohort clings
to its longstanding Confucian meritocratic traditions, embodied in the Chinese gaokao or if it too will succumb to the temptation,
ever present in a multiethnic polity, of preferring ethnic kinsmen over others.
Does anyone know how a minority such as the Uighurs fares in terms of elite Chinese university admissions?
This may sound like special-pleading, but it's not clear that full-scale IQ measures are meaningful when assessing and predicting
Jewish performance. Jewish deficits on g-loaded spatial reasoning task may reflect specific visuo-spatial deficits and not deficits
in g. As far as I know, no one doubts that the average Jewish VIQ is at least 112 (and possibly over 120). This score may explain
jewish representation which seems to exceed what would be projected by their full-scale iq scores. Despite PIQ's correllation
to mathematical ability in most populations, we ought also remember that, at least on the WAIS, it is the VIQ scale that includes
the only directly mathematical subtest. We should also note that Jewish mathematicians seem to use little visualization in their
reasoning (cf. Seligman
That said, I basically agree that Jews are, by and large, coasting. American Jews want their children to play hockey and join
'greek life' and stuff, not sit in libraries . It's sad for those of us who value the ivory tower, but understandable given their
stigmatiziation as a nerdish people.
I wonder if it would be at all possible to assess the political biases of admissions counselors at these schools by assessing
the rates at which applicants from red states are admitted to the elite universities. I suppose you would have to know how many
applied, and those data aren't likely to exist in the public domain.
One major flaw with this article's method of determining Jewish representation: distinctive Jewish surnames in no way make
up all Jewish surnames. Distinctive Jewish surnames happen to be held by only 10-12% of all American Jews. In fact, the third
most common American Jewish surname after Cohen and Levy is Miller. Mr. Unz' methodology does not speak well for itself, given
that he's comparing a limited set of last names against a far more carefully scrutinized estimate.
I'm not suggesting his estimate of national merit scholars and the like is off by a full 90%, but he's still ending up with
a significant undercount, possibly close to half. That would still mean Jews may be "wrongfully" over-represented are many top
colleges and universities, but the disproportion is nowhere near as nefarious as he would suggest.
@Nick – the "red state" application and admission rates isn't useful data.
Short answer: There are many reasons for this, but basically, historical momentum and comfort play a much bigger role in where
kids apply than we think. I assure you, far more top Nebraska HS seniors want to be a Cornhusker than a Crimson, even though many
would find a very receptive consideration and financial aid package.
Long answer: 1st, although this article and discussion have been framed in broad racial/cultural terms, the mechanics of college
admissions are mostly local and a bit like athletic recruiting – coverage (and cultivation) of specific regions and districts,
"X" high school historically deliver "X" kinds of candidates, etc. So to the degree we may see broader trends noted in the article
and discussion, some of that is rooted at the HS level and lower.
2nd, in "red states", most Ivy applicants come from the few blue or neutral districts. E.g.: the only 2 Utah HS's that consistently
have applicants to my Ivy alma mater are in areas that largely mirror other high-income, Dem-leaning areas nationwide rather than
the rest of Utah.
3rd, but, with some variation among the schools, the Ivy student body is more politically balanced than usually assumed. Remember,
most students are upper-income, Northeastern suburban and those counties' Dem/Rep ratio is often closer to 55/45 than 80/20.
But to wrap up, ideology plays a negligible role in admissions generally (there's always an exception); they have other fish
to fry (see below).
"Quota against Asians" is not entirely wrong, but it's too strong because it implies the forward intent is about limiting their
numbers.
Put another way, Unz believes the Ivies are failing their meritocractic mission by over-admitting a group that is neither disadvantaged
nor has highest technical credentials; and this comes at the expense of a group that is more often disadvantaged and with higher
technical credentials. The Ivies would likely reply, "well, we define 'meritocractic mission' differently".
That may be a legitimate counter, but it's also what needs more expansion and sunlight.
But Unz' analysis has a broader causation vs correlation gap. Just because admissions is essentially zero-sum doesn't mean
every large discrepancy in it is, even after allowing for soft biases. I've mentioned these earlier in passing, but here are just
a couple other factors of note:
Admissions is accountable for selection AND marketing and matriculation – these are not always complementary forces. Essentially,
you want to maximize both the number and distribution (racial, geographic, types of accomplishment, etc.) of qualified applicants,
but also the number you can safely turn down but without discouraging future applications, upsetting certain stakeholders (specific
schools, admissions counselors/consultants, etc.) or "harming" any data in the US News rankings. And you have a very finite time
to do this, and – not just your competition, but the entire sector – is essentially doing this at the same time. You can see how
an admissions process would develop certain biases over time to limit risks in an unpredictable, high volume market, even if rarely
intended to target a specific group. Ivy fixation (but especially around HYP) is particularly concentrated in the Northeast –
a sample from several top HS' across America (public and private) would show much larger application and matriculation variations
among their top students than would be assumed from Unz's thesis. Different Ivies have different competitors/peers, which influences
their diversity breakdowns – to some degree, they all co-compete, but just as often don't. E.g.: Princeton often overlaps with
Georgetown and Duke, Columbia with NYU and Cooper Union, Cornell with SUNY honors programs because it has some "in state" public
colleges, etc.
There's much more, of course, but returning to Unz's ethnographic thesis, I have this anecdote: we have two friends in finance,
whose families think much of their success. The 1st is Asian, went to Carnegie Mellon, and is a big bank's trading CTO; the 2nd
is Jewish, went to Wharton, and is in private equity.
Put another way, while both families shared a pretty specific vision of success, they differed a lot in the execution. The
upper echelon of universities, and the kinds of elite-level mobility they offer, are much more varied than even 25 years ago.
While the relative role of HYP in our country, and their soft biases in admission, are "true enough" to merit discussion, it's
probably not the discussion that was in this article.
While you may have a point as to the difficulty in some cases of identifying a Jewish surname, the most important thing methodologically
is that the criteria be performed uniformly if one is comparing Jewish representation today vs. that of other periods. I can't
think, for example, of any reason that Cohens or Levys or Golds should be any less well represented today as opposed to many years
ago if indeed there has not been an underlying shift in numbers of Jews in the relevant categories. (Nor, for that matter, should
issues like intermarriage affect the numbers much here - for every mother whose maiden name is Cohen who marries a non-Jew with
a non-Jewish surname, and whose half Jewish child will be counted as non-Jewish, there is, on average, going to be a man named
Cohen who will marry a non-Jew, and whose half Jewish child will be counted as Jewish.)
One might suppose that all this "inequity" and "discrimination" matters if we're keeping score. However, seems to me that too
much emphasis is typically placed on equality whereas real criteria in productive and satisfying lives are neglected. Kind'a like
some people wanting bragging rights as much, if not more, than wanting positive reality.
I guess I just went about my way and lived a pretty god life (so far). Who knows?; maybe those "bragging rights" are meaningful.
Ditto to many comments about the "last name problem", even if its correction weakens but doesn't invalidate the argument. (One
imagines, chillingly, a new sub-field: "Jewish last name theory", seeking to determine proportionalities of classic names validated
against member/donor lists of synagogues and other Jewish organizations.)
Regarding the 20% inner ring suggestion, it suffers from its harsh transition. Consider a randomized derating scheme: a random
number between some lower bound (say 0.90) and 1.00 is applied to each score on the ranked applicant list.
The added noise provides warmth to a cold test scores list. Such an approach nicely captures the directive: "study hard, but
it's not all about the grades".
By adjusting the lower bound, you can get whatever degree of representativeness relative to the application base you want.
That it's a "just a number" (rather than a complex subjectivity-laden labyrinth incessantly hacked at by consultants) could
allow interesting conversations about how it could relate to the "top 1% / bottom 50%" wealth ratio. The feedback loop wants closure.
You missed my point, candid. A relatively small proportion of Jews, intermarried or otherwise, have distinctive Jewish names.
I didn't make that 10-12% figure up. It's been cited in numerous local Jewish population studies and is used in part (but certainly
far from whole) to help estimate those populations. It's also been significantly dragged down over the years as the Jewish population
(and hence the surname pool) has diversified, not just from intermarriage, but in-migration from groups who often lack "distinctive
Jewish surnames" such as Jews from the former Soviet Union. Consider also that for obvious reasons, Hillel, which maintains Jewish
centers on most campus, has an incentive to over-report by a bit. Jewish populations on college campuses in the distant past were
easier to gather, given that it was far less un-PC to simply point blank inquire what religious background applicants came from.
Again, I'm not saying there isn't a downward trend in Jewish representation among high achievers (which, even if one were to
accept Unz's figures, Jews would still be triple relative to were they "should" be). But Unz has made a pretty significant oversight
in doing his calculations. That may happen to further suit his personal agenda, but it's not reality.
This is interesting, but I suspect mostly bogus, based on your not having a decent algorithm for discovering if someone's Jewish.
I'm not sure what exact mechanism you're using to decide if a name is Jewish, but I'm certain it wouldn't have caught anyone,
including myself, in my father's side of the family (Sephardic Jews from Turkey with Turkish surnames), nor my wife's family,
an Ellis Island Anglo name. Or probably most of the people in her family. And certainly watching for "Levi, Cohen and Gold*" isn't
going to do anything.
Isn't the point about Jewish over representation in the Ivy League about absolute numbers?
Yes the Jewish demographic has a higher IQ at 115 to the Goyishe Kop 100 but Jewish people are only 2% of the population so
you have 6 million Jewish people vying with 200 million white Goys for admission to the Ivy League and future control of the levers
of power. That is a 33 times larger Bell curve so the right tail of the Goys' Bell curve is still much larger than the Jewish
Bell curve at IQ levels of 130 and 145, supposedly there are seven times more Goys with IQs of 130 and over 4 times more Goys
with IQs of 145. So why the equality of representation, one to one, Jewish to white Goy in the Ivy Leagues?
Russell K. Nieli on study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford (mentioned by Unz):
"When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes
astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as
similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely.
These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade
and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low."
Having worked with folks from all manner of "elite" and not so elite schools in a technical field, the main conclusion I was
able to draw was folks who went to "elite" colleges had a greater degree of entitlement. And that's it.
If all of the author's suspicions are correct, the most noteworthy takeaway would be that Jewish applicants have absolutely
no idea that they are being given preferential treatment when applying to Ivys.
Not that they think they are being discriminated against or anything, but no Jewish high school student or their parents think
they have any kind of advantage, let alone such a huge one. Someone should tell all these Jews that they don't need to be so anxious!
Also, I know this is purely anecdotal but having gone to an ivy and knowing the numbers of dozens of other Jews who have also
gone, I don't think I have ever witnessed a "surprise" acceptance, where someone got in with a score under the median.
I don't doubt for a minute that it's increasingly difficult for Asian students to get into so-called "elite" universities.
Having grown up in that community, I know a lot of people who were pressured into applying at Harvard and Yale but ended up *gasp*
going to a very good local school. My sarcasm aside, we can't really deny that having Harvard on your CV can virtually guarantee
a ticket to success, regardless of whether or not you were just a C student. It happens.
But what worries me about that is the fact that I know very well how hard Asian families tend to push their children. They
do, after all, have one of the highest suicide rates and that's here in the US. If by some means the Asian population at elite
universities is being controlled, as I suspect it is, that's only going to make tiger mothers push their children even harder.
That's not necessarily a good thing for the child's psyche, so instead of writing a novel here, I'll simply give you this link.
Since the author brought up the subject of Amy Chua and her book, I think it's a pretty fitting explanation of the fears I have
for my friends and their children if this trend is allowed to continue.
As a former admissions staff person at Princeton, I always sigh when I read articles on elite college admissions processes
which build cases on data analysis but which fail to consult with admissions experts on the interpretation of that data.
I am neither an expert in sociology, nor am I a statistician, but I have sat in that chair, reading thousands of essays, and
I have a few observations:
The most selective part of any college's admissions process is the part where students themselves decides whether or not to apply.
Without data on the actual applicant sets, it is, at the least, misleading to attribute incongruities between the overall population's
racial/ethnic/income/what-have-you characteristics and the student bodies' make-ups entirely to the admission decisions. The reality
is that there is always a struggle in the admission offices to compensate for the inequities that the applicant pool itself delivers
to their doorsteps. An experienced admission officer can tell you that applicants from cultures where academics and education
are highly valued, and where the emphasis on a single test is quite high, will generally present with very high SAT scores. Race
does not seem to be correlated, but immigrant status from such a culture is highly correlated. (This may partially explain Unz's
observation of a "decline" in Jewish scores, although I also do not believe that the surname tool for determining which scores
are "Jewish" holds much water.) One of the reasons that such students often fare less well in holistic application processes is
that the same culture that produces the work ethic and study skills which benefit SAT performance and GPA can also suppress activities
and achievement outside of the academic arena. Therefore, to say that these students are being discriminated against because of
race is a huge assumption. The true questions is whether the students with higher test scores are presenting activity, leadership
and community contributions comparable to other parts of the applicant pool which are "overrepresented". All of these articles
seem to miss the point that a freshman class is a fixed size pie chart. Any piece that shrinks or grows will impact the other
slices. My first thought upon reading Unz' argument that the Asian slice shrank was, "What other pieces were forced to grow?"
Forced growth in another slice of the class is the more likely culprit for this effect, much more likely than the idea that all
of the Ivies are systematically discriminating against the latest victim. I could go on and on, but will spare you! My last note
is to educate Mr. Unz on what an "Assistant Director" is in college admissions. Generally that position is equivalent to a Senior
Admission Officer (one step up from entry level Admission Officer), while the head of the office might be the Dean and the next
step down from that would be Associate Deans (not Assistant Directors). So while Michelle Hernandez was an Assistant Director,
she was not the second in charge of Admissions, as your article implies. A minor distinction, but one which is important to point
out so that her expertise and experience, as well as my own, as AN Assistant Director of Admission at Princeton, are not overstated.
A last personal note: During Princeton's four month reading season, I worked 7 days a week, usually for about 14 hours a day,
in order to give the fullest, most human and considerate reading of each and every applicant that I could give. I am sure that
the admission profession has its share of incompetents, corruptible people and just plain jerks, and apparently some of us are
not intelligent enough to judge the superior applicants . . . . But most of us did it for love of the kids at that age (they are
all superstars!), for love of our alma maters and what they did for us, and because we believed in the fairness of our process
and the dignity with which we tried to do it.
The sheer numbers of applicants and the fatigue of the long winters lend themselves to making poor jokes such as the "Night
of 1000 Lee's", but a good dean of admission will police such disrespect, and encourage the staff, as mine did, to read the last
applicant of the day with the same effort, energy and attention paid to the first. We admission folk have our honor, despite being
underpaid and playing in a no-win game with regard to media coverage of our activities. I am happy to be able to speak up for
the integrity of my former colleagues and the rest of the profession.
My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions.
When these Ivy League institutions were first begun in the colonial period, they were not strictly speaking meritocratic. The
prevailing idea was that Christocentric education is the right way to go, both from an eschatological and a temporal perspective,
and the central focus was on building and strengthening family ties. The Catholic institutions of higher learning took on the
vital role of preserving Church tradition from apostolic times and were thus more egalitarian and universalist. The results went
far beyond all expectations.
Nothing lasts forever. Your premise misses the essential point that the economy is for man and not vice-versa.
Many of the statements in this article relating to Jews are rather misleading: for while the Hillel data regarding percentage
of students who self-identify as Jews may be fairly accurate, the numbers the author cites based upon "likely Jewish names" are
a gross under-count of the real numbers, leading to the appearance of a large disparity between the two which, in reality, does
not exist. The reason for the under-count is that a large percentage of American Jews have either Anglicized their family name
or intermarried, resulting in their being mistaken for non-Hispanic whites. Thus, one ends up with incorrect statements such as
"since 2000, the percentage (of Jewish Putnam Fellows) has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in
the last seven years". The reality is that Jews, by Hillel's definition of self-identified students, have continued to be prominent
among the Putnam Fellows, US IMO team members, and high scorers in the USA Mathematical Olympiad. I have published a careful analysis
of the true ethnic/racial composition of the very top-performing students in these math competitions from recent years (see, Andreescu
et al. Notices of the AMS 2008; http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf
). For example, Daniel Kane, a Putnam Fellow in 2002-2006, is 100% of Jewish ancestry; his family name had been Cohen before
it was changed. Brian Lawrence was a Putnam Fellow in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011; his mother is Jewish. Furthermore, many of the
non-Jewish Putnam Fellows in recent years are Eastern European or East-Asian foreigners who matriculated to college in the US;
they were not US citizen non-Jewish whites or Asian-Americans, respectively. Rather, my data indicate that in recent years both
Jews and Asians have been 10- to 20-over-represented in proportion to their percentage of the US population among the students
who excel at the highest level in these math competitions. The authors conclusions based upon data from other types of competitions
is likely similarly flawed.
The title of this piece captured me to read what it was all about. What was discussed was admissions into elite colleges as
the only focus on "meritocracy" in America. That leaves the tail of the distribution of high IQ people in America, minus those
that make it into elite colleges, to be ignored, especially those that managed to be admitted to Cal Tech, or MIT, or a number
of other universities where significant intellectual power is admitted and fostered. this seems to further the meme that only
the elite graduates run the nation. They may have an early advantage through connections, but I believe that the Fortune 400 CEO's
are fairly evenly spread across the university world.
(1) Jews are better at verbal IQ, Asians at math. Your measures are all math. That woudl be OK if all else were equal across
time, but especially because Jews care a lot about admissions to Ivies, what we'd expect is that with growing Asian competition
in math/science, Jews would give up and focus their energy on drama/writing/service. I wonder if Jewish kids are doing worse in
music competitions too? Or rather- not even entering any more.
(2) For college numbers, adjustment for US/foreign is essential. How many Asians at Yale are foreign? It could well be that
Asian-Americans are far more under-represented than it seems, because they face quota competition from a billion Chinese and a
billion Indians. Cal Tech might show the same result as the Ivies.
(3) A separate but interesting study would be of humanities and science PhD programs. Different things are going on there,
and the contrast with undergrads and with each other might be interseting.
I also learned that Jews are no longer as prominent in math and science achievement, and that's not surprising to me at
all, because everyone in the elite knows that STEM is for Asians and middle-class kids. Jewish parents have learned that colleges
value sports and "leadership" activities more than raw academic achievement and nerdy activities like math olympiads, and that
the most prestigious careers are value transference activities which don't require science or high-level math.
The higher representation of Jews in the Ivies compared to Asians who have better average academic records compared to Jews
(applicants that is ) in the Ivies is due to the greater eligibility of Jews for preferences of every kind in the Ivies. In a
typical Ivy school like Harvard, at least 60% of the freshman class will disappear because of the vast system of preferences that
exists. There is no doubt that there is racial animus involved despite the denials of the Ivies and other private universities
despite the constant denials involved like that of Rosovsky who happens to be a historian by training. Jews are classified as
white in this country, hence there would presumably greater affinity for them among the white Board of Trustees and the adcom
staff. This is in contrast to Asians who do not share the same culture or body physiogonomy as whites do.
I had read the Unz article and the Andrew Goldman response to it. I just do not agree with Unz with his solutions to this problem.
First of all private schools are not going to give legacy preferences and other kinds of preferences for the simple reason that
it provides a revenue stream. Harvard is nothing but a business just like your Starbucks or Mcdonald's on the corner.
Around the world private universities regarded as nothing but the dumping ground of the children of the wealthy, the famous
and those with connections who cannot compete with others with regards to their talent and ability regardless of what anyone will
say from abroad about the private universities in their own country. Bottomline is in other countries , the privates simply do
not get the top students in the country, the top public school does. People in other countries will simply look askance at the
nonsensical admissions process of the Ivies and other private schools, the system that the Ivies use for admission does not produce
more creative people contrary to its claims.
The Goldman response has more to do with the humanities versus math . My simple response to Andrew Goldman would be this :
a grade of A in Korean history is different from a grade of A in Jewish history, it is like comparing kiwis and bananas. The fast
and decisive way of dealing with this problem is simply to deprive private schools of every single cent of tax money that practices
legacy preferences and other kinds repugnant preferences be it for student aid or for research and I had been saying that for
a long time. I would like to comment on the many points that had been raised here but I have no time.
The solution to a lot of problems would be transparency. I'd love to see the admissions and grade data of even one major university.
Public universities should be required to post publicly the names, SAT scores, and transcripts of every student. Allowing such
posting should be a requirement for admission.
The public could then investigate further if, for example, it turned out that children of state senators had lower SAT scores.
Scholars could then analyze the effect of diversity on student performance.
Of course, already many public universities (including my own, Indiana), post the salaries of their professors on the web,
and I haven't seen much analysis or muckraking come out of that.
One factor hinted at in the article, but really needing to be addressed is the "school" that is being attended.
By this, I mean, you need philosophy students to keep the philosophy department going. When I was in college 20 years ago,
I was a humanities major. I took 1 class in 4 years with an Asian American student. 1 class. When I walked through the business
building, it was about 50% Asian.
Could Asian-American students only wanting to go to Harvard to go into business, science, or math be skewing those numbers?
I don't know, but it's just a thought to put out there.
You are preaching to the choir! I blog on this extensively on my Asian Blog: JadeLuckClub. This has been going on for the last
30 years or more! All my posts are here under Don't ID as Asian When Applying to College:
All private schools basically practice legacy prefrences and other kinds of preferences and this practice has been going on
in the Ivies since time immemorial. The income revenue from these gallery of preferences will certainly not encourage the Ivies
to give them up.
In many countries around the world, private universiites are basically the dumping ground for the children of the wealthy ,
the famous and the well connected who could not get into the top public university of their choice in their own country. This
no different from the Ivies in this country where these Ivies and other private universities are just a corral or holding pen
for the children of the wealthy, the famous and the well connected and the famous who could not compete with others based on their
won talent or ability.
Abroad you have basically 3 choices if you could not get into the top public university of that country , they are:
Go to a less competetive public university
Go to a private university
or go abroad to schools like the Ivies or in other countries where the entrance requirements to a public or private university
are less competetive compared to the top public universities in your own home country.
You can easily tell a top student from another country, he is the guy who is studying in this country under a government scholarship
( unless of course it was wrangled through corruption ). the one who is studying here through his own funds or through private
means is likely to be the one who is a reject from the top public university in his own country. That is how life works.
I am generally satisfied with the data that Ron provided about Jews compared to Asians where Jews are lagging behind Asians
at least in grades and SAT scores in the high school level, from the data I had seen posted by specialized schools in NY like
Stuy , Bronx Sci, Brook Tech, Lowell (Frisco ) etc.
Ron is correct in asserting that the Ivies little represents the top students in this country. Compare UCLA and for example.
For the fall 2011 entering freshman class at UCLA , there were 2391 domestic students at UCLA compared to 1148 at Harvard who
scored above 700 in the Math portion of the SAT and there were 439 domestic students who scored a perfect 800 in the Math portion
of the SAT at UCLA, more than Harvard or MIT certainly. For the fall 2012 freshman classs at UCLA the figure was 2409 and 447
respectively.
We can devise a freshman class that will use only income, SATS,grades as a basis of admissions that will have many top students
like UCLA has using only algorithms.
The central test of fairness in any admissions system is to ask this simple question. Was there anyone admitted under that
system admitted over someone else who was denied admission and with better grades and SAT scores and poorer ? If the answer is
in the affirmative, then that system is unfair , if it is in the negative then the system is fair.
I like the comments from Chales Hale. (Nov. 30, 2012) He says: "Welcome to China". It said all in three words. All of these
have been experienced in China. They said there is no new things under the sun. History are nothing but repeated, China with its
5000 years experienced them all.
I meant that there were 439 domestic students in the fall 2011 freshman class at UCLA and 447 domestic students in the fall
2012 freshman class at UCLA who scored a perfect score of 800 in the Math portion of the SAT. In either case it is bigger than
what Harvard or MIT has got.
In fact for the fall 2011 of the entire UC system there were more students in the the freshman class of the entire UC system
who scored above 700 in the Math portion of the SAT than the entire fall 2011 freshman of the Ivy League (Cornell not included
since it is both a public and a private school )'
As I mentioned earlier there were 2409 domestic students in the fall 2012 UCLA freshman class who scored above 700 in the Math
portion of the SAT. We know that Harvard had only 1148 domestic students in its fall 2011 freshman class who scored above 700
in the Math portion of the SAT, why would Harvard ever want to have that many top students like Berkeley or UCLA have ? The answer
to that is simple , it has to do with money. For every additional student that Harvard will enroll it would mean money being taken
out of the endowment .
Since the endowment needs constant replenishment. Where would these replenishment funds come from ? From legacies,from the
children of the wealthy and the famous etc. of course . It would mean more legacy admits, more children of the wealthy admitted
etc.
That would mean that the admission rate at Harvard will rise, the mean SAT score of the entering class will be no different from
the mean SAT scores of the entering freshman classes of Boston University and Boston College
down the road. With rising admission rates and lower mean SAT scores for the entering freshman class that prospect will not prove
appetizing or appealing to the applicant pool.
Harvard ranks only 8th after Penn State in the production of undergrads who eventually get Doctorates in Science and Engineering.
Of course Berkeley has the bragging rights for that kind of attribute.
In the scenario I had outlined above, it would mean that the mean SAT score of the Harvard freshman class will actually go
down if it tried to increase the size of its freshman class and that kind of prospect ia unpalatable to Harvard and that is the
reason as to why it wants to maintain its current " air of exclusivity ".
There is another way of looking at the quality of the Harvard student body. The ACM ICPC computer programming competition is
regarded as the best known college competition among students around the world , it is a grueling programming marathon for 2 or
3 days presumably. Teams from universities around the world vie to win the contest that is dubbed the "Battle of the Brains "
What is arguably sad is that Ivy schools, Stanford and other private schools teams fielded in the finals of the competition are
basically composed of foreign students or foreign born students and foreign born coaches.
The University of Southern California team in this competition in its finals section was made up of nothing but foreign Chinese
students and a Chinese coach. The USC team won the Southern California competition to win a slot in the finals. Apparently they
could not find a domestic student who could fill the bill. However the USC team was roundly beaten by teams from China and Asia,Russia
and Eastern Europe. The last time a US team won this competition was in 1999 by Harvey Mudd, ever since the US had gone downhill
in the competition with the competition being dominated by China and Asia and by countries from Eastern Europe and Russia. Well
I guess USC's strategy was trying to fight fire with fire (Chinese students studying in the US versus Chinese students from the
Mainland ), and it failed.
Thank you Mr. Unz for scratching the surface of the various forms of corruption surrounding elite college admissions. I hope
that your next article further discusses the Harvard Price (and Yale Price and Brown Price etc). The recent press surrounding
the Hong Kong couple suing the person they had retained to pave their children's way into Harvard indicates the extent of the
problem. This Hong Kong couple just were not savvy enough to lay their money down where it would produce results.
Additionally, a discussion of how at least some North Eastern private schools facilitate the corrupt process would be illuminating.
Finally, a more thorough discussion of whether the Asian students being admitted are US residents or nationals or whether they
are foreign citizens would also be worth while and reveal. I suspect, an even lower admit percentage for US resident citizens
of Asian ethnicity.
For these schools to state that their acceptances are need blind is patently untrue and further complicates the admissions process
for students who are naive enough to believe that. These schools should come clean and just say that after the development admits
and the wealthy legacy admits spots are purchased, the remaining few admits are handed out in a need blind fashion remembering
that many of admit pools will already be filled by the development and wealthy legacy admits resulting in extraordinarily low
rates for certain non-URM type candidates (I estimate in the 1% range).
"By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America's current population, one which is completely
misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination
have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe
for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form."
I completely agree that it is not healthy for one tiny segment of our population to basically hold all the key positions in
every major industry in this country. If Asians or Blacks (who look foreign) all of a sudden ran education, media, government,
and finance in this country, there would be uproar and resistance. But because Jewish people look like the majority (whites),
they've risen to the top without the masses noticing.
But Jewish people consider themselves a minority just like blacks and Asians. They have a tribal mentality that causes stronger
ethnic nepotism than most other minority groups. And they can get away with it because no one can say anything to them lest they
be branded "jew-hunters" or "anti-semists."
The question is, "where do we go from here?" True race-blind meritocracy will never be instituted on a grand scale in this
country both in education and in the work force. One group currently controls most industries and the only way this country will
see more balance is if other groups take more control. But if one group already controls them all and controls succession plans,
how will there ever be more balance?
If Jews become presidents or regents of universities, that's a credit to their ability. Nothing sinister there.
But when Jews (or anyone) buy into an institution to create the 'Goldman School of Business', or when they give large donations,
that is not a credit to anyone's ability and there may well be something sinister there.
It is no secret that corporations and individuals look for influence, if not control, in return for cash. The same thinking
can easily affect admissions policy.
It's always the same. In spite of all the jingoism about "democracy" and "freedoms" and the "free market capitalist system",
the trail of money obfuscates and corrupts. It is still very true that whoever pays the piper, calls the tune. And naive to believe
otherwise.
How recent was it that Princeton cancelled its anti-Semitism classes for lack of participation, and at least one Jewish organisation
was screaming that Princeton would never get another penny from any Jew, ever.
That is close to absolute control of a curriculum. I give you money, and you teach what I want you to teach.
How far is that from I give you money and you admit whom I want you to admit? Or from I give you money and you hire whom I
want?
A university that is properly funded by the government – "the people" – doesn't have these issues because there is nothing
you can buy.
Operating educational institutions as a business, just like charities and health care, will always produce this kind of corruption.
Two other points:
1. It occurred to me that the lowly-paid underachiever admissions officers might well have been mostly Jewish, and hired for
that reason, and that in itself could skew the results in a desired manner.
2. I think this is a serious criticism of the othewise excellent article:
At the end, Ron Unz wants us to believe that a $30-billion institution, the finest of its kind in the world, the envy of the
known universe and beyond, the prime educator of the world's most prime elites, completely abandons its entire admissions procedures,
without oversight or supervision, to a bunch of dim-witted losers of "poor human quality" who will now choose the entire next
generation of the nation's elites. And may even take cash payments to do so.
Come on. Who are you kidding? Even McDonald's is smarter than this.
Some of the comments suggest major problems with estimating who is Jewish. But the authors information is underpinned by data
collected by Jewish pressure groups for the purpose of ensuring the gravy train keeps flowing. It's either their numbers, or the
numbers are consistent with their numbers.
This article, to me, is shocking and groundbreaking. I don't think anyone has gone this in-depth into this biased and un-meritocratic
system. This is real analysis based on real numbers.
Why is this not getting more coverage in the media? Why are people so afraid to talk about this?
There is an excellent analysis of this article at The Occidental Observer by Kevin MacDonald, "Ron Unz on the Illusory
American Meritocracy". The MSM is ignoring Unz's article for obvious reasons.
I don't know if there's any truth behind the idea that Japanese Americans have become lazy relative to their Korean and Chinese
counterparts. I've grew up in Southern California, a part of the country with a relatively high percentage of Japanese Americans,
yet I've know very few other Japanese Americans in my life. I can recall one Japanese American classmate in jr. high, and one
Japanese classmate in my high school (who returned to Japan upon graduating). Even at the UC school I attended for undergrad,
I was always the only Japanese person in the every class, and the Japanese Student Association, already meager in numbers, was
almost entirely made up of Japanese International students who were only here for school.
If, in fact, 1% of California is made up of Japanese Americans, I suspect they are an aging population. I also think many 2nd
and 3rd generation Japanese Americans are only partially Japanese, since, out of necessity, Japanese Americans have a very high
rate of out marriage.
The carefully researched article makes a strong case that there is some discrimination against Asian-Americans at the Ivy League
schools.
On the other hand, I don't see how a percentage of 40-60% Asian-Americans at the selective UC schools, even given the higher
percentage of Asian-Americans in California, does not perhaps reflect reverse discrimation, or at least affirmative action on
their behalf. To be sure one way or the other, we would have to see their test scores AND GPA, apparently the criteria that the
UC schools use for admission, considered as well in the normalization of this statistical data.
The replies to date make some good points but also reflect precisely the biases pointed out in the article as likely causing
the discussed distortions.
1) use of name data in achievement vs use of Hillel data for Ivy admits: definitely an issue but is this only one of the measures
used in this study. Focusing only on this obscures the fact that Jewish enrollment as measured over time by Hillel numbers (apples
to apples) increased significantly over the past decade while the percent of Jewish high school age students relative to other
groups declined. One explanation for this surge could be that Jewish students became even more academically successful than they
have been in the past. The achievement data using Jewish surnames is used to assess this thesis in the absence of other better
data. Rejecting the surname achievement data still leaves a huge enrollment surge over time in Jewish attendance at the Ivies
relative to their percentage of the population.
2) many comments accept that the numbers show disproportionate acceptance and enrollment growth but simply then go on to assert
that Jewish students really are smarter (absolutely or in gaming the system) relying on anecdotal evidence that is not at all
compelling. All definitions of "smarter" contain value judgments". Back in the '20s the argument was that the Ivies should rely
more on objective testing to remove bias against the then high testing Jewish students; now the writers argue conveniently wthat
the new subjective tests that are applied to disproportionately admit Jewish students over higher scoring Asians and non-Jewish
Caucasians are better measures. In both cases, there is still an issue of using a set of factors that disproportionately favors
one group. In all such cases of significant disproportionate admits, the choice of the factors used to definemmerit and their
application should be carefully evaluated for bias. The burden of proof should shift to those defending the status quo in this
situation. In any event, it is clear that given the large applicant pool, there is no shortage of non-Jewish caucasians and Asians
who are fully qualified, so if the desire was there for a balanced entering class, the students are available to make it happen
3) the numbers don't break down admissions between men and women. When my child was an athletic recruit to Harvard, we received
an ethnic breakdown of the prior year's entering class. I was surprised to discover that the Caucasian population skewed heavily
male and the non-white/Asian population skewed heavily female. It seemed that Harvard achieved most of its ethnic diversity that
year by admitting female URMs, which made being a Caucasian female the single most underrepresented group relative to its percentage
in the school age population. I'm curious if this was an anomaly or another element of bias in the admissions process.
I will note that there is one flaw in this whole argument, and that flaw is thus:
Harvard and Yale aren't the best universities in the country. As someone who went to Vanderbilt, I knew people who had been
to those universities, and their evaluation was that they were no better – and perhaps actually worse – than Vanderbilt, which
is "merely" a top 25 university.
While there is a great deal of, shall we say, "insider trading" amongst graduates of those universities, in actuality they
aren't actually the best universities in the country today. That honor probably goes to MIT and Caltech, which you note are far
more meritocratic. But most of the other best universities are probably very close in overall level, and some of them might have
a lot of advantages over those top flight universities.
Or to put it simply, the Ivy League ain't what it used to be. Yeah, it includes some of the best universities in the country,
but there are numerous non-Ivy League universities that are probably on par with them. This may indeed be in part a consequence
of some of what you have described in the article, as well as a sense of complacency.
I suspect that in twenty or thirty years a lot of Ivy League graduates are going to feel a lot less entitled simply because
there has been an expansion of the top while they weren't paying attention.
I'm against the Ivies going up to 30-50% Asian but I'm also against the over-representation of a tiny minority group. This
country is going to go downhill if we continue to let one group skirt a fair application process just because they possess money
and influence. Who will stand up for fairness and equality?
Many of those commenting above don't seem to be picking up on Unz's evidence of bias against white Gentiles, which by meritocratic
measures is far worse than the bias against Asian Americans.
A drop of 70 PERCENT??? What's going on? Why is so much of the discussion that this article has spawned focused only on Asian
Americans and (secondarily) Jews?
National Merit Scholarship semifinalists are chosen based on per-state percentiles.
What this means is that NMS semifinalist numbers would be skewed _against_ a high-performing demographic group to the extent
that group's demographics concentrate geographically. Mr. Unz acknowledges that geographical skewing of Jewish populations is
huge. However, he ignores its effect on the NMS semifinalist numbers he uses as a proxy for academic performance on a _national_
level to predict equitable distributions at _national_ universities.
Please somebody explain to me how this oversight isn't fatal to his arguments
Surely the author must be aware that approximately half the children with "Jewish" names are not fully Jewish. Over half of
the marriages west of the Mississippi are reportedly mixed. Many non-Jews have last names that start with "Gold". Just these two
facts make the entire analysis ridiculous. Hillel does not keep statistics on how Jewish a student is, while many of Levys and
Cohens are not actually Jewish. What would we call Amy Chua's daughters? Jewish or Asian? It is therefore impossible to tease
out in a multi-racial society who is who.
I am an elementary school teacher at a Title One school in northern California. I supported your "English for the Children"
initiative when it was introduced.
However, the law of unintended consequences has kicked in, and what exists now is not at all what you (or anyone else, for that
matter) had intended.
The school day was not lengthened to create a time slot for English language instruction. Instead, history and science classes
were elbowed aside to make way for mediocre English language instruction. These usually worthless classes have crowded out valuable
core academic instruction for English language learners.
To make matters worse, while English language learners are in ESL classes, no academic instruction in science or history can
be given to "regular" students because that would lead to issues of "academic inequity." In other words, if the Hispanic kids
are missing out on history, the black kids have to miss out on it, too.
As a teacher, I hope you will once again consider bringing your considerable talents to focus on the education of low-income
minority children in California.
Could it be that the goal of financial, rather than academic, achievement, makes many young people uninterested in
competing in the science and math competitions sought out by the Asian students? I wonder about the different percentages
of applicants to medical school versus law or business.
I must also add that I am surprised that the author used the word "data" as singular, rather than plural. Shouldn't he be stating
that the data ARE, not IS; or SHOW, not SHOWS.
The author perhaps pays an incredible amount of attention to those with strengths in STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering,
and math), even though the proportion of all native-born white students majoring in these fields has plummetted in recent decades.
That means that he overlooks a shift in what kinds of training is considered "prestigious," and that this might be reflected in
the pursuits of students in high school. Perhaps there is a movement away from Jewish students' focus on Math Olympiad because
they are in no way interested in majoring in math or engineering fields, instead preferring economics or business. Is that the
fault of the students, or of the rewards system that corporate America has set up?
Jobs in STEM fields pay considerably less than do jobs in numerous professions - investment banking and law. So that is why
~ 40% of the Harvard graduating class - including many of its Jewish students - pursue that route. But to rely on various assessments
of math/science/computing as the measure of intelligence fails to incorporate how the rewards structure in our society has changed
over time.
I teach at an Ivy League university, and believe that many of the authors' arguments have merit, but there are also many weaknesses
in his argument. He sneers at Steinberg and the other sociologists he cites for not quite getting how society has changed - but
he clearly doesn' tunderstand how other aspects of our society have changed. Many of our most talented undergrads have no desire
to pursue careers in STEM fields. Entrance into STEM jobs even among those who majored in those fields is low, and there is very
high attrition from those fields, among both men and women. Young adults and young professionals are voting with their feet. While
our society might be better off with more Caltech grads and students interested in creating our way to a better future rather
than pursuing riches on wall street, one cannot fault students for seeking to maximize their returns on their expensive education.
That's the system we have presented them with, at considerable cost to the students and their families.
Personally, what I found profoundly disturbing is not the overrepresentation of Jewish students or the large presence of Asians
who feel they are discriminated against, but the fact that Ivy League schools have not managed to increase their representation
of Blacks for the last 3 decades. We all compete for the same talent pool. And until the K-12 system is improved, Black representation
won't increase without others screaming favoritism. The other groups - high performing Asians, middle class Jews - will do fine,
even if they don't get into Ivy League schools but have to "settle" for elite private schools. But if the Ivy Leagues are the
pathway to prestige and power, than we're not broadening our power base enough to adequately reprewsent the demographic shifts
reshaping our nation. more focus on that, please.
I've been an SAT tutor for a long time in West Los Angeles (a heavily Asian city), and I feel that at least some of Asians'
over-representation in SAT scores and NMS finalists is due to Asian parents putting massive time and money into driving their
children's success in those very statistics.
In my experience, Asian parents are more likely than other parents to attempt to ramrod their kids through test prep in order
to increase their scores. For example, the few students I've ever had preparing for the PSAT - most students prepare only for
the SAT - were all Asian.
Naturally, because it's so strange to be preparing for what is supposed to be a practice test, I asked these parents why their
9th or 10th grade child was in this class, and the answer was that they wanted to do well on the PSAT because of its use in the
NMS! Similarly, many Asian immigrants send their children to "cram school" every day after regular school lets out (and I myself
have taught SAT at one of these institutions), essentially having their students tutored in every academic subject year-round
from early in elementary school.
Because whites are unlikely to do this, it would seem to me that the resulting Asian academic achievement is analogous to baseball
players who use steroids having better stats than baseball players who do not.
It seems reasonable that the "merit" in "meritocracy" need not be based solely on test scores and grades, and that therefore
a race-based quota system is not the only conclusion that one can draw from a decrease in the attendance rate of hard-driving
test-preppers. Maybe the university didn't want to fill its dorms with grade-grubbers who are never seen because they're holed
up in the library 20 hours a day, and grade-grubbers just happen to be over-represented in the Asian population?
Unz's piece analyzes only the data that lead up to college - when the Asian parents' academic influence over their children
is absolute - whereas the Ivy League schools he criticizes are most concerned with what their students do during and after college.
Is the kid who went to cram school his entire life as likely to join student organizations? To continue practicing his four instruments
once his mom isn't forcing him to take lessons 4 days a week? To start companies and give money to his university? Or did he just
peak early because his parents were working him so hard in order to get him into that college?
However, the remedies considered are not. It is silly to believe that all abilities can be distilled into a small set of numbers,
and anyway, no one knows what abilities will succeed in marketplaces. The source of the problem is the lack of competition in
education, including higher education, a situation written in stone by current accreditation procedures. The solution to the problem
is entry. Remember Brandeis U? With sufficient competition, colleges could take whomever they pleased, on whatever grounds, and
everyone would get a chance.
Concerning the drop in non-Jewish white enrollment:
I am a recent graduate of a top public high school, where I was a NMS, individual state champion in Academic Decathlon, perfect
ACT score, National AP Scholar, etc. etc. Many of my friends – almost exclusively white and Asian – had similar backgrounds and
were eminently qualified for Ivy. None of us even applied Ivy, let alone considered going there. Why? At $60,000/yr, the cost
is simply not worth it, since none of us would have been offered anything close to substantial financial aid and our parents were
unable/unwilling to fully fund our educations. Meanwhile, my Asian friends applied to as many Ivies as they could because it was
understood that (a) their parents would foot the bill if they got in or (b) they would take on a large debt load in order to do
it.
This article discounts financial self-selection, which (at least based on my own, anecdotal evidence) is more prevalent than
we tend to think.
The author ignores the role that class plays in setting kids up for success. At one point he notes, "Given that Asians
accounted for just 1.5 percent of the population in 1980 and often lived in relatively impoverished immigrant families. . ."
When I was at Harvard in the mid-1980s, there were two distinct groups of Asian students: children of doctors, academics, scientists
and businesspeople who came from educated families in China, Korea and Vietnam, and therefore grew up with both strong educational
values and parental resources to push them; and a much smaller group of kids from Chinatown and Southeast Asian communities,
whose parents were usually working class and uneducated. The second group were at a severe disadvantage to the first, who were
able to claim "diversity" without really having to suffer for it.
I would expect you'd see the same difference among higher-caste educated South Asian Brahmins and Indians from middle and
lower castes or from places like Guyana. It is ridiculous to put South Asians and East Asians in the same category as "Asian."
They have different cultural traditions and immigration histories. Ask any Indian parent what race they are and they'll answer
"Caucasian." Grouping them without any kind of assessment of how they might be different undermines the credibility of the
author.
The takeaway is not that affirmative action is damaging opportunities for whites, but that whites are losing against Asians.
The percentage of Hispanic and Black students at leading schools is still tiny. Hence, if invisible quotas for Asians are lifted,
there will be far fewer white students at these schools. This isn't because of any conspiracy, but because white students are
scoring lower than the competition on the relevant entry requirements. I would love to see an article in this publication titled,
"Why White Students Are Deficient." How about some more writing about "The White Student Achievement Gap?"
As parents of 2 HYP grads, We can tell you from experience that Asian students are not under-represented in the Ivies today.
(In fact, I think they are slightly over represented, for the same reasons and stats the author cited).
True, if one looks at stats, such as SAT, scientific competition awards etc, it seems to imply that a +35% enrollment of Asian
students is warranted. However, these indicators are just a small part of a "holistc" approach in predicting the success of a
candidate not only in the next 4 years, but the individual's success in life and be able to impact and contribute to society later.
I have seen candidates of Asian background, who score almost full mark in SAT but was less than satisfactory in all other aspects
of being a potential achiever in life.
Granted, if one wants to be an achiever in science and technology, by all means go with Caltech and MIT. But if one wants an
real "education" and be a leader later on in life, one has to have other qualities as well (skin color is NOT one of them). Of
course, history, and current cultural and political climate may influence the assessment of such qualities because it is highly
subjective. (Is is unfair to pick a pleasant looking candidate over a lesser one, if the rest are the same?)
That is why an interview with the candidates is a good way to assess a potential applicant. I always encourage my children
to conduct interviews locally for their alma mater.
I just hope that the Ivies do not use this holistic approach to practice quota policies.
Here's a quote from a friend just today about this related topic: "Just like the Catholic church in the middle ages recruited
the smartest peasants in order to forestall revolutionary potential, and to learn mind bending religious dogma to befuddle the
remaining peasants, current practice is much the same. To twist Billy Clinton's mantra, "its the economy stupid", No ,"its the
co opted brains"! "
We can substitute economics dogma to the befuddlement mix. The bottom line is every ruling elite has co-opted the top 1%-5%
of high wage earners, to make the pyramid work. Sociology writing is all over this. Veblen, Weber, etc. We can see this little
group created everywhere minerals or natural resources are coveted by private empires.
The universities are doing exactly what they are supposed to do to protect the interests of the Trustees and Donors who run
them for a reason. They are a tool of, not a cause of, the inequality and over-concentration. It is interesting how the story
goes into hairsplitting and comparing Asians to others, etc. But, the real story is a well understood sociology story. This article
explains why Napoleon established free public education after the French Revolution.
This is a fascinating article. So much data. So many inferences. It's hardly surprising to any parent of high school students
that college admissions are only marginally meritocratic. Whether that's a good a thing or a bad thing is an open question. I
think meritocracy has a place in college admissions. But not the only place. Consider athletics, which are themselves almost exclusively
meritocratic. Only the best among the best are offered Division I scholarships. The same, I think, applies to engineering schools,
the physical sciences, and (to a lesser degree), elite law schools. It also applies to auto-mechanics, plumbers, and electricians.
Regarding the humanities (a field in which I hold a PhD), not so much. I think Unz's beef is less with admissions policies per
se (which I agree are mind-bogglingly opaque) than with the status of elite institutions. I also think, and I may be wrong, that
Unz appears heading down the Bobby Fisher highway, intimating that those pesky Jews are
America never promised success through merit or equality. That is the American "dream." America promises freedom of
religious belief and the right to carry a gun.
This is a fascinating and extremely important article which I am very eager to discuss privately with the author, having spent
my whole life in higher education, albeit with a unique perspective. I was flabbergasted the findings about Jewish and non-Jewish
white representation, and intrigued, all the more so since my own ancestry is evenly divided between those two groups. I do want
to make one criticism, however of something the author said about the 1950s which I do not think is correct.
At one point in the article the author makes the claim that the breakdown of Ivy League Jewish quotas in the 1950s reflected
the power of Jews in the media and Hollywood. The statistics he gives about their representation there may be correct, but the
inference, I believe, is unsustainable. The Proquest historical database includes the Washington Post, New York Times, and many
other major newspapers. I did a search for "Harvard AND Jewish AND quota" for the whole period 1945-65 and it turned up only 20
articles, not one of which specifically addressed the issue of Jewish quotas at Harvard and other Ivy League schools. The powerful
Jews of that era had reached their positions by downplaying their origins–often including changes in their last names–and they
were not about to use their positions overtly on behalf of their ethnic group. (This could be, incidentally, another parallel
with today's Asians.) Those quotas were broken down, in my opinion, because of a general emphasis on real equality among Americans
in those decades, which also produced the civil rights movement. The Second World War had been fought on those principles.
I could not agree more that the admissions policies of the last 30 years have produced a pathetic and self-centered elite that
has done little if any good for the country as a whole.
It is really refreshing to see in print what we all know by experience, but I have to wonder out loud, what is our higher purpose?
Surely, you have a largely goal than merely exposing corruption in the academy. Lastly, I have to wonder out loud, how would the
predicament of the working class fit into your analysis? I thank you for this scathing indictment of higher ed that has the potential
to offer us a chillingly sobering assessment.
This is why we need to reinstate a robust estate tax or "death tax" as conservatives derisively call it. To break the aristocracy
described in this article. No less than Alexis de Tocqueville said that the estate tax is what made America great and created
a meritocracy (which now is weaker and riddled with loopholes, thus the decline of America). Aristocracies dominated Europe for
centuries because they did not tax the inheritance.
The day when I learned so many Chinese ruling class' offspring are either alumni or current students of Harvard (the latest
example being Bo GuaGua), it was clear to me Harvard's admission process is corrupt. How would any ivy college determine "leadership"
quality? Does growing up in a leader's family give you more innate leadership skills? Harvard obviously thinks so.
Therefore, it's not surprising that Ron said the following on this subject. " so many sons and daughters of top Chinese leaders
attend college in the West ..while our own corrupt admissions practices get them an easy spot at Harvard or Stanford, sitting
side by side with the children of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush." I hope world peace will be obtained within reach
in this approach.
The chilling factor is a hardworking Chinese immigrant's child in the U.S. would have less chance of getting into ivies than
these children of privileged.
It was also very disappointing to see another Asian parent whose children are HYP alumni saying too many Asians in ivies, despite
the overwhelming evidence showing otherwise.
Perhaps it's to be expected given the length of the article (over 22,000 words), but so many of the objections and "oversights"
raised in the comments are in fact dealt with – in detail and with a great deal of respect – by Unz in the article itself.
For example, this:
National Merit Scholarship semifinalists are chosen based on per-state percentiles.
What this means is that NMS semifinalist numbers would be skewed _against_ a high-performing demographic group to the extent
that group's demographics concentrate geographically. Mr. Unz acknowledges that geographical skewing of Jewish populations
is huge. However, he ignores its effect on the NMS semifinalist numbers he uses as a proxy for academic performance on a _national_
level to predict equitable distributions at _national_ universities.
Please somebody explain to me how this oversight isn't fatal to his argument
because geographical skewing of Asian populations is also huge, yet we don't witness the same patterning in admissions data
pertaining to Asian students. As the article states: "Geographical diversity would certainly hurt Asian chances since nearly half
their population lives in just the three states of California, New York, and Texas."
Unz goes on to note: "Both groups [Jews and Asians] are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated
within a few states, so the 'diversity' factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better
at the admissions office."
So there's your answer.
And aside from the fact that your "basic question" has a very simple answer, it's just ludicrous in any case to suggest that
the validity of the entire article rests on a single data point.
There is no doubt this is more of a political issue than the academic one. If only merit is considered then asian american
would constitute as much as 50% of the student population in elite universities. Politically and socially this is not a desired
outcome. Rationale for affirmative action for the african americans and hispanics is same – leaving a large population is in elite
institution is not desired, it smacks of segregation.
But the core issue remains unsolved. Affirmative action resulted in higher representation but not the competitiveness of the
blacks. I am afraid whites are going the similar path.
Anyone famliar with sociology and the research on social stratification knows that meritocracy is a myth; for example,
if one's parents are in the bottom decile of the the income scale, the child has only a 3% chance to reach the top decile in his
or her lifetime. In fact, in contrast to the Horatio Alger ideology, the U.S. has lower rates of upward mobility than almost any
other developed country. Social classses exist and they tend to reproduce themselves.
The rigid class structure of the the U.S. is one of the reasons I support progressive taxation; wealth may not always be
inherited, but life outcomes are largely determined by the class position of one's parents. In this manner, it is also a myth
to believe that wealth is an individual creation;most financially successful individuals have enjoyed the benefits of class privilege:
good and safe schools, two-parent families, tutors, and perhaps most important of all, high expecatations and positive peer socialization
(Unz never mentions the importants of peeer groups, which data show exert a strong causal unfluence on academic performance).
And I would challenge Unz's assertion that many high-performing Asians come from impovershed backgrounds: many of them
may undereport their income as small business owners. I believe that Asian success derives not only from their class background
but their culture in which the parents have authority and the success of the child is crucual to the honor of the family. As they
assimilate to the more individualist American ethos, I predict that their academic success will level off just as it has with
Jews.
1. HYP are private universities: the success of their alumni verifies the astuteness of their admissions policies.
2. Mr. Unz equates "merit" with "academic". I wonder how many CalTech undergrads would be, or were, admitted, to HYP (and vice-versa).
3. I would like ethnic or racial stats on, for several examples, class officers, first chair musicians*, job holders, actors^,
team captains, and other equally valuable (in the sense of contributing to an entering freshman class) high-school pursuits.*By
17, I had been a union trombonist for three years; at Princeton, I played in the concert band, the marching band, the concert
orchestra, several jazz ensembles, and the Triangle Club orchestra.^A high school classmate was John Lithgow, the superb Hollywood
character actor. Harvard gave him a full scholarship – and they should have.
What if we were one homogeneous ethnic group? What dynamic would we set up then?
I suggest taking the top 20% on straight merit, based on SAT scores, whether they crammed for them or not, and take the next
50% from the economically poorest of the qualified applicants (1500 – 1600 on the SAT?) by straight ethnicity percentages to directly
reflect population diversity, and 30% at random to promote some humility, and try that for 20 years and see what effects are produced
in the quality of our economic and political leadership. And of course, keep them all in the dark as to how they actually got
admitted.
Maybe one effect is that more non-ivy league schools will be tapped by the top recruiters.
"Surely the author must be aware that approximately half the children with "Jewish" names are not fully Jewish. Over
half of the marriages west of the Mississippi are reportedly mixed. Many non-Jews have last names that start with "Gold". Just
these two facts make the entire analysis ridiculous. Hillel does not keep statistics on how Jewish a student is, while many
of Levys and Cohens are not actually Jewish. What would we call Amy Chua's daughters? Jewish or Asian? It is therefore impossible
to tease out in a multi-racial society who is who."
Well, there are several arguments to be made. First, unless you are advocating that there has been a mass adoption of words
like "Gold" in non-Jewish last names these past 10, 15 years, that argument sinks like a stone. Second, by selecting for specifically
Jewish last names, intermarriage can be minimized but not eliminated. How many kids with the lastname "Goldstein" was a non-Jew
in the last NMS? Not likely a lot of them.
Intermarriage can account for some fog, but not all, not by a longshot. Your entire argument reeks of bitter defensiveness.
You have to come to grips that Jews have become like the old WASPs, rich, not too clever anymore, and blocking the path forward
for brighter, underrepresented groups.
With all due respect, I was worried that I would get an answer that lazily points to the part of the essay that glosses over
this point (which mind you I had combed through carefully before posting my question). However, I was hoping that in response
someone might respond who had thought a little more carefully about the statistical fallacy in Unz's essay: that far-reaching
statements about nation-wide academic performance can be drawn directly from per-state-percentiles.
Yes, Asian Americans, like Jews, have concentrations. But their geographical distributions differ. Yes, it might be possible
that upon careful analysis of relative distributions of populations and NMS semifinalists in each state Unz might be able to draw
a robust comparison: he might even come up with the same answer. The point that I made is that he doesn't even try.
Given the lengths Unz goes to calculate and re-calculate figures _based_on_ the assumption of _equal_ geographic distributions
among Asians and Jews, it is - and I stand by this - a disservice to the reader that no effort (beyond hand-waving) is made to
quantitatively show the assumption is at all justified.
The statistical analysis used in this article is flawed. The author uses last names to identify the religion (or birth heritage)
of NMS semifinalists? Are you serious? My son was a (recent) National Merit Finalist and graduated from an ivy league university.
His mother is Jewish; his father is not, thus he has a decidedly WASP surname and according to the author's methods he would have
been classified as WASP. With the growing numbers of interfaith and mixed-race children how can anyone draw conclusions about
race and religion in the meritocracy or even "IQ" argument? Anecdotally, my son reported that nearly half his classmates at his
ivy league were at least one-quarter Jewish (one or more parents or one grandparent). To use last names (in lieu of actual demographic
data) to make the conclusion that Jews are being admitted to ivies at higher rates than similarly qualified Asians is irresponsible.
Essentially, the leftist forces in this country are trying to put the squeeze on white gentiles from both directions.
Affirmative action for underachieving minorities to take the place of white applicants.
Meritocracy for highly achieving Asians to push down white applicants, while never mentioning that full meritocracy would push
out other minorities as well (that's not politically correct).
The whole thing has become more about political narrative than actual concern for justice. I want you to know that as an Asian
man who graduated from Brown, I sympathize with you.
Very interesting article. The case that East Asian students are significantly underrepresented and Jewish students overrepresented
at Ivy League schools is persuasive, although not dispositive. The most glaring flaw in the analysis is the heavy reliance on
performance on the PSAT (the discussion of the winners of the various Olympiad and Putnam contests has little informational value
relevant to admissions, since those winners are the outliers on the tail of the distribution), which is a test that can be prepped
for quite easily. Another flaw is the reliance on last names to determine ethnicity, which I doubt works well for Jews, although
it probably works reasonably well for East Asians.
Unfortunately, the article is also peppered with (very) thinly supported (and implausible) claims like Asians are better at
visuospatial skills, worse at verbal skills, and that the situation is reversed for Jews. This kind of claim strikes me as racial
gobbledygook, and at least anecdotally belied if one considers the overrepresentation of Jews among elite chess players, both
in the US and worldwide.
In any event, the fundamental point is that the PSAT (as is the case with all standardized tests) is a fixed target that can
be studied for. Whether one chooses to put in 100s of hours studying for the PSAT is not, and should not be, the only criterion
used for admissions.
I find the relative percentage of East Asians and Jews at schools like MIT (and also Caltech and Berkeley, although obviously
those are in part distorted by the heavy concentration of East Asians in California) as compared to HYP as strong evidence that
the admissions process at HYP advantages Jews and disadvantages East Asians.
I suspect, though, that the advantages Jews enjoy in the admissions process are unconscious and unintentional, whereas the
disadvantages suffered by East Asians are quite conscious and intentional.
The graph entitled "Asians Age 18-21 and Elite College Enrollment Trends, 1990-2011″ is misleading. It contrasts percentage
of enrolled Asian students vs. the total number of the eligible Asian applicants. Therefore, it led to a flawed argument
when comfusing number vs. percentage . For proof, if a similar graph of Hispanic student percentage vs. eligible applicants
were drawn, it would appear that they were discriminated against as well. So would be the Black!
well, even a fair and objective admission criteria can have devastating consequences. here at IIT, we admit about 1 in 100.
this has the same effect on student ethics, career options and so on. in fact, even worse, since IIT is an engineering college,
the very definition of engineering in India has now distorted as serving international finance or distant masters in a globalized
world. our own development problems remain unattended.
also, the above is a part of the current trend of knowledge concentration, i.e., a belief that only a few universities can
impart us "true" knowledge or conduct "true" research.
see http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~sohoni/kpidc.pdf
This is a very valuable article. It deals with a subject that has received too little attention. I believe that cultural bias
in many cases outweighs the racial bias in the selection program. Time and again, I have seen young people with great potential
being selected against because they are culturally different from what the selectors are looking for (often people who are like
them culturally). The article's mentioning that students who participated in R.O.T.C., F.F.A. and/or 4H are often passed over
is a good illustration.
It was interesting to note that the girl who wrote an essay on how she dealt with being caught in a drug violation found acceptance.
I suspect that a student with similar academic qualifications who wrote an essay on the negative aspects of drug use would not
be so lucky.
comes news that Yale President Levin's successor will be Peter Salovey, tending to confirm Unz's observations regarding the
grossly disproportionate number of Jewish presidents at Ivy League schools.
All very interesting but I am among the National Merit Scholars from California who has a not obviously Jewish name despite
having two Jewish parents. It was changed in the 1950s due to anti-Semitism and an urge to assimilate. A lot of other names can
be German or Jewish for example. I suspect in light of that and intermarriage cases where the mom is Jewish and the dad is not,
not to mention a lot of Russian names, you may be undercounting Jews among other things. Although to be fair, you are probably
also undercounting some half-Asians given most of those marriages have a white husband and Asian wife.
I'm an Asian HYP grad. I applaud this article for being so extremely well researched and insightful. It's an excellent indictment
of the arbitrariness and cultural favoritism concentrated in the hands of a very small group of unqualified and ideologically
driven admissions officers. And I hasten to add that I am a liberal Democratic, an avid Obama supporter, and a strong proponent
of correcting income inequality and combating discrimination in the workplace.
To me, the most compelling exhibit was the one towards the end which showed the % relative representation of enrolled students
to highly-qualified students (I wish the article labeled the exhibits). This chart shows that in the Ivies, which administer highly
subjective admission criteria, Jews are overrepresented by 3-4x, but in the California schools and MIT, which administer more
objective criteria, Jews are overrepresented by only 0-50%, a range that can easily be explained by methodology or randomness.
This single exhibit is unequivocal evidence to me of systematic bias in the Ivy League selection process, with Jews as the
primary beneficiary. I tend to agree with the author this this bias is unlikely to be explicit, but likely the result of cultural
favoritism, with a decision-making body that is heavily Jewish tending to favor the activities, accomplishments, personalities,
etc. of Jewish applicants.
The author has effectively endorsed one of the core tenets of modern liberalism – that human beings tend to favor people who
look and act like themselves. It's why institutions dominated by white males tend to have pro-white male biases. The only twist
here is that the decision-making body in this instance (Ivy League admissions committees) is white-Jewish, not white-Gentile.
So if you're a liberal like me, let's acknowledge that everyone is racist and sexist toward their own group, and what we have
here is Jews favoring Jews. We can say that without being anti-semitic, just like we can say that men favor men without being
anti-male, or whites favor whites without being anti-white.
Just some puzzling statistics: In p. 32, second paragraph, it is mentioned "The Asian ratio is 63% slightly above the white
ratio of 61 percent", then in the third paragraph "However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their
ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of
even the Asian figure", leading to the conclusion that "As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by
a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all". Not very clear on the analysis!
Let me try to make a guess on the calculation of this statistics ratio: Assume that all groups in NMS will apply, with mA=Asians,
mJ=Jews, mW=Whites be the respective numbers in NMS. Suppose that nA, nJ, and nW are those Asians, Jews, and Whites finally admitted.
Then if the statistics ratio for G means ((nG)/(mG))/(mG/mNMS), where mNMS is the total number in the NMS, then the ratio will
amplify the admission rate (nG/mG) by (mNMS/mG) times and becomes very large or very small for small group size. For example,
for a single person group, being admitted will give a ratio as large as mNMS, and a zero for not being admitted. Why can this
ratio be used for comparing under-representation between different groups?
Very well. Loved the fact that the author put a lot into reseaching this piece. But i would like to know how many asians who
manage to attend this ivy schools end up as nobel leaurets and professors?? This demonstrates the driving force behind the testscore
prowess of the asians-financial motivation. The author talks about asians being under-represented in the ivies but even though
they manage to attend then what?? do they eventually become eintiens and great nobel leurets or great cheese players. Also what
is the stats like for asian poets, novelist, actors.etc Pls focus should be given on improving other non-ivy schools since we
have a lots of high SAT test scores than high running universities.
Look at Nobel prizes, field medals and all kind of prizes and awards that recognize lifetime original academic contributions.
Not many asians there yet. Perfect grades or SAT scores does not guarantee creativity, original thinking, intelectual curiosity
or leadership. The problem is that those things are hard to measure and very easy to fake in an application.
Loved all the research in the article and I am on board with the idea that moving in the tiger mother direction will kill creativity
in young people. And I agree with the observation that our country's top leadership since 1970 or so has been underwhelming and
dishonest especially in the financial services industry which draws almost entirely from the Ivies.
However, I am not so convinced that the over representation of Jewish students in the Ivy league is created by intentional
bias on the part of Jewish professors or administrators at these institutions. Is it possible that admissions officers select
Jewish applicants at such a high rate because they are more likely to actually attend? Once a family of four's income exceeds
$160k the net price calculation for a year at Harvard jumps up pretty quickly. By the time you hit annual income of $200k you
are looking at $43k/yr or $172k for 4 years. And at the lower income levels, even if a family has to pay just $15k a year, how
will they do that if they are struggling to make it as it is? Do they want/does their student want to graduate with $60k worth
of debt? Why not choose a great scholarship offer from a state university to pay nothing at all or go to community college for
2 years and then on to the state public institution?
There are many options for top students who can compete at the Ivy level. If I am an admissions officer looking to fill slots
left over after minority admissions (ones poor enough to get the education for free and thus to say yes), legacies, athletic recruits,
and the few super special candidates, wouldn't I choose those most likely to take me up on the admissions offer and protect my
yield number? Might an easy way to get this done be to consult a demographic tool showing net worth by zip code? And to stack
the yield odds a little more in my favor might I also choose families with Jewish appearing last names knowing they would be extremely
likely to accept my offer since I obviously have recent history to show me that these families say yes to our prices? I think
this is a much more plausible explanation then assuming some secret quota in force at these schools.
I am a conservative but I cannot believe Jewish liberals would go that far just to ensure more Jewish liberals attend their
institutions or to keep conservative white non Jewish middle income students out. Dollars and cents and the perception a yield
number conveys about the desirability of a school are what is at work here in my humble opinion.
There is a very simple solution. There is no legal definition of race. Simply check the "Negro" (or "African-American" or whatever
it is called today) box on the application form. You don't look it? Neither do many others, because your ancestry is really mixed.
This may get you in. It won't hurt your chances, which are essentially zero before you check that box. At the very least, it will
make it harder for the bigots in the admissions office to exercise their bigotry.
"Look at Nobel prizes, field medals and all kind of prizes and awards that recognize lifetime original academic contributions.
Not many asians there yet. Perfect grades or SAT scores does not guarantee creativity, original thinking, intelectual curiosity
or leadership. The problem is that those things are hard to measure and very easy to fake in an application."
Last year, 75% of Ph.D candidates where foreign born, most of which were either Indian or Chinese. You should rely on statistics
that are more current and relevant.
Wow, another article on how corrupt higher eduation is.
Folks, open your eyes a bit. Online education is growing massively; sharing this growth are websites that write academic papers
(even Ph.D. theses) on demands .these websites in toto have nearly as many customers as there are online students.
Harvard is unusual in that they actually banned students for cheating. Every investigation of cheating on campus shows it exists
on a massive scale, and reports of half or more of a class cheating are quite common in the news.
The reason for this is simple: administrators care about retention, nothing else. Faculty have long since gotten the message.
I've taught in higher education for nearly 25 years now, and I've seen many faculty punished for catching cheaters; not once has
there been any reward.
Over 90% of remedial students fail to get a 2-year degree in three years, yet administration sees no issue with talking them
into loans that will keep them in debt forever. Admin sees no issue with exploiting the vulnerable for personal gain, of course.
Here's what higher education is today: desperate people take out loans to go to college. They use the money to pay the tuition,
and they use the money to buy academic papers because they really aren't there for college, they're there for the checks. Their
courses are graded by poorly paid faculty (mostly adjuncts), again paid by those checks. The facutly are watched over by administrators
to make sure there is no integrity to the system and again, admin is paid by those checks (in fact, most of the tuition money
goes to administrators).
Hmm, what part of this could be changed that would put integrity back into the system?
I think your sources who claim to be familiar with China are very wrong concerning entrance into Chinese universities, especially
those so-called upper tier unis. It is well known amongst most Chinese students who take the gaokao, the all-or-nothing university
entrance examination, bribes, guanxi (connections) and just being local, are often better indicators of who will be accepted.
• Replies: @KA Same and
some more in India.
In India it is politics of the gutter. Someone can get to medical school and engineering school even if he or she did not qualify,if
scored say 3 points out of 1000 points as long as he or she belonged to lower caste of Hindu. The minimum requirements they have
to fulfill is to pass the school leaving examinations with science subjects .A passing level is all that matters . The process
then continues (in further education -master , training, post doctoral, and in job and in promotion)
While upper caste Hindu or Christian or Muslim may not be allowed despite scoring 999 out of 1000. It is possible and has happened.
Unfortunately the lower caste has not progressed much. Upper caste Hindus have misused this on many occasions and continue to
do do by selling themselves as lower caste with legal loopholes .Muslim or Christians can't do that for they can't claim to be
Hindu
Ron Unz is a brilliant man. He created software that made him rich, and has written articles on all kinds of subjects. But
apparently, Ron shares a problem with a very tiny number of humanity. Ron is one of those oddball characters, that, no matter
where the truth leads him, he simply has to express it, regardless of political correctness. He did this in California with the
debate on English,etc.
Compared to the administrators of these Ivy League Institutions, Ron is a mental giant, not even near being in the same class
as these supposedly important but in reality, worthless beurocrats.
If ten million Gentile whites and Asians changed their surname to Kaplan, Levy, Golden, Goldstein, Goldman, it obviously would
throw a monkey wrench into the process of ethnic favoritism.
To paraphrase Unz - the "shared group biases" of Ivy League college admission officers that have "extreme flexibility and subjectivity",
does harm white Gentiles and Asians, but only because the process lacks objective, meritocratic decision making, and in its place
is a vile form of corrupt cronyism and favoritism.
An Asian speaking here, I agree that America isn't a meritocracy, but has it ever been? It seems like this article's falling
for the oldest trick in the book - looking back at the "good old days". I'd argue that now more than ever, the barrier to entry
is lower than ever, and that every individual can rise to the occasion and innovate for the better. Places like Exeter (my alma
mater) aren't just playgrounds for the rich - I'm not extremely wealthy, and neither were my classmates. Most of us were even
on financial aid. Don't just point fingers at institutions to account for shortcomings - if you had the stroke of fortune to be
born in a nation with such opportunity, with hard work and CREATIVITY and INNOVATION, anything is possible.
Has anyone thought about why the test-prep business has expanded so much? It's to feed into the very same system that you're
complaining about. Be the change you wish to see in the world, not a victim of it. To many of the Asians out there, I'd say get
over your 4.0 GPA and 2400 SAT score and be unique for once.
To put Unz's findings in social and historical perspective, it is important to understand where Jewish academics come from.
The Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Northeast US in the Twentieth Century ran into an immigrant world dominated by Catholics
and particularly Irish Catholics. The Irish, who were as "hungry" as the Jews got control over government and its ancillary economic
benefits. I wasn't there at the time, but I imagine we Irish did not do much to help Jewish immigrants compared with Catholic
immigrants.
One area abandoned by the Catholic Church was public and secular education. The Church formed its own educational Catholic
ghetto. Jewish immigrants adopted the public-secular educational world as their own and became strong adherents of education as
the key to Americanization. Education became their small piece of turf. The only memorable political conflict between Jews and
AfricanAmericans in New York City was over control of the public schools.
Just as the Irish react against affirmative action for non-Irish in government jobs, the descendants of these Jewish immigrants
react to the plagiarism of their assimilation plan by the Chinese/Koreans. When you have de facto Irish affirmative action you
don't want de jure African American affirmative action. When you have Jewish "meritocracy" you don't want Asian meritocracy.
The result is what you see today. The Irish still have a stranglehold on government related jobs in the Northeast with a smattering
of minorities ("New Irish") and the Jews try to protect their secular education turf from the "New Jews". It's just business.
Don't take it personally.
All I can say is see a book: "Ivy League Fools and Felons"' by Mack Roth. Lots of them are kids of corrupt people in all
fields.
But I disagree that opportunity is being closed off to most Americans. Here in North Dakota I work for a high school graduate,
self made trucking millionaire. Five years ago she was a secretary in Iowa. But she got off her butt and went to where the money
is circulating. Just my 2 cents
Sorry, but quick correction regarding rankings (and I only have to say this because I go to MIT). Technically, MIT and Caltech
are *both* ranked the same. The only reason why Caltech appears on the list before MIT is because it come before it alphabetically
to suggest otherwise would be untrue. When you look at individual departments, you'll find that MIT consistently ranks higher
than that of Caltech in all engineering disciplines and most scientific disciplines. Also, personally speaking, MIT has a far
better humanities program that Caltech (especially in the fields of economics, political science, philosophy, and linguisitics).
We do have a number of Pulitizer Prize winners who teach here.
Also generally, in academic circle, MIT is usually viewed with higher regard than Caltech, although that isn't to say Caltech
isn't a fantastic school (it really and truly is–I loved it there and I wish more people knew more about it)
One observation about methodology that struck me while reading this:
The Jewish population of universities is being evaluated based on Hillel statistics, with the "Non-Jewish white" population
being based on the white population minus the Jewish population.
This can be problematic when you consider that these population are merging at a pretty high rate. (I don't have much information
here, but this is from the header of the wikipedia article: "The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey reported an intermarriage
rate of 52 percent among American Jews.")
What percentage of partially Jewish students identify as "Jewish" or does Hillel identify as Jewish? If you're taking a population
that would have once identified as "white" and now identifying them as Jewish, obviously you'll see some Jewish inflation, and
white deflation. And when a large percentage of this population bears the names "Smith", "Jones", "Roberts" etc., you're obviously
not going to see a corresponding increase in NMS scores evaluated on the basis of last names.
Of course, I have no idea what methodology Hillel is using, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's an inflated one.
Thank you Mr. Unz for this provocative article. It isn't the author's first one on Jewish & Asian enrollment at Ivy League
colleges. I remember another one, in the 1990s I believe.
According to what I read, less and less American Jews apply for medical school nationwide, and Jewish women are very educated,
but it comes also with a low birthrate and high median age. It makes the recent spike in Jewish admissions at Harvard College
all the more curious, intriguing.
This month, the NY Times published a list of the highest earners in the hedge fund industry in 2012, and 8 out of 10 were Jewish.
Are certain universities aggressively seeking donations from this super rich demographic since the 2000s?
The young American Jew is not like his grandparents. They are just as fun loving and lazy as any other. This is the result
of a lack of perceived persecution that use to keep the group together. In the major cities, half of the young people leave the
tribe through intermarriage. This is human nature. The Rabbis changed the rules some time ago to define a Jew as coming from the
mother, so the Jewish man would marry a Jewish woman, instead of a woman outside of the tribe. Read the Bible. In David's time,
the men had an eye for good looking women outside of the tribe(like all men). Now days, the young people just laugh at the Rabbi's
words.
Instead of the old folks liberal ideas of race and ethnic divisions, let us change it to go by economic class. According to
liberal thought, intelligence is equally distributed throughout all economic classes, so higher education admissions should be
by economic class, and not the old divisive ideas of race and ethnic background. After all, affirmative action programs are institutionalized
racism and racial profiling.
• Replies: @KA Yes . You
have points . This is one of the fears that drove the Zionist to plan of Israel in 1880 . It was the fear of secular life free
from religious persecution and freedom to enjoy life to its fullest in the post industrial non religious Europe guided by enlightenment
that drove them embrace the religious ethnic mix concept of statehood.
These and many other ills would be alleviated if government would stop: (a) banning aptitude tests or even outright discrimination
as determinants of employment; (b) subsidizing private institutions such as Harvard; and (c) close down all government schools,
starting with state institutions of "higher learning."
I know, pie in the sky. But the author's suggestions by comparison are mere Band-Aids.
Great analysis, but pie-in-the-sky prescription, which was presumably just intended to be thought provoking. If you want to
know why Harvard would never adopt the author's recommendation, just read what he wrote:
"But if it were explicitly known that the vast majority of Harvard students had merely been winners in the application lottery,
top businesses would begin to cast a much wider net in their employment outreach, and while the average Harvard student would
probably be academically stronger than the average graduate of a state college, the gap would no longer be seen as so enormous,
with individuals being judged more on their own merits and actual achievements. A Harvard student who graduated magna cum laude
would surely have many doors open before him, but not one who graduated in the bottom half of his class."
I wonder why Harvard officials would desire this outcome?
So a lot of ivy league presidents with Jewish-sounding names somehow influence admissions staff who may not have Jewish-sounding
names to favor undeserving applicants because they also have Jewish-sounding names? And this is because of some secret ethnic
pride thing going on? And nobody's leaked this conspiracy to the outside world until our whistle blowing author? The guy's a nut
job.
All of your statistics are highly suspect due to the enormous, and rapid annual increase in Jewish intermarriage. I do not
have the statistics, but over many years, it certainly appears that Jewish men are far more likely to intermarry than Jewish women
(the lure of the antithesis to their Jewish mother??) and to complicate matters further, Jewish men seem to have a predilection
for Asian women, at least in the greater NY Metro Area. But that still does not represent the majority of Jewish men marrying
Christians. QED. More Jewish last names, for children who are DNA wise only half Jewish than non Jewish names for the intermarried.
And if one wanted to get really specific, the rapidly rising intermarriage is diluting the "Jewish" genetic pool's previously
demonstrable intelligence superiority., strengthened by the fact that most couples use the Jewish fathers last name.
These observations are in no way associated with how the various Jewish denominations define 'Jewish"
In short: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of
Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy.
In addition, Unz's arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted
by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289, 56 points higher
than the average SAT score of white respondents.
First. I was thrilled to see your advocacy of admissions by lottery. I have advocated such a plan on various websites that
I participate in, but you have written the first major article advocating it that I have seen. Congratulations.
Just a small quibble with your plan, I would not allow the schools any running room for any alternatives to the lottery. They
have not demonstrated any willingness to administer such a system fairly. After a few years of pure lottery it would be time to
evaluate it and see if they should be allowed any leeway, but I wouldn't allow any variation before that.
I would hypothesize that one effect of a lottery admissions plan would be a return to more stringent grading in the class rooms.
It would be useful to the faculty to weed out the poor performers more quickly, and the students might have less of an attitude
of entitlement.
Second, I am glad that you raised the issue of corruption of the admissions staffs. It would be a new chapter in human history
if there was no straight out bribe taking of by functionaries in their positions. My guess is that the bag men are the "high priced
consultants". Pay them a years worth of tuition money and a sufficient amount will flow to the right places to get your kid in
to wherever you want him to go.
Third, three observations about Jewish Students.
First, Jews are subject to mean reversion just like everybody else.
Second, the kids in the millennial generation were, for the most part, born into comfortable middle class and upper class homes.
The simply do not have the drive that their immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents had. I see this in my own family. My
wife and I had immigrant parents, and we were pretty driven academically (6 degrees between us). Our kids, who are just as bright
as we were, did not show that same edge, and it was quite frustrating to us. None of them have gone to a graduate or professional
school. They are all working and are happy, but driven they aren't.
Third, Hillel's numbers of Jewish students on their website should be taken cum grano salis. All three of our kids went to
Northwestern U. (Evanston, IL) which Hillel claimed was 20% Jewish. Based on our personal observations of kids in their dorms
and among their friends, I think the number is probably 10% or less.
Finally, the side bar on Paying Tuition to a Hedge Fund. I too am frustrated with the current situation among the wealthy institutions.
I think that it deserves a lot more attention from policy makers than it has received. The Universities have received massive
benefits from the government (Federal and state) - not just tax exemptions, but grants for research and to students, subsidized
loans, tax deductions for contributions, and on, and on. They have responded to this largess by raising salaries, hiring more
administrators, spending billions on construction, and continually raising tuitions far faster than the rate of inflation. I really
do not think the tax payers should be carrying this much of a burden at a time when deficits are mounting without limit.
Henry VIII solved a similar problem by confiscating assets. We have constitutional limits on that sort of activity, but I think
there a lot of constitutional steps that should be considered. Here a few:
1. There is ample reason to tax the the investment gains of the endowments as "unrelated business taxable income" (UBTI, see
IRS Pub 598 and IRC §§ 511-515) defined as income from a business conducted by an exempt organization that is not substantially
related to the performance of its exempt purpose. If they do not want to pay tax on their investments, they should purchase treasuries
and municipals, and hold them to maturity.
2. The definition of an exempt organization could be narrowed to exclude schools that charge tuition. Charging $50,000/yr and
sitting on 30G$ of assets looks a lot more like a business than a charity.
3. Donations to overly rich institutions should be non deductible to the donors. Overly rich should be defined in terms of
working capital needs and reserves for depreciation of physical assets.
Is the proposed mechanism that Jewish university presidents create a bias in the admissions department?
That could be tested by comparing Jewish student percentages between schools with Christian and Jewish presidents. If Christian
presidents produce student bodies with a high proportion of Jews, then Jewish ethnocentrism is not the cause. (We'd have to find
a way to control for presidents' politics.)
If admissions departments are discriminating in favor of liberals, that will boost the proportion of all liberals, including
many Jews, but it will be political discrimination, not ethnic discrimination. (Both are bad, but we should be accurate.)
Liberals see a discrepancy in ethnic outcomes and consider it proof of ethnic discrimination. Are we doing the same thing?
After Russian emancipation, the Jews from Pale settlement spread out and took up jobs in government services, secured admissions
in technical and medical schools, and established positions in trade in just two decades. Then they started interconnecting and
networking more aggressively to eliminate competition and deny the non-Jews the opportunities that the non Jews rightfully claimed.
This pattern was also evident in Germany after 1880 and in Poland between interwars .
The anti-Jewish sentiment seen in pre revolutionary Russia was the product of this ethnic exclusivisity and of the tremendous
in-group behaviors .
@Ira The young American
Jew is not like his grandparents. They are just as fun loving and lazy as any other. This is the result of a lack of perceived
persecution that use to keep the group together. In the major cities, half of the young people leave the tribe through intermarriage.
This is human nature. The Rabbis changed the rules some time ago to define a Jew as coming from the mother, so the Jewish man
would marry a Jewish woman, instead of a woman outside of the tribe. Read the Bible. In David's time, the men had an eye for good
looking women outside of the tribe(like all men). Now days, the young people just laugh at the Rabbi's words.
Instead of the old folks liberal ideas of race and ethnic divisions, let us change it to go by economic class. According to
liberal thought, intelligence is equally distributed throughout all economic classes, so higher education admissions should be
by economic class, and not the old divisive ideas of race and ethnic background. After all, affirmative action programs are institutionalized
racism and racial profiling.
Yes . You have points . This is one of the fears that drove the Zionist to plan of Israel in 1880 . It was the fear of secular
life free from religious persecution and freedom to enjoy life to its fullest in the post industrial non religious Europe guided
by enlightenment that drove them embrace the religious ethnic mix concept of statehood.
@Anonymous I think your
sources who claim to be familiar with China are very wrong concerning entrance into Chinese universities, especially those so-called
upper tier unis. It is well known amongst most Chinese students who take the gaokao, the all-or-nothing university entrance examination,
bribes, guanxi (connections) and just being local, are often better indicators of who will be accepted.
Same and some more in India. In India it is politics of the gutter. Someone can get to medical school and engineering school
even if he or she did not qualify, if scored say 3 points out of 1000 points as long as he or she belonged to lower caste of Hindu.
The minimum requirements they have to fulfill is to pass the school leaving examinations with science subjects .A passing level
is all that matters . The process then continues (in further education -master , training, post doctoral, and in job and in promotion)
While upper caste Hindu or Christian or Muslim may not be allowed despite scoring 999 out of 1000. It is possible and has happened.
Unfortunately the lower caste has not progressed much. Upper caste Hindus have misused this on many occasions and continue to
do do by selling themselves as lower caste with legal loopholes .Muslim or Christians can't do that for they can't claim to be
Hindu
Takeaways:
Jews are really good at networking and in-group activity. They have centuries of practice, and lived a meritocratic existence
of self-sorting in the Pale and elsewhere.
That is evident to all who look.
Other groups have different approaches, and different organizational or affiliation bonds, based on their history, culture
and other factors.
NE Asians share some traits, and both value education as a way to improve themselves and to some extent their groups.
S Asians will demonstrate their own approach, focusing heavily on STEM.
Expect demographics to win out, given 2.5B Asians versus a smaller NAM or NE European-base populace.
Thanks for the informative article. Your proposal sounds reasonable. Another option would be to attempt to vastly decrease
the significance of these elite private schools. Why should we allow undemocratic little fiefdoms to largely control entry into
our country's ruling class? It would probably be considerably more fair, more transparent and more efficient to pour a lot of
resources into our public universities. If Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, UMass, etc. were completely free, for instance–or if they
provided students with living expenses as well as free tuition, the quality of their students would conceivably surpass that of
the Ivy League's, and over time the importance and prestige of Harvard, Stanford, etc. would diminish. Instead, we are subsidizing
students at elite private colleges more than those at public colleges–an absurd state of affairs (see this article, whose author
is a bit of an ideologue but who is right on this issue:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich/2014/1014/How-the-government-spends-more-per-student-at-elite-private-universities-than-public
).
Mr. Unz; thank you for the long, informational and scholarly article. I read the whole thing, and from Sailer I am familiar
with your reputation as a certified genius. I must admit however, after the 5-10,000 words you had written, I was a bit shocked
that your answer to how to improve elite University enrollment, was to FLIP A FIGURATIVE COIN.
I expected some chart with differential equations that I would have to consult my much more intelligent brother, the electrical
engineer to explain to me. Not that it does not make a lot of sense.
The issue with your solution is that you go from a three class university:
1) Legacy Admits
2) Non athletic, black admits
3) everyone else
to a much-more rigid, two class university:
1) academic admits
2) coin-flip admits
One tier being one of the smartest 15-18 year olds in the world, the other being "somewhat better than good student at Kansas
State."
My brother works at a little ivy league school. Well endowed because the parents Dun and Bradstreet reports are at the top
of the selection sheets with parents jobs also. Extra points for finance and government jobs at executive levels.
This article was excellent and reinforced everything he has told me over the years. One thing he did mention i would like to
add. Asians, which for years were their choice for filling minority quotas, are horrible when it comes to supporting the alma
mater financially during the fund drives. This information was confirmed by several other schools in the area when they tried
a multi-school drive in the far east and south east asia to canvas funds and returned with a pitiful sum.
Diversity is a scheme that is the opposite of a meritocracy. Diversity is a national victim cult that generally demonizes gentiles,
and more specifically demonizes people that conform to a jewish concocted profile of a nazi.
Why would anyone use the word diversity in the same sentence as the word meritocracy?
"Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?" Why would anybody claiming to be intelligent
include meritocracy and diversity in the same sentence?
@Sean Gillhoolley Harvard
is a university, much like Princeton and Yale, that continues based on its reputation, something that was earned in the past.
When the present catches up to them people will regard them as nepotistic cauldrons of corruption.
Look at the financial disaster that befell the USA and much of the globe back in 2008. Its genesis can be found in the clever
minds of those coming out of their business schools (and, oddly enough, their Physics programs as well). They are teaching the
elite how to drain all value from American companies, as the rich plan their move to China, the new land of opportunity. When
1% of the population controls such a huge portion of the wealth, patriotism becomes a loadstone to them. The elite are global.
Places like Harvard cater to them, help train them to rule the world....but first they must remake it.
I agree, common people would never think of derivatives , nor make loans based on speculation .
"Tiffany Wang['s] SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship
semifinalist "
"Julianna Bentes her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany's "
Did Ms. Wang underperform on her SATs? NMS semifinalist status depends purely on the score on a very SAT-like test being at
a 99.5 percentile level, as I understand it (and I was one, albeit a very long time ago) and I gather from the above that her
SAT scores did not correspond to the PSAT one. That is, merely " 100 points above the Wesleyan average" doesn't seem all that
exceptional. Or am I wrong?
Mr. Unz several times conflates NMS semifinalist status with being a top student. Which I most definitely was not. It's rather
an IQ test. As was the SAT.
Following decades of increased life expectancy rates, Americans have been dying earlier for
three consecutive years since 2014, turning the elusive quest for the 'American Dream' into a
real-life nightmare for many. Corporate America must accept some portion of the blame for the
looming disaster.
Something is killing Americans and researchers have yet to find the culprit. But we can risk
some intuitive guesses.
According to researchers from the Center on Society and Health, Virginia Commonwealth
University School of Medicine, American life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other
wealthy countries and is now in fact decreasing.
The National Center for Health Statistics reported that life expectancy in the United States
peaked (78.9 years) in 2014 and subsequently dropped for 3 consecutive years, hitting 78.6
years in 2017. The decrease was most significant among men (0.4 years) than women (0.2 years)
and happened across racial-ethnic lines: between 2014 and 2016, life expectancy decreased among
non-Hispanic white populations (from 78.8 to 78.5 years), non-Hispanic black populations (from
75.3 years to 74.8 years), and Hispanic populations (82.1 to 81.8 years).
"By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug
overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases," wrote
researchers Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker in a
study that appears in the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical
Association.
At the very beginning of the report, Woolf and Schoomaker reveal that the geographical area
with the largest relative increases occurred "in the Ohio Valley and New England."
"The implications for public health and the economy are substantial," they added, "making
it vital to understand the underlying causes."
Incidentally, it would be difficult for any observer of the U.S. political scene to read
that passage without immediately connecting it to the 2016 presidential election between Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Taking advantage of the deep industrial decline that has long plagued the Ohio Valley, made
up of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, Trump successfully
tapped into a very real social illness, at least partially connected to
economic stagnation , which helped propel him into the White House.
Significantly, thirty-seven states witnessed significant jumps in midlife mortality in the
years leading up to 2017. As the researchers pointed out, however, the trend was concentrated
in certain states, many of which, for example in New England, did not support Trump in
2016.
"Between 2010 and 2017, the largest relative increases in mortality occurred in New
England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%, Massachusetts 12.1%) and the
Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%), as well as
in New Mexico (17.5%), South Dakota (15.5%), Pennsylvania (14.4%), North Dakota (12.7%),
Alaska (12.0%), and Maryland (11.0%). In contrast, the nation's most populous states
(California, Texas, and New York) experienced relatively small increases in midlife
mortality.
Eight of the 10 states with the highest number of excess deaths were in the industrial
Midwest or Appalachia, whereas rural US counties experienced greater increases in midlife
mortality than did urban counties.
A tragic irony of the study suggests that greater access to healthcare, notably among the
more affluent white population, actually correlates to an increase in higher mortality rates.
The reason is connected to the out-of-control prescription of opioid drugs to combat pain and
depression.
"The sharp increase in overdose deaths that began in the 1990s primarily affected white
populations and came in 3 waves," the report explained: (1) the introduction of OxyContin in
1996 and overuse of prescription opioids, followed by (2) increased heroin use, often by
patients who had become addicted to prescription opioids, and (3) the subsequent emergence of
potent synthetic opioids (eg, fentanyl analogues) -- the latter triggering a large post-2013
increase in overdose deaths.
"That white populations first experienced a larger increase in overdose deaths than
nonwhite populations may reflect their greater access to health care (and thus prescription
drugs)."
In September, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, reached a
tentative settlement with 23 states and more than 2,000 cities and counties that sued the
company, owned by the Sackler family, over its role in the opioid crisis
Other factors also helped to drive up the U.S. mortality rate, including alcoholic liver
disease and suicides, 85% of which occurred with a firearm or other method.
The United States spends more on health care than any other country, yet its overall health
report card fares worse than those of other wealthy countries. Americans experience higher
rates of illness and injury and die earlier than people in other high-income
nations.
Researchers were perplexed but not surprised by the data as there existed clear signs back
in the 1980s that the United States was heading for a cliff as far as longevity rates go.
So what is it that's claiming the life of Americans, many at the prime of their life, at a
faster pace than in the past? The reality is that it is likely to be an accumulation of
negative factors that are finally beginning to take a toll. For example, apart from the opioid
crisis, there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate
America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former
member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand,
which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades.
Today's real average wage – that is, after accounting for inflation – has about
the same purchasing power it did about half a century ago . Meanwhile, in the majority of
cases, increases in salary have a marked tendency to go to the highest-paid tier of
executives.
In a
report by Pew Research, "real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago:
The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would
today."
One needs only consider the growing mountain of tuition debt now
consuming the paychecks of many university graduates, many of whom have yet to land their dream
6-figure job from their relatively worthless liberal education, to better understand the quiet
desperation that exists across the country.
At the same time, the exponential rise in the use of social media, which has been proven to
trigger depression
and loneliness in users, also deserves serious consideration. What society is experiencing
with its massive online presence is a total overhaul as to the way human beings relate to each
other. Presently, it would be very difficult to argue that the changes have been positive; in
fact, they seem to be contributing to the
early demise of millions of Americans in the prime of life.
Taken together, abusive labor practices that ignores workplace democracy, the epidemic of
opioid usage, compounded by the anti-social features of 'social media' suggests a perfect storm
of factors precipitating the rise of early deaths in the United States. Since all of these
areas fall in one way or another under the control of corporate power, this powerful agency
must find ways to help address the problem. The future success of America depends upon it.
With a college degree and half a brain things are still pretty good. They look pretty good
for trades guys too, as long as they are honest hard workers. I just got a quote from some
guy to dig up a 70 foot driveway and replace it with topsoil... $14,000. Nobody is hurting
too bad where I am except serious white trash with no job skills. Well, blacks and latinos
without job skills are hurting too, the difference is, they're resigned to their fate after
300+ years of getting abused. It's the Trump trailer trash who are mad that they aren't
throwing around big money any more for stealing copper or whatever the **** these trash did
before now.
You think life expectancy has dropped off now? Give it 10 or 20 years. Fentynal+a cheap
plastic mask with nitrogen or co2 emitter will be easily available on the internet...Most
people over 50 are ill equipped to deal with burgeoning economic realities. I'm 51 and I see
it all around me in NW Montana, dudes that are 50 or 100 pounds overweight, smoking, drinking
whisky and taking pills, not showing up for work. The economy here is booming and yet there
are men and women, mostly my age or older wandering around with tombstone eyes all day,
bumming money in front of the grocery stores. I spend more time than I like in Portland OR,
and it's even more apparent there. There are kids that panhandle, but 90% of the people
camping on the street are 45+. Dis Eases of dispair.
When men abandon their families to pursue money and fame, their families move on, and
then, when the men found they were chasing fool's gold, they despaired and died, since they
had fucked themselves, their children and the women who were willing to love them.
There wasn't any reason to live, if one doesn't believe in repairing such social crimes,
or second chances. And there's a time limit for such rehabilitation; wait too long to get
smart, and your chances are gone.
I know of three such cases in my immediate family.
In "Democracy in America", Alexis de Tocqueville commented on Americans' obsession with
money and means of procuring it. I would hypothesize that the deteriorating economic means of
ordinary Americans is behind the increase in midlife mortality. The pursuit of money has
resulted in a lifestyle that is not conducive to a happy and healthy life.
Stress causes the body to release cortisol which responds by building up belly fat for the
emergency times ahead. Sleep and stress reduction can reduce the waist line, slowly.
"there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate
America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former
member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand,
which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades." This cracked me up.
companies are NOT Democratic and never should be.
Isn't Capitalism wonderful? We mandate that a company may not make a decision not in the interests of the shareholder.
And then whinge because Big Pharma does just that. It makes drugs that maximize
profits. Why did you expect anything different?
And what about insurance companies? How are shareholders of insurance companies served if
the insurance companies pay up for claims? Anyway, let me present a physicians
point of view , that the AMA represents the shareholders of Big Pharma, not the
doctors. BTW. Black salve works against Big C. (I have to use euphemisms because it is illegal to
utter the words "Cures Big C". Why? I dunno. ( Bloodroot , a common plant.)
How unpatriotic it would be to praise Unions! So I shan't. Instead I recommend Guilds. A complete monopoly of particular trades by their
own Guild House. The guild controls the training of their members. It controls who gets to
work where. It controls their accommodation and pension. It controls for the benefit of it's
members. It is Vast.
It negotiates with politicians on protecting it's own interests by Law. (Hey, why should
only multi-national companies lobby in their own interest!)
For instance. A electrical guild would negotiate a contract with a builders guild for
cheap housing. (You scratch my back, I scratch yours.) It would negotiate with the teacher's
guild for the correct education of their children.
Big international companies are going to love it. But why do we need to consider their
emotions?
This rampant social illness is why Trump ran for President. He knew there were a lot of
hurting people out there who needed to believe in something, anything, and most importantly
he knew they would devour every scoop of manure he shoveled their way.
"real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate
recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today."
No big drama here considering growth in wealth inequality for the period.
The world is filled with conformism and groupthink. Most people do not wish to think for
themselves. Thinking for oneself is dangerous, requires effort and often leads to rejection by
the herd of one's peers.
The profession of arms, the intelligence business, the civil service bureaucracy, the
wondrous world of groups like the League of Women Voters, Rotary Club as well as the empire of
the thinktanks are all rotten with this sickness, an illness which leads inevitably to
stereotyped and unrealistic thinking, thinking that does not reflect reality.
The worst locus of this mentally crippling phenomenon is the world of the academics. I have
served on a number of boards that awarded Ph.D and post doctoral grants. I was on the Fulbright
Fellowship federal board. I was on the HF Guggenheim program and executive boards for a long
time. Those are two examples of my exposure to the individual and collective academic
minds.
As a class of people I find them unimpressive. The credentialing exercise in acquiring a
doctorate is basically a nepotistic process of sucking up to elders and a crutch for ego
support as well as an entrance ticket for various hierarchies, among them the world of the
academy. The process of degree acquisition itself requires sponsorship by esteemed academics
who recommend candidates who do not stray very far from the corpus of known work in whichever
narrow field is involved. The endorsements from RESPECTED academics are often decisive in the
award of grants.
This process is continued throughout a career in academic research. PEER REVIEW is the
sine qua non for acceptance of a "paper," invitation to career making conferences, or
to the Holy of Holies, TENURE.
This life experience forms and creates CONFORMISTS, people who instinctively boot-lick their
fellows in a search for the "Good Doggy" moments that make up their lives. These people are for
sale. Their price may not be money, but they are still for sale. They want to be accepted as
members of their group. Dissent leads to expulsion or effective rejection from the group.
This mentality renders doubtful any assertion that a large group of academics supports any
stated conclusion. As a species academics will say or do anything to be included in their
caste.
This makes them inherently dangerous. They will support any party or parties, of any
political inclination if that group has the money, and the potential or actual power to
maintain the academics as a tribe. pl
That is the nature of tribes and humans are very tribal. At least most of them.
Fortunately, there are outliers. I was recently reading "Political Tribes" which was written
by a couple who are both law professors that examines this.
Take global warming (aka the rebranded climate change). Good luck getting grants to do any
skeptical research. This highly complex subject which posits human impact is a perfect
example of tribal bias.
My success in the private sector comes from consistent questioning what I wanted to be
true to prevent suboptimal design decisions.
I also instinctively dislike groups that have some idealized view of "What is to be
done?"
As Groucho said: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member"
The 'isms' had it, be it Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Elitism all demand
conformity and adherence to group think. If one does not co-tow to whichever 'ism' is at
play, those outside their group think are persecuted, ostracized, jailed, and executed all
because they defy their conformity demands, and defy allegiance to them.
One world, one religion, one government, one Borg. all lead down the same road to --
Orwell's 1984.
David Halberstam: The Best and the Brightest. (Reminder how the heck we got into Vietnam,
when the best and the brightest were serving as presidential advisors.)
Also good Halberstam re-read: The Powers that Be - when the conservative media controlled
the levers of power; not the uber-liberal one we experience today.
We tend to think of propaganda as something generated by the state. This is a prime example
of it coming from ideologues within universities, and making its way to the public via
sympathizers in the mass media. Eventually, these lies become de facto truths, either because
people really do believe in them, or the cost of questioning them becomes too great, so people
conform. In time, younger people -- those who grew up being socialized into the lie -- don't
know any different. In my interviews for my forthcoming book on lessons we must learn from the
communist experience, a Ukrainian immigrant named Olga Grigorenko, recalling her Soviet
childhood, said "Nobody told me that I was living in a lie. I was just living my life in my
country, the Soviet Union. Nobody said it was a lie."
As she grew older, she came to see that in fact she lived within a system of lies. Her
husband, Vladimir, spoke about how the ideology corrupted all knowledge. From the
transcript:
Vladimir: For example, all history was represented as the fight between capitalism
and the workers. It takes a really creative mind to see the system of classes from
Marxism-Leninism presenting itself in ancient Egypt. But that's what they did. All history
books were filled with that point of view. The Florentine Republic was the equal of the Great
October Revolution – things like that. All our history books were like that. Every
scientific paper was supposed to have a prefatory chapter describing how Marx and Engels were
geniuses in that particular field of science, and how their findings anticipated whatever
this scientific article described. Any and all sciences had to show a connection to the
decision of the party in a previous convention.
Olga: But nobody believed in it.
Vladimir: But everybody knew that you had to say these things in order to be
published.
More:
Olga: In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school
kids do. But you never could write what you think about the subject. Never, ever. The subject
could be interesting, but you never could put what do you think. You have to find some way to
relate that to the communist view.
Vladimir: The general culture taught you this doublethink.
Olga: I remember when I was eight or nine years old, I came home from school and
told my parents a funny anecdote about a famous Red Army hero, one that made him look bad. I
just started to tell my parents, and my father looked at me and said, 'Never do that again.
Not in our house, not anywhere. Just stop, and forget. You can't tell funny stories about
communist leaders.' And I was afraid.
Vladimir: Sooner or later, society would tell you what you shouldn't say. And if
you said it, you would end up in the camp.
We are reproducing that system here, in an American way. It begins with the ideological
corruption of knowledge in the institutions of higher education, then moves out from there. How
difficult do you imagine it would be within the New York Times newsroom, or any major
American newsroom, to mount a serious challenge to the concepts of "whiteness," "patriarchy,"
and the like? In fact, we have an example of it, from this summer:
the leaked transcript of the Times 's internal town hall meeting , in which an
unnamed staffer told editor-in-chief Dean Baquet that "I just feel like racism is in
everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our
national reporting."
Baquet declined the opportunity to deliver a Journalistic Standards 101 lecture to this
person, and instead gave a fuzzy non-answer (
read the transcript ; you'll see) praising the paper's then-upcoming "1619 Project," a
massive initiative attempting to "reframe" American history around slavery.
If you'll recall, the 1619 Project was named for the year the first African slave arrived on
American shores; the Times said that year, not 1776, ought to be remembered as the
founding of America.
Is it any wonder that the old foreign service establishment "embrace a geopolitical outlook that is simplistic, foolhardy, and
dangerous"?
The foreign service exam of that era (probably no better today) tested substantially on ones knowledge of fiction: novels and
such.
Rather like choosing career foreign service officers based on a person's performance in the entertainment trivia night at the
local watering hole. It was a test of memory not logic or insightfulness or historical perspective. These folks are not latter-day
De Toquevilles or great historians, even if many came from colleges viewed as top drawer.
While
clearly not intended as a tool for the subversion of capitalism, the 2019 Credit
Suisse Global Wealth Report provides a fascinating glimpse at the inequality that the
neoliberal era has produced, who has benefitted and those who have been left behind.
According to the tenth edition of the report, recently released, "The bottom half of wealth
holders collectively accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth in mid-2019, while the
richest 10% own 82% of global wealth and the top 1% alone own 45%." (Note that this a study
about wealth and not income. It measure assets [housing, stocks, bonds etc.] minus debts.)
Further evidence of the incredible inequality generated by neoliberal capitalism:
North America and Europe together account for 57% of total household wealth, but contain
only 17% of the world adult population;
2.9 billion people, 57% of all adults, have wealth below $10,000 US in 2019. Of course
many of these have more debts than assets;
Average wealth per adult in Africa is $6,488 while that figure for North America (which
seems to be defined as Canada and the USA) is $417,694. For India it is $14,569 while in
Latin America the average wealth is $22,502;
Average wealth in "socialist" China has grown more rapidly than elsewhere over the past
two decades to $58,544. (It seems government intervention in the economy is good for wealth
creation);
The share of total global wealth owned by millionaires (47 million or 0.9% of adults) has
grown from 34% in 2000 to 44% today;
About 40% of millionaires reside in the USA and more than half of the 1.1 million who
achieved that status in the past year live in the land of Trump. The U.S. growth of
millionaires exceeded that of the next nine countries combined (Japan, China, Germany, the
Netherlands, Brazil, India, Spain, Canada and Switzerland);
Australia lost 124,000 millionaires over the past year, primarily due to declining real
estate prices;
The wealth of 41 million of the millionaires was between 1 and 5 million dollars. Another
3.7 million are worth between 5 million and 10 million, and almost exactly 2 million adults
now have wealth above 10 million. Of these, 1.8 million have assets in the 10–50
million range, leaving 168,030 with a net worth above 50 million;
Of these 168,030 members of the capitalist ruling class, 80,510 (48%) live in the USA.
China has 18,130 (11%) , Germany 6,800 (4%), the UK 4,640, India 4,460, France 3,700, Canada
(3,530), Japan 3,350, Russia 3,120 and Hong Kong 3,100.
The importance of knowing where rich people are and might be popping up next is what has
produced this annual "most comprehensive and up-to date survey of household wealth".
In ancient Greece people would consult the oracles in order to choose the fruitful path, but
today the most common source of such divination is the wisdom of the dollar and its associated
deities. Rather than seek advice from experts at interpreting the various Hellenic gods, we
consult those who specialize in illuminating where "the money" has been and is going. The
ancient oracles could be found at shrines to the various gods; the modern version of these
advice givers reside in universities, think tanks, mutual fund companies, brokerages, banks and
the ever-present business media. The offerings of those seeking the guidance of today's
financial gods support a multi-billion dollar information and advice industry.
This seems "rational" behavior only because we live in an economic system that distributes
power on a one-dollar-one-vote basis. To divine where the dollars are is to learn where best to
seek the power that comes from them. In other words, the rich get richer and those who want to
catch the crumbs as they fall off the banquet table need to be present at the court of King
Capital.
Like the royal courts of feudal Europe that moved around its realm from castle to castle,
money, in the form of capital, travels around its planetary realm from country to country, city
to city, economic sector to economic sector, searching for the highest profit. This movement of
capital creates real estate and other booms in favored locations then financial crises when the
wealthy decide it is time to move on.
According to supporters, capitalism is supposed to be all about competition. The system is
supposed to reward merit. Winners and losers are legitimate because everyone has an equal
chance to succeed. But this is clearly not true in the actual world as described by the Credit
Suisse report.
How can the 2.9 billion adults who own less than $10,000 in net assets compete fairly
against 47 million millionaires, let alone the 168,030 who own $50 million or more?
The system is rigged. In a neoliberal capitalist competition to buy the most profitable
companies, processes, patents, ideas, and anything else that can be made "property" the winners
will always be those with the most money.
This report illustrates the pyramid of capitalist wealth and the peculiar property of money
that guarantees most of it floats to the top.
The only way for billions of people, most countries and entire continents to escape the
inevitable "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is by using the power of collectivity
(call it government, socialism or mutual aid) to counter the power of one-dollar-one-vote
capitalism.
"... By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute ..."
"... Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy ..."
"... When the government subsidize R&D here, what reason would there be for the resultant products that come from that R&D, be made here? In Canada the SRED (Scientific Research and Experimental Development) tax credits are used by companies to develop products that are then manufactured in China. No Canadian production worker will ever see an hour of labor from those subsidies. That result is baked into the R&D cake. ..."
"... As you point out, "many of the large International Corporations moved their software development and R&D offshore too". What stops them from co-mingling the subsidies and scamming the system for their benefit, since everything done to favor big business resolves to a scam on the peasants. ..."
Posted on
November 5, 2019 by Yves SmithBy Marshall Auerback, a
market analyst and commentator. produced by Economy for All , a project of the
Independent Media Institute
National industrial policy was once something you might read about in today's equivalent of
a friend's Facebook post, as hard as that might sound to believe. It was in newspapers; it was
on the radio. Taxi drivers had opinions about it. That all changed in the last 35 years, when
the rise and fall of the stock market and a shallow conversation about unemployment rates took
over. Industrial policy became an inside-baseball conversation, and to the extent that it was
discussed, it was through the prism of whether it imperiled the golden gospel and great
economic distraction of our time, "the free market."
The decades of free-market propaganda we've been exposed to are basically an exercise in
distracting the public from the meaningful choices that are now made behind closed doors. The
two big political parties that outwardly represent symbolic issues like gun rights and school
prayer spend the bulk of their time and political energy on complex industrial and regulatory
questions.
But much like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, they'd better start considering the question
of a national industrial policy before there's no industry left to manage. Manufacturing is now
at its smallest share of the U.S. economy in 72 years,
reports Bloomberg . Multinational supply chains undermine the negotiating power of workers,
thereby exacerbating inequality.
Are there ways to bring back manufacturing, or should we just capitulate to a mindset that
argues that these jobs are gone for good, that software retention is good enough, even as we
shift what's left of our manufacturing sector overseas to sweatshop economies? That seems
short-sighted. After all, it's pretty easy to steal IP; it's not so easy to steal an auto
manufacturing facility. The real question is: In the absence of some sort of national
industrial strategy, how do Western societies retain a viable middle class?
Decades of American middle-class exposure to favor China and other Asian countries'
industrial capacity have foisted it right back from elite circles into our politics and the
ballot box, in spectacular fashion, through the unlikely Donald Trump, who, in his typically
blunderbuss fashion, has called attention to some serious deficiencies in our current
globalized system, and the competitive threat posed by China to which we have remained
oblivious for all too long.
Not that Trump's 19th-century protectionism represents the right policy response, but his
concerns about Beijing make sense when you compare how much China invests in its own industrial
base relative to the U.S.: Robert D. Atkinson and Caleb Foote of the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation
write that a recent Harvard Business School "
study estimated that the Chinese governments (national, provincial, and local) paid for a
whopping 22.2 percent of business R&D in 2015, with 95 percent of Chinese firms in 6
industries receiving government cash -- petrochemicals, electronics, metals and materials,
machinery and equipment, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and information technology."
In addition to the direct government grants on R&D, Atkinson and Foote
estimate that "the Chinese R&D tax credit is between 3
and 4.6 times more generous than the U.S. credit. To match China's R&D tax credit
generosity, the U.S. rate for the Alternative Simplified Credit would have to be increased from
14 percent to between 35 and 40 percent." Atkinson and Foote also
note that "
97 percent of American federal government funding went to just three sectors:
transportation equipment, which includes such as fighter jets, missiles, and the like ($14
billion); professional, scientific, and technical services ($5 billion); and computer and
electronic products ($4 billion)."
Taken in aggregate,
Atkinson and Foote calculate that "nearly 25 percent of all R&D expenditures in China
come in the form of government subsidies to firms." That's the sort of thing that must enter
the calculations of antitrust advocates when they call for breaking up big tech, without
considering the ramifications to research and development, especially relative to their Chinese
counterparts. (Statistically, as Anne
Marie Knott and Carl Vieregger find in a 2016 paper "Reconciling the Firm Size and Innovation
Puzzle," there are ample studies illustrating that R&D spending and R&D
productivity increase with scale.)
Why does this matter? Robert Kuttner,
writing at the Huffington Post at the inception of Barack Obama's presidency, made a
compelling argument that many of America's great industrial enterprises did not simply spring
up spontaneously via the magic of the "free market":
American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It
reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S.
dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable
patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to
overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700
billion at America's wounded banks is also an industrial policy.
So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit
policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the
industries of the next century, such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise
some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in
return?"
In fact, Kuttner describes a problem that well preceded Barack Obama. America's belief in
national industrial planning has been undermined to the extent that the U.S. began to adhere to
a doctrine of shareholder capitalism in the 1980s and beyond, a philosophy that minimized the
role of the state, and gave primacy to short-term profitability, as well as production growth
through efficiency (i.e., downsizing) and mergers. Corporate prioritization of maximizing
shareholders' value and the ways American corporations have minimized long-term R&D
expenditures and capital investment, all of which have resulted in the "unproductive disgorging
of corporate cash profits -- through massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on
stock repurchases -- over productive investment in innovation," write
Professors Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad .
Although European companies have not gone quite as far down that route, their "stakeholder
capitalism" culture has been somewhat subverted to the same short-term goals as their American
counterparts, as evidenced via Volkswagen's emissions
scandal and the erosion of workers' rights via the
Hartz labor "reforms" (which actually undermined the unions' stakeholder status in the
companies, thereby freeing up management to adopt many of the less attractive American
shareholder capitalism practices). The European Union too is now belatedly
recognizing the competitive threat posed by China . There's no doubt that the European
political classes are also becoming mindful that there are votes to be won here as well, as
Trump correctly calculated in 2016.
In the U.S., industrial policy is increasingly finding advocates on both the left (Elizabeth
Warren's policy director,
Ganesh Sitaraman ) and the right (
Professor Michael Lind ), via the convenient marriage of national security considerations
and with international investment and trade. If trade policy is ultimately subordinated to
national security concerns, it is conceivable that industrial policy could be
"bi-partisanized," thereby giving primacy to homegrown strategic industries necessary to
sustain viable national defense and security.
But this approach is not without risks: it is unclear whether the "national
security-fication" of the industrial policy renaissance will actually enhance or hinder
creativity and risk-taking, or merely cause these firms to decline altogether as viable
civilian competitors vis a vis Beijing. The
current travails of Boeing provide a salutary illustration of the risks of going too far
down the Pentagon rat hole.
And there are a number of recent studies illustrating that the case for "dual-use" (i.e.,
civilian and military) manufacturing does not substantially enhance civilian industrialization
and, indeed,
may retard overall economic growth. On the other hand, as the venture capitalist William
Janeway highlights in his seminal work, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy , there are advantages at times to
being
"[d]ecoupled from any direct concern with economic return [It allowed] the Defense Department
[to] fund numerous alternative research agendas, underwriting the 'wasteful' search for
solutions that inevitably accompanies any effort to push back the frontiers of knowledge." So
there's a balance to be struck here. But, as Janeway notes
, "the strategic state interventions that have shaped the market economy over generations have
depended on grander themes -- national development, national security, social justice,
liberation from disease -- that transcend the calculus of welfare economics and the logic of
market failure."
Furthermore, to the extent that national security considerations retard offshoring and
global labor arbitrage, it can enhance the prospects for a viable form of "
national developmentalism ," given that both mean tighter labor markets and higher wages,
which in turn will likely push firms toward upgrading R&D spending in order to upgrade on
the high end of the technology curve ( as Seymour
Melman argued years ago ), as well as enhancing productivity gains.
As author Ted Fertik observes :
Higher productivity makes possible more generous welfare states, and helps national
industries compete to supply the world with high-tech products. If technological leadership
and a prosperous, patriotic citizenry are the surest guarantees of military preponderance,
such an economic policy represents the best military strategy in an era of great power
competition.
Both the left and the right are beginning to recognize that it makes no sense to make war on
wage-earners while claiming to protect the same wage earners from Chinese competition. But
governments need to do more than act as a neutral umpire, whose role never extends beyond
fixing market failures. As Janeway has
illustrated , governments have historically promoted the basic research that fueled
innovation and nurtured the talent and skills that "became the foundation of the Innovation
Economy"; "the central research laboratories of the great corporations were first supplemented
and then supplanted by direct state funding of research." But in spite of providing the
foundational research for a number of leading commercial products (e.g., Apple's iPhone), the
government has proved reticent in considering alternative forms of ownership structure (e.g., a
" government
golden share ," which gives veto rights on key strategic issues, such as relocation,
offshoring, special voting rights, etc.), or retaining intellectual property rights and
corresponding royalty streams to reflect the magnitude of their own R&D efforts, as
Professor Mariana Mazzucato
has proposed in the past . At the very least, we need to consider these alternative
ownership structures that focus entrepreneurial development on value creation, as opposed to
capitulating to the depredations of rentier capitalism on the spurious grounds that this is a
neutral byproduct of the market's efficient allocation of resources.
Within the U.S., national industrial policy also suits green advocates, such as Senator
Bernie Sanders, whose Green
New Deal plan , while failing to address domestic/local content, or manufacturing in the
broadest possible sense, at least begins to move the needle with regard to the federal
government building and owning a national renewable grid.
Likewise in Europe, German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier recently published a "
National Industrial Strategy 2030 ," which,
according to Dalia Marin of Bruegel think tank in Brussels , "aims to protect German firms
against state-subsidized Chinese competitors. The strategy identifies key industrial sectors
that will receive special government support, calls for establishing production of electric-car
batteries in Europe, and advocates mergers to achieve economies of scale." It is striking that
EU policymakers,
such as Lars Feld of the German Council of Economic Experts , still apparently think it is
a protectionist step too far to consider coordinating with the car companies (where there is
already a high degree of trans-European policy coordination and international consolidation),
and other sectors, to help them all at the same time --
as Beijing is now doing . Of course, it would help to embed this in a manufacturing-based
Green New Deal, but it represents a healthy corrective to offshoring advocates who continue to
advocate that their car industry should migrate to China,
on the short-term grounds of cost consideration alone .
Essentially, the goal should be to protect the industries that policymakers think will be
strategically important from outsiders, and to further integrate with allies and partners to
achieve efficiencies and production scale. (Parenthetically, it seems particularly perverse
right at this juncture for the UK to break away from all this continental European integration,
and to try to go it alone via Brexit.) The aim should not be to protect private rent-seeking
and increasing private monopolization under the guise of industrial policy, which, as Dalia
Marin
notes , is why EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager
blocked the proposed merger between France's Alstom and Germany's Siemens. The two
companies "rarely compete with CRRC in third countries, because the Chinese company mainly
focuses on its home market." Hence, the grounds for creating "
heavyweight champions " was really a cover for developing an oligopoly instead.
Much of the focus of negotiation in the seemingly endless trade negotiations between the
U.S. and China has been on American efforts to dismantle the wave of subsidies and industrial
support that Beijing furnishes to its domestic industries. This seems both unrealistic as well
as being the exact opposite of what the U.S. should be doing if it hopes to level, or at least
carve up, the playing field.
Likewise, the problem in both the EU and the U.S. is not the size of these companies
generated by national developmentalism, but a size-neutral form of national regulation that
precludes these companies from stifling competition. The goal of a truly successful and
workable industrial policy should be to create an environment that supports and sustains value
creation and that socializes the benefits of the R&D for society as a whole, rather than
simply licensing it or selling it on to private companies so that it just becomes a vehicle
that sustains rent extraction for private profits alone.
We are slowly but surely starting to move away from market fundamentalism, but we still have
yet to make the full conceptual leap toward a sustainable industrial policy that creates an
economy for all. At least this is now becoming a fit discussion as far as policy making goes,
as many of the neoliberal shibboleths of the past 40 years are gradually being reconsidered and
abandoned. That is a start.
Repressed consumption in a few countries with sustained huge current account surpluses
naturally drives manufacturing outside the US (and other deficit countries). Interestingly,
Pettis says that those imbalances manifest today, not as a conflict between surplus/deficit
countries, but between economic sectors: bankers and owners in surplus/deficit countries vs.
the rest. According to Pettis this can be addressed internally in the US by tackling income
inequality: Tax transfers, reduced health care & educational costs, raising minimum wages
and giving negotiating power to unions. BUT BEFORE DOING THAT, THE US SHOULD IMPOSE CONTROLS
ON FOREIGN CAPITAL INFLOWS (by taxing those) INSTEAD ON TARIFFS ON FOREIGN PRODUCTS. From the
article:
It would have the additional benefit of forcing the cost of adjustment onto banks and
financial speculators, unlike tariffs, which force the cost onto businesses and
consumers.
If the US ever does this, other deficit countries, say the UK, France or Spain for
instance, should do exactly the same, and even more abruptly if these don't want to be awash
with foreign capital inflows and see inequality spiking even further.
It is financialization which is causing this. Please read Michael Hudson. As he has
pointed out it is financialization that is key. There is a reason his book was titled
"Killing the Host". Boeing's decline is also because of financialization. https://evonomics.com/hedge-fund-activists-prey-companies/
How Hedge Fund Activists Prey on Companies
Private equity and hedge are responsible for US manufacturing decline since the 1980s,
along with desire not to innovate-example why Deming's advice ignored by US automakers and
absorbed by the Japanese-who then clobbered the US automakers.
Hudson also knows that rising expenses for homeowners reduced their consumption capacity.
A main cause is rise in housing costs, education, and health.
Melman's main message is that focus on national security destroyed civilian sector. Today
most of US Govt R&D spending still in defense sector, while R&D disappearing in
private sector because of financialization.
Industrial strategy is useless for US unless housing costs come down, unless robots are
used. Hudson has already pointed out US cannot compete with Germany because of housing cost
differences. As Carl Benedikt Frey who focusses on tech has pointed out Midwest revolt was
because most automation was there.
"Frey argues that automation, or what he calls the third industrial revolution, is not only
putting jobs at risk, but is the principal source of growing inequality within the American
economy."
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/technology-trap-more-automation-driving-inequality-89211
" there are more robots in Michigan alone than in the entire American west. Where
manufacturing jobs have disappeared is also where US dissatisfaction is the greatest" https://voxeu.org/article/automation-and-its-enemies
Automation and its enemies
Carl Benedikt Frey, Ebrahim Rahbari 04 November 2019
I don't know that it's so much"free markets," as the financialization of the economy,
where money has mutated free a medium of exchange and necessary tool, to the end goal of
creating as much notational wealth, as the purpose of markets.
Money largely functions as a contract, where the asset is ultimately backed by a debt. So in
order to create the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
For one thing, it creates a centripedial effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the
center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Since finance
functions the value circulation mechanism of society, this is like the heart telling the
hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get. The
Ancients used debt nubiles to reset this process, but we lack the long term perspective.
The other consequence is the government has been manipulated into being debtor of last
resort. Where would those trillions go otherwise and could Wall Street function without the
government soaking up so much excess money. The real elephant in the room is the degree
public debt backs private wealth.
Further note; Since this borrowed money cannot be used to compete with the private sector
for what is a finite amount of profitable investments, it is used to blow up whatever other
countries incur the wrath of our despots.
As Deep Throat explained, if you want to know what's going on, follow the money.
Whenever I see the term "free markets" bandied about I know it's a framing that fits an
ideology but in no way fits the actual facts.
Just like we now have two criminal justice systems, we now have two market systems: crony
capitalism, and actual capitalism.
Crony capitalism is for Exxon Mobil; Verizon; Amazon; Raytheon; JP Morgan. Actual
capitalism is reserved for the plebes, who get "creative destruction". Mom slipped and fell;
the hospital bill arrived and there wasn't enough cash; so they took the house.
It's the obverse of the "socialism" argument. We have socialism across the length and
breadth of the economy: more Federal dollars are spent subsidizing fossil fuels than are
spent educating children. But heaven forbid Bernie should utter the "S" word, because he's
talking about the kind of socialism for you and me.
The problem is avoiding that us versus them polarity and show why what is going on is BS.
That the markets NEED government debt to function and then waste that collective value. Not
that government is some old nanny, trying to quell the 'animal spirits" of the market.
Maintaining infrastructure just isn't as glamorous as guns and bombs. Probably doesn't
threaten to kill you, if you don't give it the money, either.
It should be obvious to most that simply pouring more vodka into the punch bowl does not
create a healthy economy, just a bunch of vultures picking at the carcass.
Finance does function as the circulation mechanism of the body of the community, just as
government, as its executive and regulatory function, is the central nervous system. We had
private government before, called monarchy. Now finance is having its 'let them eat cake'
moment.
As a medium, money is a public utility, like that other medium of roads. You can have the
most expensive car out there, but you still don't own the road.
It's not that society should be either private, or public, but an intelligent mix of
both.
Just winging it a bit here but perhaps it might be an idea to map out money flows to help
decide how to strengthen America's industrial health. As an example, it might be time to end
some subsidies. I understand that there are deliberate tax breaks for corporations that move
their manufacturing overseas. Cut them now for a start. Yeah, I know. Closing the barn door
too late.
To free up cash for R&D, turn back the clock to 1982 and make stock buybacks once more
illegal. Give tax credits to companies that pay for a younger generation of machinist's
education. Have the Federal government match dollar-for-dollar money spent on R&D. If the
government really wants to free up resources, bring out a law that says that it is illegal
for the government to give any subsidies for any corporation with a net worth of $1 billion
or more.
But we all know that none of this will ever happen as there are far too many rice bowls
involved for this to be done – until it is too late. Oh well.
"I understand that there are deliberate tax breaks for corporations that move their
manufacturing overseas. Cut them now for a start. Yeah, I know. Closing the barn door too
late."
Better late than never!
Personally, I think that is the only way to get a handle on this situation – Change
the tax laws.
1. Designate industries as targets to retain/recreate significant manufacturing capability
in the US – semiconductors, flat screens, solar panels, and pharmaceuticals come to
mind. Give them preferential protection with quotas, tariffs etc. instead of just shotgun
tariffs. These industries should be forward looking instead of recreating mid 20th
century.
2. Integrate this into NAFTA and maybe add Central American countries to it. If we need to
use cheap labor, then do it in countries that otherwise provide illegal immigrants to us to
build up their economies. Far better than sending the jobs to China, a major global
competitor.
3. Fund big science such as NASA etc. A lot of discoveries come out that can then be
commercialized with manufacturing inside the US and NAFTA.
It's very refreshing to read articles of this kind. Thank you.
I'm recently retired and my career consisted of a healthy portion of managerial and
executive responsibilities as well as a long denouement of flat out proletarian,
worker-drone, pseudo-Taylorized work. (Think Amazon but not at Amazon.) I've experienced, in
some detail, what I consider to be both sides of the post WWII dynamic as it relates to
technology and who controls the shop floor. Now that I have some time on my hands I've
decided to see if I can better understand what appears to be a central contradiction of
modern industrial practice and especially what I believe to be misguided efforts by
non-industrial corporations to employ industrial-work-process techniques in day-to-day
practice.
It does seem to me that we can do a lot better. A well developed industrial policy should
include both a strategy for improving our productive capacity while simultaneously more
fairly distributing the fruits of productivity more broadly throughout the population.
This article and the comments are very helpful in pointing the way.
For those who have used up their free access to Foreign Policy there's a non-paywalled
version of the Pettis article on the Carnegie endowment website.
There is so much to like in this post I am going to concentrate on the few points with
which I had problems:
1. Any time I hear an economist bemoaning policies which "may retard overall economic
growth." I am tempted to just tune out. 'nega-growth', a variant of Amory Lovins'
'Nega-Watts' maybe. But surely not more military Keynesianism, speeded up planned
obsolescence and just plain junk!
2. Then there is "the convenient marriage of national security considerations and with
international investment and trade." If national security considerations involve insuring
circuit boards for more exceptional (SIC) fighting machines like the F35 or for that matter
more hydrogen bombs that might actually work, count me out. OTOH if they include, for
example, insuring the country has the capability to produce its own medicines and generally
any of the goods and services required for national survival, sign me up.
(national security) Then there is 'climate change', brought to us by Exxon Mobile and the
century-long pursuit of
The Prize in the Middle Eastern deserts.
An anecdote regarding this free market for everything all the time mentality –
My small city's council recently debated whether to pay several tens of thousands of
dollars for a "branding" campaign with a PR/marketing company who in the past has dealt with
Conde Nast, so read high end clientele. My better half, who is a councilor, argued that
spending all that $$$ to attract more tourists wasn't the best use of the city's funds and
that we weren't a "brand" to begin with, but a city. We've already had big problems will
illegal Airbnb's removing significant amounts of housing from the market and housing costs
have skyrocketed in recent years while wages, of course, have not. The city had until
relatively recently been a blue collar suburb but that has changed rapidly. My wife tried to
make the case that the result of this "branding" was likely to push housing costs even higher
and push more long time residents right of of town. The council is pretty liberal, whatever
that means these days, and I don't believe there is a pro-business Republican among them. She
was still on the losing end of a 6-1 vote in favor of the "branding".
Very good article, however I don't think trying to bring manufacturing back by framing it
in terms of 'national security' is a good idea. Although the idea itself is correct,
explicitly promoting it this way would just hand more power over to the national security
industry and that has not served us well at all in the last two decades.
This was a great summary of rational thinking. Thank you MA. I've been almost depressed
this last year or so by the relentless undermining of national sovereignty. Trying to replace
it with everything from global supply chains to the ECB to Brexit-free-trade (even without
Europe) to private property rights to you name it. Sovereignty is a very basic thing –
we agree to it like we agree to our currency. And by that agreement we certainly imply an
"Industrial Policy to create an economy for all." How this wisdom got systematically
gaslighted is a whole nuther story. I'm glad China didn't get hooked.
Apparently, Americans don't need flag-making jobs as they will not Make America Great.
Trump campaign making banners in China – moving fast to beat tariffs deadline. Although
there is the possibility that these are for domestic consumption in China to help rally
Chinese hackers to the cause of supporting the Trump campaign, including voting for Trump.
That would prove there is No Collusion with Russia.
This post started off suggesting it's time to toss the "the free market" and I would add
that it's time to toss "free trade/globalization" too, but it shifted to discussions of
R&D spending, cautions to anti-trust advocates, and considerations of industrial policy
and national security.
If R&D spending and productivity increase with scale, and many sectors of the US
economy are dominated by a handful of large International Corporations does that mean that US
R&D spending and productivity are close to full-scale -- as are the Corporations? How
does scaled-up R&D spending reconcile with "massive dividend payouts and unprecedented
spending on stock repurchases" and the Corporate prioritization of "short-term
profitability"? Should I read the claims about how R&D spending and productivity increase
with 'scale' to mean the scale of the R&D spending -- not the scale of the firm? If so
what sort of calculations should be made by "antitrust advocates when they call for breaking
up big tech" if I separate the scale of a firm from the scale of the R&D spending? Does
it matter where the R&D is done? Haven't many of the large International Corporations
moved their software development and R&D offshore too? ["Software retention"? -- What
"software retention"?]
"Likewise, the problem in both the EU and the U.S. is not the size of these companies
generated by national developmentalism, but a size-neutral form of national regulation that
precludes these companies from stifling competition." What sort of industrial policy will
compel International Cartels to play nice with domestic small and medium-sized businesses?
Will that industrial policy be tied with some kind of changes to the 'free market' for
politicians, prosecutors, courts, and regulators?
If we sell it here, but we don't make it here any more then what kind of industrial policy
will rebuild the factories, the base of industrial capital, skills, and technical know-how?
It will take more than trade disputes or currency rate of exchange tricks, or R&D
spending, or targeted spending on a few DoD programs to rebuild US Industry. Shouldn't an
industrial policy address the little problem of the long distance splaying of industries
across seas and nations, the narrowing and consolidation of supply chains for the parts used
the products still 'made in the usa'? If the US started protecting its 'infant industry' I
think that might impact the way a lot of countries will run their economies. This would
affect a basis for our international hegemony. And if we don't protect our industry, which
will have to be re-built and raised from the razed factory buildings scattered around this
country, how would it ever reach the size and complexity needed to prosper again?
When the government subsidize R&D here, what reason would there be for the
resultant products that come from that R&D, be made here? In Canada the SRED (Scientific
Research and Experimental Development) tax credits are used by companies to develop products
that are then manufactured in China. No Canadian production worker will ever see an hour of
labor from those subsidies. That result is baked into the R&D cake.
As you point out, "many of the large International Corporations moved their software
development and R&D offshore too". What stops them from co-mingling the subsidies and
scamming the system for their benefit, since everything done to favor big business resolves
to a scam on the peasants.
Where is the line between "working class" and "middle class"? Maybe there isn't
any.
Defining the "middle class" has devolved to a pundit parlor game, so let's get real for a
moment (if we dare): the "middle class" is no longer defined by the traditional metrics of
income or job type (blue collar, white collar), but by an entirely different set of
metrics:
1. Household indebtedness, i.e. how much of the income is devoted to debt service, and
2. How much of the household spending is funded by debt.
3. The ability of the household to set aside substantial savings / capital investment.
4. The security of the households' employment.
5. The dependence of the household wealth on speculative asset bubbles inflated by central
bank policies.
6. The percentage of the household income that is unearned, i.e. derived not from labor but
from productive assets.
7. The exposure of the households' employment to automation, AI or offshoring.
8. How much of the household income is government transfers: benefits, subsidies, etc.
After writing about the middle class and America's class structure in depth for over a
decade, it seems to me the actual, real-world class structure is something along these
lines:
1. No formal earned income, dependent on government transfers, possibly supplemented by
informal "black market" income; no family wealth.
2. The Working Poor, those laboring at minimum wage or part-time jobs with few if any
benefits. This class depends on government transfers to get by: EBT (food stamps), housing
subsidies, school lunch subsidies, Medicaid, etc. Highly exposed to reductions in hours, tips,
gigs, etc. and layoffs.
3. The "muddle class" which muddles through on earned income, much of which goes to
debt service (student loans, auto loans, mortgages, credit cards) and skyrocketing big-ticket
expenses: rent, healthcare, childcare, etc. Unable to save enough to move the needle on
household capital, any net worth is dependent on speculative asset bubbles continuing to
inflate. Highly exposed to layoffs or destabilizing changes in employment status: from
full-time to part-time, loss of benefits, etc.
4. The Protected Class with secure income/earnings and benefits: this includes the
nomenklatura of government employees, mid-level technocrat / managerial employees in
academia, government-funded non-profits, etc., and retirees with Medicare, Social Security and
other income (pensions, unearned investment income, etc.) and family assets (home owned free
and clear, substantial 401K nest eggs, etc.)
5. "Winner Take Most" Corporate America / market-economy households: top managers and
salespeople, entrepreneurs, successful business owners, speculators in financialization/asset
bubbles, marketers, those earning substantial royalties, etc. Most work crazy-hard and make
sacrifices, as per this article from The Atlantic: Why
You Never See Your Friends Anymore : Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are
taking a dire toll on American society.
6. The wealthy and super-wealthy. Many continue working hard despite being worth tens of
millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, as per this article from NYT.com: Why Don't Rich
People Just Stop Working?Are the wealthy addicted to money, competition, or just
feeling important? Yes.
7. The upper reaches of this class constitute a Financial Aristocracy / Oligarchy / New
Nobility, those who have leveraged mere wealth into political, social and financial
power .
8. The Mobile Creatives Class , currently small but expanding, which essentially
obsoletes the entire status quo of working for an employer (often to get benefits), going
heavily into debt for a college degree, vehicle, house, wedding, etc., hiring employees and
paying outrageous prices to live in an overcrowded, soul-destroying city, etc.
Where is the line between "working class" and "middle class"? Maybe there isn't any.
The old definitions of working and middle class were social more than financial--the
middle class was better educated (school teacher, etc.) than the working class (factory
worker, skilled tradesperson) but both could aspire to owning a home and giving their children
a more secure life than they had started with.
The working class was not limited to the working poor : working-class
jobs provided security and social mobility, just like white-collar middle class jobs.
What differentiates classes now is debt, employment security and the ability to build
household capital that isn't just a sand castle of speculative bubble "wealth." The worker
with tradecraft skills (welding, logger, etc.) has more security and earning power than a
college graduate with few skills that can't be outsourced or automated.
Many college graduates work in sectors that are highly exposed to layoffs and downsizing
once the economy contracts: food and beverages, hospitality, etc.
All of which leads us to a highly verboten conclusion: both political parties and the
corporate media have abandoned the 2/3 of the workforce that is working/middle class. The
bottom 20% dependent on government transfers has more security than those earning just enough
to disqualify the household for transfers, while the top 15% in the Protected Class are doing
just fine unless they're over-indebted.
The winner take most class and the wealthy dominate both political parties and the
media which is now dependent on advertising that appeals to the top 10% of households that
collect more than 50% of the national income.
The political parties take care of the government dependent class to keep the rabble from
rebelling, and they keep the government gravy train flowing to the Protected Class (healthcare,
national defense, academia, government employees) to insure their support at election time, but
they take their marching orders from the Aristocracy / Oligarchy that fund their campaigns and
enrich them with $100,000 speaking fees, seats on the board of directors, etc.
The Working/Middle Class gets nothing but lip-service, and that's been the case for
decades. The political parties and the media abandoned the Working/Middle Class long ago,
buttering their bread with the soaring wealth of the Aristocracy / Oligarchy and relegating
everyone outside the Protected Class who labors for their livelihood to the servitude of
politically impotent tax donkey / debt-serfdom.
Please examine these charts closely. They look busy but show that income inequality has been
rising for over three decades.
Here's income by quintile. The top 5% have done extremely well, the Protected Class
15% below them have done just fine, and the bottom 80%, well, who cares about them as long as
they're politically passive and make their loan payments?
Cumulative income reveals the widening gap between the bottom 80% and the top 5%. The
gap was not very big in the early 1990s, but look at it now:
Another chart of the top 5% pulling away from the rest of us:
No wonder the media depends on luxury/aspirational advertising: the top 5% are the
only ones with the money and credit to blow on status-signifying fripperies:
Where does this lead? To this--a collapse of buffers: debt is not income, and
eventually the buffers of borrowing more to keep afloat thin and break down. When the financial
buffers of the middle two-thirds of working / middle class households break down, the economy
and the social-political order will break down, too.
Don't think it won't happen just because it hasn't happened yet.
"... The real world politics of affirmative action, targeted (as opposed to universal) benefit programs and the like reside in these complexities. The equity graphic conveys the initial insight, but the assumptions packed into its story make it harder rather than easier to think through the controversies that bedevil equity politics. ..."
"... This goes back to what I call justice vs fairness. Justice is supposed to be blind, with the same outcome for all. It ain't so at the moment, but let's suppose we'd get a perfect justice. It still would not be fair. Fine of 1k may mean bankruptcy for some, and way beyond the level of recognition for someone else. ..."
"... But if you start getting into "fair", it has its own problems. Namely, fair depends on the context, and the context may vary – what is fair in one context may be deeply unfair in another, and it's possible that there's no solution where something is "fair" in all possible (or even majority) contexts. ..."
"... Precisely a point. Abstract words require context when applied to concrete cases. The main case for 'equal' is likely "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence. The context there especially is a retort to the divine right of royalty. ..."
"... I think this argues for why a human element – judges – are indispensible for taking into account context and setting consequences appropriately. So Yves' introduction about the co-optation of the judiciary by Law & Economics is pertinent. It is vital for society to require the judiciary to act in the public interest. ..."
"... The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Anatole France ..."
"... Another angle: all three are cheating, trying to watch the game without paying. If everybody did that. The point of the pictures is to simplify the concepts enough to provide a working definition – though as Studebaker wrote, it isn't a very good definition. ..."
"... Neo-liberal economics has resulted in more and more Americans finding themselves on the ' outside' , looking in, and a great many of them are quite upset about that because they remember a better time, and understand that in a very real sense, they're situation is the result of the callous, and willful behavior of elites who've profited in ruining their quality of life. ..."
"... Indeed. "The baseball game is dependent on the wall." Because, for one, who wants to run all the way to the river and wade in after the stupid ball? Baseball is an enjoyable distraction. So, to carry this metaphor, is the economy. Equity, to me, was always an equal share of something. A stake in something. Equal justice under the law. Without equity, as is now dawning on me, there can be no hope of equality. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is "accumulation by dispossession" (David Harvey) so there's no equity there. Hence no equality. ..."
Yves here. To give you a bit of break rom the loud warble
coming from far too many news outlets, here's a point of entry into a classic debate about
fairness, or more specifically, equality versus equity.
In case you missed it, there's been a war on equity in the form of the law and economics
movement. From ECONNED:
The third avenue for promoting and institutionalizing the "free market" ideology was
inculcating judges. It was one of the most far-reaching actions the radical right wing could
take. Precedents are powerful, and the bench turns over slowly. Success here would make the
"free markets" revolution difficult to reverse.
While conservative scholars like Richard Posner and Richard Epstein at the University of
Chicago trained some of the initial right-leaning jurists, attorney Henry Manne gave the
effort far greater reach. Manne established his "law and economics" courses for judges, which
grew into the Law and Economics Center, which in 1980 moved from the University of Miami to
Emory in Atlanta and eventually to George Mason University.
Manne had gotten the backing of over 200 conservative sponsors, including some known for
extreme right-wing views, such as the Adolph Coors Company, plus many of the large U.S.
corporations that were also funding the deregulation.
Manne is often depicted as an entrepreneur in the realm of ideas. He took note of the fact
that, at the time, the University of Chicago had one of the few law schools that solicited
funding from large corporations. Manne sought to create a new law school, not along
conventional brick-and-mortar lines (his efforts here failed), but as a network. He set out
to become a wholesaler, teaching law professors and judges. However, although Manne presented
his courses as teaching economics from a legal perspective, they had a strong ideological
bias:
The center is directed by Henry Manne, a corporate lawyer who has undertaken to demolish
what he calls "the myth of corporate responsibility." "Every time I hear a businessman
acknowledge public interest in what they do," Manne warns, "they invite political control
over their activities." At Manne's center in Miami, interested judges learn how to write
decisions against such outside political control couched in the new norms of market
efficiency.
Manne approached his effort not simply as education, but as a political movement. He would
not accept law professors into his courses unless at least two came from a single school, so
that they could support each other and push for others from the law and economics school of
thought to be hired.
The program expanded to include seminars for judges, training in legal issues for
economists, and an economics institute for Congressional aides. A 1979 Fortune article on the
program noted that the instructors "almost to a man" were from the "free market" school of
economics. Through 1980, 137 federal district and circuit court judges had finished the basic
program and 56 had taken additional "advanced" one-week courses.
It is hard to overstate the change this campaign produced, namely, a major shift in
jurisprudence. As Steven Teles of the University of Maryland noted:
In the beginning, the law and economics (with the partial exception of its application
to antitrust) was so far out of the legal academic mainstream as to be reasonably
characterized as "off the wall." . . . Moving law and economics' status from "off the wall"
to "controversial but respectable" required a combination of celebrity and organizational
entrepreneurship. . . . Mannes' programs for federal judges helped erase law and economics'
stigma, since if judges -- the symbol of legal professional respectability -- took the
ideas seriously, they could not be crazy and irresponsible.
Now why was law and economics vantage seen as "off the wall?" Previously, as noted above,
economic thinking had been limited to antitrust, which inherently involves economic concepts
(various ways to measure the power of large companies in a market). So extending economic
concepts further was at least novel, and novel could be tantamount to "off the wall" in some
circles. But with hindsight, equally strong words like "radical," "activist," and
"revolutionary" would apply.
Why? The law and economics promoters sought to colonize legal minds. And, to a large
extent they succeeded. For centuries (literally), jurisprudence had been a multifaceted
subject aimed at ordering human affairs. The law and economics advocates wanted none of that.
The law and economics advocates wanted none of that. They wanted their narrow construct to
play as prominent a role as possible.
For instance, a notion that predates the legal practice is equity, that is, fairness. The
law in its various forms including legislative, constitutional, private (i.e., contract),
judicial, and administrative, is supposed to operate within broad, inherited concepts of
equity. Another fundamental premise is the importance of "due process," meaning adherence to
procedures set by the state. By contrast, the "free markets" ideology focuses on efficiency
and seeks aggressively to minimize the role of government. The two sets of assumptions are
diametrically opposed.
By Peter Dorman, professor of economics at The Evergreen State College. Originally
published at Econospeak
Here's the graphic, widely used to explain why equity outcomes require unequal treatment of
different people.
Benjamin Studebaker (hat tip Naked Capitalism ) doesn't like it at all: "I hate it so
much." But his complaints, about the way the graphic elides classic debates in political
theory, strike me as being too redolent of grad school obsessions. The graphic is not trying to
advance one academic doctrine over another; it just makes a simple case for compensatory
policy. I agree in a general way with this perspective.
Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which mandates special facilities in
public buildings to accommodate people in wheelchairs or facing other mobility challenges. This
is unequal treatment: extra money is spent to install ramps that only a few will use, rather
than for amenities for everyone. But it's a great idea! Yes, compensation is concentrated on a
minority, but it aims to allow everyone to participate in public activities, and in doing this
it embodies a spirit of solidarity that ought to embrace all of us. By making a simple,
intuitive case for focused compensation, the graphic captures the spirit behind the ADA and
many other policies that take account of inequalities that would otherwise leave some members
of the community excluded and oppressed.
Unfortunately, however, there are serious limitations to the graphic; above all, it embodies
assumptions that beg most of the questions people ask about compensatory programs. Some are
challenges from conservatives of a more individualistic bent, others might be asked by friendly
critics on the left, but all are worthy of being taken seriously.
1. Watching the game over the fence is binary: either you can see it or you can't. In the
real world, however, most activities are matters of degree. You can learn more or less of a
particular subject in school, have a better or worse chance of getting the job you want, live
in a bigger or smaller house or apartment. How much compensation is enough? At what point do we
decide that the gains from ex post equity are not large enough to justify the other costs of
the program, not only monetary but possible conflicts with other social objectives? Every
teacher who has thought about how much extra attention to give those students who come to the
classroom with extra needs has faced this problem.
2. Watching the game is passive, an act of pure consumption. Things get more complex when
inequalities involve activities that produce goods of value to others. For instance, how would
the graphic address compensatory programs for the baseball players ? Yes, a player from
an underserved, overlooked community should get an extra chance to show they should be on the
team. But should the criteria for who makes the team be relaxed? How and how much? In case you
haven't noticed, this gets to the core of debates over affirmative action. Again, I am in favor
of the principle of taking extra steps to compensate for pre-existing inequalities, but the
graphic offers no guidance in figuring out how far to go in that direction.
3. Height is a largely inherited condition, but what about differences in opportunity that
are at least partly the result of the choices we make ourselves? This is red meat to
conservatives, who denounce affirmative action and other compensatory policies on the grounds
that they undermine the incentive to try hard and do one's best. I think this position is too
extreme, since inherited and environmental conditions are obviously crucial in many contexts,
but it would also be a mistake to say that individual choices play no role at all. Again we are
facing questions of degree, and the graphic, with it's clear intimation that inequality is
inborn and ineluctable, doesn't help.
4. The inequality depicted in the graphic is height, which is easily and uncontroversially
measured. Most social inequalities are anything but. Student A went to a high school with a
library; student B's high school didn't have one. That's a meaningful inequality, and if an
opportunity can be awarded to only one of them, like entrance into a selective college program,
it ought to be considered. But how big an effect should we attribute to it? Damned if I
know.
5. There is no real scarcity facing the three game-watchers in the graphics. There are
enough boxes to allow everyone to get a good view and enough fence space for everyone to share. In the real world neither tends to be true. Resources that can be devoted to compensatory
programs are limited, especially on a global scale, which, if you're really an egalitarian, is
how you should think about these things. Even locally, the money often runs short. The college
I used to teach at could be criticized for not doing enough for students from low income and
rural backgrounds with weak K-12 systems (I certainly did), but even with the best of
intentions the money was not there. Of course, where the goods to be distributed are
competitive, like slots in a school or job openings at a company, the problem is that there's
not enough fence space to go around. Yes, we should take action to provide more opportunities
and reduce the competitive scarcity. No, this won't make the scarcity go away completely.
6. The graphic shows us three individuals and asks us to visually compare their heights.
America has a population of over 320 million, and even "small" communities can have a cast of
thousands. Surely we are not expected to make individual calculations for every
person-by-person comparison. No, those using the graphic usually have in mind group
comparisons -- differences requiring compensatory interventions according to race, class,
gender, ability status, etc. But while that makes things easier by reducing the number of
comparisons, it makes everything else much harder to figure out: How do we measure group
advantages and disadvantages? How do we account for intersections? Are they additive,
multiplicative or something else? Do all members of the group get assigned the same
advantage/disadvantage rankings? If not, on what criteria? These are tremendously difficult
questions. I am not suggesting that they force us to abandon an egalitarian commitment to
substantive, ex post equality -- quite the contrary, in fact. We do have to face them if we
want to reduce the inequality in this world. My point here is that, by depicting just these
three fans watching a baseball game over a fence, one tall, one medium, one short, the graphic
is a dishonest guide to navigating actual situations.
My bottom line is that, while I agree with the spirit of the graphic that policies, whether
at a single office, a large institution or an entire country, should take account of the
inequalities people face in real life and try to compensate for them, how and how far to go is
difficult to resolve. Achieving ex post equality is complicated in the face of so many factors
that affect our chances in life, and on top of this, equality is only one of many values we
ought to respect.
The real world politics of affirmative action, targeted (as opposed to
universal) benefit programs and the like reside in these complexities. The equity graphic
conveys the initial insight, but the assumptions packed into its story make it harder rather
than easier to think through the controversies that bedevil equity politics.
This goes back to what I call justice vs fairness. Justice is supposed to be blind, with the same outcome for all. It ain't so at the moment,
but let's suppose we'd get a perfect justice. It still would not be fair. Fine of 1k may mean bankruptcy for some, and way beyond the
level of recognition for someone else.
But if you start getting into "fair", it has its own problems. Namely, fair depends on the
context, and the context may vary – what is fair in one context may be deeply unfair in
another, and it's possible that there's no solution where something is "fair" in all possible
(or even majority) contexts.
Justice is blind really means it declaratively sets the context and recognises no other.
But if we lock the context for fairness, we'll generate some unfair outcomes.
That all said, the fact that the perfect outcome is unachievable doesn't mean we'd not
strive for a better one.
Precisely a point. Abstract words require context when applied to concrete cases. The main
case for 'equal' is likely "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence.
The context there especially is a retort to the divine right of royalty.
Abstractions are particularly subject to korinthenkacking, "questions of degree".
Commitment to decisions tend to binarism, and (imo) usually based on one or two factors, with
a third for nuance.
For all the dithers, there is an egalatarianism inherent in the image; universally,
everyone has been a child and at some point has felt the pain of being too small. That
emotional impact is part of its success.
I think this argues for why a human element – judges – are indispensible for
taking into account context and setting consequences appropriately. So Yves' introduction
about the co-optation of the judiciary by Law & Economics is pertinent. It is vital for
society to require the judiciary to act in the public interest. Manne's framing of this as
"political control" is not completely wrong. The kind of judicial reform we (I) would like to
see needs to articulate what "public interest" means. I find Dorman's grappling with this
graphic to be a helpful start. The left seems deficient in thinking about this kind of
complexity (though perhaps I've missed it).
Wow, hadn't seen this before. Kinda fun to think about. Maybe the whole point is just to
illustrate the difference in the definitions of the two words in an Ikea sorta way. Haven't
seen the Studebaker critique so I don't know what his issues are.
I also have no idea what the "classic debates in political theory" wrt this graphic are.
But a few thoughts occur to me–can the short guy cut a hole in the the fence, or do the
"rules" say that the only way to see the game, without buying a ticket of course, is by
looking OVER the fence?
Is there a legitimate reason for the fence at all? If so, what is it? If not, why is it
there? Why are there no wheel chairs in the picture, when the discussion involves disabled
accommodation? Why do the kibitzers in the graphic appear to be minorities, no whites?
Gotta take the dog to the vet now. Will look for the Studebaker piece later. Maybe he
answers my questions.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Anatole France
I have always found this graphic both confusing and troubling. Why are the three central
figures watching the game outside the park? Isn't the difference between the outside the
fence watchers and the comfortably seated audience inside the park a question of equality and
equity? Are equity standards only applied to people relegated to not only 'second class
seating' but standing room only areas? Finally, do the people inside the park get to decide
not only who gets into the park but also how well or poorly the excluded fence watchers
execute a workaround to subvert the exclusionary practices implied by the presence of a
fence?
Another angle: all three are cheating, trying to watch the game without paying. If
everybody did that. The point of the pictures is to simplify the concepts enough to provide a working
definition – though as Studebaker wrote, it isn't a very good definition.
In simplifying it so much, it leaves a tremendous amount out and dodges a legion of
questions – both our writers seem to agree that it dodges crucial questions.
In the end, it's just a cartoon. You're right: the field would have guards out there to
prevent this sort of thing, unless they were consciously offering charity.
Why has no one made note of the fact that the people in the graphic are all excluded,
presumedly because of lack of the price of a ticket?
And is that lack of money due to the fact that they are all people of color, and so
subject to the economic inequality, based on racial prejudice, that plagues our system?
To me, the graphic portrays, in sub-text, the notion that people with less can/should be
happy with less than full participation in the culture in which they live, so long as that
austerity is ' properly' distributed amongst those ' outside ' the fence.
Neo-liberal economics has resulted in more and more Americans finding themselves on the '
outside' , looking in, and a great many of them are quite upset about that because
they remember a better time, and understand that in a very real sense, they're situation is
the result of the callous, and willful behavior of elites who've profited in ruining their
quality of life.
To take my analysis a bit further, IMO, it is the ' nouveau poor ' who, because of
their belief that they deserve the better life they clearly remember, and so recently lost,
insist that the ' equality ' portrayed in the left panel is reasonable, and should be
accepted because it is obviously evenly distributed.
This misinformed opinion might be attributed to their lack of experience with their new
life ' outside ', where people over time learn to cooperate in making do with
less.
There is a rich literature dealing with this reality, think The Prince and the Pauper, or
even the teachings of Jesus, and the Buddha.
The folks who believe in MAGA, are refusing to adjust, and believe that somehow, they will
regain their rightful place in an economy that has clearly decided to leave them behind, and
' outside '.
Our job then, is to help them understand that their only real hope for a better life is in
solidarity with the rest of us, in our fight to get everyone a place inside the fence.
This job is obviously a long, up hill battle, largely because of the long history of the
PTB stigmatizing socialism, dividing to conquer, and of course the MSM's total abandonment of
their civic duty.
I odce spent a few months in Cuba. It is absolutely not a model for most things. One
anecdote: an employee of the film industry (ICAIC) told me she gave some desperately poor
friends movie theater tickets. They ended up not going because they couldn't afford the bus
fare.
A bigger issue: the daily struggle to get enough to eat beyond rice, beans, and sugar.
We can debate the role of the US in turning Cuba into a near prison, and all sanctions need
to stop now, but it is what it is.
We can debate the role of the US in turning Cuba into a near prison, and all sanctions
need to stop now, but it is what it is.
And we can debate why, without sanctions, the US has the largest prison population in the
world at the highest rate of imprisonment. Tthough, of course, there is "no daily struggle"
for food or healthcare )
Cuba is an actual country with 11 million real people in it, not just a set of talking
points or a hypothetical. Of all the manifestations of North American arrogance, being made
into fairy tales pisses off Latin Americans, including the left, about as much as any. We can
abolish the current prison model and also abolish the sanctions on Cuba and do other things
not to make their already difficult lives worse.
A country a hundred miles from Disney World has the boot of the US state pressing down on
its suffering people and most American leftists only talk about it in terms of an internal US
political debate. Exhibit 10000 of why the American left sucks.
And yes, Cuba today distributes what resources it does have so unequally that it is not a
great model of social justice.
In the graphic, there are at least three games going on: the baseball game, about which we
don't learn very much; the game of the fence, which is solved with box arrangements, or by
taking it down; and the game of the definitions of 'equality' and 'equity', which comes
through the fourth wall into the world in which the cartoonist is trying to prove something.
According to my communistic prejudices, I would have said the only just solution would be to
remove the wall, but it could be that the baseball game is dependent on the wall -- I would
think most goods produced by labor, especially performances, would require some defining
structure -- and certainly the word game requires the wall as part of its raw material.
Or, replace the wall with clear plexiglass, thus retaining the nature of the game but
removing the market barriers that keep people without access to funds from enjoying the
game.
Indeed. "The baseball game is dependent on the wall." Because, for one, who wants to run
all the way to the river and wade in after the stupid ball? Baseball is an enjoyable
distraction. So, to carry this metaphor, is the economy. Equity, to me, was always an equal
share of something. A stake in something. Equal justice under the law. Without equity, as is
now dawning on me, there can be no hope of equality.
Little Manu Macron, in a burst of
hypocrisy, told Trump that the difference between France and the US was that France was based
more on social justice. Justice. I really don't see that as fundamentally French. But I
definitely don't see it as fundamentally USA. "Equity" is as much verbiage as "Equality". We
might want to start looking at the antonyms. Neoliberalism is "accumulation by dispossession"
(David Harvey) so there's no equity there. Hence no equality.
A version of this graphic was used at a civic engagement seminar on multi-modal
transportation accessibility I attended last night. It featured one twist – the
replacement of the slotted fence with a chain link fence so that all could see the game
"because the cause of the inequity was addressed. The systemic barrier was removed." In the
context of the presentation about accessibility in the city, the presenter mentioned
universal design
. This reminded me of Bucky Fuller's anticipatory design since both seek to
think comprehensively (i.e. inclusively) about design challenges and to accommodate the
maximum number of beneficiaries while doing harm to the least number possible. Seem equitable
to me! The designer of the equity meme has a great post at Medium that
provides a thorough overview of how the graphic has evolved (including the the chain link
fence addition), the variety of interpretations, and how the "famous" meme has spread far and
wide.
Is Mr. Dorman damning this image with faint praise? I think it's a brilliant way of
illustrating how an issue can be turned on it's head and looked at from a different
perspective.
It presents the difference between equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. Even
some self-labeled progressives (perhaps in order to appease conservatives?) have claimed they
are only interested in the former, not the latter. The graphic shows how meaningless that way
of judging results is.
The first step in trying to achieve good outcomes for all is to listen to all. This gets
my goat:
"Surely we are not expected to make individual calculations for every person-by-person
comparison."
Well, that's what individuals do, and if you respect them you take their perceptions of
inequity as data for your distributed computation. Not everyone wants the same thing. Some
people don't even like baseball.
And yes, that fence around the field is a good starter for a conversation about the
problems of enclosure. You wouldn't need the damn boxes if you hadn't blocked the view.
Wow, hadn't seen this before. Kinda fun to think about. Maybe the whole point is just to
illustrate the difference in the definitions of the two words in an Ikea sorta way. Haven't
seen the Studebaker critique so I don't know what his issues are.
I also have no idea what the "classic debates in political theory" wrt this graphic are.
But a few thoughts occur to me–can the short guy cut a hole in the the fence, or do the
"rules" say that the only way to see the game, without buying a ticket of course, is by
looking OVER the fence?
Is there a legitimate reason for the fence at all? If so, what is it? If not, why is it
there? Why are there no wheel chairs in the picture, when the discussion involves disabled
accommodation? Why do the people in the graphic appear to be minorities, no whites?
Gotta take the dog to the vet now. Will look for the Studebaker piece later. Maybe he
answers my questions.
I think a big challenge in the US is the general assumption that equality, equity, etc.
are a zero-sum game. If somebody gets something, then other people have lost. I think this
thinking is one of the reasons that we have seen low productivity growth over the past couple
of decades.
If the lower-class elements in society can get better conditions and opportunities, they
also have the opportunity to contribute more to society which increases the total size of the
pool for everybody to split. High inequality, such as now, means that many people are not
able to contribute to their full potential, which means the total size of the pool can be
smaller than it otherwise might be.
I don't think it is accidental that one of the great economic booms of all time occurred
from about 1950 to 2000 when the US:
1. Helped fund reconstruction of Europe and Japan after WW II;
2. Instituted the GI Bill which allowed many people who would never have gone to higher
education to do so;
3. Desegregated schools and generally allowed minorities to participate more fully;
4. Encouraged women to participate more fully in society; and
5. Disabled people could participate more fully.
All of these factors contributed to substantial growth in the 50s-90s period as more and
more groups become economically prosperous. However, we are now going to the ultimate
meritocracy where the economic winners are beginning to crush the people who have not done as
well and concentrate wealth at the top. As a result, the growth has stagnated as mobility is
decreasing and the upper pools are not growing.
1950-2000? I think the key date is 1973, when labor productivity was detached from wage
compensation. That's your neoliberalism kicking in, and it kicks on (and down).
"... Yes, about 10 percent of all American workers are making $100,000 or more a year, but most of those high paying jobs are concentrated in the major cities along the east and west coasts. For much of the rest of the country, these are very challenging times as the cost of living soars but their paychecks do not. ..."
The truth is that most American families are deeply struggling, but you hardly ever hear this from the mainstream media.
Yes, about 10 percent of all American workers are making $100,000 or more a year, but most of those high paying jobs are concentrated
in the major cities along the east and west coasts. For much of the rest of the country, these are very challenging times as the
cost of living soars but their paychecks do not.
According to the Social Security Administration
, the median income in the United States last year was just $32,838.05. In other words, 50 percent of American workers made more
than $32,838.05 and 50 percent of American workers made less than $32,838.05 in 2018. Let's be generous and round that number up
to $33,000, and when you break it down on a monthly basis it comes to just $2,750 a month. Of course nobody can support a middle
class lifestyle for a family of four on $2,750 a month before taxes, and so in most families more than one person is working these
days. In fact, in many families today more than one person is working multiple jobs in a desperate attempt to make ends meet, and
it still is often not quite enough.
If you want to look at the Social Security wage statistics for yourself, you can find them
right here . As you will see, I am not making these
numbers up.
These days many would have us feel bad if we are not making at least $100,000 a year, but according to the report only about 10
percent of all American workers make that much money.
Instead, most Americans are in what I would call "the barely getting by" category. Here are some key facts that I pulled out of
the report
-33 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
-46 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.
-58 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.
-67 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.
That means that approximately two-thirds of all American workers are making $4,000 or less a month before taxes.
Ouch.
But these numbers help us to understand why survey after survey has shown that most Americans
are living paycheck to paycheck . After paying the bills, there just isn't much money left for most of us.
And for an increasing number of Americans, even paying the bills has become exceedingly difficult. In fact, a brand new report
from UBS says that
44 percent of all U.S. consumers "don't make enough money to cover their expenses"
Low-income consumers are struggling to make ends meet despite the "greatest economy ever," and if a recession strikes or the
employment cycle continues to decelerate -- this could mean the average American with insurmountable debts will likely fall behind
on their debt servicing payments, according to a UBS report, first reported by
Bloomberg .
UBS analyst Matthew Mish wrote in a recent report that 44% of consumers don't make enough money to cover their expenses.
That means that about half the country is flat broke and struggling just to survive financially.
Of course those at the top of the economic food chain often don't have a lot of sympathy for those that are hurting. Many of them
have the attitude that those that are struggling should just go out and get one of the "good jobs" that the mainstream media is endlessly
touting.
But most jobs in the United States are not "good jobs".
Today, the poverty level for a household of four in the United States is $25,750. More than 40 percent of the workers in this
country make less than that each year.
Starting a business is always an option, but that takes money, and thanks to government regulations it is harder than ever to
run a small business successfully.
Just look at what is happening to our dairy farmers. There are few occupations that are more quintessentially "American" than
being a dairy farmer, and since most people drink milk and eat cheese, you would think that it would be a pretty safe profession.
But instead, dairy farms are shutting down at a pace that is absolutely chilling all over the nation. For example, just check
out what has been going on
in Wisconsin
At this rate, the Dairy State could lose 735 dairy farms this year, which would be a decline of 9%. In 2018, the state lost
691 farms, a rate of decline of 7.9%.
Over the last decade the state has lost more than 5,000 farms, or 40% of its licensed dairy farms. To state the obvious, the
current rate of exits is more than double that of the last decade.
"... "Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic," he said. ..."
Share U.S. Attorney General
William Barr raised concerns about the increase in secularism in society in a speech on
Oct. 11, speaking about how that has contributed to a number of social issues plaguing
communities across the nation.
Barr, who
delivered his remarks to students at the University of Notre Dame's law school, drew
attention to the comprehensive effort to drive away religion and traditional moral systems in
society and to push secularism in their place.
"We see the growing ascendancy of secularism
and the doctrine of moral relativism," Barr said.
He said that the forces of secularism are using mass media and popular culture, the
promotion of greater reliance on government intervention for social problems, and the use of
legal and judicial institutions to eliminate traditional moral norms.
Barr explored several of the consequences of "this moral upheaval," highlighting its effect
on all parts of society.
"Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and
mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and
alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic," he
said.
"Over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses," he said. "But I won't dwell on the
bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the
traditional moral order has coincided, and, as I believe, has brought with it, immense
suffering and misery."
Barr said religion has come under increasing attack over the past 50 years, underscoring how
secularists are using society's institutions to systematically destroy religion and stifle
opposing views.
"Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular
culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and
traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular
orthodoxy but also to drown out and silence opposing voices," he said.
He said that people are moving away from "micro-morality" observed by Christians, a system
of morality that seeks to transform the world by focusing on their own personal morality and
transformation. Instead, he said the modern secularists are pushing a "macro-morality," which
focuses on political causes and collective actions to address social problems.
"In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of
licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct become so high that society ultimately
recoils and reevaluates the path it is on," Barr said.
"But today, in the face of all the increasing pathologies, instead of addressing the
underlying cause, we have cast the state in the role as the alleviator of bad consequences. We
call on the state to mitigate the social costs of personal conduct and irresponsibility. So the
reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility but abortion; the reaction to
drug addiction is safe injection sites."
"The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage, and while we
think we are resolving problems, we [actually] are underwriting them."
He also pointed out how the law has been used to "break down traditional moral values and
establish moral relativism as the new orthodoxy," giving the example of how laws have been used
to aggressively force religious people and entities to subscribe to practices and policies that
are antithetical to their faith .
"The forces of secularism have been continually seeking to eliminate the laws that reflect
traditional moral norms," he said.
Barr also highlighted the role of religion in society, saying it promotes moral discipline
while it influences people's conduct.
"Religion also helps promote moral discipline in society. We're all fallen. We don't
automatically conform our conduct to moral rules, even when we know that they're good for us.
But religion helps teach, train, and habituate people to want what's good," he said.
"It doesn't do this primarily by formal laws -- that is, by coercive power -- it does this
through moral education and by framing society's informal rules -- the customs and traditions
which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages. In other words, religion helps frame a
moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline."
In a nation grappling with growing inequality, stagnating social mobility, crushing
personal debt, and crumbling job security, efforts to set America's generations against one
another persist. Don't blame the system, blame the "greedy" boomers. Or the "slacker" Gen
Xers. Or "entitled" millennials. But who gains from such discourses?
Efforts to foment that warfare, intentionally or not, serve specific agendas. Numerous
writers warn that age-group hostilities are "coming." And then, pitting generations against
one another, aside from their war metaphors, writers reach for doomsday predictions,
lachrymose empathy for "our kids," and questionable data. All this relies on the invention of
mendacious attributes, conferring on millions of diverse people implausible character flaws
or virtues. Karl Mannheim, the 20th-century sociologist known for explaining the uses of
generational units, would be rolling over in his grave.
Here is the hidden history of a perverse political discourse: It started with the
so-called boomers. As they aged toward peak midlife wages in the 1980s, they got saddled with
a reputation for being rich and greedy. The media concocted a lie that made it seem as if
they wouldn't ever need Social Security.
Bill Gates was born in 1955. That makes him what is commonly called a boomer. Rene Lavoie
was also born in 1955. The Globe recently recounted the problems that led this white Army vet
to spend time in Boston's homeless shelters. According to the principal investigator of a
recent study, Dennis Culhane, many people of Lavoie's age are indeed part of a boom -- "a
boom in aging homeless people." They were "less well educated people who faced economic
challenges in their youth -- falling wages and rising housing costs -- and never recovered
financially. ... Now in their 50s and 60s, they are biologically older than most people their
age. ... The average lifespan for a homeless person is 64."
Unlike Gates's co-billionaires in the .01 percent, 29 percent of people 55 and over have
nothing at all saved for retirement, according to the Government Accountability Office, and
many of the rest have little. Ageism in the workforce is one reason they lose a job and then
can't find an equally good one -- or find any work at all. Boomers are often treated as
"deadwood." Corporations drop them by the thousands. Even Xers are now old enough to be at
risk of having their resumes discarded. When people suffering from middle ageism stop looking
for work they are omitted from the unemployment data. At midlife, some submit to deaths of
despair.
Succeeding cohorts (all containing the same disparities -- of class, race, gender, and
education) have also been treated as if they were a single human with a character flaw.
During the 1990s recessions, when the so-called Xers couldn't find work, they too were
branded with a slur -- "slackers" -- while boomers were represented as the horde bullies who
held onto all the good jobs.
The baleful technique is still at work today. Given the same problem -- lack of decent
jobs for all ages, especially people without college degrees and people over 50 -- it's the
turn of the millennials. One of them complains about the stereotypes, defensively, in Vox:
"We demand participation trophies, can't find jobs, and live with our parents until we're
30." His response is to bash -- you guessed it -- the boomers, who "have a ton of maladaptive
personality characteristics."
In the Atlantic, pundits Niall Ferguson, from the Hoover Institution, and Eyck Freymann
defend millennials because their "early working lives were blighted by the financial crisis"
-- but ignore how home foreclosures, sluggish growth, and job losses also blighted people
around Ferguson's own age (55).
Millennials are supposed to be so ignorant and cruel that they would dismiss old people's
needs because of the boomers' alleged wealth. "Cutting old-age benefits for boomers would be
an easy call if millennials are anywhere on the line of fire," write the original concoctors
of the age-war distraction, Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their latest pandering assault,
"Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation."
We frequently hear that our elders' retirement needs will "break the bank" despite their
lifelong pay-ins. If Republicans manage to destroy the whole system of social trust, cutting
Social Security could indeed be one of the dire outcomes of the lies of generational warfare.
Otherwise, experts say, its financial failure is not remotely in the cards. For families it
has always been the most popular government program, because it provides a measure of
dignified independence for older people and a measure of relief for their adult children.
Younger people should support the expansion of Social Security for another reason, writes
one millennial who doesn't take the bait. Nick Guthman argues in The Hill that because of
student debt, "Millennials and Generation Z will need Social Security even more than our
parents and grandparents do."
The 2100 Act, now before Congress, would raise the cap on taxable-wage contributions.
Conservatives reject this easy fix, but it is overwhelmingly popular with the public.
Manipulating cohort characteristics damages far more than attitudes toward Social
Security, bad as the effect of that contrived skepticism could be. Blaming an older
generation that is already maligned allows many real perpetrators to smugly hide from their
irresponsibility. Will the climate movement find youngsters blaming the boomers for
ecological destruction, because some drove big cars? Wouldn't it be better to turn on the
CEOs of Exxon, who hid the dangers of burning fossil fuels that their scientists discovered
so thoroughly that few of us knew to stop flying?
Persistent precarity is indeed the historical issue that is obscured by these discourses.
The fact of American decline is this: Most people in each generation have had it worse than
their parents. According to a report on The State of Working America, the United States lags
behind its peer countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
in measurements of father-son mobility. In the United States, the "sons" have been receiving
stagnant wages, fewer benefits, jobs in the insecure gig economy. Many women too have lost
the progress narrative of rising expectations. That progress narrative, when upward mobility
was more widespread, supported the American Dream. It gave hope that democracy would work for
increasing numbers.
Don't blame your parents. Every article manipulating cohort stereotypes lets the
government and corporations off the hook for outsourcing abroad, the crash of rust-belt
industries, de-unionization, and the decades of cascading downward mobility we now endure.
You can't even want to get justice until you know the true sources of injustice.
How do imaginary reputations and hostile emotions get nailed onto struggling groups,
decade after decade, in this pernicious way? Naming each imagined age cohort makes it
possible. The process is called reification. Naming makes vague temporal proximity into a
thing.
Only the name baby boomers had an adequate demographic and historical reason to exist.
These millions were born (from 1946 to 1964) of the relative affluence that spread after
World War II. Their numbers did give them unifying experiences as they grew up -- made their
elders build new schools for them, made their working lives more competitive. Now they are
confronted by a president who, after promising not to, is cutting their security and health
care in devious ways.
But, even undergoing historical events together, age-peers don't build the same memories,
share the same beliefs, behave uniformly. During Vietnam, some young men were conscripted
into the war while others fought to end it. Stark differences likewise mark the current group
of young people (unimaginatively called "post-millennials"). Some of them are woke and ready
to take on racism, sexism, homophobia, gun control, global warming. At the same age,
neo-Nazis are setting fire to synagogues.
Once cohorts are reified by name, the labels become dog-whistles. Envy and fear can divide
a nation and abet destructive political changes. Malice can turn one generation against
another.
We could mitigate the divisiveness. Editors could stop soliciting age-war articles by
second-rate phrasemakers. We ordinary people need to defy the lies, and build
intergenerational bonds. Let us understand that capitalist and neoliberal choices have
worsened life, for decades, for every later, unequal subculture. And a comforting, unifying
cross-age coalition should eject politicians unwilling to maintain and repair our precious
communal institutions.
Computer programmer Steve Relles has the poop on what to do when your job is outsourced to
India. Relles has spent the past year making his living scooping up dog droppings as the
"Delmar Dog Butler." "My parents paid for me to get a (degree) in math and now I am a pooper
scooper," "I can clean four to five yards in a hour if they are close together." Relles, who
lost his computer programming job about three years ago ... has over 100 clients who pay $10
each for a once-a-week cleaning of their yard.
Relles competes for business with another local company called "Scoopy Do." Similar
outfits have sprung up across America, including Petbutler.net, which operates in Ohio.
Relles says his business is growing by word of mouth and that most of his clients are women
who either don't have the time or desire to pick up the droppings. "St. Bernard (dogs) are my
favorite customers since they poop in large piles which are easy to find," Relles said. "It
sure beats computer programming because it's flexible, and I get to be outside,"
Job Growth Remains Slow in September, but Unemployment Rate Falls to 3.5 Percent
By Dean Baker
Manufacturing employment hit a record low as a share of private sector employment.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 136,000 jobs in September,
after adding 168,000 in August. The 157,000 average for the last three months is considerably
slower than the 179,000 average for the last year, but this slowing is expected in a tight
labor market.
The September job growth led to a 0.2 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to
3.5 percent, a fifty-year low. The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) rose 0.1 percentage
point to 61.0 percent, a new high for the recovery that is 0.6 percentage points above the
year-ago level.
The EPOPs for both prime-age (ages 25 to 54) men and women rose by 0.1 percentage point in
September. The 74.0 percent rate for women is a new high for the recovery, although still
below the peak of 74.9 percent hit in April of 2000. The 86.4 percent rate for men is 0.3
percentage points below the March level and 1.6 percentage points below the prerecession
peak.
The unemployment rate for Hispanics fell to 3.9 percent, the lowest on record, 0.6
percentage points below the year-ago level. The unemployment rate for workers without a high
school degree also fell sharply to 4.8 percent, 0.8 percentage points below the year-ago
level. The share of unemployment due to voluntary quits, a measure of workers' confidence in
their labor market prospects, jumped 1.7 percentage points to 14.6 percent, a level more
typical for a strong labor market.
Other data in the household survey were more mixed. While the mean duration of
unemployment spells edged down 0.1 weeks to 22.0 weeks, the median duration rose 0.5 weeks to
9.4 weeks. The share of long-term unemployed also rose by 2.1 percentage points to 22.7
percent.
The number of involuntary part-time workers edged down by 31,000. The number of workers
choosing to work part-time also fell, dropping by 124,000 in September. The percentage of the
workforce choosing to work part-time has been dropping over the last year, after rising
sharply following the implementation of the ACA. This likely due to workers having greater
difficulty getting health care outside of employment.
Another negative item is an increase in the number of multiple job holders, especially
among women. The share of employed women who have multiple jobs rose to 5.9 percent, 0.5
percentage points above the year-ago level. The vast majority of these women report that they
work a second job in addition to a full-time job.
The picture on the establishment side is more negative. Slower job growth is to be
expected in a tighter labor market, but it has virtually stopped altogether on the
goods-producing side. The goods-producing sector has added a total of just 2,000 jobs over
the last three months, with construction adding 8,000 jobs, manufacturing adding 4,000, and
mining and logging losing 10,000. A big part of this is the fallout from the trade war and
the resulting drop in investment. Also, lower world oil prices are a big hit to the mining
sector. The manufacturing share of private sector employment sunk to a new all-time low in
September of 9.96 percent.
On the service side, job growth in the high-paying professional and technical services
sector has slowed sharply in the last two months, added an average of 13,900, compared to an
average of 23,900 over the last year. Restaurant employment has also slowed sharply, with the
sector adding an average of just 1,500 jobs over the last four months. This should be
expected in a tight labor market, where workers have higher-paying options. Retail lost
11,400 jobs in September, bringing its losses over the last year to 60,900, just under 0.4
percent of total employment.
A big job gainer in recent months is health care, which added 38,800 jobs in September
after adding 37,200 in August. The sector has accounted for almost a third of job growth in
the private sector over the last two months.
In contrast to the evidence of a tight labor market in the household survey, wage growth
appears to be slowing slightly. The average hourly wage rose 2.9 percent over the last year,
although the annualized rate of wage growth, comparing the last three months (July, August,
September) with the prior three months (April, May, June), was a slightly higher 3.4
percent.
[Graph]
This is a generally positive report with some serious warning signs. The goods sector is
very weak and likely to get weaker, according to a wide variety of measures of manufacturing.
The evidence of slowing wage growth is also striking in a labor market with 3.5 percent
unemployment.
"I am resolute in my ability to elevate this collaborative, forward-thinking team into the
revenue powerhouse that I believe it can be. We will transition into a DevOps team specialising
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that outsources IT level 2 OpenScore Sysadmin 527 points ·
4 days ago
"We will utilize Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Cloud technologies, python, data
science and blockchain to achieve business value"
And internal system inequality
is very different
From inter system inequality
Deng famously declared it's all right if some advance before others
Internally
He understood development involved greater internal inequality at not just one initial
stage
But at various stages ie domestic inequality
Is not constantly subject to improving Gini
On the path to the technical frontier ...
"... Meanwhile, greed -- once best known for its place on the list of Seven Deadly Sins -- became a point of pride for Wall Street's Masters of the Universe. With a sophisticated smile, the rallying cry of the rich and fashionable became "1 got mine -- the rest of you are on your own." ..."
And yet America's policies were headed in the wrong direction. The big banks kept lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would
gut families' last refuge in the bankruptcy courts -- the same bill we describe in this book. (It went by the awful name Bankruptcy
Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, but it should have been called the Gut the Safety Net and Pay OIT the Big Banks Act.).
The proposed law would carefully preserve bankruptcy protections for the likes of Donald Trump and his friends, while ordinary families
that had been crushed by debts from medical problems or job losses were thrown under the bus.
When we wrote The Two-Income Trap, it was already pretty clear that the big banks would win this battle. The fight kept going
for two more years, but the tide of blame-the-unlucky combined with relentless lobbying and campaign contributions finally overwhelmed
Congress.
In 2005, the Wall Street banking industry got the changes they wanted, and struggling families lost out. After the law was rewritten,
about 800,000 families a year that once would have turned to bankruptcy to try to get back on their feet were shut out of the system.1
That was 800,000 families -- mostly people who had lost jobs, suffered a medical catastrophe, or gone through a divorce or death
in the family. And now, instead of reorganizing their finances and building some security, they were at the mercy of debt collectors
who called twenty or thirty times a day -- and could keep on calling and calling for as long as they thought they could squeeze another
nickel from a desperate family.
As it turned out, the new law tore a big hole in the last safety net for working families, just in time for the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, the bank regulators kept playing blind and deaf while the housing bubble inflated. Once it burst, the economy collapsed.
The foreclosure problem we flagged back in 2003 rolled into a global economic meltdown by 2008, as millions of people lost their
homes, and millions more lost their jobs, their savings, and their chance at a secure retirement. Overall, the total cost of the
crash was estimated as high as S14 trillion.2
Meanwhile, America's giant banks got bailed out, CEO pay shot up, the stock market roared back, and the investor class got rich
beyond even their own fevered dreams.3
A generation ago, a fortune-teller might have predicted a very different future. With so many mothers headed into the workforce,
Americans might have demanded a much heavier investment in public day care, extended school days, and better family leave policies.
Equal pay for equal work might have become sacrosanct. As wages stagnated, there might have been more urgency for raising the minimum
wage, strengthening unions, and expanding Social Security. And our commitment to affordable college and universal preschool might
have become unshakeable.
But the political landscape was changing even faster than the new economic realities. Government was quickly becoming an object
of ridicule, even to the president of the United States. Instead of staking his prestige on making government more accountable and
efficient, Ronald Reagan repeated his famous barb "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are Tin from the government
and I'm here to help."'8 After generations of faithfulness to the promise of the Constitution to promote general welfare, at the
moment when the economic foundations of the middle class began to tremble, our efforts to strengthen each other and offer a helping
hand had become the butt of a national joke.
Those who continued to believe in what we could do together faced another harsh reality: much of government had been hijacked
by the rich and powerful. Regulators who were supposed to watch out for the public interest shifted their loyalties, smiling benignly
as giant banks jacked up short-term profits by cheating families, looking the other way as giant power companies scam mod customers,
and partying with industry executives as oil companies cut comers on safety and environmental rules. In this book we told one of
those stories, about how a spineless Congress rewrote the bankruptcy laws to enrich a handful of credit card companies.
Meanwhile, greed -- once best known for its place on the list of Seven Deadly Sins -- became a point of pride for Wall Street's
Masters of the Universe. With a sophisticated smile, the rallying cry of the rich and fashionable became "1 got mine -- the rest
of you are on your own."
These shifts played nicely into each other. Every' attack on "big government" meant families lost an ally, and the rules tilted
more and These shifts played nicely into each other. Every attack on "big government" meant families lost an ally, and the rules
tilted more and more in favor of those who could hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers. Lower taxes for the wealthy -- and more money
in the pockets of those who subscribed to the greed-is-good mantra. And if the consequence meant less money for preschools or public
colleges or disability coverage -- the things that would create more security for an overstretched middle class -- then that was
just too bad.
Little by little, as the middle class got deeper and deeper in trouble, government stopped working for the middle class, or at
least it stopped working so hard. The rich paid a little less and kept a little more. Even if they didn't say it in so many words,
they got exactly what they wanted. Remember the 90 percent -- America's middle class, working class, and poor -- the ones who got
70 percent of all income growth from 1935 through 1980?
From 1980-2014, the 90 percent got nothing.9 None. Zero. Zip. Not a penny in income growth. Instead, for an entire generation,
the top 10 percent captured all of the income growth in the entire country. l(X) percent.
It didn't have to be this way. The Two-Income Trap is about families that w'ork hard, but some things go wrong along the way --
illnesses and job losses, and maybe some bad decisions. But this isn't what has put the middle class on the ropes. After all, people
have gotten sick and lost jobs and made less-than-perfect decisions for generations -- and vet, for generations America's middle
class expanded. creating more opportunity to build real economic security and pass on a brighter future to their children.
What would it take to help strengthen the middle class? The problems facing the middle-class family are complex and far-reaching,
and the solutions must be too. We wish there could be a simple silver bullet, but after a generation of relentless assault, there
just isn't. But there is one overriding idea. Together we can. It's time to say it out loud: a generation of I-got-mine policy-making
has failed -- failed miserably, completely, and overwhelmingly. And it's time to change direction before the entire middle class
has been replaced by hundreds of millions of Americans barely hanging on by their fingernails.
Americas middle class was built through investments in education, infrastructure, and research -- and by' making sure we all have
a safety net. We need to strengthen those building blocks: Step up investments in public education. Rein in the cost of college and
cut out- standing student loans. Create universal preschool and affordable child care. Upgrade infrastructure -- mass transit, energy,
communications -- to make it more attractive to build good, middle-class jobs here in America. Recognize that the modem economy can
be perilous, and a strong safety net is needed now more than ever. Strengthen disability coverage, retirement coverage, and paid
sick leave. And for heavens sake, get rid of the awful banker-backed bankruptcy law, so that when things go wrong, families at least
have a chance at a fresh start. We welcome the re-issue of The Two-Income Trap because we see the original book as capturing a critical
moment, those last few minutes in which the explanation of why so many hardworking, plav-by- tho-mlcs people were in so much trouble
was simple: It was their own fault. If only they would just pull up their socks, cinch their belts a little tighter, and stop buying
so much stuff, they -- and our country -- would be just fine. That myth has died. And we say', good riddance.
"... The main culprit for the economy's falling growth rate and the general middle-class economic squeeze is debt - or more specifically, the burden of having to pay it back, with penalties, fees and lower credit ratings. The mainstream press depicts the rising market price of homes as a benefit to homeowners, a capital gam as if they almost were real estate speculators or capitalists in miniature, not wage-eamers running up debt. GDP statisticians include the rise hi valuation of owner-occupied real estate and the rising rents it saves homeowners from having to pay as adding to GDP. ..."
"... "What has occurred is an inversion of values about the proper aim of economies. Today, it is to get rich by means of a financialized rentier economy. From the point of view of rentiers and other investors, the production-and-consumption economy is the overhead. The costs of labor and capital are to be minimized by squeezing out more economic rent. By contrast, our approach treats the production-and-consumption sector as primary, and the FIRE sector and other rent extracting sectors as overhead." ..."
"... "Each debt is a credit on the other side of the balance sheet, because behind each borrower is a lender." ..."
Those who praise the post-2008 economy as a successful recovery point to the fact that the
stock market has soar ed to all-time highs, while the unemployment rate has fallen to a
decade-low. But is the stock market a good proxy for how the overall economy is doing? The low
reported unemployment rate sidesteps the predominance of minimum-wage jobs. part-time "gig''
work, and the fact that the Federal Reserve's Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S.
Households in 201S reports that 39% of Americans do not have $400 cash available for a medical
or other emergency, and that a quarter of adults skipped medical care hi 2018 because they
could not afford it. 1 The latest estimates by the U.S. Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report that nearly half (48 percent) of households headed by someone 55 and older
lack any retirement savings or pension benefits.2 Even in what the press calls an economic
boom, most Americans feel stressed and many are chronically angry and worried. According to a
2015 survey by the American Psychological Association, financial worry is the "number one cause
of stress in America today."3 The Fed describes them as suffering from '•financial
fragility." What is fragile is their economic status and self-worth, teetering 011 the brink of
downward mobility. Living hi today's fmancialized economy creates stresses that seem more
damaging emotionally than living hi a poor country. America certainly is not a poor counfry,
but it has become so debt-ridden, and its wealth and income growth so highly concentrated, that
much of its population is emotionally worse off than that of almost any other country hi the
world.
The U.S. economy's soaring wealth and income finds its counterpart on the liabilities side
of the balance sheet. Rising stock prices have been fueled by corporate stock buyback programs
and debt leveraging, not earnings from new tangible investment and employment. And rising real
estate prices reflect the decline hi interest rates, enabling a given rental flow to be
capitalized hito higher bank loans and market prices. Additionally, the wave of foreclosures
011 junk mortgages and debt- strapped new home buyers has reduced home ownership rates, forcing
more of the population into a rental market, whose rising charges for housing have supported
general real estate prices. Thus, these capital gains do not reflect a thriving economy, but a
higher-cost one that is polarizing between creditors and debtors, property owners and renters,
and the financial sector vis-a-vis the rest of the economy.
The main culprit for the economy's falling growth rate and the general middle-class economic
squeeze is debt - or more specifically, the burden of having to pay it back, with penalties,
fees and lower credit ratings. The mainstream press depicts the rising market price of homes as
a benefit to homeowners, a capital gam as if they almost were real estate speculators or
capitalists in miniature, not wage-eamers running up debt. GDP statisticians include the rise
hi valuation of owner-occupied real estate and the rising rents it saves homeowners from having
to pay as adding to GDP. But
2 William E. Gibson, "Nearly Half of Americans 55+ Have No Retirement Savings or Pension
Benefits," AARP, March 28, 2019.
https://www.aarp.org/retirement/retirement-savings/info-2019/no-retirement-money-saved.html
3 Source: American Psychological Association (2015). "American Psychological Association
survey shows money stress weighing on Americans' Health Nationwide," February 4, 2015.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/02/monev-stiess.aspx.
"What has occurred is an inversion of values about the proper aim of economies. Today, it
is to get rich by means of a financialized rentier economy. From the point of view of
rentiers and other investors, the production-and-consumption economy is the overhead. The
costs of labor and capital are to be minimized by squeezing out more economic rent. By
contrast, our approach treats the production-and-consumption sector as primary, and the FIRE
sector and other rent extracting sectors as overhead."
"Each debt is a credit on the other side of the balance sheet, because behind each
borrower is a lender."
"According to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau,
in 2018, over 30 percent of U.S. households earned over $100,000 (i.e., the upper
class).
Fewer than 30 percent of households earned between $50,000 and $100,000 (i.e., the
middle class).
The share of U.S. households making at least $100,000 has more than tripled since 1967,
when just 9 percent of all U.S. households earned that much (all figures are adjusted for
inflation).
In 2018, the share of households earning less than $50,000 (i.e., the lower class)
dropped below 40 percent for the first time since the U.S. Census data on this metric started
to be collected in 1967. Back then, 54 percent of households earned less than
$50,000.
So the next time you hear someone allege that the economy is leaving an increasing share
of American households behind or see a pundit bemoan the "shrinking middle class," take a
closer look at the data and keep in mind that a "shrinking middle class" may actually be a
sign of growing prosperity."
I am struck by the variety of ways in which the actual spiritual state of Americans is
denied by people who have every reason to know what that state is: our educators, artists,
and politicians. It is hard for me to believe, for example, that educators do not know the
sorry truth behind the lack of real education here. It seems very clear to me that until the
educators themselves believe in what they teach, there is no hope for their students. But the
educators cannot accept this, because in order to do so they would have to overhaul every
aspect of their private lives, which effort would hurl them forever beyond the bounds of the
academic life.
James Baldwin, 1961
The catastrophe which is education in this country is not new. For the majority of students
in the United States, black students in particular, education has never meant anything more
than a training to stay in one's place. Over the past several decades, however, with the
American Empire in an accelerating free-fall, American education, ever the handmaiden of
society's rich and powerful, has in tandem spiraled downward: our schools endlessly drill our
children with boring and meaningless "worksheets"; we subsidize and celebrate the digital
economy by "teaching" children with computers and computer programs; we script our teachers to
guarantee a minimum of human interaction in the classroom; we strip our schools of art and
music, making sure that our students never see beauty or truth in the world; and, of course, we
drill our students for weeks and months on end with testing, and more testing, and still more
testing, lest our students find any joy whatsoever in learning. In short, our schools dull the
intelligence and curiosity of our young people such that they will never question the
meaningless and unpleasant lives they will be forced to lead in a society that is everywhere
falling apart around them.
In higher education, too, we see this dramatic narrowing of the already slim chances that
any of our students will achieve a real education. Our state legislatures, in the most telling
example, cut state support for higher education requiring that university administrations jack
up tuition, tuition that rises far more rapidly than does inflation. Higher tuition yields both
higher student debt and more students working twenty, thirty, or forty hours a week in paying
jobs while they attend school. Our indebted students then must hew as closely as they possibly
can to career paths which enable them to minimize and pay back their debts; and the long hours
of minimum wage work taken on by our students all but guarantee that they cannot be serious
students, cannot devote the hours they need to study and reflection, cannot, in short, do the
work most necessary for them to become educated, mature, human beings. But then educated,
mature human beings do not fit well into our global economy.
In the face of this disaster, our university faculty refuse to take any stand against the
strangling of education in this country. We mouth words in our classrooms about truth, and the
search for truth, and the value and necessity of honesty and ethics, and democracy, and
responsible citizenship. Privately, we condemn the various assessment schemes we're compelled
to carry out; privately, we denounce the rapid multiplication of educationally meaningless
administrative and compliance positions on our campuses. And privately, we bemoan the ignorance
of our students, their lack of curiosity and their lack of academic preparation. But when it
comes to denouncing all the various assaults upon education occurring across the entire
spectrum of our educational landscape, when we are compelled to speak to the reasons why our
students enter our universities uneducated, and still more seriously, why they leave our
universities uneducated, we lose our voice. As more than one of my colleagues has said to me in
explanation of his silence: "I don't want to stick my neck out."
As one who never finished the 'official' "education" process, I can look back and see that
I was reacting to an almost subconscious realization that I was 'there' for the wrong
reasons, according to the received wisdom of that, and every other, time. This disconnect
between the 'ideal' of education and the 'reality' of the "Paper Chase," is perennial.
Historically speaking, a 'proper' higher education serves the purpose of producing a 'well
rounded' person. Traditionally, that process was reserved for those with a high amount of
disposable income; the children of the wealthy. The "lower orders" beavered on in technical
colleges and apprenticeships. The odd 'special' case was made in the 'proper' universities
for the exceptionally bright and the token 'charity' student. Call it an institutional case
of virtue signalling.
Today, those two disparite streams of education have been melded into one almost
monolithic bloc. The original utilitarian view of education, previously reserved for the
'technical' fields has invaded and corrupted the "higher" educational sphere. Now, everything
has a "price." Presumably, that formulation also applies to the students enmeshed in the new,
magisterial 'education' instrumentality. Roughly speaking, the 'students' are now the
'product' of the universities, not the education.
Finally, all this might be a socially 'agreed upon' process to short circuit the
production of intellectually and emotionally 'well balanced' individuals. There is nothing
more fear producing in any ruling elite than the prospect of an 'aware' public.
As a consumer, and producer of higher education curricula over 20 years in academia, this
article is spot on in how it describes the bezzle. And the area of specialization for me
(family finance – human ecology) is the prototypical example of the Neoliberal
university coaxing students into believing that incremental change, small bits of
knowledge/courses will change their lives for our students for the better -- while large
institutions continue to cheat, obscure malfeasance, and promote the administrative culture.
Its sickening on so many levels.
It is sickening to experience (teaching and learning). And if we remembered more than we
forget, it would take about 20 seconds to remember how the market has changed higher
education in terms content (what is studied), how we study (crammage), and why we study.
Lastly, if we imagine the exact same degree type for two different eras we can see the main
focus very clear:
1. Tuition at Cal Berkley in 1970? Around 1K 2019 – more like 1K per credit
hour.
2. Paying for your future assumes that we have a future (climate change, job market
opportunities)
3. Debt peonage and rentier education squatting requires the right mix of desperation and
time
When I think about the time/money/energy that is wasted in this country (not just in
universities – anyone just has to spend 1 minute with someone who participates in
fantasy football or sports gaming to see how out of wack we are as a culture and as a
people.
The hollowed out spaces in universities are now more about pretending to be competent,
maintaining the status quo -- each unit within departments competing against one another for
resources and students rather than we are all in this together (for the student).
If education can be seen in the lens of abuse, we have the profiteers abusers, and the
admin enables with chaos for everyone else.
Crazy
As Regina Spektor says: Living in Den of Thieves – its contagious
What Barber is saying: Teaching is hard, and my students aren't very bright (look in a
mirror, sir, neither are you). Revolutions are fun. Let's do that instead.
Yes, most people are educated, especially these days, to be conformist, to adopt the
current economic fantasies, and to be highly verbal.
But Barber does himself no favors: What can he possibly mean by the American Church? I am
detecting someone who has spent too much time in the U.S. South (Tennessee) where the
"church" is those nice Methodists down the street. Along with some required singing of
Amazing Grace. So what he may think of as an insightful critique of Americans' flexible
morals doesn't get to the center of the problem. The American "church" is utilitarianism.
Whatever one can get away with one gets away with. Actions have no consequences among the
perfected.
And the mention of the Greeks by Barber and Deneen is gratuitous. Neither of them has much
use for the Greeks and Greek philosophy. Each of them likely considers Greek philosophy
mainly to be the support that makes the American Church intellectually legitimate.
I understand the moral problem of anyone trying to get an education in the U S of A these
days. My alma mater is one of the main cheerleaders for fundamentialist free-market fantasy.
(Alma mater: What an idea.) Yet the diploma is only a start: Education has to go throughout
one's life, and sentimental education (is that even a "thing" here in the U S of A?) has to
go on everyday for the rest of one's post-diploma life.
Actually, the diploma is the end of the beginning. The start is "the first five" years of
life (talk, read, sing) which is likely to expose the growing brain to stimuli that allows
for future "discovery". The beginning of formal education (K-12), unfortunately for many,
starts with poverty (25% of all school children) and impoverished school resources (including
underpaid, over-worked teachers) that conspire toward an assembly-line methodology (testing,
and more testing). Those who make it to college (honestly) are well-versed in manufacturing
"acceptable" papers on topics not understood. But then the college curricula (more demanding
than H.S.) and the concept of "critical thinking" (ignoring the social implications of 18-20
y.o.'s on their own) makes the idea of "learning how to learn" a difficult grasp. Some get
it, some don't.
It is after getting the college diploma, and maybe of few years of travel (for pleasure or
a job) that a much broader, mature perspective of the world (Plato) emerges. (Hopefully those
Classics, or an introduction to NC, comes across your path.) It is then the real learning
starts.
I agree wholeheartedly with your diagnosis (not to mention greatly appreciate your lovely
prose), however, I think your theory of change as stated here – "force the issue and
meaning of education before American society" – misses the mark.
I have spent the better part of 2 decades studying, first history, then education, with
the goal of becoming an educator (accumulating no small amount of debt in the process). So
long as I stuck to diagnosing the problem as you did here, and keeping my calls to arms
strictly in the rhetorical realm, I was welcomed as an "ally" and fellow traveler by a not
insignificant portion of my colleagues.
Unfortunately for my career (not to mention mental health), I wasn't satisfied with that,
and began to delve and a very focused and specific way into the actual structure of
educational systems, and looking for levers to gain the power necessary to change them (or,
more specifically, to shift power from those who hold it to those who do not). That was when
I learned just how thin of a gruel "allyship" really is in academia.
I think you are assuming educators have real power. They do not. Power, real power, comes
from control over the material necessities and niceties of life. The primary social function
of our educational institutions, from pre-k through endowed chairmanship is to sort people
into an unequal society. If the "real issue and meaning of education" (i.e. creating the
conditions and connections necessary for truly democratic life) were to take hold in such an
institution, it would either destroy the institution or turn it into something else
entirely.
I agree "an educated people" is indeed our only hope, because to me an educated people is
synonymous with a democratic people. Indeed, I think education is the inevitable result of
people getting together to solve problems nonviolently with a coequal distribution of power.
Where it has truly taken root (e.g. Freedom schools in the 60s, the meetings organized by
populist party at the turn of the 19th/20th century), it has had a material function and base
that is diametrically opposed to the way virtually all today's "educators" earn their daily
bread.
IMO, the way people become true "educators" – those who "force the issue and meaning
of education before American society" – is by serving the educational function in a
democratic movement. They are people who are delegated authority democratically (i.e. without
coercion) by those they serve because they, in essence, are effective hubs for the
uninhibited flow of social information. In other words, they are authentically democratic
leaders, whose power is entirely dependent on maintaining trust because trust is fundamental
to the uninhibited flow of social information, and the temptation to violate social trust is,
well, why human societies have more drama than ant colonies.
You are a professor, and no doubt do a great deal of good for a great many students (I did
a brief stint of that as well, and in no way am trying to undermine how valuable and
rewarding it can be), but you will never be, in that role, an "educator" in the truly
democratic sense because every one of your students knows you could, if you wanted,
completely screw them over and there's not a family blogging thing they could do about
it.
You can, however, be a real educator (i.e. democratic leader) in your spare time, and are
in a unique and special institutional position to prepare future (and support present) real
democratic educator/leaders to manage one hell of a clusterfamilyblog of a global
civilizational collapse that is coming whether we want it to or not. I hope you will do so
with a hard-nosed evaluation of the relationship between power, information flows, democracy,
and the material world, as I fear anything less will be far from adequate.
These comments appear to me to be the epitome of neoliberal doctrine:
1. People have everything they need to excel
2. Its never been easier to study as information has been democratized
3. Invocation of Maslow, ambient culture (interesting view of life-stage development for
young adults too
4. Individualistic lens – "addressing the big issues of your time"
Maybe I read this wrong, or it started with "NC folk" – but there is no mention
of:
Debt peonage
Administrative culture
Global Labor Markets
Real Costs for Students – Tuition Inflation (higher than healthcare costs over last 30
years)
– Parking predation
– Textbook Bezzles
– Adjunct – itus
– Pay to Play Tenure
– Darwinian death struggle among college units in departments (Survival =
Resources)
– Forgetting – a major theme (making meaning of one's education) – moving
onto CV building
Social Costs of Expensive Higher Education (delay family formation)
Long term wealth implications for this generation's graduates
Education is not a solitary event, with isolated moments of brainstorming and
individualistic memes of hardwork. It is a system with millions of parts -- and these parts
have been bent to serve our neoliberal masters in about every domain imaginable.
And in my experience, (as Yves says) this is not a bug in the system -- it was a feature
of a system reboot designed especially for these outcomes
Last year I went to the local library book sale, and bought a stack of college textbooks
– chemistry, physics, elec engineering, calc, etc. The stack was 3′ tall, and it
cost me $26.
A few months ago, I downloaded the latest Linux & Java development workbench onto the
computer I built from components sourced from Ebay/Amazon. Full, up-to-date, latest edition
of Java development workbench on killer hardware $650, including 21″ monitor. Software
and how-to materials all free. I have done this several times during my career, and it's
never been easier or cheaper to do.
To glean those textbooks, all I have to do is read, do the probs at the back of the
chapter. To build salable skills, all I have to do is think up a problem to solve, and write
the software to solve it. Effort. Those two things – ID useful problem, and the
marshalling of components to solve it – gives me demonstrable evidence of competency,
and I can parlay that into a good job.
When I look a the amount of time expended on smart phones, Facebook, etc. I become less
sympathetic about people's plight – in general. One counter-example: the 450-year
systematic repression of blacks is one issue that merits societal redress.
And whether this cultural malady of victimhood is by design (by the "elites", for ex), or
by circumstance, it is not mandatory . No one is making people watch TV. There are
choices, and some are making different, better choices, and benefiting from it.
Visit http://www.coursera.org .
Tell my why I would go into debt to get what I need when it's available (from many of the
elite schools and professors) for free.
So, if taking initiative to address my own needs is what you call NeoLiberal, then I'm all
for neoliberalism. I get confused about all the political classifications afoot these days,
so I'm not real sure what bin I fit into, exactly.
Lastly, I doubt anyone could name 100 parts (types, not instances) of their educational
experience, let alone millions. It's not nearly as complex as all that.
While there a many areas where the web and libraries do indeed offer the curious and
disciplined an opportunity to better themselves with book knowlege of software. Much of what
we hope to understand about our world – fundamental research, and many speciality areas
of knowlege require a 'craft' or hands on component that no amount of book reading can
replace. Skill crafts of cabinetmakers, tailors, chefs and and product designers, or in my
field of biology. Lab 'bench craft' is fundamental to learning: microbiology, molecular
biology and much of fundamental physics requires labs. I understand from engineering friends
that trial test rigs during university are also fundamental to locking in skills. Many areas
of STEM require significant funds to back the student, because the study work loads make
academic excellence really challenging, and part time jobs nearly impossible. I know, I
worked 20 hours in a lab on weekends during much of my undergraduate. At graduate school the
extra hours 'spare' ideally are spent working on one's bench craft as free slave labour to
the senior ranking (i.e. higher skilled, greater knowledgeable senior scientists). In biology
labs, there is almost a medieval apprentice, journeyman, master craftsman route of skill
acquisition. There is as much an art to casting an agarose gel as there is in knowing the
tweak of the 'recipe' for the molecular attributes desired. It is with great relief that I am
not part of the US system, but sitting in a well funded more democratic (free) educational
system in Europe. Our world needs to radically think how to put much ore cash into STEM and
fundamental research. Incentivise school students (everywhere on planet) to commit the insane
hours needed for genetics, molecular biology and all the other emerging areas of life
sciences. It requires countries to overhaul education to allow curious minds regardless of
family finances. I agree with many NC readers that wide systematic overhaul is needed to
untangle many of these difficult and decaying situations (not just US).
Yes. It is still possible to get an education if you are self-motivated and
self-disciplined. Either inside or outside the academy – and which academy is
secondary. But in my view education requires teachers – this is missing from your model
and a very important part of the Academy.
However, Credentialling is only available if you pay the price of attaching yourself to
the academy. DOn;t worry – credentials are becoming less and less important as changing
times and institutional decay make truly educated and adaptable people more and more
important and the obedient credentialled irrelevent and useless.
Only how many hundreds of job ads on Indeed use "do you have a bachelors degree" as a
screening question? And straight into the circular disposal unit your digital submission goes
if you don't.
Ah well pesky reality of the job market and all, sure does reduce philosophizing about
"the pointlessness of credentials and formal education" down to size. And no my position is
not that noone can succeed without credentials, just that it's obviously harder.
I've never had an employer, in the last 35 years, who would give you any credibility for
stuff you learnt on your own.
If it isn't on your school transcripts or a diploma, you don't get to negotiate with it.
If you have great knowledge, acquired on your own, and use it on the job, you will get no
mention of it, no credit, nada. They will keep taking until they are made to stop, and nary
so much as a "thank you".
But that's just my experience of 35 years on the job.
"I've never had an employer, in the last 35 years, who would give you any credibility for
stuff you learnt on your own."
+1 and most WILL NOT give any credibility for class you take either, under no
circumstances.
There are two things employers give weight to:
1) on the job experience
2) credentialing, not taking a class in this or that but having a bachelors or a masters. And
this #2 is only as a screening device, #1 is still paramount, #2 can be used to screen out
but seldom is it by itself an "in". Now there are unique circumstances, if you are still in
your 20s, some will let you start out with just a degree as "you have to start somewhere",
but after that age, no you need #1 and best to have #2 as well.
+1 on this as well. My experience is that either you have the knowledge certified by
diploma or you are considered to know nothing about the subject & that is even more true
when dealing with people with neither diploma nor knowledge of/in the subject matter. They
use what little they know and what they know is to look at a diploma.
Ignoring opinions/knowledge from non-certified people is something actively taught at
universities and especially at business schools – if things go wrong then the defense
can be: He/she was the expert and had the diploma to show for it. People in positions of
responsibility are experts at avoiding responsibility, credentials help to deflect
blame/responsibility so it is often used.
IT has been slightly different, in the older days, but now it is settling in and even IT
recruiters no longer need to take chances on the uncredentialled.
Plinking away on a keyboard may feel like you're doing "real work", but there's a lot more
that's necessary to keep any kind of civilization going than developing a new Java app.
Training yourself to do any of these myriad other tasks takes more capital, financial and
otherwise, than the $700 you've laid out above. Not to mention that staring at a computer
screen is profoundly unhealthy and not suitable work for us jumped-up monkeys.
But that's where we are now, aren't we? The only work that Americans think of as "good real
work" these days is on a family-blogging computer, and everything else that keeps things
going has had the living wage taken away from it and the training ignored.
Everything is a waste of time if it's not improving one's usefulness to the economic
system I guess you would argue. And whether it's spending time on facebook and smart phones,
or taking care of old people, or raising kids, or engaging in political activism, or
increasing one's understanding of the world, or volunteering, or hanging out with friends
which Americans increasingly don't even have, or etc.. Because you know it's not just
Facebook people spend time on.
This is the philosophy of a tool. Your soul was bought on the cheap and you don't even
have the inner spirit to miss it.
As I re-read my piece a key question descended upon me. Since Maslow's hierarchy is a
guide, or a possibility, it's not a given that someone ever will "self-actualize", or will do
so in some socially- or ecologically-useful manner. So what happened to make you
"self-acualize" in a direction that might include an NC and the values it espouses?
A parent? A book? A Ken Burns documentary? Did you decide one day to sail outside the safe
harbors of conformity, and got swept – with malice afore-thought, and cocktail in hand
– into the currents of worldliness?
This is a key question for you democratic educators, ref. funemployed above: "Where's the
launch button?"
When I first encountered Maslow, I was puzzled, thinking I was missing something profound.
Now I'm simply amazed that he can be celebrated as an intellectual with penetrating insight
for stating the obvious.
"Food, clothes and shelter
All the poor man asking for"
– Misty in Roots
None of the answers I have received when younger, about how society was organized made any
sense in justice or fairness. Thus, the quest for better answers began. If that is an
awakening, then perhaps it is genetic. Some just seek to know more. Or perhaps more have had
that curiosity defeated by society's need for conformity earlier. The quest for knowledge
often is the lonelier path, for conforming to thr tribe brings fellowship and norms to
follow. There is safety in the middle of the pack.
Now, having observed a better understanding of the intrinsic unfairness of societal
arrangements and structures, the question turns to what nudges to the body may be possible to
limit the damage we bring upon ourselves as a species to strive for better returns (profits?
Benefits?) without the understanding of what "better" or "returns" means.
Smokers know smoking is bad, but the nicotine calls are here and now answered.
Feed scrollers know it doesn't improve their lives, but the hope for just a bit of pleasure
keeps the finger scrolling.
As to the digital opiate of the masses, is it because they have been conditioned/addicted
to lose their own agency to said opiate? Perhaps the very discussions here in NC is but a
different flavour of the same digital opiate. Or to paraphrase Mulder, "The answer IS out
there", and we just have to discover it.
The more things change Check out Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918)
or John Dewey The Public and its Problems and other works. Formal education, divorced as it
is from the practices of everyday life, presents these sorts of problems as a feature, not a
bug. That said, it has been my experience over the past 35 years that education can be and is
world opening for many young students. I have also found that the problem often rests with
the educator as much as it does the system of education. Well recognized philosophies of
education underlay a fundamental split teaching practice, (e.g., transmission of "facts"
versus enlivenment of knowing). Those that don't take the time to learn how to teach end up
frustrated that the "system" is failing. That a tenured full professor is lamenting thus,
just as Veblen did a century ago, is suggestive.
The prof can complain about students, but I think the students know what's going on better
than does the prof. The problems are much higher up the ladder than lowly students readiness
for college humanities courses. I expect the students are learning a great deal that's not in
the official curriculum. See:
tools for an economic system that prizes 'flexibility' (geographic, interpersonal,
ethical
Learning tools to develope flexible ethics kind of creeps me out.
Yup, training up thinkers is tough, I agree.
I think this is corollary to the above article–and if you've been in the classroom any
year for the past forty this should ring sickeningly familiar:
I loved the book about Summerhill – the alternative education option in the UK (back
in the 70s). Everyone was aghast because they thought it was remiss not to educate children
rigidly. It never got traction here in the US. But last night there was a segment on
alternative education in the UK, allowing children to go at their own pace, find their own
interest and above all learn that they didn't need an intermediary (teacher basically) to
learn – they could be successful autodidacts. It sounds like it is taking off in
England. How nice. Summerhill is still alive and kicking – it advertises itself as a
student democracy. Choose what you want to study. I certainly still like the idea because I
had my nose in a book from about the age of 7. I always read what interested me and it has
been a true pleasure. That's gotta be worth somthin.
Permit me to add three more books to your recommendation:
1. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and
Education by Grace Llewellyn. I don't think this one's in print anymore.
2. The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. Still in
print. Here's the author's website: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
3. The Day I Became an Audidact by Kendall Hailey. As far as I can tell, no longer
in print.
Enjoy your self-education outside the system, everyone!
From the OED: educate, v. [f. L. ēducāt- ppl. stem of ēducāre to rear, bring up
(children, young animals), related to ēdūcĕre to lead forth (see educe), which
is sometimes used nearly in the same sense.] 1 To rear, bring up (children, animals) by
supply of food and attention to physical wants. Obs. 2 To bring up (young persons) from
childhood, so as to form (their) habits, manners, intellectual and physical aptitudes. b To
instruct, provide schooling for (young persons). 3 To train (any person) so as to develop the
intellectual and moral powers generally. 4 To train, discipline (a person, a class of
persons, a particular mental or physical faculty or organ), so as to develop some special
aptitude, taste, or disposition. b To train (animals).
It would seem that Prof. Barber bemoans the demise of meaning 3, if that ever was the purpose
or function of our educational system.
Meanings 2 and 4 are alive and well. A special aptitude for narrow-minded submission is
successfully cultivated, the more so as the academic ladder is scrambled up.
But it's in Deneen's characterization of our students as "individuals without a past
cultureless ciphers".
I get that.
Americans have no use for History (with a capital H). American History is trail of carnage
and savagery on the scale of Attila and Hitler. Any discussion of History is replete with
irony, exceptions and contradictions. Things that Americans do not do well, and things that
you do not want rattling around in the heads of right-thinking citizens. Critical thinking
could be the catastrophic result.
OK then! Well enculturated Americans know that we have an exceptional past and we are an
exceptional people. But, History meh!
What we do have is a future. That's what America is all about. The wonderful, wonderful
future with it's myriad fabulous possibilities. Really, you could wet your pants just
thinking about it!
By 8th grade students are well versed in basic math and language arts. At that point the
student and family should have a choice between a college bound liberal arts education or a
technical education where they have a choice of several knowledge disciplines to choose to
study during High school. That way kids who leave high school and are not college bound at
least have one skill they can take anyplace in the USA and get a job.. Auto Mechanic, Diesel
Mechanic, Marine Mechanic, Chef, Software Development, Website Development, Cosmetology,
Adobe Creative Suite (video and photo editing), etc. Not all of those careers would be
offered at every high school. But at least 2 or 3 at a minimum and more choices the better.
After 12 years of state schooling students should have a skill or a plan to attend college to
acquire that skill.
Yes it is, but only for couples with low level of marital satisfaction.
Notable quotes:
"... They also looked at marital breakup more generally, focusing on when couples decided to end their relationships (not necessarily if or when they got divorced). Their findings revealed that when men were unemployed, the likelihood that either spouse would leave the marriage increased. What about the woman's employment status? For husbands, whether their wife was employed or not was seemingly unimportant-it was unrelated to their decision to leave the relationship. It did seem to matter for wives, though, but it depended upon how satisfied they were with the marriage. ..."
"... When women were highly satisfied, they were inclined to stay with their partner regardless of whether they had employment. However, when the wife's satisfaction was low, she was more likely to exit the relationship, but only when she had a job. ..."
The first study considers government data from all 50 U.S. states between the years 1960 and 2005.1 The researchers predicted
that higher unemployment numbers would translate to more divorces among heterosexual married couples. Most of us probably would have
predicted this too based on common sense-you would probably expect your partner to be able to hold down a job, right? And indeed,
this was the case, but only before 1980. Surprisingly, since then, as joblessness has increased, divorce rates have actually
decreased.
How do we explain this counterintuitive finding? We don't know for sure, but the researchers speculate that unemployed
people may delay or postpone divorce due to the high costs associated with it. Not only is divorce expensive in terms of legal fees,
but afterward, partners need to pay for two houses instead of one. And if they are still living off of one salary at that point,
those costs may be prohibitively expensive. For this reason, it is not that uncommon to hear about estranged couples who can't stand
each other but are still living under the same roof.
The second study considered data from a national probability sample of over 3,600 heterosexual married couples in the U.S. collected
between 1987 and 2002. However, instead of looking at the overall association between unemployment and marital outcomes, they considered
how gender and relationship satisfaction factored into the equation. 2
They also looked at marital breakup more generally, focusing on when couples decided to end their relationships (not necessarily
if or when they got divorced). Their findings revealed that when men were unemployed, the likelihood that either spouse would leave
the marriage increased. What about the woman's employment status? For husbands, whether their wife was employed or not was seemingly
unimportant-it was unrelated to their decision to leave the relationship. It did seem to matter for wives, though, but it depended
upon how satisfied they were with the marriage.
When women were highly satisfied, they were inclined to stay with their partner regardless of whether they had employment.
However, when the wife's satisfaction was low, she was more likely to exit the relationship, but only when she had a job.
"... A good economy compensates for much social dysfunction. ..."
"... More than that, it prevents the worst of behaviors that are considered an expression of dysfunction from occurring, as people across all social strata have other things to worry about or keep them busy. Happy people don't bear grudges, or at least they are not on top of their consciousness as long as things are going well. ..."
"... This could be seen time and again in societies with deep and sometimes violent divisions between ethnic groups where in times of relative prosperity (or at least a broadly shared vision for a better future) the conflicts are not removed but put on a backburner, or there is even "finally" reconciliation, and then when the economy turns south, the old grudges and conflicts come back (often not on their own, but fanned by groups who stand to gain from the divisions, or as a way of scapegoating) ..."
"... "backwaters of America, that economy seems to put out fewer and fewer chairs." ~~Harold Pollack~ ..."
"... Going up through the chairs has become so impossible for those on the slow-track. Not enough slots for all the jokers within our once proud country of opportunities, ..."
"... George Orwell: "I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if they learned to spend their money more economically. ... If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly." ..."
"... Perhaps you are commenting on the aspect that when (enough) job applicants/holders define down their standards and let employers treat them as floor mats, then the quality of many jobs and the labor relations will be adjusted down accordingly, or at the very least expectations what concessions workers will make will be adjusted up. That seems to be the case unfortunately. ..."
A good economy compensates for much social dysfunction.
A bad economy moves people toward the margins, afflicts those
near the margins and kills those at the margins.
This is what policy makers should consider as they pursue policies that do not put the citizen above all else.
cm -> Avraam Jack Dectis...
"A good economy compensates for much social dysfunction."
More than that, it prevents the worst of behaviors that are considered an expression of dysfunction from occurring, as
people across all social strata have other things to worry about or keep them busy. Happy people don't bear grudges, or at least
they are not on top of their consciousness as long as things are going well.
This could be seen time and again in societies with deep and sometimes violent divisions between ethnic groups where in
times of relative prosperity (or at least a broadly shared vision for a better future) the conflicts are not removed but put on
a backburner, or there is even "finally" reconciliation, and then when the economy turns south, the old grudges and conflicts
come back (often not on their own, but fanned by groups who stand to gain from the divisions, or as a way of scapegoating)
Dune Goon said...
"backwaters of America, that economy seems to put out fewer and fewer chairs." ~~Harold Pollack~
Going up through the chairs has become so impossible for those on the slow-track. Not enough slots for all the jokers within
our once proud country of opportunities, not enough elbow room for Daniel Boone, let alone Jack Daniels! Not enough space
in this county to wet a tree when you feel the urge! Every tiny plot of space has been nailed down and fenced off, divided up
among gated communities. Why?
Because the 1% has an excessive propensity to reproduce their own kind. They are so uneducated about the responsibilities of
birth control and space conservation that they are crowding all of us off the edge of the planet. Worse yet we have begun to *ape
our betters*.
"We've only just begun!"
~~The Carpenters~
William said...
"Many of us know people who receive various public benefits, and who might not need to rely on these programs if they made
better choices, if they learned how to not talk back at work, if they had a better handle on various self-destructive behaviors,
if they were more willing to take that crappy job and forego disability benefits, etc."
George Orwell: "I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if they learned to spend their money
more economically. ... If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would
not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly."
cm said in reply to William...
A valid observation, but what you are commenting on is more about getting or keeping a job than managing personal finances.
Perhaps you are commenting on the aspect that when (enough) job applicants/holders define down their standards and let
employers treat them as floor mats, then the quality of many jobs and the labor relations will be adjusted down accordingly, or
at the very least expectations what concessions workers will make will be adjusted up. That seems to be the case unfortunately.
"... In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true. ..."
"... the truth is that we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society... ..."
"... Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. ..."
"... What we are seeing is the long term impacts of the "Reagan Revolution." ..."
"... The affected cohort here is the first which has lived with the increased financial and employment insecurity that engendered, as well as the impacts of the massive offshoring of good paying union jobs throughout their working lives. Stress has cumulative impacts on health and well-being, which are a big part of what we are seeing here. ..."
"... Lets face it, this Fed is all about goosing up asset prices to generate short term gains in economic activity. Since the early 90s, the Fed has done nothing but make policy based on Wall Street's interests. I can give them a pass on the dot com debacle but not after that. This toxic relationship between wall street and the Fed has to end. ..."
"... there was a housing bubble that most at the Fed (including Bernanke) denied right upto the middle of 2007 ..."
"... Yellen, to her credit, has admitted multiple times over the years that low rates spur search for yield that blows bubbles ..."
"... Bursting of the bubble led to unemployment for millions and U3 that went to 10% ..."
"... "You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place." ..."
"... Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices ..."
"... It is not some unstoppable global trend. This is neoliberal oligarchy coup d'état. Or as it often called "a quite coup". ..."
"... First of all, whether a job can or is offshored has little to do with whether it is "low skilled" but more with whether the workflow around the job can be organized in such a way that the job can be offshore. This is less a matter of "skill level" and more volume and immediacy of interaction with adjacent job functions, or movement of material across distances. ..."
"... The reason wages are stuck is that aggregate jobs are not growing, relative to workforce supply. ..."
"... BTW the primary offshore location is India, probably in good part because of good to excellent English language skills, and India's investment in STEM education and industry (especially software/services and this is even a public stereotype, but for a reason). ..."
"... Very rough figures: half a million Chicago employees may make less than $800 a week -- almost everybody should earn $800 ... ..."
"... Union busting is generally (?) understood as direct interference with the formation and operation of unions or their members. It is probably more common that employers are allowed to just go around the unions - "right to work", subcontracting non-union shops or temp/staffing agencies, etc. ..."
"... Why would people join a union and pay dues when the union is largely impotent to deliver, when there are always still enough desperate people who will (have to) take jobs outside the union system? Employers don't have to bring in scabs when they can legally go through "unencumbered" subcontractors inside or outside the jurisdiction. ..."
"... Credibility trap, fully engaged. ..."
"... The anti-knowledge of the elites is worth reading. http://billmoyers.com/2015/11/02/the-anti-knowledge-of-the-elites/ When such herd instinct and institutional overbearance connects with the credibility trap, the results may be impressive. http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2015/11/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts-pop.html ..."
"... Suicide, once thought to be associated with troubled teens and the elderly, is quickly becoming an age-blind statistic. Middle aged Americans are turning to suicide in alarming numbers. The reasons include easily accessible prescription painkillers, the mortgage crisis and most importantly the challenge of a troubled economy. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention claims suicide rates now top the number of deaths due to automobile accidents. ..."
"... The suicide rate for both younger and older Americans remains virtually unchanged, however, the rate has spiked for those in middle age (35 to 64 years old) with a 28 percent increase (link is external) from 1999 to 2010. ..."
"... When few people kill themselves "on purpose" or die from self-inflicted but probably "unintended" harms (e.g. organ failure or accidental death caused by substance abuse), it can be shrugged off as problems related to the individual (more elaboration possible but not necessary). ..."
"... When it becomes a statistically significant phenomenon (above-noise percentage of total population or demographically identifiable groups), then one has to ask questions about social causes. My first question would be, "what made life suck for those people"? What specific instrument they used to kill themselves would be my second question (it may be the first question for people who are charged with implementing counter measures but not necessarily fixing the causes). ..."
"... Since about the financial crisis (I'm not sure about causation or coincidence - not accidental coincidence BTW but causation by the same underlying causes), there has been a disturbing pattern of high school students throwing themselves in front of local trains. At that age, drinking or drugging oneself to death is apparently not the first "choice". Performance pressure *related to* (not just "and") a lack of convincing career/life prospects has/have been suspected or named as a cause. I don't think teenagers suddenly started to jump in front of trains that have run the same rail line for decades because of the "usual" and centuries to millennia old teenage romantic relationship issues. ..."
"There is a darkness spreading over part of our society":
Despair, American Style, by Paul
Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are "down on America," and reinforced
his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with
the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political
enemies look ever more at odds with reality.
Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. ... There has been
a lot of comment ... over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality
among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999..., while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries
and among other groups in our own nation.
Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing
themselves... Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and ... drinking... But what's causing this epidemic of
self-destructive behavior?...
In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their
economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were
raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
That sounds like a plausible hypothesis..., but the truth is that we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading
across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society...
I know I'm not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility
of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites
they feel have betrayed them. No, deporting immigrants and wearing baseball caps bearing slogans won't solve their problems,
but neither will cutting taxes on capital gains. So you can understand why some voters have rallied around politicians who at
least seem to feel their pain.
At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education,
and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair.
bakho said...
There are a lot of economic dislocations that the government after the 2001 recession stopped doing much about it. Right after
the 2008 crash, the government did more but by 2010, even the Democratic president dropped the ball. and failed to deliver. Probably
no region of the country is affected more by technological change that the coal regions of KY and WV. Lying politicians promise
a return to the past that cannot be delivered. No one can suggest what the new future will be. The US is due for another round
of urbanization as jobs decline in rural areas. Dislocation forces declining values of properties and requires changes in behavior,
skills and outlook. Those personal changes do not happen without guidance. The social institutions such as churches and government
programs are a backstop, but they are not providing a way forward. There is plenty of work to be done, but our elites are not
willing to invest.
DrDick -> bakho...
The problem goes back much further than that. What we are seeing is the long term impacts of the "Reagan Revolution."
The affected cohort here is the first which has lived with the increased financial and employment insecurity that engendered,
as well as the impacts of the massive offshoring of good paying union jobs throughout their working lives. Stress has cumulative
impacts on health and well-being, which are a big part of what we are seeing here.
ilsm said...
Thuggee doom and gloom is about their fading chance to reinstate the slavocracy.
The fever swamp of right wing ideas is more loony than 1964.
Extremism is the new normal.
bmorejoe -> ilsm...
Yup. The slow death of white supremacy.
Peter K. -> Anonymous...
If it wasn't for monetary policy things would be even worse as the Republicans in Congress forced fiscal austerity on the economy
during the "recovery."
sanjait -> Peter K....
That's the painful irony of a comment like that one from Anonymous ... he seems completely unaware that, yes, ZIRP has done
a huge amount to prevent the kind of problems described above. He like most ZIRP critics fails to consider what the counterfactual
looks like (i.e., something like the Great Depression redux).
Anonymous -> sanjait...
You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05
and that produced the great recession in the first place. Because preemptive monetary policy has gone out of fashion completely.
And now we are going to repeat the whole process over when the present bubble in stocks and corporate bonds bursts along with
the malinvestment in China, commodity exporters etc.
Peter K. -> Anonymous...
"liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate... it will purge the rottenness out of the system.
High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted,
and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people."
sanjait -> Anonymous...
"You want regulation? I would like to see
1) Reinstate Glass Steagall
2) impose a 10bp trans tax on trading financial instruments."
Great. Two things with zero chance of averting bubbles but make great populist pablum.
This is why we can't have nice things!
"3) Outlaw any Fed person working for a bank/financial firm after they leave office."
This seems like a decent idea. Hard to enforce, as highly intelligent and accomplished people tend not to be accepting of such
restrictions, but it could be worth it anyway.
likbez -> sanjait...
" highly intelligent and accomplished people tend not to be accepting of such restrictions, but it could be worth it anyway."
You are forgetting that it depends on a simple fact to whom political power belongs. And that's the key whether "highly intelligent
and accomplished people" will accept those restrictions of not.
If the government was not fully captured by financial capital, then I think even limited prosecution of banksters "Stalin's
purge style" would do wonders in preventing housing bubble and 2008 financial crush.
Please try to imagine the effect of trial and exile to Alaska for some period just a dozen people involved in Securitization
of mortgages boom (and those highly intelligent people can do wonders in improving oil industry in Alaska ;-).
Starting with Mr. Weill, Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin, Mr. Phil Gramm, Dr. Summers and Mr. Clinton.
Anonymous -> Peter K....
"2003-2005 didn't have excess inflation and wage gains."
Monetary policy can not hinge just on inflation or wage gains. Why are wage gains a problem anyway?
Lets face it, this Fed is all about goosing up asset prices to generate short term gains in economic activity. Since the
early 90s, the Fed has done nothing but make policy based on Wall Street's interests. I can give them a pass on the dot com debacle
but not after that. This toxic relationship between wall street and the Fed has to end.
You want regulation? I would like to see
1) Reinstate Glass Steagall
2) impose a 10bp trans tax on trading financial instruments.
3) Outlaw any Fed person working for a bank/financial firm after they leave office. Bernanke, David Warsh etc included. That includes
Mishkin getting paid to shill for failing Iceland banks or Bernanke making paid speeches to hedge funds.
Anonymous -> EMichael...
Fact: there was a housing bubble that most at the Fed (including Bernanke) denied right upto the middle of 2007
Fact: Yellen, to her credit, has admitted multiple times over the years that low rates spur search for yield that blows bubbles
Fact: Bursting of the bubble led to unemployment for millions and U3 that went to 10%
what facts are you referring to?
EMichael -> Anonymous...
That FED rates caused the bubble.
to think this you have to ignore that a 400% Fed Rate increase from 2004 to 2005 had absolutely no effect on mortgage originations.
Then of course, you have to explain why 7 years at zero has not caused another housing bubble.
Correlation is not causation. Lack of correlation is proof of lack of causation.
pgl -> Anonymous...
"You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble
in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place."
You are repeating the John B. Taylor line about interest rates being held "too low and too long". And guess what - most economists
have called Taylor's claim for the BS it really is. We should also note we never heard this BS when Taylor was part of the Bush
Administration. And do check - Greenspan and later Bernanke were raising interest rates well before any excess demand was generated
which is why inflation never took off.
So do keep repeating this intellectual garbage and we keep noting you are just a stupid troll.
Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century
By Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Midlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted. However, that these upward trends were persistent
and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. If the white mortality rate for
ages 45−54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had
continued to decline at its previous (1979‒1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013,
comparable to lives lost in the US AIDS epidemic through mid-2015. Concurrent declines in self-reported health, mental health,
and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress.
Abstract
This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United
States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other
rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics
and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall.
This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic
liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall
increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates
of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and
ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured
deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and
consequences of this deterioration.
ilsm -> Sarah...
Murka is different. Noni's plan would work if it were opportune for the slavocracy and the Kochs and ARAMCO don't lose any
"growth".
Maybe cost plus climate repair contracts to shipyards fumbling through useless nuclear powered behemoths for war plans made
in 1942.
Someone gotta make big money plundering for the public good, in Murka!
CSP said...
The answers to our malaise seem readily apparent to me, and I'm a southern-born white male working in a small, struggling Georgia
town.
1. Kill the national war machine
2. Kill the national Wall Street financial fraud machine
3. Get out-of-control mega corporations under control
4. Return savings to Main Street (see #1, #2 and #3)
5. Provide national, universal health insurance to everyone as a right
6. Provide free education to everyone, as much as their academic abilities can earn them
7. Strengthen social security and lower the retirement age to clear the current chronic underemployment of young people
It seems to me that these seven steps would free the American people to pursue their dreams, not the dreams of Washington or
Wall Street. Unfortunately, it is readily apparent that true freedom and real individual empowerment are the last things our leaders
desire. Shame on them and shame on everyone who helps to make it so.
DeDude -> CSP...
You are right. Problem is that most southern-born white males working in a small, struggling Georgia town would rather die
than voting for the one candidate who might institute those changes - Bernie Sanders.
The people who are beginning to realize that the american dream is a mirage, are the same people who vote for GOP candidates
who want to give even more to the plutocrats.
kthomas said...
The kids in Seattle had it right when WTO showed up.
Why is anyone suprised by all this?
We exported out jobs. First all the manufacturing. Now all of the Service jobs.
But hey...we helped millions in China and India get out of poverty, only to put outselves into it.
America was sold to highest bidder a long long time ago. A Ken Melvin put it, the chickens came home to roost in 2000.
sanjait -> kthomas...
So you think the problem with America is that we lost our low skilled manufacturing and call center tech support jobs?
I can sort of see why people assume that "we exported out jobs" is the reason for stagnant incomes in the U.S., but it's still
tiresome, because it's still just wrong.
Manufacturing employment crashed in the US mostly because it has been declining globally. The world economy is less material
based than ever, and machines do more of the work making stuff.
And while some services can be outsourced, the vast majority can't. Period.
Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices. The U.S. has one of the more closed economies in
the developed world, so if globalization were the cause, we'd be the most insulated. But we aren't, which should be a pretty good
indication that globalization isn't the cause.
cm -> sanjait...
Yes, the loss of "low skilled" jobs is still a loss of jobs. Many people work in "low skilled" jobs because there are not enough
"higher skill" jobs to go around, as most work demanded is not of the most fancy type.
We have heard this now for a few decades, that "low skilled" jobs lost will be replaced with "high skill" (and better paid)
jobs, and the evidence is somewhat lacking. There has been growth in higher skill jobs in absolute terms, but when you adjust
by population growth, it is flat or declining.
When people hypothetically or actually get the "higher skills" recommended to them, into what higher skill jobs are they to
move?
I have known a number of anecdotes of people with degrees or who held "skilled" jobs that were forced by circumstances to take
commodity jobs or jobs at lower pay grades or "skill levels" due to aggregate loss of "higher skill" jobs or age discrimination,
or had to go from employment to temp jobs.
And it is not true that only "lower skill" jobs are outsourced. Initially, yes, as "higher skills" obviously don't exist yet
in the outsourcing region. But that doesn't last long, especially if the outsourcers expend resources to train and grow the remote
skill base, at the expense of the domestic workforce which is expected to already have experience (which has worked for a while
due to workforce overhangs from previous industry "restructuring").
likbez -> sanjait...
"Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices."
It is not some unstoppable global trend. This is neoliberal oligarchy coup d'état. Or as it often called "a quite coup".
sanjait -> cm...
"Yes, the loss of "low skilled" jobs is still a loss of jobs. Many people work in "low skilled" jobs because there
are not enough "higher skill" jobs to go around, as most work demanded is not of the most fancy type.
We have heard this now for a few decades, that "low skilled" jobs lost will be replaced with "high skill" (and better
paid) jobs, and the evidence is somewhat lacking. "
And that is *exactly my point.*
The lack of wage growth isn't isolated to low skilled domains. It's weak across the board.
What does that tell us?
It tells us that offshoring of low skilled jobs isn't the problem.
"And it is not true that only "lower skill" jobs are outsourced. Initially, yes, as "higher skills" obviously don't exist
yet in the outsourcing region."
You could make this argument, but I think (judging by your own hedging) you know this isn't the case. Offshoring of higher
skilled jobs does happen but it's a marginal factor in reality. You hypothesize that it may someday become a bigger factor ...
but just notice that we've had stagnant wages now for a few decades.
My point is that offshoring IS NOT THE CAUSE of stagnating wages. I'd argue that globalization is a force that can't really
be stopped by national policy anyway, but even if you think it could, it's important to realize IT WOULD DO ALMOST NOTHING to
alleviate inequality.
cm -> sanjait...
I was responding to your point:
"So you think the problem with America is that we lost our low skilled manufacturing and call center tech support jobs?"
With the follow-on:
"I can sort of see why people assume that "we exported out jobs" is the reason for stagnant incomes in the U.S., but
it's still tiresome, because it's still just wrong."
Labor markets are very sensitive to marginal effects. If let's say "normal" or "heightened" turnover is 10% p.a. spread out
over the year, then the continued availability (or not) of around 1% vacancies (for the respective skill sets etc.) each month
makes a huge difference. There was the argument that the #1 factor is automation and process restructuring, and offshoring is
trailing somewhere behind that in job destruction volume.
I didn't research it in detail because I have no reason to doubt it. But it is a compounded effect - every percentage point
in open positions (and *better* open positions - few people are looking to take a pay cut) makes a big difference. If let's say
the automation losses are replaced with other jobs, offshoring will tip the scale. Due to aggregate effects one cannot say what
is the "extra" like with who is causing congestion on a backed up road (basically everybody, not the first or last person to join).
"Manufacturing employment crashed in the US mostly because it has been declining globally. The world economy is less
material based than ever, and machines do more of the work making stuff."
Are you kidding me? The world economy is less material based? OK maybe 20 years after the paperless office we are finally printing
less, but just because the material turnover, waste, and environmental pollution is not in your face (because of offshoring!),
it doesn't mean less stuff is produced or material consumed. If anything, it is market saturation and aggregate demand limitations
that lead to lower material and energy consumption (or lower growth rates).
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, several nations (US and Germany among others) had programs to promote new car sales
(cash for clunkers etc.) that were based on the idea that people can get credit for their old car, but its engine had to be destroyed
and made unrepairable so it cannot enter the used car market and defeat the purpose of the program. I assume the clunkers were
then responsibly and sustainably recycled.
cm -> sanjait...
"The lack of wage growth isn't isolated to low skilled domains. It's weak across the board.
What does that tell us?
It tells us taht offshoring of low skilled jobs isn't the problem."
This doesn't follow. First of all, whether a job can or is offshored has little to do with whether it is "low skilled"
but more with whether the workflow around the job can be organized in such a way that the job can be offshore. This is less a
matter of "skill level" and more volume and immediacy of interaction with adjacent job functions, or movement of material across
distances. Also consider that aside from time zone differences (which are of course a big deal between e.g. US and Europe/Asia),
there is not much difference whether a job is performed in another country or in a different domestic region, or perhaps just
"working from home" 1 mile from the office, for office-type jobs. Of course the other caveat is whether the person can physically
attend meetings with little fuss and expense - so remote management/coordination work is naturally not a big thing.
The reason wages are stuck is that aggregate jobs are not growing, relative to workforce supply. When the boomers
retire for real in another 5-10 years, that may change. OTOH several tech companies I know have periodic programs where they offer
workers over 55 or so packages to leave the company, so they cannot really hurt for talent, though they keep complaining and are
busy bringing in young(er) people on work visa. Free agents, it depends on the company. Some companies hire NCGs, but they also
"buy out" older workers.
cm -> cm...
Caveat: Based on what I see (outside sectors with strong/early growth), domestic hiring of NCGs/"fresh blood" falls in two
categories:
Location bound jobs (sales, marketing, legal, HR, administration, ..., also functions attached to those or otherwise preferring
"cultural affinity") - which are largely staffed with locals, also foreigners (visa as well as free agent (green card/citizen))
"Technical functions" and "technical" back office (i.e. little or no customer contact) - predominantly foreigners on visa
(e.g. graduates of US colleges), though some "free agent" hiring may happen depending on circumstances
Then there is also the gender split - "technical/engineering" jobs are overweighed in men, except technical jobs in traditionally
"non-technical/non-product" departments which have a higher share of women.
All this is of course a matter of top-down hiring preferences, as generally everything is either controlled top-down or tacitly
allowed to happen by selective non-interference.
cm -> sanjait...
"You could make this argument, but I think (judging by your own hedging) you know this isn't the case. Offshoring of
higher skilled jobs does happen but it's a marginal factor in reality. You hypothesize that it may someday become a bigger
factor ... but just notice that we've had stagnant wages now for a few decades."
I've written a lot of text so far but didn't address all points ...
My "hedging" is retrospective. I don't hypothesize what may eventually happen but it is happening here and now. I don't presume
to present a representative picture, but in my sphere of experience/observation (mostly a subset of computer software), offshoring
of *knowledge work* started in the mid to late 90's (and that's not the earliest it started in general - of course a lot of the
early offshoring in the 80's was market/language specific customization, e.g. US tech in Europe etc., and more "local culture
expertise" and not offshoring proper). In the late 90's and early 2000's, offshoring was overshadowed by the Y2K/dotcom booms,
so that phase didn't get high visibility (among the people "affected" it sure did). Also the internet was not yet ubiquitous -
broadband existed only at the corporate level.
15-20 years ago it was testing and "low level" programming, perhaps self contained limited-complexity functions or modules
written to fairly rigid specifications, or troubleshooting and bug fixes implemented here or there.
Then 10-15 years ago it advanced to offshore product maintenance, following up on QA issues, small development projects,
or assisting/supporting roles in "real" projects (either conducted offshore or people visiting the domestic offices for weeks
to months).
This went on in parallel with domestic visa workers from the first 15-20 years ago wave either being encouraged or themselves
expressing a desire to go back home (personal, career, family reasons etc.) and "spread the knowledge" and advancing into technical/organization
management roles.
Then 5-10 years ago with clearly grown offshore skills (my theory is that people everywhere are cut from the same cloth,
and we are now at 10+ years industry experience in this narrative), the offshore sites started taking on ownership of product
components, while all the "previous" functions of testing, R&D support, tech pub (which I didn't mention earlier), etc. remained
and evolved further. Also IT (though IT support is more timezone bound and is thus present in all time zones).
Since then there has been little change, it is pretty much a steady state.
BTW the primary offshore location is India, probably in good part because of good to excellent English language skills,
and India's investment in STEM education and industry (especially software/services and this is even a public stereotype, but
for a reason).
Syaloch -> sanjait...
Whether low skilled jobs were eliminated due to offshoring or automation doesn't really matter. What matters is that the jobs
disappeared, replaced by a small number of higher skill jobs paying comparable wages plus a large number of low skill jobs offering
lower wages.
The aggregate effect was stagnation and even decline in living standards. Plus any new jobs were not necessarily produced in
the same geographic region as those that were lost, leading to concentration of unemployment and despair.
sanjait -> Syaloch...
"Whether low skilled jobs were eliminated due to offshoring or automation doesn't really matter. "
Well, actually it does matter, because we have a whole lot of people (in both political parties) who think the way to fight
inequality is to try to reverse globalization.
If they are incorrect, it matters, because they should be applying their votes and their energy to more effective solutions,
and rejecting the proposed solutions of both the well-meaning advocates and the outright demagogues who think restricting trade
is some kind of answer.
Syaloch -> sanjait...
I meant it doesn't matter in terms of the despair felt by those affected. All that matters to those affected is that they have
been obsoleted without either economic or social support to help them.
However, in terms of addressing this problem economically it really doesn't matter that much either. Offshoring is effectively
a low-tech form of automation. If companies can't lower labor costs by using cheaper offshore labor they'll find ways to either
drive down domestic wages or to use less labor. For the unskilled laborer the end result is the same.
Syaloch -> Syaloch...
See the thought experiment I posted on the links thread, and then add the following:
Suppose the investigative journalist discovered instead that Freedonia itself is a sham, and that rather than being imported
from overseas, the clothing was actually coming from an automated factory straight out of Vonnegut's "Player Piano" that was hidden
in a remote domestic location. Would the people who were demanding limits on Freedonian exports now say, "Oh well, I guess that's
OK" simply because the factory was located within the US?
Dan Kervick -> kthomas...
I enjoyed listening to this talk by Fredrick Reinfeldt at the LSE:
Reinfeldt is a center-right politicians and former Swedish Prime Minister. OF course, what counts as center-right in Sweden
seems very different from what counts as center-right in the US.
Perhaps there is some kind of basis here for some bipartisan progress on jobs and full employment.
William said...
I'm sure this isn't caused by any single factor, but has anyone seriously investigated a link between this phenomena and the
military?
Veterans probably aren't a large enough cohort to explain the effect in full, but white people from the south are the most
likely group to become soldiers, and veterans are the most likely group to have alcohol/drug abuse and suicide problems.
This would also be evidence why we aren't seeing it in other countries, no one else has anywhere near the number of vets we
have.
cm -> William...
Vets are surely part of the aggregate problem of lack of career/economic prospects, in fact a lot of people join(ed) the military
because of a lack of other jobs to begin with. But as the lack of prospects is aggregate it affects everybody.
" At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to
education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair."
UNOINIZED and (therefore shall we say) politicized: you are in control of your narrative -- win or lose. Can it get any more hopeful
than that? And you will probably win.
Winning being defined as labor eeking out EQUALLY emotionally satisfying/dissatisfying market results -- EQUAL that is with
the satisfaction of ownership and the consumer. That's what happens when all three interface in the market -- labor interfacing
indirectly through collective bargaining.
(Labor's monopoly neutralizes ownership's monopsony -- the consumers' willingness to pay providing the checks and balances
on labor's monopoly.)
If you feel you've done well RELATIVE to the standards of your own economic era you will feel you've done well SUBJECTIVELY.
For instance, my generation of (American born) cab drivers earned about $750 for a 60 hour (grueling) work week up to the early
80s. With multiples strip-offs I won't detail here (will on request -- diff for diff cities) that has been reduced to about $500
a week (at best I suspect!) I believe and that is just not enough to get guys like me out there for that grueling work.
Let's take the minimum wage comparison from peak-to-peak instead of from peak-to-trough: $11 and hour in 1968 -- at HALF TODAY'S
per capita income (economic output) -- to $7.25 today. How many American born workers are going to show up for $7.25 in the day
of SUVs and "up-to-date kitchens" all around us. $8.75 was perfectly enticing for Americans working in 1956 ($8.75 thanks to the
"Master of the Senate"). The recent raise to $10 is not good enough for Chicago's 100,000 gang members (out of my estimate 200,000
gang age minority males). Can hustle that much on the street w/o the SUBJECTIVE feeling of wage slavery.
Ditto hiring result for two-tier supermarket contracts after Walmart undercut the unions.
Without effective unions (centralized bargaining is the gold standard: only thing that fends off Walmart type contract muscling.
Done that way since 1966 with the Teamsters Union's National Master Freight Agreement; the long practiced law or custom from continental
Europe to French Canada to Argentina to Indonesia.
It occurred to me this morning that if the quintessential example of centralized bargaining Germany has 25% or our population
and produces 200% more cars than we do, then, Germans produces 8X as many cars per capita than we do!
And thoroughly union organized Germans feel very much in control of the narrative of their lives.
No longer thoroughly, with recent labor market reforms the door has likewise been blown open to contingent workforces, staffing
agencies, and similar forms of (perma) temp work. And moving work to nations with lower labor standards (e.g. "peripheral" Europe,
less so outside Europe) has been going on for decades, for parts, subassembly, and even final assembly.
Very rough figures: half a million Chicago employees may make less than $800 a week -- almost everybody should earn $800
...
... putative minimum wage? -- might allow some slippage in high labor businesses like fast food restaurants; 33% labor costs!
-- sort of like the Teamsters will allow exceptions when needed from Master agreements if you open up your books, they need your
working business too, consumer ultimately sets limits.
Average raise of $200 a week -- $10,000 a year equals $5 billion shift in income -- out of a $170 billion Chicago GDP (1% of
national) -- not too shabby to bring an end to gang wars and Despair American Style.
Just takes making union busting a felony LIKE EVERY OTHER FORM OF UNFAIR MARKET MUSCLING (even taking a movie in the movies).
The body of laws are there -- the issues presumably settled -- the enforcement just needs "dentures."
Union busting is generally (?) understood as direct interference with the formation and operation of unions or their members.
It is probably more common that employers are allowed to just go around the unions - "right to work", subcontracting non-union
shops or temp/staffing agencies, etc.
Why would people join a union and pay dues when the union is largely impotent to deliver, when there are always still enough
desperate people who will (have to) take jobs outside the union system? Employers don't have to bring in scabs when they can legally
go through "unencumbered" subcontractors inside or outside the jurisdiction.
cm -> cm...
It comes down to the collective action problem. You can organize people who form a "community" (workers in the same business
site, or similar aggregates more or less subject to Dunbar's number or with a strong tribal/ethnic/otherwise cohesion narrative).
Beyond that, if you can get a soapbox in the regional press, etc., otherwise good luck. It probably sounds defeatist but I don't
have a solution.
When the union management is outed for corruption or other abuses or questioable practices (e.g. itself employing temps or
subcontractors), it doesn't help.
Syaloch said...
There was a good discussion of this on last Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher.
Surprisingly, I pretty much agree with David Frum's analysis -- and Maher's comment that Trump, with his recent book, "Crippled
America", has his finger on the pulse of this segment of the population. Essentially what we're seeing is the impact of economic
stagnation upon a culture whose reserves of social capital have been depleted, as described in Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone".
When the going gets tough it's a lot harder to manage without a sense of identity and purpose, and without the support of family,
friends, churches, and communities. Facebook "friends" are no substitute for the real thing.
Peter K. said...
Jared Bernsetin:
"...since the late 1970s, we've been at full employment only 30 percent of the time (see the data note below for an explanation
of how this is measured). For the three decades before that, the job market was at full employment 70 percent of the time."
We need better macro (monetary, fiscal, trade) policy.
Maybe middle-aged blacks and hispanics have better attitudes and health since they made it through a tough youth, have more
realistic expectations and race relations are better than the bad old days even if they are far from perfect. The United States
is becoming more multicultural.
Suicide, once thought to be associated with troubled teens and the elderly, is quickly becoming an age-blind statistic.
Middle aged Americans are turning to suicide in alarming numbers. The reasons include easily accessible prescription painkillers,
the mortgage crisis and most importantly the challenge of a troubled economy. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention claims
suicide rates now top the number of deaths due to automobile accidents.
The suicide rate for both younger and older Americans remains virtually unchanged, however, the rate has spiked for those
in middle age (35 to 64 years old) with a 28 percent increase (link is external) from 1999 to 2010. The rate for whites in
middle-age jumped an alarming 40 percent during the same time frame. According to the CDC, there were more than 38,000 suicides
(link is external) in 2010 making it the tenth leading cause of death in America overall (third leading cause from age 15-24).
The US 2010 Final Data quantifies the US statistics for suicide by race, sex and age. Interestingly, African-American suicides
have declined and are considerably lower than whites. Reasons are thought to include better coping skills when negative things
occur as well as different cultural norms with respect to taking your own life. Also, Blacks (and Hispanics) tend to have stronger
family support, community support and church support to carry them through these rough times.
While money woes definitely contribute to stress and poor mental health, it can be devastating to those already prone to depression
-- and depression is indeed still the number one risk factor for suicide. A person with no hope and nowhere to go, can now easily
turn to their prescription painkiller and overdose, bringing the pain, stress and worry to an end. In fact, prescription painkillers
were the third leading cause of suicide (and rising rapidly) for middle aged Americans in 2010 (guns are still number 1). ...
cm -> Fred C. Dobbs...
When few people kill themselves "on purpose" or die from self-inflicted but probably "unintended" harms (e.g. organ failure
or accidental death caused by substance abuse), it can be shrugged off as problems related to the individual (more elaboration
possible but not necessary).
When it becomes a statistically significant phenomenon (above-noise percentage of total population or demographically identifiable
groups), then one has to ask questions about social causes. My first question would be, "what made life suck for those people"?
What specific instrument they used to kill themselves would be my second question (it may be the first question for people who
are charged with implementing counter measures but not necessarily fixing the causes).
Since about the financial crisis (I'm not sure about causation or coincidence - not accidental coincidence BTW but causation
by the same underlying causes), there has been a disturbing pattern of high school students throwing themselves in front of local
trains. At that age, drinking or drugging oneself to death is apparently not the first "choice". Performance pressure *related
to* (not just "and") a lack of convincing career/life prospects has/have been suspected or named as a cause. I don't think teenagers
suddenly started to jump in front of trains that have run the same rail line for decades because of the "usual" and centuries
to millennia old teenage romantic relationship issues.
"... If returns to experience are in decline, if wisdom no longer pays off, then that might help suggest why a group of mostly older people who are not, as a group, disadvantaged might become convinced that the country has taken a turn for the worse. It suggests why their grievances should so idealize the past, and why all the talk about coal miners and factories, jobs in which unions have codified returns to experience into the salary structure, might become such a fixation. ..."
The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters
April 10, 2017
.....................
The arguments about Case and Deaton's work have been an echo of the one that consumed so much of the primary campaign, and
then the general election, and which is still unresolved: whether the fury of Donald Trump's supporters came from cultural and
racial grievance or from economic plight. Case and Deaton's scholarship does not settle the question. As they write, more than
once, "more work is needed."
But part of what Case and Deaton offer in their new paper is an emotional logic to an economic argument.
If returns to experience are in decline, if wisdom no longer pays off, then that might help suggest why a group of mostly
older people who are not, as a group, disadvantaged might become convinced that the country has taken a turn for the worse. It
suggests why their grievances should so idealize the past, and why all the talk about coal miners and factories, jobs in which
unions have codified returns to experience into the salary structure, might become such a fixation.
Whatever comes from the deliberations over Case and Deaton's statistics, there is within their numbers an especially interesting
story.
This is a classic catch 22 situation with this "oath" described below...
Also I think a lot of professors of neo-classical economics look like the member of Komsomol
described below ;-) For them it is about opening new opportunities for advancement not about the
truth and the level of corresponding to the reality of this pseudo-scientific neo-classical garbage, with the smoke screen of
mathematics as a lipstick on the pig (mathiness)
Most such people will teach students complete garbage understanding that this is a complete garbage with a smile.
Still, in in Soviet way it is possible for some to accept the position and work to undermine neo-classical economics acting within
the institution using Aesopian language in lectures and papers.
"... Consider an example from the contemporary United States. Today a number of private universities, colleges, and schools in several states require teachers and professors to take a "loyalty oath" to ensure that they do not "hold or foster undesirable political beliefs.... ..."
"... From a political standpoint she disagreed with the practice of taking loyalty oaths, and later, in her role as professor of the sociology of law, she voiced political positions counter to those mentioned in the oath and challenged the oath-taking practice itself. ..."
"... However, before she could do this, she first had to take the oath, understanding that without this act she would not be employed or recognized by the institution as a legitimate member with a voice authorized to participate in teaching, research, and the institution's politics (committees, meetings, elections, and so forth), including even the possibility to question publicly the practice of taking oaths. ..."
"... "The oath did not mean much if you took it, but it meant a lot if you didn't." ..."
"... However, "when a vote had to be taken, everyone roused -- a certain sensor clicked in the head: 'Who is in favor?' -- and you raised your hand automatically" (see a discussion of such ritualized practices within the Komsomol in chapter a). ..."
"... Participating in these acts reproduced oneself as a "normal" Soviet person within the system of relations, collectivities, and subject positions, with all the constraints and possibilities that position entailed, even including the possibility, after the meetings, to engage in interests, pursuits, and meanings that ran against those that were stated in the resolutions one had voted for. ..."
"... These acts are not about stating facts and describing opinions but about doing things and opening new possibilities. ..."
A general shift at the level of concrete ritualized forms of discourse, in which the
formal dimension's importance grows, while the
informal, substantiative dimension opens up to new meanings, can and does occur in different historical and
cultural contexts.
Consider an example from the contemporary United States. Today a number of private
universities, colleges, and schools in several states require teachers and professors to take a
"loyalty oath" to ensure that they do not "hold or foster undesirable political
beliefs....
While the statutes vary, [these institutions] generally deny the right to teach to those who
cannot or will not take the loyalty oath" (Chin and Rao 2003, 431 -32). Recently, a sociologist
of law took such a loyalty oath at a Midwestern university when her appointment as a professor
began.
From a political standpoint she disagreed with the practice of taking loyalty oaths, and
later, in her role as professor of the sociology of law, she voiced political positions counter
to those mentioned in the oath and challenged the oath-taking practice itself.
However, before
she could do this, she first had to take the oath, understanding that without this act she
would not be employed or recognized by the institution as a legitimate member with a voice
authorized to participate in teaching, research, and the institution's politics (committees,
meetings, elections, and so forth), including even the possibility to question publicly the
practice of taking oaths.
Here, the informal, substantiative dimension of the ritualized act experiences a shift, while the
formal dimension remains fixed and important: taking the oath opens a world of
possibilities where new informal, substantiative meanings become possible, including a professorial position
with a recognized political voice within the institution. In the sociologist's words, "The
oath did not mean much if you took it, but it meant a lot if you didn't." 3
^
This example illustrates the general principle of how some discursive acts or whole types of
discourse can drift historically in the direction of an increasingly expanding formal
dimension and increasingly open or even irrelevant informal, substantiative dimension. During Soviet late
socialism, the formal dimension of speech acts at formal gathering and rituals became
particularly important in most contexts and during most events.
One person who participated in large Komsomol meetings in the 1970s and 1980s described how
he often spent the meetings reading a book. However, "when a vote had to be taken, everyone
roused -- a certain sensor clicked in the head: 'Who is in favor?' -- and you raised your hand
automatically" (see a discussion of such ritualized practices within the Komsomol in chapter
a).
Here the emphasis on the formal dimension of organizational discourse was unique both
in scale and substance. Most ritualized acts of "organizational discourse" during this time
underwent such a transformation.
Participating in these acts reproduced oneself as a
"normal" Soviet person within the system of relations, collectivities, and subject positions,
with all the constraints and possibilities that position entailed, even including the
possibility, after the meetings, to engage in interests, pursuits, and meanings that ran
against those that were stated in the resolutions one had voted for.
It would obviously be wrong to see these acts of voting simply as informal, substantiative statements
about supporting the resolution that are either true (real support) or false (dissimulation of
support). These acts are not about stating facts and describing opinions but about doing
things and opening new possibilities.
"... By Jeff Bryant, a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools , a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm. produced by Our Schools , a project of the Independent Media Institute. ..."
"... One of the first school districts to become entangled in the conglomeration of firms Wise and Sundstrom assembled was Nashville, which in 2016 chose Jim Huge and Associates to help with hiring a new superintendent. The following year the board hired Shawn Joseph, whom Huge had recommended. ..."
"... Shortly after Joseph arrived in Nashville, according to local News Channel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams, he began pushing the district to give $1.8 million in no-bid contracts to Performance Matters, a Utah-based technology company that sells "software solutions" to school districts. ..."
"... In addition to pushing Performance Matters, Williams reported, Joseph gave an "inside track" to Discovery Education, a textbook and digital curriculum provider and another company he and his team had ties to from their work in Maryland. ..."
"... By June 2018, Nashville school board member Amy Frogge was questioning Joseph about possible connections these vendors might have to ERDI. A district audit would confirm that ERDI's affiliated companies -- including Performance Matters, Discovery Education, and six other companies -- had signed contracts totaling more than $17 million with the district since Joseph had been hired. ..."
"... "Too often, national search firms are also driven by money-making motives and/or connections with those seeking profit," Frogge contended. That conflict of interest is a concern not only in Nashville but also in other districts where school leaders with deep ties to education vendors and consultants have resulted in huge scandals that traumatized communities and cost taxpayers millions. ..."
Lambert here:
More corruption in the professional class.
By Jeff Bryant, a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools , a project of the
Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy
journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center
for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear
in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public
education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm. produced by Our Schools , a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
In July 2013, the education world was rocked when a breaking story by Chicago independent
journalist Sarah Karp
reported that district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett had pushed through a no-bid $20 million
contract to provide professional development to administrators with a private, for-profit
company called SUPES Academy, which she had worked for a year before the deal transpired.
Byrd-Bennett was also listed as a senior associate for PROACT Search, a superintendent search
firm run by the same individuals who led SUPES.
By 2015, federal investigators
looked into the deal and found reason to charge
Byrd-Bennett for accepting bribes and kickbacks from the company that ran SUPES and PROACT. A
year-and-a-half later, the story made national headlines when Byrd-Bennett was convicted and
sentenced to prison for those charges. But anyone who thought this story was an anomaly
would be mistaken. Similar conflicts of interest among private superintendent search firms,
their associated consulting companies, and their handpicked school leaders have plagued
multiple school districts across the country.
In an extensive examination, Our Schools has discovered an intricate web of businesses that
reap lucrative school contracts funded by public tax dollars. These businesses are often able
to place their handpicked candidates in school leadership positions who then help make the
purchasing decision for the same businesses' other products and services, which often include
professional development, strategic planning, computer-based services, or data analytics. The
deals are often brokered in secrecy or presented to local school boards in ways that make
insider schemes appear legitimate.
As in the Byrd-Bennett scandal, school officials who get caught in this web risk public
humiliation, criminal investigation, and potential jail time, while the businesses that
perpetuate this hidden arrangement continue to flourish and grow.
The results of these scandals are often disastrous. School policies and personnel are
steered toward products that reward private companies rather than toward research-proven
methods for supporting student learning and teacher performance. School governance becomes
geared to the interests of well-connected individuals rather than the desires of teachers and
voters. And when insider schemes become public, whole communities are thrown into chaos,
sometimes for years, resulting in wasted education dollars and increased disillusionment with
school systems and local governance.
While media accounts generally frame these scandals as examples of corrupt school leaders
who got caught and brought to justice, reporters rarely delve into the corporate-operated
enterprises that undergird the whole system.
A Potent Business Model
Months before Byrd-Bennett's conviction, another individual connected to the Chicago
scandal, SUPES co-owner Gary Solomon,
pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges related to a scheme that diverted over $5 million in
public money from the Chicago contracts into his private pocket.
Solomon, who had been forced out of a previous job as a high school administrator after he
was accused of racist
comments and "preying" on female students, cofounded SUPES -- along with sister companies
PROACT Search and Synesi Associates -- with his former student Thomas Vranas, who also pleaded
guilty to charges stemming from the Chicago deals.
Although Solomon and Vranas got caught and were convicted for their scheme, they
nevertheless stumbled on a potent business model that combined PROACT's superintendent search
services with SUPES Academy professional development programs and consulting by Synesi
Associates to help districts "implement
reform strategies." Combining leader recruitment with leadership training and consulting gave
Solomon and Vranas three ways into a business relationship with a school district and multiple
ways to upsell clients into more expensive new contracts.
New administrators PROACT helped place in leadership roles could be reliable allies for
pitching professional development services to the district. School districts that had employed
SUPES might be more inclined to hire PROACT for a leadership search. And Synesi would have an
inside track for its consulting services. Further, any of the firm's school leader contacts who
became idle between full-time jobs, which often happens in this profession, would be able to
work for the firm as "associates."
School districts may have welcomed this arrangement as a form of "one-stop shopping" for
their needs, but it's not hard to see how it could lead to conflicts of interest and a veil for
fraud.
Chicago was not the only district that fell for the pitch. Shortly after news of the
Byrd-Bennett scandal broke, school districts in
DeKalb County , Illinois;
Fayette County (Lexington), Kentucky; and
Lancaster , Pennsylvania ended their contracts with PROACT.
In Iowa City, Iowa, a local reporter
found the district had a contract with Synesi Associates to conduct an audit of the
district and then hired PROACT to recruit candidates for a vacant director position. At the
same time, superintendent Stephen Murley took 34 days off work to do paid consulting for those
two organizations and for SUPES Academy.
In St. Louis ,
superintendent Kelvin Adams started consulting for SUPES shortly after the school board awarded
a $125,000 contract to the firm, Sarah Karp and Melissa Sanchez reported. The district also
awarded a $16,500 no-bid deal to Synesi.
But Solomon and Vranas did not invent this money-making strategy, nor did it die when they
were convicted and sent to jail.
From Retail Store to Mega-Mall
In June 2016, the Chicago Sun Times
reported that in the wake of the Byrd-Bennett scandal, parts of SUPES Academy were
purchased by Joseph Wise and his partner David Sundstrom. Their Chicago-based firm Atlantic
Research Partners (ARP) had already gotten at least $5 million in recent business from Chicago
schools. (Sundstrom would later
contend ARP rescinded the agreement to acquire SUPES and that the "only remaining
connection between the companies" was a licensing of training material.)
Wise founded ARP with Sundstrom in 2007 after both had been ousted from their jobs in the
Duval County, Florida, school district due to alleged
"serious misconduct." According to the ARP website, the project's mission was to launch a
"teacher-training program focused on instructional coaching and school capacity-building."
Around the same time ARP was acquiring parts of SUPES, the company also
merged with Jim Huge and Associates, a firm with deep experience in school superintendent
and other talent searches. Huge had also
served as chief strategy officer for PROACT Search. The announced rationale of the merger
was "to maximize seamless delivery of the intensive executive services to schools and school
leaders."
Undoubtedly, what Wise and Sundstrom assembled was similar to the three-part business model
Solomon and Vranas put together. What was different, though, was Wise and Sundstrom would
expand on the model with their
subsequent acquisition of Education Research and Development Institute (ERDI).
According to Louisiana school teacher and wily blogger
Mercedes Schneider , Sundstrom registered an entity called ERDI Partners as a business with a Florida address in 2017.
But an entity called ERDI had been in existence since at least 2005 when an article in
Education Week described the company as
an intermediary organization bringing together school administrators and education vendors to
help companies improve the products and services they offer school systems. Specifically, ERDI
arranged get-togethers by paying superintendents consulting fees plus expenses to travel to
conferences at luxury resorts where they would meet with company representatives. The
companies, in turn, underwrote the conferences with substantial fees paid to ERDI.
Critics of ERDI
argue that the company's model for paying school administrators for their advice on
education products inevitably leads to conflict of interest issues when those administrators
are presented with offers to purchase products promoted by ERDI.
Byrd-Bennett had a relationship with ERDI dating back to at least 2014 and was listed as senior
advisor on the firm's website while she was employed as Chicago schools' CEO.
With the acquisition of ERDI, Wise and Sundstrom could transform their business model from a
lone retail operation to a mega-mall of
education vendors of all kinds.
'The Search Was Manipulated'
One of the first school districts to become entangled in the conglomeration of firms Wise
and Sundstrom assembled was Nashville, which in 2016
chose Jim Huge and Associates to help with hiring a new superintendent. The following year
the board
hired Shawn Joseph, whom Huge had recommended.
Shortly after Joseph arrived in Nashville, according
to local News Channel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams, he began pushing the district to
give $1.8 million in no-bid contracts to Performance Matters, a Utah-based technology company
that sells "software solutions" to
school districts.
Williams found Joseph had spoken at the company's conference and he had touted the company's
software products in promotional materials while he was employed in his previous job in
Maryland. Williams also unearthed emails
showing Joseph began contract talks with Performance Matters two weeks before he formally
took office in Nashville. What also struck Williams as odd was that despite the considerable
cost of the contract, district employees were
not required to use the software.
In addition to pushing Performance Matters, Williams reported, Joseph gave an
"inside track" to Discovery Education, a textbook and digital curriculum provider and another company he and his team had
ties to from their work in Maryland. With Joseph's backing, Discovery Education received an
$11.4 million contract to provide a new science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM)
program even though a smaller company came in with a
bid that was a fraction of what Discovery proposed.
By June 2018, Nashville school board member Amy Frogge was
questioning Joseph about possible connections these vendors might have to ERDI. A district
audit would confirm that ERDI's affiliated companies -- including Performance Matters,
Discovery Education, and six other companies -- had signed contracts totaling more than $17
million with the district since Joseph had been hired.
Frogge also came to realize that all these enterprises were connected to the firm who had
been instrumental in hiring Joseph -- Jim Huge and Associates.
"The search that brought Shawn Joseph to Nashville was clearly manipulated," Frogge told Our
Schools in an email, "and the school board was kept in the dark about Joseph's previous tenure
in Maryland and his relationships with vendor companies."
Frogge said some of the manipulation occurred when the search firm told school board members
that disputes among current board members -- over charter schools, school finances, and other
issues -- indicated the district was "'too dysfunctional' to hire top-level superintendents and
therefore needed to hire a less experienced candidate."
But
previous investigations of school leadership search firms conducted by Our Schools have
found companies like these frequently forego background checks of prospective candidates they
recommend, promote favored candidates regardless of their experience or track record, and push
board members to keep the entire search process, including the final candidates, confidential
from public scrutiny.
"Too often, national search firms are also driven by money-making motives and/or connections
with those seeking profit," Frogge contended. That conflict of interest is a concern not only
in Nashville but also in other districts where school leaders with deep ties to education
vendors and consultants have resulted in huge scandals that traumatized communities and cost
taxpayers millions.
In the Youngstown City School District in Ohio, CEO Krish Mohip
became mired in questions about his role as a paid consultant for ERDI while the district
had a $261,914 contract with a partner company of ERDI. Under calls for his resignation, Mohip
left before his contract was up.
Beaufort County School District in South Carolina became the
subject of an FBI investigation because of contracts with ERDI and 30 other companies
connected to the firm while superintendent Jeff Moss worked as a paid consultant for ERDI. He
resigned from the district two years before his contract was up.
In Pittsburgh, superintendent Anthony Hamlet drew
scrutiny when reporters found the district spent more than $14 million on dozens of no-bid
contracts to firms connected to ERDI at the same time Hamlet was serving as a paid consultant
with the company.
In Baltimore County, Maryland, Shaun Dallas Dance made national
headlines when he was convicted of perjury committed during his time as superintendent of
the district. Dance had concealed $4,600 he'd been paid by ERDI. After Dance participated in
confidential meetings with vendors at an ERDI conference, the district extended contracts from
companies connected to the firm.
Obviously, school board members could avoid these conflicts by avoiding leadership search
firms and consultants connected to ERDI. But that is easier said than done.
After Baltimore County's troubles with Dance, it hired
the independent firm Ray and Associates to conduct a search to find an interim leader. The
search resulted in six finalists, from which the board chose Verletta White. Shortly after she
took the job, the board's ethics review panel found she had violated financial disclosure rules
and "used the prestige of her office or public position for private gain" by accepting
compensation from ERDI.
Indeed, superintendent search firms
frequently fail to find conflicts of interest and other problems in the candidate
background checks they conduct. And some of these firms operate side businesses that also lead
to conflict of interest issues.
A Revolving Door of Business Deals Funded by Taxpayers
One of the largest superintendent search firms in the United States, Schaumburg,
Illinois-based Hazard, Young, and Attea (HYA), is part of
the ECRA Group , a consulting firm providing an array of services to schools.
ECRA claims to have worked with over 1,000 districts, but a close examination of how the
company worked with a number of school districts in Illinois reveals how the firm uses a
revolving-door business model in which its search service rotates administrators into and out
of leadership positions while the company uses those leadership connections to successfully
upsell districts into expensive long-term consulting contracts funded by taxpayers.
ECRA's business relationships with Oak Park Elementary District 97 in Illinois go back to at
least 2010 when it was
hired to help replace outgoing superintendent Constance Collins. With HYA's
help , the district
hired Albert Roberts. In 2013, during Roberts' tenure, school board minutes
show the district considered a plan to hire ECRA to analyze the district's achievement data
at a cost of $74,000 a year. The following year, the district
hired ECRA to produce an analysis of the achievement gap between white and nonwhite
students in the district. Board minutes from 2015
show the district continuing to work with ECRA.
When Roberts retired, District 97 used HYA again for a superintendent search that resulted
in hiring
Carol Kelley. Kelley currently appears in ECRA's marketing literature touting the firm's Strategic Dashboard, which
District 97 apparently employs.
Former superintendent Collins was
hired to lead Round Lake District 116, also in Illinois, just before HYA and ECRA acquired
the district's superintendent search and strategic planning contracts. Under her tenure, Round
Lake paid ECRA $75,918 for consulting services in
2016 ,
2017 , and 2018 .
Collins
retired from Round Lake in 2018, but, according to her LinkedIn page, she became an HYA
associate in 2017. She also serves on the advisory board of ECRA, according to her bio at a nonprofit for developing school
leaders.
Another Illinois district, Niles Township High School District 219, placed its
superintendent on administrative leave after it became known she was the daughter of the
president of ECRA, which had a contract with the district worth $149,419 and $120,389 in the
final two years of her tenure. (She claimed that relationship with ECRA
dated to before she was made superintendent, but she decided to resign anyway.)
Huntley Community School District 158, also in Illinois, had contractual arrangements with
ECRA dating to at least 2009 when
John Burkey was superintendent. When Burkey
resigned in 2017, District 158
hired HYA to find a new superintendent at a cost of $17,500. At the end of a hiring process
in which HYA kept all finalists
confidential , District 158 announced it had hired Scott Rowe. Under his leadership, District 158
spent $94,980.11 on ECRA in 2018
alone.
One more example in Illinois: Evanston/Skokie School District 65 has hired ECRA for a
variety of consulting services since at least 2010 when it paid the firm $22,737.50, according
to state records, to survey
the district's administrators. By 2013, Evanston/Skokie
considered ECRA a "long-standing partner" and hired
the firm to help pick its new superintendent. Outgoing superintendent Hardy Murphy also
recommended
the district hire the firm for teacher appraisal work.
Based on HYA's recommendations
, Evanston/Skokie
hired Paul Goren in 2014, and under his tenure, checks continued to flow to ECRA's
consulting business, including $129,855.92 in 2015 .
However, Goren's tenure was troubled and brief, and in 2019 he
resigned with a $100,000 severance package. A local reporter
noticed that unmentioned in the district's settlement statement was that under his
leadership "the district's own progress reports [showed] declines in test scores across all
groups of students and district losing ground against its own five-year targets."
ECRA's own leadership has also been embroiled in conflict of interest issues. Current ECRA
president Glenn "Max" McGee
resigned from his last superintendent job, in Palo Alto, California after an outside
investigation found the district had mishandled claims of sexual assault. With a payout of
roughly $150,000, McGee, on his way out the door,
recommended the district hire HYA to conduct the search for his replacement, just after he
had accepted the offer to become leader of ECRA. The district went with McGee's
recommendation.
When asked whether this relationship among McGee, ECRA, and the Palo Alto district was a
possible conflict of interest, McGee told Our Schools in a phone call that he "stayed out of
the search" to fill his old position. Of his replacement, Don Austin from nearby Palos Verdes
Peninsula Unified School District in California, McGee admitted being an acquaintance of "many
years."
Who's to Blame?
When controversies arise over superintendents and contracts with outside services, private
firms that are responsible for pushing these hiring and outsourcing decisions are
quick to blame school board members who signed off on the decisions. And critics of public
schools frequently
use these scandals to argue that democratically elected school boards are dysfunctional and
need to be scrapped for other governance structures.
These criticisms leave a lot of context out.
First, being a school board member is customarily a part-time job paying very little money.
And school board members are elected to serve as representatives of parents and voters, not to
be experts on school finance and administration.
"School board members, although often well intentioned, are sometimes too unqualified and
uninformed to exercise effective oversight of spending, and board members are not aware of the
personal relationships and personal interests that may be driving decisions by administrative
leaders," Nashville board member Frogge explained.
Also, there are multiple ways superintendents can keep board members in the dark about the
inner workings of contractor relationships and district operations.
"From the beginning, Joseph surrounded himself with those who promoted him, including
organizations he hired to 'train' the board," Frogge explained. "Joseph also prohibited all
district employees from speaking to school board members, which prevented board members from
recognizing leadership problems during the early days of his tenure. When board members finally
began to confront Joseph about problems, including disturbing financial irregularities and his
failure to follow board policy, Joseph lied to board members, exacted retribution from those
questioning him, and stirred up controversy to distract from the issues at hand."
That said, Frogge noted school boards have alternatives to using private search firms that
promote tainted candidates willing to feed the search firms' side businesses.
"School board members need to become better informed and more savvy about profit motives and
organizations that seek to influence their selection," she wrote. "School boards can instead
opt to hire a local school boards association (for example, the Tennessee School Boards
Association) or a local recruiter with a reputation for personal integrity to conduct a search.
They can also choose to hire from within."
How school boards decide to avoid conflicts of interest with school leaders and outside
consulting firms is "critical" according to Frogge because decisions that are driven by these
insiders "can lead to catastrophic outcomes for students and staff."
Among those negative outcomes are increased community acrimony, wasted education funds, and
career debacles for what could perhaps have been promising school leaders.
In the case of Joseph and Nashville, controversies with his leadership decisions strongly
divided
the city's black community, and taxpayers were
stuck with a $261,250 bill for buying out the rest of his contract. As a result of the
fallout, Joseph
lost his state teaching license, and he
vowed never to work in the state again.
In the meantime, HYA continues to win contracts for high-profile superintendent
searches, and ERDI's conferences bringing school leaders and vendors together continue to
sell out .
When Students Melt Down Over a 'B'
Rampant grade anxiety is a reflection of deeper American social dysfunction, with our children the biggest
victims.
By
David Masciotra
•
September 17, 2019
By Marjan Apostolovic /Shutterstock
The library on campus of a small Catholic university in Illinois was largely empty. Since
the administrators had replaced most of the bookshelves with plush furniture, conference tables, and chairs, it better
resembled an airport terminal just before a redeye. A handful of students were staring intensely into computer screens,
while another pair talked loudly -- no more than 10 feet from the silent, visibly demoralized librarian -- about the rap song
that one of them had just played moments earlier. Not one student was near a book. There wasn't a single newspaper or
journal in sight. The university had canceled its subscriptions and removed the periodical section a few semesters
earlier.
I was making my way toward the front door when one of the students
from my Intro to Literature course stopped me, tears rolling down her cheeks, her body nearly convulsing as she
attempted to suppress her sobs. Because any human contact is potentially criminal, I ignored my impulse to offer a
consoling hand to the shoulder, and asked what was wrong. Expecting her to tell me about a personal tragedy -- perhaps the
terminal diagnosis of a loved one -- I almost began to weep myself when she said, "You gave me a 'B' on the paper."
Her crying made the harangue that followed difficult to fully comprehend, but it
seemed that she must maintain a certain GPA to remain in athletics. When I countered that a "B" is a good grade and that
she would have plenty of time to aspire towards an "A" on other assignments, she began pleading with me for
opportunities to "bring up the grade." I declined, and asked if some other, more personal factor was contributing to her
stress over a passing grade on one paper in a course entirely unrelated to her major. She insisted that there was not.
Helpless and baffled, I wished her well, offered her reassurance, and proceeded out of the library and into the parking
lot.
Fielding an existential meltdown, complete with a crying jag, is not part of my
professional training. Yet rarely does a semester go by without some kind of grade-related complaint, appeal for mercy,
and panic attack. When a student appears as if he has just undergone a life-altering trauma because he's realized he is
hanging over the edge of a "C," I think of my father, who at around the same age was in Vietnam. We all have our crosses
to bear, whether surviving guerrilla warfare or dealing with a professor who will not give extra credit.
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"Grade anxiety," to use the more popular term, is not unique to my students or school
of employment. Studies from Penn State and reports from
Psychology Today
,
Boston University
, and many other
sources have confirmed that debilitating anxiety is now the leading mental health problem for college students. A quick
Google search of "grade anxiety" reveals endless pages of advice to students apoplectic about their exam scores, the
professors on the receiving end of their complaints and concerns, and the parents who cannot cope with anything other
than perfection.
In all fairness, contemporary college students, contrary to Baby Boomer sanctimony, do
have a tougher task than their predecessors. More of them work, often full-time, while completing their degree
requirements, and must shoulder heavy financial burdens to acquire their education -- which they understand they will
carry, in the form of student debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy, for the majority of their working lives.
Yet even acknowledging the peculiar injustice that exists in American higher
education, there is no avoiding the conclusion that 20-year-old adults obsessing and crying over their grades is not a
sign of societal health. It's a tornado siren blasting 100 yards away from a trailer park.
As tempting as it is to ridicule the students for their inability to put their lives
in mature perspective, it's more instructive to recognize that they are products of American families, institutions, and
culture. The overwhelming prevalence of severe grade anxiety indicts a society that is failing to strengthen children
into thoughtful and resilient adults. As Gore Vidal once quipped, "I've never met a boring six-year-old in America, and
I've never met an interesting 16-year-old."
Even before reaching the age of six, children are under the constant influence of
their families. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff document in their important book
The Coddling of the American Mind
how
"helicopter parenting" has weakened us all. Paranoid about safety, aggressively committed to their children's
achievement, parents aspire to protect their sons and daughters from all potential hardship, pushing them into closely
monitored extracurricular activities. They treat school work as an accountant treats an actuarial table. The wealthier
the parents, the more likely they are to enter their children into the vigilant competition of meritocracy. Some
families even send their kids to elite preschools, believing that failure to do so will keep them off the Ivy League
university trajectory.
The self-esteem movement has ensured that children will not only aspire to the
materialistic measurement of the "best," but believe that they are innately worthy of it. Hearing for their entire lives
that they are flawless specimens of Da Vinci-esque brilliance and creativity leaves them unprepared for even the mildest
form of criticism. One of the most common rebuttals to a low grade from a student is an indignant "I think I did a great
job," spoken as if the teacher should receive a pupil's opinion about his own work as a Catholic priest receives a papal
encyclical.
Since the move toward standardized testing as the ultimate metric for student and
school success, educational institutions in both rich and poor neighborhoods have relegated the learning experience to
high stakes exam preparation, indoctrinating children to believe that they can reduce the value of their intellectual
pursuits to a number on a results sheet. The testing model of education complements the American adult's inevitable
entrance into a consumer culture with a hierarchy of social status and purchasing power. The earning power of the
Kardashians or Waltons allows them to accrue more political influence and cultural value than the typical family in a
city without a "Real Housewives" franchise.
Too many conservatives insist on demoting education to nothing more than job training,
encouraging the prevalent anti-intellectualism in the United States with suspicion, or outright derision, towards the
"impractical" liberal arts. Liberals don't help matters by too often transforming the humanities into conduits of
leftist social theory, and before that making elementary and secondary schools too bureaucratic. Formulaic lesson plans
and mechanical approaches to pedagogy prevent teachers from developing fruitful bonds with their students, or adjusting
their class agendas according to student need and interest.
The
Atlantic
has run informative but also demoralizing reports on how elementary schools in Finland
allow children plenty of free time for play, while also encouraging them to indulge their curiosities in the classroom.
In the United States, organic and unrestrained learning is a privilege for children whose parents pay the high prices of
a Montessori school. An American kindergartener has an average of 30 minutes of homework per night.
One of my favorite assignments as a child, at the Lutheran elementary school I
attended from first through eighth grade, was the book report. Our teacher would walk us to the library and tell us to
pick any book, read it, and write a page on it. Depriving children of choice robs them of any joy they might associate
with learning. I now teach students in perpetual panic over their grades, and more times than not, the only questions I
receive after attempting to facilitate a discussion on a masterpiece of literature is "Will this be on the test?" or
"How long does the paper have to be?"
Standards of evaluation are necessary. But I often try to inculcate in my students the
knowledge that, in any walk of life and in comparison with the development of passions and the need to sharpen one's
ability to look at a complex world, grades are not that important.
This is a tough sell -- pun intended -- in a country that has so thoroughly degraded its
public vision of life to an endless quest for wealth and power. There is now a handy measurement of everything. Are you
successful? Check your bank account. Are you important? Check your social media followers. Are you attractive? Check the
likes on your latest profile picture.
Grades, with the weight of an institution behind them, act as a final judgment in the
minds of too many students. They equate A's not only with immediate academic success, but also the chance of having a
successful life. Anything less than the optimum might lead to unhappiness.
All lives have moments of failure, pain, and agony. Real adversity is not a "B" on a
paper, but your best friend in a coffin, your child's frightening medical condition, your injury that leads to a
permanent disability. Education at its best can bequeath what Albert Murray called "equipment for living."
Students who panic and cry over less than perfect grades demonstrate that America has
not given them equipment that is helpful and durable. America, in that respect, is worthy of an "F."
"... Instead of submitting a general application, as used to be the case in the past, and have the ability to work with the company to find the role that works best. HR has ruined a lot of good companies and their recruiting processes by going to rigid job descriptions instead of just hiring smart people and letting them work. ..."
The Economic Cycle Research Institute's
(ECRI) Lakshman Achuthan recently sat down with CNBC's
Michael Santoli to discuss the jobs growth downturn. Keep in mind, this conversation was held on
Wednesday, several days before Friday's
disappointing
jobs report.
Achuthan told Santoli there's a "
very clear cyclical downturn
in jobs growth, there's really no debating that, and it looks set to continue
."
Achuthan said January 2019 marked the cyclical peak in jobs growth, has been moving lower ever
since, and the trend is far from over.
Both nonfarm payrolls and the household survey
year-over-year growth are in cyclical downturns,
he said.
While the economic narratives via the mainstream financial press continue to cheerlead that the
consumer will lift all tides thanks to the supposedly strong jobs market, Achuthan believes the
downturn in jobs growth will start to "undermine consumer confidence." And it's the loss in consumer
confidence that could tilt the economy into recession.
He also said when examining cyclically
sensitive sectors of the economy, there are already "questionable jobs numbers," such as a significant
surge in the construction unemployment rate.
Achuthan said nonfarm payroll growth has plunged to a 17-month low, and the household survey is
even weaker. He said the top nonfarm payroll line would be revised down by half a million jobs in the
coming months, which would underline the weakness in employment.
Achuthan emphasized to Santoli that
ECRI's recession call won't be "taken off the table.
We've been talking
about a growth rate cycle slowdown.
We're slow-walking toward -- some recessionary window of vulnerability
-- we're
not there today -- but this piece of the puzzle [jobs growth downturn] is looking a bit wobbly. This is the main message that Wall
Street is missing."
As Wall Street bids stocks to near-record highs on "trade optimism" and the belief that the consumer
will save the day, in large part because of solid jobs growth.
ECRI's Leading Employment
Index, which correctly anticipated this downturn in jobs growth, is at its worst reading since the
Great Recession
.
And Wall Street's bet today is that the Fed can achieve a soft landing –
as in 1995-96 – when it started the rate cut cycle the same month the inflation downturn was signaled
by the U.S. Future Inflation Gauge (USFIG) turning lower.
And now it should become increasingly clear to readers why President Trump has sounded the alarm about the need for 100bps rate
cuts, quantitative easing, and emergency payroll tax cuts - it's because he's been briefed about the economic downturn that has
already started.
I don't agree with him that the Fed can do anything to correct this,
nor do they have an incentive to do so. The Fed is not on the
consumer's side. They will appropriate funds to whoever they want to,
just like 08, and give the middle finger to everyone else.
Job quality is horrible, particularly for US citizen STEM workers.
This has been the case since the downturn that began in the late
1990s. Trump needs to fully cancel the OPT program and almost
eliminate the H-1B program. Major employers don't even bother
considering US citizen STEM talent before they hire foreign
nationals.
Yes, but they don't bother to come out and tell you its a fake ad. One of the tragedies of the online job application process is that it forces a person, with little to no knowledge of a company and its internals, to pick, out of potentially hundreds of roles, which one would be best for them.
Instead of submitting a general application, as used to be the case in the past, and have the ability to work with the company to find the role that works best. HR has ruined a lot of good companies and their recruiting processes by going to rigid job descriptions instead of just hiring smart people and letting them work.
Should We Worry About Income Gaps Within or Between Countries?
The rise of populist nationalism throughout the West has been fueled partly by a clash between the objectives of equity in rich
countries and higher living standards in poor countries. Yet advanced-economy policies that emphasize domestic equity need not
be harmful to the global poor, even in international trade.
By DANI RODRIK
At the beginning of classes every autumn, I tease my students with the following question: Is it better to be poor in a rich
country or rich in a poor country? The question typically invites considerable and inconclusive debate. But we can devise a more
structured and limited version of the question, for which there is a definitive answer.
Let's narrow the focus to incomes and assume that people care only about their own consumption levels (disregarding inequality
and other social conditions). "Rich" and "poor" are those in the top and bottom 5 percent of the income distribution, respectively.
In a typical rich country, the poorest 5 percent of the population receive around 1 percent of the national income. Data are a
lot sparser for poor countries, but it would not be too much off the mark to assume that the richest 5 percent there receive 25
percent of the national income.
Similarly, let's assume that rich and poor countries are those in the top and bottom 5 percent of all countries, ranked by
per capita income. In a typical poor country (such as Liberia or Niger), that is around 1,000 U.S. dollars, compared to 65,000
U.S. dollars in a typical rich country (say, Switzerland or Norway). (These incomes are adjusted for cost-of-living, or purchasing-power,
differentials so that they can be directly compared.)
Now, we can calculate that a rich person in a poor country has an income of 5,000 (1,000 x 0.25 x 20) U.S. dollars while a
poor person in a rich country earns 13,000 (65,000 x 0.01 x 20) U.S. dollars. Measured by material living standards, a poor person
in a rich country is more than twice as well off as a rich person in a poor country.
This result surprises my students, most of whom expect the reverse to be true. When they think of wealthy individuals in poor
countries, they imagine tycoons living in mansions with a retinue of servants and a fleet of expensive cars. But while such individuals
certainly exist, a representative of the top 5 percent in very poor countries is likely to be a mid-level government bureaucrat.
The larger point of this comparison is to underscore the importance of income differences across countries, relative to inequalities
within countries.
At the dawn of modern economic growth, before the Industrial Revolution, global inequality derived almost exclusively from
inequality within countries. Income gaps between Europe and poorer parts of the world were small. But as the West developed in
the 19th century, world economy underwent a "great divergence" between the industrial core and the primary-goods-producing periphery.
During much of the postwar period, income gaps between rich and poor countries accounted for the greater part of global inequality.
From the late 1980s onward, two trends began to alter this picture. First, led by China, many parts of the lagging regions
began to experience substantially faster economic growth than the world's rich countries. For the first time in history, the typical
developing-country resident was getting richer at a faster pace than his or her counterparts in Europe and North America.
Second, inequalities began to increase in many advanced economies, especially those with less-regulated labor markets and weak
social protections. The rise in inequality in the United States has been so sharp that it is no longer clear that the standard
of living of the American "poor" is higher than that of the "rich" in the poorest countries (with rich and poor defined as above).
These two trends went in offsetting directions in terms of overall global inequality – one decreased it while the other increased
it. But they have both raised the share of within-country inequality in the total, reversing an uninterrupted trend observed since
the 19th century.
Given patchy data, we cannot be certain about the respective shares of within- and between-country inequality in today's world
economy. But in an unpublished paper based on data from the World Inequality Database, Lucas Chancel of the Paris School of Economics
estimates that as much as three-quarters of current global inequality may be due to within-country inequality. Historical estimates
by two other French economists, François Bourguignon and Christian Morrison, suggest that within-country inequality has not loomed
so large since the late 19th century.
These estimates, if correct, suggest that the world economy has crossed an important threshold, requiring us to revisit policy
priorities. For a long time, economists like me have been telling the world that the most effective way to reduce global income
disparities would be to accelerate economic growth in low-income countries. Cosmopolitans in rich countries – typically the wealthy
and skilled professionals – could claim to hold the high moral ground when they downplayed the concerns of those complaining about
domestic inequality.
But the rise of populist nationalism throughout the West has been fueled partly by the tension between the objectives of equity
in rich countries and higher living standards in poor countries. Advanced economies' increased trade with low-income countries
has contributed to domestic wage inequality. And probably the single best way to raise incomes in the rest of the world would
be to allow a massive influx of workers from poor countries into rich countries' labor markets. That would not be good news for
less educated, lower-paid rich-country workers.
Yet advanced-economy policies that emphasize domestic equity need not be harmful to the global poor, even in international
trade. Economic policies that lift incomes at the bottom of the labor market and diminish economic insecurity are good both for
domestic equity and for the maintenance of a healthy world economy that provides poor economies a chance to develop.
Dani Rodrik is Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Trade and income distribution are related but the relationship can be determinative lay shaped by domestic institutions and country
wide foreign trade policy
We need institutions run by and for common workng people
And foreign trade policy to shape impact patterns on domestic households in a pro common working people pattern
Too many well meaning Cosmo humanists assume the corporate message to be binding
A r
Trade off between foreign poor and domestic wage earners
Was part of global progress
Nope
Not necessarily so
Dani has several popularly written papers on tis point
Dani Rodrik is wrong. The idea that poor in the USA live better then top 5% in the most poor counties is a kind of persistent
neoliberal myth that needs to dispelled.
1. Purchase party essentially means that in poor countries dollar is overvalued twice or more. Which means that $5K in poorest
countries is close to $10 or even $15K in the USA and other Western countries.
2. Access to education and medical care is incomparable. In the USA most poor live without medical insurance. That put them
in severe disadvantage with top 5% of a poor country.
3. Top 5% in poor countries typically own very comfortable apartments, in many cases far superior to what is available in the
USA even for middle income families. Cost of the rent on two bedroom apartment in the large city in poor countries is typically
5-10 times less then in the USA. Taking into account very low quality of apartment complexes in the USA, the apartments in poor
countries for top 5% might well belong to luxury apartment class in the USA. I know for sure that in the capital of Tajikistan
(2017 GDP per Capita: $777) they are better.
The low 5% in the USA actually live in the third world country with considerable level of segregation from the rest of population
as for apartments in which they live (look housing of the low paid retail and WalMart employees for actual data; their standard
of living is just horrible, especially for single mothers with children)
3. Level of education. Top 5% in poor country are mostly university educated or better. Low 5% in the USA and other Western
countries usually are functionally illiterate.
1. 32 million adults can not read in the United States equal to 14% of the population.
2. 21% of US adults read below the 5th grade level.
3. 19% of high school graduates can not read.
4. 85% of juveniles who interact with the juvenile court system are considered functionally illiterate.
5. 70% of inmates in America's prisons can not read above the fourth grade level.
4. Military industrial complex and Wall Street had taken ordinary Americans for a ride much like in the UK during the days
of British Empire.
Which for one thing means that due to lack of affordable public transportation you need to own a car outside major metropolises.
Which drops you standard of living. You will be fleeced three times: first by used car dealerships, then by insurance companies
(low credit rating and high risk of default means high premium) and then repair shops which in some cases are really criminal
enterprises exploiting the most poor and vulnerable parts of the population. Parts who has no access to quality cars.
Top 5% in poor countries has access to new small and midsize Japanese models (like Corolla, Nissan Juke, etc )
Also Rodrik method of calculation of income of top 5% of population is highly questionable. He never tried to verify his calculation
with actual statistic of distribution of incomes in say top 10 poorest countries in the world (the list includes three the xUSSR
"stans"; for them top 5% earns probably at least $20K a year, if not more )
IMHO for poor countries the income of the top 5% is probably two to four times higher then Rodrick estimate due to extreme
values of GINI coefficient for such countries. Top 5% on such countries are mostly represented by people working for foreign companies
(compradors), high level professionals and high level government employees. For the latter the salary is just the top of the iceberg
of the real income.
Clowns should be increasingly used in redundancy (layoff, firing) meetings until it
becomes the norm and employers start to compete with each other to offer the best clown
redundancy experience and promote it as a benefit.
It would also create clown jobs, which would probably require more clown schools, meaning
that the tuition prices would go through the roof and young people dreaming of becoming
redundancy clowns would either have to come from wealth or take out massive clown loans to
fund their education for clown universities and grad schools. Shareholders can only take so
much top line costs and Wall Street pressure would force corporations to improve return on
investment and reduce redundancy clown labor expenses. Sadly, redundancy clowns would find
themselves training their own replacements – HB1 clowns from "low cost" countries.
Employers would respond to quality criticisms of the HB1 clown experience by publishing
survey results showing very similar almost ex-employee satisfaction with the new clowns.
Eventually, of course, redundancy clowns will be replaced by AI and robots. It's just the
future and we will need to think about how to adapt to it today by putting in place a UBI for
the inevitable redundant redundancy clowns.
Amazing; I had no idea Betsy Voss – advocate of for-profit charter schools (privatizing
education) and The New Curriculum – and Eric Prince (advocate for privatizing war) are
brother and sister. Blood will tell.
Profiteering is naked and in the open now in the west, and public systems increasingly
favour the wealthy – if you want better, you should be ready to pay for it. I guess
that's what all those tax cuts were about – shifting a burden off of the wealthy, so
that now public services are pay-as-you-go because the government can't afford to provide
them for everyone. However, tax cuts also favoured the wealthy – gee, it almost makes
you think the class system is coming back, dunnit?
I recall Jeremy Scahill mentioning in his book on Blackwater (before it started changing its
name faster than you can change your socks) that Erik Prince was related to Betsy deVos. This
was long before Scahill turned his own name and reputation into mud when he walked out of a
London conference back in 2012 or 2013 because the Syrian nun Agnes Mariam de la Croix, who
was known to support President Assad at the time, was a guest speaker at the conference.
"... When the issues of poverty and inequality came up, a common neoliberal dodge was to invoke the Horatio Alger myth -- that in America, with hard work one can, or should be able to, raise oneself up by one' bootstraps. This switches the question from security ..."
"... As it happens, mobility has declined over the long term in the United States, but that aside, it's a two-way street. The escalator of life runs in both directions. Moreover, it's a separate issue from that of poverty or inequality. One can have more mobility and the same or worse poverty or inequality. The rising tide goes out as well as in. ..."
"... The neoliberal remedy for poverty and inequality is commonly held to be education, because workers lack the requisite skills to earn a living wage. It's kind of their fault. All that's needed is some reasonable public expenditure. No deeper structural factors are at issue. This mindset is contradicted now in two ways. ..."
When the issues of poverty and inequality came up, a common neoliberal dodge was to invoke
the Horatio Alger myth -- that in America, with hard work one can, or should be able to, raise
oneself up by one' bootstraps. This switches the question from security made possible by
the public sector to an individual responsibility for economic mobility.
As it happens, mobility has declined over the long term in the United States, but that
aside, it's a two-way street. The escalator of life runs in both directions. Moreover, it's a
separate issue from that of poverty or inequality. One can have more mobility and the same or
worse poverty or inequality. The rising tide goes out as well as in.
The neoliberal remedy for poverty and inequality is commonly held to be education, because
workers lack the requisite skills to earn a living wage. It's kind of their fault. All that's
needed is some reasonable public expenditure. No deeper structural factors are at issue. This
mindset is contradicted now in two ways.
First, the idea of education as an essential,
missing ingredient is being supplanted by the idea that what's at issue is power , both
political and economic . The wealthy control streams of income and institutions of
credentialization that could be rerouted, via taxation, to finance education ("free college") that has an equalizing effect on
wealth and enhances economic security..
"... The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. ..."
"... The U-6 also includes what the labor dept. calls involuntary part time employed. It should include the voluntary part time as well, but doesn't (See, they're not actively looking for work even if unemployed). ..."
"... But even the involuntary part time is itself under-estimated. I believe the Labor Dept. counts only those involuntarily part time unemployed whose part time job is their primary job. It doesn't count those who have second and third involuntary part time jobs. That would raise the U-6 unemployment rate significantly. The labor Dept's estimate of the 'discouraged' and 'missing labor force' is grossly underestimated. ..."
"... The labor dept. also misses the 1-2 million workers who went on social security disability (SSDI) after 2008 because it provides better pay, for longer, than does unemployment insurance. That number rose dramatically after 2008 and hasn't come down much (although the government and courts are going after them). ..."
"... The way the government calculates unemployment is by means of 60,000 monthly household surveys but that phone survey method misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others working in the underground economy in the inner cities (about 10-12% of the economy according to most economists and therefore potentially 10-12% of the reported labor force in size as well). ..."
"... The SSDI, undocumented, underground, underestimation of part timers, etc. are what I call the 'hidden unemployed'. And that brings the unemployed well above the 3.7%. ..."
The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. Here's why: the 3.7% is
the U-3 rate, per the labor dept. But that's the rate only for full time employed. What the
labor dept. calls the U-6 includes what it calls discouraged workers (those who haven't looked
for work in the past 4 weeks). Then there's what's called the 'missing labor force'–i.e.
those who haven't looked in the past year. They're not calculated in the 3.7% U-3 unemployment
rate number either. Why? Because you have to be 'out of work and actively looking for work' to
be counted as unemployed and therefore part of the 3.7% rate.
The U-6 also includes what the labor dept. calls involuntary part time employed. It
should include the voluntary part time as well, but doesn't (See, they're not actively looking
for work even if unemployed).
But even the involuntary part time is itself under-estimated. I believe the Labor Dept.
counts only those involuntarily part time unemployed whose part time job is their primary job.
It doesn't count those who have second and third involuntary part time jobs. That would raise
the U-6 unemployment rate significantly. The labor Dept's estimate of the 'discouraged' and
'missing labor force' is grossly underestimated.
The labor dept. also misses the 1-2 million workers who went on social security
disability (SSDI) after 2008 because it provides better pay, for longer, than does unemployment
insurance. That number rose dramatically after 2008 and hasn't come down much (although the
government and courts are going after them).
The way the government calculates unemployment is by means of 60,000 monthly household
surveys but that phone survey method misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others
working in the underground economy in the inner cities (about 10-12% of the economy according
to most economists and therefore potentially 10-12% of the reported labor force in size as
well). The labor dept. just makes assumptions about that number (conservatively, I may
add) and plugs in a number to be added to the unemployment totals. But it has no real idea of
how many undocumented or underground economy workers are actually employed or unemployed since
these workers do not participate in the labor dept. phone surveys, and who can blame them.
The SSDI, undocumented, underground, underestimation of part timers, etc. are what I
call the 'hidden unemployed'. And that brings the unemployed well above the 3.7%.
Finally, there's the corroborating evidence about what's called the labor force
participation rate. It has declined by roughly 5% since 2007. That's 6 to 9 million workers who
should have entered the labor force but haven't. The labor force should be that much larger,
but it isn't. Where have they gone? Did they just not enter the labor force? If not, they're
likely a majority unemployed, or in the underground economy, or belong to the labor dept's
'missing labor force' which should be much greater than reported. The government has no
adequate explanation why the participation rate has declined so dramatically. Or where have the
workers gone. If they had entered the labor force they would have been counted. And their 6 to
9 million would result in an increase in the total labor force number and therefore raise the
unemployment rate.
All these reasons–-i.e. only counting full timers in the official 3.7%;
under-estimating the size of the part time workforce; under-estimating the size of the
discouraged and so-called 'missing labor force'; using methodologies that don't capture the
undocumented and underground unemployed accurately; not counting part of the SSI increase as
unemployed; and reducing the total labor force because of the declining labor force
participation-–together means the true unemployment rate is definitely over 10% and
likely closer to 12%. And even that's a conservative estimate perhaps." Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jack Rasmus
Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published book, 'Central Bankers at the End of
Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression', Clarity Press, August 2017. He blogs
at jackrasmus.com and his twitter handle
is @drjackrasmus. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com .
Speech is controlled by political correctness. Someone behind the scenes decides what
is acceptable and what is not, what is desirable or not, and even what is permissible. You
make one 'mistake' and you are out; from the teaching positions at the universities, or
from the media outlets.
And what is permissible is becoming truly weird. These are comments on an article over
at http://www.thecollegefix.com
"Poll: 73 percent of Republican students have withheld political views in class for fear
their grades would suffer".
I'm ABD (all but dissertation) in Econometrics because my adviser was a Marxist nutcase
from the London School of Economics. I couldn't fight the communists forever; not when they
held all the cards.
Reply: Medina-Merino
I left my PhD program in Anthropology when on a "field trip" , my advisor and his
idiotic tie-dyed moron of a wife (former student of his) crawled into my tent on the
first night of a 2 week research project in black leather bondage harnesses and informed
me it was time for me to join them in a "night of pure pleasure".
Fast forward I got up, got into my car, drove through the night back to campus, parked
outside of the Dean's office, stormed in with wide-blood-shot-eyes when he arrived in his
700-Series turbo-charged Special Edition BMW and told him I wanted to file a complaint
against Professor "Bondo" and when he (Dean Bozo) did not respond to my request in over a
week, I withdrew from my program (ABD also) before the "Drop Deadline" so I could get
full refund of my hard-earned TENS OF THOUSANDS of tuition dollars and used the money to
secure an attorney (who I later learned was on-the-take for the University's own legal
counsel office of "Equity & Fairness") until I ran out of money and then left town to
take a position in Scotland on a research team studying Celtic migrations to the Northern
Coast of the Iberian Peninsula, known for centuries unofficially as the "Celtic Coast". I
loved my work and worked with some amazing and HONEST and RESPECTFUL colleagues.
I learned a big lesson from this EFFIN nightmare be verrrrrrrrrrrrrrry careful of
whose hands you find your career in there are a lot of filthy, abusive, corrupt "faculty"
and even more dishonest and disingenuous and despicable "administrators" in the
contemporary academy and many have brass name-plates on their doors and hold
do-nothing-but-damage-to-the-lives-of those who are often powerless against their callous
and deliberate abuses.
Even today, on my sleepless nights I can still hear Mr. Chips rustling in his
grave
I went on to hold positions of academic renown in Europe and Latin America and
eventually returned to the US when I knew I would be able to secure adjunct positions in
the US and Canada and Puerto Rico to support myself and my family, whose lives I was able
to maintain in a stable trajectory throughout this horror!
Revenge is sweet however today when I receive requests from my former "institution of
higher learning" I respond in the SASE
"NEVER WILL I EVER GIVE YOU ONE CENT FOR NOT HAVING PROTECTED ME FROM ABUSE AT THE HANDS
OF DR. "BONDO" YEARS AGO!" Even today, he is part of campus lore and is whispered about
in hushed tones.
What happened to the "prof" he died of very painful brain cancer (poetic justice) and
his idiot wife went full-tilt into drugs and is sitting in a pool of her own pee in a
very dismal geriatric ward. And the "Dean"? He is likewise awaiting his last days in his
luxury condo in Santa Barbara, CA surrounded by like-minded Lutheran do-gooders holding
prayer circles and burning incense and rubbing crystals for each of their pathetic
selves
Knuth: Well, certainly it seems the way things are going. You take any particular subject
that you are interested in and you try to see if somebody with an American high school
education has learned it, and you will be appalled. You know, Jesse Jackson thinks that
students know nothing about political science, and I am sure the chemists think that students
don't know chemistry, and so on. But somehow they get it when they have to later. But I would
say certainly the students now have been getting more of a superficial idea of mathematics than
they used to. We have to do remedial stuff at Stanford that we didn't have to do thirty years
ago.
Frana: Gio [Wiederhold] said much the same thing to me.
Knuth: The most scandalous thing was that Stanford's course in linear algebra could not get
to eigenvalues because the students didn't know about complex numbers. Now every course at
Stanford that takes linear algebra as a prerequisite does so because they want the students to
know about eigenvalues. But here at Stanford, with one of the highest admission standards of
any university, our students don't know complex numbers. So we have to teach them that when
they get to college. Yes, this is definitely a breakdown.
Frana: Was your mathematics training in high school particularly good, or was it that you
spent a lot of time actually doing problems?
Knuth: No, my mathematics training in high school was not good. My teachers could not answer
my questions and so I decided I'd go into physics. I mean, I had played with mathematics in
high school. I did a lot of work drawing graphs and plotting points and I used pi as the radix
of a number system, and explored what the world would be like if you wanted to do logarithms
and you had a number system based on pi. And I had played with stuff like that. But my teachers
couldn't answer questions that I had.
... ... ... Frana: Do you have an answer? Are American students different today? In one of
your interviews you discuss the problem of creativity versus gross absorption of knowledge.
Knuth: Well, that is part of it. Today we have mostly a sound byte culture, this lack of
attention span and trying to learn how to pass exams. Frana: Yes,
Level 4/5 is the ability to read complex information and glean information from it, or in
numeracy, the ability to do algebra and above. You will note that only about 1 in 10 function at
this level. The vast majority function at about 6th to 8th grade competency.
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By Laura Ungar, who health issues out of Kaiser Health News' St. Louis office, and Trudy
Lieberman, a journalist for more than 45 years, and a past president of the Association of
Health Care Journalists. Originally published by Kaiser Health
News .
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Army veteran Eugene Milligan is 75 years old and blind. He uses a
wheelchair since losing half his right leg to diabetes and gets dialysis for kidney
failure.
And he has struggled to get enough to eat.
Earlier this year, he ended up in the hospital after burning himself while boiling water for
oatmeal. The long stay caused the Memphis vet to fall off a charity's rolls for home-delivered
Meals on Wheels , so he had
to rely on others, such as his son, a generous off-duty nurse and a local church to bring him
food.
"Many times, I've felt like I was starving," he said. "There's neighbors that need food too.
There's people at dialysis that need food. There's hunger everywhere."
Indeed, millions of seniors across the country quietly go hungry as the safety net designed
to catch them frays. Nearly 8% of Americans 60 and older were "food insecure" in 2017,
according to a recent study released
by the anti-hunger group Feeding America. That's 5.5 million seniors who don't have
consistent access to enough food for a healthy life, a number that has more than doubled since
2001 and is only expected to grow as America grays.
While the plight of hungry children elicits support and can be tackled in schools, the
plight of hungry older Americans is shrouded by isolation and a generation's pride. The problem
is most acute in parts of the South and Southwest. Louisiana has the highest rate among states,
with 12% of seniors facing food insecurity. Memphis fares worst among major metropolitan areas,
with 17% of seniors like Milligan unsure of their next meal.
And government relief falls short. One of the main federal programs helping seniors is
starved for money. The Older Americans Act -- passed more than half a century ago as part of
President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reforms -- was amended in 1972 to provide for
home-delivered and group meals, along with other services, for anyone 60 and older. But its
funding has lagged far behind senior population growth, as well as economic inflation.
The biggest chunk of the act's budget, nutrition services, dropped by 8% over the past 18
years when adjusted for inflation, an AARP report
found in February. Home-delivered and group meals have decreased by nearly 21 million since
2005. Only a fraction of those facing food insecurity get any meal services under the act; a
U.S. Government
Accountability Office report examining 2013 data found 83% got none.
With the act set to expire Sept. 30, Congress is now considering its reauthorization and how
much to spend going forward.
Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 45% of eligible adults 60
and older have signed up for another source of federal aid: SNAP, the food stamp program for
America's poorest. Those who don't are typically either unaware they could qualify, believe
their benefits would be tiny or can no longer get to a grocery store to use them.
Even fewer seniors may have SNAP in the future. More than 13% of SNAP households with
elderly members would lose benefits under a recent Trump administration proposal.
For now, millions of seniors -- especially low-income ones -- go without. Across the nation,
waits are common to receive home-delivered meals from a crucial provider, Meals on Wheels, a
network of 5,000 community-based programs. In Memphis, for example, the wait to get on the
Meals on Wheels schedule is more than a year long.
"It's really sad because a meal is not an expensive thing," said Sally Jones Heinz,
president and CEO of the Metropolitan
Inter-Faith Association , which provides home-delivered meals in Memphis. "This shouldn't
be the way things are in 2019."
Since malnutrition exacerbates diseases and prevents healing, seniors without steady,
nutritious food can wind up in hospitals, which drives up Medicare and Medicaid costs, hitting taxpayers with an even
bigger bill . Sometimes seniors relapse quickly after discharge -- or worse.
Widower Robert Mukes, 71, starved to death on a cold December day in 2016, alone in his
Cincinnati apartment.
The Hamilton County Coroner listed the primary cause of death as "starvation of unknown
etiology" and noted "possible hypothermia," pointing out that his apartment had no electricity
or running water. Death records show the 5-foot-7-inch man weighed just 100.5 pounds.
A Clear Need
On a hot May morning in Memphis, seniors trickled into a food bank at the Riverside
Missionary Baptist Church, 3 miles from the opulent tourist mecca of Graceland. They picked up
boxes packed with canned goods, rice, vegetables and meat.
Marion Thomas, 63, placed her box in the trunk of a friend's car. She lives with chronic
back pain and high blood pressure and started coming to the pantry three years ago. She's
disabled, relies on Social Security and gets $42 a month from SNAP based on her income,
household size and other factors. That's much less than the average $125-a-month benefit for
households with seniors, but more than the $16 minimum that one in five such households get.
Still, Thomas said, "I can't buy very much."
A day later, the Mid-South Food Bank brought a "mobile pantry" to Latham Terrace, a senior
housing complex, where a long line of people waited. Some inched forward in wheelchairs; others
leaned on canes. One by one, they collected their allotments.
The need is just as real elsewhere. In Dallas, Texas, 69-year-old China Anderson squirrels
away milk, cookies and other parts of her home-delivered lunches for dinner because she can no
longer stand and cook due to scoliosis and eight deteriorating vertebral discs.
As seniors ration food, programs ration services.
Although more than a third of the Meals on Wheels money comes from the Older Americans Act,
even with additional public and private dollars, funds are still so limited that some programs
have no choice but to triage people using score sheets that assign points based on who needs
food the most. Seniors coming from the hospital and those without family usually top waiting
lists.
More than 1,000 were waiting on the Memphis area's list recently. And in Dallas, $4.1
million in donations wiped out a 1,000-person waiting list in December, but within months it
had crept back up to 100.
Nationally, "there are tens of thousands of seniors who are waiting," said Erika
Kelly , chief membership and advocacy officer for Meals on Wheels America. "While they're
waiting, their health deteriorates and, in some cases, we know seniors have died."
Edwin Walker, a deputy assistant secretary for the federal Administration on Aging,
acknowledged waits are a long-standing problem, but said 2.4 million people a year benefit from
the Older Americans Act's group or home-delivered meals, allowing them to stay independent and
healthy.
Seniors get human connection, as well as food, from these services. Aner Lee Murphy, a
102-year-old Meals on Wheels client in Memphis, counts on the visits with volunteers Libby and
Bob Anderson almost as much as the food. She calls them "my children," hugging them close and
offering a prayer each time they leave.
But others miss out on such physical and psychological nourishment. A devastating phone call
brought that home for Kim Daugherty, executive director of the Aging Commission of the
Mid-South , which connects seniors to service providers in the region. The woman on the
line told Daugherty she'd been on the waiting list for more than a year.
"Ma'am, there are several hundred people ahead of you," Daugherty reluctantly explained.
"I just need you all to remember," came the caller's haunting reply, "I'm hungry and I need
food."
A Slow Killer
James
Ziliak , a poverty researcher at the University of Kentucky who worked on the Feeding
America study, said food insecurity shot up with the Great Recession, starting in the late
2000s, and peaked in 2014. He said it shows no signs of dropping to pre-recession levels.
While older adults of all income levels can face difficulty accessing and preparing healthy
food, rates are highest among seniors in poverty. They are also high among minorities. More
than 17% of black seniors and 16% of Hispanic seniors are food insecure, compared with fewer
than 7% of white seniors.
A host of issues combine to set those seniors on a downward spiral, said registered
dietitian Lauri Wright , who
chairs the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of North Florida. Going to
the grocery store gets a lot harder if they can't drive. Expensive medications leave less money
for food. Chronic physical and mental health problems sap stamina and make it tough to cook.
Inch by inch, hungry seniors decline.
And, even if it rarely kills directly, hunger can complicate illness and kill slowly.
Malnutrition blunts immunity, which already tends to weaken as people age. Once they start
losing weight, they're more likely to grow frail and are more likely to die within a year, said
Dr. John Morley, director of the division of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University.
Seniors just out of the hospital are particularly vulnerable. Many wind up getting
readmitted, pushing up taxpayers' costs for Medicare and Medicaid. A
recent analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that Medicare could save $1.57 for
every dollar spent on home-delivered meals for chronically ill seniors after a
hospitalization.
Most hospitals don't refer senior outpatients to Meals on Wheels, and advocates say too few
insurance companies get involved in making sure seniors have enough to eat to keep them
healthy.
When Milligan, the Memphis veteran, burned himself with boiling water last winter and had to
be hospitalized for 65 days, he fell off the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association's radar. The
meals he'd been getting for about a decade stopped.
Heinz, Metropolitan's CEO, said the association is usually able to start and stop meals for
short hospital stays. But, Heinz said, the association didn't hear from Milligan and kept
trying to deliver meals for a time while he was in the hospital, then notified the Aging
Commission of the Mid-South he wasn't home. As is standard procedure, Metropolitan officials
said, a staff member from the commission made three attempts to contact him and left a card at
the blind man's home.
But nothing happened when he got out of the hospital this spring. In mid-May, a nurse
referred him for meal delivery. Still, he didn't get meals because he faced a waitlist already
more than 1,000 names long.
After questions from Kaiser Health News, Heinz looked into Milligan's case and realized
that, as a former client, Milligan could get back on the delivery schedule faster.
But even then the process still has hurdles: The aging commission would need to conduct a
new home assessment for meals to resume. That has yet to happen because, amid the wait,
Milligan's health deteriorated.
A Murky Future
As the Older Americans Act awaits reauthorization this fall, many senior advocates worry
about its funding.
In June, the U.S. House passed a $93 million increase to the Older Americans Act's nutrition
programs, raising total funding by about 10% to $1 billion in the next fiscal year. In
inflation-adjusted dollars, that's still less than in 2009. And it still has to pass in the
Republican-controlled Senate, where the proposed increase faces long odds.
U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Civil Rights and Human
Services Subcommittee, expects the panel to tackle legislation for reauthorization of the act
soon after members return from the August recess. She's now working with colleagues "to craft a
strong, bipartisan update," she said, that increases investments in nutrition programs as well
as other services.
"I'm confident the House will soon pass a robust bill," she said, "and I am hopeful that the
Senate will also move quickly so we can better meet the needs of our seniors."
In the meantime, "the need for home-delivered meals keeps increasing every year," said
Lorena Fernandez, who runs a meal
delivery program in Yakima, Wash. Activists are pressing state and local governments to
ensure seniors don't starve, with mixed results. In Louisiana, for example, anti-hunger
advocates stood on the state Capitol steps in May and unsuccessfully called on the state to
invest $1 million to buy food from Louisiana farmers to distribute to hungry residents.
Elsewhere, senior activists across the nation have participated each March in "March for Meals"
events such as walks, fundraisers and rallies designed to focus attention on the problem.
Private fundraising hasn't been easy everywhere, especially rural communities without much
wealth. Philanthropy has instead tended to flow to hungry kids, who outnumber hungry seniors
more than 2-to-1, according to Feeding America.
"Ten years ago, organizations had a goal of ending child hunger and a lot of innovation and
resources went into what could be done," said Jeremy Everett, executive director of Baylor
University's Texas Hunger Initiative. "The same thing has not happened in the senior adult
population." And that has left people struggling for enough food to eat.
As for Milligan, he didn't get back on Meals on Wheels before suffering complications
related to his dialysis in June. He ended up back in the hospital. Ironically, it was there
that he finally had a steady, if temporary, source of food.
It's impossible to know if his time without steady, nutritious food made a difference. What
is almost certain is that feeding him at home would have been far cheaper.
Coulnd't get the JOLTS, November 2016 links to work, but the skills gap is
wild.
At an institution of higher ed I'm familiar with, both faculty and
administrative positions continue to be unfilled. There are very few candidates
even for entry level positions. Failed searches are now the norm. It's feast or
famine: either people are perfect for the job and have many options, or have no
related experience at all.
I wonder if the labor force participation rate is starting to catch up with
the job market. That is, there are a lot of healthy adults who have dropped out
of the workforce who would be the people you'd want in those positions.
Or that the job market is not nearly as liquid as they'd have you believe,
and people can't relocate from where they are because of adult children who
live with them, or things of that nature. All kinds of weird things now in the
job market. I know someone who commutes a significant distance to work that has
to look for another job because their workplace's health care plan only covers
a geographic area close to that job.
Discrimination thru stupid job descriptions is catching up to the
economy paying $12 per hour five years experience required nonsense job
descriptions designed to help the accredited and credentialed have a leg up
There seem to be three types of employment categories
real jobs that might last through 12 quarters
gigs
and surfdumb/$lavery gigs where your hours are messed with, your schedule
is messed with & you are expected to pay for the stupid uniform some bean
counter thinks is branding
IMUO it is not a skills gap it is the demanding of irrelevant capacities
and experience that almost always have very little to do with the actual
tasks required
"... Neoliberals often argue that people should be glad to lose employment at 50 so that people from other countries can have higher incomes, and leftists often agree because hey "free movement" and because after all the professional class jobs aren't at risk ..."
"... "I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other world powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions, by re-negotiating trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people." ..."
"... No one has literally argued that people should be glad to lose employment: that part was hyperbole. But the basic argument is often made quite seriously. See e.g. outsource Brad DeLong . ..."
"... To the guy who asked- poor white people keep voting Republican even though it screws them because they genuinely believe that the country is best off when it encourages a culture of "by the bootstraps" self improvement, hard work, and personal responsibility. They view taxing people in order to give the money to the supposedly less fortunate as the anti thesis of this, because it gives people an easy out that let's them avoid having to engage in the hard work needed to live independently. ..."
"... Attempts at repairing historical racial inequity read as cheating in that paradigm, and even as hostile since they can easily observe white people who are just as poor or poorer than those who racial politics focuses upon. ..."
"... The extent to which "poor white people" vote against their alleged economic interests is overblown. To a large extent, they do not vote at all nor is anyone or anything on the ballot to represent their interests. And, yes, they are misinformed systematically by elites out to screw them and they know this, but cannot do much to either clear up their own confusion or fight back. ..."
"... The mirror image problem - of elites manipulating the system to screw the poor and merely middle-class - is daily in the news. Both Presidential candidates have been implicated. So, who do you recommend they vote for? ..."
"... My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education level rather than income. ..."
"... Eric Berne, in The Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, proposed that among the defining characteristics of a coherent group is an explicit boundary which determines whether an individual is a member of the group or not. (If there is no boundary, nothing binds the assemblage together; it is a crowd.) The boundary helps provide social cohesion and is so important that groups will create one if necessary. Clearly, boundaries exclude as well as include, and someone must play the role of outsider. ..."
"... I am somewhat suspicious of leaving dominating elites out of these stories of racism as an organizing principle for political economy or (cultural) community. ..."
"... Racism served the purposes of a slaveholding elite that organized political communities to serve their own interests. (Or, vis a vis the Indians a land-grab or genocide.) ..."
"... Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying hierarchy like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with ersatz status. ..."
"... For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community, but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations. ..."
fn: "Of course there is a subtext to these racist hate campaigns that someone else here raised
and rich ran with a bit, which is the hatred of the unemployed. I think a lot of people voting
leave imagine that the next thing on the agenda is slashing the dole to force poor white people
to do the work the Eastern Europeans did. "
Yes, in part. In part, also, people imagine that
poor citizens will get jobs that previously were done by migrants. This has a hatred of slackers
element that is bad, but as economics, it's pretty well-founded that if you reduce the size of
the labor pool relative to the population then unemployment will go down and wages will go up.
Neoliberals often argue that people should be glad to lose employment at 50 so that people
from other countries can have higher incomes, and leftists often agree because hey "free movement"
and because after all the professional class jobs aren't at risk. But strangely enough some
people seem to resent this.
Lupita: "I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash
and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other world
powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions, by re-negotiating
trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people."
... ... ...
Rich Puchalsky 08.04.16 at 12:03 pm
"I can't recall any particular instance where someone made this argument."
No one has literally argued that people should be glad to lose employment: that part was hyperbole.
But the basic argument is often made quite seriously. See e.g.
outsource
Brad DeLong.
engels 08.04.16 at 12:25 pm
While this may be the effect of some neoliberal policies, I can't recall any particular instance
where someone made this argument
Maybe this kind of thing rom Henry Farrell? (There may well be better examples.)
Is some dilution of the traditional European welfare state acceptable, if it substantially increases
the wellbeing of current outsiders (i.e. for example, by bringing Turkey into the club). My answer
is yes, if European leftwingers are to stick to their core principles on justice, fairness, egalitarianism
etc
Large numbers of low-income white southern Americans consistently vote against their
own economic interests. They vote to award tax breaks to wealthy people and corporations, to
cut unemployment benefits, to bust unions, to reward companies for outsourcing jobs, to resist
wage increases, to cut funding for health care for the poor, to cut Social Security and Medicare,
etc.
The same thing has happened in Mexico with neoliberal government after neoliberal government
being elected. There are many democratically elected neoliberal governments around the world.
Why might this be?
In the case of Mexico, because Peña Nieto's wife is a telenovela star. How cool is that? It places
Mexico in the same league as 1st world countries, such as France, with Carla Bruni.
Patrick 08.04.16 at 4:32 pm
To the guy who asked- poor white people keep voting Republican even though it screws
them because they genuinely believe that the country is best off when it encourages a culture
of "by the bootstraps" self improvement, hard work, and personal responsibility. They view
taxing people in order to give the money to the supposedly less fortunate as the anti thesis
of this, because it gives people an easy out that let's them avoid having to engage in the
hard work needed to live independently.
They see it as little different from letting your kid move back on after college and smoke
weed in your basement. They don't generally mind people being on unemployment transitionally,
but they're supposed to be a little embarrassed about it and get it over with as soon as
possible.
They not only worry that increased government social spending will incentivize bad
behavior, they worry it will destroy the cultural values they see as vital to Americas past
prosperity. They tend to view claims about historic or systemic injustice necessitating
collective remedy because they view the world as one in which the vagaries of fate decree that
some are born rich or poor, and that success is in improving ones station relative to where
one starts.
Attempts at repairing historical racial inequity read as cheating in that paradigm, and
even as hostile since they can easily observe white people who are just as poor or poorer than
those who racial politics focuses upon. Left wing insistence on borrowing the nastiest
rhetoric of libertarians ("this guy is poor because his ancestors couldn't get ahead because
of historical racial injustice so we must help him; your family couldn't get ahead either but
that must have been your fault so you deserve it") comes across as both antithetical to their
values and as downright hostile within the values they see around them.
All of this can be easily learned by just talking to them.
It's not a great world view. It fails to explain quite a lot. For example, they have literally
no way of explaining increased unemployment without positing either that everyone is getting
too lazy to work, or that the government screwed up the system somehow, possibly by making it
too expensive to do business in the US relative to other countries. and given their faith in
the power of hard work, they don't even blame sweatshops- they blame taxes and foreign
subsidies.
I don't know exactly how to reach out to them, except that I can point to some things people
do that repulse them and say "stop doing that."
bruce wilder 08.04.16 at 5:50 pm
The extent to which "poor white people" vote against their alleged economic interests is
overblown. To a large extent, they do not vote at all nor is anyone or anything on the ballot
to represent their interests. And, yes, they are misinformed systematically by elites out to screw
them and they know this, but cannot do much to either clear up their own confusion or fight back.
The mirror image problem - of elites manipulating the system to screw the poor and merely
middle-class - is daily in the news. Both Presidential candidates have been implicated. So, who
do you recommend they vote for?
There is serious deficit of both trust and information among the poor. Poor whites hardly have
a monopoly; black misleadership is epidemic in our era of Cory Booker socialism.
bruce wilder 08.04.16 at 7:05 pm
Politics is founded on the complex social psychology of humans as social animals. We elevate
it from its irrational base in emotion to rationalized calculation or philosophy at our peril.
T 08.04.16 at 9:17 pm
@Layman
I think you're missing Patrick's point. These voters are switching from one Republican to another.
They've jettisoned Bush et. al. for Trump. These guys despise Bush. They've figured out that the
mainstream party is basically 30 years of affinity fraud. So, is your argument is that Trump even
more racist? That kind of goes against the whole point of the OP. Not saying that race doesn't
matter. Of course it does. But Trump has a 34% advantage in non-college educated white men. It
just isn't the South. Why does it have to be just race or just class?
Ronan(rf) 08.04.16 at 10:35 pm
"I generally don't give a shit about polls so I have no "data" to evidence this claim, but
my guess is the majority of Trump's support comes from this broad middle"
My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning
classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved
in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education
level rather than income.
This would make some sense as they are generally in economically unstable jobs, they tend to
be hostile to both big govt (regulations, freeloaders) and big business (unfair competition),
and while they (rhetorically at least) tend to value personal autonomy and self sufficiency ,
they generally sell into smaller, local markets, and so are particularly affected by local demographic
and cultural change , and decline. That's my speculation anyway.
T 08.05.16 at 3:12 pm
@patrick @layman
Patrick, you're right about the Trump demographic. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
Layman - Why are these voters switching from Bush et al to Trump? Once again, Corey's whole point
is that there is very little difference between the racism of Trump and the mainstream party since
Nixon. Is Trump just more racist? Or are the policies of Trump resonating differently than Bush
for reasons other than race? Are the folks that voted for the other candidates in the primary
less racist so Trump supporters are just the most racist among Republicans? Cruz less racist?
You have to explain the shift within the Republican party because that's what happened.
Anarcissie 08.06.16 at 3:00 pm
Faustusnotes 08.06.16 at 1:50 pm @ 270 -
Eric Berne, in The Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, proposed that among
the defining characteristics of a coherent group is an explicit boundary which determines whether
an individual is a member of the group or not. (If there is no boundary, nothing binds the assemblage
together; it is a crowd.) The boundary helps provide social cohesion and is so important that
groups will create one if necessary. Clearly, boundaries exclude as well as include, and someone
must play the role of outsider. While Berne's theories are a bit too nifty for me to love
them, I have observed a lot of the behaviors he predicts. If one wanted to be sociobiological,
it is not hard to hypothesize evolutionary pressures which could lead to this sort of behavior
being genetically programmed. If a group of humans, a notably combative primate, does not have
strong social cohesion, the war of all against all ensues and everybody dies. Common affections
alone do not seem to provide enough cohesion.
In an earlier but related theory, in the United States, immigrants from diverse European communities
which fought each other for centuries in Europe arrived and managed to now get along because they
had a major Other, the Negro, against whom to define themselves (as the White Race) and thus to
cohere sufficiently to get on with business. The Negro had the additional advantage of being at
first a powerless slave and later, although theoretically freed, was legally, politically, and
economically disabled - an outsider who could not fight back very effectively, nor run away. Even
so, the US almost split apart and there continue to be important class, ethnic, religious, and
regional conflicts. You can see how these two theories resonate.
It may be that we can't have communities without this dark side, although we might be able to
mitigate some of its destructive effects.
bruce wilder 08.06.16 at 4:28 pm
I am somewhat suspicious of leaving dominating elites out of these stories of racism as an
organizing principle for political economy or (cultural) community.
Racism served the purposes of a slaveholding elite that organized political communities to serve
their own interests. (Or, vis a vis the Indians a land-grab or genocide.)
Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying hierarchy
like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with ersatz
status. The ugly prejudices and resentful arrogance of working class whites is thus a component
of how racism works to organize a political community to serve a hegemonic master class. The business
end of racism, though, is the autarkic poverty imposed on the working communities: slaves, sharecroppers,
poor blacks, poor whites - bad schools, bad roads, politically disabled communities, predatory
institutions and authoritarian governments.
For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity
was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community,
but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of
social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations.
engels 08.07.16 at 1:02 am
But how did that slavery happen
Possible short answer: the level of technological development made slavery an efficient way
of exploiting labour. At a certain point those conditions changed and slavery became a drag on
further development and it was abolished, along with much of the racist ideology that legitimated
it.
Lupita 08.07.16 at 3:40 am
But how did that slavery happen
In Mesoamerica, all the natives were enslaved because they were conquered by the Spaniards.
Then, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas successfully argued before the Crown that the natives had souls
and, therefore, should be Christianized rather than enslaved. As Bruce Wilder states, this did
not serve the interests of the slaveholding elite, so the African slave trade began and there
was no Fray Bartolomé to argue their case.
It is interesting that while natives were enslaved, the Aztec aristocracy was shipped to Spain
to be presented in court and study Latin. This would not have happened if the Mesoamericans were
considered inferior (soulless) as a race. Furthermore, the Spaniards needed the local elite to
help them out with their empire and the Aztecs were used to slavery and worse. This whole story
can be understood without recurring to racism. The logic of empire suffices.
Workers of all ages are caught in a vice. Older workers need to keep working longer in an economy which values younger
workers (and their cheaper healthcare premiums). Younger workers are caught in the vice of "you don't have enough experience" and
"how do I get experience if nobody will hire me?"
Middle-aged workers are caught between the enormous Millennial generation seeking better jobs and the equally numerous baby Boom
generation seeking to work a few more years to offset their interest-starved retirement funds. (Thank you, predatory and rapacious
Federal Reserve for siphoning all our retirement fund interest to your cronies the Too Big to Fail Banks.)
Workers 55 and older are undeniably working longer. Here is the labor participation rate for 55+ workers:
... And here's why so many workers have to work longer--earned income's share of the GDP has been in a free-fall for decades
as Fed-funded financiers and corporations skim an ever greater share of the nation's GDP.
I am 62, very much an older worker with a startling 46 years in the work force (first formal paycheck, 1970 from Dole Pineapple).
(Thanks to the Fed's zero-interest rate policy, I should be able to retire at 93 or so--unless the Fed imposes a negative-rate policy
on me and the other serfs.)
But I recall with painful clarity the great hardships and difficulties I experienced in the recessions of 1973-74, 1981-82 and
1990-91 when I was in younger demographics. My sympathies are if anything more with younger workers, as it is increasingly difficult
to get useful on-the-job experience if you're starting out.
That said, here are some suggestions for 55+ workers seeking to find work in a very competitive job/paid work market.
1. Target sectors that haven't changed much. There's a reason so many older guys find a niche in Home Depot and
Lowe's--power saws, lumber, appliances, etc. haven't changed that much (except their quality has declined) for 40 years.
The same can be said of many areas of retail sales, house-cleaning, caring for children, etc.
Everyone knows the young have an advantage in sectors dominated by fast-changing technology, so avoid those sectors and stick
to sectors where your knowledge and experience is still applicable and valued by employers.
2. If at all possible, get your healthcare coverage covered by a spouse or plan you pay. Those $2,000/month premiums
for older workers are a big reason why employers would rather hire a $200/month premium younger worker, or limit the hours of older
workers to part-time so no healthcare coverage is required.
Telling an employer you already have healthcare coverage may have a huge impact on your chances of getting hired.
3. If you have any computer-network-social media skills, you can get paid to help everyone 55+ with fewer skills.
Your computer skills may not be up to the same level as a younger person's, but they are probably far more advanced than
other 55+ folks. Many older people are paying somebody $35/hour or more to help them set up email, fix their buggy PCs and Macs,
get them started on Facebook, etc. It might as well be you.
4. Focus on fields where managerial experience and moxie is decisive. Even highly educated young people have
a tough time managing people effectively because they're lacking experience. Applying biz-school case studies to the real world isn't
as easy as it looks. (I found apologizing to my older employees necessary and helpful. Do they teach this in biz school? I doubt
it.)
The ability to work with (and mentor) a variety of people is an essential skill, and it's one that tends to come with age and
experience.
5. Reliability matters. The ability to roll with the punches, show up on time, do what's needed to get the job
done, and focus on outcomes rather than process are still core assets in a work force.
Being 55+ doesn't automatically mean someone has those skills, but they tend to come with decades of work.
6. If nobody will hire you, start your own enterprise to fill scarcities and create value in your community.
The classic example is a handyperson, as it's very difficult for a young person to acquire the spectrum of experience needed to efficiently
assess a wide array of problems and go about fixing them.
#3 above is another example of identifying one's strengths and then seeking a scarcity to fill. Value, profits and high wages
flow to scarcity. Don't try to compete in supplying what's abundant; seek out scarcities and work on addressing those in a reliable
fashion.
Every age group has its strengths and weaknesses, and the task facing all of us is to 1) identify scarcities we can fill and 2)
seek ways to play to our strengths.
Shizzmoney
That's easy: the elitist old people in power will start a war, force the young people into that war, where they will all be
killed and the old people get their jobs.
Also, for those young people who protest the war, the government and corporate military security forces will detain and kill
them, too.
Exactly. Value youth? Is that why we saddle them with $250,000 worth of student loan debt and a degree in women's studies to
find no jobs because we let in illegals and skilled workers with Visas from foreign countries? Seems like we hate our youth. Of
course, they deserve it since they have been focused on being social justice fucktards rather than getting any marketable skills
and paying attention to what the gov't is doing to their future. Schadenfreude.
deja
No, they are stupid enough to saddle themselves with $250,000 worth of student loan debt for a degree in womens' studies.
cougar_w
The OP doesn't make much sense to me. Most of the work people my age do, the young people either don't want or are not qualified
for. Maintaining vital COBOL apps or air traffic controller software from the 70's? Really? And the ones are, they don't mind
working with older employees and seem to enjoy our "gravity".
I work in IT so maybe things are a bit different. Grey beards are huge around here and always will be.
But this has been a challenge for centuries, young people have to find their own way and "their way" (being probably a dream
from childhood or an inspiration from a college professor) might not be practical at first. They bounce around a little until
marriage hits them and then they find something that works for supporting a family. Same as it ever was. The idea that "their
way" is some kind of unswerving life's mission is usually part of the corporate "just do it" meme that sells $400 specialty running
shoes. Yeah whatever, just figure it out actually, life will tell you what you are supposed to be doing, and who you are supposed
to be doing it with.
GeezerGeek
The market for COBOL programmers had a sudden surge around Y2K, but only certain industries still maintain their old COBOL
apps. Curiously, a certain computer/software has recently tried pushing a visual version of COBOL, much like Gates did when he
came out with Visual Basic back in the early 1990s. I retired after 40 years in IT in 2011, so I am a bit out of touch where COBOL
is concerned. Does anyone even teach it anymore in college? Maybe if someone modified it to create phone apps and games it would
once again be popular.
Abbie Normal
Then it's a good thing I didn't follow my undergrad English Prof's advice and switch my major from science to arts, because
he thought there was some "real intelligence" in my writing style that even his grad students lacked. Maybe I should look him
up....
eatthebanksters
I have two buddies, one a 61 year old attonery who has never lost a case and the other a 59 year old facilities director. The
lawyer has been seeking work for 6 years and has pretty much given up...he can't even get hired at lesser jobs because he is overqualified
and 'will leave when something better comes along'. The facilities director has a great resume and knows his stuff but has been
out of work for almost two years. He has come in 'second' more times than I can count. He is working od jobs and living with a
friends mother, exchanging work on the house for rent and meals. Welcome to Obama's economy.
N0TaREALmerican
He'd work if he'd accept less money, but he feels "entitled to earn what HE thinks he's worth". Just another lazy old-fart
who feels the world owns him something. Welcome to a competitive economy old-fart, nobody said life was fair. Stop bitching and
work for less.
mary mary
If you ever need an attorney, you might look for an experienced attorney who worked so hard that he never lost a case.
If you ever inherit a zillion bucks and buy a bunch of properties, you might confer with an experienced facility manager who
actually managed a bunch of properties.
I doubt an attorney who never lost a case achieved that record by going around saying, "somebody owes me something".
I doubt a facilities manager who managed a bunch of properties achieved that by going around saying, "somebody owes me something".
Baa baa
What a load of crap. Most will take anything. I know, I am one. Don't lecture me about being "entitled" you punk. Your post
reeks of the entitlement generation. Slug through 50 years of working, rearing a family, kids to college... I am beginning to
wonder if the hundreds of thousands spent on the education and well-being of your ingrate ass was a misallocation of funds.
corporatewhore
Give credit where credit is due. This inability to find work at an older age has been going on for years and can't be blamed
on Obama. Senior buyers at Macy's, older workers at Monsanto or television weather people at KSDK in St Louis all suffer the same
fate. Labor cost and benefits are all less for the younger generation no matter what level of experience or capability. We develop
a mindset throughout our productive career that we are indispensable and worth it because of our knowledge, contacts and industry
wherewithal. It's all an illusion and we are NOT prepared or equipped to face the reality at an older age that we are completely
dispensable.
At an older age if you want meaning you have to find it and think out of the paradigm that you've been led to believe is real.
No one owes you anything for your experience or wealth of knowledge. Figure it out and rethink yourself as to what you love to
do and want to do not what you must do to make money.
At 58 in 2008 I was fucked over by my corporation and wallowed in miserableness and poverty while i worked every contact and
firm I knew. Nothing resulted. I had to work 3 part time jobs until I earned 2 full time ones and work over 90 hours per week
because I enjoy it. It is work that covers the bills and allows me to create what I want to work on for the future while I still
can walk think and breathe.
Best advice to your children: Go in business for yourself because just as it happened to me, it will happen to you when you
become 55.
Nobody For President
Thanks for that, corporate whore. That sounds like an honest reprise of an incredibly hard time in your life, and I totally
agree. I'm telling all (4) my grandkids, from 7 to 20, to live your life, not someone else's. The oldest one gets it, and I think
the other ones will also, if I live long enough, because I walked that walk.
I'm old, and work full time (more or less) and make a living - not a killing, but a living - at it.
nuubee
Good news old people, the economy currently doesn't value anything you can produce, unless you can print money.
Cautiously Pessimistic
You get up every morning
From your 'larm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above
And people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls who try to look pretty
And if your train's on time
You can get to work by nine
... ... ...
mary mary
MSM says Baby Boomers "have stolen everything", but in fact Baby Boomers are having to extend their careers because they're
broke. This is the easily foreseeable result of 20+ years of the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low, making Baby Boomers
suffer the double-whammy of (1) not having their deferred income (pensions) grow, while (2) inflation in fact continued at 6%
annual, thanks also to the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low.
Yes, someone "have stolen everything". That someone is the owners of the Fed.
"... First, rising inequality reflects the economic rents captured in resource extraction and production, whether by the owners of those resources or by financiers acting as parasitic middlemen. Second, inequality fosters the extravagant excesses that some now call plutonomy – an economic system in which a small group, the ultra-wealthy, accounts for a large share of total consumption. Under such conditions, a rising tide lifts only yachts, and competitive consumption creates an escalating pattern of what Thorstein Veblen, perhaps the greatest American economist, called conspicuous waste. Lastly, rising inequality is a good indicator of financial instability, which increases the probability of an impending crash. ..."
Rising inequality is
symptomatic of a wide range of economic and political problems that are standing in the way of
achieving a just and sustainable society. But for all the concern about the income and wealth
gap within countries in recent years, there has been surprisingly little acknowledgement of the
forces actually driving the trend.
"Sustainability" is a relatively new organizing principle in global policy. It is new partly
because economists have long been largely hostile to the very idea. Postwar neoclassical growth
theories deliberately ignored resource and environmental limits, disparaged and disdained
ecologists, and promised what was effectively impossible: perpetual growth fueled by unlimited
resources, the free disposal of wastes, and never-ending technological progress. Early warnings
– notably the Club of Rome's pathbreaking 1972 report, The Limits to Growth – were
ridiculed. More recently, the science of limits has gained acceptance, but most economists
remain preoccupied with growth.
But there is at least one dimension of unsustainability that not even economists can
overlook: inequality. Income and wealth disparities, along with other forms of inequality, are
relevant to sustainability for at least three reasons.
First, rising inequality reflects the economic rents captured in resource extraction and
production, whether by the owners of those resources or by financiers acting as parasitic
middlemen. Second, inequality fosters the extravagant excesses that some now call plutonomy
– an economic system in which a small group, the ultra-wealthy, accounts for a large
share of total consumption. Under such conditions, a rising tide lifts only yachts, and
competitive consumption creates an escalating pattern of what Thorstein Veblen, perhaps the
greatest American economist, called conspicuous waste. Lastly, rising inequality is a good
indicator of financial instability, which increases the probability of an impending crash.
For all these reasons, understanding and controlling the rise of inequality is an
ecological, socioeconomic, and political imperative. It is, in other words, a sustainability
issue.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
To get a grip on economic inequality, we must overcome two major sources of confusion. On the
theoretical side, mainstream economics treats inequality largely as a byproduct of supply and
demand in "labor markets." It is thus regarded as a "microeconomic" phenomenon, driven on the
demand side by technological change, and on the supply side by a barely observable quantum that
goes by the name of human skill.
When economists write about policies that affect inequality, they tend to work within this
market framework. The labor market may be local, regional, or – at the very most –
national. Proposed policies focus mainly on the characteristics and capabilities of individuals
and how they can improve their positions in the market. These matters are undoubtedly
important, particularly when it comes to education and health, but they ignore the broader
"macroeconomic" forces – booms and busts, interest rates and debt, exchange rates and
commodity prices – that affect individuals, firms, economic sectors, and entire
countries.
On the empirical side, there is a question of information: What can we know from the
available data? Most of the data we have come from surveys, and most surveys focus on
households. These data are relevant for judging economic welfare – and also for thinking
about how people with different characteristics (age, gender, race, education, and so on)
interact with markets. Yet householders are not employees, and their income is not the same as
the wages paid for particular kinds of work. So, data collected on households are several steps
away from production, pay, and the forces of structural change.
When it comes to international and comparative analysis, there is yet another problem:
surveys are expensive. More surveys are conducted in stable rich countries than in unstable
poor ones. And they can be conceptually inconsistent, because the questions differ according to
the choices made by those managing the surveys. Are we measuring income? Expenditure? Before or
after tax? As with all surveys, the only answers one gets are to the questions asked.
An alternative approach that has become popular in recent years is to consult income-tax
records. But these data are even more sparse and inconsistent than surveys, and such records
are not available for all countries (indeed, not all countries have an income tax). So, in the
effort to measure inequality within countries and around the world, there has long been less
signal than noise.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
For the past two decades, my students and I have been working on ways to address these
measurement shortcomings. We have sought out payroll records that cover a diverse range of
countries over many years, and in broadly consistent terms. With these data, we can measure
economic inequalities in the structure of pay, which then allows us to estimate the associated
inequalities of household income, both across countries and through time.
To explain the philosophy behind this approach, I often refer to a line from the American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's essay "The Fixation of Belief":
Kepler undertook to draw a curve through the places of Mars [ ] and his greatest service
to science was in impressing on men's minds that this was the thing to be done if they wished
to improve astronomy; that they were not to content themselves with inquiring whether one
system of epicycles was better than another, but that they were to sit down to the figures, and
find out what the curve, in truth, was.
We have attempted to follow this advice, and we have had a fair amount of success. Our
measures have proven to be largely reliable and consistent with the existing survey record,
while also sensitive to known historical events: wars, revolutions, and the like. Moreover, we
have been able to look for patterns at the regional and even global level.
What would consistent patterns beyond the national level imply? I believe they are prima
facie evidence that the main source of change in various forms of inequality lies in
transnational developments, not in local conditions. To understand the problem of inequality,
then, we need to study common developments across a continental or even global economic
space.
As it happens, we have identified patterns showing a consistent gradient in levels of income
inequality across both space and time. If one looks across space, there are not too many
surprises. Income inequality within countries and regions rises as one moves from north to
south, reflecting the concentration of advanced industry and middle-class welfare states in
countries that were once the seats of empire. In Europe, inequality also rises as one moves
from "East" to "West," reflecting the legacy of state socialism.
Moreover, countries in close proximity, and with similar income levels and neighborly
diplomatic and trade relations, have relatively similar levels of inequality – as one can
see very clearly in maps. Common sense tells us that if they did not have similar levels of
inequality, regional migration patterns would sooner or later even things out.
Likewise, patterns of inequality change over time. In particular, there is a general
movement toward higher inequality from the 1980s until 2000, after which inequality begins to
stabilize. So far, all of this is what one would expect, which attests to the quality of the
data. Our attempt to capture a much broader picture of inequality across the world has not been
misguided.
WAVES OF INEQUALITY
These movements show, quite plainly, that levels of inequality once widely associated with the
Third World are now quite generalized globally. The First World has not become poorer, but it
has grown much less equal. There are a few exceptions, of course, and they should not come as a
surprise. Measures of inequality in Denmark or Finland, for example, are not far from where
they were a generation back. And some countries in Central and Eastern Europe – the Czech
Republic stands out – have low levels of inequality (though higher than under their
severe post-war communist regimes).
Now, consider another interesting pattern: the temporal movement of inequality within
countries is very similar to that between countries. If one takes a standard measure of
inequality between countries (not weighted for population, lest China and India dominate the
data), one finds that it has risen both between and within countries at the same time. Again,
this no surprise: rich countries comprise relatively wealthy people, whereas the people of poor
countries are poorer. In a global economy, when inequality between people changes, it is
natural that the inequalities between their respective countries change in a similar way.
But here it is important to remember that we are picking out the movement of inequality
within countries, measured separately using national statistics, and standardized by an
international statistical bureau. There are about 155 countries in our most recent data set,
and the predominant patterns across all of them tell the essential story. From 1963 to 1971, no
particular trend stands out. There is a bump in inequality within countries in 1973, followed
by a modest decline. For much of the world – for poorer countries and poorer peoples
alike, though not for the troubled rich – the 1970s were a time of growth and
progress.
Then comes a key turning point. Beginning in 1981, inequality starts rising in waves around
the world, increasing relentlessly until 2000, at which point the waves subside. In this era,
the first major wave is dominated by Latin America and Africa, and subsequent waves are driven
by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the associated regime changes in Eastern Europe.
Finally, economic liberalization in Asia fuels another wave that culminates in the 1997 Asian
financial crisis. From 2000, the rise in inequality slows, and inequalities even decline in
parts of the world, including Latin America, China, and the Russian Federation.
A TALE OF FINANCIAL HISTORY
The message contained in these numbers is neither subtle nor obscure. This is a story about the
relationship between debtors and creditors in the world economy. Under the post-World War II
Bretton Woods framework, stability prevailed – until the system collapsed in 1971, when
the United States ended the dollar's convertibility into gold. In 1973, the oil shock and a
commodity boom led to a surge in credit in Latin America and elsewhere as countries took on
commercial-bank debt to sustain growth in the face of higher fuel prices. As developing
countries grew, their middle classes expanded and inequalities declined.
All of that ended in 1981 with the start of a worldwide debt crisis that emanated from
monetary-policy changes in the US, where interest rates shot up to 22%. No longer able to pay
their debts, developing countries were forced to pursue austerity measures and to abandon their
independent industrial development strategies. Commodity prices collapsed, as did the Soviet
bloc – much of it heavily indebted – a decade later. The Asian crisis of 1997
rounded out this period.
Inequality at the global level peaked in 2000. In the wake of the dot-com bust and the
attacks of September 11, 2001, the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates, and China, growing
strongly and now a member of the World Trade Organization, increased its commodity purchases
worldwide. Prices and credit conditions improved, and for a while global inequality stopped
rising.
The trends in inequality over this period are in keeping with the commonsense insights of
Simon Kuznets back in 1955. Kuznets surmised that inequality would rise sharply during the
initial stages of economic development, and then decline at later stages. China and India
reflect this pattern, but for other developing countries in Asia and Latin America,
industrialization and urbanization have been far enough advanced for decades that rapid growth
reduces inequality and depression increases it. In a very few rich countries – notably
the US and the United Kingdom – rapid growth increases inequalities, because it
concentrates income in globally dominant sectors, especially finance and high technology.
So, in the rough history presented above, there are two key elements to consider: the
structure of the underlying economies and the effects of booms and busts on that structure.
Global forces for boom and bust have tended to affect individual countries and their people in
proportion to their ability to resist them. Countries with strong institutions that were able
to maintain independence and manage their own affairs fared the best. Those that could not
defend themselves against global forces were periodically ravaged by them. In our time, this is
the difference between, say, China and Mexico.
These global forces can be identified by the big turning points. The first was the breakdown
of Bretton Woods and the rush to private debt in the 1970s. The second was the debt crisis of
the 1980s, which was followed by the collapse of oil and commodity prices, and then of
Soviet-style socialist governments, and then by liberalization in Asia, culminating in the 1997
crisis – but not in China, which was poised for another decade of double-digit growth.
The third big turning point occurred in 2000, when lower interest rates, higher commodity
prices, and modest advances in social-welfare policies and national economic development
strategies helped to reduce inequality and poverty in Latin America and Russia, while in China,
too, inequalities peaked and started to decline.
In Europe, events played out somewhat differently. European countries did not reject
neoliberal ideology and re-embrace social-welfare policies after 2000. The introduction of the
euro was followed by nearly a decade of easy credit terms, which fueled a boom in housing and
commercial construction in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece (where the boom included the
2004 Olympics, among other projects). This period was not unlike the 1970s in Latin America.
But as Herbert Stein, a chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Richard
Nixon and Gerald Ford, famously observed, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." In
2009, the global financial crisis brought the happy early days of the euro to an abrupt
end.
REIN IT IN
What the available evidence demonstrates is that economic inequality has been regulated over
time by the behavior of global finance. The data even show that changes in levels of inequality
within the smaller, open economies are closely related to exchange-rate movements. When
currencies become overvalued, their countries are vulnerable to Dutch disease – eroding
the competitiveness of industry – and to financial crisis. Financial crises and
devaluations quickly reestablish the high level of inequality that human-development programs
were meant to overcome.
Inequality is thus irreducibly a global and, contrary to what many economists like to think,
macroeconomic issue. Labor-market considerations are secondary, crowded out by the dominant
macro movements described above. As such, the only way to address inequality effectively is to
bring the forces of financial instability, debt peonage, and predatory austerity under control.
These forces can be tempered by financial regulation, a function of rich-country governments
and central banks. But regulators are of course subject to capture by big finance, and
central-bank mandates – whether to target full employment or only price stability –
were drafted in an age of national economic policymaking. National central banks – as
also the European Central Bank – are not set up to consider their policies' effects on
peoples beyond their jurisdictional boundaries.
To be sure, there is still much that nation-states around the world can do to fight
inequality when conditions permit. Useful measures include raising the minimum wage,
strengthening trade unions, establishing social-insurance schemes, and building infrastructure
and providing public goods. The problem is that these forms of progress can be – and
regularly are – erased by financial crises and the subsequent imposition of severe
austerity. This means that the capacity to reduce inequalities sustainably depends on the
capacity for insulation from external financial pressures. However difficult it may be, the
rest of the world needs to protect itself from the destabilizing forces of global finance.
In short, economic inequality is tied to the most unstable and unsustainable element of the
world system, which is global finance. Achieving anything sustainably – especially, but
not only, the reduction of extreme inequalities – requires a financial order that is
broadly reformed and that can once again serve as a tool for other institutions and purposes,
and not as their self-serving master. This is particularly important as humanity turns toward
that other, more critical goal: the sustainability of human life on this planet. Global
financial stability is a necessary step on the way to a clean-energy economy – as
envisioned in the Green New Deal and similar proposals. At the end of the day, if we want to
have a sustainable and civilized future, we need to get a grip on global finance.
James K.
Galbraith is Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs, University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books are Inequality: What Everyone
Needs to Know and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of
Europe.
"... Being an unemployed techie myself, I cannot begin to describe what a godsend this book is. NETSLAVES finally reveals the truth about what it is to be part of what is likely the most under-appreciated sect of the working class. ..."
"... It is a comment on upper and middle management corporate business practices in general, and the dismal fate of the vast armies of workers used as cannon fodder since day one for the follies of unscrupulous robber barons; or morons who just happen to find themselves in the right place at the right time to make market killings; or Scrooges who will never learn what it is to have a heart. Baldwin and Lessard are heirs to the muckrakers of the early 20th Century. Corporate E-merica, take heed. ..."
Being an unemployed techie myself, I cannot begin to describe what a godsend this book is. NETSLAVES finally reveals the
truth about what it is to be part of what is likely the most under-appreciated sect of the working class.
The stale stories of "dorm-room success" have been supplanted by the pathetically sad/darkly humorous accounts of those who
have been saddled with with million-dollar job titles, bleeding ulcers, and ramen noodle grocery budgets.
NETSLAVES is an entertaining and enligtening read, written by two men who have actually been passengers in every sewer pipe
that is the new-media industry. This book is a must for every modern library, as it can be considered a "warning shot" for those
with IT aspirations, or as a source of vindication for those of us who have been dismissed and trampled on. Bravo!
A customer, November 24, 1999
Handwriting on the Wall
NetSlaves tells it like it is for the millions of us on the business end of the IPO and monopoly screwdrivers. Apply these
lessons to the law, publishing, automotive, chemical, airline industries, etc., etc. This book is not just a cerebral and satirical
indictment of the internet industry.
It is a comment on upper and middle management corporate business practices in general, and the dismal fate of the vast
armies of workers used as cannon fodder since day one for the follies of unscrupulous robber barons; or morons who just happen
to find themselves in the right place at the right time to make market killings; or Scrooges who will never learn what it is to
have a heart. Baldwin and Lessard are heirs to the muckrakers of the early 20th Century. Corporate E-merica, take heed.
Its just from slow growth and the Boomer deleveraging era. Its a global phenom and its
impacts are global into the cultural realm. The college degree boom is a great example of
this phenom. It was really based on the surge in consumer debt boom after WWII boosting these
supply chains in the US to increased consumption to GDP and reduced manufacturing, which fell
in real terms during the 1950-2000 period.
This created traditionally required college degree jobs into a nexus that was originally
based around the Baby Boomer generation and strengthened afterwards. Once growth petered in
2007(and we developed a oversupply since 2000) we now have too many people with college
degrees.
Even the rich aren't as rich as they were in 2007. Real profits are struggling this cycle
and are showing up with weak job growth this year. The unemployment rates flaws are showing
up this cycle as well, as total numbers mean little compared historically than the potential
that is lowest unemployment can go.
Based on that, the current level of labor market saturation seems to be at a late 70's
cycle level. In otherwards, if you adjust the population growth and total size this cycle is
doing no better than the Carter era top in 1979 .then we see the whining.
Both the Reagan and Bush II era expansions were a bit better and probably onto a intro of
a "boom".
Obviously it is noticeably the Korean, Vietnam and Tech era booms which would require
unemployment to fall below 3% to reach, maybe down to 2.5%, which tells you something about
potential unemployment drop peaks.
As it translated into similar impulses in internal policy, which led to neoliberalism and
restoration of the rule of fiancial oligarchy within the USA. The USA experiment with democracy
was actually over in 1945
'Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system designed to protect the
wealthy and the powerful." Warren said it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and
powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else."'
Yet the rest of the article focuses almost entirely on internal US shenanigans. When it comes
to protecting wealth and power, George Kennan hit the nail on the head in 1948, with "we have
about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is
particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot
fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise
a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity."
This, which has underpinned US policy ever since, may not be corrupt in the sense of
illegal, but it certainly seems corrupt in the sense of morally repugnant to me.
Approaching from the opposite direction, if someone were to say "I sincerely believe that
the USA has the most open & honest political system and the fairest economic system in
human history" would you not think that person to be incredibly naive (or, cynically, a
liar)?
There has been, for at least the last couple of decades. a determined effort to do away
with corruption – by defining it away. "Citizens United" is perhaps the most glaring
example but the effort is ongoing; that Weiner op-ed is a good current example.
Shinola, I'm reminded of the statement "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest,
most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." in the movie Manchurian
Candidate . Much of what is said today just pops out as prepackaged propaganda.
It was possible twenty, thirty, forty years ago to make a reasonable case that the federal
government, as well as many of the state and municipal ones, were fairly honest and
functional. It is still possible that the writer believes what he wrote, but I think saying
that the belief that our system is rigged is mere irresponsible cynicism is at best an
example of charming naïveté and more likely cynical propagandistic fiction
itself.
Before EFI, the standard boot process
for virtually all PC systems was called "MBR", for Master Boot Record; today you are likely to
hear it referred to as "Legacy Boot". This process depended on using the first physical block
on a disk to hold some information needed to boot the computer (thus the name Master Boot
Record); specifically, it held the disk address at which the actual bootloader could be found,
and the partition table that defined the layout of the disk. Using this information, the PC
firmware could find and execute the bootloader, which would then bring up the computer and run
the operating system.
This system had a number of rather obvious weaknesses and shortcomings. One of the biggest
was that you could only have one bootable object on each physical disk drive (at least as far
as the firmware boot was concerned). Another was that if that first sector on the disk became
corrupted somehow, you were in deep trouble.
Over time, as part of the Extensible Firmware Interface, a new approach to boot
configuration was developed. Rather than storing critical boot configuration information in a
single "magic" location, EFI uses a dedicated "EFI boot partition" on the desk. This is a
completely normal, standard disk partition, the same as which may be used to hold the operating
system or system recovery data.
The only requirement is that it be FAT formatted, and it should have the boot and
esp partition flags set (esp stands for EFI System Partition). The specific data and
programs necessary for booting is then kept in directories on this partition, typically in
directories named to indicate what they are for. So if you have a Windows system, you would
typically find directories called 'Boot' and 'Microsoft' , and perhaps one named for the
manufacturer of the hardware, such as HP. If you have a Linux system, you would find
directories called opensuse, debian, ubuntu, or any number of others depending on what
particular Linux distribution you are using.
It should be obvious from the description so far that it is perfectly possible with the EFI
boot configuration to have multiple boot objects on a single disk drive.
Before going any further, I should make it clear that if you install Linux as the only
operating system on a PC, it is not necessary to know all of this configuration information in
detail. The installer should take care of setting all of this up, including creating the EFI
boot partition (or using an existing EFI boot partition), and further configuring the system
boot list so that whatever system you install becomes the default boot target.
If you were to take a brand new computer with UEFI firmware, and load it from scratch with
any of the current major Linux distributions, it would all be set up, configured, and working
just as it is when you purchase a new computer preloaded with Windows (or when you load a
computer from scratch with Windows). It is only when you want to have more than one bootable
operating system – especially when you want to have both Linux and Windows on the same
computer – that things may become more complicated.
The problems that arise with such "multiboot" systems are generally related to getting the
boot priority list defined correctly.
When you buy a new computer with Windows, this list typically includes the Windows
bootloader on the primary disk, and then perhaps some other peripheral devices such as USB,
network interfaces and such. When you install Linux alongside Windows on such a computer, the
installer will add the necessary information to the EFI boot partition, but if the boot
priority list is not changed, then when the system is rebooted after installation it will
simply boot Windows again, and you are likely to think that the installation didn't work.
There are several ways to modify this boot priority list, but exactly which ones are
available and whether or how they work depends on the firmware of the system you are using, and
this is where things can get really messy. There are just about as many different UEFI firmware
implementations as there are PC manufacturers, and the manufacturers have shown a great deal of
creativity in the details of this firmware.
First, in the simplest case, there is a software utility included with Linux called
efibootmgr that can be used to modify, add or delete the boot priority list. If this
utility works properly, and the changes it makes are permanent on the system, then you would
have no other problems to deal with, and after installing it would boot Linux and you would be
happy. Unfortunately, while this is sometimes the case it is frequently not. The most common
reason for this is that changes made by software utilities are not actually permanently stored
by the system BIOS, so when the computer is rebooted the boot priority list is restored to
whatever it was before, which generally means that Windows gets booted again.
The other common way of modifying the boot priority list is via the computer BIOS
configuration program. The details of how to do this are different for every manufacturer, but
the general procedure is approximately the same. First you have to press the BIOS configuration
key (usually F2, but not always, unfortunately) during system power-on (POST). Then choose the
Boot item from the BIOS configuration menu, which should get you to a list of boot targets
presented in priority order. Then you need to modify that list; sometimes this can be done
directly in that screen, via the usual F5/F6 up/down key process, and sometimes you need to
proceed one level deeper to be able to do that. I wish I could give more specific and detailed
information about this, but it really is different on every system (sometimes even on different
systems produced by the same manufacturer), so you just need to proceed carefully and figure
out the steps as you go.
I have seen a few rare cases of systems where neither of these methods works, or at least
they don't seem to be permanent, and the system keeps reverting to booting Windows. Again,
there are two ways to proceed in this case. The first is by simply pressing the "boot
selection" key during POST (power-on). Exactly which key this is varies, I have seen it be F12,
F9, Esc, and probably one or two others. Whichever key it turns out to be, when you hit it
during POST you should get a list of bootable objects defined in the EFI boot priority list, so
assuming your Linux installation worked you should see it listed there. I have known of people
who were satisfied with this solution, and would just use the computer this way and have to
press boot select each time they wanted to boot Linux.
The alternative is to actually modify the files in the EFI boot partition, so that the
(unchangeable) Windows boot procedure would actually boot Linux. This involves overwriting the
Windows file bootmgfw.efi with the Linux file grubx64.efi. I have done this, especially in the
early days of EFI boot, and it works, but I strongly advise you to be extremely careful if you
try it, and make sure that you keep a copy of the original bootmgfw.efi file. Finally, just as
a final (depressing) warning, I have also seen systems where this seemed to work, at least for
a while, but then at some unpredictable point the boot process seemed to notice that something
had changed and it restored bootmgfw.efi to its original state – thus losing the Linux
boot configuration again. Sigh.
So, that's the basics of EFI boot, and how it can be configured. But there are some
important variations possible, and some caveats to be aware of.
"... I know what it feels like to be marginalized because you're out of work. To be judged by others as if there's something wrong with you. To grow increasingly depressed, demoralized and despairing as three months turns into six months and that goes on for a year or more; as rejection after rejection becomes crushing, humiliating, and leaves you feeling worthless. ..."
"... All money-related impacts aside, you lose confidence. You wear out. You start to give up ..."
"... Now and then, an acquaintance will make an off-hand remark about those who borrow money or live on credit cards. The assumption is that credit purchases are frivolous, or that the person who racks up consumer debt does so out of irresponsibility and poor judgment. ..."
"... Never assume. Yours truly? I borrowed to put food on the table. I borrowed to pay for school supplies for my kids. I borrowed to enable them to take advantage of academic opportunities that they earned through their own hard work. I also counted my blessings. While I had no family to assist, my kids were healthy and doing well, I was basically healthy despite chronic pain, and I was able to use credit. Borrowing is a double-edged sword of course, especially if it continues for an extended period. But for my little household, debt was the only path to survival. For all I know, it will be again. ..."
"... These days? I still live on a tight budget, I dream of recovering from the years of financial devastation "someday," and I take every gig I can get. Willingly. I've gained new skills along the way and continue to refine them, I'm always looking for another project and thrilled when I nab one, and I'm accustomed to a 12- to 14-hour workday. I put in long hours throughout my corporate career and I have no problem doing so now. In fact, I'm grateful for these workdays and I take none of them for granted. Moreover, I suggest that few of us should take our sources of income as a given ..."
"... The longer that Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to report signs of poor psychological well-being," says the study. "About one in five Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression - almost double the rate among those who have been unemployed for five weeks or less. ..."
"... To be in this position - wanting to work, needing to work, knowing you still have much to contribute but never getting a foot in the door - is deeply frustrating, horribly depressing, and leaves us feeling powerless. Add up these elements and you have the formula for despair. ..."
"... One small act of compassion can breathe new hope into the worst situation. And here's what I know with 100% certainty. We may be unemployed, we may be depressed but we aren't powerless if we come together and try to help one another. ..."
Are you over 50, unemployed, depressed and feeling powerless? For that matter, are you any age
and feeling hopeless because you can't seem to land a job?
Frustrated Middle Age Man
The recession may be officially over, and for some segments of the population, things are
looking up. But too many are still sinking or hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Long-term
unemployment or underemployment has become a way of life.
This issue, for me, is personal.
I know what it feels like to be marginalized because you're out of work. To be judged by
others as if there's something wrong with you. To grow increasingly depressed, demoralized and
despairing as three months turns into six months and that goes on for a year or more; as
rejection after rejection becomes crushing, humiliating, and leaves you feeling worthless.
All money-related impacts aside, you lose confidence. You wear out. You start to give up.
And you don't even make it into the "statistics." It's been too long since your last employment
relationship.
Overqualified, Over-Educated, Over 50
Despite my fancy educational background and shiny corporate career history, for a number of years
I was unable to obtain work that was even remotely close to using my skills. Paying me a living
wage? Let's not even discuss it. I must have applied to 100 positions over the course of several
years, attended the usual networking events, and schmoozed every contact I could come up with.
No go. I suffered from the three O's: Overqualified, Over-educated and Over 50, though I may not
have looked it. That last? If you ask me, age was the kicker. Throughout that period, as
post-divorce skirmishes continued to flare (further complicating matters), I nonetheless took
every project I could eke out of the woodwork, supplemented by debt.
Hello, bank bail-out? How about a few bucks for those of us who foot the bill in tax dollars?
The Borrowing Trap
Now and then, an acquaintance will make an off-hand remark about those who borrow money or live
on credit cards. The assumption is that credit purchases are frivolous, or that the person who
racks up consumer debt does so out of irresponsibility and poor judgment.
Never assume. Yours truly? I borrowed to put food on the table. I borrowed to pay for school
supplies for my kids. I borrowed to enable them to take advantage of academic opportunities that
they earned through their own hard work. I also counted my blessings. While I had no family to
assist, my kids were healthy and doing well, I was basically healthy despite chronic pain, and I
was able to use credit. Borrowing is a double-edged sword of course, especially if it continues
for an extended period. But for my little household, debt was the only path to survival. For all
I know, it will be again.
Fighting Your Way Back
These days? I still live on a tight budget, I dream of recovering from the years of financial
devastation "someday," and I take every gig I can get. Willingly. I've gained new skills along
the way and continue to refine them, I'm always looking for another project and thrilled when I
nab one, and I'm accustomed to a 12- to 14-hour workday. I put in long hours throughout my
corporate career and I have no problem doing so now. In fact, I'm grateful for these workdays and
I take none of them for granted. Moreover, I suggest that few of us should take our sources of
income as a given.
You know the expression - "There but for the grace of God go I." Misfortune can visit any one of
us. Layoff. Accident or illness. Gray divorce. The phone call or email with no warning, saying
"you're done" as you're replaced by someone 20 years younger.
And yes, I've internalized the wisdom of this little gem: "If opportunity doesn't knock, build a
door." But I also know it isn't always possible, and the secret to success is not as simple as
hard work. It's aided by the assistance of others, not to mention - luck.
Forbes staff writer Susan Adams cites a Gallup poll as follows:
The longer that Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to report signs of poor
psychological well-being," says the study. "About one in five Americans who have been
unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression -
almost double the rate among those who have been unemployed for five weeks or less.
She goes on to note:
The long-term unemployed, unfortunately, have good reason to be depressed. They suffer
plenty of discrimination in the job market. A 2012 study by economist Rand Ghayad found that
employers preferred candidates with no relevant experience, but who had been out of work for
less than six months, to those with experience who had been job hunting for longer than that.
.... ... ...
How many of you have found yourselves laid off and unable to get another job?
How many of you are
struggling in midlife to create a career where once you were responsible for taking care of a
family?
How many of you have knocked on doors and connected until your blue in the face, only to give
up?
How many of you have drained away any savings you may have had or incurred crushing debt?
Have you had more success at creating new ventures for yourself - a business or freelance work?
Were you able to rely on the assistance of family or friends for a temporary period?
If you're over 50, have you found it harder? Have you had an experience similar to Cindy's?
I'm certain that many of you have fought your way back; I'm still fighting after years, but I
have seen progress. Slower than I'd like, but progress all the same.
If someone helped you out, have you paid it forward by making connections for others?
Please do read this comment from Cindy. I have responded as best I can. I'm sure she would
welcome your suggestions.
A Note on Despair
To be in this position - wanting to work, needing to work, knowing you still have much to
contribute but never getting a foot in the door - is deeply frustrating, horribly depressing, and
leaves us feeling powerless. Add up these elements and you have the formula for despair.
It's brutally hard to fight your way back from despair. But sometimes, an act of compassion can
help.
I've been on the receiving end of those incredible kindnesses - from strangers, from readers, and
from one friend in particular, herself too long living on the edge.
One small act of compassion can breathe new hope into the worst situation. And here's what I know
with 100% certainty. We may be unemployed, we may be depressed but we aren't powerless if we
come together and try to help one another.
Don't panic is always a good advice. Following it is another story...
Notable quotes:
"... Using contacts, no matter how far in the past they rest, is nothing to be ashamed of! You've probably spent most of your life working, and meeting a lot of people along the way. ..."
"... Your resume should be tailored to each and every job you apply for. While it is important to showcase your talent and skills, how you present the information is equally important. ..."
When you find yourself over 50 and unemployed, the thought of finding another job may seem daunting and hopeless.
It is quite easy to become discouraged because many people fear being stereotyped because of their age, the tough job market,
or the prospect of being interviewed by someone half their age. However, there are some things the older unemployed should keep in
mind while on the job search. Using the following tips will increase your chances of a short job search and create an overall more
pleasant experience.
Quit telling yourself that no one hires older workers. This is simply just not true. In some cases older
workers have to exert more effort to overcome discrimination, but this is certainly not the case for every employer. There are
even entire websites with jobs posted specifically for older workers, and a quick Google search will render you a list of those
websites. Take advantage of such resources!
Take advantage of new technology. Learn to blog and micro-blog, via Twitter, about your profession and interests.
You should even create a LinkedIn profile (a website similar to Facebook
yet has a more career oriented function) to assist it meeting people in your desired field. All of which will help you stay fine
tuned on your skills, while developing new ones. Learning to use social networking will indicate to potential employers that you
can adapt to change and learn new things, particularly technology, fairly quickly.
Use all those hard earned contacts. Using contacts, no matter how far in the past they rest, is nothing
to be ashamed of! You've probably spent most of your life working, and meeting a lot of people along the way. It is completely
acceptable to reach out to former colleagues, class mates, co-workers and employers for job possibilities. Using resources like
Facebook or LinkedIn are great ways to find those long lost contacts as well. Chances are they would love to hear from you and
help you out if possible.
Don't clutter your resume. Your resume should be tailored to each and every job you apply for. While
it is important to showcase your talent and skills, how you present the information is equally important. This means keep
it straight to the point and relate your past experience to the skills necessary for the job you are applying for. Essentially,
don't do a history dump of every job you've ever had, instead, make each word count!
Don't act superior to the interviewer. It is likely that the people interviewing you will be younger than
you. But this does not mean you should look down upon them. Obviously they have earned their position, and if you play your cards
right, in due time, you will earn yours! Even if you've worked more years than your interviewer has been alive, it's not okay
to tell him or her that you can "teach" them anything. A better idea would be to state your experience working in a multi-generational
work place.
Use these tips to help make your job search less stressful and more positive. Whatever you do, don't throw in the towel before
you've even tried. Your experience and knowledge will be recognized. All you need is the right employer to identify it.
This is essentially a scam. Help in landing $13 per hour job is not a big achievement.
Notable quotes:
"... Older workers like Lane make up a larger percentage of the persistently jobless than ever before. Nearly 40 percent of unemployed workers are over the age of 45 - a 30 percent rise from the 1980s. ..."
"... P2E is an intensive, individualized five-week bootcamp that teaches job skills and works to build job-seekers' confidence and emotional health. "We acknowledge that there are serious emotional issues for people who'd been unemployed for that long," Carbone said. ..."
"... The privately-funded program makes deals with businesses who hire P2E graduates for "internships," a few-week trial period for the would-be employee, whose salary is subsidized by the WorkPlace. Often, it leads to full-time work. According to P2E, 80 percent of their participants have been granted trial periods, and of those, more than 85 percent have been hired by employers. ..."
"... This acceptance of a new economic reality is at the heart of P2E; the program isn't solving the problems of precarity, real-wage decline, or manufacturing losses so much as doing damage control. ..."
"... "I'd say 100 percent of the people who went through Platform are making less than they did previously," said Carbone. "We get them prepared for the fact that their standard of living will go down, that they probably have to change careers." ..."
When Bret Lane was laid off from his telecommunications sales job after 16 years, he wasn't worried.
He'd never been unemployed for more than a few days since he started working as a teenager. But months
passed, and he couldn't find a job. One day, he heard the Purina plant in his Turlock, Calif., neighborhood
was hiring janitors for $14 an hour. When he arrived early at 4 a.m., he counted more than 400 people
lined up to interview.
"That's when I realized things had gotten serious," said Lane, 53, who called being out of work
"pure hell."
Lane's experience is hardly unique.
As of September 2013, 4
million people had been unemployed for six months or more. The economy has been slow to regain the
8.7 million jobs lost during the Great Recession, making prospects grim for many of the long-term
unemployed.
Older workers like Lane make up a larger percentage of the persistently jobless than ever before.
Nearly 40 percent of unemployed workers are over the age of 45 - a 30 percent rise from the 1980s.
And for this group, the job hunt can be particularly long and frustrating. Unemployed people aged
45-54 were jobless for 45 weeks on average, and those 55 to 64 were jobless for 57 weeks, according
to an October 2013
Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.
Younger workers didn't have such a hard time, perhaps because many employers perceive them to
be more energetic or productive than older workers, said Linda Barrington, an economist at Cornell
University's Institute for Compensation Studies. Employers "acting on such inaccurate assessments
or stereotypes is what benefits younger workers and disadvantages older workers," she said.
Addressing the emotional side of unemployment
An innovative program based in Bridgeport, Conn., is helping to get those who are over 50 and
unemployed for long periods back into the market. Platform to Employment started in 2011 when a Connecticut
job center called the WorkPlace was overwhelmed by calls from "99ers"-people who had been unemployed
for 99 weeks, exhausting their unemployment benefits-many of whom were older workers.
The exact number of 99ers across the country is unknown; the Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn't
distinguished between 99ers and those out of work for a year since 2010, an oversight that
some say renders this group even more politically invisible. Already, the long-term unemployed
face biases in hiring. It's both legal and common for employers to write "unemployed need not apply"
on job postings.
There has been virtually no public policy tackling long-term unemployment since the recession
hit, said P2E founder Joe Carbone, and his program seeks to fill that gap. "These people have lost
access to opportunity, which is a basic American tenet," said Carbone. "We find a way to make them
competitive and feel hopeful."
P2E is an intensive, individualized five-week bootcamp that teaches job skills and works to build
job-seekers' confidence and emotional health. "We acknowledge that there are serious emotional issues
for people who'd been unemployed for that long," Carbone said.
The privately-funded program makes deals with businesses who hire P2E graduates for "internships,"
a few-week trial period for the would-be employee, whose salary is subsidized by the WorkPlace. Often,
it leads to full-time work. According to P2E, 80 percent of their participants have been granted
trial periods, and of those, more than 85 percent have been hired by employers.
Accepting a new economic reality
Bret Lane washes out his coffee pot at his home after a shift at a call center in San Diego, Calif.,
on Oct. 31. Lane was laid off after 16 years as a salesman in telecommunications and was unemployed
until he got a job at a call center. Sandy
Huffaker / Getty Images for NBC News
The program has spread to 10 other cities across the United States, including San Diego, where
Lane, a P2E graduate, has been employed full-time at a call center since May. After a year and nine
months of unemployment, Lane sold his two-bedroom house, pared down his possessions to fit in a 5x10
storage unit, and drove to San Diego to live with his sister. That's when he saw an ad in the paper
for Platform to Employment.
He learned how to make his online resume more searchable by adding keywords, as well as how to
create an impressive LinkedIn profile. "It also occurred to me that I was being discriminated against"
because of age, rather than being rejected for not being good enough. Lane now makes about half of
his previous salary and still lives with his sister, but he's "happy to be working again."
This acceptance of a new economic reality is at the heart of P2E; the program isn't solving the
problems of precarity, real-wage decline, or manufacturing losses so much as doing damage control.
"I'd say 100 percent of the people who went through Platform are making less than they did previously,"
said Carbone. "We get them prepared for the fact that their standard of living will go down, that
they probably have to change careers."
This guidance is necessary, Barrington said. "A lot of [the long-term unemployed] came into the
workforce still thinking you could work for the same company for your whole life," she said. "Someone
has to sit you down and tell you that's not going to happen."
She added that businesses need to be reminded of the value of older workers, who often bring intangible
skills, such as punctuality, responsibility, and "being able to write a memo," that younger employees
may not yet have.
Heidi DeWyngaert, President of Bankwell, a holding company of several banks in Connecticut, said
one of her banks hired an older worker from P2E who is succeeding on the job precisely for these
reasons. "She's mature, reliable and responsible with a great attitude," said DeWyngaert.
The program has gained so much prominence that it's become competitive in its own right. Early
last year, after P2E was featured on 60 Minutes, the Bridgeport office was flooded with inquiries.
The program routinely gets 1,000 applicants for around 20 spots.
Hoping to spark a national conversation
Vanessa Jackson, 57, saw the segment and kept track of P2E's growth until it expanded to her area
in Chicago. Jackson had been unemployed off and on since 2008, when she lost her $100,000 job as
a marketing manager during a corporate downsizing. "I thought, of course, I would get another comparable
job," she said.
But it didn't happen. She decided to get an MBA to "ride out the recession," but that just landed
her more debt. She finally got a part-time job as a deli clerk, until she broke her arm and went
on disability for 10 months. Her $300,000 401(k) account dwindled to $60,000. She sold her house
in the suburbs and moved in with her boyfriend on the South Side of Chicago.
"It was the most desperate thing in the world," Jackson said. It pained her to remember the days
when recruiters would tell her she was one of "the top African-American women in marketing."
P2E "revived my energy," she said. "It lifted the depression that was very much there."
Jackson now works part-time as a project coordinator at a home care service agency for $13 an
hour, which she admits is inadequate for her level of education. Still, she almost missed out on
the opportunity. When P2E came to Chicago earlier this year, she wasn't selected at first. "It felt
like applying for a job in itself," she said. "I beseeched [Chicago program manager Michael Morgan].
He said 'I admire your ambition' and let me in."
Carbone is all too aware of P2E's limited reach. "We've helped hundreds of people, but that doesn't
put even a small dent in the amount who need help," he said. Carbone hopes to spark a national conversation
and, eventually, get the attention of Washington.
"Let's be clear," Carbone said. "I wouldn't be doing this if there were appropriate and relevant
government policies."
2000 | Rated R directed by Steven Soderbergh
Based on the true story of an unemployed mother of three who forced her way into a job as a legal clerk and built an anti-pollution
case against a California utility company. Erin Brockovich has become a name for someone with tenacity and perseverance.
The Journey of Natty Gann
1985 | Rated PG directed by Jeremy Kagan
Disney's family-friendly adventure demonstrates how tough the Great Depression was on kids, namely the teenage girl of the title
who journeys across America to reunite with her father. Grounded by strong performances, including a young John Cusack, this gem
serves as a fine introduction of a difficult subject to younger viewers.
Tootsie
1982 | Rated PG directed by Sydney Pollack
This light-hearted, quirky comedy stars Dustin Hoffman as an unemployed actor who pretends to be a woman for a full-time role in
a soap opera. Beneath the hilarity is a sobering reminder that landing a job sometimes requires thinking outside the box, to say
the least.
Up in the Air
2009 | Rated R directed by Jason Reitman
George Clooney is stellar as a veteran hatchet man who has lost his ability to form meaningful relationships, living a life on the
road. Ultimately this is a poignant drama about identity and what defines us. If we are nothing more than our occupation, what remains
when that is gone?
Russ Breimeier, a freelance film critic who lives in Indianapolis, was unemployed for two years until recently landing a part-time
job.
Probably not. But the quantities necessary might diminish considerably...
Notable quotes:
"... Adapted from the new book The Future of the Professions by Richard Susskind & Daniel Susskind (Oxford University Press, 2015).Originally published at Alternet ..."
"... The proof is in how there is one premium cost if the medical provider is on their own and magically it is cheaper if theu are part of a group or hospital.. Same doctor same practices lower rates prima facia evidence of insurance company rate fraud ..."
"... Re solidarity, you might be surprised. One reason law school enrollments are down is that it is becoming public knowledge that employment for graduates in upwardly mobile career positions is way down ..."
"... Many are shunted into low level proletarian type legal work, churning out evidence for use in lawsuits owned and managed by large firms. Lawyers who do this earn less then a good paralegal with less job security and no benefits. ..."
"... So much of the 'grunt work' of professions – once the entry and training province of new graduates – is now being done overseas by shops that specialize in legal research, or reading x-rays, or accounting and tax preparation. ..."
"... The 'grunt work' that grounds one in the full knowledge of the profession and how it works is slowly removed from the profession. That omission leaves future practitioners with an incomplete understanding. ..."
"... This loss makes them more reliant on big data as both assistant and excuse/defense, and makes them less master craftsmen (if I may use the term without giving offense) and more the front-end interface of one-size-fits-all processes. Very good for corporate profits. Not so good for the professions or their clients. ..."
"... Long ago, firms started off-shoring basic, tedious, repetitive tasks, generally considered as unrewarding, such as software testing or error correction to India. The idea was to focus on "high added-value" jobs such as system architects or project management, and leave low-level operations, supposedly requiring less qualifications, to cheaper Indian contractors. Decades later, there is a shortage of qualified people for those high-skilled jobs - precisely because fewer and fewer young people have had the possibility ..."
"... The result? It is now necessary to import expensive project managers and system architects from foreign countries. ..."
"... Bottom line: the race to the bottom for wages is "on". ..."
"... Professionals would be the next logical choice of squeezing cost out of work; unions, middle management, big industry, airlines, manufacturing and construction have all paid their price at the alter of the 1%. ..."
"... I also agree with the concept of there being less for the bottom 90% to spend. And as more automation kicks in, there will be even less bad choice jobs for these folks to scramble for. Just waiting for truck drivers to be slowly replaced with auto-drive trucks. ..."
"... " . Prefer a fence at the top of the cliff to an ambulance at the bottom " ..."
"... The rich and the truly rich will always have skilled, artistic human professionals to serve their personally tailored bespoke needs. It is the rest of us who will be assigned the doctorobots, the lawyer machines, etc. ..."
"... Part of the "crapification of everything" except for managers and owners, it is part of their cost cutting plan. ..."
"... First they came for the blue collar workers, and I did nothing? Then they came for the white collar workers, and I did nothing? Now they are coming for the professionals, and they are laughing at my passivity? ..."
"... They have played all the classes, higher than the one they are currently discarding, and the remaining consumers are happy to throw their neighbors under the bus. But your turn will come. Karma. ..."
"... Once corporations start setting guidelines and dictating the drugs you can and can't use for treatment, do you think they'll do it according to what's cost effective and least risky for the patient based on current science or do you think they'll do it based on their own profits? ..."
Posted on
January 9, 2016 by Yves Smith Yves here. Many
members of the top 10% regard their role in society as relatively secure, particularly if the are in a niche that serves the capital-deploying
1% or better yet, 0.1%. But a new book suggest their position is not secure. And trends in motion confirm this dour reading, such
as the marked decline in law school enrollments, and the trend in the US to force doctors to practice out of hospitals or HMOs, where
they are salaried and are required to adhere to corporate care guidelines. For instance, my MD is about to have her practice bought
out, and is looking hard as to whether she can establish a concierge practice. Mind you, she appears regularly on TV and writes a
monthly column for a national magazine [not that is how I found her or why I use her]. Yet she has real doubts as to whether she
can support all the overhead. If someone with a profile can't make a go at it solo in a market like Manhattan, pray tell, who can?
The end of the professional era is characterized by four trends: the move from bespoke service; the bypassing of traditional gatekeepers;
a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to professional work; and the more-for-less challenge.
The Move From Bespoke (Custom) Service
For centuries, much professional work has been handled in the manner of a craft. Individual experts and specialists-people who
know more than others-have offered an essentially bespoke service ("bespoke" is British for "custom"). In the language of the tailor,
their product has been "made-to-measure" rather than "off-the-peg." For each recipient the service has been disposable (used once
only), handcrafted ordinarily by a solitary scribe or sole trusted adviser, often in the spirit of an artist who starts each project
afresh with a blank canvas.
Our research strongly suggests that bespoke professional work in this vein looks set to fade from prominence, as other crafts
(like tailoring and tallow chandlering) have done over the centuries. Significant elements of professional work are being routinized:
in checklists, standard form materials, and in various sorts of systems, many of which are available online. Meanwhile, the work
that remains for human beings to handle conventionally is often not conducted by individual craftspeople, but collaboratively in
teams, sometimes collocated, but more often virtually. And, with the advance of increasingly capable machines, some work may not
be conducted by human beings at all.
Just as we witnessed the "death of gentlemanly capitalism" in the banks in the 1980s, we seem to be observing a similar decline
in bespoke professionalism.
The Bypassed Gatekeepers
In the past, when in need of expert guidance we turned to the professions. Their members knew things that others did not, and
we drew on their knowledge and experience to solve our problems. Each profession acted as a "gatekeeper" of its own, distinct body
of practical expertise. Today this set-up is under threat.
We are already seeing some work being wrested from the hands of traditional professions. Some of the competition is coming from
within. We observe professionals from different professions doing each other's work. They even speak of "eating one another's lunch."
Accountants and consultants, for example, are particularly effective at encroaching on the business of lawyers and actuaries. We
also see intra-professional friction, when, for example, nurses take on work that used to be exclusive to doctors, or paralegals
are engaged to perform tasks that formerly were the province of lawyers.
But the competition is also advancing from outside the traditional boundaries of the professions-from new people and different
institutions. We see a recurring need to draw on people with very different skills, talents, and ways of working. Practicing doctors,
priests, teachers, and auditors did not, for example, develop the software that supports the systems that we describe. Stepping forward
instead are data scientists, process analysts, knowledge engineers, systems engineers, and many more. Today, professionals still
provide much of the content, but in time they may find themselves down-staged by these new specialists. We also see a diverse set
of institutions entering the fray-business process outsourcers, retail brands, Internet companies, major software and service vendors,
to name a few. What these providers have in common is that they look nothing like twentieth-century doctors, accountants, architects,
and the rest.
More than this, human experts in the professions are no longer the only source of practical expertise. There are illustrations
of practical expertise being made available by recipients of professional work-in effect, sidestepping the gatekeepers.
On various platforms, typically online, people share their past experience and help others to resolve similar problems. These "communities
of experience," as we call them, are springing up across many professions (for example, PatientsLikeMe and the WebMD communities
in medicine). We say more about them in a moment. More radical still are systems and machines that themselves generate practical
expertise. These are underpinned by a variety of advanced techniques, such as Big Data and artificial intelligence. These platforms
and systems tend not to be owned and run by the traditional professions. Whether those who do so will in turn become "new gatekeepers"
is a subject of some concern.
The keys to the kingdom are changing. Or, if not changing, they are at least being shared with others.
You nailed it on medical professionals would like to add, that at least here in flori duh there seems to be massive pricing
fraud by malpractice and liability insurance providers which state regulators allow to continue to force small or single practitioners
to join groups by financial obliteration at least in floriduh, there is the usual massive distortion suggesting insurance companies
are paying out huge amounts when there in fact seems to be collusion amongst insurance companies neglecting the legal requirement
to try to settle on good faith and end up forcing people to settle for pennies on the dollar yet the insurance companies keep
picking the pockets of medical professionals
The proof is in how there is one premium cost if the medical provider is on their own and magically it is cheaper if theu
are part of a group or hospital.. Same doctor same practices lower rates prima facia evidence of insurance company rate fraud
Yes some of it is only logical though, if masses of the population see their income declining and yet the costs of medical
care keeps increasing eventually noone can afford to see the doctor never mind the ACA etc.. And it can get to be this way with
a lot of professional services less urgent and distorted than medical care, like soon noone can afford an accountant, you use
turbo tax, a lawyer – no middle class people start to make their own wills. Many professions seek ever further protections of
government for their guilds (more and more requirements to practice to try to preserve their privilege) and yet with nothing protecting
the income of the other 80% (read: unions, that would be their role) unless they plan to only serve the fellow 20%
So solidarity? Yea, but making the solidarity argument with many (not all) members of such professions is a waste of time as
they instinctively side with the 1s.
Re solidarity, you might be surprised. One reason law school enrollments are down is that it is becoming public knowledge
that employment for graduates in upwardly mobile career positions is way down
Many are shunted into low level proletarian type legal work, churning out evidence for use in lawsuits owned and managed
by large firms. Lawyers who do this earn less then a good paralegal with less job security and no benefits.
It has been said Paralegals are being squeezed out, to make way for the huge increase in law graduates from prior class booms.
Why not use cheap lawyers, with better credential, and desperate for employment?
So much of the 'grunt work' of professions – once the entry and training province of new graduates – is now being done
overseas by shops that specialize in legal research, or reading x-rays, or accounting and tax preparation.
There are 3 downsides to this, in my opinion. New college grads have fewer entry slots. The 'grunt work' that grounds one
in the full knowledge of the profession and how it works is slowly removed from the profession. That omission
leaves future practitioners with an incomplete understanding.
This loss makes them more reliant on big data as both assistant and excuse/defense, and makes them less master craftsmen
(if I may use the term without giving offense) and more the front-end interface of one-size-fits-all processes. Very good for
corporate profits. Not so good for the professions or their clients.
Your first two points (no entry-level jobs for beginners, no acquisition of professional basics) are essential - and their
detrimental effects are already painfully felt in some professions.
Case in point: software development.
Long ago, firms started off-shoring basic, tedious, repetitive tasks, generally considered as unrewarding, such as software
testing or error correction to India. The idea was to focus on "high added-value" jobs such as system architects or project management,
and leave low-level operations, supposedly requiring less qualifications, to cheaper Indian contractors. Decades later, there
is a shortage of qualified people for those high-skilled jobs - precisely because fewer and fewer young people have had the possibility
to
(a) start in the profession at entry-level positions (when job postings all require qualifications as senior software engineer
and five years experience, what do you do?)
(b) learn the ropes and practice the skills from the ground up (the necessary step before rising in the professional hierarchy).
The result? It is now necessary to import expensive project managers and system architects from foreign countries.
From what I read, the UK has been especially hit by this phenomenon, because it was particularly enthusiastic about off-shoring
IT to India.
I can't find the cite, but last year I read that some of the Indian companies that American law firms have outsourced to are
now moving offices "stateside" to hire American attorneys, here.
The Washington State Bar has initiated a
legal technician
program , and I find the timing questionable, even if the premise of the program is good-hearted. As the market is awash in
underemployed, licensed attorneys, the Bar is going ahead and turning veteran paralegals into the people to undercut the market
even further. It seems like bad timing to let someone who has years of experience, and no law school debt get over on a bunch
law school grads who are facing a life of being hounded for their debts. I spoke to someone at the Bar who made a good defense,
that the legal technician is like an ARNP. Only later did it occur to me that there are very few out-of-work doctors.
From another perspective, the legal technician answers another problem of the collapsing paralegal market. Much of the collapse
has been driven by advances in document management, especially scanning that 'reads' the text and makes it searchable. But hey,
here is a shiny new program. Go ahead and set up a parenting plan with your abusive ex for $75! What could go wrong?
The key to really get the legal field de-humanized would be robot judges and robotic juries. I hope someone is already working
on it.
Don't worry what's old is new again. At some point in the future we'll all be scratching glyphs on clay tablets .once the 2nd
law of thermodynamics really kicks in ..plenty of work then!
Work! What about George Jetson? The go west value system we are stuck with these days is almost perfectly incompatible with
a future that requires very little human labor.
Professionals would be the next logical choice of squeezing cost out of work; unions, middle management, big industry,
airlines, manufacturing and construction have all paid their price at the alter of the 1%.
Public sector unions are hanging on but as the majority of local & state taxpayers have less to give, these wages, benefits
and especially pensions will be cut. Those earning less and less will gleefully pull down those public employees who are 'living
like kings'.
I also agree with the concept of there being less for the bottom 90% to spend. And as more automation kicks in, there will
be even less bad choice jobs for these folks to scramble for. Just waiting for truck drivers to be slowly replaced with auto-drive
trucks.
This leads us to an enhanced confrontation at the Federal level on how to go forward. The earned income tax credit, a good
concept also under siege, I believe, will have to be supplemented with a minimum guaranteed income.
By this time, 20 years, the DEMs will be the party of business and the GOP will be entirely dependent on fed govt subsidies.
Oh the irony.
Reading Rise of a The Robots right now, and the law and accounting profession have and will continue to be hurt hard by computers
armed with big data, and the education and medical profession are next. Has to be. It's already a travesty that education and
medical costs continue to rise as incomes stagnate and drop, and that just cannot continue. Well, maybe it can, until all of those
guns out there are used by the people as they rise up. Look at the buffoon who many are considering for the Republican nominee,
more out of blind, misinformed anger, than anything. Scary.
The rich and the truly rich will always have skilled, artistic human professionals to serve their personally tailored bespoke
needs. It is the rest of us who will be assigned the doctorobots, the lawyer machines, etc.
The French phrase "Everything changes and remains the same" remains true today.
Whereas today the top of society has its professionals to isolate and protect them from the remainder of the population and
the rules nobility and the church had its knights, nobles, obedient serfs and peasants to fight and protect "their" nobility.
Names and titles changed but the rules remained. Those who have will get those who don't will not.
Correct. The same applies in education. The wealthy know what kinds of schools serve their children best: those with better
teacher to student ratios, rich arts curricula, and a progressive approach to instruction. Just see what Obama's kids got at their
fancy Quaker school. The rest get standardized lesson plans, big class sizes, deep cuts in music and the arts, and high-stakes
testing.
Part of the "crapification of everything" except for managers and owners, it is part of their cost cutting plan.
Why would you trust a medical system run by politicians and insurance companies a system promoted by those same managers
and owners. Like hiring the Three Stooges as your plumber, electrician and roofer. Gullibility will be the death of us that
and malice.
First they came for the blue collar workers, and I did nothing? Then they came for the white collar workers, and I did
nothing? Now they are coming for the professionals, and they are laughing at my passivity?
They have played all the classes, higher than the one they are currently discarding, and the remaining consumers are happy
to throw their neighbors under the bus. But your turn will come. Karma.
In Oregon some doctors are unionizing to resist medical assembly line medicine.
From NYTimes:
Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
"Dr. Alexander and his colleagues say they are in favor of efficiency gains. It's the particular way the hospital has interpreted
this mandate that has left them feeling demoralized. If you talk to them for long enough, you get the distinct feeling it is
not just their jobs that hang in the balance, but the loss of something much less tangible - the ability of doctors everywhere
to exercise their professional judgment."
I find myself thinking about an episode of the original Connections series, that was produced in the 70s.
There it was mused about how corporate management would idle their days away waiting for the computer in the basement to crunch
the numbers and come up with company decisions they were then to implement.
Instead what happened was that the professional managerial class, the MBAs, dug in while computers instead replaced the laborers
via robotics.
Or shorter: The common argument that 'we (by that I mean you) have to become more employable' is about to hit home among the
people with long education. Will they recognize the similarity to what has already happened to others and/or will they themselves
make themselves more 'employable'?
I think one of the major consequences we are seeing as a result of a misguided professional system is the lack of basic legal
services for millions of people. This resulted in people being thrown out of their homes as the result of very obvious fraud and
yet having no recourse unless they were able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees.
I think the popular new series 'Making of a Murderer' emphasizes this problem. I don't think a show that emphasizes the problems
that the very poor have with justice from the lack of being able to pay for legal services would have been this popular 10 years
ago.
Once corporations start setting guidelines and dictating the drugs you can and can't use for treatment, do you think they'll
do it according to what's cost effective and least risky for the patient based on current science or do you think they'll do it
based on their own profits?
What happens when they own their own pharmacies – as they're all scrambling to do right now – and try to jack up reimbursement
through that unit too? Do you think patients were served when Philidor started (criminally) altering scripts and making substitutions?
For profit healthcare is really sickcare, isn't it? Why cure a disease when treating it brings in more revenue? Why sell cheap
human insulin when you can patent a variety on the molecule, jack up the price and carve up the market?
Keep the sucker paying the vig
These guys aren't adopting better guidelines for treating chronic disease based on the best available science. In fact, as
they corporatize they're getting worse. I've talked to these clowns. They're typically ten years behind the state of the art in
their field. Patients do the reading and then they stare at us like we're morons. Fifteen years later they swear they knew the
truth all along.
If these corporate suits are setting the guidelines for care, how come there's no common national board standard for care,
no portfolio investment model approach where they model the disease with the best available experts, determine how to intervene
in the various genetic pathways that are perturbed and then pick the simplest, cheapest methods/chemicals to try first?
That sounds like a pretty reasonable, scientific approach to treatment – but, if that's your standard, then these people are
in breech of fiduciary duty left and right and it all has to do with that old canard "maximizing shareholder value." What about
maximizing customer service? Corporate medicine will lead to tobacco-level deaths. I know doctors who have been personally injured
in this system already. Corporations want to avoid risk to their profit – *not* their patient. Imagine what *those* mandatory
arbitration clauses are going to look like. Imagine what the sequel to _Merchants of Doubt_ will look like in the era of corporate
medicine and Supreme Court decisions that bust doctors' unions.
I'm still burning from Peter Thiel's comments on monopolies in the New York Times this morning. Does he have any clue how bad
the service is in regional hospital cartels already and how fast prices are rising?
It's not even a matter of price in the drug markets now. It's basic availability. Aside from the persistent shortages of cheap,
effective generics due to the kickback scheme in PMOs/PBMs, we now have explicit regulatory interference. The FDA has been moving
to withdraw entire lines of medication from compounding pharmacies even when there's no rival big pharma product competing against
them or any indication of patient risk. These are decades-old treatments. (It's the CDC's job to set treatment guidelines, by
the way, not the FDA's).
It's just a knee-jerk reaction at this point to protect imaginary future profits, I suppose. You can't make up this stuff.
The FDA has even imposed a 30% sales volume rule for "safety." It has nothing to do with purity or contamination of compounded
products. If Tesla sold exploding cars, how would restricting 30% of their sales volume to California improve consumer safety?
It's clearly a market-rigging reg – and it's because the corporate medicine lobby wants it.
What does this have to do with corporate medicine? Compounding pharmacies in big chain hospitals – which are often pitifully
narrow in their professional scope – are all magically exempt (oligopolistic and more expensive too). Isn't that wonderful?
The current corporatization of medicine rests on the notion that the chief challenge faced by those of us with serious illnesses
is that we simply don't read enough fine print or fill out enough paperwork.
If you think that corporations have done a fine job handling your retirement investments in this era of lax accounting standards,
wait until you see what they do with your actual body.
This article is based on the faulty perception that this is all normal benign efficiency working it's way out of an antiquated
system, perhaps with a few -to be expected- hiccups. It isn't.
What we are experiencing is wholesale greed and corruption on an international scale working it's way into the core of our
civilization like mold or cancer, and perverting technology as well as the process of social change and adjustment to that change
– for it's exclusive benefit – as it goes. It is unconscionable that we could call this progress or adjustment in anything but
the most cruelly ironic sense.
The shift from reactive to proactive my foot! 60 years ago doctors were getting out proactive messages far better
than today via education, television, the media and so on. And they gave a damn!!! Today, insurance companies are devising ever
new ways to minimize what they spend on your care, maximize what they charge you for it, and call it, "proactive." Proactive theft,
or genocide for fun and profit, would be closer to the mark.
Secular stagnation of the US economy might be parcially driven by high (above $50 per barrel) oil prices. That nessesarity
generates high level of unemployment, especially chromic unemployment and "perma-temps".
Masterpiece, offers solution for THE problem of our time/div> I am astonished at the quality of this book, which is about the
eighth book in a personal reading program that included Paul Roberts' The End of Oil, Kenneth Deffeyes' Beyond Oil, Jared Diamon's
Collapse, Cottrell's Energy and Society, Michael Klare's Blood and Oil, and others, all extremely good and relevant books.
The task this author undertakes is to help readers find a new perspective from which to constructively and usefully interpret
inevitable and major changes the world around us. By taking this approach, the author is providing the very essential tool we
need to cope with these changes.
The issue is our ecological footprint.
Catton uses the term "Age of Exuberance" to represent the time since 1492 when first a newly discovered hemisphere and then
the invention of fossil-fuel-driven machines allowed Old-World humans to escape the constraints imposed by a population roughly
at earth's carrying capacity, and instead to grow (and philosophize and emote) expansively.
He then reminds us that we are soon to be squeezed by the twin jaws of excessive population and exhausted resources, as our
current population is utterly dependent on the mining and burning of fossil energy and its use to exploit earth's resources in
general.
In spring 2005, the buzz about "the end of cheap energy" is reaching quite a pitch, and when and if the "peak oil" scenario
(or other environmental limit-event) is reached, the impact on our social / political world will be enormous. Already the US is
brandishing and using its superior weaponry to sieze control of oil assets; this same kind of desperate struggle may well erupt
at all levels of society if we don't find a way to identify the problem, anticipate its consequences, and find solutions.
Catton offers a perspective based on biology / ecology -- not bad, since we are indeed animals in an ecology and we are indeed
subject to the iron laws of nature and physics.
With this perspective we can avoid ending up screaming nonsense at each other when changes begin to get scary. My urgent recommendation
is, read this G.D. book and do it now.
"... It has to be explained that Stoics believe that nothing external to the individual is secure, and thus the truly important thing is virtue, based on ethics and moral. ..."
"... Stoicism is the appropriate philosophy for what awaits us. It brings out the best of us and it eases the anguish. The illusion of control is our worst enemy. Matters are completely out of our control and Nature will deal with them as she pleases. ..."
I wholeheartedly agree that even a cursory look at things reveals the overwhelming scope
of things and quickly leads to despair.
It doesn't have to lead to despair. I recommend
Stoicism
, which is the way
Greeks and Romans coped with their own decline.
In the words of Seneca:
"Let Nature deal with matter, which is her own, as she pleases; let us be cheerful and brave
in the face of everything, reflecting that it is nothing of our own that perishes." (De Provid.
v.8)
It has to be explained that Stoics believe that nothing external to the individual is secure,
and thus the truly important thing is virtue, based on ethics and moral.
Virtue can not be
taken from an individual whatever the circumstances, and helps him deal with adversity. That is
what Seneca means with
"nothing of our own that perishes"
.
Stoicism is the appropriate philosophy for what awaits us. It brings out the best of us
and it eases the anguish. The illusion of control is our worst enemy. Matters are completely out
of our control and Nature will deal with them as she pleases.
"... I am lucky in that I lived very frugally my whole life as I have always feared what was coming, and what in my opinion has now come. I am retired, and have been for over 4 years, but not by choice. ..."
"... For me, the misery index is High. I am lucky that I am not in danger of homelessness, but I have to be very careful about what I spend as prices keep going up and up and most things I consume. Meaning, food, utilities, taxes, etc. These days food doesn't go up by cents, but rather usually a dollar at a time. Carrots at my local Costco just went from $6.99 to $7.99 for example. ..."
"... I think that for everyone but the top 10%, the Misery Index is High ..."
From just outside Boulder, CO: John Edwards said "there are two Americas". I am thinking
he was more than correct, but that it should be 4 Americas: the top ,1%, the rest of the top
10%, the people who were prudent and saved and are older who are suffering but still can
afford to live, and the truly poor who can't come up with $400 in an emergency, which would
include the homeless. I am lucky in that I lived very frugally my whole life as I have
always feared what was coming, and what in my opinion has now come. I am retired, and have
been for over 4 years, but not by choice. Nobody here wants to hire an over 60 IT
worker.
I measure the "economy" and the it's health by what I refer to as the "misery index". It
isn't measured in numbers but rather in how one feels about their life and the world around
them. For me, the misery index is High. I am lucky that I am not in danger of
homelessness, but I have to be very careful about what I spend as prices keep going up and up
and most things I consume. Meaning, food, utilities, taxes, etc. These days food doesn't go
up by cents, but rather usually a dollar at a time. Carrots at my local Costco just went from
$6.99 to $7.99 for example.
I think that for everyone but the top 10%, the Misery Index is High . But, around
here, it is I believe one of the more affluent areas of the country. People are buying up
$1.5 million dollar houses like crazy, and tearing down $1 million dollar old houses to build
new custom houses. Tesla's and Mercedes are everywhere. Google has taken over Boulder and the
young Tech workers are numerous. My little town of about 10,000 people is building new homes
on every square inch of available land. They are talking about another 500 new homes of close
to a million dollars to well over a million dollars. Traffic is outrageous, and bad air
pollution days seem to be more and more numerous these days.
So, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Depends on who you are.
I think though that we are in the midst of a class war. The racial issues we are
experiencing are to distract people and divide people. Divide people on race, divide people
on age, divide people on ideology. No matter what, just divide people so while the common
"man" is fighting each other, the rich plunder more and more.
Finally, from my perspective, as a student of history, especially Nazi Germany, and Russia
under Stalin, I am more and more frightened each day by the acceptance of the Trump rhetoric.
It is messianic and dangerous.
"... I actually walked out of a Popeyes chicken place last month over the treatment I received. I am usually extremely laid back concerning service, having done a lot of it over the years. Recently though, the service workers have become actively hostile, in several places. This low wage economy is finally having some deleterious effects on the society at large. ..."
"... Fricking BS neoliberal greed masquerading as public policy. ..."
"... The bigger problem is the multi dimensional conflict with China. If its rate of acceleration is not brought down a lot, it will do some real damage to businesses who clean up by exploiting cheap and efficient Chinese industry while selling widgets into wealthy western markets. All such businesses, could get hurt, real bad (and their Chinese counterparts too). Will this happen? I think there will be warning shots. Huawei being the elephant in the room. ..."
"... I thought the quote from Business Insider that dole queues have been replaced by low paid part-time work was insightful. In a few words it explains why poor life conditions for many people are invisible. They are working somewhere not hanging around at street corners. It also explains how the situation may be just bearable for those with the low paid jobs since they do earn some income. It also explains why they don't turn their difficult conditions into political demands for a better life. They don't have the time as they are too busy and tired just surviving. ..."
"... The low interest rates are needed for bigger stock buybacks to prop up the overinflated housing and stock markets. Float those fantasies of fake wealth. It's alll that's left of their dystopian dream ..."
"... One thing has been proven beyond denial and that is that neoliberalism doesn't work. Infusions of money are still going to the rich, connected people mostly for frivolous justifications. Recession and ecological devastation plague the rest of us. ..."
"... IMO the US economy is a house of cards. What is the US economy currently? In my view it is the FIRE (Finance, IT, Real Estate, and Energy) sector, Education, and Health Care. ..."
"... Many people are living large at the expense of education and healthcare and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. What happens when the bubble bursts?? Many small cities are going to be ghost towns. ..."
"... Anecdotally, where I live in central WA I know quite a few young people in their 30s and 20s who patch together various crummy jobs to make ends meet. None of them can afford a house and it's hard to see much of a future for them other than endless part-time, low paying jobs ..."
"... The county I live in has an official poverty rate of 14%, about 1 out of every 7 people, but I think the actual amount is higher. We have a lot of Mexican immigrant workers here who likely are not counted, and in any case the federal definition of poverty is not very realistic. Same applies to official inflation stats. I would say that things are mixed, but for many under 40 the future isn't bright. ..."
I think much is just stuff that was ever thus and not new, there has always been a lot of poverty in the U.S.. Now that poverty
may be creeping more into the middle class more and so becomes more noticeable, and homelessness has grown some places, but there
was always much poverty.
This economic system especially without even a measly safety net, will not ever eliminate poverty and share the wealth. And
of course it's going to destroy life on earth pretty soon if it keeps going.
Local experience: people who have not had an easy time getting stable jobs or sometimes work at all even recently are getting
some now. But there are still perfectly decent people that can't find work.
Here in the North American Deep South, "things" are sliding slowly down that slippery slope. The "Street Signs" I see about
me are signaling a growth in the population of the truly impoverished. People with their belongings carried about in backpacks
are now a regular sight on our streets. Panhandlers abound on the street corners. So much so that the local City Council has just
passed an ordinance practically outlawing the practice. One of the local salvage store outlets, of which we have four in this
town now, representing three corporations, now has some regular parking lot and front door panhandlers. A store assistant manager
told me that it was "too much of a hassle" to run the panhandlers off, so the store tolerates their presence.
One of these panhandlers has a shtick of opening the front door to the store for customers with his hand out, as if he was
a legitimate doorman. Five years ago, such now common sights were unknown around here.
On the small business front, today is the last day for our friendly local small vitamin and health food shop. She has given
up after thirteen years. She has said that the internet killed her business off. For the last two months she has been looking
for work. With her business background, she has had no "legitimate" offers of employment to date.
Another person who worked at the store while going to the local college just graduated with a Business and Communications major
and minor. A sharp person, he told me two weeks ago before he went home to Gulfport to live with his parents again, he will be
taking his little brother's room since the little brother just joined the military, that all he has received in the way of job
offers in six months of searching are "bulls -- t job" offers, and one decent possibility over in Dallas. Even that job offer
was on a recurring one year contract schedule. He would be a 'job shopper.'
I generally look at the faces of the people I pass by in shops and on the street to judge the tenor of the times. I have seen
precious few smiling faces recently. Even the retail food workers are now surly and brusque.
I actually walked out of a Popeyes chicken place last month over the treatment I received. I am usually extremely laid
back concerning service, having done a lot of it over the years. Recently though, the service workers have become actively hostile,
in several places. This low wage economy is finally having some deleterious effects on the society at large.
What in the World is a "business improvement district?" And why does any California cities especially the large ones like L.A.,
San Diego, San Jose, or San Francisco? The smaller towns especially out in the peripheral Red areas could certainly use some economic
help, but really housing is the single biggest problem state-wide with the possible exception of water, but that's only in long
drought.
If people had dependable affordable housing, business would pick up.
Fricking BS neoliberal greed masquerading as public policy.
As another commenter said above, "fine" is a relative term. But I suppose this is in reference to this week's news-media theme
of discussing recession fears. Thus the "fine" we are talking about means a combination of prices in stocks and real estate, and
annual performance of big firms.
By that definition, the fears are a possibility, but just that. I mean the stock market is probably overvalued, but that isn't
a crisis, and with the FED easing, what the heck they'll be overvalued more.
The bigger problem is the multi dimensional conflict with China. If its rate of acceleration is not brought down a lot,
it will do some real damage to businesses who clean up by exploiting cheap and efficient Chinese industry while selling widgets
into wealthy western markets. All such businesses, could get hurt, real bad (and their Chinese counterparts too). Will this happen?
I think there will be warning shots. Huawei being the elephant in the room.
An even worse scenario for the rest of the world (but not the US) is if efforts to contain China succeed, and growth of Chinese
industry is halted. The non-US world will have to pay significantly more for pretty much everything, and therefore economy will
grow slower. Will this happen? I don't think so.
As far as locally in this reader's neck of the woods? I live in a locally wealthy college town, so kindof impossible to say
from this vantage point, but I think things are actually going well. The place I work, a tiny scientific-industrial equipment
maker in a very specialized niche, is looking at some of the bigger contracts we've had yet. My biggest fear in terms of external
events is that we have an absolutely vital component supplier who is US-branded-made-in-China and a "dual-use" technology (we
are the civilian use). That's a risk. There are Japanese-branded-Chinese alternatives but the US-branded-Chinese one is more advanced,
I suspect due to patent protection, which should fortunately expire in a few years (reckoning based on how long it's been on the
market).
Well duh. Your college has been suctioning money out of the pockets of kids for the last couple decades or so at a rate that
is multiples of the general growth rate. Which means most (probably all) of the wealth you see around you is a shift from elsewhere,
not a creation of such.
At best it is maybe repatriating some of the money going to Asia.
I am also in the Deep South, but just barely. Our area is booming if you judge from the amount of construction taking place.
However, there are loads more homeless people than there used to be, in a county that is hostile to them. It's easy to wind up
doing thirty days in jail if you show up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with no money. I employ a homeless guy to do yard
work. He has plenty of skills and works for others too, so money isn't a problem, theoretically. However, he has found there are
few rooms available where the homeowners do not have substance abuse problems. He's been through four since I've been employing
him -- about nine months. He used to have a drinking problem, but no longer does, as far as I can tell. Life sobered him up. He
has pointed out to me how many homes are unoccupied and falling down, and could be used to house people.
We have a similar problem with "abandoned/unsafe buildings." The local response to this is to tear the buildings down. Salvable
housing stock becomes empty lots, with the demolition bill sent to the last owner of record.
Rentals for the really poor are difficult at best. Very few rooming houses here. Most house rental contracts around here prohibit
co-renters. The main exceptions are the college student rentals, and many of them have premium rents, essentially, gouging the
out of towners.
Criminalizing poverty is an old and much honoured tradition.
The entire country sorely needs more rooming houses -- impossible nowadays, even in "liberal" towns, either because of land-construction
prices or zoning or both.
Economists this time around seem to be oblivious to the "everything" bubble, be it the stock market, fracking, those darling
tech companies worth billions having never made a profit, housing, student debt, debt generally
They seem mostly oblivious to structural pathologies, like the unchecked growth of monopoly, gross income inequality, unchecked
automation, unchecked AI, resource constraints, ecological blowback, systemic pollution, eternal privatized warprofiteering.
This economy seems to me an epic disaster in the making. But I am a lowly manual laborer, so never mind me .
Another structural pathology I would add is the lack of low income housing for the working poor: In Seattle, and I'm sure this
problem is replicated in other medium sized and bigger cities across the country, e.g., NYC, LA., A lot of SRO's and cheap apartments
have been destroyed or bought up by developers and turned into expensive luxury apartments for high earning professionals. Much
of the working poor ends up being stuck living in RV's and tents in business districts and residential neighborhoods, and under
bridges, as well as shelters all over the city. The pathology extends to our citizens as well -- many believe they are nothing
more than losers who didn't prepare themselves for better careers, takers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and criminals. Much of that
fed by 40 years of corporate elite and media brainwashing: If you are poor in America, you deserve to die in the gutter; It's
your fault.
As others have said, define good and define economy. We continue to stress "capital" doing well and ignore "labor". By that
definition all is hunky dory until the pitchforks come out.
In southern New Brunswick, Canada the number of homeless has become a problem that municipal officials have not been able to
ignore because of the attention that the public and advocates have brought to it especially during the past winter. In one municipality,
a current news item suggests that the number of homeless has doubled during the past year. Aside from homelessness, it is difficult
to measure the local economy because people who don't have money to spend are not visible.
I thought the quote from Business Insider that dole queues have been replaced by low paid part-time work was insightful.
In a few words it explains why poor life conditions for many people are invisible. They are working somewhere not hanging around
at street corners. It also explains how the situation may be just bearable for those with the low paid jobs since they do earn
some income. It also explains why they don't turn their difficult conditions into political demands for a better life. They don't
have the time as they are too busy and tired just surviving.
Food inflation hidden by reduced packaging size. Sugar, flour, coffee, ice cream all used to be sold by the pound. No more.
1% interest on savings accounts. Fed reducing interest rates.
Pennsylvania checking in. The growing divide in economic well-being is not as obvious in certain neighborhoods. While wealthy
area of the state SEEM to be smiling, underneath is a growing debt to support such "lifestyle". Meanwhile, a household-by-household
survey may be able to turn up factual evidence for this if only embarrassment could be avoided (snark, a little).
Poverty rates in formerly industrial areas are much higher, with depopulation occurring in central PA and those industrial
suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as well as cities like Erie, Harrisburg, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, etc. (most of these small
towns live by pension money from retirees, as young move away). Cannot forget the central issue of a "commonwealth" budgetary
system that has not led to any such "commonwealth" since the dawn of the Industrial Age. You see many trucks and service vehicles
not owned or leased by major businesses, but rather operated by individuals with craft ability working as day laborers and contracted
whenever they can beat out the competition, which is fierce. Trucks, of course, are loaded with loan indebtedness, mouths at the
nest are upturned and open
Banks are doing well -- of course, they loan and do business with pharmaceuticals, health providers, and out-of-state big actors
with plenty of collateral or connections. Infrastructure erodes, public transportation is on its own and those few improvements
where progressives have any influence are not income-related, thus leaving most with belief that Trump & cronies are fighting
the fight against all this immiseration.
What a world. Pretty much as it is elsewhere, I reckon.
NY's Southern Tier along the PA Border is just as bad. Cities like Binghamton and Elmira are falling apart at the seams, and
every year is a little worse than the previous year. There has been no "recovery".
a lot of fields around here didn't get planted because of the wet May/June. on the other hand, my trip to Middlefield (OH)
revealed more than a dozen help wanted / 'now hiring' signs on a 2 mile stretch of RT 87 heading into town
Here in Western New York, in beautiful Chautauqua County, stretching from the shores of Lake Erie to the Pennsylvania border,
the statistics are woeful. Population is declining, both median age and median income are in the low 40's, and almost 20% of the
population is under the poverty level. Unsurprisingly, the county ranks 59 (out of 62) in total 'health outcomes.' We have a lot
of obesity, metabolic diseases, drug addiction and 'early deaths.'
At a meeting we attended this week, planning for an annual summer festival, the big 'problem' was diagnosed as the aging volunteer
base. We have to hire people to do the heavy lifting of setting up, dismantling, etc., whereas 20 years ago the volunteers were
young and hale enough to do it all. That, and only old people tend to come out for the festival.
However, the countryside is beautiful, at least in spring, summer and fall, with rolling hills, hundreds of acres of abandoned
farmland that is 'reforesting,' and no traffic problems. No traffic, actually. You have to watch for deer and Amish buggies.
In the last few years, people have started 'fixing up' their houses. This spring I noticed a rash of new, big garages and outbuildings,
for storing 'toys' such as ATV's, second and third trucks, monstrous riding lawn mowers. Others are adding on porches; front porches
facing the street have become newly fashionable. Compared to 10 years ago, houses for sale seem to be selling. Or at least, the
"For Sale" signs are coming down. Some wooded house lots, of several acres each, sold. They had been for sale for at least 5 years.
Downtown in the county's biggest city, Jamestown, the old brick buildings are still crumbling and boarded up. SRO's, better
than tents, for sure, have filled the old hotels, and house people who would be homeless in Seattle. News releases touting the
amazing success of the new National Comedy Center (heavily subsidized by State and local funds) are constant. There are more people
about on Friday and Saturday evenings in downtown. And a new brewery just opened up.
Shopping at the area's three chain food markets, Wegman's, Aldi's and Top's, one notices the sharp class divide. Summer people
from the Chautauqua Institute or those who have second homes on the lakes, hang out at Wegman's olive bar and extensive cheese
counters. (But because this is a county with really really poor health outcomes, Wegman's bulk food section is almost all candy.)
The Amish frequent Aldi's and the locals who are either carless or don't drive far, go to Top's.
We have water lots of water. We have natural gas wells, everywhere. Neighbors still get free gas, under decades old agreements
with the producers. We have clean air (well, except when the gas pipelines spring a leak.) We have lots of land and timber (second
or third growth.) We have old people who have inherited their grandfather's old diary farm, 100, 200, 300 acres, and are still
sitting on the land. Our 95 year old neighbor, for instance. He still mows all the pastures regularly. Shhhh!
Personally as a retiree I'm OK with the economy. Low inflation is great. Wish the stock market was more stable, but with a
slow down on it's way, not to mention an election, I can deal with it.
Core inflation doesn't include food or energy to eliminate seasonal changes. Overall inflation does include them. Often the
press reports "inflation rate" without specifying. But you are right, my house is paid off, so I don't care that much about housing
prices for now, it's mostly gas, food, utilities etc.
The Fed's been looking out for you by controlling inflation. Yeah, right! The key components of inflation have been fiddled
with to show little or no inflation.
The Fed thinks the economy is fine? No way they can really think the economy is fine when there is so much begging for more
low interest rates. The low interest rates are needed for bigger stock buybacks to prop up the overinflated housing and stock
markets. Float those fantasies of fake wealth. It's alll that's left of their dystopian dream
The Fed is functioning from an 1800s-liberal playbook in a 2019 post-neoliberal world. One thing has been proven beyond
denial and that is that neoliberalism doesn't work. Infusions of money are still going to the rich, connected people mostly for
frivolous justifications. Recession and ecological devastation plague the rest of us.
We have become complacent about homelessness. Hard to imagine being so oblivious. How quickly we regress to a less informed
century without even a twitch of guilt on our part. When Putin blamed the world's dysfunction on liberal politics he wasn't far
off. My how times don't change. If there is one thing we can look at and say, gee we really aren't a very good society after all,
it is homelessness. In every big city in America. And congress? It is almost completely incapable of governing. We might as well
be a feudal state again.
Glancing at Powell comments today, it appears he and the Fed spend more time thinking and talking about the economic problems
in China and Germany than he does here in America. That may explain a lot.
Have been helping an in-law over the last 6 months find a house to move up here and got an interesting peek into the real estate
market. Researched 80-100 different houses (3-4 BRs within 20 miles of Portland) and went to probably 30 open houses and personal
showings.
General takeaways:
-- The market has been weirdly hot, with three separate all-cash offers at full list price rejected for other offers that were
over ask.
-- People have noticed and a lot of houses have come on the market with elevated list prices as people try to cash in
-- Our own home's Zestimate on Zillow (no promise on how accurate this measure is) has increased almost 20% over the last year.
-- Tons of new houses built in last 2 years, typically of lower quality and on poor lots with houses close to each other and all
trees removed
-- Quality of non-luxury or non-custom houses built from 1980's to now is generally poor; good example of crapification. Houses
built in large numbers in sub-divisions in particular seem to have bad trim and obviously deteriorating siding/roofs/general conditions.
-- While the in-law isn't interested in a project, generally feel that solid older homes which can be relatively easily renovated
would be the better long-term play.
-- Portland's real estate market, after the litany of "best City" and "Best restaurants" awards over the last few years and the
advent of AirBnB, is out of the reach of most people. This has driven up the demand and prices in outlying towns as people look
for housing close to the job center
Personally feel that the focus on dropping interest rates/protecting real estate values post the GFC has really hurt the country.
Above and beyond favoring home-owners over younger people, the rising home prices increase property taxes that have to be paid
and are hard to realize given selling your house requires buying a diff overpriced house. This is just leading to more and more
debt being taken on to simply have a decent house.
One of the reliable signs that you're approaching the West Coast is the increasing number of homeless. They really start to
appear around Spokane, and by the time you reach the Liberal strip along the Seattle-Portland-San Francisco line the tents are
everywhere. And it's been this way for more than a decade. The real economy never recovered to begin with. Hard to be afraid of
a new recession when you never left the old one.
IMO the US economy is a house of cards. What is the US economy currently? In my view it is the FIRE (Finance, IT, Real
Estate, and Energy) sector, Education, and Health Care.
My memory is failing me as to how Yves and Lambert described the Finance sector's contribution to the overall economy but to
me it is not really "productive" and mostly casino capitalism.
The medium to large cities are living off of the FIRE sectors. If you travel to small cities and towns it seems that Rural
America is surviving on Education(Universities) and Healthcare. Let's tease that out a bit:
Full disclosure: For the accuracy/facts police, I am trying to paint a picture in broad strokes here of how I see the US economy.
Education (i.e. universities) and their employees are living off of the government (Pell Grants etc.), student loans, and the
wealthy. Let's pretend the government ends any educational assistance for college students and that student loans are no longer
available. What happens to the University Industrial Complex? It seems that many universities would close or as they are doing
now start marketing to foreign students.
Healthcare seems heavily subsidized by the government i.e. Medicaid, Medicare, and ObamaCare and the wealthy. Yes many people
have health insurance through their employer. And the US population is getting older and needing more healthcare. But when I look
around what I see is an over expansion and oversupply of healthcare facilities. And hospitals do not look like hospitals anymore.
They look like massive hotels. It seems the healthcare industrial complex and the university industrial complex are both bubbles
that at some point will burst.
What will happen to the healthcare industry when Single Payer/Medicare for All is started and there is significant cost controls??
I think the gravy train is going to end for many health systems.
And what about college tuition? Sanders is talking about free college. I hope by that he means that the government will not
be an open checkbook for universities and there will be cost controls as well?
Lambert has talked about the US needing an industrial policy. In my view it can't happen soon enough because relying on education,
health care, and finance to sustain an economy is asking for trouble.
Lastly the grift of the healthcare sector and education sector seem related to the Predatory Precarity excerpt from Water Cooler
a couple of days ago.
Many people are living large at the expense of education and healthcare and have a vested interest in maintaining the status
quo. What happens when the bubble bursts?? Many small cities are going to be ghost towns.
The US economy is like a human body with no bones or decaying bones.
The biggest city in our state (Seattle), is booming, so property values within a 75-100 mile radius have been increasing steadily
for years. However Seattle also has thousands of homeless people, and things are definitely not booming for them.
Anecdotally, where I live in central WA I know quite a few young people in their 30s and 20s who patch together various
crummy jobs to make ends meet. None of them can afford a house and it's hard to see much of a future for them other than endless
part-time, low paying jobs . I know some others that are doing OK but most are just getting buy and I doubt they can amass
any savings. The country kids around here with little education work agricultural jobs and deal drugs. A new thing around these
parts is heroin, which 15 years ago was unheard of. The biggest employers in the area are local government and the university,
and the student population helps some local businesses thrive.
The county I live in has an official poverty rate of 14%, about 1 out of every 7 people, but I think the actual amount
is higher. We have a lot of Mexican immigrant workers here who likely are not counted, and in any case the federal definition
of poverty is not very realistic. Same applies to official inflation stats. I would say that things are mixed, but for many under
40 the future isn't bright.
The view from a self-employed craftsman in the Bay Area: Local real estate is not dropping but there is a slight smell of realization
that this might be the top o' the bubble so sellers are sweating to get on the market. Less readily agreeable to spending money
on custom work..say 3 months delaying/hemming and hawing vs. "yes, let's do it."
My girl (who works in dental) her office has lost 3 people in the last year and are struggling to replaced them. The 3 Drs
make $400,000 + each and just gave remaining staff a $1/hour raise to $24/per hour in an attempt to keep them. Full bennies and
401k contributions keep her there.
Future sis-in-law: works at a wholesale nursery up in Santa Rosa. Last couple of years they were working 6 days a week to keep
up. This year? No longer working Saturdays and now Fridays have been cut. That's a 30% reduction in hours she's now on the brink.
So, how's the economy? Depends who you are.
Well duh. Your college has been suctioning money out of the pockets of kids for the
last couple decades or so at a rate that is multiples of the general growth rate. Which means
most (probably all) of the wealth you see around you is a shift from elsewhere, not a
creation of such.
At best it is maybe repatriating some of the money going to Asia.
Neoliberalism and Education
(To borrow a term often seen here at NC term – more evidence of "crapification")
In the new issue of the American Affairs Journal, the following article may be of interest
to those who tune into scholastic matters. Two quotes are posted here in case the paywall
obstructs.
1. "But the technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development and an
unredeemable waste. In the first place, technology exacerbates the greatest problem of all in
schools: confusion about their purpose. Education is the cultivation of a person, not the
manufacture of a worker. But in many public school districts we have already traded our
collective birthright, the promise of human flourishing, for a mess of utilitarian pottage
called 'job skills.' The more recent, panicked, money-lobbing fetish for STEM is a late
realization that even those dim promises will go unmet [E]ducational technology is a
regressive political weapon, never just a neutral tool: it increases economic inequality,
decreases school accountability, takes control away from teachers, and makes poorer students
more vulnerable to threats from automation and globalization."
2. "Dumping gadgets on children is a win-win proposition in poor school districts. It's a
win for tech billionaires looking to buy progressive indulgences (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg
in Newark), and it's a win for local mayors wanting to gesture toward needy schools
without changing the underlying economic reality (e.g., Cory Booker in Newark, Pete
Buttigieg in South Bend) The meanest trick of all is when funds allocated to bring struggling
students "into the future" are used instead to banish them into the realm of for-profit
programs called "online charter schools," which consist mostly of children watching lecture
videos all day instead of being taught by a teacher. Online charter schools are a worsening
catastrophe. Compared to the performance of peers in traditional public schools with similar
income, race, gender, and first-language characteristics, the impact of online charter
attendance on student reading is so bad, it's like missing 72 days of school each year.
In math, being afflicted by an online charter school is like being absent for 180 days!"
This is a clear lack of up mobility. In other words American Dream is now a fake for all but
extremely talented or extremely lucky. .
Class Warfare
"6 findings that show the dire state of America's middle class" [
Business Insider ] (From May, still germane). "Nearly 60% of those who said they grew up
affluent now consider themselves to be in a lower class -- about half of this group said
they're middle-class or upper-middle-class, while the other half said they're poor or
working-class. Nearly 60% of those who said they had an upper-middle-class upbringing
identified with a lower class -- half of this group said they're middle-class, while the
remaining half said they're poor or working-class. And while half of those who said they grew
up in the middle class said they're still in it today, more than one-third identified with a
lower class. Only about 12% said they're now part of a higher class." • Lover
"... A lesson of use at job interviews, schools and even in families. I am thankful for an added knowledge and understanding of the many problems associated with these Endeavors. This book should be a "must" to all young people. ..."
Bold Endeavors by Jack Stuster proved to be a real page-turner! Since childhood reading about adventures and explorers had
been my favorite literature. In this book the persons behind these endeavors came to life.
They were of flesh and blood and you as a reader took part of their everyday life, their hardships and personal problems. A
thrilling experience. A lesson in the importance of relationships not only among people in isolation
A lesson of use at job interviews, schools and even in families. I am thankful for an added knowledge and understanding
of the many problems associated with these Endeavors. This book should be a "must" to all young people.
Unemployment benefits currently are usually is just six month or so; this is the time when you can plan you "downsizing". You do
not need to rush but at the same time do not expect that you will get job offers quickly, if at all. Usually it does not happen.
many advertised positions are fakes, another substantial percentage is already reserved for H1B candidates and posting them is the
necessary legal formality.
Often losing job logically requires selling your home and moving to a modest apartment, especially if no children are living with
you. At 50 it is abut time... You need to do it later anyway, so why not now. But that's a very tough decision to make... Still, if the current housing market is close to the top
(as it is in 2019), this is one of the best moves
you can make. Getting from your house several hundred thousand dollars allows you to create kind of private pension to compensate for
losses in income till you hit your Social Security check, which currently means 66.
$300K investment in A quality bonds that returns 3% per year is enough to provides you with $24K per year "private pension" from 50 to
age of 66 when social security kicks in. That allows you to pay for the apartment and amenities. The food is extra but with this
level of income you qualify for food assistance.
This way you can take lower paid job, of much lower paid job (which mean $15 per hour), of temp job and survive.
And if this are many form you house sell your 401k remains intact and can supplement your SS income later on. Simple Excel spreadsheet can provide you with
a complete picture of what you can afford and what not. Actually the ability to walk of fresh air for 3 or more hours each day worth a lot
of money ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Losing a job in your 50s is a devastating moment, especially if the job is connected to a long career ripe with upward mobility. As a frequent observer of this phenomenon, it's as scary and troublesome as unchecked credit card debt or an expensive chronic health condition. This is one of the many reasons why I believe our 50s can be the most challenging decade of our lives. ..."
"... The first thing you should do is identify the exact day your job income stops arriving ..."
"... Next, and by next I mean five minutes later, explore your eligibility for unemployment benefits, and then file for them if you're able. ..."
"... Grab your bank statement, a marker, and a calculator. As much as you want to pretend its business as usual, you shouldn't. Identify expenses that don't make sense if you don't have a job. Circle them. Add them up. Resolve to eliminate them for the time being, and possibly permanently. While this won't necessarily lengthen your fuse, it could lessen the severity of a potential boom. ..."
Losing a job in your 50s is a devastating moment, especially if the job is connected to a long career ripe with upward mobility.
As a frequent observer of this phenomenon, it's as scary and troublesome as unchecked credit card debt or an expensive chronic health
condition. This is one of the many reasons why I believe our 50s can be the most challenging decade of our lives.
Assuming you can clear the mental challenges, the financial and administrative obstacles can leave you feeling like a Rube Goldberg
machine.
Income, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, bills, expenses, short-term savings and retirement savings are
all immediately important in the face of a job loss. Never mind your Parent PLUS loans, financially-dependent aging parents, and
boomerang children (adult kids who live at home), which might all be lurking as well.
When does your income stop?
From the shocking moment a person learns their job is no longer their job, the word "triage" must flash in bright lights like
an obnoxiously large sign in Times Square. This is more challenging than you might think. Like a pickpocket bumping into you right
before he grabs your wallet, the distraction is the problem that takes your focus away from the real problem.
This is hard to do because of the emotion that arrives with the dirty deed. The mind immediately begins to race to sources of
money and relief. And unfortunately that relief is often found in the wrong place.
The first thing you should do is identify the exact day your job income stops arriving . That's how much time you have
to defuse the bomb. Your fuse may come in the form of a severance package, or work you've performed but haven't been paid for yet.
When do benefits kick in?
Next, and by next I mean five minutes later, explore your eligibility for unemployment benefits, and then file for them if
you're able. However, in some states severance pay affects your immediate eligibility for unemployment benefits. In other words,
you can't file for unemployment until your severance payments go away.
Assuming you can't just retire at this moment, which you likely can't, you must secure fresh employment income quickly. But quickly
is relative to the length of your fuse. I've witnessed way too many people miscalculate the length and importance of their fuse.
If you're able to get back to work quickly, the initial job loss plus severance ends up enhancing your financial life. If you take
too much time, by your choice or that of the cosmos, boom.
The next move is much more hands-on, and must also be performed the day you find yourself without a job.
What nonessentials do I cut?
Grab your bank statement, a marker, and a calculator. As much as you want to pretend its business as usual, you shouldn't.
Identify expenses that don't make sense if you don't have a job. Circle them. Add them up. Resolve to eliminate them for the time
being, and possibly permanently. While this won't necessarily lengthen your fuse, it could lessen the severity of a potential boom.
The idea of diving into your spending habits on the day you lose your job is no fun. But when else will you have such a powerful
reason to do so? You won't. It's better than dipping into your assets to fund your current lifestyle. And that's where we'll pick
it up the next time.
We've covered day one. In my next column we will tackle day two and beyond.
Peter Dunn is an author, speaker and radio host, and he has a free podcast: "Million Dollar Plan." Have a question for Pete
the Planner? Email him at [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not
necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.
Decline of neoliberalism in not a pretty picture. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Greek version of this saying
which appers in Sophocles’ play Antigoneis more
precise: "evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction". Oscar Wilde — 'When the Gods wish to
punish us, they answer our prayers.'
The United States witnessed three mass shootings in one week recently in California, Texas, and Ohio. There have been more than 250
mass shootings so far in 2019, more than one a day. This year in America,
more than 33,000 shooting incidents have killed more than 8,700 people.
America is the richest country in the world, but it has more than half a million homeless and 28 million people without health
insurance – out of a population of around 325 million. The U.S. infant mortality rate places it 33rd out of wealthiest 36 nations.
... ... ...
People from other industrialized countries must think that the United States has simply gone insane. It is a nation of terrible extremes:
grotesque wealth and horrific poverty, brilliant minds and widespread ignorance, high rates of volunteerism and endemic violence.
America seems to be suffering from some kind of bipolar disorder with pockets of manic energy and large areas of deep depression.
It would be tempting to argue that America is only suffering from a bout of temporary insanity. But mass shootings, gross economic
inequality, and corruption didn't begin when Donald Trump became president. He has made matters worse, to be sure. But these trends
are longstanding.
So, why do Americans put up with such violence, economic inequality, and political nonsense?
... ... ...
Moreover, more than half of Americans
have never traveled to another country. One in ten hasn't even
gone outside the state in which he or she was born. Since most of the news about other countries is negative, Americans naturally
believe that life is more dangerous outside their borders. They haven't actually seen what it's like in other countries, so there's
no way for them to compare the craziness of life in America with life anywhere else.
Of course, plenty of countries experience considerable violence, economic inequality, and political corruption. But they are usually
not powerful industrialized nations.
In the 2019 Global Peace Index
, for instance, the United States ranks 128 th in the world, between South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Kosovo, Haiti, and
Bangladesh all rank higher than America. Part of the reason that the United States ranks so poorly is the amount of military violence
that the country inflicts around the world – through war, arms sales, and military bases. But the high homicide rate in the United
States also dragged its score down.
The GINI index measures a country's economic inequality. The United States,
according to OECD figures , is fourth
from the bottom of the wealthiest countries in the world. Only Chile, Turkey, and Mexico have greater income inequality after taxes
and transfers.
On corruption issues, the United States has generally been in the top twenty in terms of transparency. But in 2018, it
dropped six places to number 22 in the Transparency International
rankings. Here, the influence of the Trump administration has been significant. The problem is not ordinary corruption like bribery.
Rather, Trump is challenging the very foundations of the rule of law. He promised to "drain the swamp" of political influence-peddling
in Washington, DC. But he has only made the nation's capital swampier.
Individuals with mental disorders can seek professional help. They can take medications and enter psychotherapy. They can check
themselves into a hospital.
"Bankruptcy-related job losses are rising at rates not seen since 2009, invoking grim
reminders of the Great Recession"
By Quentin Fottrell, Personal Finance Editor...Aug 7, 2019...8:24 p.m. ET
"The recent spate of bankruptcies in corporate America is taking its toll.
In the first seven months of the year, U.S.-based companies announced 42,937 job cuts due
to bankruptcy, up 40% on the same period last year and nearly 20% higher than all
bankruptcy-related job losses last year, a report released Tuesday concluded. Despite
record-low unemployment, bankruptcy filings have not claimed this many jobs since the Great
Recession.
"It is the highest seven-month total since 2009 when 50,258 cuts due to bankruptcy were
announced," according to the report by outplacement and business coaching firm Challenger,
Gray & Christmas. "In fact, it is higher than the annual totals for bankruptcy cuts every
year since 2009."...
https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html <img
src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" /> By
Natalia Abrams, the Executive Director of Student Debt Crisis, and Cody Hounanian, the Program
Director of Student Debt Crisis. Originally published at
openDemocracy
Student debt has been solely responsible for the majority of my decision-making as an
adult
(Erin – Portland, Maine)
The student debt crisis is not the burden of a single generation. It impacts Baby Boomers in
their 60s and 70s; Gen Xers in their 40s and 50s; Millennials in their 20s and 30s – as
well as Gen Z high school students still planning for college. Thus it's a grave mistake to
frame student loan debt as exclusively or even primarily a "Millennial problem." At the same
time, Millennials have borne the brunt of the astounding rise in college costs. They are the
first generation to experience a life shaped by the near-certainty of student debt.
Weighted for inflation, college costs (including tuition and fees) rose 81% between 2001 and
2009 – the decade when well over half of Millennials graduated high school.
Traditionally, when the price of a commodity rises rapidly, demand for that commodity drops.
Necessities like food and shelter are usually exempt from that general rule. However, college
has become one of those essentials, with the perceived cost of not attending growing at
least as fast as the actual costs themselves. As a result, student loans make the essential,
attainable.
Not everyone saddled with a tremendous debt burden ends up with a degree. Whether a borrower
receives a degree or not, few are in a position to rapidly repay their student loans. While a
college degree may or may not expand opportunities; as we're finding, student loan debt
absolutely shuts doors that might have otherwise remained open.
Lower Homeownership rates
Growing up I was told by my parents, teachers, and guidance counselors to go to college
because it would give me a better life. I graduated in 2013 with a Master's Degree in English
with the hopes of being a teacher myself. There are no teaching jobs in high schools or
colleges and I owe over $100,000 in student debt. I now work a job that doesn't even require
a degree, and was turned down for a mortgage because my debt to income ratio was too high.
Not a day goes by where I don't think about my debt
(Danielle – Roseville, California)
If homeownership is fundamental to the 'American dream', then student loan debt puts that
dream out of reach for millions of Americans. After years of growth, homeownership rates
noticeably declined in 2017. While partly due to factors unrelated to student debt (such as
rising housing prices , particularly in urban areas), the rate of Millennial homeownership
has fallen faster than that of the general population.
In a January 2019 study, the
Federal Reserve revealed the connection between lower homeownership rates and the
Millennial generation most burdened by student debt: "our estimates suggest that increases in
student loan debt are an important factor in explaining (young people's) lowered homeownership
rates." The study went on to conclude that "a little over 20 percent of the overall decline in
homeownership among the young can be attributed to the rise in student loan debt. This
represents over 400,000 young individuals who would have owned a home in 2014 had it not been
for the rise in debt."
While the Federal Reserve study focused on the decade between 2005-2014, a 2019 survey by
Bankrate
of nearly 4,000 American borrowers found that 31% of Millennial respondents postponed buying a
home because of student loan debt. By comparison, when the Baby Boomers were entering the
housing market 40 years ago, only 15% delayed a purchase because of student loan debt.
It's also worth noting that the real number of Millennials unable to purchase a home because
of student debt is likely much higher. While 31% of Millennial respondents reported that
student debt directly delayed homeownership, this figure only accounts for potential buyers who
still consider future homeownership a real possibility. Thus it does not reflect the unknown
number of those whose debt to income ratio is so high that they don't expect to ever afford a
home. As Forbes
noted in 2019, "no matter how many possible solutions are tossed around Washington and
beyond on reducing the crushing burden of student loan debt, it remains one of the top reasons
millennials are putting off buying a home."
Historically, home mortgages defined middle-class debt. Yet due to pre-existing debt,
student loan borrowers face difficulty qualifying for a mortgage. In tandem with rising housing
prices, and stringent mortgage qualification requirements adopted in the wake of the 2008
economic crisis, those with already exorbitant levels of student debt face a near-perfect storm
for obtaining a mortgage: placing a key component of the 'American dream' out of reach for
millions of young Americans.
A
2018 study by Summer and Student Debt Crisis found that 56% of respondents reported that
student loan debt made it more difficult to buy a home. That figure excludes those who consider
homeownership so unattainable that they have preemptively "given up." The same study notes that
58% of those surveyed experienced a decline in their credit score as a direct result of their
student debt. Credit scores, based on past payment habits as well as debt-to-income ratios, are
pivotal to mortgage qualification. Even borrowers who haven't yet considered buying a home are
keenly aware that their student-debt-burdened credit scores have put a mortgage out of
reach.
Fewer Marriages
I have put off having children, marrying, or purchasing a home due to the high costs of
student debt repayment. Regularly, I contemplate selling everything and living in my car to
help free up money to pay off the debt sooner.
(Melissa – Granbury, Texas)
Homeownership is not the only dream deferred, or abandoned altogether, because of crushing
student loan debt.
One theme in the stories we've collected – and in our studies – is that student
debt is an overwhelming factor in declining marriage and birth rates. Millennial borrowers like
Melissa, regularly told us that there were three central dreams that debt had put out of reach:
buying a home, getting married, and having children.
In 1990, 26% of adults under 65 were never married – by 2018, that number rose to 36%.
Today, only one in five adults are married before the age of 30 – and the average age of
first marriage has risen by more than six years since 1960. There are a host of factors that
have driven the marriage rate to record lows – and we do not suggest that student debt is
the sole (or even primary) driver of delayed marriage. Evolving and elevated expectations for
romantic partnership, economic shifts, greater equality for women and increased acceptance of
premarital sex all play critical roles in changing marriage habits. One cause of social
transformation however, doesn't negate the impact of another.
Student loan debt delays marriage in several ways. One way is through a sheer
misunderstanding of the law regarding debt. Several borrowers told us they were reluctant to
marry and "make my spouse responsible for my debt." Though the laws concerning spousal
responsibility vary by state, the fears of saddling a partner with one's debts are not
unfounded. Similarly, if a spouse with pre-existing debt returns to school after marriage, both
the debt incurred before and during marriage gets lumped together as a shared liability.
Practically, the legal responsibility for the liability is a nominal matter. Most couples
cannot simply isolate one partner's debt. The money spent each month on student loans could be
collectively used for other essentials, like rent, car repairs, or childcare.
A study
released in June 2019 by the think-tank Demos showed that those who start college after age
twenty (or go back to college following a break) have a particularly hard time paying off
loans. Twelve years after leaving school, the average borrower (who started college after the
age of twenty) will have paid off only 5% of their student debt. If a borrower is
determined not to bring their student debt into a marriage, research suggest that they will
have to wait a very long before they wed.
Media coverage tends to ignore that finances, rather than changing social mores, are the
primary driver of diminishing marriage rates. For every young person who "never wants to
marry", statistics suggest there are far more who would like to wed someday but can't imagine
ever being able to afford to do so. A
Pew Organization study in 2017 found that nearly six out of ten unmarried American adults
hope to marry someday. That same report noted that unmarried Millennials cited "not being
financially stable" as one of the chief reasons why they haven't yet wed. 41% of those
unmarried cited financial instability as a primary reason for remaining single, while 28%
described it as a "secondary" reason. (By comparison, only 24% of young adults named "not being
ready to settle down" as the primary explanation for not being married.)
The research is clear: the primary reason why Americans delay wedlock, or forego it
altogether, is financial insecurity. Debt is reshaping our most intimate relationships, putting
a profound source of happiness further and further out of reach.
Falling Birthrates
My wife and I have been married 3 years and she desperately wants kids. But paying out
$350 a month to pay off my 45k in loans has shattered our dreams of family. We both work but
it's not enough. I've paid my loans since 2004 and I'm not getting ahead.
(James – Kansas City, Missouri)
With less homeownership, along with fewer marriages – it's hardly surprising that the
most debt-laden generation in history is also having far fewer babies than their parents and
grandparents. Millennials are on track to have a lower birth rate than any generation in
American history. In 2018, the overall birth rate in the United States fell to 59 births per
1000 women, the lowest on record and a 2% drop from the previous year.
The birth rate has fallen steadily since the start of the Great Recession in 2008. Yet even
after the recovery, the birth-rate continued to decline.
There's a disagreement as to whether the birthrate decline can be attributed to women
wanting fewer babies (or wanting them later), versus women being unable to afford children. Yet
the survey data is fairly compelling: most young people have had (or expect to have) fewer
children than they consider ideal. In a
2018 New York Times/Morning Consult survey , four of the top five reasons respondents cited
for not having as many children as they wanted focused on financial concerns:
Child care
is too expensive (64% of respondents)Want more time for the children I have (54%)Worried about the economy (49%)Can't afford more children (44%)Waited
because of financial instability (43%)
Furthermore, a 2015 study by the National Institutes of
Health examined the impact of debt on the decision to have children. The results were
stunning. While mortgage holders were more likely than renters to have children, and
credit-card debt had no impact among debtors, the study found that "holding student loans more
significantly affects fertility at higher levels of indebtedness." Low levels of student loan
debt reduced fertility only slightly; high levels of student debt sharply reduced the chances
of having a baby.
Every generation reassesses priorities. Some pundits look at the lives of Millennials and
conclude that they're simply less interested in homeownership, simply more suspicious of
enduring monogamy, simply less interested in having children. The evidence shows that's a false
narrative.
The research in fact reveals that a high percentage of Millennials want homeownership,
marriage, and children. The chief obstacle is not the timeless problem of finding the right
person, but financial insecurity. Student loan debt is a central driver behind this precarity
– affecting the fundamental milestones of our lives.
I hear the phrase "student loan forgiveness " quite often these days. "Forgiveness" for
being a victim of financial predators and a failed leadership class? No, that's not
forgiveness. That's justice. Forgiveness comes from the victims, not the perpetrators.
Personally, I'm not forgiving anybody involved. Politicians, schools, the "financial
industry", etc. These are the folks that should be begging for forgiveness from the
borrowers, not the other way around. These policies have destroyed lives. They then try to
frame any corrective action as doing the victims a favor, "forgiveness", rescuing the
borrowers from their own failures and poor choices. Right. This is basically a war on the
poor. I wonder if it isn't a way to curb greenhouse emissions without inconveniencing the
wealthy.
Excellent comment -- thank you! Let us never let our fellow Americans forget Joe Biden's
central role in killing bankruptcy protection for student debtors.
I also think your final point is very important, as I am increasingly convinced that
"environmental footprint reduction" is likely to be used as a pretext for further austerity
for the working class. Environmentalism has always been a mostly elite and middle class
phenomena, and working class interests are often unmindfully ignored or disregarded. In fact,
I don't think it's unduly paranoid to anticipate ostensibly radical environmentalists
(Extinction Rebellion and the like) being used as cat's paws to extend Overclass policies of
extraction and control.
It's already happened in France – the Gilets Jaunes movement was a direct result of
the radical neoliberal Macron government putting higher taxes on diesel – a regressive
tax on the poor and rural working class.
No, penury and exploitation as a result of educational debt is not a way to cut greenhouse
gas emissions without inconveniencing the wealthy. It's just another example of Americans
being suckered by their own delusions and ignorance, just another example of wealthy
Americans, many of whom are rich without being educated, ripping off poorer Americans, many
of whom ernestly believe that going into long-term crippling debt in order to pay for a
college degree is a good way to get up and out of living from week to week with maxed out
credit cards.
The typical American university/college student has drunk the kool-aid. She believes that
higher education is a personal choice, freely made, to invest in earning potential. The
possibility that this is not necessarily the case apparently does not occur to her. She
genuinely believes, or sometimes she is compelled to believe, that it makes sense to take on
for example 100k in educational debt because the degree that should follow will allow her to
earn a hopefully large multiple of that number. Such students and their parents are
apparently blind to the fact that a country that struggles to defend a primitive form of
democracy is doomed to dystopic horrors without an educated population. Education, including
higher education, is not a personal choice alone – much more it is a national mission
that compels the government to provide instruction to qualified candidates at a minimal cost
to candidates. This is a not a utopian vision – this is reality in democracies that are
not as primitive as the American.
The attempt to associate the diesel tax with French educational policy needs
clarification: The French have free public higher education. Their free public higher
education consists of institutions that are selective, some highly selective, as well as
institutions that are not selective. The selective institutions are intended to provide a
nominally meritocratic elite-building function at the service of both public and private
beneficieries. Public transport infrasturcture is weak in the country, and the Gilets Jaunes
(GJ) argue that that's becasue administrators and mangers, many of whom are graduates of
tuition-free elite universities, have not only failed to improve it: they threw salt in GJ
wounds by attempting to impose a diesel tax. Though for many the tax is a tax-deductable
expense, there are enough economically non-rural residents of rural areas in France to make
the salt really sting. The GJ should more aggressively criticize the meritocratic fallacy of
(highly) selective public institutions and bring attention to the phenomenon of economically
non-rural residents of rural areas. They are relatively heavy polluters (lots of driving,
single-family homes). I wonder if public transport infrastructure in rural areas could be
expanded or if economically non-rural residents of rural areas could be compelled to live in
less isolation.
The most repressive and draconian indebtedness has been thrust upon the youth of America
by its government. I say 'youth' because many of those suffering under this burden were young
once but have struggled long enough to be middle aged and even beyond in the search for a
quality education, not only so they could have a good job but also in order to develop their
minds. This was not a foolish pursuit – – until it was.
Something has to be done about this. And if it has to be done, it will be done, to
paraphrase what Professor Hudson has said: if a debt can't be paid it won't be paid. And also
lest we forget, these neoliberal shenanigans came about as financiers figured they could
layer everything into juicy offerings for the players on Wall Street. Tranches or trenches as
with mortgages – you know, like layers of filo dough with yummy stuff sandwiched in
between. (Hah, my spellcheck doesn't like the word 'neoliberal'. Phooey on you, spellcheck;
it's a word!)
Hasn't been thrust upon the youth of America by its government – the student debt
crisis is a result of predatory financial interests consorting with ignorant, anti-government
ideologues to corrupt the wise support of state and federal governments for public education.
Private non-profit as well as private for-profit "educators" have lobbied lobbied lobbied for
example to expand government lending facilities for students while doing little to regulate
the "institutions" that were convincing candidates to use the facilities to borrow funds to
pay for the questionable degrees that the "institutions" were awarding. There should have
been a major cultural effort to convince Americans that we need public education including
virtually free higher education and to contradict the delusion that an investment in higher
education was essentially an investment in earning potential. Free public education including
effectively free public higher education is essential for the success of democracy. Sadly
many Americans have forgotten a fundamental aspect of the American Way of Life.
Brother in law couldn't make the payments, went underground and worked for cash, then
ultimately committed suicide in his 50's. Not saying he wasn't unstable to begin with, but
will say that having a mountain of debt he was never going to be able to get out from under
certainly was a major factor.
With an 81% increase adjusted for inflation in under a decade, why aren't schools being
penalized? Why not stop writing any and all loans for those schools?
That's an excellent point. I had burdensome student loans and eventually paid them off,
but I support student loan forgiveness. However, from a political standpoint, I understand
why some people are angry about the concept. They think they were smart and chose not to go
to college because of the financial danger, and if loans are forgiven, they're being
"punished" in the housing and job market for being "responsible."
Your "justice" framing could address both of these interest groups. Instead of just
looking at the student loans alone, we'd consider all the ways in which the loans and the
degrees have influenced people's lives. Maybe everyone could have access to "educational
credit," which could be used to directly pay off existing loans, allow people to enroll in a
degree program now, or be credited towards a new or existing mortgage. The program becomes a
universal benefit, and depending upon one's situation, the money could be used in different,
socially beneficial ways.
The main point is I like the "justice" framing, and it should be used to create a program
that benefits everyone. Then the messaging is more about rectifying a dysfunctional system,
then bailing out irresponsible spendthrifts (I don't believe this is true, but that is how
loan forgiveness is framed).
How about the government takes over all consumer debt and charges only the Fed rate in
interest? And writes down any amount considered unpayable? Would anyone not connected to the
financial industry be opposed?
The arguments against student loan forgiveness on the basis of "I paid mine off, why can't
you?" are short-sighted and ultimately injure the person making them.
Everyone is harmed by the toxic environment of debt that we're living in -- even those of
us who never had student loans and those of you who paid them off. We are all suffering under
a regime that has paralyzed people economically. The act of debt cancellation, as those whose
incomes were locked up now get a little piece of it back to spend on other things, would have
a stimulative effect on the economy.
I work with a lady who's only child entered college last year, and was exposed at work to
her discussions with her daughter over the phone and with co workers what is on the list she
choose for her student loans. Things like room and board/rent, etc. This lady has a killer
personality that works smashingly well in corporate offices – only positive things may
be talked about and she juggles her aging, ailing mom, her daughter off to college, and work
quite well.
It wasn't my place to offer advice, but I got a bad feeling listening to the load up of
student loan debt. Then I overhead her advice to her mother regarding what package from
Comcast to get. She recommended the package for seniors with insurance that protects seniors
from phishing and that sort of thing. I don't recall the fee, but she also has insurance for
her smart phone screen.
The $$$ signs of how I could manager their budget and save them some money where dancing
in my head.
I guess they call that being a Financial Advisor today. It used to be called common
sense.
When I was with my former, much younger partner, I told him he would live free with me on
condition he cut back his 60+hrs/week working at multiple Dunkin Donuts and go to school,
take NO school debt and pay everything with his paycheck. He did, and got tax credits on top
of that. He choose medical billing and coding at a school that has since gone bankrupt. But
it got him in the door. He is now supervisor in the billing department at Boston Children's
Hospital and they told him they are sending him to management training at their expense.
He too has a killer personality. Perfect for Facebook where only positive things are said.
He will do well but I worry he will later be not so well off because he doesn't save, he
spends everything he has.
My first year at University of Chicago undergrad was $4,000. Second year $5,000. Then I
moved to Boston and my employer paid most of my school expense while I finished up at
Northeastern University. Peanuts compared to today.
I would never pay for College education at todays prices. I'd take that same money and buy
a house.
And I say that as someone who just dropped a smartphone face-down on a hardwood floor.
I'm here to say that my screen protector, which cost something like 30 bucks, did its job.
It took one for the Arizona Slim team and cracked in several places. The screen was intact.
Hooray!
However, the replacement protector doesn't stick, so back to the phone repair shop I go.
While I'm there, I think I'll strike up a conversation about the right to repair. Hey, I
might just be able to turn another person on to Naked Capitalism.
I'd say that a robust course in home economics would be valuable in public schools. But
I'm guessing our owners would heavily attack that effort.
Fact is, if you want to have any professional career, an education is mandatory. I don't
want my nurse practitioner or doctor to be the likes of the Trump children simply because
they're the only ones who will be able to afford the education, same as all economics,
political science, law etc. workers to only be the ones who can afford it. Sort of insures
that our future leaders won't have any clue whatsoever about the lives of the 90% they'll be
claiming to support. A crappy situation made even worse.
The author claims that college costs (that term is not defined) rose 80% from 2001 to
2009. That is far higher than any figure I have seen. According to National Center for Education
Satistics, the figure for tuition+fees is closer to 30% which is still outrageous. If the
descrepancy means that aid is being cut back more or non-tuition/fee costs are increasing
faster, that would be good to know. Defenders of high prices claim that aid is increasing (I
doubt that but do not have figures).
Good discussion topic. Permit me to share a little tale from the Arizona Slim file:
As mentioned here before, I am learning the Russian language. After completing all 30
lessons in Mark Thompson's "Russian Made Easy" video series on YouTube, I decided that it was
time for some classroom training.
So, off to look at the University of Arizona website. I couldn't easily find any
information about enrolling as a non-degree student, so I sent an email to the department
where I'd be taking an intro Russian class.
Reply: In order to become a UA non-degree student, I would have to complete an online
application. And pay a $45 application fee.
Nyet.
Instead of paying the UA 45 bucks just to apply, I could spend that same money on a
vocabulary builder course, which is taught by a native Russian speaker. From her home in
Moscow, she has built a global business as a language teacher. So, look out, Real Russian
Club, here I come. Link:
Arizona Slim, take a look at the free Russian language courses on Coursera.org. I've taken
excellent Italian courses on EdX, but Coursera looks better now for conversational Russian.
(EdX has a couple of classes on Russian for scientific work.) With foreign languages, the
more practice and exposure, the better, so maybe Coursera could be useful in addition to your
vocabulary builder course.
I was wondering about the kids and parents who pay full freight for college. Can that cost
ever be recouped? Even for top colleges? For instance, financial aid at Harvard maxes out at
$110K in household income. So a high income family will have to pay full sticker price every
year. Tuition and living expenses could be $70K per year or more. So a four year education
could cost $280K to $350K. It's like buying a house in many parts of the country without
buying a house. Yet the median salary for a Harvard graduate is $90K ten years after entering
school (six years after graduation). If college costs are paid back in ten years, the college
graduate will have to pay back $30K every year, on top of everything else. Not much left for
savings, retirement, or a house. Even for Harvard College graduates.
I love these articles. At no point is it ever questioned or addressed why cost of college
has gone exponential relative to the real economy (taking out real estate and healthcare)
since the late 1970s,
It is because "financial aid", especially loans, spends the same as cash. The colleges
will charge what the market will bear, Econ 101,taking account the new money those loans
bring into the picture, driving up the price. Colleges have no skin in the game for repayment
/ default of loans.
Sorry, but I am cool with the whole system collapsing into itself and my bank account
sitting this one out.
Please spare me the club med, lazy river, climbing wall stories. FULL DISCLOSURE: I went
to Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, a garden spot of the city between 31st and
35th and State Street off the Dan Ryan Expressway in the late 70s. The place is a bigger dump
now when I went there, full salute to the Mies Van Der Rohe flat roof glass shoe boxes and
the post WWII housing project-like dorms.
A friend invited me to lunch at the cafeteria in the university dorm building. Lunch was
$11 50, but all-you-can-eat with a gourmet style, nice China tableware. I had pizza,
hamburger , pasta al fredo, pudding, cookies, salad, soft drinks. Great opportunity to gain
weight & spend $$$!
well also probably due to both the decimation of the non-college job market, and
credential inflation (a degree now being required for jobs it didn't use to be). of course
college grads are now overproduced relative to demand as well.
Here's an educational experiance one can endeavor : Enter your local thrift/antique
establishment/yard sale/dump, etc. and pick an item – any item .. and figure out how to
rebuild/repair/make serviceable said item. Presto ! THERE'S your future, waiting in the wings
of regression !
Not a bad place to be actually .. beats high penury, no ?
My paleo-conservative dad likes to point out that student loans existed before the
government started backing them. He took out a very large loan in 1950 to attend MIT in got
his Masters there, PhD at SUNY Buffalo in 1970. He paid it off in 1985. Back then lending
standards were based on reality and job market projections. When I went to school, all you
had to do was fog a mirror Then in the 1990s prices started doubling and tripling, etcetc .
Answer is to ban the government from backing loans, full stop.
I have a bunch of hoops to jump through for that!
Here's what my hoops look like:
One of them cancels $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with household income under
$100,000.
Another hoop provides substantial debt cancellation for every person with household income
between $100,000 and $250,000. The $50,000 cancellation amount phases out by $1 for every $3
in income above $100,000, so, for example, a person with household income of $130,000 gets
$40,000 in cancellation, while a person with household income of $160,000 gets $30,000 in
cancellation. Pick you hoop!
I also have a non-hoop, hoop that offers no debt cancellation to people with household income
above $250,000 (the top 5%).
For most Americans, cancellation will take place automatically using data already available
to the federal government about income and outstanding student loan debt.
We also have a moving hoop private student loan debt is also eligible for cancellation, and
the federal government will work with borrowers and the holders of this debt to provide
relief.
And our final hoop. Canceled debt will not be taxed as income.
E. Warren (the Hoop Queen)
Well unless full room and board is paid for, that's how it ends up being though? I mean
free tuition is simply not going to solve this, because how to pay for a roof over one's head
while going to school?
1) live at the parents home and go to a nearby school, sure a bit infantalizing 2) get the
bank of mom and dad to foot the dorm costs again mom and dad paying 3) take out debt for
living expenses.
Haha, no you usually can't afford housing on or off campus (renting a room) with some low
wage job!!! And if you had the capacity to get a well paying job without a degree (or other
training) you might not be pursuing one anyway. Since a large number of students are homeless
(actually true here, shocking numbers), I guess that's also an option.
I'm surprised, this being NC, that no one has mentioned this yet – student debt is a
modern form of indentured servitude.
While it does not directly tie the indebted (former) student to a single employer, it
provides potential employers with leverage in regard to wages & working conditions. Quite
simply, someone with a large debt hanging over their head is more likely to accept a job with
lower pay, fewer raises and/or benefits than some someone who is debt-free and therefore can
afford to be more picky, more demanding to be paid & treated decently.
Get 'em in more debt at an earlier age so they will be more docile and accepting of
neoliberal crapification.
At the same time it has become vastly more expensive a college degree has also become
watered down and of less value. That is the true injustice. Many jobs that once required only
a high school education now require a college degree. This is not because the job
requirements have changed. This is due to the simple fact that many more people possess
college diplomas, so employers now demand them for a greater number of occupations. However,
the pay for these occupations has not risen to be commensurate with the additional costs
incurred to gain the newly required credentials. Now these holders of costly credentials find
themselves in a real bind. The author of this article offered no solutions.
This article contains content that some may find distressing.
Jeffrey Epstein "was" apparently a serial molester of children. He had manipulation down to an art form, as many molesters do.
He seemed to be an expert at figuring out a girl's weak point, whether it was poverty, a deceased family member, or feeling alienated
from her peers.
This is a common ploy. Many molesters seek out children or teens who have lost a parent and use this as a way to build a friendship.
Then, because children don't think like adults, they are manipulated, coerced, or threatened into sexual activity.
The story below could be told a hundred thousand times with only tiny changes. The names and the faces would be different. The
settings might not be a mansion in Manhattan or in Palm Beach but rather a quiet part of a church, a school, or some kind of activity
for teens. The setting could be in the house next door to you, where someone with evil intent befriends a vulnerable young person
with the stated goal of helping them, but an end result that couldn't be further from reality.
How 14-year-old Jennifer Araoz met Jeffrey Epstein
Jennifer Araoz was 14 years old when she first met her future rapist, Jeffrey Epstein. She wrote about how she was manipulated,
first by his recruiter, then by Epstein himself. There are many powerful lessons that we as parents can learn from her story.
During my freshman year, one of Epstein's recruiters, a stranger, approached me on the sidewalk outside my high school. Epstein
never operated alone. He had a ring of enablers and surrounded himself with influential people. I was attending a performing arts
school on the Upper East Side, studying musical theater. I wanted to be an actress and a singer. (
source )
Another
report based on court documents says that the recruiter befriended Jennifer, took her out to eat after school a few times, and
learned more about her, such as the fact that Jennifer's father had died from an AIDs-related illness and her family could barely
scrape by financially.
The recruiter told me about a wealthy man she knew named Jeffrey Epstein. Meeting him would be beneficial, and he could introduce
me to the right people for my career, she said. When I confided that I had recently lost my father and that my family was living
on food stamps, she told me he was very caring and wanted to help us financially. (
source )
The recruiter finally got Jennifer to go with her to meet Epstein. Court documents say that they all three met together for the
first month or so.
The visits during the first month felt benign, at least at the time. On my second visit, Epstein also gave me a digital camera
as a gift. The visits were about one to two hours long and we would spend the time talking. After each visit, he or his secretary
would hand me $300 in cash, supposedly to help my family. (
source )
Epstein claimed he was 'a big AIDS activist' which you can imagine would mean a lot to a 14-year-old whose father died of the
disease.
Soon the visits would take a dark turn.
By the second month of Jennifer's visits to the mansion, the recruiter no longer attended the visits., the manipulation began
in earnest.
But within about a month, he started asking me for massages and instructed me to take my top off. He said he would need to
see my body if he was going to help me break into modeling. I felt uncomfortable and intimidated, but I did as he said. The assault
escalated when, during these massages, he would flip over and sexually gratify himself and touch me inappropriately. For a little
over a year, I went to Epstein's home once or twice a week.
After that day, I never went back. I also quit the performing arts school -- the one I had auditioned for and had wanted so
badly to attend. It was too close to his house, the scene of so many crimes. I was too scared I would see him or his recruiter.
So I transferred to another school in Queens close to my home. Since I was no longer able to pursue my dream of performing arts
I eventually lost interest and dropped out. (
source )
Sure, we can say that she knew things weren't right when he asked her to take her top off. By this point, she was 15 years old.
Old enough to know right from wrong. But if she was getting $300 twice a week and helping her family with it, it's pretty easy to
see how she would want to continue helping her family despite her discomfort. Epstein knew exactly what he was doing.
Epstein's wealth, power, and connections would have made going against him seem like an insurmountable feat for a vulnerable 15-year-old
girl who had recently lost her father. Who would have believed her word against that of this presumed philanthropist?
A few days ago, Jennifer, now 32, filed a massive lawsuit against Epstein's estate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and 3 members of Epstein's
household staff. The complaint alleges that Maxwell and the staff "conspired with each other to make possible and otherwise facilitate
the sexual abuse and rape of Plaintiff."
Some of Epstein's victims recruited new girls for him.
Epstein's indictment explains how he manipulated some of the girls he sexually abused to bring other girls to him.
Prosecutors say he lured underage girls, some as young as 14, to his residences, promising them a cash payment in exchange
for giving him a massage. Instead, he would sexually abuse them -- groping them, making them touch him while he masturbated, and
using sex toys on the minors. Then, he would allegedly ask them to recruit other girls. (
source )
A detailed report in the Miami Herald referred to it as a "sexual pyramid scheme." One of Epstein's accusers, Courtney Wild, reiterates
the theme of the story told by Jennifer Boaz.
"Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one
would listen to and he was right,'' said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein. (
source )
Courtney's time spent with Epstein nearly destroyed her.
Before she met Epstein, Courtney Wild was captain of the cheerleading squad, first trumpet in the band and an A-student at
Lake Worth Middle School.
After she met Epstein, she was a stripper, a drug addict and an inmate at Gadsden Correctional Institution in Florida's Panhandle.
Wild still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of 14.
She was fair, petite and slender, blonde and blue-eyed. (
source )
She began to recruit other girls for him in Palm Beach.
Wild said Epstein preferred girls who were white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy to manipulate into going further
each time
"By the time I was 16, I had probably brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15 years old. He was involved in my life
for years," said Wild, who was released from prison in October after serving three years on drug charges.
The girls -- mostly 13 to 16 -- were lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and other girls, who went to malls, house
parties and other places where girls congregated, and told recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man -- Epstein
-- a massage, according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained by the Herald. (
source )
Epstein had it down to an art form.
Palm Beach police detective Joseph Recarey explains how Epstein insinuated himself into the girls' lives.
"The common interview with a girl went like this: 'I was brought there by so and so. I didn't feel comfortable with what happened,
but I got paid well, so I was told if I didn't feel comfortable, I could bring someone else and still get paid,' '' Recarey said.
During the massage sessions, Recarey said Epstein would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral sex and
intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls
Epstein could be a generous benefactor, Recarey said, buying his favored girls gifts. He might rent a car for a young girl
to make it more convenient for her to stop by and cater to him. Once, he sent a bucket of roses to the local high school after
one of his girls starred in a stage production. The floral-delivery instructions and a report card for one of the girls were discovered
in a search of his mansion and trash. Police also obtained receipts for the rental cars and gifts, Recarey said.
Epstein counseled the girls about their schooling, and told them he would help them get into college, modeling school, fashion
design or acting. At least two of Epstein's victims told police that they were in love with him, according to the police report.
( source )
You may look at these stories and scorn the victims. After all, they kept going back, didn't they? They liked the money, didn't
they?
But they were children. Many of them were isolated, vulnerable, and without support systems. Many of them felt ashamed but didn't
know how to extricate themselves. They were confused and scared, and Epstein was a pro at taking advantage of these emotions and
doubts.
The girls are not to blame here. The adults are.
Epstein is not the only predator out there.
While this article focuses on how Epstein was able to lure so many victims,
as Dagny Taggert recently wrote , there are
many more people in power out there preying on children. Clergy, priests, teachers, neighbors, musicians, and random people on the
internet are out there preying on and trafficking children.
Dagny wrote:
According to
The National
Center for Victims of Crime , the prevalence of child sexual abuse (CSA) is difficult to determine because it is often not
reported. Experts agree that the incidence is far greater than what is reported to authorities.
Statistics below represent some of the research done on child sexual abuse.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Children's Bureau report Child Maltreatment 2010 found that
9.2% of victimized children were sexually
assaulted (page 24).
1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual
abuse incident;
During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.
According to Darkness to Light , a non-profit committed to empowering adults
to prevent child sexual abuse, only about one-third of child sexual abuse incidents are identified, and even
fewer are reported .
When my children's father passed away, it wasn't too long afterward that I left my corporate job. I volunteered when the company
began layoffs and took a small payment and my retirement fund to start a new life writing freelance. It wasn't long after that when
I started this website.
I wanted to be home when they got back from school every day. I didn't want them to seem like prey to those looking for children
with weak support systems. My own daughters could so easily have had a story like the one Jennifer has told.
I know that what I did is not possible for every family that suffers a loss. I was pretty fortunate to be able to find work from
home that paid enough to allow me to be there.
What you, as a parent, must understand are the things that make your child seem vulnerable.
Loneliness
Social isolation and few, if any, friends
Lack of a support system from parents and caregivers
Spending too much time on their own
Alienation from parents
Some signs that your child could be getting abused or groomed.
Sudden secretiveness regarding their phone or computer (a lot of grooming happens online
Spending a great deal of time alone with another adult
Signs of increased anger or fear
Lack of participation in things that used to bring them happiness
Withdrawal from family and friends
Obviously, these lists are not comprehensive, nor are they sure signs of abuse. What teenager doesn't seem angry and withdrawn
from time to time? But it's vital, no matter how hard they push you away, to stay involved, particularly after a traumatic event.
Teach your kids that some secrets should not be kept.
Predators manipulate children in all sorts of ways. One of the biggest ways is warning them to keep their "relationship" a secret
or else.
Or else what?
They'll hurt Mom or Dad
They'll hurt the child's pet
They'll hurt the child's siblings
They'll cause extreme financial problems for the family
Predators often put a burden on a child where they feel as though they must stay silent to protect the people they love.
Kids need to know that if anyone threatens them if they tell a secret, then they absolutely must tell that secret. Mom and Dad
will be safe and will protect them. People who ask children to keep their presence in their lives a secret are never to be trusted.
And finally, make sure your children know that whatever they tell you, you will believe them and you know it's not their fault.
"... The reason the ruler's have decreed 'anybody but Bernie' is that Sanders' (and to a lesser perceived degree, Warren's) campaign proposals challenge the austerity regime that has been relentlessly erected since the 1970s precisely to set American workers and the whole capitalist world on a Race to the Bottom, in which each year brings lower living standards and more insecurity to the population at large. ..."
"... The obscene increases in wealth inequality are the desired result and true essence of austerity. ..."
"... "the top one-tenth of one percent (.1%) of the population -- households making $2.757 million a year -- now number almost 200,000 families, a cohort big enough to create and inhabit a large and coherent social world of its own. ..."
Sanders (D)(1): "Why the Rich Want to Bury Bernie, the Not-Really-Socialist" [Glen Ford,
Black Agenda
Report (CI)]. Really excellent.
Here's "why":
"The reason the ruler's have decreed 'anybody
but Bernie' is that Sanders' (and to a lesser perceived degree, Warren's) campaign proposals
challenge the austerity regime that has been relentlessly erected since the 1970s precisely to
set American workers and the whole capitalist world on a Race to the Bottom, in which each year
brings lower living standards and more insecurity to the population at large.
The obscene
increases in wealth inequality are the desired result and true essence of austerity."
There's
much more, but this on local oligarchies is important: "the top one-tenth of one percent (.1%)
of the population -- households making $2.757 million a year -- now number almost 200,000
families, a cohort big enough to create and inhabit a large and coherent social world of its
own.
From their rich enclaves in every state of the country, this formidable "base" of truly
wealthy folks effectively dictate the politics of their regions for the benefit of themselves
and the oligarchs at the top of the pyramid. "
Revised Profit Data Are Good News But Don't Reverse Decades of Wage Stagnation
By Dean Baker
In July, the U.S. Department of Commerce released data showing GDP growth had slowed
sharply in the second quarter. Most economic reporting appropriately highlighted the data
showing that we were not getting the investment boom that the Republicans had promised would
result from their tax cut.
But there was also an important item in the annual GDP data revisions that many overlooked
in the report: The revised profit data for 2018 showed that the profit share of corporate
income had fallen by 0.4 percentage points from the prior year. This is a big deal for two
reasons: It means that workers are now clearly getting their share of the gains from growth,
and it tells us an important story about the structure of the economy.
On the first point, we know that the wages of the typical worker have not kept pace with
productivity growth over the last four decades. While productivity growth has not been great
over most of this period (1995-2005 was the exception), wages have lagged behind even the
slow productivity growth over most of this period.
The one exception was the years of low unemployment from 1996 to 2001, when the wages of
the typical worker rose in line with productivity growth. With unemployment again falling to
relatively low levels in the last four years, many of us expected that wages would again be
keeping pace with productivity growth.
The earlier data on profits suggested that this might not be the case. It showed a small
increase in the profit share of corporate income, suggesting that corporations were able to
increase their share of income at the expense of labor, even with an unemployment rate below
4 percent.
The revised data indicate this is not the case. The low unemployment rate is creating an
environment in which workers have enough bargaining power to get their share of productivity
gains and even gain back some of the income share lost in the Great Recession.
This brings up the second issue. Most of the upward redistribution over this period was
not from ordinary workers to profits, but rather to high-end workers. The big winners in the
last four decades have been CEOs, hedge fund and private equity partners, and at a somewhat
lower level, highly paid professionals like doctors and dentists.
The shift to profits takes place only in this century after much of the upward
redistribution had already occurred. One obvious explanation was the weak labor market
following the Great Recession. With unemployment remaining stubbornly high, wages were not
keeping pace with productivity growth or even inflation. An alternative explanation was that
growing monopolization of major sectors (think of Google, Facebook and Amazon) was allowing
capital to gain at the expense of labor.
The revised profit data seem to support the first story. In the last four years, the
profit share has fallen by 3.2 percentage points. (It had dropped another percentage point in
the first quarter of 2019, although the quarterly data are highly erratic.) At this rate, in
four more years, the run-up in profit shares in this century will be completely reversed.
If the weak labor market following the Great Recession is the story of the rise in profit
shares, there is still the problem of the run-up in profit share in 2003-2007, the years
preceding the Great Recession. One explanation is that the profits recorded in these years
were inflated by phony profits recorded by the financial sector.
Banks like Citigroup and Bank of America were recording large profits in these years on
loans that subsequently went bad. This would be equivalent to a business booking large
profits on sales to customers that did not exist. Their books would show large profits when
the sales were recorded, but then they would show large losses when the business had to
acknowledge that the customer didn't exist, and therefore write off a previously booked
sale.
Profits that are based on sales to nonexistent customers don't come at the expense of
workers, nor do profits that are booked on loans that go bad. (The subsequent recession was,
of course, very much at the expense of workers.) For this reason, we should be somewhat
skeptical of the shift from wages to profits in the years of the housing bubble.
In any case, the revised profits data are good news. They show a tight labor market is
working the way it is supposed to. But this doesn't mean everyone is doing great. You don't
reverse four decades of wage stagnation with four relatively good years.
However, things are at least moving in the right direction now, and that is good news.
That has not generally been the case over the last 40 years.
the upwardly-mobile are the voice for those left behind. do you see how the caste system
works in India?
4 castes! same thing in US. we have 4 castes.
1. we have billionaires,
2. then we have the multi-millionaires those who have more than 50 million dollars per
household but not as much as 1 billion,
3. then we have the millionaires who have more than 1 million dollars but not 50 million
dollars
4. then we have everyone else, the poor, We the People if you like, We the 89%,
how can we prevent upward Mobility?
Ahh! Very simple! all we have to do is tax people back down to their own level; in other
words, if we can simply tax the Billionaire's at a rate which is equal to 2% of the net worth
each year, but tax poor people at a rate of 7% of their net worth each year then we can
prevent upward Mobility. do you see how easy that is?
whoops we don't even have to do that. according to Elizabeth Warren we are doing that
already. we can relax now.
was Joe Biden presiding over the Senate when all that ground work was being done on the
tax code so that we don't have to do any of that anymore? well bless his bones! senile as he
is, he was right there with it when we needed him the most.
Most states lean heavily on lower-income families. An Illinois referendum is a step toward
correcting the problem.
Economic inequality is on the rise in Illinois, and the state government is part of the
problem. Illinois taxes low-income families at much higher rates than high-income families,
asking the most of those who have the least.
Low-income households in Illinois pay about 14 cents in state and local taxes from every
dollar of income, while the state's most affluent households pay about 7 cents per
dollar.
That gap between the poor and the wealthy in Illinois is one of the largest in any state,
but the poor pay taxes at higher rates in 45 of the 50 states, according to a 2018 study * by
the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
It's a bipartisan phenomenon. The institute's list of the 10 states with the most
regressive tax systems -- the states doing the most to increase inequality through taxation
-- also includes conservative Tennessee and Texas, purple Nevada and Florida, and liberal
Washington.
Now Illinois is trying to take its name off the list. The state plans to hold a referendum
next year on a constitutional amendment that would authorize the state to tax higher incomes
at progressively higher rates -- the system used by the federal government and 32 states.
Illinois currently taxes income at a flat rate of 4.95 percent. Under the proposed system,
income below $100,000 would be taxed at a slightly lower rate. Income up to $250,000 would be
taxed at the current rate. And income above that amount would be taxed at rates of up to 7.99
percent. There is also a kind of millionaire's tax: Individuals making more than $750,000, or
couples making more than $1 million, would pay the 7.99 percent rate on all their income.
Moving Toward Tax Fairness
Illinois will hold a referendum next year on replacing its flat income tax with a system
requiring higher-income households to pay higher rates. Even including sales and property
taxes, the rich still would pay a smaller share of income in state and local taxes than
lower-income people.
Economic inequality in the United States has reached the highest levels since the 1920s,
and there is mounting evidence that the unequal distribution of income and wealth is
contributing to the nation's economic and political problems. Reducing inequality ought to be
a focus of public policy. Rewriting state tax laws to place the greater burden on those with
greater means is an effective and sensible response.
Taxation in the United States remains progressive because the federal income tax remains
the largest source of government revenue. But the distribution of the total burden has become
much less progressive. In 1961, Americans with the highest incomes paid an average of 51.5
percent of that income in federal, state and local taxes. Half a century later, in 2011,
Americans with the highest incomes paid just 33.2 percent of their income in taxes, according
to a study ** by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published last year. Over
that same period, the bottom 90 percent of Americans, ranked by income, saw their tax burden
increase from 22.3 percent of income to 26 percent of income.
Tax Cuts for the Affluent, More Taxes for Everyone Else
Over 50 years, federal tax cuts reduced the overall burden on the well-to-do, while others
paid more because of increases in federal payroll taxation, and in state and local taxes.
(Since 2011, federal income taxation has increased under President Barack Obama and
declined under President Trump. Data on the full impact of those countervailing changes is
not yet available.)
The headline problem is that Congress sharply reduced taxation of the wealthy, cutting top
income tax rates as well as corporate and estate taxation.
Meanwhile, the tax burden on everyone else has increased. One reason is the gradual rise
of federal payroll taxation, the flat-rate income tax that provides funding for Social
Security and Medicare. The Social Security tax is particularly regressive because it applies
only to income up to $132,900. The relative scale of state and local taxation also has risen,
partly because the federal government increasingly funds its operations with borrowed money
rather than tax dollars.
State and local governments rely heavily on sales and property taxes, which impose a
greater burden on less affluent households because wealthier people typically spend a smaller
share of income on food, housing and other forms of consumption. In roughly one-third of
states, this effect is partly offset by progressive income taxation. But even in most of
those states, the overall burden still falls more heavily on those with lower incomes. Only a
handful of states -- California, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey and Vermont -- and the
District of Columbia have written their tax laws so that those with the highest incomes pay
the largest share of their incomes.
The Illinois plan is a step in the right direction rather than a complete corrective.
Under current law, households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution pay 14.4
percent of their income in taxes on average, while those in the top 1 percent pay 7.4 percent
of their income in taxes -- a difference of 7 percentage points. The proposed changes in the
income tax would cut that gap to 4.3 percentage points, according to the Institute on
Taxation and Economic Policy.
Illinois is seeking to address longstanding fiscal problems, notably an underfunded
pension system, so it is raising taxes on the rich without significantly reducing taxes for
everyone else. Other states, however, could do better by raising taxes on the rich and using
the money to reduce the taxation of low-income families.
Opponents of progressive taxation warn that wealthy people and businesses will flee to
other states, and that those with the most money are the most mobile. People can vote with
their feet, and some do prefer low-tax states like Florida. But a quick look at the list of
states with progressive tax structures should make clear that plenty of rich people choose to
stay put.
Indeed, the Cornell sociologist Cristobal Young has calculated that people with
million-dollar incomes move across state lines less often than other Americans. They are more
likely to be married, more likely to have children, more likely to be involved in civic and
social groups -- and, in many cases, their wealth stems from their communities. A successful
Springfield dentist cannot relocate her patients to Missouri. A man who owns a chain of gas
stations around Peoria is likely to remain in Peoria. A company that relies on Chicago's
highly educated work force may not be focused on finding the place with the lowest tax
rates.
The potential cost of losing a few millionaires also needs to be weighed against the
benefits of equitable taxation. By imposing a somewhat larger burden on high-income
households, states can significantly improve the material circumstances of lower-income
households and slow the troubling expansion of economic inequality.
At the very least, states ought to stop making things worse.
"... For example, as a Stanford graduate he nonetheless argues that "The skills required for getting into Stanford at 17 (extracurriculars, SAT prep etc) do not correlate to job success as a software developer ..."
"... How good a student you were at 17, is not very relevant to who you are at 25." References are flawed because "People will only ever list references who will say good things about them," and they ultimately punish people who've had bad managers. But asking for source code from past sides projects penalizes people with other interests or family, while "most work product is confidential." ..."
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday July 28, 2019 @06:34AM from the if-it-is-broke-fix-it dept.
DevNull127 writes: Hiring is
broken and yours is too," argues a New York-based software developer whose LinkedIn profile
says he's worked at both Amazon and Google, as well as doing architecture verification work for
both Oracle and Intel. Summarizing what he's read about hiring just this year in numerous
online articles, he lists out the
arguments against virtually every popular hiring metric , ultimately concluding that "Until
and unless someone does a rigorous scientific study evaluating different interviewing
techniques, preferably using a double-blind randomized trial, there's no point in beating this
dead horse further. Everyone's hiring practices are broken, and yours aren't any
better."
For example, as a Stanford graduate he nonetheless argues that "The skills required for
getting into Stanford at 17 (extracurriculars, SAT prep etc) do not correlate to job success as
a software developer.
How good a student you were at 17, is not very relevant to who you are at
25." References are flawed because "People will only ever list references who will say good
things about them," and they ultimately punish people who've had bad managers. But asking for
source code from past sides projects penalizes people with other interests or family, while
"most work product is confidential."
Brain teasers "rely on you being lucky enough to get a flash of inspiration, or you
having heard it before," and are "not directly related to programming.
Even Google says it is useless ." And live-coding exercises are "artificial and contrived,"
and "not reflective of practical coding," while pair programming is unrealistic, with the
difficulty of the tasks varying from day to day.
He ultimately criticizes the ongoing discussion
for publicizing the problems but not the solutions. "How exactly should we weigh the various
pros and cons against each other and actually pick a solution? Maybe we could maybe try
something novel like data crunch the effectiveness of each technique, or do some randomized
experiments to measure the efficacy of each approach? Lol, j/k. Ain't nobody got time for
that!"
"... And ultimately, this is why I can't blame graduate students for figuring out that they need to be technocrats in order to survive. The job market is tough, there are very few tenure-track jobs available, and the people who make it are the people who don't do History for the love of it but who do it like...a career. ..."
Right now, for a creative or artistic or even just a curious person, I think over-exposure to academia is intellectual and spiritual
poison.
But I should qualify that disillusionment by saying that academia also saved me. If I hadn't read Franz Kafka in community college
and discovered (to my utter shock) that I had a gift for writing poetry in my first creative writing class, I have no idea what kind
of bad roads I would've wandered down. So my disillusionment with academia was gradual and fairly late.
I can maybe explain if you'll indulge a mini-narrative of my academic career. After community college, I went to a very conservative
Christian college in the Missouri Ozarks. It was a school for working class kids where you worked on campus to pay for your tuition
and room and board. So for most students it was our one realistic chance at a full college education without crushing debt.
So, no matter how crazy the school's politics got in our eyes, we felt like we were stuck there. But when I was a student, the
college also had a great English faculty who turned us on to William Butler Yeats, Flannery O'Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Emily
Dickinson, Faulkner, Hemingway. There was also a healthy theater department.
Little by little, my handful of weirdo artsy friends and I learned how to creatively thrive without institutional sanction or
ideological kinship with our hyper-conservative college.
After my undergrad education, I went to the University of Arkansas's MFA program in creative writing to study poetry. And that
was pretty amazing in its own feral way. I connected with this great generation of old school Southern writers in Arkansas, though
that generation began phasing out during my four years in the program. They started getting replaced by writers who were more slick,
more credentialed, more politically astute, less problematic but also infinitely less interesting than the generation that preceded
them. [Emphasis mine -- RD]
... So I think my issues are less with Duke or that particular English department and more with this emerging academic generation,
which to me seems to double-down on the older generation's worst trait (ideological certainty) while skimping out on its greatest
strengths (genuine erudition and intellectual curiosity). As an academic, I generally felt like as soon as the older professors retired,
I was going to be surrounded by people who all read the same ten theorists and who uniformly had pretty banal tastes in literature
and who were all frothing to cancel and leap-frog each other into eternity and/or tenure. [Emphasis mine -- RD]
If Cambridge decolonizes its curriculum then our heritage will be preserved at places like the College of the Ozarks.
I had a very similar experience in my PhD program, mine was in History. I did an MA in London and loved every minute of it.
It was designed as a very international program, and I have so many fond memories of sitting in pubs after our seminars arguing
in a good natured way about the topic of the day, and I thought "this is what I want to do with my life!" But graduate work for
a career in academia is nothing like that. People have to specialize, and so you find quickly that in a room full of PhD candidate
historians there is actually not that much to talk about because everyone's silo is so specific and so different. Politics plays
a role too, I suppose. I was free to be an out and proud conservative in my MA program.
I did not feel that freedom in my PhD
program, where you need good professional relationships in order to have a chance at a job.
And ultimately, this is why I can't blame graduate students for figuring out that they need to be technocrats in order to survive.
The job market is tough, there are very few tenure-track jobs available, and the people who make it are the people who don't do
History for the love of it but who do it like...a career.
Which is what they want it to be. They had the right approach and I
had the romantic, and wrong, approach. It's not their fault. Being one of the few to carve out a career in such an industry takes
determination and not a little joyless professionalism. If you aren't ready to turn your passion into a business, don't go to
graduate school.
I noticed when I was in graduate school in the 80s that one thing that seemed to characterize many of the students and professors
in literature-oriented fields -- particularly Comp Lit -- was that they didn't really seem to enjoy reading very much. I'm not
sure they were even capable anymore of just sitting and reading a book purely for enjoyment with trying to mine it for nuggets
to support their pet theory.
"If you deeply love art or books or music, I really believe the last thing you should do is pursue a graduate degree studying
that thing you love. "
They will beat that love right out of you, replace it with vapid ideology, and you'll never love those things with the same
wide-eyed innocence as before.
This is unfortunate, as a cooler, more mature perspective on art is something we should all try to cultivate. But critique
as murder + autopsy is the order of the day.
My American poetry professor in college (a proper reactionary, he spoke without irony of 'the War of Northern Aggression) inoculated
me against 'interrogating the text' in the way the modern academy trains its cadres to do.
Just in time for the 2020 presidential election, the Democrats have discovered that there is
real economic inequality in the United States. But they have not yet fully addressed the role
that the Democratic party and its leaders have played in creating this vast inequality that led
to the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.
The presidential candidates have been slow to fully recognize the role that former President
Bill Clinton's globalization policies (NAFTA and WTO) played in the outsourcing of American
jobs or the lowering of wages for workers.
As the Democratic presidential debates have shown, Vice President Biden is having a hard
time defending his long public record, especially as an opponent of federally mandated "forced"
busing to integrate our public schools decades after the Supreme Court's overturning of racial
segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As a Senator Joe Biden was a free
trade advocate as well.
But Senator Biden played a large role in creating inequality in two additional realms. He
was a strong backer of a 2005 bankruptcy "reform" law that made it harder for people to file
personal bankruptcy and to wipe out all of their debts. Given that perhaps as many as fifty
percent of all personal bankruptcies in America are caused by debt incurred from health care
not covered by insurance, this was an especially cruel blow to those seeking relief from their
heavy debt loads.
In "'
Lock the S.O.B.s Up: Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration ," The New York
Times documents his decades-long support of tough on criminals legislation, culminating in
the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill, signed into law by President
Clinton, has been blamed for the jailing of high numbers of African Americans and other
minorities, in particular.
Unlike the Republicans whose goal is to increase inequality by lowering taxes on the
wealthy, at least the Democrats seem sincere about reducing it. To do this, they have fallen
all over themselves to offer free college tuition and to reduce student loan debt. Sen. Bernie
Sanders recently proposed to
eliminate all student loans entirely .
Why have Democrats focused on college as a means of solving economic inequality? Statistics
have shown that in general the more education you have, the higher your lifetime earnings will
be. For example, men with bachelor's degrees earn nearly a million more
dollars in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates.
"... As Curtis notes, full-time salaries are only one part of the faculty salary picture. Curtis' own research for the AAUP (published as an appendix to my Equality for Contingent Faculty documents that only twenty-five percent of professors now teach on the tenure-track, and only sixteen percent have tenure. Seventy-five percent of all college professors, one million in total, teach off the tenure-track, with fifty percent of all professors teaching part-time. ..."
"... While "free trade" agreements encouraged the closing of American factories and the loss of millions of American jobs, colleges and universities instituted their own brand of wage theft called by adjunct Ron Swift "inside-outsourcing." Even though the number of students was increasing, the colleges staunched the number of well-paid, secure, full-time tenure-track positions. They met rising enrollments by staffing classrooms with "contingent" faculty who teach off the tenure-track without the protections for free speech afforded their tenured brothers and sisters. ..."
"... The colleges save money by refusing to pay these contingent professors a living wage, in flagrant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work. They are paid on a completely separate and lower pay scale than their full-time counterparts are paid for teaching the very same courses; they are paid on average only about fifty percent of what a full-timer would earn for teaching the same number of courses. See my " The Wal-Martization of Higher Education: How Young Professors Are Getting Screwed "). ..."
"... In " The Ph.D. Now Comes with Food Stamps ," the Chronicle of Higher Education has documented hundreds of thousands of people with graduate degrees receiving some form of public assistance, many of them contingent faculty. ..."
So are the Democrats right to try and solve the equality problem
by making college more affordable, with tuition perhaps free? Or are these proposals simply the
current version of the Herbert Hoover's 1928 Presidential campaign where he literally offered
voters "
A chicken for every pot."
But before we go spending trillions of dollars on college tuition and eliminating student
debt, shouldn't we ask: What has been driving up the cost of attending college over the past
few decades leading to the current lack of affordable college options?
In his run for re-election as Vice President in 2012, Joe Biden made clear that he blamed
college professors' high salaries for the skyrocketing costs of tuition. This was an
astonishing charge, especially given that his wife has long been a college professor. He was
immediately admonished by faculty groups around the country. "
Faculty Groups Try to Educate Biden on Salaries ".
John Curtis, former Director of Research for the American Association of University
Professors, wrote a rebuttal to Biden on January 18, 2012. He took issue with Biden's claim,
pointing out that full-time faculty salaries have been stagnant for a number of years. He noted
that tuition rates, in contrast, had risen "between three and fourteen times as fast as
full-time faculty salaries." (underlining added)
As Curtis notes, full-time salaries are only one part of the faculty salary picture. Curtis'
own research for the AAUP (published as an appendix to my Equality for
Contingent Faculty documents that only twenty-five percent of professors now teach on
the tenure-track, and only sixteen percent have tenure. Seventy-five percent of all college
professors, one million in total, teach off the tenure-track, with fifty percent of all
professors teaching part-time.
While "free trade" agreements encouraged the closing of American factories and the loss of
millions of American jobs, colleges and universities instituted their own brand of wage theft
called by adjunct Ron Swift "inside-outsourcing." Even though the number of students was
increasing, the colleges staunched the number of well-paid, secure, full-time tenure-track
positions. They met rising enrollments by staffing classrooms with "contingent" faculty who
teach off the tenure-track without the protections for free speech afforded their tenured
brothers and sisters.
The colleges save money by refusing to pay these contingent professors a living wage, in
flagrant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work. They are paid on a completely
separate and lower pay scale than their full-time counterparts are paid for teaching the very
same courses; they are paid on average only about fifty percent of what a full-timer would earn
for teaching the same number of courses. See my "
The Wal-Martization of Higher Education: How Young Professors Are Getting Screwed ").
In other words, though women are still paid only 82% percent of what men earn for doing the
same work, with black men earning only 73% and Hispanics only 69%, most adjunct professors are
paid at most 50% of what tenure-track faculty earn for teaching the same course.
Though possessing Master's and Doctorates and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans,
these college professors are not being paid for all of the hours they work outside of class
preparing lectures, grading tests, and meeting with students. They often do not even have
offices. Their work schedule is capped below full-time so they will not qualify for tenure.
Their work varies from quarter to quarter and they are often denied unemployment when they are
in fact unemployed. The adjuncts and other contingent professors usually do not have any health
insurance or retirement benefits
In " The Ph.D. Now Comes with
Food Stamps ," the Chronicle of Higher Education has documented hundreds of
thousands of people with graduate degrees receiving some form of public assistance, many of
them contingent faculty.
The treatment between the two tiers is so disparate that I have called it "faculty
apartheid" because the tenure-track few control and dominate the contingent many. Indeed, the
tenured faculty often serve as the direct supervisors of the contingents. I have called the
kind of discrimination that exists in higher education "tenurism," the baseless but widespread
stereotype that the tenured faculty are superior and warrant higher pay and better treatment
and than the non-tenure-track faculty. (see my " Against Tenurism ").
In an interview with Shankar Vedantam on the NPR show "The Hidden Brain," Raj Chetty, a
Harvard economist who has done research on inequality in education, says the best solution is
to have "the best teachers in American classrooms."
But we are far from that solution, with the majority of the U.S. higher education teaching
force earning much less than the vaunted $15 an hour minimum wage recommended by nearly all of
the Democratic candidates. These contingent faculty are "apprentices to nowhere" with little
realistic hope of escaping the academic ghetto as the contingents far outnumber the dwindling
number of tenure-track professors.
But don't' the Democrats have a tight relation with the faculty unions (American Association
of University Professors, American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education
Association)? Yes, they do. But the unions themselves have collectively bargained the
contingents into poverty and income insecurity. The two-tier system exists within the unions
too, which have long been run by and for the tenure-track faculty; these unions clearly have
not apprised the Democrats of these inequalities, let alone insist they solve them.
Will the Democrats insist that these unions, upon whom they are so dependent for money and
campaign workers, treat all of their members equally? Or will they continue to look the other
way in order to keep union money flowing into their campaign coffers.
Will the Democrats insist that these colleges, upon whom they wish to build an equal
society, treat their professors equally and offer them the same opportunities for a better life
that they are offering their students?
If politicians are going to solve a problem, they must first have a clear diagnosis before
offering a treatment. Before the Democrats spend tax money on free tuition and paying off
student loans, they need to acknowledge the income disparity among the professoriate and make
solving it an equal priority.
The issue of Millennial 'burnout' has been an especially hot topic in recent years - and not
just because the election of President Trump ushered in an epidemic of co-occurring TDS (Trump
Derangement Syndrome) that sent millions of American twenty somethings on a never-ending quest
for a post-grad 'safe space'.
For those who aren't familiar with the subject, the World Health Organization recently
described burnout as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that
has not been successfully managed." As birth rates plunge and so-called deaths from despair
(suicides and overdoses) climb, sending the US left expectancy lower for multiple consecutive
years for the first time since the 1960s, many researchers see solving the problem of burnout
as critical to fixing many of our societal issues.
To try and dig deeper into the causes and impact of millennial burnout, Yellowbrick
, a national psychiatric organization, surveyed 2,000 millennials to identify what exactly is
making a staggering 96% of the generation comprising the largest cohort of the American labor
force say they feel "burned out" on a daily basis.
The answer is, unsurprisingly, finances and debt: These are
the leading causes of burnout (and one reason why Bernie Sanders latest proposal to wipe
out all $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt might be more popular with millennial voters
than many other Americans realize).
At 6% interest with a 6-year amortization, that works out to monthly payments of $497 --
about what many of these folks spend on eating at restaurants or on tattoos or on drugs per
month.
It's a matter or priority -- and repaying the student loans isn't a priority for them
which is why a report in '17 showed that at 7 years after graduation, more than 45% of them
hadn't paid even one dollar of principle on their student loans.
This is becoming exhausting. The boomers and the like simply don't want to admit that it
is much harder today making ends meet than it was when they were younger. That is a fact,
inflation and asset inflation has made the value of a dollar half of what is was 40 years
ago. Meaning, you would have to work 80 hours in today's money to match 40 hours in money
from the late 70's. Now, millenials don't get off easy either because they think they deserve
that same standard and since it does not and cannot exist in our monetary system, they try to
usurp personal responsibility, at any level, by finger pointing and apathy. Our society is
slowly collapsing.
Unlike Occupy, then, Barber has demands, both policy and geographical. Barber and Theoharis,
having convened the "the first-ever Poor People's Moral Action Congress," write in
The Hill , on policy:
We will present a national moral budget, outlining a plan to pay for real, systemic change
as well a challenge to the lie of scarcity. And poor people who haven't seen a place for them
in American public life will testify before the House Budget Committee, in a hearing to share
their stories and address what the federal government can and must do now to address the real
issues affecting everyday Americans.
And on geography:
We are building coalitions among poor people who are too often pitted against one another
by the divide-and-conquer tactics of the Southern Strategy. In the so-called "red-states" of
the South and Midwest, we are organizing people into a movement who will vote, take action
and challenge the assumptions of candidates from both parties. We are organizing across race
and other lines that too often divide us and lifting up and deepening the leadership of those
most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation.
The United States has abundant resources for an economic revival that will move towards
establishing a moral economy. This report identifies:
$350 billion in annual military
spending cuts that would make the nation and the world more secure; $886 billion in estimated
annual revenue from fair taxes on the wealthy, corporations, and Wall Street; and Billions
more in savings from ending mass incarceration, addressing climate change, and meeting other
key campaign demands.
The below comparisons demonstrate that policymakers have always found resources for their
true priorities. It is critical that policymakers redirect these resources to establish
justice and to prioritize the general welfare instead. The abundant wealth of this nation is
produced by millions of people, workers, and families in this country and around the world.
The fruits of their labor should be devoted to securing their basic needs and creating the
conditions for them to thrive. At the same time, policymakers should not tie their hands with
"pay-as-you-go" restrictions that require every dime of new spending to be offset with
expenditure cuts or new revenue, especially given the enormous long-term benefits of most of
our proposals. The cost of inaction is simply too great.
I think the left could get behind all of this (though sadly, MMT is not explicitly included,
though it's certainly righteous to cripple PayGo).
So why can't we have nice things? The budget concludes on page 115:
For too long, we have turned to those with wealth and power to solve our most pressing
social problems. We have been led to believe that those in positions of influence and
authority will use the resources at hand in the best possible way for the betterment of our
society. This orientation has justified tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and work
requirements for the poor; it has secured environmental shortcuts for industry and military
expansion around the world; and it has yielded very little for the 140 million people in this
country who are still poor and struggling to meet their needs.
This is not an argument for charity or goodwill to the poor. It is, rather, a simple
recognition that the poor are not only victims of injustice, but agents of profound social
change. Rather than following the direction and leadership of the wealthy and powerful,
it is time to follow the direction and leadership of the poor. Indeed, if we organize
our resources around the needs of the 140 million, this Budget shows that we will strengthen
our society as a whole.
This is why the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival continues to
organize and build power among the poor today. It understands that those who have been cast
out of the economy and who are living on the few remaining crumbs of its meager offerings are
also articulating a way out of this wretched existence -- not just for themselves, but for us
all.
That's the stuff to give the troops! If I have a criticism of PPC (and the budget) it's that
who "those with wealth and power" might be is not crisply articulated (unlike, for example, "
the billionaire
class "). At this point, I realize I've shifted from saying the left should give an account
to the PPC to saying that the PPC should give an account to the left. Be that as it may, Barber
tweets:
... ... ...
Well, those Democrats who talk about "working people" use that phrase -- "working families"
seems to have, mirabile dictu , vanished from the discourse -- probably started doing so
only recently, having been pressured from their left, and as a replacement for "working class";
they don't take their bourbon neat, that is, but watered down. And yes, they may be scared of
the "free stuff" argument that liberal Democrats deploy against the left. However, I think the
left (very much as opposed to liberals) would view "the poor" as a subset of the working class,
those who are coerced sell or give their labor to survive (forgive the crudity of this
ahistorical analysis). If indeed the PPC/DSA/left are to move beyond a relationship of
"endorsing partners" to something akin to co-operation, both tactical and strategic, then
distinctions like this are going to have to be hashed out. For example, Barber tweets:
... ... ...
"Policy murder" is brilliant framing (and would provide one account of elite behavior on
climate change). However, who is the murderer? Barber says "a legislator." But if you believe
-- as most of the left does, and (I would say) most liberals do not, especially donor-dependent
NGOs -- that we live in an oligarchy, then the murderer is not the legislator, but
the person who hired or owns the legislator: Much more often than not, when all the threads are
traced down, a billionaire. The billionaire class is surely composed of great sinners. And
every
billionaire is a policy failure , just as surely as every slaveowner was. Should this be
hard to say? Should we not seek to remove the systemic occasion of sin?
This kind of discussion is something that is badly needed on the Left. Rev. Barber is
doing an excellent job of making a class-based argument for reform based on Protestant
theology. It's a matter of shame for American Protestantism that more pastors in affluent
suburban congregations and mega-churches are not doing the same.
That said, the persuasiveness of Christian theology is shrinking, not growing. Other
voices from other spiritual traditions are needed who can articulate the connections between
their non-Abrahamic frames of reference and the suffering of the poor and the sacredness of
the Earth and its creatures. This is especially true for making the case to the young who are
constantly bombarded with materialism and individualism on the one side and find patriarchal
religion on the other side too much to swallow, especially given the historical realities of
how those patriarchal religions have conducted themselves in the past. That's one reason why
I find Marianne Williamson's presence in the debates to be refreshing. At least she's
bringing spirituality to the conversation where it's usually absent except for cliches.
I also think that James Fowler's stages of faith analysis is useful for understanding the
impact of one's "faith" and political views. His argument is that everyone lives by "faith,"
which he defines as a worldview through which we encounter and interpret life and its
experiences. The critical difference is not the content of the "faith" but the maturity level
of the individual's faith development. My recent explorations of the thought of Gary Snyder,
a counterculture, Peyote using Buddhist/animist, and Wendell Berry, a Kentucky
born-and-raised Protestant, reveals that the contents of "faith" of each is very different --
they argue about it frequently -- but their way of interacting with the world and their
fellow human beings is essentially the same because they both have a high level of spiritual
maturity. In Fowler's system, both are at top of the pyramid.
The divisive encounters we have with others about spiritual matters are often more a
result of differing levels of spiritual maturity than the content of the faith. The
close-minded Fundamentalist reflexively citing Bible verses rather than truly engaging in
dialog is someone who has not moved beyond the level of faith maturity achieved upon junior
high confirmation training in a tradition. The sort of person who runs through an Eschaton
thread repeating "THERE IS NO GOD!!!!!" over and over again has moved beyond the
indoctrinated stage but has not attained the ability to re-integrate any spiritual aspects
into what amounts to a barren, incomplete "faith" typical of the college freshman who throws
aside his religious training because he's seen through the difficulties in the simplistic
religion he was taught in Sunday School or confirmation class.
This seems like a good prompt to revisit the the Pelagians, from around 400 AD, one of whom
wrote in the marvellous essay On Riches :
Get rid of the rich man, and you will not be able to find a poor one. Let no man have more
than he really needs, and everyone will have as much as they need, since the few who are rich
are the reason for the many who are poor. (p. 194)
Michael Hudson has advice for you old chap, if you have time to read his " .. and forgive
them their debts." It turns out that the Catholics and Protestants of all flavors overlook an
important part of the Christian message about debt jubilees. Overturning the money tables of
the Rabbi-approved bankers in the temple was in pursuit of a fairer economic system such as had
been common in the Bronze Age.
Hudson reveals the precedent cause of the collapse of first Athens, then Rome, then
Constantinople and now us is the oligarchy of each civilisation favoring creditors and writing
laws that advantage them and punish / enslave debtors. The result is the accumulation of global
wealth on a small class of people with the rest of the population in poverty and careless of
the country in which they live.
Its a great pleasure to see Mr Hudson is reading this NC article. Good luck to him. Any
errors in this note are mine.
This seems very different from "For ye have the poor always with you" (Matt 26:11, Mark
14:7, John 12:8). lambert
This is not to excuse poverty but as an indictment of that generation since:
However, there will be no poor among you , since the Lord will surely bless you in
the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, if only you
listen obediently to the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all this commandment
which I am commanding you today. Deuteronomy 15:4-5 [New American Standard Bible (NASB)
[bold added]
However obedience included the following:
"You shall not charge interest to your countrymen: interest on money, food, or
anything that may be loaned at interest. You may charge interest to a foreigner, but to your
countrymen you shall not charge interest, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all that
you undertake in the land which you are about to enter to possess. Deuteronomy 23:19-20 New
American Standard Bible (NASB) [bold added]
Draw your own conclusion then as to whether government privileges for a usury cartel are
Biblical.
James could have been the first century PPC leader. Oddly missing from most sermons is this
passage (instead we worship the rich for their "ingenuity" and "work ethic"):
James 5:1-5 (NIV)
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.
Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.
Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your
flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days.
Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against
you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.
You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the
day of slaughter.
"... The Democratic Party, thanks largely to the Clintons and their DLC nonsense, has certainly moved to the right. So far right that I haven't been able to call it the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Every Democrat should sign on to FDR's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights speech. It is hardly radical, but rather the foundation of the modern Democratic Party, or at least was before being abrogated by the "new Democrats." Any Dem not supporting it is at best one of the "Republican-lights" who led the Dem party into the wilderness. It would also behoove the party to resurrect FDR's Veep Henry Wallace's NY Times articles about the nature of big businesses and fascism, also from '44. Now that was a party of the people. 7 Replies ..."
In its most recent analysis, Gallup
found that from 1994 to 2018, the percentage of all Democrats who call themselves liberal more
than doubled from 25 percent to 51 percent.
Over the same period, the percentage of Democratic moderates and conservatives fell
steadily, with the share of moderates dropping from 48 to 34 percent, and of conservatives
dropping from 25 to 13 percent. These trends began to accelerate during the administration of
George W. Bush and have continued unabated during the Obama and Trump presidencies.
... ... ...
The anti-establishment faction contributed significantly to the large turnout increases in
Democratic primaries last year.
Pew found that from 2014 to 2018, turnout in House primaries rose from 13.7 to 19.6 percent
of all registered Democrats, in Senate primaries from 16.6 to 22.2 percent and in governor
primaries from 17.1 to 24.5 percent.
... ... ...
The extensive support among prospective Democratic presidential candidates for
Medicare for All , government-guaranteed jobs and a higher minimum wage reflects the
widespread desire in the electorate for greater
protection from the vicissitudes of market capitalism -- in response to "increasingly
incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change," as the political scientist
Jacob Hacker put it in "
Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy
Retrenchment in the United States ." Support for such protections is showing signs of
becoming a litmus test for candidates running in the 2020 Democratic presidential
primaries.
... ... ...
Sawhill looks at the ideological shifts in the Democratic electorate less from a historical
perspective and more as a response to contemporary economic and social dislocation. Among both
conservatives and liberals, Sawhill argued, there is "an intellectual awakening about the flaws
of modern capitalism" -- a recognition of the failings of "neoliberalism, the idea that a
market economy with a few light guardrails is the best way to organize a society." This
intellectual climate may result in greater receptivity among voters to more radical
proposals.
These "big, bold leftist ideas" pose a strategic problem for liberals and the Democratic
Party," (sigh). Here we go again. I am an older guy (Caucasian). I attended Texas A&M
University from 1978 to 1982. My tuition payments during that entire time was $4 per credit
hour. Same for every Texas resident during that time. Roughly $128 per year. Had Texas
A&M not offered education at this modest entry point financially, I would still be
working in the Holiday Inn kitchen washing dishes. Like I was in high school. So, I don't
understand why older guys who went to school on the cheap, like me, and probably like Mr.
Edsall, are writing articles about "radical" proposals like "free" or at least "affordable"
education for Americans. We could achieve this very easily if America refocused on domestic
growth and health and pulled itself out of its continuous wars. America has spent $6 Trillion
dollars on war since 2001. For what? Nothing. Imagine how much college tuition we could have
paid instead. Imagine how that would change America. What is radical is killing people of
color in other countries for no goal and no reason. Let's refocus on domestic USA issues that
are important. Like how to get folks educated so they/we can participate in the US economy.
Mr. Edsall, what did you pay to
go to school per year? Was that "radically" cheap? For me, it was not radical to pay $128 per year. It was a blessing.
Bruce Rozenblit Kansas City, MO
Jan. 23 Times Pick
To the conservative, liberal means socialist. Unfortunately, they don't know what socialism
is. They think socialism is doing nothing and getting paid for it, a freeloader society.
Socialism is government interference in the free market, interference in production.
Ethanol
is socialism. Oil and gas subsidies are socialism. Agricultural price supports are socialism.
Tax breaks and subsidies are socialism. The defence industry is socialism. All of these
socialist policies greatly benefit big business. What liberals want is socialism of a similar
nature that benefits people. This would include healthcare, education, public transportation,
retirement, and childcare. Currently, people work their tails off to generate the profits
that pay for corporate socialism and get next to nothing in return. Daycare costs as much as
many jobs pay.
Kids graduate from college $50,000 in debt. Get sick and immediately go
bankrupt. They have to work past 70. Pursuing these policies is not some far out leftist
agenda. They are the norm in most industrialized nations.
It's hard to live free or die if
you don't have anything to eat. It's easy to be a libertarian if you make a million bucks a
year. Liberals are not advocating getting paid for doing nothing. They want people to have
something to do and get paid for it. That is the message that should be pushed. Sounds pretty
American to me. 27 Replies
This old white (liberal) man regrets that I was born too late for the FDR New Deal era and
too early to be part of this younger generation taking us back to our roots. I lived in
America when we had a strong middle class and I have lived through the Republican
deconstruction of the middle class, I much preferred the former.
Economic Security and FDR's second bill of rights is a very
good place for this new generation to pick up the baton and start running. 4 Replies
Are these really moves to the left, or only in comparison to the lurch further right by the republicans. What is wrong with
affordable education, health care, maternal and paternal leave, and a host of other programs that benefit all people? Why
shouldn't we have more progressive tax rates? These are not radical ideas. 6 Replies
As a senior, who has been a healthcare provider for decades, I hope that people will not be
afraid if they get sick, that people will not fear going bankrupt if they get sick, that they
do not have to fear they will die needlessly if they get sick, because they did not have
proper access to haeathcare treatment. If a 29 year old woman from Queens, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, can fulfill my hopes and dreams, and alleviate these fears, just to get humane
healthcare - then I say "You Go Girl!" What a wonderful world that would be..... 9 Replies
Moving to the left??? I'm 64 years old. I started out on the left and haven't moved leftward
in all these years. I'm just as far left now as when I registered to vote as a Democrat when
I was 18. We called it being liberal and the Democratic Party reflected my beliefs.
The
Democratic Party, thanks largely to the Clintons and their DLC nonsense, has certainly moved
to the right. So far right that I haven't been able to call it the Democratic Party. So far
right that I have seriously considered changing my party affiliation. Right now, the only
think keeping me in the party is this influx of vibrant new faces. One thing that will make
me leave is any ascendancy of the corporate lapdog "New Democrat Coalition" attempting to
keep my party in thrall to the Republicans. No. The electorate has not shifted sharply
leftward. We've been here all along. Our party went down a wrong path. It had better get back
on track or become a footnote. 12 Replies
I work with young adults in a university setting. The university I work for used to be really
inexpensive. It is still relatively inexpensive and still a bargain. Most of the students
have student loans. They can not make enough money in the summer or during the term to pay
for tuition, fees, housing, and food. They need jobs that will pay enough to pay for those
loans. They also need portable health care. As the employer based health insurance gets
worse, that portable health care becomes a necessity so they can move to where the jobs are.
So if a livable wage and universal health care are far left ideas then so be it. I am a
leftist. 1 Reply
Every Democrat should sign on to FDR's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights speech. It is hardly
radical, but rather the foundation of the modern Democratic Party, or at least was before
being abrogated by the "new Democrats." Any Dem not supporting it is at best one of the
"Republican-lights" who led the Dem party into the wilderness. It would also behoove the
party to resurrect FDR's Veep Henry Wallace's NY Times articles about the nature of big
businesses and fascism, also from '44. Now that was a party of the people. 7 Replies
@Michael. Pell grants and cheap tuition allowed me to obtain a degree in aerospace
engineering in 1985. I'd like to think that that benefited our country, not radicalized it.
I don't think that's entirely accurate, and even if true, leaving students to
the predations of private lenders isn't the answer. Although I'm willing to entertain your
thesis, soaring tuition has also been the way to make up for the underfunding of state
universities by state legislatures.
At the same time, there's been an increase since the 70s
in de luxe facilities and bloated administrator salaries. When administrators make budget
cuts, it isn't for recreational facilities and their own salaries -- it's the classics and
history departments, and it's to faculty, with poorly paid part-time adjuncts teaching an
unconscionable share of courses. So universities have been exacerbating the same unequal
division between the people who actually do the work (faculty) and the people who allocate
salaries (administrators) -- so too as in the business world, as you say.
I have a friend who lives on the West Coast and is constantly posting on social media about
"white privilege" and how we all need to embrace far left policies to "even the playing
field" for minorities. I always bristle at this, not because I don't support these policies,
but because this person chooses to live in a city with actually very few minorities. She also
lives in a state that's thriving, with new jobs, new residents and skyrocketing real estate
values. I, by contrast, live in a state that's declining....steadily losing jobs, businesses
and residents....leaving many people feeling uneasy and afraid. I also live in a city with a
VERY high minority crime rate, which also makes people uneasy and afraid. Coastal liberals
like my friend will instantly consider anyone who mentions this a racist, and hypocritically
suggest that our (assumed) racism is what's driving our politics. But when I look around here
and see so many Trump supporters (myself NOT included), I don't see racists desperately
trying to retain their white privilege in a changing world. I see human beings living in a
time and place of great uncertainty and they're scared! If Dems fail to notice this, and fail
to create an inclusive message that addresses the fears of EVERYBODY in the working/middle
class, regardless of their skin color, they do so at their own peril. Especially in parts of
the country like mine that hold the key to regaining the WH. Preaching as my friend does is
exactly how to lose. 5 Replies
A majority of Americans, including independent voters and some Republicans favor Medicare for
all, a Green New Deal, and higher taxes on the rich. While Trump has polarized voters around
race, Ocasio-Cortez is polarizing around class -- the three-fourths of Americans working
paycheck to paycheck against the 1 percenters and their minions in both parties. Reading the
tea leaves of polls and current Democratic Party factions as Edsall does, is like obsessing
about Herbert Hoover's contradictory policies that worsened the Depression. If Ocasio-Cortez
becomes bolder and calls for raising the business taxes and closing tax incentives,
infrastructure expansion, and federal jobs guarantee, she'll transform the American political
debate from the racist wall meme to the redistribution of wealth and power America needs. 1
Reply
Labels such as 'liberal" fail to characterize the political agenda articulated by Bernie
Sanders. By style and substance, Sanders represented a departure from the hum-drum norm. Is
something wrong about aspiring to free college education in an era when student debt totals
$1.5 trilliion? His mantle falls to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her followers. One hundred
years ago, American progressivism was spawned by Robert La Follette. As governor and senator
from Wisconsin, and as failed third party candidate for president, La Follette called for
laws to protect youth from horrendous labor practices. He called for laws to protect civil
rights. In time, many of La Follette's positions became mainstream. Will history repeated
itself? Maybe. The rise of "liberalism" in the Democratic Party is therapeutic, as evidenced
by youthful audiences who attended the Sander's rallies. Increasing voter turnout will take
back government from a minority that undermines the essence of a democratic system. A
Democratic counterbalance to the Republican "Freedom Caucus" may appear divisive to some. To
others, it offers a path to the future. 4 Replies
Ok, from the perspective of a rural white midwest retiree independent with post graduate
education, the issues weren't the democrats moving to the left, it was the Republican party
turning right (and they show no signs of stopping). Who is against an equal opportunity for
an equal quality education for everyone? My college costs years ago could be met with a
barely minimum wage job and low cost health insurance provided by the school and I could
graduate without debt even from graduate school. Seeing what years of Republican rule did to
our college and university systems with a raise in tuition almost every year while
legislative support declined every year, who is happy with that? Unions that used to provide
a majority of the apprenticeships in good jobs in the skilled were killed by a thousand tiny
cuts passed by Republicans over the years. The social safety net that used to be a hand up
became an ever diminishing hand out. What happened is those that had made it even to the
middle class pulled the ladder up behind them, taking away the self same advantages they had
in the past and denying future generations the opportunity. The young democrats and
independents coming along see this all too clearly. 1 Reply
These so-called liberal and progressive ideas aren't new. They work now in other countries
and have so for many, many years, but the rich keep screaming capitalism good, socialism bad
all the while slapping tariffs on products and subsidizing farmers who get to pretend that
this is somehow still a free market. It's fun to watch my neighbors do mental gymnastics to
justify why subsidizing soy bean farmers to offset the tariffs is a strong free market, but
that subsidizing solar panels and healthcare is socialism AKA the devil's work. All of this
underscores the reality that, much like geography, Americans are terrible with economics.
The tensions between progressive and moderate positions, liberal and conservative positions
in the Democratic Party and in independents, flow from and vary based on information on and
an understanding of the issues. What seems to one, at first glance, radically
progressive/liberal becomes more mainstream when one is better informed. Take just one issue,
Medicare for all, a progressive/liberal objective. At first glance people object based on two
main points: costs and nefarious socialism. How do you pay for Medicare for all? Will it add
to the debt? Will socialism replace our capitalist economy? People who have private medical
insurance pay thousands in premiums, deductibles, co-pays each year. The private insurance is
for profit, paying CEO's million dollar salaries and returns to stockholders. People paying
these private insurance premiums would pay less for Medicare and have more in their own
pockets. Medicare for all is no more nefariously socialistic than social security. Has social
security ended capitalism and made America a socialist country? I think not. Is social
security or Medicare adding to the national debt? Only if Congress will continue to play
their tribal political games. These programs are currently solvent but definitely need
tweaking to avoid near term shortfalls. A bipartisan commission could solve the long term
solvency issues. The more we know and understand about progressive/liberal ideas, the less
radical they become. The solution is education. 17 Replies
@Bruce Rozenblit Absolutely correct. According to the Bible of Saint Reagan, Socialism for
corporations and the rich: Good. Socialism for the poor and working class: bad.
@Michael - cheaper tuition starts with getting the Federal Govt out of the student loan
business, it's as simple as that. Virtually unlimited tuition dollars is what drove up
tuition rates. Higher Ed is a business, make no mistake.
@Bruce, have you ever considered creating a new "reality" network where the truth about
things could be told? You're quite good at articulating and defining how the world works,
without all the usual nonsense. I really appreciate your comments.
Can we please, please stop talking about AOC? Sure, she's young and energetic and is worthy
of note, but what has she accomplished? It's easy to go to a rooftop- or a twitter account-
and yell "health care and education for all!' But please, AOC, tell us how you are going to
not only pay for these ideas but actually get them through Congress and the Senate? It's just
noise, until then, and worse, you're creating a great target for the right that will NOT move
with you and certainly can label these ideas as leftist nutism- which would be fine, if we
weren't trying to get Trump out of office ASAP.. Dreams are great. Ideals are great. But
people who can get stuff actually done move the needle...less rhetoric, more actual plans
please.. 10 Replies
Its ok for a far right bigoted clown to be elected to the president and a tax cut crazy party
that wants to have a full scale assault against the environment and force more medical
related bankruptcies to be in charge? The safe candidate protected by 800 superdelegates in
2016 was met with a crushing defeat. The Democratic establishment wants a safe neo con
corporatist democrat. Fair taxation and redistribution of wealth is not some far out kooky
idea. The idea that the wealthiest Americans getaway with paying tax at 15%, if at all, is
ruinous to the country. Especially since there is an insane compulsion to spend outlandish
trillions on "national security". Universal health care would save the country billions of
dollars. Medicare controls costs much more effectively than private insurers. As with defense
the US spends billions more on health care than other countries and has worse medical
outcomes. Gentrification has opened fissures in the Democrats. The wealthy price out other
established communities. The problems of San Francisco and Seattle and other places with
gentrification need to be addressed before an open fissure develops in the party. 2 Replies
@Midwest Josh It's time for higher education to stop being a business. Likewise it's time to
stop electing leaders who are businessmen/women. 38 Replies
One could argue that many of these ideas are not that far left - rather it's a result of more
and more Americans realizing that WE are not the problem. Clean water and air, affordable
health care and affordable education are not that radical.
@Midwest Josh Hmmm, how old are you Midwest Josh? There were student loans back in the 1970s
when college cost me about $400 a year. Maybe something happened when that failed Hollywood
actor spouted slogans like "Government is not the solution, government is the problem" (and,
no, it was not taken out of context, he most definitely DID mean that government is the
problem - look it up) www.remember-to-breathe.org 38 Replies
You are studying this like it represents some kind of wave but in fact it is just a few
districts out of 435. These young women seem extraordinarily simply because the liberal media
says they are extraordinary. If the media attention on these new representatives were to
cease, no one except their families, their staff, and maybe Stephen Colbert would notice. 9
Replies
Finally, the left came out of its hibernation. We have spent the last decade or more either
sleeping or hiding, while at the same time, the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, Trump, and his
minions were taking over our government---It is such a breath of fresh air to finally listen
to airwaves filled with outrage over CEO's making millions of dollars an hour, of companies
that have become monopolies, of tax plans that bring back the middle class---it took us a
while, but we are back. 2 Replies
For so long (40+ years) the political spectrum has been pulled wildly and radically to the
right across so many issues. The Democratic party has for the most part ''triangulated''
their stances accordingly to essentially go along with republicans and corporate interests
for a bargain of even more tax/corporate giveaways to hold the line on social issues or
programs. It has now gotten to the point that continuous war has been waged for two (2)
decades and all the exorbitant costs that go along with that. There has been cut, after cut
after cut whereas some people and businesses are not paying any taxes at all now.
Infrastructure, social spending and education are all suffering because the cupboard is now
bare in the greatest and most richest country in the world. It just came out the other day
that ONLY (26) people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire world's
population. That amount of wealth in relation to dwindling resources of our planet and
crushing poverty for billions is abjectly obscene on so many levels. Coupled with all of the
above, is the continued erosion of human rights. (especially for women and dominion over
their own bodies) People are realizing that the founding fathers had a vision of a secular
and Progressive nation and are looking for answers and people that are going to give it to
them. They are realizing that the Democratic party is the only party that will stand up for
them and be consistent for all.
Democrats just don't like to win presidential elections. Go ahead. Move left. But remember,
you are not taking the rest of the country with you. As a NeverTrump Republican, I'll vote
for a moderate Democrat in 2020. No lefties. Sorry. Don't give the country a reason to give
Trump four more years. Win the electoral college vote instead of complaining about it. The
anti-Trump is a moderate. 5 Replies
"These "big, bold leftist ideas" pose a strategic problem." No they don't. The Real Problem
is the non-thinking non-Liberal 40% of Democrats and their simpatico Republicans who are
programmed to scream, "How will we pay for all that?" Don't they know all that money will
just be stolen? They were silent when that money was stolen by the 0.1% for the Tax Giveaway
(they're now working on tax giveaway 2.0) and by the military-industrial complex (to whom
Trump gave an extra $200,000,000,000 last year), various boondoggle theft-schemes like the
Wall, the popular forever Wars (17 years of Iraq/Afghanistan has cost $2,400,000,000,000 (or
7 times WW2)), and the Wall Street bailouts. Don't those so-called Democrats realize whose
money that was? First of all, it's our money. And second, our money "spent" on the People is
a highly positive investment with a positive ROI. Compare that to money thrown into the usual
money pits which has no return at all - except more terrorists for the military, more income
inequality for the Rich, and Average incomes of $422,000 for Wall Street. When the People's
money is continually stolen, how can anyone continue to believe that we're living in a
democracy?
Bruce, a succinct summary of your post is this: What we have now is socialism for the wealthy
and corporations (who, as SCOTUS has made clear, are people, too) and rugged individualism
for the rest of us. What we're asking for is nothing more than a level playing field for all.
And I hope that within my lifetime SCOTUS will have an epiphany and conclude that, gosh,
maybe corporations aren't people after all. We can only hope. 27 Replies
Edsall writes with his normal studious care, and makes some good points. Still, I am growing
weary of these "Democrats should be careful and move back to the center" opinions. Trump
showed us that the old 'left-right-center' way of thinking is no longer applicable. These
progressive policies appeal to a broad majority of Americans not because of their ideological
position, but because so many are suffering and are ready to give power to representatives
who will finally fight for working families. Policies like medicare for all are broadly
popular because the health insurance system is broken and most people are fed up and ready to
throw the greedy bums out. We've been trying the technocratic incrementalism strategy for too
long, with too little to show for it. Bold integrity is exactly what we need. 1 Reply
@Bruce Rozenblit Thank you; as others have commented already, this is so well said. To build
on your point: just yesterday, a commenter on a NYT article described AOC as a communist.
Incredible. The extent to which decent, pragmatic and, in a bygone era, mainstream, ideas are
now painted as dangerous, extreme, and anti-American is both absurd and disturbing. 27
Replies
If Hillary were President, there would never have been a shutdown. That is the lesson that
Mrs. Pelosi, AOC and Democrats should carry forward to 2020. 5 Replies
@LTJ No one is promoting ''free stuff'' - what is being proposed is that people/corporations
pay into a system Progressively upwards (especially on incomes above 10,000,000 dollars per
year) that allowed them and gave them the infrastructure to get rich in the first place. I am
sure you would agree that people having multiple homes, cars, and luxury items while children
go hungry in the richest nation in the world is obscene on its face. Aye ?
@Ronny Respectfully, President Clinton had a role in the deconstruction of the middle class.
My point is many of the folks in the news today were in congress that far back. Say what you
will about President Trump and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez,I believe they both have exposed
the left,the right,the press for what they are. Please choose your own example. I don't agree
with all of her positions, but I can't express how I enjoy her making the folks that under
their watch led us to where we find ourselves today squirm and try to hide their anger for
doing what she does so well. I've been waiting 55 years for this. Thank you AOC.
@Bruce Rozenblit Bruce, spot on. The point of the New Deal was not to replace capitalism with
socialism, but to save capitalism from itself by achieving the balance that would preserve a
capitalist economic system but one in which the concerns of the many in terms of freedom from
want and freedom from fear were addressed. In other words, the rich get to continue to be
rich, but not without paying the price of not being hung in the public square - by funding an
expanding middle class. A middle class that by becoming consumers, made the rich even richer.
But then greed took over and their messiah Saint Reagan convinced this large middle class
that they too could be rich and so cutting taxes for the wealthy (and in the process
redistributing the wealth from the expanding middle class to the wealthy) would one day
benefit them - when they were wealthy. Drunk on the promise of future wealth, and working
harder than ever, the middle class failed to notice whose ox was being gored and voted
Republican. And now finally, the pendulum swings. Amen. 27 Replies
@Socrates I'm reminded of a poll I saw several years ago that presented positions on issues
without attaching them to any individual politician or affixing labels of party or ideology.
The pol aimed to express the issue in neutral language without dog whistles or buzzwords.
When the pollsters had the data, they looked for the member of Congress whose positions best
reflected the view of the majority of respondents. It was Dennis Kucinich, the scary liberal
socialist bogeyman of his day.
I lived in Europe for a long time. Not even most right wing parties there wish to abolish
universal healthcare, replace low or tuition-free colleges with college debt, etc. The US has
politically drifted far to the right when the center Democrats were in charge. Now Trump is
lurching the country to extreme raw capitalism at the cost of national debt, even our
environment and climate, Democrats need to stop incrementalism. Simple as that. 1 Reply
@Michael Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was opposed to the eternal triumvirate axis of inhumane
evil aka capitalism, militarism and racism. King was a left-wing socialist community
organizer. In the mode of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. And the Nazarene of Matthew 25:
31- 46. America's military and prison industrial complexes are the antithesis of America' s
proclaimed interests and values. America is number one in arms, money and prisoners. MAGA? 38
Replies
Bernie and AOC don't seem all that radical to me for the reason this op-ed points out -- I
grew up in a New Deal Democratic family. My Grampa was an electrician supervisor for the City
of Chicago and my Granma was a legal secretary. They wanted universal health care and free
education and jobs for all. Those things made sense then, and they make sense now. They
provide solutions to the deep problems of our society, so who wouldn't want them? We've had a
lab test -- other than actual jobs for all Northern Europe has these things and we don't.
Neo-liberalism, its Pay-Go formula for government, and its benefits for the rich fails on
most counts except producing massive inequality and concentrated wealth. Bernie voters want
solutions to inequality and climate change, and they are readily available if government can
be wrested from the hands of Republicans like Trump and neo-liberals.
@Michael To me, the key sentence in your excellent post is that American needs to "refocus on
domestic growth and health and pull itself out of its continuous wars." All policiticians
hoping for our votes in the future need to make clear where they stand on this. As to those
who say that making all those weapons creates jobs, is there any reason that we couldn't
instead start producing other quality goods in the U.S. again? 38 Replies
@chele Me too! I am 72 y/o, retired, college educated at a rather tough school in which to
gain entrance. Lived below my means for over 40 years. Parents are both WW2 Marine Corps
officers(not career), who voted Republican and were active in local elections. They would be
shocked and disgusted at what that "party" represents now.
I think you look at all this in a vacuum. Democrats veered left because there was a need to
counterbalance what was happening on the right. They see Republicans aggressively trying to
undo all the gains the left had achieved the previous several decades. Civil rights, Womens'
rights, anti-poverty efforts, and so on all not just being pushed to the right, but forced to
the right with a bulldozer. It got to a tipping point where Democrats could clearly see the
forest for the trees. A great deal of this was a result of Republicans inability to candy
coat their agenda. Universal healthcare....not being replaced by affordable alternatives, but
by nothing. Tax cuts that were supposed to help the middle class, but, as evidenced by the
government shutdown, giving them no economic breathing room. And, in fact, making their tax
cut temporary, something nearly impossible to reverse with such a high deficit. Attacking
immigrants with no plan on who, actually, would do the work immigrants do. The list goes on
and on. In the past, many social programs were put in place not so much to alleviate
suffering as to silence the masses. Now Republicans feel the time has come to take it all
back, offering easily seen through false promises as replacements. That the left should see
the big picture here and say "Not so fast" should come as absolutely no surprise. All they
need now is a leader eloquent enough to rally the masses.
I think the Democratic Party is finally returning to its roots. We are now engaging in the
same politics which gave us control of the House for about fifty years. I went to my first
International Union convention is 1972 at which Ted Kennedy was one of the featured speakers.
One of the themes of the convention was healthcare for all. Now it treated as some sort of
radical proposal from the left. I am not certain why clean air and water, affordable health
care and housing, combating climate change, raising wages, taxing the highest income
brackets, updating our infrastructure, solving the immigration issue, and providing aid not
weapons to other nations, are considered liberal or socialistic. I think it represents the
thinking of a progressive society looking to the future rather than living in the past. 1
Reply
@David G. I would also say that many people think a cooperative economic enterprise, such as
a worker owned factory, is Socialism. But this is blatantly wrong and is pushed by the rich
business and stock owners to denigrate these types of businesses. Cooperatives have often
proven themselves quite successful in navigating a free market system, while simultaneously
focussing on workers rights and ownership. We need more if this in North America. 27 Replies
@Samuel She's been in office less than a month. You want to shut down the conversation that
is finally bringing real hope & passion to average people, & is bringing a new set of
goals (& more integrity) to the Democratic Party? Paying for single-payer has been
rehashed many times; just look at all the other 'civilized' countries who have it. For once,
try putting the savings from ending co-pays, deductibles, & premiums into the equation.
Think about the savings from large-group bids, & negotiations for drug prices, & the
savings from preventative medicine heading off more expensive advanced treatment. Bernie
Sanders has been explaining all this for years now. 'Less rhetoric'? The conversation is
(finally) just now getting started! You start by explaining what is possible. When enough
people understand it, the needle will start to move. Watch.
@JBC, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was voted into congress and then the media took notice. It wasn't
the other way around. My only hope is that she stays the course.
@Bruce Rozenblit And don't forget the biggest socialist project of our time - the wall! And
withholding 800k employee checks to do so? That's socialism at gun point. 27 Replies
There are two points left out of all of the analysis of both Pressley's and Ocasio-Cortez's
campaigns. First of all, both women did old fashioned retail politics, knocking on doors,
sending out postcards, gathering as many volunteers as they could and talking about the
issues with voters face to face. They took nothing for granted. This is precisely what
Crowley and Capuano did not do. Second, they actually listened to the voters regarding what
they needed and wanted in Congressional representation. What both of the stand for is neither
Liberal or Conservative. What they stand for human values. This is not to say that Capuano
and Crowley did not stand for these same values, but they took the voter for granted. That is
how you lose elections. The Democrats are going back to their roots. They have found that the
Mid-terms proved that issues of Health Care, minimum wages, good educations for all despite
economic circumstances, and how important immigration is to this country really matter to the
voters. They need to be braver in getting this across before the next election And the press
might want to start calling the candidates Humane, period. 1 Reply
@MIMA Yes, absolutely. I'm retired from the healthcare field after practicing 38 years. It is
unconscionable that we question the access of healthcare to everyone. The complaint usually
heard from the right is about "the takers." Data I've seen indicates that the majority on
"the dole" are workers, who can't make ends meet in the gig economy or the disabled. That
some lazy grubbers are in the system is unavoidable; perfection is the enemy of the good.
@Stu Sutin I agree, "Liberal" is too broad a term, as so-called liberals do not agree on
everything, especially the degree. We can be socially liberal, while economically
moderate--or vice versa. Some believe in John Maynard Keynes economics, but appose abortion.
Some want free college tuition, while others support public schools but do not support the
public paying for higher education. Our foreign policy beliefs often differ greatly. What
joins us is a belief in a bottom up economy, not top down--and a greater belief in civil
liberties and a greater distribution of wealth. Beyond that, our religious and cultural
beliefs often differ.
I think the Internet has provided an influx of new understanding for the American left.
They've learned that things considered radical here are considered unexceptional in the rest
of the developed world. There is a realization that the only reason these are not normal here
is because of a lack of political will to enact them. That will is building as the ongoing
inequities are splashed across the front pages and the twitter feeds. It is the beginning of
the end for American exceptionalism (a term coined by Stalin as America resisted the wave of
socialism spreading around the world in the early 20th century). Unbridled capitalism lasted
longer than communism but only because its costs were hidden longer. We need to find the
sustainable middle path that allows for entrepreneurship along with a strong social safety
net (and environmental protection). This new crop of progressive Democrats (with strong
electoral backing) might lead the way.
at 63, I was there. I don't want second Trump administration either, but the route to a
Democratic victory is not cozying up to the corporations and the wealthy, but by stating
clearly, like FDR, "they are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." We
need people who are willing to say that the rich deserve to be taxed at a higher rate,
because they have benefited more from our society, that no income deserves to be taxed at a
lower rate than the wages paid to working people, and that vast wealth needs to be earned,
not inherited. Emmanuel Saez makes persuasive arguments, but they need to be made in the
language of the working people. 12 Replies
@Michael Your $128 a year would be more like $414 or so in today's dollars. Still . . . I
went to Brooklyn College, part of the tuition-free City University of New York from
1969-1973. We paid a $53 general fee at the start of every semester ($24 for a summer
semester), and that was it. Wealthy or poor, everyone paid the same amount (about $334 in
today's dollars). 38 Replies
@JRS Democratic party leaders have been in favor of more border security and an overhauled
immigration system for as long as I've been alive. The suggestion (clearly this comment's
intention) that Democrats favor "open" borders, ports, etc., is a myth propagated by an ever
more influential right wing. And it's working: it's been repeated so often that it's now
virtually an assumption that Democrats favor open borders, despite that fact that any
critical thought on the subjection indicates the opposite is true.
I'm a very moderate Democrat -liberal on social issues and very supportive of free global
trade- who would vote for any of the current Democrats over Trump, but would leave the party
if AOC's ideas became the norm. I don't have a problem in principle with a 70% top marginal
tax rate or AOC's Green New Deal- Meaning, these aren't moral issues for me per se. I just
believe they would bankrupt the economy and push us into a chaos far worse than what we're
seeing under Trump. 5 Replies
@Michael The increase in fees for education to include the books along with the lowering of
standards for the classes taken is part and parcel of the reagan revolution to remake
American society. One of the most problematic things for those seeking to undo what FDR did
was the plethora of well educated and well read people American had managed to create. How
were they going to be able to overcome this? You can deduce whatever methods you may know but
I saw them tank the economy on purpose and prey on the fear that it created with more and
more radical propaganda. Once they got into office they removed the best and brightest of our
Civil Service and began making legal the crimes they wanted to commit and changing laws and
procedures for how things were done so that people would eventually come to think of this as
the "right" way when it was in fact purpose designed to deny them their due. 38 Replies
Younger candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appeal to younger voters. John Kennedy
appealed to WWII veterans, most of whom were in their 30s when they elected him. One of the
reasons for Barack Obama's support in 2008 among younger voters is that he was a younger
candidate and they identified with a younger candidate. That appeal to a younger electorate
will play a larger role in future elections. Don't focus too strongly on issues. Democrats
will win by a landslide in 2020 if they nominate a younger candidate that can inspire younger
voters. November 3, 2020. 1 Reply
@Samuel Actually, running a campaign and getting elected is a significant accomplishment.
Before anyone decides about what bills to promote and means of paying for them, we need a
momentum of discourse, and promoting that discourse is another major accomplishment. You and
many millions of others, also, have good reasons to be frustrated. Let's just try to actually
"work" at talking the talking and walking the walk, and maybe we will--or maybe we
won't--arrive some place where we can see some improvement.
The interesting part of this piece is the statement about politicians moving unwillingly. So
some Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen are allowing their personal beliefs to be
compromised for the glory of being elected or re-elected? Sounds like someone I would not
care to support. 2 Replies
A great essay! The wild card in all this analysis, of course, is what happens when these
(now) young voters, age, eventually partner, and have kids. As every generation has shown,
the needs of a voter changes as they age. I'm surrounded by many new neighbors with little
kids who moved out of Brooklyn and Jersey City who suddenly find themselves concerned about
rising property taxes- they now see the balance between taxes and services. Not something
they worried about a few years ago. 2 Replies
@Tracy Rupp I am a senior citizen heterosexual white male. I do not apologize for my race,
gender, etc. In fact, I am proud of our accomplishments. I do apologize for my personal
wrongs, and strive to improve myself.
"This will be difficult, given the fact that what is being proposed is a much larger role for
government, and that those who are most in need of government support are in the bottom half
of the income distribution and disproportionately minority -- in a country with a long racist
history." True enough, but if progressives want actual people in that bottom half to lead
happier lives, the focus of any programs should not be to employ armies in left-leaning and
self-perpetuating "agencies," but rather to devise policies to help people develop the
self-discipline to: A) finish high school, B) postpone the bearing of children until marriage
(not as a religious construct but as a practical expression of commitment to the child's
future), and; C) Find and get a regular job. These are supported by what objective, empirical
data we have. These have not struck me as objectives of the rising left in the Democratic
party. Mostly, I see endless moral preening, and a tribal demonizing of the "other," just
exactly as they accuse the "other." In this case the "other" is we insufficiently "woke" but
entirely moderate white folks who still comprise a plurality of Americans. I see success on
the left as based primarily on an ability to express performative outrage. But remember, you
build a house one brick at a time, which can be pretty boring, and delivers no jolt of
dopamine as would manning the barricades, but which results in a warm, dry, comfortable place
to live. 4 Replies
@Concerned Citizen For your information, Holiday Inns typically had a restaurant in the hotel
in the days Michael is talking about so... whatever! 38 Replies
My father fought in Germany during WWII, then came home and went to college on the GI bill.
Both my parents received federal assistance for a loan on their first house. Later, during
retirement, they were taken care of by Medicare and given an income by Social Security. They
worked hard, kept their values, lived modestly, and voted for Democrats. Apparently, they
were wild-eyed, leftist-socialist radicals, and I never knew it.
@Bruce Shigeura AOC in some ways is doing what Bernie was doing -- mobilizing people around
class as you say -- but the difference is that AOC doesn't shy away from issues of racial
justice. Bernie seemed to want to unite people by ignoring issues of race, as if he was
afraid that mentioning race too much might drive Whites away. AOC seems able to hold whites
on the class issue while still speaking to the racial justice issues that are important to
non-Whites. She's an extraordinary phenomenon: smart, engaging, articulate and with personal
connections to both the White and Non-White worlds, so she threatens neither and appeals to
both.
@Stu Sutin "Is something wrong about aspiring to free college education in an era when
student debt totals $1.5 trilliion?" Yes. If you're the Congressperson who gets his/her
funding from the lenders.
A O-C has yet to open a district office. A O-C is more interested in "national" issues and
exposure than those of her district. What A O-C may have forgotten is that it is her district
and constituents that have to re-elect her in less than 2 tears (or not): "Would you rather
have a Congress member with an amazing local services office, or one that leads nationally on
issues?" she queried her 1.9 million followers on Instagram -- a number that is well over
twice the population of her district. The results strongly favored national issues."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/nyregion/aoc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-district-office.html
As Mr. Edsall points out, her district is not necessarily progressive and liberal and while
there may be national issues, at the bottom line, many of her instagram groupies are not her
constituents. Democrats like to constantly point out that Ms. Clinton won the popular vote,
and she was the non-liberal-progressive Democrat. I am sure that the Republicans pray for the
success of the Democratic left. They seek to give voice to that left. That will bring the
swing votes right back to or over to the Republicans, without, but possibly even with Mr.
Trump (if the Democrats cross a left-wing tipping point). Bottom line, instagram is fine and
likes are great, twitter is good for snappy answers, but representatives to the House have to
deliver to their district and constituents. A O-C leads, but to the salvation of the
Republican party. 6 Replies
@Joshua Schwartz M. Ocasio-Cortez explained on The Late Show the other night that the reason
she has not opened her district office is due to the Government Shutdown. The people charged
with setting up the office are on furlough, the money for the office is being held up and she
staff or furnish the office.
Isn't this somehow the natural swing of things? Years of heavy-handed politics benefitting
small minorities on the right have taken their toll, so now new ideas are up at bat. By the
way, these ideas aren't really that bold at all - many countries have living minimum wages or
mandatory healthcare, and are thriving, with a much happier population. Only in the context
of decades-long, almost brainwash-like pounding of these ideas as 'Un-American' or
'socialist' can they be seen as 'bold'. American exeptionalism has led to a seriously
unbalanced and dangerously threatened social contract. Tell me again, Republicans: why is a
diverse, healthy and productive population living under inspiration instead of constant fear
so bad?
The "experts" offering advice here seem to have forgotten that Hillary Clinton listened to
them in 2016: the party decided that appealing to suburban Republicans and Jeb Bush voters
was more important than exciting the Democratic party base. The other hazard of calculated
politics is that the candidate is revealed to be a phony, believing in nothing but power or
that it's simply "her turn" -- an uncompelling program for a voter. 1 Reply
They will all face primary challengers in 2020. Tlaib and Omar didn't even win a majority of
the primary vote. There were so many candidates running in those primaries, they only managed
a plurality. And let's be honest about the demographic changes in the districts Pressley and
Ocasio Cortez won. They went from primarily ethnic White to minority majority. Both women
explicitly campaigned on the premise that their identity made them more representative of the
district than an old White male incumbent. Let's not sugarcoat what happened: they ran
explicitly racist campaigns. They won with tribalism, not liberal values. Democrats actually
need more candidates like Lucy McBath, Antonio Delgado, and Kendra Horn if they want to
retain Congressional control and change policy. And many minorities and immigrants aren't
interested in the far left faction. We don't have a problem with Obama and a moderate
approach to social democracy.
@JABarry - Some data: Canada has a program like Medicare for All, and its bottom line health
care statistics are better than ours in spite of a worse climate. We paid $9506.20 per person
for health care in 2016. In Canada, they paid $4643.70. If our system we as efficient as
Canada's, we would save over $1.5 TRILLION each and every year. This is money that can be
used for better purposes. If one uses the bottom line statistics, we see that both Canada and
the UK (real socialized medicine) do better than we do: Life expectancy at birth (OECD):
Canada- 81.9, UK - 81.1, US - 78.8 Infant Mortality (OECD)(Deaths per 1,000): Canada - 4.7,
UK - 3.8, US - 6.0 Maternal Mortality (WHO): Canada - 7, UK - 9, US - 14 Instead of worrying
how we would pay for it, we will have the problem of how to spend all the money we would
save. BTW can you point to a period where too high federal debt hurt the economy? In 1837 the
federal debt as a percentage of GDP was 0%; it was 16% in October of 1929. Both were followed
horrendous depression. It was 121% in 1946 followed by 27 years of Great Prosperity.
Best comment in some time. I work and live too much in the'big flat'. I am a very hard core
Chicago Democratic Liberal from birth, but the distressed towns and small cities are facing
extinction. then what?
@In the know I'm formerly Republican, and female. I'm on the ACA, and while premiums were
going up slowly, they've exploded in the past two years due to Republican sabatoge. They are
certainly no reason to vote for Trump.
@Midwest Then the rich will only be eligible for college. Give me government intervention any
time. I am retired military . Off base in Lewes De a mans hair cut is now 20.00 plus tips.
Just a plain cut. On base with gov intervention it 12.00 . Capitalism you support is only for
the 1 percent the 99 percent never gets ahead. 38 Replies
She has a massive throng of twitter followers, is completely unconcerned with facts, uses
publicity to gain power and seems unwilling to negotiate on her positions. Remind you of
anyone else? 3 Replies
The establishment is trying so hard to spin the progressives push on the issues of Medicare
for All, free state college and university tuition, a livable wage of $15/hr as ponies and
fairy dust and an extreme "socialist" makeover/takeover of America. But from all the polls
that I've seen, these policies are actually quite popular even with a majority of
Republicans. Yes, a majority of Republicans. A Medicare for All would cover everybody,
eliminate health insurance premiums for individuals and businesses ( which by the way are
competing with businesses in other countries that have a single-payer system) and would save
$2 trillion over ten years (Koch bothers funded study). The result would be a healthy and
educated populace. But how to pay for this? Well, we spend over $700 billion on our military
while Russia spends $20 billion and China spends $146 billion, so there seems to be plenty of
money that is already being spent to be redirected back to us without compromising national
security. A Medicare for All system supports a private healthcare system just as it is now,
except instead of giving some insurance company our premium who then skims off a big chunk
for their profit, we pay it to our government who then administers the payments to the
healthcare provider(s). The system is in place and has been for people 65 years and older and
works very well with high satisfaction rates. Just expand it to all. 2 Replies
@Midwest Josh Wrong!!! Tuition's have skyrocketed because for past 35 years States have
slashed support for public universities. The Federal Government took over student loan
business from predatory banks which was a very good thing but unfortunately have kept
interest rates high ... Student loans is a profit center for Federal Government 38 Replies
@Concerned Citizen Go ahead and check the holiday inn in Palestine Texas. It had a small
restaurant in 1978. I was their dishwasher. There was no ford plant nearby. 38 Replies
@Bruce Rozenblit Well put. As Martin Luther King Jr. said: "We all too often have socialism
for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor." 27 Replies
@stuart They used to call it the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party". I was glad when
Thomas Edsall finally got around, in this piece, to mentioning that what is often thought of
as a radical leftist turn today, due to just how far to the right our general political
discussions had gone, was actually pretty much mainstream Democratic policy for much of the
middle 20th century.
@Len Charlap Quite simply Canada's healthcare quality is ranked 16th in the world, while ours
is lower ranked at 23rd. And we pay twice as much. That indicates some funny business going
on.
It is remarkable that "big, bold leftist ideas" include - preserving the historical
relationship between the minimum wage and the cost of living - lowering the cost of college
to something in line with what obtained for most public colleges and universities in the 50s,
60s and 70s and exist in the rest of the Western world today - adapting our existing Medicare
system to deliver universal coverage of the kind generally supported across the political
spectrum in Canada and the UK Democrats should reject the "leftist" label for these ideas and
explain that it is opposition to these mainstream ideas that is, in fact, ideological and
extreme. 2 Replies
@Marc Except that's outright false. Offices are open. All the other new Congress members from
New York are setup and taking care of people. She doesn't care about constituent service. She
revels in the media attention, but isn't getting anything done even in the background. NY has
three Congress members (Lowey, Serrano, Meng) whose under-appreciated work on the
appropriations committee actually helps ensure our region's needs and liberal priorities are
reflected in federal spending. Meanwhile Ocasio Cortez is working on unseating Democrats
incumbents she deems insufficiently leftist e.g. Cuellar, Jeffries. Who needs Republicans
when you have Socialists trying to destroy the Democratic Party.
The NYT should consider getting some columnists who reflect the new (FDR? new?) trends in the
country and in the Democratic party. The old Clinton/Biden/Edsall Republican lite approach --
all in for Wall Street -- is dying. Good riddens. BTW I'm a 65 year old electrical engineer.
1 Reply
You're missing something big here, sir. Capuano was a Clinton superdelegate in 2016 who
declared well before the primaries (like all other Mass superdelegates, save for Warren who
waited until well after the primaries.) Thereby in effect telling constituents that their
vote was irrelevant, as they were willing to override it. Somerville went for Sanders 57% to
42%. Putting party over voters maybe isn't a great idea when 51% of voters in Massachusetts
are registered Unenrolled (Independent) and can vote in primaries. Bit rich to signal that
our votes don't matter, but then expect it later as it maybe actually does matter after all.
Pressley was all in for Clinton, which is of course suspect. But like me, she had only one
vote.
@C Wolfe Wow. Funky Irishman has been, for many months, writing about and presenting
excellent data showing that the US is actually a center-left (if not strongly progressive)
country. I used to present this evidence to Richard Luettgen (where has he gone??) who kept
insisting we are center-right (but never, as was his custom, presented any evidence for
this). your example is the best I've ever seen. I'm a member of a 4000-strong Facebook group,
the "Rational Republicans" (seriously - a local attorney with a decidedly liberal bent
started it and almost beat regressive Patrick McHenry here in Asheville). I've been making
this point on the FB page for the past year and people are stunned when they see the numbers.
I'm going to post your example as well. Excellent!
It's funny to watch people shocked when she makes her proposal. Her ideas are very old and
have worked in the past in various cultures. But the point that she can voice them is because
she can. Her people put her there because she said those things with their approval. She
reflects her community ideals. Just like Steve King.
I'm already tired of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I'm a liberal and Hispanic...its constant
overkill, everybody falling over her, total overexposure. The news media has found their
darling for the moment. Let's see what she accomplishes, what bills she proposes and passes
that is the work to be done not being in the news 24/7.
Until the left figures out that every single one of their most desired Policy Implementations
are only feasible with controlled immigration and secured borders doesn't matter who the
messenger is. Want Single Payer Healthcare? Can't have it and Open Borders too. Want free
College? Can't have it and Open Borders too. Want Guaranteed Basic Income? Cannot have it in
any form without absolutely controlling the Border. So, either you want that influx of new
voters to win elections or you want to see new policy changes that will benefit all
Americans. Pick one and fight for it. You seem to have chosen the new voters. 3 Replies
@Matt Williams But they are extraordinary, relative to their bought and paid for colleagues.
That came first and the media is reporting it. Their authenticity is naive, but it shouldn't
be, and that's the story. It's a glimmer of hope for democracy that may be extinguished -
let's celebrate this light in the darkness, while it lasts.
@Bruce Rozenblit This is. Spot. On. The socialism of: Privatize the profits, socialize the
losses. It's defined American economic and social policy for the last 30+ years and we can
see the results today. 27 Replies
@shstl I agree and as a moderate Democrat, I already feel like an outsider, so imagine what
independents are thinking. AOC stated that she wants to primary Hakeem Jeffries, who is a
moderate. With statements like these, made before spending a day in congress, who needs the
GOP to tear apart the Democratic party? Sanders didn't even win the primary and his
supporters claim the primary was stolen. We lost the house and senate all by ourselves. I
already have AOC fatigue and my rejoice for the blue wave is still there but fading.
The Democratic party was shoved to the right with Bill Clinton's Third Way ideology that made
its focus the same wealthy donor class as the Republicans, while breaking promises to its
former base, the middle and working class. This led to the unchecked capitalism that produced
the Crash of '08, and the subsequent bail out to Wall St. The powers running the DNC - all
Third Way disciples, like Hilary - refused to take up any of these "socialist" causes because
their wealthy donors didn't want to have their escalating wealth diminished. Meanwhile these
Democrats In Republican Clothing were banking on continued support from those they had
abandoned. And they got it for years...until now. Now, finally, we're getting candidates who
represent those abandoned, and who are refusing to hew to the poobah's Third Way agenda. But
the Old Guard is trying to retain their power by labeling these candidates as "socialists",
and "far left". Well, if that's true, then FDR was a "socialist" too. Funny though how all
those "socialists" who voted for FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ enjoyed such capitalistic benefits
like good paying jobs, benefits, home ownership, good education, and the fruits of Big
Guv'mint like the Interstate Highway system, electricity, schools, the Space Program and all
the benefits that produced. It was only when we turned our backs on that success and relied
on unchecked capitalism that most of America began their slide backwards. We need to go left
to go forward.
Why is the media lionizing this ignorant, undisciplined child? She should shut up, sit down,
learn how to listen and learn from her elders in government. She is acting like a college
student, who has no one to hold her accountable for her reckless, stupid behavior. Why does
the media seem to be enamored of her?????
@Michael Lucky for you. I went to the University of Michigan at roughly the same time and it
was no where near that cheap--not even close. And housing? Don't get me started on that. Even
then it took my breath away. 38 Replies
@chele That which you are pleased to call the DLC nonsense originated not with the Clintons,
but with one of the worst presidential defeats the Democratic party ever suffered: the 1972
campaign of George McGovern. That debacle resulted in a second Nixon administration and I
hope that the current trends within the Democratic party do not result in a second Trump
administration.
It is exceeding strange to me that "Conservatives" in the US consider Medicare for all and
universal access to higher education as being radical, pie-in-the-sky, proposals. Here in
Canada we have had universal medicare for a half a century and it has proven itself to be
relatively effective and efficient and has not driven us into penury. As for free access to
education beyond high school, I remember learning a while ago that the US government
discovered that it had earned a return of 700% on the money spent on the GI Bill after WWII
which allowed returning GIs to go to colleges and universities. The problem with American
conservatives is that they see investments in the health, welfare and education of the
citizenry as wasteful expenditures, and wasteful expenditures such as the resources going to
an already bloated military, and of course tax cuts for themselves as investments.
@chele Amen to you! I too am old guy (79) and think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a savior of
the Democratic Party! She is young and has great ideas. I agree with you about the Clintons,
they led the party down a sinkhole. I agree with just about everything I have heard
Alexandria espouse. She is refreshing. Glad she is kicking the butts of those old guard
Democrats that have fossilized in place--they are dinosaurs. 12 Replies
@Tracy Rupp The problem with blaming a group based on demographics, rather than behavior or
ideology, is that you are likely to be disappointed. There are a lot of people who are not
old white men who are just as seduced by money, power, and local privilege as was the old
guard. Feminists writing letters to condemn a male student who made charges of being sexually
harassed by his female professor; African American activists who refuse to reject the
antisemitism of charismatic cult leaders. Human beings in charge will be flawed, regardless
of their race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. As the balance of power changes hands,
corruption too will become more diverse. 6 Replies
Money is the mother's milk of politics, so let me comment on "many of whom did not want the
Democrats to nominate a candidate with deep ties to party regulars and to the major donor
community." Include me. Because the major donor community is Charles E Schumer, Leader
Democrats, House Top Contributors, 1989 - 2018 1 Goldman Sachs 2 Citigroup Inc 3 Paul, Weiss
et al 4 JPMorgan Chase & Co 5 Credit Suisse Group That is Wall Street Nancy Pelosi,
leader Democrats, House Top Contributors, 2017 - 2018 1 Facebook Inc 2 Alphabet Inc (Google)
2 Salesforce.com 4 University of California 5 Intel Corp $13,035 That is Silicon Valley . The
U of CA should spent its money on students What is the interest of these donors ? For Wall
Street, it is maximizing profits by suppressing wages, outsourcing to of enterprises it owns
to low wage countries, and immigration of people willing to work for less For Silicon Valley
it is Mining your data, violating your privacy, and immigration of people willing to work for
less via H1B To win general (not primary) elections you need large amounts of money. At in
return for this money, you need to take care of your donors, lest you find you without money
in the next election Until the Democratic Party frees itself of this system, it will spout
liberal rhetoric, but do little to help average Americans As Sanders showed, it can do so,
running on small donations. DNC, eye on frightened donors, killed his attempt. 1 Reply
"The most active wing of the Democratic Party -- the roughly 20 percent of the party's
electorate that votes in primaries and wields disproportionate influence over which issues
get prioritized -- has moved decisively to the left." Yet it seems that you feel that the
party should ignore them and move to the center right in order to capture suburban Republican
women, who will revert back to the Republican party as soon as (and if) it regains something
resembling sanity. Do you seriously think that its worth jettisoning what you describe as
"the most active wing of the party" for that? 2 Replies
@David G. See Norway, Denmark, Germany, England and Finland. Citizens have jobs and health
care; education is affordable and subsidized. Not all young people attend universities; many
go to vocational schools which prepare them for good jobs. We could do the same. 27 Replies
@Midwest Josh That is so NOT true Midwest Josh. The unattainable loans and interest problems
are because the private sector has been allowed into the student loan game. The government
should be the underwriter for all student loan programs unless individual schools offer
specialized lending programs. Whenever the government privatizes anything the real abuse
starts and the little guy gets hurt. 38 Replies
@Bruce Rozenblit, at the end of a long line of commenters, I add my congratulations for a
well-articulated overview of our political dilemma. Both "trickle-down"economics and
"neo-liberalism" have brought us to this pass, giving both Democrats and Republicans a way of
rewarding their corporate masters. I believe both Cinton and Obama believed they could find a
balance between the corporate agenda and a secure society. We see with hindsight how this has
hailed to materialize, and are rightly seeking a more equitable system – one that
addresses the common sense needs of all of us. I, for one, am overjoyed that the younger
generation has found its voice, and has a cause to support. My recollection of demonstrating
against the Viet Nam war (and the draft), marching for civil rights, and even trying to
promote the (then largely inchoate) women's rights movement, still evokes a passionate
nostalgia. We have witnessed an entire generation that lacked passion for any cause beyond
their individual desires. It's good to have young men and women reminding us of our values,
our aspirations, and our power as citizens. As the bumper sticker says, "If you think
education is expensive – try ignorance." Thanks again for a fine post. 27 Replies
@Quiet Waiting That was FIFTY YEARS AGO. People who fought in the Spanish-American War were
still casting ballots, for heaven's sake. McGovern has been used by Third Way apologists as a
cautionary tale to provide cover for doing what they clearly wanted to do anyway. The other
reality is that the McGovern/Nixon race took place in a time when there was broad consensus
that many of the social programs Republicans are now salivating over privatizing weren't
going anywhere. 12 Replies
Abolishing ICE is tantamount to having open borders. No modern country can allow all people
who are able to get to its borders to just move in, and take advantage of its government
services. If a country were to start offering Medicare for All, no or reduced college
tuition, a universal jobs guarantee, a $15 minimum wage, and wage subsidies to the entire
bottom half through an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, paid maternity/paternity
leave, and free child care, it would need tax-payers to support these plans. It could not
afford to support all of the poor, uneducated migrants who have been illegally crossing our
borders, let alone all of those who would run here if ICE were to be abolished. Look at
Canada which has more of a social safety net than is offered in our country. It has
practically no illegal immigrants. (A long term illegal immigrant had to sue for the
government to pay for her extensive medical care, and the court decisions appear to have
limited government payment of her medical bills just to her and not to other illegal
migrants.) It picks the vast majority of its legal immigrants on a merit system that
prioritizes those who would contribute a special needed skill to the Canadian economy, who
are fluent in English and/or French, and who could easily assimilate. Thus, most of Canada's
immigrants start paying hefty taxes as soon as they move to Canada, helping to support the
country's social safety net. 1 Reply
@Samuel To pay for universal health care you capture all the money currently being spent for
the health care system. That includes all the employer insurance premiums, VA medical care
costs, military medical costs, all out-of-pocket expenses, everything. That provides plenty
of money for our health care needs as exemplified by the costs in other advanced countries
with better systems. Also re-activate parts of the ACA that were designed to control and
reduce costs but that have gone unfunded. Reduce hospital and hospital administration costs,
which are exorbitant and provide little real health care benefit. There will be plenty of
funds for actual provider salaries (physicians, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, etc). 10
Replies
You have to accept some of this polling data with a grain of salt. Most of the population has
no idea what "moderate," "slightly liberal," or extremely liberal mean. These tend to be
labels that signify how closely people feel attached to other people on the left side of the
ideological spectrum. The same is true, btw, of people on the right. The odd thing is that if
you ask Trump voters about the economic policies they favor, they generally agree that social
security ought to be expanded, that the government has an obligation to see that everyone has
medical care, that taxes on the rich should be higher and that we ought to be spending more
money, not less on education. Where you see a divergence is on issues tightly aligned with
Trump and on matters that touch on racial resentment. Trump voters do not favor cuts in
spending on the poor, though they do support cuts in "welfare." The moral of the story is
that a strategic Democratic politician who can speak to these Trump voters on a policy level
or at the level of values -- I'm thinking Sharrod Brown -- may be able to win in 2020 with a
landslide.
I saw AOC on the Colbert Show recently and one of her first statements was in regards to
wearing red nail polish. I turned it off. Enough of the red lipstick as well. Please. Next
she'll discuss large hoop earrings. 1 Reply
O'Cortez is a "Fantasy Socialist. She says the stupidest and most outlandish things so the
media puts a microphone in front of her face. She hates when folks fact check her because
nothing she is saying adds up. O'Cortez has all of the same "spread the wealth" tendencies as
the previous president who was much more cunning and clever at hiding his true Socialist
self.
@chele Right on. I expect there is a very large contingent of us. It is disheartening to be
associated by age and ethnicity with the corporatist financial elite power mongers who
control both parties and the media. But we can still continue vote the right way and spread
the word to fight corruption and corporatism. Eschew New Democrats like ORourke. The first
commitment to find out about is the commitment to restore democracy and cut off the power of
the financial elite in politics. All the other liberal sounding stuff is a lie if that first
commitment is not there. Because none of it will happen while the financial elite are
controlling votes. There will always be enough defectors against, for example, the mainstream
support for medicare for all national health care to keep it from happening if New Democrats
aren't understood as the republican lite fifth column corrupters they really are. 12 Replies
Chock full of very interesting data, but we tend to to believe Zeitz's conclusion that Dems
are just returning to their roots, following the spectacular 2008 failures that saw no
prosecutions - in starkest contrast to the S&L failure and boatload of bankers charged:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html
To the extent this primary voter data is replicated across the country in Dem primaries, and
not just the AOC and Ayana Pressley races, we could be convinced some massive swing is
occurring in Dem primary results. Until then, we tend to believe that the cycle of 30-50
House seats which swing back and forth as Dem or GOP from time to time (not the exact same
30-50 districts each cycle, but about 30-50 in total per election cycle or two) is a
continuation of a long-term voting trend. Unpacking the egregious GOP'er gerrymandering, as
is the goal of Eric Holder and Barack Obama: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/politics/voting-gerrymander-elections.html
which has blunted Dem voter effects, will be of far more consequence - get ready !
@Michael Gig'em dude. Class of '88, and I feel the same way. And as far as I can tell, the
increase has been almost totally because state support has fallen in order to fund tax cuts
for the people, like us, who got the free education. Who says you can't have your cake and
eat it too? You just have to raid everyone else's plate. 38 Replies
I understand the Andy Warhol concept of everyone having 15 minutes of fame. But it's absurd
that AOC's 15 minutes of fame coincide with her first 15 minutes in office.
Ocasio-Cortez and the rest haven't been in Congress a month. Get back to me when anyone of
them even gets a bill passed naming a Post Office. Until the, maybe you ought to learn your
jobs?
@In the know, Your party invented the fundamental ACA program. It was the brainchild of the
Heritage Foundation that started this fiasco that you'd like to blame on Dems. Also, you
simply cannot argue that the Republicans attempted to implement the program in good faith.
They have done everything they can to sabotage it. In the end, Republicans don't want people
to have affordable health care. It doesn't fit their "family-unfriendly" philosophy.
Furthermore, the only real business-friendly ideas Republicans embrace are a) eliminate
taxes, b) remove regulations, c) pay employees nothing. If you as a woman believe these are
notions that strengthen you or your family, I'm at a total loss in understanding your
reasoning.
@Matt Williams - You are ignoring the many statistics in the article that apply to the
Democratic party as a whole. For example: "From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of Democrats who
said the government should create "a way for immigrants already here illegally to become
citizens if the meet certain requirements" grew from 29 to 51 percent, while the share who
said "there should be better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws"
fell from 21 to 5 percent." There are many others.
"...as millennials and minorities become an ever-larger proportion of the party, it will have
a natural constituency..." I would counter that as they start to actually pay taxes then the
millennials will adopt the standard liberal plaint, 'raise the taxes on everybody except me'
@D I Shaw I think the precise point is that would much easier to do A,B, and C if there were
universal health care, job guarantees, and clean water to drink. It is much easier to make
good long-term decisions when you aren't kept in a state of perpetual desperation.
These 'new' ideas are not new, nor are they 'progressive democrats'', nor are they even the
democratic party's per se. More importantly, the 'issue', for which no one has come up with a
solution, is the same -- how are we going to pay for this all? The GAO reported in '16 that
Sander's proposal for payment was completely unsustainable. Similarly, Cortez's plan for a
tax rate of 70% of earnings (not capital gains) over $10mm per annum does not come close to
funding 'medicare for all', 'free collage/trade school', and 'the New Green Deal'. Our
military is a 'jobs program' rooted in certain state's economy -- it is going to be very
difficult to substantially reduce those expenditures any time soon. The purpose of government
is governance -- what politician is going to have the integrity and cujones to tell the
American people that we need these 'liberal' policies, but that every single one of us is
going to have to contribute, even those at the far lower income strata? Are we all willing to
work longer in life and live in much smaller houses/apartments to do what is necessary? If
the answer is yes, then and only then can any of us claim the moral high ground. Until then,
it's just empty rhetoric for political gain and personal Aggrandizement of so-called
progressives. 5 Replies
@chele I'm an "elder millennial" in my 30s. The first US election I really paid attention to
was in 2000. Remember how all of the Democrats would gripe about, "oh I really *like* Nader,
but the Green Party candidate is never going to win..." It's a party in dire straights when
the ideological base doesn't even particularly love its candidates on the issues. Repeat in
2004 with Kerry. Obama managed to win based on charisma and the nation's collective disgust
with the neocons, but then we did it again with Hillary. 12 Replies
Sorry libs, but with the exception of the Left Coast, and Manhattan, there is not alot of
attention given AOC and her silly class warfare 70% tax nonsense, that goes with the Dem/Lib
territory--nothing new or exciting with her. Being a certain ethnicity or gender is not
exciting or inherently "good" as Progressives attempt to convince others. Identity politics
is nonsense. When she does something of merit, not simply engage in publicity stunts and
class warfare nonsense then maybe she will get some attention outside of Lib/Wacko world.
"With all the attention that is being paid to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley,
Rashida Tlaib" Other than these opinion pages and the Lib coasts, not so much. 2 Replies
Since Reagan there has been a steady drumbeat to the right and far-right policies. We've
lived so long in this bubble that we've normalized these For-the-Rich policies as centrist.
So I don't accept the writer's premise that the Democratic party is moving to a radical left.
The Democratic party is simply embracing pro middle class policies that were once the norm
between 1935-1979. And I welcome the shift of the pendulum. 1 Reply
@Giacomo That's right, this country can afford trillions for the Pentagon system--the
military-industrial complex, to coin a phrase--and foolishly criminal wars, but it can't
afford national health insurance, something that some industrialized countries have had since
the late 19th century. Anybody who thinks these ideas are "radical" or "leftist" clearly
understands nothing about politics.
The shift claimed by Mr. Edsall among democratic voters who claim to be liberal or
progressive is more illusion than reality. With President Obama more democrats are willing
and indeed proud that our party represents the cutting edge principle that we protect the
needs and interests of those struggling to find a place in our society. For a long time
Democrats bought into the notion that the word liberal was some how shameful. But now with
the machinations of a McConnell and Trump it becomes obvious that Democratic principles of
justice for all and fighting for economic equality are not outside ideas, but actually
central to the growth of our country. No longer will we kow tow to a false stilted opinion,
but stand up proudly for what we believe and fight for.
AOC behaves like a sanctimonious know-it-all teenager....entertaining for about 5 minutes,
then just plain annoying and tiresome. Does not bode well for the Democratic Party,...
Actually, people like AOC or Bernie aren't that far left at all. Internationally, they'd be
considered pretty centrist. They're simply seen as "far left" because the Overton window in
DC is far to the right. Even domestically, policies like universal healthcare and a living
wage enjoy solid majority support, so they're perfectly mainstream
I understand what you are saying, but please remember- half of this country thinks- rightly
or wrongly- that AOC and many of her ideals are unobtainable and socialist. Whether they are
or are not is NOT the point. We need ideas that are palatable to the mainstream, average
American- not just those of us on the liberal wings. And I AM one of those. Since you bring
up Bernie- how well did that work out? The country isn't ready for those ideas. And rightly
or wrongly, pursuing them at all cost will end up winning Trump the next election.
@Jose Pieste Well here in Australia its 10 minute waits for appointments made on the same
day. I have MS and see my specialist without a problem. And the government through the PBS
prescription benefit scheme pays $78 of my $80 daily tablets. We are not as phenomenally
wealthy a country as the USA and we mange it with universal health care. I pay about $30
Australian for each doctor's visit and sometimes with bulk billing that is free too. You
reflect a uniquely American attitude about social services that is not reflective of what is
done in other modern democracies. I really do feel for you my friend and for all Americans
who have been comprehensively hoodwinked by the "can't afford it" myth. You can pay for
trillion dollar tax cuts for people who don't need it. Honestly mate - you have been conned.
@Samuel Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has sponsored or co-sponsored 18 bills in the House, including
original co-sponsor with Rep. Pressley of H.R.678 -- 116th Congress (2019-2020) To provide
back pay to low-wage contractor employees, and for other purposes. 10 Replies
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, as is well documented here and throughout world media, prefers spotlights
and baffling interviews to opening her district office and serving her electorate. As with
every other media creation, the shiny star that it has made of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will fade
soon. The arc of her House career will as well. 4 Replies
"What pundits today decry as a radical turn in Democratic policy and politics actually finds
its antecedents in 1944." This quote in the article should have been the lede. Instead, it
appears 66 paragraphs into the article. What is now being called "left" used to be called
"center." It used to be called the values and the core of the Democratic party.
@Derek Flint There was a reason for the DLC's decision to be more center left. The Democrats
were losing and this gave them a chance to win, which they did with Clinton, almost Gore, and
Obama. 12 Replies
@Jason A. Representatives should represent their constituents. For example, if most of the
voters one represents want Medicare, perhaps that's a sign that one should reconsider their
anti-Medicare views. And think about why constituents want Medicare.
The leftward swing of the Democrats is in direct proportion to the rightward swing of the
Republicans and a gut reaction to the GOP's failure to do anything constructive while in
power -- i.e. failure to replace Obamacare with Trump's promise of "cheaper and better;"
failure to repair our crumbling infrastructure, and yet another failed attempt at
trickle-down economics by robbing the U.S. Treasury with a massive tax cut for the rich that
provided absolutely no benefits for the middle class and the poor. As always, what the
Republicans destroy the Democrats will have to fix.
@Quiet Waiting, the DLC was officially formed after Mondale's loss, in '85. the DLC's main
position is that economic populism is not politically feasible. But I don't recall either
McGovern or Mondale's losses being attributed to being too pro-worker, too pro-regulation of
capitalism, or making tax rates progressive again. Further, the idea that economic populism
has no political value was just disproved by a demagogue took advantage of it to get elected.
The RP's mid-term losses and other data points show that people in the middle are realizing
Trump's not really a populist. Those economic Trump voters, some of whom voted for Obama
twice, are up for grabs. Why would you be afraid that the DP's shift to raising taxes on the
wealthy and being pro-worker will result in a Trump victory? 12 Replies
@Michael The cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security has increased as a fraction of
tax receipts. Twice the as many people go to college as when you went, so the subsidies are
spread more thinly. Colleges have more bureaucrats than professors because of multiple
mandates regarding sex, race, income, sexual preference, etc. People have not been willing to
see taxes raised, so things like college subsidies get squeezed. The US decided in the 1940s
that the only way to avoid a repeat of WW1 and WW2 was to provide a security blanket for
Western Europe and Japan (and really, the world), and prevent military buildups in either
region while encouraging economic development. The world is as a result more peaceful,
prosperous, and free than ever in human history, despite "its continuous wars" as you put it.
For the US to pull back would endanger the stability that gave us this peace and prosperity,
but Trump is with you all the way on that one, so it must be a good idea. Liberal reforms
will mean tax increases, especially Medicare for all, but also more college subsidies, which
largely benefit the middle class and up. Liberal reformers need to convince the public to
send more money to the IRS, for which there is no evident support. Let's not confuse
opposition to Trump with a liberal groundswell. 38 Replies
Why do Political Commentators and Analysts keep operating under the delusion that people vote
their skin colour ? People vote their economic interests. I am all in favour of National
Health Care Letting Immigrants who have not committed a crime stay and become citizens. But I
am also in favour of stricter Border Control as I feel our duty is to the poor citizens of
America. Send Economic aid to poorer countries, help them establish just governments. As for
Ocasio-Cortez, she is aiming too high and has too many lies about her past to go much higher.
The meanings of these labels--liberal, left, center, conservative--, and of the spectrum
along which they supposedly lie, changes year to year, and most pundits and politicians seem
to use them to suit their own purposes. When you realize that a significant group of people
voted for Obama and then for Trump, you realize how radically the politics of the moment can
redefine the terms. The Democrats could create a narrative that unites the interests of all
economically disadvantaged people, including white people. Doing so would create a broad
majority and win elections, but it would arouse the fury of the oligarchs, who will demonize
them as "socialists." But as Obamacare proved, if actually you do something that helps people
across the board even the Republicans and the media will have a hard time convincing people
that they are oppressed, for example, by access to health insurance. For the oligarchs, as
for the Republicans, success depends on creating a narrative that pits the middle class
against the poor. In its current, most vulgar form, this includes pitting disadvantaged white
people against all the rest, but the Republicans have an advantage in that their party is
united behind the narrative. Democratic politicians may be united against Trump, but that
means nothing. The challenge will be uniting the politicians who run on economic justice with
the establishment Democrats who have succeeded by hiding their economic conservativism behind
identity politics.
I applaude AOC. I am 72 white male. I have been waiting for someone like AOC to emerge. I
wish her the best and will work for her positions and re-elections and ultimate ambitions.
She is a great leader, teacher, learner, whip smart, and should not be taken likely. Go for
it AOC! Realize your full potential.
Someone as thoroughly imbedded in the establishment as this Op-Ed writer is necessarily going
to need to be educated on what the political center of gravity really is. The Democrats have
shifted RIGHT over the past few decades. Under Bill Clinton and Pelosi, Schumer, Feinstein
and Obama. They are not left, not center-left, not center, but instead center-right. They
have pursued a center-right agenda that does not engage with the rigged economy or widening
inequality, or inadequate pay, or monopolist abuse of power, or adequate regulation and
punishment of corporate crime. They have enthusiastically embraced our deeply stupid wars of
choice, and wasted trillions that could have been put to productive use at home. The new
generation of progressive Democrats seek to move the debate BACK TO THE CENTER or Center-Left
if you will. Not the Left or Far-Left. They want to address the issues the current Democrat
Establishment have ignored or exacerbated, because they are in essence, the same rarified
rich as the lobbyists and donors they mingle with. The issues that affect MOST of us, but not
the FEW of them. The endgame of this shift is that Obama engineered a pseudo-recovery that
saw the very rich recover their gains, but the poor become MORE impoverished. Such is the
rigged economy, 21st Century style. Things have to change, the old guard have to be neutered.
Too much wealth and power is concentrated in too few hands, and it's too detrimental to our
pseudo-democracy.
This is the difference between R & D's. OAC may get her support from well-to-do, educated
whites, but her platform focuses on those left behind. Even her green revolution will provide
jobs for those less well off. R's, on the other hand, vote only for candidates that further
their selfish interests.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and her legislative cohorts are a much needed breath of fresh, progressive
air for the U.S. Congress. And I say that as someone going on age 70 who was raised and
educated in the conservative Deep South. Go left, young people!
@Bruce Rozenblit Unfortunately, the hot button on fox is the word socialism. so undo the
negative press there and have a chance of implementing fairer policies. 27 Replies
@Samuel "It's easy to go to a rooftop- or a twitter account- and yell "health care and
education for all!'" Its not easy to get anyone to listen. The moral impetus precedes the
"actual plans," which come out of the legislative process, Why would you be against this
getting attention?Unless, of course, you oppose health care and education for all. 10 Replies
The further the Democrats go Left with all the cultural politics including white people
bashing and calling Men toxic, the further I am heading towards the right. I personally can't
stand what the Democratic Party has turned into. We'll see who wins in 2020. I think a lot of
people forget what happens in mid term elections. People vote for change and then, after
seeing what they wrought, switch back.
I am a old white male geezer and lifelong liberal living in complete voter disenfranchisement
in Florida due to gerrymandering, voter suppression and rigged election machines (how else
does one explain over 30,000 votes in Broward County that failed to register a preference for
the Senate or Governor in a race where the Republican squeaked in by recount?). I am pleased
to finally see the party moving away from corporatist and quisling centrists to take on
issues of critical import for the economy, the environment and the literal health of the
nation. As "moderate" Republicans come to a cognitive realization that they too are victims
of the fascist oligarch billionaire agenda to end democracy; they too will move to the left.
So, I for one am not going to worry an iota about this hand-wringing over something akin to
revolution and instead welome what amounts to the return of my fellow New Deal Democrats.
Too much attention here to this new cohort of self important attention seekers presenting as
civil servants. Not one of them has had any legislative experience in their lives how can
they do all they say they want. They have no grasp of policy economics and politics. Are they
too good to recall the wise words of Sam Rayburn - "Those who go along get along" or is that
too quaint outdated and patriarchal for them? Why dont journalists and other pols call them
out. Example, AOC calls for 70% marginal tax rate - saying we had it before, ha ha. Yes but
only when defense spending as percent of gdp was 20-40 percent, in the depth of WW2 and the
cold war, life and death struggles - it is now 5%, no one has the stomach for those rates
now, and no need for them to boot. Free school, free healthcare, viva la stat! yeah ok who
will pay for it? Lots of ideas no plans, flash in the pan is what it is, it will die down
then settle in for a long winter.
There is a difference between posturing as a leader and actually leading. So, there is
another, and very direct, way for real Americans to end the shutdown: Recall petitions. With
very little money, why not target Mitch McConnell. Laid off federal workers could go
door-to-door in Kentucky. The message, not just to the Senate majority leader, would be
powerful. And this need not be limited. There are some easy targets among GOP senators.
Perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can achieve greater national standing with a clipboard and pen down
on the hustings.
All this fuss over a bright young person who stopped complaining and ran for office. She has
a platform. Time will tell how effective she will be. Right now, she's connecting to those
young and old who believe we can do better. If you had a choice who would you rather share a
beer with?A Trump supporter who has no interest beyond building an ineffective wall or an
Ocasio-Cortez supporter, full of ideas, some fanciful, some interesting but most off all
energy and light versus fear and hate?
I'm a liberal Democrat and I remain very skeptical regarding the platforms of these new
members of Congress. Youthful exuberance is admirable, but it's not sufficient to address
complicated issues related to fairness. Fairness does not always mean equity of wealth. Some
people have more because they have worked more, worked longer, or took more risks with their
money. Should the nurse who worked three jobs to make $150,000/year be made to sacrifice a
significant portion for those who chose to work less? Such an anecdotal question may seem
naive, but these are the kinds of questions asked by regular Americans who often value social
programs, but also value fairness. The claim that only some tiny fraction of the 1% will bear
the cost of new programs and will alone suffer increased taxation is simply untrue, and those
who are making this claim know it. This tiny group of wealthy knows how to hide its money
off-shore and in other ways, as documented in the Times last year. Everyone knows the
low-lying fruit for increased taxation is the upper middle class: Those who work hard and
save hard and are nowhere near the top of the wealth pyramid. It's that nurse with the three
jobs, or the small business owner who now clears $200,000 a year, or the pair of teachers
who, after 25 years of teaching, now bring home $150,000 combined. Those are the targets of
the proposed "new" taxes. Don't believe the hype. I'm a liberal, and I know what's up with
these people. 4 Replies
Ocasio-Cortez represents the success of a progressive in ousting a white liberal in a safely
Democratic district. While interesting, that doesn't provide much of a blueprint for winning
in 2020 in districts and states that voted for Trump. As noted elsewhere in this newspaper,
of the roughly 60 new Democrats in Congress elected in 2018, two-thirds, were pragmatic
moderates that flipped Republican seats. Progressives were notably less successful in
flipping Republican seats.
Just keep in mind that what the author deems "radical" ideas are considered mainstream in the
rest of the developed world. We are an extreme outlier in lacking some form of universal
health care, for example. Also, while the NYT clearly saw Bernie's 2016 campaign as
shockingly radical, the very people Edsall says we must court were wild about Bernie. His
message about income inequality resonates with anyone living paycheck to paycheck and the
only thing "radical" about it is that he said the truth out loud about the effects of
unbridled capitalism. The neoliberal types that the NYT embraces are the milquetoast people
who attract a rather small group of voters, so, I am not too eager to accept his analysis. I
fully expect the Times to back Gillibrand and Biden, maybe even that other corporatist,
Booker. They don't scare the moneyed class.
The Dems have been drifting to the right for decades, egged on by pundits who keep telling
them to move to the center. Do the math: moving to the center just moves the center to the
right. Frankly, Nixon was more liberal than most of today's Dems. A move to the left is long
overdue.
The rumblings in the Democratic party may represent a realization that WE THE PEOPLE deserve
a bigger slice of the pie. Democrats such as Sanders, Warren and AOC are tapping into a
reservoir of voters who have been excluded from the American Dream by design. The new message
seems to be "fairness". I think that translates into government which does the most good for
the greatest number of people. Candidates who embody that principle will be the new leaders.
Ignore at your peril.
@Quiet Waiting: if voters believe republicans are helping them economically then follow them
off the cliff. Hopefully enough voters will try a more humane form of capitalism. 12 Replies
Ms Ocasio Cortez is a partial illustration of Reagan's dictum that "The trouble with our
liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so". In
the case of AOC she is not only very ignorant but she believes many things that are actually
not true. For her to actually believe that the "world will end in 12 years" and
simultaneously believe that, even if true, Congress could change this awful fact is so
breathtakingly ignorant one hardly knows where to start.
Maybe it's worth considering that a lot of those spooky millennials, the stuff of campfire
scare stories, themselves grew up in the suburbs. They are the children of privilege who have
matured into a world that is far less secure and promising than that of their swing-voter
soccer moms. Health care, student debt, secure retirement, and the ability to support a
family are serious concerns for them. And don't even get me started on climate change and the
fossil fuel world's stranglehold on our polity.
@dudley thompson, if you are one of those elite moderate liberals against the "lefties"
concern about college and medical costs, protections for workers and the environment, and
progressive taxation, then in the end getting your vote isn't worth sacrificing the votes of
all the other people who do care about those things. Your "moderate" way may calm those swing
voters who fear change, and allow them to vote for the Democrat, but it also demoralizes and
disappoints the much larger group of potential Democratic voters that craves change.
@Jessica Summerfield ..."article described AOC as a communist." And I saw an article describe
Ross Douthat as a "columnist"... equally misleading. Will the calumny never cease? 27 Replies
Thomas, this "left" used to be known as the middle. A commitment to housing instead of an
acceptance of homelessness. Dignity. A tax system designed to tax wealthy people, not, as we
have now, a tax system designed to tax the middle class and poor. Can we all just take a look
at what is being promoted -- look at what AOC is proposing compared to Eisenhower era tax
rates. We have lurched right so that event center-right is now considered left.
Rage is the political fuel that fires up the Left. Rage also is the source of some very bad
ideas. Having bad ideas is the reason people don't vote for a political party in a
presidential election. The democrats are now the party of socialism, open borders, very high
taxes, anti-religious bigotry, abolishment of free speech, rewriting the constitution,
stuffing the Supreme Court, impeachment of the President, and being intolerance of other
views. They have also alienated 64 million Americans by calling them deplorables, racist and
a host of other derogatory terms. Not a good strategy to win over voters in swing states.
They also have attacked all men and white men in particular. They think masculinity is toxic
and that gender is not biological but what a person believes themselves to be (noticed that I
used the plural pronoun?). So far a long list of bad ideas. Let's see how it plays out in
2020. 1 Reply
We need to be careful what we refer to as left. Is the concept that we have access to
affordable housing, healthcare, and decent jobs really a position of the far left? Not
really. The 1944 progressives saw access to basic life as a right of all people. This is why
young educated progressives support policies that encourage success within the unregulated
capitalist economy that has been created over the last 40 years. The evidence illustrates
that federal and state governments need to help people survive, otherwise we are looking at
massive amounts of inequality that affect the economy and ultimately affect the very people,
the extremely rich, who support deregulation.
@Bruce Rozenblit The Republicans great skill has been selling lies to the socially
conservative to get their greedy financial agenda through. They have never cared about their
voters other than how best to spin their rhetoric. 27 Replies
Moving left takes a twitter account, a quixotic mentality and the word free. Its sedition
arousing rhetoric is blinkered by the lack of a viable strategy to support and move it
forward. Liberals thrive on the free media attention which feeds their rancor and aplomb.
Liberals are the infants of the Democratic Party. They're young, cute and full of amusing
antics. They have an idyllic view of what the world can be but without efficacy. When they
are challenged, or don't get enough attention, they revert to petulance. As all mammals do,
most liberals eventually grow up to join the Democratic median. Those that don't become the
party regalers brought out when the base needs energized. They grow old and fade away,
remembered only for their flamboyance and dystopian view of the world. The Democratic Party
has never been more fractured since its inception. With close to thirty potential candidates
for President, it is going to take a coalition within their party in order to put forth a
viable nominee. Then the party infighting will commence which will lead the party into
defeat. Democrats must focus on a untied party platform which is viable and will produce
results for the American people. Enough of the loquacious hyperbole and misandrous language;
it's time to stop reacting and start leading.
If it looks like the Democrats are moving strongly to the left, it's because they have
stopped chasing the GOP over the cliff in a vain effort to meet them in some mythical middle.
That's why the gap is widening; Republicans have not slowed in their headlong rush to
disaster. In truth it is the Republican Party and its messaging machine that has been doing
its best to drag America to the extreme right by controlling the narrative and broadcasting
talking points picked up and amplified by the Mainstream Media. The Mainstream Media has its
own issues. Increasingly consolidated under corporate ownership into fewer and fewer hands,
it has developed a reflex aversion to anything that looks too 'left' and a suspicion of
anything that looks progressive. The desperate battle for eyeballs in a fragmenting market
has also taken a toll; deep journalism or reporting that risks alienating any part of the
shrinking audience for traditional news is anathema to the bean counters who have
financialized everything. Deliberate intimidation by the right has also taken a toll.
Republicans have no answers; Democrats do - and that's the gist of it. The real challenge is
to prevail against a party that has embraced disinformation, the politics of resentment and
destruction - and the Mainstream Media that has failed to call them out on it.
We are looking at a future Speaker of the House. Watch out Republicans, this woman is not
afraid of you white, stodgy, misogynistic and racist haters. Your party, once a viable and
caring party, is dead.
The Republican Party used to be a moderate political party that was fully capable of
governing. Over the years, the right wing of the party assumed control and they became a
radically conservative party that basically hated government and did nothing for the benefit
of average Americans. As a result, many voters came to believe that a more liberal stance was
preferred to what the Republicans had become. Basically, the Republican Party veered sharply
to the right and went off and left a lot of their earlier supporters, like me.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect foil to the Trump twitter fest we've been subjected
to for the past 2 years. However, enough of the tit for tat -- I would still like to see the
freshman representative put forth some legislation for a vote.
In terms of policies, this "sharp shift to the left" represents a return to the New Deal and
the Great Society and a renewed commitment to civil rights. It is a return to things we never
should have turned away from.
@Tracy Rupp Don't be so quick to condemn. The really old white men of today defeated Germany
and Japan. Then those same old white men went into Korea and then Vietnam. Ok so maybe you
have a point.
Shifted to the LEFT? After decades of movement to the Right, by the GOP and even assisted by
Dems such as the Clintons, etc., this political movement is merely a correction, not a
radical shift as your article contends.
Just as the reader comments from yesterday's opinion piece on the Covington School story by
David Brooks reveal rampant confirmation bias, the comments here reveal an equally relevant
truth: nobody, but nobody, eats their own like the left. The "Down With Us" culture in full
effect.
I am confused about what message, what issues resonate with the "moderate" people who are
disaffected from the liberal message of the Democrats on the left. What policies would bring
them to vote Democratic, what is it about health care for all, a living wage and opening the
voting process to all people are they opposed to. Is it policy or message that has them
wavering?
@dudley thompson Do you consider Eisenhower leftist? (highest tax rates ever). How about
Nixon? (established the EPA). We have lurched so far right in this country that the middle
looks left. I'm sick of the labels -- listen to what these leaders are actually proposing. If
you don't understand how the marginal tax rate works, look it up. If you don't realize we
once didn't accept mass homelessness and mass incarceration as a fact of life in America,
learn some history. We're living in a myopic, distorted not-so-fun-house where up is down and
center is left. We need to look with fresh eyes and ask what our communal values are and what
America stands for. 5 Replies
Here is a thought I would like to share with the New York Times: Thomas Edsall's article is
excellent. The corollary I draw from it that the paper that projects itself as the voice of
the liberals in this county has to understand that it has fallen behind times. If the
statistics and commentary accompanying it is a criteria to consider, The Times should move to
a more progressive editorial platform. The sooner, the better! The support given by this
paper to Hillary Rodham Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 is unforgivable. The attitude
exhibited towards Elizabeth Warren is hardy different. This has to change if you want to keep
your relevance unless you believe publishing Edsall's essay is just part of your "diversity"
policy. What the followers of AOC and other progressives are clamoring for are very basic
human needs that have been delivered in affluent (and not so affluent) societies all over the
globe. No need to name those countries, by now the list is well known. What do we need
delivered: Universal Healthcare, Free Public Education K through College, No Citizens United,
Total Campaign Finance Reform, Regulation of Wall Street, Regulation of Pharma, Regulation of
Big Tech, Gender Equality, 21st Century Infrastructure. All paid for by cutting the Military
and Defense Budget Waste (cf Charlie Grassley, a buddy of Karl Marx) and taxing the top
percent at levels AOC cites and Professors Suez and Zucman concur with in their Times OpEd.
Democrats need to win elections first. Progressive ideas may have support on the coasts and
cities but fall flat in red states where there is still widespread dislike for immigrants and
minorities and strong opposition to "having my hard-earned tax money supporting free stuff
for the undeserving who can't/won't take care of themselves." Because the Electoral College
gives red states disproportionate representation the Democrats must win some red states to
win a presidential election. Running on a strong progressive platform won't work in those
Republican-majority states. What Democrats need is a "Trojan Horse" candidate. Someone who
can win with a moderate message that has broad appeal across the entire country but who will
support and enact a strong progressive agenda once he/she is elected. And on a local election
level, Democrats need to field candidates whose message is appropriate for their local
constituency -- progressive in liberal states, more moderate in conservative areas. Winning
elections comes first. Let's do what it takes to win and not let our progressive wish list
blind us to the importance of winning elections.
@Westchester Guy: Leftists want amnesty and, eventually, open borders. This is utterly and
totally incompatible with their push for "free" college, universal health care, and so forth.
The fiscal infeasibility is so obvious that one could only believe in these coexisting
policies if they were blinded by something, like Trump hatred, or just plain dishonest. The
"leftist" label for the new Democrat party is entirely appropriate. You also have your own
bigots to counter Trump. The difference is that their bigotry is sanctioned by most of the
mainstream media.
Has AOC or any other liberal offered any feasible policy to improve the lives of the people
they claim to help? Just take a good hard look at NYC where AOC is from which for many years
the Public Housing Authority cannot even provide adequate heat in the building the city owns.
So while AOC dreams of taxing the wealthy 70% perhaps she needs to slow down and catch up to
reality to realize what she offers is only building towards another Venezuela.
This article is half poison pill. By reading it, you learn a lot about Democratic Party
voting patterns, but you also have to endure a number of false ideas, the worst of which is
Edsall's warning that radical Democrats will foment internal chaos leading to electoral loss.
The fact is, it is the corporate democrats, who in the last 40 years abandoned the base of
working, blue collar democrats in favor of their Wall Street overlords. It is the corporate
democrats who created the billionaire class by reducing corporate tax rates. It is the
corporate Democrats who by reducing marginal tax rates created the plutocracy. It is the
corporate democrats who gave *Trillions of Dollars* to Bush and Obama's perpetual wars and
$70 Billion more than the defense department asks. This impoverishing the citizenry with debt
is their legacy as much as the Republicans. This shoveling of money to the 1% who abandoned
the middle class has been a train ridden by Corporate Democrats. It is the Corporate
Democrats who caused all this friction by letting the middle class fall off the edge of the
economic cliff -- all the while proclaiming how much they care. They show up on MLK day and
read flowing speeches from the podium when what we really need is activism and changes in
marginal tax rates, defense spending and the Medical Insurance and care oligopoly. So now
there is revolution brewing in response to the Corporate Democrats' appeasement of the
Oligarchy? Good. Bring it on.
Honestly, it is the centrist, neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that gave up on talking
to the Midwest and focused on the coasts. That was the Clinton strategy and it didn't work.
Although AOC comes from an urban area, her message is broad: she is for the struggling,
working person. Edsall underestimates AOC's basis in economic thinking and her appeal to
flyover country. She speaks carefully and justly to social issues, but she also speaks to the
"kitchen table" issues that middle America is concerned with--in a much more real way than
the neoliberal Dems have figured out how to.
Please end you outsized coverage of AOC. I really don't know how you justify all the news
coverage. She is one of 435 representatives, and a new one at that. No accomplishments, just
a large Instagram following.
@John Patt Everybody over the age of 50 should apologize for giving our young people
catastrophic climate change, endless wars, broken healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, ever
widening income and wealth disparates, unaffordable post-secondary education, rampant gun
violence, no voice for labor. We over 50 didn't care enough to vote and to make enough
political noise to keep these things from happening. We over 50 all have personal
responsibilities for this messed up world we're leaving the young. 6 Replies
@Zor The answer is no. Remember Schumer saying that for every urban vote Democrats lost by
running Hillary, they would gain 2 suburban votes. It didn't turn out that way. The centrist,
corporatist Democrats (including Hillary and Biden) have no clue how to reach the working
class of any race. The working class focus of AOC is the Democratic Party's best chance at a
future. But of course the establishment, centrist, corporatist Democrats are still focused on
helping their big money donors. Here's another question: Just how are establishment,
centrist, corporatist Democrats different from Republicans?
Here's my thing- though I'm a deeply liberal person who shares a lot of political beliefs
with Ocasio-Cortez, I'm am not the least bit interested in her. Why? Because she's one
representative of a district all the way across the country from where I live. I care about
about my newly flipped district in Sherman Oaks. I care about my solidly Democratic district
in Santa Rosa. Just because one charismatic representative from Brooklyn has a good Twitter
feed doesn't mean that I have to care or that she deserves a highly-placed role on an
important committee. She's a freshman. Let her learn. And then, go ahead and tell me she
deserves a seat.
There really is not a far left in America. You guys have this weird aversion to moderate
sensible socialism that -as the saying goes- is only in America. Our conservative government
in Australia accepts it as a given the things AOC is fighting for. There is nothing weird
about universal health care in modern advanced countries. The conservatives have a magic word
in the USA that they us as a bogeyman and the word is socialism. Ironically they don't mind
Trump snuggling up to extreme left dictators like Kim and ex KGB Soviet operatives like Don's
supervisor Vlad Putin who by definition had to be a card carrying communist to get to his
position. But moderate socialism is all over northern Europe, NZ, UK and Australia. You
people are oppressed by conservatives playing the "that's socialism" card at every turn. We
never ask where does the money come from? here. The money seems to be there in all the
countries that take care of the health of their citizens. America is a wonderful country with
fantastic people- I love visiting... but to use an Aussie word - crikey I wouldn't want to
live there. 1 Reply
A.O.C. Alexandria "Overexposure" Cortez. This young woman is talented but should pace herself
a bit. It's not a marathon but it's not a sprint either. Let's call it "middle distance" in
track terms. You need to save some breath for when it's really needed. Pace for long term
influence on policy. Or be a "one hit wonder".
@Matt Williams Exactly. I'm a Democratic in a conservative area, and all my Democrat friends
think this woman is nuts. Our Senator Jon Tester is wonderful. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Hard
pass. 9 Replies
@Cass You may self-identify as a moderate but you sound like a conservative. Please go join
the other party of no ideas if AOC strikes you as radical. The majority of Democrats don't
agree with you.
Ideology fails when it meets reality. Trump and McConnell are busy teaching the American
middle class what it is to be reduced to poverty - health care they can't afford, rising
taxes on those who have had some economic success, elimination of well paying jobs, and on
and on. Those voters are understandably interested in pocket book issues, the resurgence of
progressive candidates meets this newly emphasized need. In addition, look at the population
demographics. The baby boomers were a "bump" in population, they in turn have produced a new
bump in their children, who are now adults. The boomers were quite left, their children have
inherited some of this belief system - equal rights and protection and support of those with
less opportunity. The voters in general are also completely fed up with politicians lying to
them and taking away their benefits. They generally have a mistrust both of the right wing
destruction of our norms, and the Democrats failure to fight back (Garland should have been
appointed even in the face of McConnell's calumny). The new face of the Democratic party
feeds pocketbook issues, a belief that America is, in fact, a melting pot, and the need for
restoration of our Democracy. This pretty much covers all the bases, the Democrats just need
to get better at educating the populace.
By and large, the majority of 2600+ counties that Trump carried are not economically well
off. However, they are socially very traditional. Do the Democrats have a message that will
resonate with millions of these traditional white middle/lower middle class voters in the
hinterland? 1 Reply
have you listened to her interviews? she doesn't say much of anything. all political about
all these socialist ideas with no means or method of how to get there. and thank goodness she
has no clue how to get there
I used to be friends with a very high-achieving guy I met as a 15-year-old on a teen summer
tour in Israel, run by the national Reform synagogue movement, in 1985. In the course of our
frienship spanning the final years of high school through the beginning of college, gradually
fading to an email or 2 once every couple years; our different paths & outlooks became
very stark, though we'd both call ourselves liberals. My friend left no stone unturned in his
unambivalent achievement orientation, embracing w/religious fervor the absolute virtue of
success, the unimpeachable morality & integrity of our meritocracy, & meritocratic
ideals/ethos. Naturally, he wound up at Harvard, majoring in government, followed by Harvard
Law. What struck me throughout was the unvarnished "empiricism" of his outlook: rarefied,
lofty principles or romantic ideals seemed alien: the nitty gritty of practical &
procedural realities were the whole picture. The one time we explicitly discussed comparative
politics, he only gravitated toward the topic of Harold Washington's coalition-building
prowess. He was an ardent Zionist ("Jewish homeland!"), with little apparent interest in
theology or spirituality for that matter. Eventually he went into corporate law, negotiating
executive compensation. I think he epitomized the Clinton Democrat: A "Social justice," equal
opportunity for all, meritocracy "synthesis." In a word, that peculiarly "practical,"
pragmatic liberalism was *ultimately conservative*.
Let us all remember that since Reagan the "center" has moved decidedly right. So when we talk
about a move left, we are moving back to where we were in the 1950s-1970's. For example take
AOC's tax proposal. Right out of that time period. Look at the GOP platform in the 1950's. It
reads like a progressive platform today. So let's put this in perspective. Everything is
relative and we have adjusted to right wing dominant politics today.
Edsall looks at the fact the Democrats (and, indeed, the whole country) are moving in a
progressive direction. He does not look at the question of why. I maintain that with an
increase in educated voters, the country is moving towards policies that work, that are good
for the country as a whole, not just for a minority. The other wealthy countries, all with a
universal government health care system such as an improved Medicare for all, get BETTER
health care as measured by all 16 of the bottom line public health statistics for ALL of
their people at a cost of less than HALF per person as we pay. High inequality has been bad
for the economy and governance of this country. Look at what happened in 1929 and 2008 both
preceded by periods of high inequality. Compare that with the long period of low inequality
after WWII of Great Prosperity. Today as a result of terrible SCOTUS decisions, the Super
Rich pushing the country towards oligarchy. The situation at our borders was actually better
before 2003 when ICE was created. It has perpetrated so many atrocities, rightly garnered
such a terrible reputation, why isn't it time to abolish the thing and start over with a new
more humane organization. After all, the Germans did not keep the Gestapo after the war. I
running out of space, but let me end by saying we are now getting more progressive voters
that say that 2 + 3 = 5, and fewer conservative ones who say 2 + 3 = 23 and fewer moderates
who want to compromise on 2 + 3 = 14.
@Concerned Citizen, likewise, public education is funded largely by property taxes, even on
those who do not have children in school, or whose children are out of school. This is not
"someone else's" money! It is all our money, and this is the way we choose to employ it
– to educate all our children, realizing, I hope, that educated children are a major
asset of a developed country. 38 Replies
Until AOC starts to achieve some actual LEGISTATIVE VICTORIES, I'm not prepared to follow her
ANYWHERE. I'm willing to listen to what she has to say, some of which I agree with and some I
question. I lean Left on most issues but I'm not a fanatic, and fanatics exist on BOTH sides
of the political spectrum. I believe that one must PROVE themselves before being beatified.
In substance, I'm open to the "new wing" of the Democratic party which I am, officially, a
member of. Let me add that I will NEVER cast a vote for anyone calling themselves a
Republican because that very label is forever tainted in my book. But I don't much care for
the 'tit for tat' Tweeting from AOC either, writing about Joe Lieberman (whom I do not like)
"who dat"? What is "dat", Miss AOC?
The insane part of this never gets addressed. Why should Americans political interests and
aspirations be controlled by two monopolistic parties? 1 Reply
The country may be in a need of a more social agenda, but this agenda must perceptible help
the depressed white rural folk first. Nothing will work what make those, who are already
falling behind feel like a "basket of deplorables". I hope AOC will find a way not just to
become a poster star of the progressive urban left, but also understand the ailing of the
depressed rural right.
The Democratic Party needs to do a very good job of educating an electorate (and possibly
some of its own members) that has for more than 30 years drunk the kool-aid of the "lower our
taxes," small government, and deregulation gurus. We have such a predatory capitalism now,
with government failing over and over again to reign in huge corporations headed by those who
think they should be determining everything from economic to housing to health to foreign
policy. Enough already. Most of the young members of Congress need a lot more experience and
more immersion in the nitty gritty of creating legislation before they can take the reins,
but they can educate their constituents. And maybe they can convince others that everyone
gains through a more level playing field.
Calling these ideas left is a joke. AOC and Bernie Sanders would practically be conservatives
in Canada and Europe. What we have are 3 unofficial parties: 1. The party of people with good
ideas who aren't afraid to speak about them because they aren't beholden to big donors 2. The
party of watered down, unpopular ideas that are vetted by 20 pollsters and donors before
seeing the light of day 3. The party that gets into office by tapping into people's primal
fears, and avoids policy altogether Republicans have been moving the goalposts for decades
now, how can you even tell left from right anymore?
@A. Stanton Since 1990, there have been funding gaps, shutdowns or serious threats of
shutdowns almost every year. The have become routine tactics in the effort of each party to
drive a hard bargain.
Running up the Democratic vote in Blue states by pandering to left leaning views will not
unseat DJT in 2020. Winning the popular vote by 3 or 3 million yields the same results.
Unless or until we adopt the Nation Popular Vote Intrastate Compact or reapportion the House
more equitably, Republicans will continue to exploit the Electoral College's
antimajoritarianism. Courting the minority of lefties mimics DJT's courting of his base; last
November proved that elections are won in the middle. Appealing to moderates in purple states
is the only path to 270. If you have any doubt, ask private citizen HRC how much good the
Democratic over-vote did for her.
@Bruce Rozenblit What is exceedingly strange to me is that those who rail against socialism
completely misread socialism at it's very roots; Family. 27 Replies
Yes, because all these pundits got 2016 so right. They are people with their own opinions,
just like everyone else, except the punditry has a vested interest in maintaining the status
quo that has been so good to them for so long. Enough already! Times, you're as much to blame
as these pundits for 2016!
When progressive solutions are proposed, the opposition yells "socialism" while others bring
up the cost of progressive solutions. No one talks about the significant portion of our
nation's wealth spent on the military. We don't audit the Pentagon or do due diligence on the
efficiency of huge projects undertaken by the military nor do we question the profits of the
industrial-military complex. Meanwhile, Russia manipulated our latest presidential race,
underscoring the worry over cyber attacks. Climate events in the country mean our citizens
experience life changing events not brought on by terrorists or immigrants. A medical event
in a family can initiate bankruptcy; we all live on that edge. Our infrastructure projects
have been delayed for so long that America looks like a second rate country. Income
inequality is ongoing with no sign of lessening. Suicide is on the increase while death by
drugs is an epidemic. An education for students can mean large debt; efforts to train the
workforce for the technological world are inconsistent. For many of us, the hate and fear
promoted in this country is repulsive. Because our society works for an ever smaller number
of us, Americans are increasingly understanding that a sustainable, just society works for
all it's citizens. We are exhausted by the stalemate in Washington leaving us caring very
little about the labels of progressive, moderate, or conservative. We just know what needs to
change.
Edall's final point that thsese are Democrats returning to Democratic roots and not a wave of
radicalism. I along with a lot of other older voters was infected with a kind of gradualism.
I voted for Hilary, much now to my dismay. AOC among others is stating what she, and what
many of us want. The old Democratic party was a mirror image of Republicans, with taking the
same money, voting for the same wars, and within it all a kind of shame,liberal as a kind of
curse, where we were afraid to make our own agenda, make our own plan for America. taking the
burden, in health care, college education, immigration, is an investment in the future
The New Democratic approach in essence is taking wealth and redistributing it, along with
promising free goods and services. Is that high-minded or simply a Brave New World. The
underlying assumption seems to be the rest of America will not find that worrisome, and that
what happened in MA and NY represents a nationwide trend. 3 Replies
These voters are not moving to the left. They are correcting a trend to the right that
accelerated with Reagan: the rise of corporate dominance and societal control; the loss of
worker rights, healthcare and protections through destruction of our unions; and the mass
incarceration of our nation's young African American men for minor drug offenses, thus
destroying their futures and communities. These "left" liberals are fighting to bring back
democratic norms and values that were once taken for granted among those of all political
stripes.
I have always voted in every primary. I have always voted for the most "leftist" available.
So did my whole family, and all the people with whom I discussed our voting. The issue was
always "most leftist available." That often was not very leftist at all. That is what has
changed. Now the option is there. It isn't because we vote for it. We vote for it now because
now we can, now the choice is there. What has changed is not so much the voters as the
invisible primary before anyone asks us voters. What changed is the Overton Window of
potential choices allowed to us. I think voters would have done this a long time ago, if
they'd had the opportunity. So why now? Abject failure of our politics to solve our problems
has been true for decades, so it isn't mere failure. I'd like to think it was voter
rebellion. We just wouldn't vote for their sell outs. Here, that meant Bernie won our
primary, and then we did not turn out for Her. We finally forced it. The money men could not
get away with it anymore.
It is strange that Mr Edsall frames Medicare 4 All , Free College , and higher taxes on
wealthy as RADICAL leftist ideas .. when it fact each of these proposals have the majority of
support from Americans.. The most current poll shows 70% support for Medicare 4 All.. so you
are only radical if you DON'T support.
Unless the progressives start addressing the concerns of the middle class, they will drive
the Democratic Party right off the cliff. You remember us, don't you? People who have tried
to do things right and work hard. Granted, our cares and concerns aren't that sexy or
tweetable so it's easy for you newly elected firebrands to overlook us. Don't forget, we are
the ones who will ultimately foot the bills for your giveaways.
The notion that democrats are moving leftward is borne on revisionist history. There's
nothing new or bold being proposed; Zeitz is right on the money.
"Medicare for All, government-guaranteed jobs and a higher minimum wage" I have a question to
all the "progressive" Democratic voices in Congress - how are you going to pay for such an
agenda? Money doesn't just grow on trees. Either you will have to cut funds from another
program, or raise taxes. Most of these progressive people favor raising taxes on the wealthy.
But what is your definition of "wealthy"? $10 million in annual income? $1 million in annual
income? $500k? $200k? Almost all the proposals I have seen coming from progressives involves
increasing tax rates for families making more than $200k, either through higher rates, phased
out deductions, or ineligibility for certain programs. A professional couple where both are
software engineers could easily surpass this threshold, but they are not rich. They struggle
to pay the mortgage, save for the future, pay taxes, and provide for their children. Why
should they be forced to pay more in taxes percentage-wise than a family earning $100k or
$60k? It is for these reasons that I as an independent will never support progressive
candidates. These candidates lack basic math abilities and a basic notion of fairness. So if
the Democratic party starts to embrace some of the policies espoused by these progressives,
they are on a path to lose elections in the future. 1 Reply
@AutumnLeaf Mitch McConnell blocked Obama at every turn; he denied him the appointment of a
moderate respected Judge to the SC, a Judge the GOP had voted for on the Superior Court.
Congress wasted time with 40 attempts to declare the ACA unconstitutional; the Plan was
modeled on a Romney Plan in MA. Scalia's Citizens United Decision declared that corporations
are people; Scalia knew that he was using a Superior Ct. Decision with a transcription error:
word spoken: corporation; word transcribed: individual. Scalia spent a lot of time at
corporate lodges, "hunting"; mainly eating until he finally ate himself to death. McConnell
spends his time with mine owners. Trump spends his time with lobbyists for Israel and Saudi
Arabia. 9 Replies
I think this article underscores the incredible opportunity available to the left if they
pick a radical democratic socialist candidate. If they are already winning the college
educated crowd that is gentrifying these major urban areas and losing the poorer minority
crowd that is voting for people like the Clinton's over Sanders or Crowley over AOC; we are
getting the people whom one would think would be less incentivized to vote for our platform
and we can gain the people who would benefit more from our platform.Therefore, it is really
just a question of exposure and talking to these people. Reaching out to minorities; talking
about mass-incarceration, how it disproportinately affects precisely these minority voters
that we have to gain; and how the moderate democrats have been benefiting economically and
politically from the chaos and inequities in these communities for years. It is a question of
messaging. Minorities are our natural allies. They are disproportinately affected by the
inequality; and as soon as we can reach them; tell them that there brothers, husbands, sons
are coming home, and that we have a job for them to support their family when they do, that
is a huge % of voters that will swing our way, and accelerate the pace of our revolution--and
what critics will come to remember as the end of their decadence and control over all facets
of society, to the detriment of everyone else. The end is coming--and a new, better society
is on the verge of being reborn 1 Reply
Of all of those quoted in this article, the only one who really gets it right is Joshua
Zeitz. FDR's 1944 State of the Union address should be required reading for every Democrat,
and every Establishment talking head who warns against alienating suburban voters by
advocating for a New Deal social safety net. I share the sentiments of many on who have
responded by noting that it was, and is, the leadership of the Democratic Party that has
moved right rather than the Democratic electorate that shifted left. Don't believe me? Go
back through the sixteen years of the Clinton and Obama presidencies and see how many times
each referenced Ronald Reagan versus even mentioning Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or
Lyndon Johnson.
Medicare for all? Get ready for 6-week waits for a 10 minute appointment (and that will be
just for primary care). After that, expect to wait 6-12 months to see a specialist. 1 Reply
@José Franco I will not dig out social security trustees' projections of future
funding requirements or the possible solutions bandied about by politicians (google them),
but one single tweak would eliminate any projected shortfalls. Currently the FICA
contribution is limited to earnings of $132,900. Those who earn over that amount pay no FICA
tax on the earnings above that level. The person earning a million dollars in 2019 will stop
paying FICA on his earnings by mid-February. Applying FICA to all earnings of all earners
would keep social security solvent. No raise in retirement age, no reduction in benefits, no
insolvency. As to Medicare's solvency and public benefits, see the excellent comments of Len
Charlap. 17 Replies
There are several issues upon which I and my like-minded moderate family members will cast
our votes in 2020: - Border security and the end to the brazen exploitation of our citizenry
by the millions of foreign migrants who illegally, and with an attitude of entitlement,
trespass into our sovereign country year after year...costing our taxpayers billions. -
Reckless proposals to increase government benefit programs that aren't affordable without
raising taxes, threatening our already stressed social security safety net. - The rise of
Antisemitism and the mendacious obsession with Israel amongst leftists within Congress, as
well as within the ranks of their constituents. Democrats will need to address these issues
to our satisfaction if they want our votes. 2 Replies
Ed, it's time to retire. If you spent time looking at the actual data, Democratic primary
voters, particularly those in overly restrictive closed primary states like New York, are
older, wealthier, "socially liberal" and "fiscally conservative." They are what we would have
called moderate/Rockefeller Republicans 40 years ago, but they vote Democratic because that's
who their parents voted for. Most progressive voters today, the ones who support Medicare for
all, investment in public higher education, taxation on wealth (you know, those pesky issues
that mainstream Democrats used to support 30-40 years ago) are younger and more likely to be
unaffiliated with any political party. This is why Bernie did much better in states with open
primaries, and Hillary did better in closed primary states like NY AOC won in spite of NY's
restrictive primary system. She was able to achieve this because many of the older Democratic
establishment voters who would have voted for Crowley stayed home, and she was able to
motivate enough first-time young voters in her district to register as a Dem and vote for
her. (First time voters in NY can register with party 30 days prior to primary election)
Let's be clear though: your premise that Dem primary voters are driving the party's shift to
the left couldn't be further from the truth--the progressive shift in the body politic you
describe is coming from younger, independent, working class voters and is redefining the
American left.
From the NYT , Edsall April 19, 2018 The Democrats' Gentrification Problem "Conversely, in
the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent),
families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 -- $7,229
less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448." Syracuse, a
democratic City in one of the most democratic States in the US, so assuredly democratic that
Democratic Presidential candidates rarely show up has been left by the Democrats and the
Democratic Governor ,Cuomo, in a death spiral of getting poorer by the day That in a State,
that includes NYC, the international capital of the global billionaire elite. Exactly, what
have the Democrats done to help ?
"Sawhill argues that if the goal of Democrats is victory, as opposed to ideological purity,
they must focus on general election swing voters who are not die-hard Democrats." Wow, what
an original argument! I have been hearing the exact same thing since I registered to vote at
age 18 in 1977. Democrats are always urged to support the "sensible, centrist" candidates who
keep on losing elections to Republicans who drag their party, and the whole country by
default, even further to the right. JFK was called a communist and worse by pundits like this
and he would have won by a landslide in 1964. How about if Democrats for once push for
policies that are backed by 90 percent of Americans, like Medicare For All, the higher
minimum wage, universal college education, renewable energy and the rest of the Green New
Deal and higher marginal tax rates for the rich. I would love to see just one presidential
candidate run on this platform before I die so I can fill out my ballot without holding my
nose. 1 Reply
Kind of make sense considering how far to the right the Republican Party has gone with the
Donald. And he's a guy who was a Democrat at one point. He's a dangerous mr nobody. Let's
counter going far to the left so we can come back to some middle ground.
@Len Charlap Canada can also more easily afford universal healthcare and a stronger social
safety net because it doesn't have the outsized military budget that we do. 17 Replies
@Ronny I agree with you - have a subsidized education - (rather I prefer to say equal access
to education) as well as health care guarantees to a greater extent equality of opportunity -
which is what all democratic societies should strive for. It's not equality of outcome but
equality of opportunity. Children should not be punished for have parents of lesser means or
being born on the wrong side of the tracks...
Until I see well-crafted legislation that is initiated by her that will help improve the
lives of many she's just another politician with sound bite platitudes. She doesn't even have
a district office in the Bronx yet to the chagrin of many of the constituents.
@Midwest Josh Perhaps student loans made by the FED at the rates they charge the big banks in
their heist of the American economy achieved back in 1913. 38 Replies
AOC is a liberal darling who's stated (on 60 Minutes) that unemployment rates are low because
everyone is working two jobs; I might add, that has nothing to do with how unemployment rates
are figured and come on, "everyone?" And recently she's stated that the world will end in 12
years if we don't do something about climate change. Come on, this is silliness, ignorance
and borderline stupidity. If she's the poster child for the Democrats, then she's the gift
that will keep on giving to the GOP.
I grew up during the Vietnam War, and over the years came to admire the American people who
ultimately forced their government to withdraw from an immoral (and disastrous) military
adventure. This is rare in human history. Rare in American history too, as the follies in
Iraq drag on and on to remind us. Perhaps the American people are becoming themselves again.
I wouldn't call it drifting left at all.
Thomas Edsall's column is yet another conservative spin on Democrats from The New York Times.
Where are the voices of progressive Democrats, who form the overwhelming majority of New York
City residents? Of New York state residents? Who form the core of the Democratic Party's
support. The Times insists that these conservative voices are the only ones deserving of
publication here. Where in the world did the notion come from that The Times was a "liberal"
publication?
@Chris Young, It seems you aonly approve of departments that teach what you consider
"productive." If schools become an adjuct to the marketplace, then only the material,
quantifiable results will be the metric by which the value of education is measured. This
will leave us, as in some ways we are already becoming, a population that emulates robots,
and has no use for critical thinking, ethics, or art. The profit in education is in the
quality of the students it turns out into the world, not on a corporate balance sheet. 38
Replies
It's all good but important to expand the focus on the entirety of the Democrats in Congress
- and the amazing age range and gender mix. The opportunities are vast - an intergenerational
government of forward thinking, principled women and men. Please media pundits - avoid focus
on only 1 or 2. There are brilliant ideas pouring forth - let the ideas from every corner
flow! Remember that the intense media focus on Trump, liberal as well as conservative,
contributed significantly to what happened in election 2016.
If by liberal you mean the circular firing squad of the politics of aggrievement, no. My
politics fall in line with FDR's Second Bill of Rights. Here he describes them in 1944
https://youtu.be/3EZ5bx9AyI4
"...true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security & independence.
"Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry & out of a job are the stuff of
which dictatorships are made... We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under
which a new basis of security & prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of
station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job...; The
right to earn enough to provide adequate food & clothing & recreation; The right of
every farmer to raise & sell his products at a return which will give him & his
family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an
atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition & domination by monopolies at home or
abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care &
the opportunity to achieve & enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the
economic fears of old age, sickness, accident & unemployment; The right to a good
education." That is where Democrats used to be. Then came the Corporate Democrats, the DLC
and the Clintons.
This piece misses more than it hits. Where it misses particularly is in it's insistence that
the Class interest of working class Democrats pulls the Party right, rather than left, and
that the insurgents are mostly young, white gentrifying liberals. This is not altogether
false, but misses that many of the gentrifiers are not middle class themselves, but lower
middle class young people with huge college debt who could never dream of living in upper
middle class enclaves like most of the opinion writers in the Time for example. So they move
into the inner city, make it safe for professionals, and then yes, Brooklyn goes white.
Harlem goes white. Berkeley loses its working class majority. Etc. The big problem for the
left of the Democratic Party is not that its mostly young, white and middle class; it is that
the very term "liberal" is now widely understood by working class people as meaning
"establishment." And they are against the "establishment". As it happens, so are the young
insurgents. This then is the task for the left of the Democrats; to unite the culturally
conservative working class with the emerging multi-racial, multi-ethnic youth vote to take
down both the reactionary Right and the Liberal establishment. And the only reason such a
sentiment seems crazy is that the New York Times, far from being a bastion of the resistance
to Trump is actually a bulwark of that Liberal Establishment. Stats are stats but the future
is unwritten.
AOC is pretty interesting. She's charismatic, fearless....and I'm trying to think of
something else. OH, she's personally attractive. If the government gig falls apart she can
probably get TV work. But as an intellectual light or a rational political leader -- she is
clearly lacking. OF course that may not matter as the earth will come to an end in 12 years.
Which is even more ludicrous than saying the earth is only 6000 years old. She is simply
spouting far left talking points which are driven by emotion, not rational thought. And she
keeps making unforced errors in her public speaking engagements. She really doesn't appear to
understand what she's talking about and can't respond to reasonable questions about her
policy positions. But then, that's not too unlike much of the left. So maybe she's a perfect
fit for a fact free faction which is beginning to run the dem party. 1 Reply
One commenter gave a really insightful look at socialism for corporations and the rich here,
otherwise known to most of us as corporate welfare, including subsidies to oil companies, who
seem rich enough, but nevertheless, extend their "impoverished" bank accounts for more of our
dollars. Successful corporations, will reward investors, CEO's, hedge fund managers, all
those at the top, but the worker, not too much for that drone, who was part of the reason of
the success of that corporation. Socialism has been tainted by countries with autocratic
rulers , uneducated masses, and ofttimes, as in Latin America, religious masses. But,
Scandinavia, has shown us a socialism to envy. It's confident citizens know that much of what
makes life livable has been achieved. Finland rates as one of the happiest countries in the
world. Taxes are high, but one isn't bankrupted because of illness, one doesn't lose a home
because of a catastrophic illness, education is encouraged, and one doesn't have to pay the
debt off for 30 years or more. The infrastructure is a priority, war is not. It just seems
like it's a secure way to live. This is socialism I wish we could duplicate. Does anyone
consider that socialism also includes our police, libraries, fire stations, roads, and so
much more? Used for the good of society, it's a boon for all, rather than unregulated
capitalism which enriches the few at the expense of most of us. 3 Replies
@Reilly Diefenbach "Democratic socialism" isn't a thing, but implies two contradictory
ideals. Social democracy is thing, a good thing, and in line with what Nordic nations have.
38 Replies
Never has someone gotta so much for doing so little. None of this means anything if it
doesn't become law. As a life long Liberal Democrat (there, I said it) myself, I find it
infuriating when Liberal/Progressive politicians get out-sized credit for their good
intentions while those same good intentions threaten party unity. The Progressive idea of
party unity seems to be limited to getting what they want or they'll walk away. They just
know better, so there's no need for compromise. Never mind that they have no way of enacting
any of this legislation -- and more often than not Progressives lose at the polls. These
"kids" need to wake up and realize that there are no moral victories in politics. The ONLY
goal of any Democrat has to be unseating Trump and McConnell, everything else is a noise, and
a dangerous distraction.
I support universal health care, free college for students who meet enhanced entrance
requirements and raising marginal tax rates to 70% on wealthy Americans. Yet I do not support
an expansion of the EITC, ending immigration enforcement or putting workers on boards of
directors. So where do I stand? All my life I've voted Democratic. But there has been a
seismic shift in politics. And after the shift I will most likely vote Republican or for a
third party. The issue that causes my change in affiliation is the Me Too movement. I find it
repugnant that feminists seem to argue that the media rather than the courts should determine
guilt or innocence in sexual assault cases. Bill Cosby had an agreement with Andrea Constand
in their case. But feminists weren't happy with the outcome. So they resorted to extra-legal
means to get Cosby convicted. This included a media campaign in which the NY Times and the
New Yorker wrote stories highlighting accusations of 60 women for which statutes of
limitations had elapsed. But statutes of limitations are there for a reason. This became
clear in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh which degenerated into a trial for rape. Nobody
except maybe the accuser could remember in any detail events at the party in which the rape
had presumably occurred. So the confirmation became one of character assassination in which
Kavanaugh was convicted of drinking beer. I will NEVER vote for any politician who supports
the Me Too movement.
"... protection from the vicissitudes of market capitalism"? People want protection from
monopoly capitalism. The left-right frame is a fallacy. If you put the actual policies on the
table, the great majority want single payer, clean elections, action on climate change, etc.
Pitting Left v. Right only redounds to tribalism. It ends up with a President who shuts down
the business of which he himself is the CEO. That's not great.
"... When administrators make budget cuts, it isn't for recreational facilities and their own salaries -- it's the classics and history departments, and it's to faculty, with poorly paid part-time adjuncts teaching an unconscionable share of courses. ..."
"... So universities have been exacerbating the same unequal division between the people who actually do the work (faculty) and the people who allocate salaries (administrators) -- so too as in the business world, as you say. ..."
I don't think that's entirely accurate, and even if true, leaving students to the
predations of private lenders isn't the answer. Although I'm willing to entertain your
thesis, soaring tuition has also been the way to make up for the underfunding of state
universities by state legislatures.
At the same time, there's been an increase since the 70s in de luxe facilities and bloated
administrator salaries. When administrators make budget cuts, it isn't for recreational
facilities and their own salaries -- it's the classics and history departments, and it's to
faculty, with poorly paid part-time adjuncts teaching an unconscionable share of
courses.
So universities have been exacerbating the same unequal division between the people
who actually do the work (faculty) and the people who allocate salaries (administrators) --
so too as in the business world, as you say.
"... The massive student-debt jubilee would be financed with a tax on Wall Street: Specifically, a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% tax on bond trades and a .005% tax on derivatives trades. ..."
"... By introducing the student-debt plan, Sanders has outmaneuvered Elizabeth "I have a plan for that" Warren ..."
In his latest attempt to one-up Elizabeth Warren and establish his brand of "democratic
socialism" as something entirely different from the progressive capitalism practiced by some of
his peers, Bernie Sanders is preparing to unveil a new plan that would involve cancelling all
of the country's outstanding $1.6 trillion in student debt.
The massive student-debt jubilee would be financed with a tax on Wall Street:
Specifically, a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% tax on bond trades and a .005% tax on
derivatives trades.
Additionally, Sanders' plan would also provide states with $48 billion to eliminate tuition
and fees at public colleges and universities. Thanks to the market effect, private schools
would almost certainly be forced to cut prices to draw talented students who could simply
attend a state school for free.
Reps Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington have already signed on to
introduce Sanders' legislation in the House on Monday.
The timing of this latest in a series of bold socialist policy proposals from Sanders -
let's not forget, Bernie is largely responsible for making Medicare for All a mainstream issue
in the Democratic Party - comes just ahead of the first Democratic primary debate, where
Sanders will face off directly against his No. 1 rival: Vice President Joe Biden, who has
marketed his candidacy as a return to the 'sensible centrism' of the Democratic Party of
yesteryear.
By introducing the student-debt plan, Sanders has outmaneuvered Elizabeth "I have a plan
for that" Warren and established himself as the most far-left candidate in the crowded
Democratic Primary field. Hopefully, this can help stall Warren's recent advance in the polls.
The plan should help Sanders highlight how Biden's domestic platform includes little in the way
of welfare expansion during the upcoming debate.
My federal student loan monthly statement says I don't have to make a payment. I don't
qualify for any forgiveness because I'm responsible. Nonetheless, I pay the loan every month.
The balance goes down but every month it's still the same story.
I have to imagine the provider prefers students to see that it says zero dollars owed this
month with the hope that they don't pay because it says 0 dollars owed, default, and rack up
a bunch of fees and interest that the student doesn't see in the fine print.
The provider can then get paid by the taxpayer no questions asked. Much more profit and
payment is significantly faster.
Education costs are in the stratosphere 'because' of conversion of univeristires into
neoliberal institution. Which mean that the costs will skyrocket even more.
Somebody once said: If the neoliberal government took over management of the Sahara
desert, in five years, there would be a shortage of sand.
The only way to rein in neoliberals in government is to stop giving them so damned much
money...
The guaranteed student loan program created a mechanism that increases the price of
education. Before the program, graduates could expect 10 times the cost of a years' tuition.
Now, they'de lucky to get one year. The Americans were pushed out of this business and the
UN-Americans replaced them. This goes on for decades until the marks realized that they've
been screwed. ... The victims are in full support since they've been systematically dumbed
down that it seems like a good idea. It's not. This is a bailout of a failed neoliberal
institution.
Schools are teaching to the test. As someone who recently retrained as a secondary science
teacher - after nearly 30 years as a journalist - I know this to be true.
Education is a prime example of where neoliberalism has had a negative effect. It worked well
when labour was pumping billions into it and they invested in early intervention schemes such
as sure start and nursery expansion. Unfortunately under the tories we have had those
progressive policies scaled right back. Children with SEND and/or in care are commodities
bought and sold by local authorities. I've been working in a PRU which is a private company
and it does good things, but I can't help but think if that was in the public sector that it
would be in a purpose built building rather than some scruffy office with no playground.
The facilities aren't what you would expect in this day in age. If we had a proper
functioning government with a plan then what happens with vulnerable children would be
properly organised rather than a reactive shit show.
"Schools teach to the test, depriving children of a rounded and useful education."
Boy do they. I work in Business/IT training and as the years have rolled on I and every
colleague I can think of have noticed more and more people coming to courses that they are
unfit for. Not because they are stupid, but because they have been taught to be stupid. So
used to being taught to the test that they are afraid to ask questions. Increasingly I get
asked "what's the right way to do...", usually referring to situation in which there is no
right way, just a right way for your business, at a specific point in time.
I had the great pleasure of watching our new MD describe his first customer-facing project,
which was a disaster, but they "learned" from it. I had to point out to him that I teach the
two disciplines involved - businesss analysis and project management - and if he or his team
had attended any of the courses - all of which are free to them - they would have learned
about the issues they would face, because (astonishingly) they are well-known.
I fear that these incurious adult children are at the bottom of Brexit, Trump and many of the
other ills that afflict us. Learning how to do things is difficult and sometimes boring. Much
better to wander in with zero idea of what has already been done and repeat the mistakes of
the past. I see the future as a treadmill where the same mistakes are made repetitively and
greeted with as much surprise as if they had never happened before. We have always been at
war with Eastasia...
The term Casializatin was repced by more correct term "neoliberalization" for clarity.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalization, a word that says much in, and of, itself, is seen as analogue of broader outsourcing initiatives. Militaries do it, governments do it, and the university does it. Services long held to be the domain of the state, itself an animation of the social contract, the spirit of the people, have now become the incentive of the corporate mind, and, it follows, its associated vices. The entire scope of what has come to be known as outsourcing is itself a creature of propaganda, cheered on as an opportunity drawing benefits rather than an ill encouraging a brutish, tenuous life. ..."
"... Practitioners and policy makers within the education industry have become devotees of the amoral dictates of supply and demand, underpinned by an insatiable management class. Central to their program of university mismanagement is the neoliberal academic, a creature both embraced and maligned in the tertiary sectors of the globe. ..."
"... The neoliberal academic is meant to be an underpaid miracle worker, whose divining acts rescue often lax academics from discharging their duties. (These duties are outlined in that deceptive and unreliable document known as a "workplan", as tedious as it is fictional.) The neoliberal academic grades papers, lectures, tutors and coordinates subjects. The neoliberal provides cover, a shield, and an excuse for a certain class of academic manager who prefers the calling of pretence to the realities of work. ..."
"... Often, these neoliberal academics are students undertaking a postgraduate degree and subject to inordinate degrees of stress in an environment of perennial uncertainty. ..."
"... A representative sample of PhD students studying in Flanders, Belgium found that one in two experienced psychological distress, with one in three at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. Mental health problems tended to be higher in PhD students "than in the highly educated general population, highly education employees and higher education students." ..."
"... Neoliberalization can be seen alongside a host of other ills. If the instructor is disposable and vulnerable, then so are the manifestations of learning. Libraries and research collections, for instance, are being regarded as deadening, inanimate burdens on the modern, vibrant university environment. Some institutions make a regular habit of culling their supply of texts and references: we are all e-people now, bound to prefer screens to paper, the bleary-eyed session of online engagement to the tactile session with a book. ..."
Any sentient being should be offended. Eventually,
the Neoliberalization of the academic workforce was bound to find lazy enthusiasts who neither
teach, nor understand the value of a tenured position dedicated to that musty,
soon-to-be-forgotten vocation of the pedagogue. It shows in the designs of certain universities
who confuse frothy trendiness with tangible depth: the pedagogue banished from the podium, with
rooms lacking a centre, or a focal point for the instructor. Not chic, not cool, we are told,
often by learning and teaching committees that perform neither task. Keep it modern; do not
sound too bright and hide the learning: we are all equal in the classroom, inspiringly even and
scrubbed of knowledge. The result is what was always to be expected: profound laziness on the
part of instructors and students, dedicated mediocrity, and a rejection of all things
intellectually taxing.
Neoliberalization, a word that says much in, and of, itself, is seen as analogue of broader
outsourcing initiatives. Militaries do it, governments do it, and the university does it.
Services long held to be the domain of the state, itself an animation of the social contract,
the spirit of the people, have now become the incentive of the corporate mind, and, it follows,
its associated vices. The entire scope of what has come to be known as outsourcing is itself a
creature of propaganda, cheered on as an opportunity drawing benefits rather than an ill
encouraging a brutish, tenuous life.
One such text is Douglas Brown and Scott Wilson's The
Black Book of Outsourcing . Plaudits for it resemble worshippers at a shrine planning
kisses upon icons and holy relics. "Brown & Wilson deliver on the best, most innovative,
new practices all aimed at helping one and all survive, manage and lead in this new economy,"
praises
Joann Martin, Vice President of Pitney Bowes Management Services. Brown and Wilson take aim at
a fundamental "myth": that "Outsourcing is bad for America." They cite work sponsored by the
Information Technology Association of America (of course) that "the practice of outsourcing is
good for the US economy and its workers."
Practitioners and policy makers within the education industry have become devotees of the
amoral dictates of supply and demand, underpinned by an insatiable management class. Central to
their program of university mismanagement is the neoliberal academic, a creature both embraced and
maligned in the tertiary sectors of the globe.
The neoliberal academic is meant to be an underpaid miracle worker, whose divining acts rescue
often lax academics from discharging their duties. (These duties are outlined in that deceptive
and unreliable document known as a "workplan", as tedious as it is fictional.) The neoliberal
academic grades papers, lectures, tutors and coordinates subjects. The neoliberal provides cover, a
shield, and an excuse for a certain class of academic manager who prefers the calling of
pretence to the realities of work.
Often, these neoliberal academics are students undertaking a postgraduate degree and subject to
inordinate degrees of stress in an environment of perennial uncertainty. The stresses
associated with such students are documented in the Guardian's Academics
Anonymous series and have also been the subject of research
in the journal Research Policy . A representative sample of PhD students studying in
Flanders, Belgium found that one in two experienced psychological distress, with one in three
at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. Mental health problems tended to be higher in PhD
students "than in the highly educated general population, highly education employees and higher
education students."
This is hardly helped by the prospects faced by those PhDs for future permanent employment,
given what the authors of the Research Policy article describe
as the "unfavourable shift in the labour-supply demand balance, a growing popularity of
short-term contracts, budget cuts and increased competition for research sources".
There have been a few pompom holders encouraging the Neoliberalization mania, suggesting that it
is good for the academic sector. The explanations are never more than structural: a neoliberal
workforce, for instance, copes with fluctuating enrolments and reduces labour costs. "Using
neoliberal academics brings benefits and challenges," we find Dorothy Wardale, Julia Richardson and
Yuliani Suseno
telling us in The Conversation . This, in truth, is much like suggesting that
syphilis and irritable bowel syndrome is necessary to keep you on your toes, sharp and
streamlined. The mindset of the academic-administrator is to assume that such things are such
(Neoliberalization, the authors insist, is not going way, so embrace) and adopt a prostrate
position in the face of funding cuts from the public purse.
Neoliberalization can be seen alongside a host of other ills. If the instructor is disposable
and vulnerable, then so are the manifestations of learning. Libraries and research collections,
for instance, are being regarded as deadening, inanimate burdens on the modern, vibrant
university environment. Some institutions make a regular habit of culling their supply of texts
and references: we are all e-people now, bound to prefer screens to paper, the bleary-eyed
session of online engagement to the tactile session with a book.
The neoliberal, sessional academic also has, for company, the "hot-desk", a spot for temporary,
and all too fleeting occupation. The hot-desk has replaced the work desk; the partitions of the
office are giving way to the intrusions of the open plan. The hot-desker, like coitus, is
temporary and brief. The neoliberal academic epitomises that unstable reality; there is little need
to give such workers more than temporary, precarious space. As a result, confidentiality is
impaired, and privacy all but negated. Despite extensive research
showing the negative costs of "hot-desking" and open plan settings, university management
remains crusade bound to implement such daft ideas in the name of efficiency.
Neoliberalization also compounds fraudulence in the academy. It supplies the bejewelled short
cut route, the bypass, the evasion of the rigorous things in learning. Academics may reek like
piddling middle class spongers avoiding the issues while pretending to deal with them, but the
good ones at least make some effort to teach their brood decently and marshal their thoughts in
a way that resembles, at the very least, a sound whiff of knowledge. This ancient code, tested
and tried, is worth keeping, but it is something that modern management types, along with their
parasitic cognates, ignore. In Australia, this is particularly problematic, given suggestions that up to 80
percent of undergraduate courses in certain higher learning institutions are taught by neoliberal
academics.
The union between the spread sheet manager and the uninterested academic who sees promotion
through the management channel rather than scholarship, throws up a terrible hybrid, one
vicious enough to degrade all in its pathway. This sort of hybrid hack resorts to skiving and
getting neoliberals to do the work he or she ought to be doing. Such people co-ordinate courses but
make sure they get the wallahs and helpers desperate for cash to do it. Manipulation is
guaranteed, exploitation is assured.
The economy of desperation is cashed in like a reliable blue-chip stock: the skiver with an
ongoing position knows that a neoliberal academic desperate to earn some cash cannot dissent, will
do little to rock the misdirected boat, and will have to go along with utterly dotty notions.
There are no additional benefits from work, no ongoing income, no insurance, and, importantly,
inflated hours that rarely take into account the amount of preparation required for the
task.
The ultimate nature of the Neoliberalization catastrophe is its diminution of the entire
academic sector. Neoliberals suffer, but so do students. The result is not mere sloth but
misrepresentation of the worst kind: the university keen to advertise a particular service it
cannot provide sufficiently. This, in time, is normalised: what would students, who in many
instances may not even know the grader of their paper, expect? The remunerated, secure
academic-manager, being in the castle, can raise the drawbridge and throw the neoliberals to the
vengeful crowd, an employment environment made safe for hypocrisy.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT
University, Melbourne and can be reached at: [email protected] . Read other articles by Binoy .
A Dutch engineering university is taking radical action to increase its share of female
academics by opening job vacancies to women only. Starting on 1 July, the Eindhoven University
of Technology (TUE) in the Netherlands will not allow men to apply for permanent academic jobs
for the first 6 months of the recruitment process under a new fellowship program. If no
suitable applicant has been found within that time, men can then apply, but the selection
committee will still have to nominate at least one candidate of each gender. The [insane] plan
was
announced today and is already attracting controversy.
"... Sherman found that her interviewees, all in the top 1-2 percent of income or wealth or both, had thoroughly imbibed the narrative of meritocracy to rationalize their affluence and immense privileges. That is, they believed they deserved all their money because of hard work and individual effort. Most identified themselves as socially and political liberal and took pains to distinguish themselves from "bad" rich people who flaunt their wealth. ..."
"... Finally, meritocracy is the classic American foundation myth and provides the basis for an entire array of other fairy tales. Foremost, this illusion serves to justify policies that foster economic inequality and hinder the development of social movements. After so many decades of neoliberal ideology, this lie is now firmly lodged in the public's collective consciousness but I'm convinced that with effort and relying on the evidence, it can be expunged. ..."
In 2017,
Sociology Professor Rachel Sherman wrote Uneasy Street: The Anxiety of Affluence , a
book which drew upon 50 in-depth interviews with Uber-wealthy New Yorkers in order to obtain a
picture of just how they perceived their status.
Sherman found that her interviewees, all in the top 1-2 percent of income or wealth or both,
had thoroughly imbibed the narrative of meritocracy to rationalize their affluence and immense
privileges. That is, they believed they deserved all their money because of hard work and
individual effort. Most identified themselves as socially and political liberal and took pains
to distinguish themselves from "bad" rich people who flaunt their wealth. Although one
unselfconsciously acknowledged "I used to say I was going to be a revolutionary but then I had
my first massage."
One striking characteristic was that these folks never talk about money and obsess over the
"stigma of privilege." One typical respondent whose wealth exceeded $50 million told Sherman,
"There's nobody who knows how much money we spend. You're the only person I've ever said the
numbers to out-loud." Another couple who had inherited $50 million and lived in a penthouse had
the post office change their mailing address to the floor number because PH sounded "elite and
snobby." Another common trait was removing the price tags from items entering the house so the
housekeeper and and staff didn't see them. As if the nanny didn't know
Her subjects (who remained anonymous) readily acknowledged being extremely advantaged but
remained "good people, normal people," who work hard, are careful about ostentatious
consumption, and above all, "give back." They spend considerable time trying to legitimate
inequality and Sherman concludes they've largely succeeded in feeling "morally worthy."
As a follow-up to this study, Prof. Sherman has been conducting similar in-depth interviews
with young people whose parents or ancestors accumulated sizable fortunes, wealth they now have
or will soon inherit. Sherman's recent piece, "The Rich Kid Revolution," ( The New York
Times , 4/28/19) reveals a stark contrast in self-perception from her earlier findings.
First, her interviewees totally "get" the lie of meritocracy as they ruefully skewer family
myths about individual effort, scrimping and saving and the origins of wealth. One young woman
who's in line to inherit a considerable fortune told Sherman, "My dad has always been a CEO,
and it was clear to me that he spent a lot of time at work, but it has never been clear to me
that he worked a lot harder than a domestic worker, for example. I will never believe
that."
Sherman discovered that whether the immense fortunes came from "the direct dispossession of
indigenous people, enslavement of African-Americans, production of fossil fuels or obvious
exploitation of workers, they often express especially acute guilt." One response has been that
some wealthy people under age 35 have formed organizations to fund social justice
initiatives.
Second, many of her respondents have read about racialized capitalism and harbor no
illusions about their own success. From access to the "right" schools and acquiring cultural
capital to social networking and good, high paying jobs, they readily acknowledged that it's
all derived from their class (and race) privilege. Third, they are convinced the economic
system is "immoral," equality of opportunity does not exist and their wealth and privileges are
absolutely "unearned." Finally, they grasp, often from personal observation, that traditional
philanthropy is primarily about keeping those at the top in place, obtaining generous tax
breaks and treating symptoms while ignoring the causes rooted in the very social structures
from which they benefit.
Beyond the article's hyperbolic title and a certain vagueness about where this new
consciousness may lead, the piece -- whether intentionally or not -- does raise issues that
demand much wider public discussion.
First, a note about philanthro-capitalism or as Peter Buffet (Warren Buffet's son) terms it,
"conscience laundering." In Chris Rock's pithy phrase, "Behind every fortune is a great crime"
and given what we know about the sources of great wealth -- the collectivity -- these monies
should be supporting public needs that are democratically determined not the cherry-picked, pet
projects of billionaires. And this reveals another motive behind private charity: the desire to
stifle any enthusiasm for an activist government responsible to the public will.
I should add that whenever I hear a philanthropist piously proclaim, "I just wanted to give
something back," my first impulse is to shout "Why not give it all back?" That is, I've always
been partial to the moral injunction, "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be
required" (Luke 12:48). And although I won't attempt to improve on scripture, I might suggest
"From whom much is taken, much is owed."
Second, one might ask about the case where a person of modest means succeeds at something
and accumulates a fortune? We've all heard or read ad infinitum, someone exclaim, "Damn it!
Nobody even handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I'm entirely self-made." Isn't that
evidence of individual merit? No. For starters, as Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Mayer
fortune, once put it, "Where would wealthy entrepreneurs be without taxpayer investments in the
Internet, transportation, public education, the legal system, the human genome project and so
on?" Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has calculated the societal contribution
at ninety percent of what people earn in Northwest Europe and the United States.
In addition to the sources mentioned above, just off the top of my head I can list many
other factors that belie this powerfully seductive but wholly fictional narrative, one that's
also touted to and embraced by many members of the working class: Child labor, Chinese and
Irish immigrant labor (railroads), eminent domain, massacres of striking workers, state
repression of unions, Immigration Act of 1864, public land grabs, corporate welfare, installing
foreign dictators to guarantee cheap labor and resources, inheritance laws, public schools and
universities, public expense mail systems, property and contract laws, government tax breaks
incentives to business, Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure trust in the stock market,
the U.S. military, and a police state to keep the rabble from picking up pitchforks. Another
factor that almost merits its own paragraphs is pure luck. By any objective criteria, we can
conclude that absent this arrangement there would be no accumulation of private wealth.
Finally, meritocracy is the classic American foundation myth and provides the basis for an
entire array of other fairy tales. Foremost, this illusion serves to justify policies that
foster economic inequality and hinder the development of social movements. After so many
decades of neoliberal ideology, this lie is now firmly lodged in the public's collective
consciousness but I'm convinced that with effort and relying on the evidence, it can be
expunged.
"... A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes . What's more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides , even though the murder rate gets so much more attention. ..."
"... In some states the upsurge was far higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%). ..."
"... Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between 35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Globally , it ranks 27th. ..."
"... The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half of all such acts in this country. ..."
"... Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower among people in higher-income brackets. ..."
"... Evidence from the United States , Brazil , Japan , and Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases, so does the suicide rate. ..."
"... One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways) than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly higher . ..."
"... The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have labeled " deaths of despair " -- those caused by suicides plus opioid overdoses and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and its ripple effects do appear to matter. ..."
"... Trump has neglected his base on pretty much every issue; this one's no exception. ..."
Yves here. This post describes how the forces driving the US suicide surge started well before the Trump era, but explains how
Trump has not only refused to acknowledge the problem, but has made matters worse.
However, it's not as if the Democrats are embracing this issue either.
BY Rajan Menon, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New
York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention
Originally published at
TomDispatch .
We hear a lot about suicide when celebrities like
Anthony Bourdain and
Kate Spade die by their own hand.
Otherwise, it seldom makes the headlines. That's odd given the magnitude of the problem.
In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves.
In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly
seven times greater than the number
of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.
A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every
12 minutes . What's more, after decades
of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since
the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do
homicides , even
though the murder rate gets so much more attention.
In other words, we're talking about a national
epidemic of self-inflicted
deaths.
Worrisome Numbers
Anyone who has lost a close relative or friend to suicide or has worked on a suicide hotline (as I have) knows that statistics
transform the individual, the personal, and indeed the mysterious aspects of that violent act -- Why this person? Why now? Why in
this manner? -- into depersonalized abstractions. Still, to grasp how serious the suicide epidemic has become, numbers are a necessity.
According to a 2018 Centers for Disease Control study , between
1999 and 2016, the suicide rate increased in every state in the union except Nevada, which already had a remarkably high rate. In
30 states, it jumped by 25% or more; in 17, by at least a third. Nationally, it increased
33% . In some states the upsurge was far
higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%).
Alas, the news only gets grimmer.
Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th
among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between
35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest
rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Globally , it ranks 27th.
More importantly, the trend in the United States doesn't align with what's happening elsewhere in the developed world. The World
Health Organization, for instance, reports
that Great Britain, Canada, and China all have notably lower suicide rates than the U.S.,
as do all but
six countries in the European Union. (Japan's is only slightly lower.)
World Bank statistics show that, worldwide,
the suicide rate fell from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2000 to 10.6 in 2016. It's been falling in
China ,
Japan
(where it has declined steadily for nearly a
decade and is at its lowest point in 37 years), most of Europe, and even countries like
South Korea and
Russia that
have a significantly higher suicide rate than the United States. In Russia, for instance, it has dropped by nearly 26% from a
high point of 42 per 100,000 in
1994 to 31 in 2019.
We know a fair amount about the patterns
of suicide in the United States. In 2017, the rate was highest for men between the ages of 45 and 64 (30 per 100,000) and those 75
and older (39.7 per 100,000).
The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New
Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own
guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a
higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half
of all such acts in this country.
There are gender-based differences as well.
From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost four-and-a-half times higher in the first of
those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last.
Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is
lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill
themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower
among people in higher-income brackets.
The Economics of Stress
This surge in the suicide rate has taken place in years during which the working class has experienced greater economic hardship
and psychological stress. Increased competition from abroad and outsourcing, the results of globalization, have contributed to job
loss, particularly in economic sectors like manufacturing, steel, and mining that had long been mainstays of employment for such
workers. The jobs still available often paid less and provided fewer benefits.
Technological change, including computerization, robotics, and the coming of artificial intelligence, has similarly begun to displace
labor in significant ways, leaving Americans without college degrees, especially those 50 and older, in
far more difficult straits when it comes to
finding new jobs that pay
well. The lack of anything resembling an
industrial policy of a sort that exists in Europe
has made these dislocations even more painful for American workers, while a sharp decline in private-sector union membership
-- down
from nearly 17% in 1983 to 6.4% today -- has reduced their ability to press for higher wages through collective bargaining.
Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted median wage has barely budged
over the last four decades (even as
CEO salaries have soared). And a decline in worker productivity doesn't explain it: between 1973 and 2017 productivity
increased by 77%, while a worker's average hourly wage only
rose by 12.4%. Wage stagnation has made it
harder for working-class
Americans to get by, let alone have a lifestyle comparable to that of their parents or grandparents.
The gap in earnings between those at the top and bottom of American society has also increased -- a lot. Since 1979, the
wages of Americans in the 10th percentile increased by a pitiful
1.2%. Those in the 50th percentile did a bit better, making a gain of 6%. By contrast, those in the 90th percentile increased by
34.3% and those near the peak of the wage pyramid -- the top 1% and especially the rarefied 0.1% -- made far more
substantial
gains.
And mind you, we're just talking about wages, not other forms of income like large stock dividends, expensive homes, or eyepopping
inheritances. The share of net national wealth held by the richest 0.1%
increased from 10% in the 1980s to 20% in 2016.
By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% shrank in those same decades from about 35% to 20%. As for the top 1%, by 2016 its share
had increased to almost 39% .
The precise relationship between economic inequality and suicide rates remains unclear, and suicide certainly can't simply be
reduced to wealth disparities or financial stress. Still, strikingly, in contrast to the United States, suicide rates are noticeably
lower and have been declining in
Western
European countries where income inequalities are far less pronounced, publicly funded healthcare is regarded as a right (not
demonized as a pathway to serfdom), social safety nets far more extensive, and
apprenticeships and worker
retraining programs more widespread.
Evidence from the United States
, Brazil ,
Japan , and
Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases,
so does the suicide rate. If so, the good news is that progressive economic policies -- should Democrats ever retake the White
House and the Senate -- could make a positive difference. A study
based on state-by-state variations in the U.S. found that simply boosting the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit by 10%
appreciably reduces the suicide rate among people without college degrees.
The Race Enigma
One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways)
than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly
higher . It increased from 11.3 per 100,000
in 2000 to 15.85 per 100,000 in 2017; for African Americans in those years the rates were 5.52 per 100,000 and 6.61 per 100,000.
Black men are
10 times more likely to be homicide victims than white men, but the latter are two-and-half times more likely to kill themselves.
The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate
effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne
Case and Angus Deaton have labeled "
deaths of despair
" -- those caused by suicides plus
opioid overdoses
and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and
its ripple effects do appear to matter.
According to a study by the
St. Louis Federal Reserve , the white working class accounted for 45% of all income earned in the United States in 1990, but
only 27% in 2016. In those same years, its share of national wealth plummeted, from 45% to 22%. And as inflation-adjusted wages have
decreased for
men without college degrees, many white workers seem to have
lost hope of success of
any sort. Paradoxically, the sense of failure and the accompanying stress may be greater for white workers precisely because they
traditionally were much
better off economically than their African American and Hispanic counterparts.
In addition, the fraying of communities knit together by employment in once-robust factories and mines has increased
social isolation
among them, and the evidence that it -- along with
opioid addiction and
alcohol abuse -- increases the risk of suicide
is strong . On top of that,
a significantly higher proportion of
whites than blacks and Hispanics own firearms, and suicide rates are markedly higher in states where gun
ownership is more widespread.
Trump's Faux Populism
The large increase in suicide within the white working class began a couple of decades before Donald Trump's election. Still,
it's reasonable to ask what he's tried to do about it, particularly since votes from these Americans helped propel him to the White
House. In 2016, he received
64% of the votes of whites without college degrees; Hillary Clinton, only 28%. Nationwide, he beat Clinton in
counties where deaths of despair rose significantly between 2000 and 2015.
White workers will remain crucial to Trump's chances of winning in 2020. Yet while he has spoken about, and initiated steps aimed
at reducing, the high suicide rate among
veterans , his speeches and tweets have never highlighted the national suicide epidemic or its inordinate impact on white workers.
More importantly, to the extent that economic despair contributes to their high suicide rate, his policies will only make matters
worse.
The real benefits from the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by the president and congressional Republicans flowed
to those on the top steps of the economic ladder. By 2027, when the Act's provisions will run out, the wealthiest Americans are expected
to have captured
81.8% of the gains. And that's not counting the windfall they received from recent changes in taxes on inheritances. Trump and
the GOP
doubled the annual amount exempt from estate taxes -- wealth bequeathed to heirs -- through 2025 from $5.6 million per individual
to $11.2 million (or $22.4 million per couple). And who benefits most from this act of generosity? Not workers, that's for sure,
but every household with an estate worth $22 million or more will.
As for job retraining provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the president
proposed
cutting that program by 40% in his 2019 budget, later settling for keeping it at 2017 levels. Future cuts seem in the cards as
long as Trump is in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office
projects that his tax cuts alone will produce even bigger budget
deficits in the years to come. (The shortfall last year was
$779 billion and it is expected to
reach $1 trillion by 2020.) Inevitably, the president and congressional Republicans will then demand additional reductions in spending
for social programs.
This is all the more likely because Trump and those Republicans also
slashed corporate taxes
from 35% to 21% -- an estimated
$1.4
trillion in savings for corporations over the next decade. And unlike the income tax cut, the corporate tax has
no end
date . The president assured his base that the big bucks those companies had stashed abroad would start flowing home and produce
a wave of job creation -- all without adding to the deficit. As it happens, however, most of that repatriated cash has been used
for corporate stock buy-backs, which totaled more than
$800 billion last year. That, in turn, boosted share prices, but didn't exactly rain money down on workers. No surprise, of course,
since the wealthiest 10% of Americans own at least
84% of all stocks and the bottom
60% have less than
2% of them.
And the president's corporate tax cut hasn't produced the tsunami of job-generating investments he predicted either. Indeed, in
its aftermath, more than 80% of American
companies stated that their plans for investment and hiring hadn't changed. As a result, the monthly increase in jobs has proven
unremarkable compared to President Obama's
second term, when the economic recovery that Trump largely inherited began. Yes, the economy did grow
2.3%
in 2017 and
2.9% in 2018 (though not
3.1% as the president claimed). There wasn't, however, any "unprecedented economic boom -- a boom that has rarely been seen before"
as he insisted in this year's State of the Union
Address .
Anyway, what matters for workers struggling to get by is growth in real wages, and there's nothing to celebrate on that front:
between 2017 and mid-2018 they actually
declined by 1.63% for white workers and 2.5% for African Americans, while they rose for Hispanics by a measly 0.37%. And though
Trump insists that his beloved tariff hikes are going to help workers, they will actually raise the prices of goods, hurting the
working class and other low-income Americans
the most .
Then there are the obstacles those susceptible to suicide face in receiving insurance-provided mental-health care. If you're a
white worker without medical coverage or have a policy with a deductible and co-payments that are high and your income, while low,
is too high to qualify for Medicaid, Trump and the GOP haven't done anything for you. Never mind the president's
tweet proclaiming that "the Republican Party Will Become 'The Party of Healthcare!'"
Let me amend that: actually, they have done something. It's just not what you'd call helpful. The
percentage of uninsured
adults, which fell from 18% in 2013 to 10.9% at the end of 2016, thanks in no small measure to
Obamacare , had risen to 13.7% by the end of last year.
The bottom line? On a problem that literally has life-and-death significance for a pivotal portion of his base, Trump has been
AWOL. In fact, to the extent that economic strain contributes to the alarming suicide rate among white workers, his policies are
only likely to exacerbate what is already a national crisis of epidemic proportions.
Trump is running on the claim that he's turned the economy around; addressing suicide undermines this (false) claim. To state
the obvious, NC readers know that Trump is incapable of caring about anyone or anything beyond his in-the-moment interpretation
of his self-interest.
Not just Trump. Most of the Republican Party and much too many Democrats have also abandoned this base, otherwise known as
working class Americans.
The economic facts are near staggering and this article has done a nice job of summarizing these numbers that are spread out
across a lot of different sites.
I've experienced this rise within my own family and probably because of that fact I'm well aware that Trump is only a symptom
of an entire political system that has all but abandoned it's core constituency, the American Working Class.
Yep It's not just Trump. The author mentions this, but still focuses on him for some reason. Maybe accurately attributing the
problems to a failed system makes people feel more hopeless. Current nihilists in Congress make it their duty to destroy once
helpful institutions in the name of "fiscal responsibility," i.e., tax cuts for corporate elites.
I'd assumed, the "working class" had dissappeared, back during Reagan's Miracle? We'd still see each other, sitting dazed on
porches & stoops of rented old places they'd previously; trying to garden, fix their car while smoking, drinking or dazed on something?
Those able to morph into "middle class" lives, might've earned substantially less, especially benefits and retirement package
wise. But, a couple decades later, it was their turn, as machines and foreigners improved productivity. You could lease a truck
to haul imported stuff your kids could sell to each other, or help robots in some warehouse, but those 80s burger flipping, rent-a-cop
& repo-man gigs dried up. Your middle class pals unemployable, everybody in PayDay Loan debt (without any pay day in sight?) SHTF
Bug-out bags® & EZ Credit Bushmasters began showing up at yard sales, even up North. Opioids became the religion of the proletariat
Whites simply had much farther to fall, more equity for our betters to steal. And it was damned near impossible to get the cops
to shoot you?
Man, this just ain't turning out as I'd hoped. Need coffee!
We especially love the euphemism "Deaths O' Despair." since it works so well on a Chyron, especially supered over obese crackers
waddling in crusty MossyOak™ Snuggies®
This is a very good article, but I have a comment about the section titled, "The Race Enigma." I think the key to understanding
why African Americans have a lower suicide rate lies in understanding the sociological notion of community, and the related concept
Emil Durkheim called social solidarity. This sense of solidarity and community among African Americans stands in contrast to the
"There is no such thing as society" neoliberal zeitgeist that in fact produces feelings of extreme isolation, failure, and self-recriminations.
An aside: as a white boy growing up in 1950s-60s Detroit I learned that if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had
to do was to hang out with black people.
" if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had to do was to hang out with black people."
amen, to that. in my case rural black people.
and I'll add Hispanics to that.
My wife's extended Familia is so very different from mine.
Solidarity/Belonging is cool.
I recommend it.
on the article we keep the scanner on("local news").we had a 3-4 year rash of suicides and attempted suicides(determined by chisme,
or deduction) out here.
all of them were despair related more than half correlated with meth addiction itself a despair related thing.
ours were equally male/female, and across both our color spectrum.
that leaves economics/opportunity/just being able to get by as the likely cause.
Actually, in the article it states:
"There are gender-based differences as well. From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost
four-and-a-half times higher in the first of those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last."
which in some sense makes despair the wrong word, as females are actually quite a bit more likely to be depressed for instance,
but much less likely to "do the deed". Despair if we mean a certain social context maybe, but not just a psychological state.
Suicide deaths are a function of the suicide attempt rate and the efficacy of the method used. A unique aspect of the US is
the prevalence of guns in the society and therefore the greatly increased usage of them in suicide attempts compared to other
countries. Guns are a very efficient way of committing suicide with a very high "success" rate. As of 2010, half of US suicides
were using a gun as opposed to other countries with much lower percentages. So if the US comes even close to other countries in
suicide rates then the US will surpass them in deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Firearms
Now we can add in opiates, especially fentanyl, that can be quite effective as well.
The economic crisis hitting middle America over the past 30 years has been quite focused on the states and populations that
also tend to have high gun ownership rates. So suicide attempts in those populations have a high probability of "success".
I would just take this opportunity to add that the police end up getting called in to prevent on lot of suicide attempts, and
just about every successful one.
In the face of so much blanket demonization of the police, along with justified criticism, it's important to remember that.
As someone who works in the mental health treatment system, acute inpatient psychiatry to be specific, I can say that of the
25 inpatients currently here, 11 have been here before, multiple times. And this is because of several issues, in my experience:
inadequate inpatient resources, staff burnout, inadequate support once they leave the hospital, and the nature of their illnesses.
It's a grim picture here and it's been this way for YEARS. Until MAJOR money is spent on this issue it's not going to get better.
This includes opening more facilities for people to live in long term, instead of closing them, which has been the trend I've
seen.
One last thing the CEO wants "asses in beds", aka census, which is the money maker. There's less profit if people get better
and don't return. And I guess I wouldn't have a job either. Hmmmm: sickness generates wealth.
How universities, banks and the government turned student debt into America's next financial black hole...
On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted '92 Toyota Tercel
in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to
end his life.
Beaten down after more than a decade of struggle with student debt, after years of taking false doors and slipping into various
puddles of bureaucratic quicksand, he was giving up the fight. "This is it, I'm done," he remembers thinking. "I sat there and just
sort of felt like I'm going to take my life. I'm going to find a way to park this car in the garage, with it running or whatever."
Nailor's problems began at 19 years old, when he borrowed for tuition so that he could pursue a bachelor's degree at the University
of Southern Maine. He graduated summa cum laude four years later and immediately got a job in his field, as an English teacher.
Bu t he graduated with $35,000 in debt, a big hill to climb on a part-time teacher's $18,000 salary. He struggled with payments,
and he and his wife then consolidated their student debt, which soon totaled more than $50,000. They declared bankruptcy and defaulted
on the loans. From there he found himself in a loan "rehabilitation" program that added to his overall balance. "That's when the
noose began to tighten," he says.
The collectors called day and night, at work and at home. "In the middle of class too, while I was teaching," he says. He ended
up in another rehabilitation program that put him on a road toward an essentially endless cycle of rising payments. Today, he pays
$471 a month toward "rehabilitation," and, like countless other borrowers, he pays nothing at all toward his real debt, which he
now calculates would cost more than $100,000 to extinguish. "Not one dollar of it goes to principal," says Nailor. "I will never
be able to pay it off. My only hope to escape from this crushing debt is to die."
After repeated phone calls with lending agencies about his ever-rising interest payments, Nailor now believes things will only
get worse with time. "At this rate, I may easily break $1 million in debt before I retire from teaching," he says.
Nailor had more than once reached the stage in his thoughts where he was thinking about how to physically pull off his suicide.
"I'd been there before, that just was the worst of it," he says. "It scared me, bad."
He had a young son and a younger daughter, but Nailor had been so broken by the experience of financial failure that he managed
to convince himself they would be better off without him. What saved him is that he called his wife to say goodbye. "I don't know
why I called my wife. I'm glad I did," he says. "I just wanted her or someone to tell me to pick it up, keep fighting, it's going
to be all right. And she did."
From that moment, Nailor managed to focus on his family. Still, the core problem – the spiraling debt that has taken over his
life, as it has for millions of other Americans – remains.
Horror stories about student debt are nothing new. But this school year marks a considerable worsening of a tale that ought to
have been a national emergency years ago. The government in charge of regulating this mess is now filled with predatory monsters
who have extensive ties to the exploitative for-profit education industry – from Donald Trump himself to Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos, who sets much of the federal loan policy, to Julian Schmoke, onetime dean of the infamous DeVry University, whom Trump appointed
to police fraud in education.
Americans don't understand the student-loan crisis because they've been trained to view the issue in terms of a series of separate,
unrelated problems.
They will read in one place that as of the summer of 2017, a record 8.5 million Americans are in default on their student debt,
with about $1.3 trillion in loans still outstanding.
In another place, voters will read that the cost of higher education is skyrocketing, soaring in a seemingly market-defying arc
that for nearly a decade now has run almost double the rate of inflation. Tuition for a halfway decent school now frequently surpasses
$50,000 a year. How, the average newsreader wonders, can any child not born in a yacht afford to go to school these days?
In a third place, that same reader will see some heartless monster, usually a Republican, threatening to cut federal student lending.
The current bogeyman is Trump, who is threatening to slash the Pell Grant program by $3.9 billion, which would seem to put higher
education even further out of reach for poor and middle-income families. This too seems appalling, and triggers a different kind
of response, encouraging progressive voters to lobby for increased availability for educational lending.
But the separateness of these stories clouds the unifying issue underneath: The education industry as a whole is a con. In fact,
since the mortgage business blew up in 2008, education and student debt is probably our reigning unexposed nation-wide scam.
It's a multiparty affair, what shakedown artists call a "big store scheme," like in the movie The Sting : a complex deception
requiring a big cast to string the mark along every step of the way. In higher education, every party you meet, from the moment you
first set foot on campus, is in on the game.
America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our
economic pie – sectors like health care, military production, banking, even commercial and residential real estate – have become
crude income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting
from gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams – that's the last
thing America makes with any level of consistent competence. In that light, Trump, among other things, the former head of a schlock
diploma mill called Trump University, is a perfect president for these times. He's the scammer-in-chief in the Great American Ripoff
Age, a time in which fleecing students is one of our signature achievements.
It starts with the sales pitch colleges make to kids. The thrust of it is usually that people who go to college make lots more
money than the unfortunate dunces who don't. "A bachelor's degree is worth $2.8 million on average over a lifetime" is how Georgetown
University put it. The Census Bureau tells us similarly that a master's degree is worth on average about $1.3 million more than a
high school diploma.
But these stats say more about the increasing uselessness of a high school degree than they do about the value of a college diploma.
Moreover, since virtually everyone at the very highest strata of society has a college degree, the stats are skewed by a handful
of financial titans. A college degree has become a minimal status marker as much as anything else. "I'm sure people who take polo
lessons or sailing lessons earn a lot more on average too," says Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice, which advocates for debt
forgiveness and other reforms. "Does that mean you should send your kids to sailing school?"
But the pitch works on everyone these days, especially since good jobs for Trump's beloved "poorly educated" are scarce to nonexistent.
Going to college doesn't guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly
shallow pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There's a lot of stick, but not much carrot, in the education game.
It's a vicious cycle. Since everyone feels obligated to go to college, most everyone who can go, does, creating a glut of graduates.
And as that glut of degree recipients grows, the squeeze on the un-degreed grows tighter, increasing further that original negative
incentive: Don't go to college, and you'll be standing on soup lines by age 25.
With that inducement in place, colleges can charge almost any amount, and kids will pay – so long as they can get the money. And
here we run into problem number two: It's too easy to find that money.
Parents, not wanting their kids to fall behind, will pay every dollar they have. But if they don't have the cash, there is a virtually
unlimited amount of credit available to young people. Proposed cuts to Pell Grants aside, the landscape is filled with public and
private lending, and students gobble it up. Kids who walk into financial-aid offices are often not told what signing their names
on the various aid forms will mean down the line. A lot of kids don't even understand the concept of interest or amortization tables
– they think if they're borrowing $8,000, they're paying back $8,000.
Nailor certainly was unaware of what he was getting into when he was 19. "I had no idea [about interest]," he says. "I just remember
thinking, 'I don't have to worry about it right now. I want to go to school.' " He pauses in disgust. "It's unsettling to remember
how it was like, 'Here, just sign this and you're all set.' I wish I could take the time machine back and slap myself in the face."
The average amount of debt for a student leaving school is skyrocketing even faster than the rate of tuition increase.
In 2016, for instance, the average amount of debt for an exiting college graduate was a staggering $37,172. That's a rise of six
percent over just the previous year. With the average undergraduate interest rate at about 3.7 percent, the interest alone costs
around $115 per month, meaning anyone who can't afford to pay into the principal faces the prospect of $69,000 in payments over 50
years.
So here's the con so far.
You must go to college because you're screwed if you don't.
Costs are outrageously high, but you pay them because you have to, and because the system makes it easy to borrow massive amounts
of money
The third part of the con is the worst: You can't get out of the debt.
Since government lenders in particular have virtually unlimited power to collect on student debt – preying on everything from
salary to income-tax returns – even running is not an option. And since most young people find themselves unable to make their full
payments early on, they often find themselves perpetually paying down interest only, never touching the principal. Our billionaire
president can declare bankruptcy four times, but students are the one class of citizen that may not do it even once.
October 2017 was supposed to represent the first glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel. This month marks the 10th anniversary
of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, one of the few avenues for wiping out student debt. The idea, launched by George
W. Bush, was pretty simple: Students could pledge to work 10 years for the government or a nonprofit and have their debt forgiven.
In order to qualify, borrowers had to make payments for 10 years using a complex formula. This month, then, was to start the first
mass wipeouts of debt in the history of American student lending. But more than half of the 700,000 enrollees have already been expunged
from the program for, among other things, failing to certify their incomes on time, one of many bureaucratic tricks employed to limit
forgiveness eligibility. To date, fewer than 500 participants are scheduled to receive loan forgiveness in this first round.
Moreover, Trump has called for the program's elimination by 2018, meaning that any relief that begins this month is likely only
temporary. The only thing that is guaranteed to remain real for the immediate future are the massive profits being generated on the
backs of young people, who before long become old people who, all too often, remain ensnared until their last days in one of the
country's most brilliant and devious moneymaking schemes.
Everybody wins in this madness, except students. Even though many of the loans are originated by the state, most of them are serviced
by private or quasi-private companies like Navient – which until 2014 was the student-loan arm of Sallie Mae – or Nelnet, companies
that reported a combined profit of around $1 billion last year (the U.S. government made a profit of $1.6 billion in 2016!). Debt-collector
companies like Performant (which generated $141.4 million in revenues; the family of Betsy DeVos is a major investor), and most particularly
the colleges and universities, get to prey on the desperation and terror of parents and young people, and in the process rake in
vast sums virtually without fear of market consequence.
About that: Universities, especially public institutions, have successfully defended rising tuition in recent years by blaming
the hikes on reduced support from states. But this explanation was blown to bits in large part due to a bizarre slip-up in the middle
of a controversy over state support of the University of Wisconsin system a few years ago.
In that incident, UW raised tuition by 5.5 percent six years in a row after 2007. The school blamed stresses from the financial
crisis and decreased state aid. But when pressed during a state committee hearing in 2013 about the university's finances, UW system
president Kevin Reilly admitted they held $648 million in reserve, including $414 million in tuition payments. This was excess hidey-hole
cash the school was sitting on, separate and distinct from, say, an endowment fund.
After the university was showered with criticism for hoarding cash at a time when it was gouging students with huge price increases
every year, the school responded by saying, essentially, it only did what all the other kids were doing. UW released data showing
that other major state-school systems across the country were similarly stashing huge amounts of cash. While Wisconsin's surplus
was only 25 percent of its operating budget, for instance, Minnesota's was 29 percent, and Illinois maintained a whopping 34 percent
reserve.
When Collinge, of Student Loan Justice, looked into it, he found that the phenomenon wasn't confined to state schools. Private
schools, too, have been hoarding cash even as they plead poverty and jack up tuition fees. "They're all doing it," he says.
While universities sit on their stockpiles of cash and the loan industry generates record profits, the pain of living in debilitating
debt for many lasts into retirement. Take Veronica Martish. She's a 68-year-old veteran, having served in the armed forces in the
Vietnam era. She's also a grandmother who's never been in trouble and consid?ers herself a patriot. "The thing is, I tried to do
everything right in my life," she says. "But this ruined my life."
This is an $8,000 student loan she took out in 1989, through Sallie Mae. She borrowed the money so she could take courses at Quinebaug
Valley Community College in Connecticut. Five years later, after deaths in her family, she fell behind on her payments and entered
a loan-rehabilitation program. "That's when my nightmare began," she says.
In rehabilitation, Martish's $8,000 loan, with fees and interest, ballooned into a $27,000 debt, which she has been carrying ever
since. She says she's paid more than $63,000 to date and is nowhere near discharging the principal. "By the time I die," she says,
"I will probably pay more than $200,000 toward an $8,000 loan." She pauses. "It's a scam, you see. Nothing ever comes off the loan.
It's all interest and fees. And they chase you until you're old, like me. They never stop. Ever."
And that's the other thing about lending to students: It's the safest grift around.
There's probably no better symbol of the bankruptcy of the education industry than Trump University. The half-literate president's
effort at higher learning drew in suckers with pathetic promises of great real-estate insights (for instance, that Trump "hand-picked"
the instructors) and then charged them truckfuls of cash for get-rich-quick tutorials that students and faculty later described as
"almost completely worthless" and a "total lie." That Trump got to settle a lawsuit on this matter for $25 million and still managed
to be elected president is, ironically, a remarkable testament to the failure of our education system. About the only example that
might be worse is DeVry University, which told students that 90 percent of graduates seeking jobs found them in their fields within
six months of graduation. The FTC found those claims "false and unsubstantiated," and ordered $100 million in refunds and debt relief,
but that was in 2016 – before Trump put DeVry chief Schmoke, of all people, in charge of rooting out education fraud. Like a lot
of things connected to politics lately, it would be funny if it weren't somehow actually happening.?"Yeah, it's the fox guarding
the henhouse," says Collinge. "You could probably find a worse analogy."
But the real problem with the student-loan story is that it's so poorly understood by people not living the nightmare. There's
so much propaganda that blames the borrowers for taking on the debt in the first place that there's often little sympathy for people
in hopeless situations. To make matters worse, band-aid programs that supposedly offer help hypnotize the public into thinking there
are ways out, when the "help" is usually just another trick to add to the balance.
"That's part of the problem with the narrative," says Nailor, the schoolteacher. "People think that there's help, so what are
you complaining about? All you got to do is apply for help."
But the help, he says, coming from a for-profit predatory system, often just makes things worse. "It did for me," he says. "It
does for a lot of people."
The real flaw is associating "higher" education with value. Get a job. Earn an income. Find an interest for your free time.
Raise a family. Spare the four years of wasted time and money.
If you want to take the risk of going into debt to attend college, you better come out with skills that are in high demand.
Otherwise you are much better off going into the military, or going to trade school. BTW, thank the Clintons for making it
impossible to get out of student debt through bankruptcy.
If you want to give out loans to kids then you should accept the risk that they might default on that debt and leave you
with the tab. Let's stop the coddling the banker bullshit. They lobbied to make this loans extremely difficult to discharge
in bankruptcy. They wanted all the profit and none of the risk. Let them assume risk and they'll stop handing out loans to
unqualified borrowers.
Amen! If the money for an "education" is more difficult to obtain, that ought to be a clue as to the value of the information
/ training one is purchasing. The fact it's so easy to get is all one needs to know about the worth of what's being spewed
by those dispensing their so-called knowledge / truth.
Allow the lawful discharge through bankruptcy and punish every single financial institution, (and especially their individual
persons who oversaw the process), that has profited off of ballooning "principle" amounts that even come close to doubling
an original amount with ties to any government official that voted to place these kind of loans in such a category.
This is madness! "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,..." Isaiah 10:1
Finally at least one person gets it. The inability to discharge student loan debt through the taint of bankruptcy is one
of the greatest financial crimes of the last century. Entirely unAmerican. America used to be all about fresh starts. That
is one reason our business life is more vibrant than say many places in Europe with less benign laws. Same goes for individuals.
If you go through the pain of bankruptcy there is no reason you shouldnt get that debt discharged. Whomever voted for that
law, whether Clintons or others should be beaten to death.
Hobart's 38-week combo welder program costs $16,625. A trained kid willing to travel and work in the field would make more
than an engineering graduate who paid a quarter-million for his degree.
No mention made of the rats nest Social Justice program$ infesting college and university campuses across the country, at
untold cost, worthless sullshit.
Not that the student loan thing isn't another banker scam, but the lead story doesn't make sense.
Firstly, educators get
loan forgiveness after a decade or two of public service. And there are income contingent repayment plans. And lawyers have,
in fact, been able to get these things discharged. None of this changes the scam that is giving out high interest loans to
kids to pursue an education. But you might want to start with a sob story that makes more sense. How about a pediatrician with
400k in loans and making 100k a year living in a coastal city? Or how about the art history majors at private liberal arts
schools with 200k in debt making $10/hour as a barista? But teachers are one of the few groups that has an actual federal out.
Maybe. My wife is a teacher in a Title I, low income school, and had been for 13 years..... She also has about 13K remaining in student loans, originally federal direct and Perkins loans. With her over 10 years in title I schools, she should be able to get them forgiven, except that she consolidated these loans
before I met her, and now they are "serviced" by AES, a private lender, and they are no longer eligible for discharge. This I call the "Consolidation Scam."
Pay off debt before you have children. There is no law that you must have children, if the debt makes it impossible. I would
have liked a lot of tings but could not afford them.
Taibbi has some gall to blame Trump, DeVos and others for the student debt explosion, but not one word about Obama or the
government's takeover of the student loan market as part of Obamacare? The student loan market was folded into the ACA as part
of the fake accounting to make the ACA numbers "work". Every market the govenrment insinuates itself into - housing, health
care, college tuition, etc. - gets distorted and costs explode. Taibbi's yet another dishonest liberal.
Yikes- is this factual? If so fuck him. All name, no cattle.
Obama began his turn as destroyer in chief at the height of the Great Recession, everyone & their brother was running into
the safety of college & student loans to pay the bills. I recall watching the local parking lots swell. :) So there's that.
But numbers are off the charts every year because younger millennials expect the govt to forgive all those loans at some
point. That's how many thought 20 years ago & it's worse today.
"The nexus between the student loan program and ObamaCare is purely opportunistic. As the Affordable Care Act was passing
through Congress, its wheels greased by the wholly fraudulent assertion that it didn't need 60 votes to pass the Senate, the
administration decided to put in a provision eliminating the private student loan industry, fully federalizing the program.
What was not widely understood at the time was that it hoped to raid the funds paid by students to provide money for the bottomless
pit known as ObamaCare"
In 1980, the states subsidized 70% of the cost per student. Today it is less than 30% and the amount of grants and scholarships
has likewise declined. Tax cuts for rich people and conservative hatred for education are the biggest problem.
Notable quotes:
"... "easy" student loans are a subsidy to colleges, ..."
"... 1965 median family income was $6900, more than 200% of the cost of a year at NU. Current median family income is about 75% of a year at NU. ..."
"... Allowing young adults to avoid challenging and uncomfortable and difficult subjects under the guise of compassion is the enemy of meritocracy. Financial illiteracy is the enemy of meritocracy. ..."
"... The specific market dynamics of health care expenditures are obviously different, but as categories of expenses they have some things in common. First, both are very expensive relative to most other household expenditures. Second, unlike consumer merchandise, neither lends itself very well to cost reduction via offshoring or automation. So in an economy where many consumer prices are held down through a corresponding suppression of real wage growth, they consume a correspondingly larger chunk of the household budget. ..."
"... JUST HAD AN IDEA THAT MIGHT LIMIT THE DAMAGE OF THESE PHONEY ONLINE COLLEGES (pardon shouting, but I think it's justified): ..."
"... of-paying) IF a built for that purpose government agency APPROVES said loan. What do you think? ..."
"... Kaplan Ed is among the worst of the worst of internet federal loan and grant sucking diploma mills. ..."
"... Because every event in today's economy is the wish of the wealthy. Do you see why they suddenly wish to deeply educate the proles? ..."
Thomas Piketty on a theme I've been hammering lately, student debt is too damn high!:
Student Loan Debt Is the Enemy
of Meritocracy in the US: ...the amount of household debt and even more recently of student debt in the U.S. is something
that is really troublesome and it reflects the very large rise in tuition in the U.S. a very large inequality in access to education.
I think if we really want to promote more equal opportunity and redistribute chances in access to education we should do something
about student debt. And it's not possible to have such a large group of the population entering the labor force with such a big
debt behind them. This exemplifies a particular problem with inequality in the United States, which is very high inequality and
access to higher education. So in other countries in the developed world you don't have such massive student debt because you
have more public support to higher education. I think the plan that was proposed earlier this year in 2015 by President Obama
to increase public funding to public universities and community college is exactly justified.
This is really the key for higher growth in the future and also for a more equitable growth..., you have the official discourse
about meritocracy, equal opportunity and mobility, and then you have the reality. And the gap between the two can be quite troublesome.
So this is like you have a problem like this and there's a lot of hypocrisy about meritocracy in every country, not only in the
U.S., but there is evidence suggesting that this has become particularly extreme in the United States. ... So this is a situation
that is very troublesome and should rank very highly in the policy agenda in the future in the U.S.
DrDick -> Jeff R Carter:
"college is heavily subsidized"
Bwahahahahahahaha! *gasp*
In 1980, the states subsidized 70% of the cost per student. Today it is less than 30% and the amount of grants and scholarships
has likewise declined. Tax cuts for rich people and conservative hatred for education are the biggest problem.
cm -> to DrDick...
I don't know what Jeff meant, but "easy" student loans are a subsidy to colleges, don't you think? Subsidies don't
have to be paid directly to the recipient. The people who are getting the student loans don't get to keep the money (but they
do get to keep the debt).
DrDick -> to cm...
No I do not agree. If anything, they are a subsidy to the finance industry (since you cannot default on them). More basically,
they do not make college more affordable or accessible (his point).
cm -> to DrDick...
Well, what is a subsidy? Most economic entities don't get to keep the money they receive, but it ends up with somebody else
or circulates. If I run a business and somebody sends people with money my way (or pays me by customer served), that looks like
a subsidy to me - even though I don't get to keep the money, much of it paid for operational expenses not to forget salaries and
other perks.
Just because it is not prearranged and no-strings (?) funding doesn't mean it cannot be a subsidy.
The financial system is involved, and benefits, whenever money is sloshing around.
Pinkybum -> to cm...
I think DrDick has this the right way around. Surely one should think of subsidies as to who the payment is directly helping.
Subsidies to students would lower the barrier of entry into college. Subsidies to colleges help colleges hire better professors,
offer more classes, reduce the cost of classes etc. Student loans are no subsidy at all except to the finance industry because
they cannot be defaulted on and even then some may never be paid back because of bankruptcies.
However, that is always the risk of doing business as a loan provider. It might be interesting to assess the return on student
loans compared to other loan instruments.
mrrunangun -> to Jeff R Carter...
The cost of higher education has risen relative to the earning power of the student and/or the student's family unless that
family is in the top 10-20% wealth or income groups.
50 years ago it was possible for a lower middle class student to pay all expenses for Northwestern University with his/her
own earnings. Tuition was $1500 and room + board c $1000/year. The State of Illinois had a scholarship grant program and all you
needed was a 28 or 29 on the ACT to qualify for a grant that paid 80% of that tuition. A male student could make $2000 in a summer
construction job, such as were plentiful during those booming 60s. That plus a low wage job waiting tables, night security, work-study
etc could cover the remaining tuition and expense burden.
The annual nut now is in excess of $40,000 at NU and not much outside the $40,000-50,000 range at other second tier or elite
schools.
The state schools used to produce the bedrock educated upper middle class of business and professional people in most states
west of the seaboard. Tuition there 50 years ago was about $1200/year and room and board about $600-800 here in the midwest. Again
you could put yourself through college waiting tables part-time. It wasn't easy but it was possible.
No way a kid who doesn't already possess an education can make the tuition and expenses of a private school today. I don't
know what the median annual family income was in 1965 but I feel confident that it was well above the annual nut for a private
college. Now it's about equal to it.
mrrunangun -> to mrrunangun...
1965 median family income was $6900, more than 200% of the cost of a year at NU. Current median family income is about
75% of a year at NU.
This allows a reader to understand how the graph was constructed and to work with the graph.
ilsm:
The US spends half the money the entire world spends on war, that is success!
Massive student debt, huge doses poverty, scores of thousands [of annual neglect related] deaths from the wretched health care
system etc are not failure!
tew:
Poor education is the enemy of meritocracy. Costly, bloated administrations full of non-educators there to pamper and pander
to every possible complaint and special interest - that is the enemy of meritocracy.
Convincing kids to simple "follow their dreams" regardless of education cost and career potential is the enemy of meritocracy.
Allowing young adults to avoid challenging and uncomfortable and difficult subjects under the guise of compassion is the enemy
of meritocracy. Financial illiteracy is the enemy of meritocracy.
Manageable student debt is no great enemy of meritocracy.
cm -> to tew...
This misses the point, aside frm the victim blaming. Few people embark on college degrees to "follow their dream", unless the
dream is getting admission to the middle class job market.
When I was in elementary/middle school, the admonitions were of the sort "if you are not good in school you will end up sweeping
streets" - from a generation who still saw street cleaning as manual labor, in my days it was already mechanized.
I estimate that about 15% or so of every cohort went to high school and then college, most went to a combined vocational/high
school track, and some of those then later also went college, often from work.
This was before the big automation and globalization waves, when there were still enough jobs for everybody, and there was
no pretense that you needed a fancy title to do standard issue work or as a social signal of some sort.
Richard H. Serlin:
Student loans and college get the bulk of the education inequality attention, and it's not nearly enough attention, but it's
so much more. The early years are so crucial, as Nobel economist James Heckman has shown so well. Some children get no schooling
or educational/developmental day care until almost age 6, when it should start in the first year, with preschool starting at 3.
Others get high quality Montessori, and have had 3 years of it by the time they enter kindergarten, when others have had zero
of any kind of education when they enter kindergarten.
Some children spend summers in high quality summer school and educational programs; others spend three months digressing and
learning nothing. Some children get SAT prep programs costing thousands, and high end educational afterschool programs; others
get nothing after school.
All these things should be available in high quality to any child; it's not 1810 anymore Republicans, the good old days of
life expectancy in the 30s and dirt poverty for the vast majority. We need just a little more education in the modern world. But
this also makes for hugely unequal opportunity.
One needs to differentiate between costs (total dollars spent per student credit hour or degree, or whatever the appropriate
metric is) and price (what fraction of the cost is allocated to the the end-user student).
Note that the level of state funding impacts price, not cost; that discussion is usually about cost shifting, not cost reduction.
I'd say that the rate of increase in costs is, more or less, independent of the percent of costs borne by the state. You can
indeed see this in the increase in private schools, the state funding is small/nil (particularly in schools without material endowments,
where actual annual fees (prices) must closely actual match annual costs). Price discounts and federal funding may both complicate
this analysis.
I think much more effort should be spent on understanding and controlling costs. As with health care, just saying "spend more
money" is probably not the wise or even sustainable path in the long term.
Costs were discussed at some length here a year(?) or so ago. There is at least one fairly comprehensive published analysis
of higher education costs drivers. IIRC, their conclusion was that there were a number of drivers - its not just food courts or
more administrators. Sorry, don't recall the link.
Syaloch -> to cm...
Actually for my first job out of college at BLS, I basically was hired for my "rounded personality" combined with a general
understanding of economic principles, not for any specific job-related skills. I had no prior experience working with Laspeyres
price indexes, those skills were acquired through on-the-job training. Similarly in software development there is no degree that
can make you a qualified professional developer; the best a degree can do is to show you are somewhat literate in X development
language and that you have a good understanding of general software development principles. Most of the specific skills you'll
need to be effective will be learned on the job.
The problem is that employers increasingly want to avoid any responsibility for training and mentoring, and to shift this burden
onto schools. These institutions respond by jettisoning courses in areas deemed unnecessary for short-term vocational purposes,
even though what you learn in many of these courses is probably more valuable and durable in the long run than the skills obtained
through job-specific training, which often have a remarkably short shelf-life. (How valuable to you now is all that COBOL training
you had back in the day?)
I guess the question then is, is the sole purpose of higher education to provide people with entry-level job skills for some
narrowly-defined job description which may not even exist in a decade? A lot of people these days seem to feel that way. But I
believe that in the long run it's a recipe for disaster at both the individual and the societal level.
Richard H. Serlin -> to Observer...
"Observer"
The research is just not on you side, as Heckman has shown very well. Early education and development makes a huge difference,
and at age 5-7 (kindergarten) children are much better off with more schooling than morning to noon. This is why educated parents
who can afford it pay a lot of money for a full day -- with afterschool and weekened programs on top.
Yes, we're more educated than 1810, but I use 1810 because that's the kind of small government, little spending on education
(you want your children educated you pay for it.) that the Republican Party would love to return us to if they thought they could
get away with it. And we've become little more educated in the last 50 years even though the world has become much more technologically
advanced.
Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer
to our health care problems - indeed, the only answer - is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view
reflects the lessons of economic theory.
Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow's "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics
of Health Care," * which demonstrated - decisively, I and many others believe - that health care can't be marketed like bread
or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow's argument.
There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don't know when or whether you'll need care - but
if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the
doctor's office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.
This tells you right away that health care can't be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance.
And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense
when it comes to health care. And you can't just trust insurance companies either - they're not in business for their health,
or yours.
This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers' point of view
- they actually refer to it as "medical costs." This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that
they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which
is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there's a widespread sense
that our fellow citizens should get the care we need - not everyone agrees, but most do - this means that private insurance basically
spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.
The second thing about health care is that it's complicated, and you can't rely on experience or comparison shopping. ("I hear
they've got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary's!") That's why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect
more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.
You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent
we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don't trust them - they're
profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.
Between those two factors, health care just doesn't work as a standard market story.
All of this doesn't necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number
of successful healthcare systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different
from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one
simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn't work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying
in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.
I believe so, as I noted above. The specific market dynamics of health care expenditures are obviously different, but as categories
of expenses they have some things in common. First, both are very expensive relative to most other household expenditures. Second,
unlike consumer merchandise, neither lends itself very well to cost reduction via offshoring or automation. So in an economy where
many consumer prices are held down through a corresponding suppression of real wage growth, they consume a correspondingly larger
chunk of the household budget.
Another interesting feature of both health care and college education is that there are many proffered explanations as to why
their cost is rising so much relative to other areas, but a surprising lack of a really authoritative explanation based on solid
evidence.
anne -> to Syaloch...
Another interesting feature of both health care and college education is that there are many proffered explanations as to why
their cost is rising so much relative to other areas, but a surprising lack of a really authoritative explanation based on solid
evidence.
[ Look to the paper by Kenneth Arrow, which I cannot copy, for what is to me a convincing explanation as to the market defeating
factors of healthcare. However, I have no proper explanation about education costs and am only speculating or looking for an analogy.
]
anne -> to Syaloch...
The specific market dynamics of health care expenditures are obviously different, but as categories of expenses they have
some things in common. First, both are very expensive relative to most other household expenditures. Second, unlike consumer merchandise,
neither lends itself very well to cost reduction via offshoring or automation. So in an economy where many consumer prices are
held down through a corresponding suppression of real wage growth, they consume a correspondingly larger chunk of the household
budget.
[ Nicely expressed. ]
Peter K. -> to anne...
"As to increasing college costs, would there be an analogy to healthcare costs?"
Yes, exactly. They aren't normal markets. There should be heavy government regulation.
Denis Drew:
JUST HAD AN IDEA THAT MIGHT LIMIT THE DAMAGE OF THESE PHONEY ONLINE COLLEGES (pardon shouting, but I think it's justified):
Only allow government guaranteed loans (and the accompanying you-can-never-get-out-of-paying) IF a built for that purpose
government agency APPROVES said loan. What do you think?
Denis Drew -> to cm...
A big reason we had the real estate bubble was actually the mad Republican relaxation of loan requirements -- relying on the
"free market." So, thanks for coming up with a good comparison.
By definition, for the most part, people taking out student loans are shall we say new to the world and more vulnerable to
the pirates.
* * * * * * * * * *
[cut and paste from my comment on AB]
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.
According to an article in the Huffington Post At Kaplan University, 'Guerrilla Registration' Leaves Students Deep In Debt,
Kaplan Ed is among the worst of the worst of internet federal loan and grant sucking diploma mills. Going so far as to
falsely pad bills $5000 or so dollars at diploma time - pay up immediately or you will never get your sheepskin; you wasted your
time. No gov agency will act.
According to a lovely graph which I wish I could patch in here the Post may actually be currently be kept afloat only by purloined
cash from Kaplan:
earnings before corporate overhead
2002 - Kaplan ed, $10 mil; Kaplan test prep, $45 mil: WaPo, $100 mil
2005 - Kaplan ed, $55 mil; Kaplan test prep, $100 mil; WaPo, $105 mil
2009 - Kaplan ed, $255 mil; Kaplan test prep, $5 mil; WaPo negative $175 mil
Wonder if billionaire Bezos will reach out to make Kaplan Ed victims whole. Will he really continue to use Kaplan's pirated
money to keep WaPo whole -- if that is what is going on?
Johannes Y O Highness:
"theme I've been hammering lately, student debt is too damn high!: "
Too damn high
but why?
Because! Because every event in today's economy is the wish of the wealthy. Do you see why they suddenly wish to deeply
educate the proles?
Opportunity cost! The burden of the intelligentsia, the brain work can by carried by robots or humans. Choice of the wealthy?
Humans, hands down. Can you see the historical background?
Railroad was the first robot. According to Devon's Paradox, it was overused because of its increment of efficiency. Later,
excessive roadbeds were disassembled. Rails were sold as scrap.
The new robots are not heavy lifters. New robots are there to do the work of the brain trust. As first robots replaced lower
caste jokers, so shall new robots replace upper caste jokers. Do you see the fear developing inside the huddle of high rollers?
Rollers now calling the play?
High rollers plan to educate small time hoods to do the work of the new robots, then kill the new robots before the newbie
'bot discovers how to kill the wealthy, to kill, to replace them forever.
Terrifying fear
strikes
Observer:
Good bit of data on education costs here
http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/
This chart shows state spending per student and tuition ...
" overall perhaps the best description of the data is something along the lines of "sometimes state appropriations go up and
sometimes they go down, but tuition always goes up." "
Navient, spun off from Sallie Mae, has thrived as student loan debt spirals across the US.
Its story reveals how, instead of fighting inequality, the education industry is reinforcing
it
Nathan Hornes: 'Navient hasn't done a thing to help me. They just want their money. And
they want it now.' Photograph: Fusion
A mong the 44 million Americans who have amassed our nation's
whopping $1.4tn in student loan debt, a call from Navient can produce shivers of dread.
Navient is the primary point of contact, or the "servicer", for more student loans in the
United States than any other company, handling 12 million borrowers and $300bn in debt. The
company flourished as student loan debt exploded under the Obama administration, and its stock
rose sharply after the election of Donald Trump.
But Navient also has more complaints per borrower than any other servicer, according to a
Fusion analysis of data. And these mounting complaints repeatedly allege that
the company has failed to live up to the terms of its federal contracts, and that it
illegally harasses consumers . Navient says most of the ire stems from structural issues
surrounding college finance – like the terms of the loans, which the federal government
and private banks are responsible for – not about Navient customer service.
Navient has positioned itself to dominate the lucrative student loan industry in the midst
of this crisis, flexing its muscles in Washington and increasingly across the states. The story
of Navient's emerging power is also the story of how an industry built around the idea that
education can break down inequities is reinforcing them.The tension at the center of the
current controversy around student loans is simple: should borrowers be treated like any other
consumers, or do they merit special service because education is considered a public good?
Often, the
most vulnerable borrowers are not those with the largest debt, but low-income students,
first-generation students, and students of color – especially those who may attend less
prestigious schools and are less likely to quickly earn enough
to repay their loans, if they graduate at all.
Last year, Navient received 23 complaints per 100,000 borrowers, more than twice that of the
nearest competitor, according to Fusion's analysis. And from January 2014 to December 2016,
Navient was named as a defendant in 530 federal lawsuits. The vast majority were aimed at the
company's student loans servicing operations. (Nelnet and Great Lakes, the two other biggest
companies in the student loans market, were sued 32 and 14 times over the same period,
respectively.)
Many of the complaints and lawsuits aimed at the company relate to its standard practice of
auto-dialing borrowers to solicit payments.
Shelby Hubbard says she has long been on the receiving end of these calls as she has
struggled to pay down her debt. Hubbard racked up over $60,000 in public and private student
loans by the time she graduated from Eastern Kentucky University with a basic
healthcare-related degree.
"It consumes my every day," Hubbard said of the constant calls. "Every day, every hour,
starting at 8 o'clock in the morning." Unlike mortgages, and most other debt, student loans
can't be wiped away with bankruptcy.
These days, Hubbard, 26, works in Ohio as a logistics coordinator for traveling nurses.
She's made some loan payments, but her take-home pay is about $850 every two weeks. With her
monthly student loan bill at about $700, roughly half her income would go to paying the loans
back, forcing her to lean more heavily on her fiancé. "He pays for all of our utilities,
all of our bills. Because at the end of the day, I don't have anything else to give him," she
said. The shadow of her debt hangs over every discussion about their wedding, mortgage
payments, and becoming parents.
The power and reach of the student loan industry stacks the odds against borrowers. Navient
doesn't just service federal loans, it has a hand in nearly every aspect of the student loan
system. It has bought up private student loans, both servicing them and earning interest off of
them. And it has purchased billions of dollars worth of the older taxpayer-backed loans, again
earning interest, as well as servicing that debt. The company also owns controversial
subsidiary companies such as Pioneer Credit Recovery that
stand to profit from collecting the debt of loans that go into default.
label="How the Trump administration is undermining students of color | Mark Huelsman and
Vijay Das"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/15/trump-administration-students-color-debt">
And just as banks have done with mortgages, Navient packages many of the private and
pre-2010 federal loans and sells them on Wall Street as asset-backed securities. Meanwhile,
it's in the running to oversee the Department of Education's entire student debt web portal,
which would open even more avenues for the company to profit from – and expand its
influence over – Americans' access to higher education.
The federal government is the biggest lender of American student loans, meaning that
taxpayers are currently on the hook for more than
$1tn . For years, much of this money was managed by private banks and loan companies like
Sallie Mae. Then in 2010, Congress cut out the middlemen and their lending fees, and Sallie Mae
spun off its servicing arm into the publicly traded company Navient.
Led by former Sallie Mae executives, Navient describes itself as "a leading provider of
asset management and business processing solutions for education, healthcare, and government
clients." But it is best known for being among a handful of companies that have won coveted
federal contracts to make sure students repay their loans. And critics say that in pursuit of
getting that money back, the Department of Education has allowed these companies to all but run
free at the expense of borrowers.
"The problem is that these servicers are too big to fail," said Persis Yu, director of the
National Consumer Law Center's Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. "We have no place to
put the millions of borrowers whom they are servicing, even if they are not doing the servicing
job that we want them to do."
In its last years, the Obama administration tried to rein in the student loan industry and
promoted more options for reduced repayment plans for federal loans. Since then, Donald Trump's
education secretary, Betsy
DeVos , has reversed or
put on hold changes the former education secretary John B King's office proposed
and appears bent on further loosening the reins on the student loan
industry , leaving individual students little recourse amid bad service.
In late August, DeVos's office announced
that it would stop sharing information about student loan servicer oversight with the federal
consumer watchdog agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.
Earlier this year, as complaints grew, the CFPB
sued Navient for allegedly misleading borrowers about the repayment options it is legally
obligated to provide.
A central allegation is that Navient, rather than offering income-based repayment plans,
pushed some people into a temporary payment freeze called forbearance. Getting placed into
forbearance is a good Band-Aid but can be a terrible longer-term plan. When an account gets
placed in forbearance, its interest keeps accumulating, and that interest can be added to the
principal, meaning the loans only grow.
Lynn Sabulski, who worked in Navient's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, call center for five
months starting in 2012, said she experienced first-hand the pressure to drive borrowers into
forbearance.
"Performing well meant keeping calls to seven minutes or under," said Sabulski. "If you only
have seven minutes, the easiest option to put a borrower in, first and foremost, is a
forbearance." Sabulski said if she didn't keep the call times short, she could be written up or
lose her job.
Navient denies the allegations, and a spokeswoman told Fusion via email seven and a half
minutes was the average call time, not a target. The company maintains "caller satisfaction and
customer experience" are a significant part of call center representatives' ratings.
But in a 24 March motion it filed in federal court for the CFPB's lawsuit, the company also
said: "There is no expectation that the servicer will act in the interest of the consumer."
Rather, it argued, Navient's job was to look out for the interest of the federal government and
taxpayers.
Navient does get more per account when the servicer is up to date on payments, but getting
borrowers into a repayment plan also has a cost because of the time required to go over the
complex options.
The same day the CFPB filed its lawsuit, Illinois and Washington filed suits in state
courts. The offices of attorneys general in nine other states confirmed to Fusion that they are
investigating the company.
At a recent hearing in the Washington state case, the company defended its service: "The
State's claim is not, you didn't help at all, which is what you said you would do. It's that,
you could've helped them more." Navient insists it has forcefully advocated in Washington to
streamline the federal loan system and make the repayment process easier to navigate for
borrowers.
And it's true, Navient, and the broader industry, have stepped up efforts in recent years to
influence decision makers. Since 2014, Navient executives have given nearly $75,000 to the
company's political action committee, which has pumped money mostly into Republican campaigns,
but also some Democratic ones. Over the same timespan, the company has spent more than $10.1m
lobbying Congress, with $4.2m of that spending coming since 2016. About $400,000 of it targeted
the CFPB, which many Republican lawmakers want to do away with.
Among the 22 former federal officials who lobby for Navient is the former US representative
Denny Rehberg, a Republican, who once criticized
federal aid for students as the welfare of the 21st century. His fellow lobbyist and former GOP
representative Vin Weber sits on a board that has aired attack ads against the CFPB, as well as
on the board of the
for-profit college ITT Tech , which shuttered its
campuses in 2016 after Barack Obama's Department of Education accused it of predatory
recruitment and lending.
In response to what they see as a lack of federal oversight, California, Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia recently required student loan servicers to get
licenses in their states. Not surprisingly, Fusion found a sharp increase in Navient's spending
in states considering such regulations, with the majority of the $300,000 in Navient state
lobbying allocated since 2016.
In Maine and Illinois, the legislatures were flooded with Navient and other industry
lobbyists earlier this year, after lawmakers proposed their own versions of the license bills.
The Maine proposal failed after Navient argued the issue should be left to the federal
government. The Illinois bill passed the legislature, but the Republican governor, Bruce
Rauner, vetoed it in August following lobbying from an
industry trade group . Rauner
said the bill encroached on the federal government's authority.
Researchers argue more data would help them understand how to improve the student loan
process and prevent more people from being overwhelmed by debt. In 2008, Congress made it
illegal for the Department of Education to make the data public, arguing that it was a risk for
student privacy. Private colleges and universities
lobbied to restrict the data. So, too,
did Navient's predecessor, Sallie Mae, and other student loan servicing companies.
Today, companies like Navient have compiled mountains of data about graduations, debt and
financial outcomes – which they consider proprietary information. The lack of
school-specific data about student outcomes can be life-altering, leading students to pick
schools they never would have picked. Nathan Hornes, a 27-year-old Missouri native, racked up
$70,000 in student loans going to Everest College, an unaccredited school, before he
graduated.
"Navient hasn't done a thing to help me," Hornes told Fusion. "They just want their money.
And they want it now."
label="The US cities luring millennials with promises to pay off their student debts"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/10/the-us-cities-luring-millennials-with-promises-to-pay-off-their-student-debts">
Hornes' loans were recently forgiven following state investigations into Everest's parent
company Corinthian. But many other borrowers still await relief.
Better educating teens about financial literacy before they apply to college will help
reduce their dependence on student loans, but that doesn't change how the deck is stacked for
those who need them. A few states have made
community colleges free , reducing the need for student loan servicers.
But until the Department of Education holds industry leaders like Navient more accountable,
individual states can fix only so much, insists Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the industry's
most outspoken critics on Capitol Hill.
"Navient's view is, hey, I'm just going to take this money from the Department of Education
and maximize Navient's profits, rather than serving the students," Warren said. "I hold Navient
responsible for that. But I also hold the Department of Education responsible for that. They
act as our agent, the agent of the US taxpayers, the agent of the people of the United States.
And they should demand that Navient does better."
Laura Juncadella, a production assistant for The Naked Truth also contributed to this
article
The Naked Truth: Debt Trap airs on Fusion TV 10 September at 9pm ET. Find out where to
watch here
A fresh story at Bloomberg, which includes new analysis, shows the ugly student debt picture is getting uglier. The driver is
that higher education costs keep rising, often in excess of the likely wages for graduates. The article's grim conclusion: "The next
generation of graduates will include more borrowers who may never be able to repay."
Student debt is now the second biggest type of consumer debt in the US. At $1.5 trillion, is is second only to the mortgage market,
and is also bigger than the subprime market before the crisis, which was generally pegged at $1.3 trillion. 1 Bloomberg
also points out that unlike other categories of personal debt, student debt balances has shown consistent, or one might say persistent,
growth since the crisis.
From the article:
Student loans are being issued at unprecedented rates as more American students
pursue higher education . But the
cost of
tuition at both private and public institutions is touching
all-time
highs , while interest rates on student loans are also rising. Students are spending more time
working instead of studying . (Some 85 percent of current students now work
paid jobs while enrolled.) Experts and analysts worry that the next generation of graduates could default on their loans at
even higher rates than in the immediate wake of the financial crisis.
The last sentence is alarming. As graduates of the class of 2009 like UserFriendly can attest, the job market was desperate. And
for the next few years, the unemployment rate of new college graduates was higher than that of recent high school graduates. One
of the corollaries of that is that more college graduates than before were taking work that didn't require a college degree; this
is still a significant trend today. And on top of that, studies have found that early career earnings have a significant impact on
lifetime earnings. While there are always exceptions, generally speaking, pay levels key off one's earlier compensation, so starting
out at a lower income level is likely to crimp future compensation.
And on top of that, interest costs are rising. The rate for direct undergraduate loans is 5% and for graduate and professional
schools, 6.6%. So student debt costs will also go up even before factoring in inflating school costs. So the ugly picture of delinquencies
and defaults is destined to get worse.
Students attending for-profit universities and community colleges represented almost half of all borrowers leaving school and
beginning to repay loans in 2011. They also accounted for 70 percent of all defaults. As a result, delinquencies skyrocketed in
the 2011-12 academic year, reaching 11.73 percent.
Today, the student loan delinquency rate remains almost as high, which Scott-Clayton attributes to social and institutional
factors, rather than average debt levels. "Delinquency is at crisis levels for borrowers, particularly for borrowers of color,
borrowers who have gone to a for-profit and borrowers who didn't ultimately obtain a degree," she said, highlighting that each
cohort is more likely to miss repayments on their loans than other public and private college students.
Those most at risk of delinquency tend to be, counterintuitively, those who've incurred smaller amounts of debt, explained
Kali McFadden, senior research analyst at LendingTree. Graduates who leave school with six-figure degrees that are valued in the
marketplace -- such as post-graduate law or medical degrees -- usually see a good return on their investment.
I'm a little leery of cheerful generalizations like "big ticket borrowers for professional degrees do better." "Better" may still
not be that good. Recall that law school and in the last year, business school enrollments have fallen because candidates question
whether the hard costs and loss of income while in school will pay off. And there are some degrees, like veterinary medicine, that
are so pricey it's hard to see how they could possibly make economic sense.
What is distressing about this ugly picture is the lack of effective activism by the victims. I am sure some are trying, but in
addition to the burden of being so overwhelmed by the debt burden as to lack the time and energy to do anything beyond cope, is the
fact that being in debt is stigmatized in our society, and borrowers may not want to deal with condescension and criticism. Another
obstacle to organizing is that most of the victims are lower income and/or from minority groups, which means Team Dem can ignore
them on the usual assumption that they have nowhere else to go. It is also harder to create an effective coalition across disparate
economic, geographic, and age groups
But the experience of the post-Civil War South says things could get a lot worse. From Matt Stoller in 2010:
A lot of people forget that
having debt you can't pay
back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.
It's actually baked into our culture. The phrase 'the man', as in 'fight the man', referred originally to creditors. 'The man'
in the 19th century stood for 'furnishing man', the merchant that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies
for the year, usually on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into which they
were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien places on their crops. When approaching a furnishing
agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment, even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts
were marked down in a notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they started
the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant farmers.
They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together
by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty
in Arkansas and pronounce it 'shocking'. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.
Sanders has made an issue of student debt, but politicians who want big bucks from financiers and members of the higher education
complex pointedly ignore this issue. As we've pointed out, top bankruptcy scholar Elizabeth Warren won't even endorse a basic reform,
that of making student debt dischargable in bankruptcy. So it may take student debtors becoming a bigger percentage of voters for
this issue to get the political traction it warrants.
______
1 Higher estimates typically included near subprime mortgages then called "Alt A".
There are many, many passages in this obscure old book called The Bible speaking of usury as a grave sin. So many it is actually
one of the most clear and condemned sins in the entire book. Maybe we could see if any of our Congress persons have ever heard
of it? They could learn something from it regarding this topic.
That said, it's passages on gender equality and family structures are pretty outdated and abhorrent so I wouldn't want them to
get any bad ideas from this book on those subjects.
Indeed, all of the old "Iron Age religions" (Judaism, Early Christianity, and Islam) explicitly denounce usury.
The great irony of the Deep South in te USA is that they've been frequently banning Sharia law, even when Sharia law is one
of the few types of law in the world which explicitly bans charging interest.
It is always intriguing how many politicians are so eager to endorse a literalist fealty to the social structures of the bible
but ignore, or even vehemently rail against, the more balanced social restrictions on things like usury or the old idea of a debt
jubilee. But then Jesus himself railed (physically) against embedding money in religion and now we have "entrepreneurial churches"
who preach a "doctrine of prosperity" so I guess times have changed.
I graduated 10 years ago and the most frustrating part was everyone telling me it would be alright and ignoring thw whole you
never recover thing. I am still unable to find worthwhile employment and probably never will be able to.
You really can't listen to many of us over 40.. we really lived in complete my different conditions. When I got out of college
in the 90's they were basically hiring everyone with a pulse in tech. From what I have seen from recent graduates it's getting
easier, as I am seeing a lot more intershops turn into job offers. But for the generation that you are part of, it's an economic
hole that may never be recovered from simply because you were born at the wrong time.
Looking at that graph, notice how the only debt that is backstopped completely by the federal government is growing the fastest.
The no default on student loans rules have to be rescinded.
Extrapolating from these trends, then in a few years the only young people that would be able to afford higher education in
the United States would the the children of the ten per cent – plus a smattering of scholarships to talented individuals found
worthy of supporting. It follows then that as these educated people entered the workforce, that over time that the people that
would be running the country would be children of the elite in a sort of inbred system. It sounds a lot like 19th century class-based
Britain that if you ask me.
As for the country itself it would be disastrous. Going by present population levels, it would mean that instead of recruiting
the leaders and thinkers of the country from the present population of 325 million, that at most you would be recruiting them
from a base level of about 30-40 million. It is to be hoped that these people are not from the shallow end of the gene pool. You
can forget about any idea of an even-handed meritocracy and America would be competing against countries that might employ the
idea of a full meritocracy in the recruitment of their leaders. I wonder how that might work out.
"America would be competing against countries that might employ the idea of a full meritocracy in the recruitment of their
leaders. I wonder how that might work out"
Would the performance of U. S. men in international soccer competition be a similar situation?
The concept of student debt as it exists today would be repulsive to our Founders. Not just for the larger issue of our country
being on the trajectory of becoming an economic aristocracy, but specifically because the Federal government is profiting tremendously
from this crushing usury being applied to majority and the least among us.
Our Founders had no problem with the conquest and seizure of Native Americans land, and they fully respected the rights and claims
of other European countries to do the same. One of their strongest repudiations of the aristocracy was the expansion of private
property rights beyond what was known under any monarchy on the planet to that point in history. In the pre-industrial world the
vast majority of people lived in an agrarian society and economy. Owning land secured you with your livelihood, your living, and
much of your resources; it fully supported most families.
For its founding and for generation after generation the United States government gave land to countless men for military service,
government service, homesteds, etc. Expansions by the Louisiana Purchase and war and treaties with other European nations, quickly
resulting in making these lands available for settlement to our citizens and to immigrants.
The point is that for well over 100 years the government provided to its citizens a huge amount of what our citizens needed
to live their lifetimes through these grants of land. These land grants were then passed from generation to generation and formed
the economic foundations for millions of people, their children and their next generations.
Our Government did this.
The United States ceased to be a predominantly agrarian country in the mid 20th century. But they did not stop aiding our people
and their economic needs. Our government (Federal and states) did continue to provide to our population through public education
(very affordable college), the GI Bill that served millions with income, housing and educational benefits, Social Security, Medicare,
etc.
Since our country's very founding our government has recognized the benefit and need to facilitate the support of its citizens.
The American economy became the greatest on earth because of our land conquest heritage and our collective investments as a nation.
No one did it all on their own, and no one pretended they did.
Reagan killed this legacy. Reagan claimed that our nations success and our heritage was built on our history of rugged individualism
and that our government was the obstacle to returning to these roots. It was a lie; nothing could have been further from the truth.
Student debt, as it exists to day, is crippling the economic futures of the millions who have accrued this debt and the millions
to come, year after year, who will do the same. The student is debt is robbing our nation of the economic activity that historically
matriculated out from those passing from college to the world. That has come almost to an end. Worse yet, our government has positioned
itself to also profit off this debt, and to prevent the indebted from escaping this type of debt through the legal means available
for virtually all other forms of debt.
Our student debt is un-American. It is a cancer on our economy. It exists for the vast short term profit of the few at the
expense of our nations future.
I hope people keep in mind it was the Democrats, specifically Joe Biden, who made student debt even more crippling and heartless
by changing the bankruptcy laws so that creditors can garnish your Social Security benefits (assuming Mitch McConnell doesn't
gut them first).
Republicans are open about what they hope to accomplish, you have to clear the verbal BS that clouds what Democrats are after,
but at the end of the day they are both about enslavement and debt bondage over unwashed masses.
I'm sure it's often the parents that end up paying the debt, as my sister is doing. Parents have deep pockets and are desperate
to help their loved ones get a good start in life.
In my sister's case, they sent their girls to private high school, where they spent the money that could have paid for college.
Not a smart decision. But they love their children and really wanted to do give them the best.
Now the girls are struggling to make a living and my sister cannot afford to retire.
There are so many feedback loops, multipliers, and perverse incentives driving forward this bubble (and its calamitous social
and cultural effects) that it's hard to know where to begin.
As Goldman Sachs
have pointed
out , student-loan-based securities are increasingly "attractive" investments for speculators:
Although the "bubble" is getting bigger, it's not a risk to overall financial stability, Goldman's Marty Young and Lotfi
Karoui said in a recent note. In fact, there's one segment of the market that's emerging as an attractive investment.
It's the $190 billion of outstanding [student] loans that are held within asset-backed securities (ABS) refinanced by private
lenders such as SoFi.
With these securities, lenders pool loans that have similar risk profiles and sell them as instruments in the public markets.
Investors profit as graduates pay back their principal and interest.
So the more student debt there is, and the higher the interest rates are, the better, from that perspective.
It's undeniable, too, that high student loan burdens mean graduates are slower to form households and will probably have fewer
children than they would otherwise. Their diminished spending power, meanwhile, adds to the ongoing erosion of the "real economy,"
in favour of the financial one. Student loans therefore disrupt the basic means of social reproduction. The resulting declines
in fertility then demand high rates of immigration to compensate. A fact cheered on, inevitably, by the open borders crowd (a
substantial number of whom, oddly or not, seem to work in or for universities).
So we see yet another instance in which "right" neoliberalism and "left" identitarianism go hand in hand–forming, indeed, two
heads of the same beast. Student loans have enabled the enormous inflation in tuition costs that have plagued the Anglosphere
over the last couple of decades. This fees income feeds the academic beast (or at least its administrators and senior managers),
while driving the one economic and social crisis (mass migration and the resulting populist backlash) that "left neoliberals,"
centrists, and Clinton/Progress types appear to care about. It's a self-licking ice cream of catastrophic size and reach.
One specific example: hospital chaplains are facing a big retirement crisis. And yet the job requires (to be hoard certified):
an undergraduate degree & then a Master's of Divinity degree, plus a year-long residency. For a job that pays around $60,000 to
$70,000. At least one school, Princeton, funds almost all of their divinity students. But I don't think it's the norm. And then
you throw in the fact that such person ideally would be emotionally & spiritually mature, with enough life experience to meet
with a wide range of people, who are often facing financial hardship due to being sick (as well as existential concerns). I don't
even know how to begin reframing the job or the qualifications or the salary to fit America in 2020. There are a lot of other
angles, such as: what about well-qualified people who can't afford seminary? I know there needs to be a way to screen-out and
screen-in the best people (who won't proselytize), but is a Master's degree the right hurdle? But, I must say, the need for access
to interfaith Spiritual Care is only increasing, as times get tougher & other hospital staff (RNs) don't have time to sit and
listen. People are in pain, not only in their bodies. One thought leader in the field has speculated that the job will just go
away due to lack of advocacy & inability to evolve into a profit center.
It would be interesting to see that student loan debt chart superimposed over %adjuncts and number of administrators. Its pretty
easy to guess what that would look like, but seeing that would be decisive.
I think a little delineation is in order. I've been an adjunct professor and believe the increasing use of adjuncts at universities
has been very beneficial overall -- in terms of the quality of education students are getting. Unfortunately, as we know, that's
not why universities are hiring so many more adjuncts; they're being hired because schools can get away with paying them abysmally.
The situation is so embarrassing that, at the university where I was teaching five years ago, the full-time faculty passed
a resolution asking the administration to give the entire projected increase in teaching salaries entirely to the adjuncts, an
amazing act of selflessness.
The relevance to our discussion here, of course, is the insupportable increase in the annual cost of attending college even
as the schools radically reduce their overall expenditures on faculty salaries.
So how long before this leads to a mass "We Won't Pay" movement? I'm stuck on the dumb treadmill myself, but I wouldn't begrudge
an entire generation for just saying no. Sure, they can garnish wages and the like, but if 30 million people simultaneously say
'eff this', it's more than just a wrench in the works it's drastic enough to force action.
Why DO they keep paying? The debts are always bought by debt collectors who don't even have COPIES promissory notes. Let them
sue you and show up for the hearing and demand proof. They can still ruin your "credit" but if student loans haven't taught you
to eschew credit nothing will. If EVERYONE "walked away" what could they do?
Unfortunately that is never going to happen. This society has been trained to worship at the altar of the FICO score, and most
job seekers cannot afford to have a low score. Said score will be examined and potentially held against you when pursuing employment.
Also, employers frown upon employees who do not pay their bills and then have their wages garnished – at least the smaller
emlpoyers do. This creates extra work for the employer and makes the employee suspect, as in irresponsible.
This problem was created by the political class and is going to require a political solution, i.e. legislation to assist the
student loan borrower or a debt jubilee. Unfortunately, there's too much money being made off the student borrower – even if the
practice is killing the host. And the "I got mine" crowd will not allow a jubilee even if it is for the greater good of society.
Lastly, student loan borrowers coming from a different era (who have paid off their loans) will begrudge the forgiving of the
loans and consider them undeserved. In this case, perhaps the best resolution is to give everyone money toward their student loans
– whether they are currently paid or unpaid.
I cannot jeopardize my employment by joining in a "eff this" movement as much as I would like to. Instead, I will continue
on this treadmill called life, pay my bills and hope to escape as unscathed as possible.
I work for a company that contracts with department of Ed to get student loan borrowers out if default and back into the hands
of loan servicers. The amount of money sloshing around is stunning. I'm sure they've got well paid lobbyists telling legislators
that people will be unemployed if student loans are reformed. I owe well over six figures so the irony is not lost on me. Hiring
one half of the working class to debt collect from the other.
Who pays for diploma-mill educations, and why? I have always assumed that people attended cash-n-carry schools because they
did not qualify aptitude/grade-wise for entrance to a state school, OR a 3rd party like DOD or VA was footing the tab. Both assumptions
appear to be supported by data. Given the far-above-average drop/flunkout rate of diploma mills. I know from my military career
that enlisted members sign up for courses (local or online) at diploma mills to get extra points toward promotions – at Navy expense.
Personally, I would not pay to send my dog to such institutions to learn how to sit up and beg.
One thing is certain, collich kidz do not appear to spend nearly as much time researching where they go to $chool as they do
buying the car they drive.
Jumping into the conversation a little late, but my alma mater recently embarked on a major rethink of the college business
model, and cut tuition from around 50k to around 30k. We even got
a writeup from Frank Bruni
for it .
College officials (I'm relatively active as a fundraiser for my class) describe it as a shift to a "philanthropy model" of
funding. Which worries me for lots of reasons. But at least it's a conversation-starter.
It's also very much a school that is not for people looking to buy a future income flow, but rather an education.
The person was definitely taken for a ride. He does not write how he obtained such a huge debt. It is difficult to do
attending state college.
Also when you are young you often stupid, and when
you became wiser, it's too late.
Notable quotes:
"... The price of a college education has quadrupled since the 1980s while wages haven't budged and rents went up by 50 percent. No wonder nearly 5 million American are in default on their student loans. At this rate, 40 percent of borrowers are expected to be in default by 2023. ..."
"... College was supposed to be about getting ahead in life. But it's become a driver of inequality . It does not have to be this way. ..."
"... Got to call BS on the 120k debt from a "state school". ..."
"... I do not understand how you got $120k of debt attending a state school for undergraduate. Either your stayed there 6 or more years or you basically earned no money during any summer or school year of your entire undergraduate and went to a really expensive school. ..."
I have $235,000 of student debt. The first $120,000 came with a bachelor's degree from my
state school. Another $70,000 or so came with my master's degree. The remainder is accrued
interest.
The suggested minimum monthly payment on my private debt alone is approximately $1,200. For
reference: that's nearly rent for the 600-square-foot apartment where I live with my partner in
New Jersey.
Without income driven repayment, the minimum payment amount for my federal student debt
would be around $1,000.
I would have to begin devoting half of my income to debt payment if I cared to pay it off by
2042. I can't do that because I make just under $4,000 per month. And that income is a fairly
new development in my life. Why would I choose to pay down my debt if it meant I wouldn't be
able to afford basic living expenses?
Short of winning the lottery, there's no way I could ever afford to pay off my debt. And
though I have a higher debt burden than most, I'm certainly not alone.
Meanwhile more and more people can't make their minimum payments.
The price of a college education has quadrupled
since the 1980s while
wages haven't budged and rents went up by 50
percent. No wonder nearly 5 million American are in default on their student loans. At this
rate, 40 percent of borrowers are expected to
be in default by 2023.
I'm privileged to have made it through the first few years of repayment. With a financial
hardship agreement with Sallie Mae, my parents – cosigners on my private loans –
pay $600 per month to keep default at bay from our family and allow me to live a decent life.
And through an income driven repayment plan (IDR) with Navient, I've been paying less than $50
per month on my public loans, though that could change as my income changes.
My parents cosigned my loans because we're first-generation immigrants. Moving to the U.S.
was about giving me a chance to live my best life. College was a critical component and we
couldn't afford it any other way. The only reason they can afford those $600 monthly payments
now is because they paid off their 30-year mortgage just a few years ago.
My parents are in their 60s and 70s and will live the rest of their lives with my student
debt. Likely so will I. Again – we won't be alone.
Three million Americans over the age of 60 are
paying off student debt . Approximately 40,000 of them are having Social Security or other
government payments garnished
.
College was supposed to be about getting ahead in life. But it's become a driver
of inequality . It does not have to be this way.
Some economists say that forgiving student debt would boost GDP by $100 billion per year for
ten years and add several million jobs to the economy. It would unlock the capacity of 44
million Americans to buy
homes , launch small businesses , and
retire with dignity.
Congress could pay for it by repealing the $1.5 trillion tax
cut it passed in 2017. Primarily
benefiting the wealthy and corporations, even
Goldman Sachs says that whatever economic boost the tax cut brought with it has passed.
And to keep future generations from suffering under the burden of student debt, Congress
could make public colleges, universities, and trade schools in the United States free.
The federal government already spends
$80 billion per year on grants and tax breaks for students pursuing higher education. It
spends another
$100 billion every year issuing new student loans.
That's $180 billion the U.S. could stop spending on a broken system if it decided to invest
it in a new one. Coincidently, that amount is more than enough to cover the cost of that new
system.
Tuition at public institutions of higher education totals
$63 billion . Add cost of living and that number reaches
$127 billion . With the remaining $53 billion, the U.S. can invest in expanding access to
higher education with job training and small business accelerators.
Until then, I'm focused on keeping the cost of servicing my debt low while I do other things
a 29-year-old should be doing, like saving for an emergency
fund or a down payment on a
house.
I'm spending my money in a way that invests in my future. Can the country do the same?
J Jive Turkey 7 hours ago
$235k for a job that pays less than $48k/year. I'm sure there was no cheaper way to go
about this, like, say, taking general education credits at a community college before
transferring over to the 'State School'. Millennials are awesome.
W WillyWonga 7 hours ago
I had around $3K in student loan debt when I graduated. That's because I received some
grants (partly based on my grades) and I WORKED...and WORKED SOME MORE...while I was
studying. Two P/T jobs that were the equivalent of a full-time job, maybe more on certain
weeks, whenever I could get the extra work.
My parents didn't co-sign anything for me. My dad passed long before I graduated high
school, and my family home went into foreclosure so my mom had a horrible credit rating
and didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Your story is an example of why we should NOT forgive student loan debt. No one forced
you to take the loans out, and given your somewhat cavalier attitude towards it there's a
good chance you'll ring up debt someplace else and expect others to pay for that too.
J James 6 hours ago
I'm playing my tiny little violin for you. I worked night shifts to pay my way through
college. Then for my second degree in engineering, I co-oped and graduated with money in
the bank. Seven years of 60 hour weeks, but it was worth it. I retired in my mid-50s.
j jim 7 hours ago
so a state school plus masters and you are making $4k a month?
And "Some economists say that forgiving student debt would boost GDP by $100 billion per
year for ten years and add several million jobs to the economy" Sure in the Bernie
Sanders way of how things work.
R R 5 hours ago
Got to call BS on the 120k debt from a "state school". This is a problem with the younger
generations. They do not want to work while going to college so they take out a ton of
loans and then complain when they get out and have a life long debt barring some
windfall. I say the issue is the government and companies giving these loans without
making sure they pay them back. That is an investment for them so they should have
programs to help them stay on track and make sure they get well paying jobs. I retired
from a company after 32 years at 50. They paid for my education and I moved up the ladder
pretty fast. I was over their clinical labs when I retired and I started in the
warehouse.
T Theo the Cat 7 hours ago
I do not understand how you got $120k of debt attending a state school for undergraduate.
Either your stayed there 6 or more years or you basically earned no money during any
summer or school year of your entire undergraduate and went to a really expensive school.
R Really 7 hours ago
Maybe your partner ought to be helping you pay off your debt. I helped my partner. That's
how "partner" is defined.
Also, the notion that if we all absorb your debt will allow you to buy a house, I say,
BS. I don't want to take any risk financing your house buy (through any government
support -- FHA, VA, FDIC insurance on banks covering your mortgage, etc.) since you were
not good for your student loan debt. No way.
P Paul 7 hours ago
My kids are in their 20s and they are in community school to get associate degrees. They
wanted to go to a university and get bachelor's but we can't afford it. So we lived
within our means and our kids deprived themselves of that "college experience". And now
thru our taxes, we will have to pay for someone else's student loans? How is that fair?
D Dustin 6 hours ago
Typical millennial....doesn't want to have to pay for anything. My wife and I are in our
40's and we made the last payment on her student debt this year. I didn't complain about
it for the last 15 years, I just paid it off.
P Pete 7 hours ago
The parents busted their hump to pay off their mortgage then get saddled with a $600 per
month payment because of the kid's degree that lead to nowhere?
"... For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. ..."
Duggan
articulately connects social and economic issues to each other, arguing that neoliberal
politics have divided the two when in actuality, they cannot be separated from one another.
In the introduction, Duggan argues that politics have become neoliberal - while politics
operate under the guise of promoting social change or social stability, in reality, she argues,
politicians have failed to make the connection between economic and social/cultural issues. She
uses historical background to prove the claim that economic and social issues can be separated
from each other is false.
For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that
economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has
only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues.
After the introduction, Duggan focuses on a specific topic in each chapter: downsizing
democracy, the incredible shrinking public, equality, and love and money. In the first chapter
(downsizing democracy), she argues that through violent imperial assertion in the Middle East,
budget cuts in social services, and disillusionments in political divides, "capitalists could
actually bring down capitalism" (p. 2).
Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that
proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. Duggan provides historical background
that help the reader connect early nineteenth century U.S. legislation (regarding voting rights
and slavery) to perpetuated institutional prejudices.
You stated, "Let's also ignore the fact that the sons and grandsons of the unionised
postwar generation for the most part subsequently rejected blue collar work no matter what
the pay. This is a sign of decadence I will grant you, and I am guilty as charged. "
This canard doesn't hold up in the face of empirical evidence. One example: 20,000 waiting
in line for lousy warehouse jobs at Amazon. The fact is, open borders and illegal immigration
are NeoLiberal tactics to promote wage arbitrage. In California, those impacted the most by
illegal immigration are African Americans. Whole sectors, such as hotel maintenance and
janitorial service, had been unionized, and had principally employed black workers whose
salaries enabled them to move into the middle class. The hotel industry welcomed the influx
of illegal immigrants willing to work for drastically lower wages. Black workers were
replaced and the union destroyed. Unfortunately, many in the US and globally have been so
propagandized about illegal immigration that even mentioning illegal immigration gets one
falsely labeled racist. in the US, Democrats use illegal immigration as a "demographic
strategy," which enables Democrats to remain in power while remaining wholly loyal to Wall
Street and doing nothing to ameliorate the misery of the bottom 90%.
The question is at what level of inequality it turns toxic. Druker mentioned the coefficient 20 between salary of the top
executive and average salary paid by the corporation.
Notable quotes:
"... Inequality encourages the rich to invest not innovation but in what Sam Bowles calls " guard labour" (pdf) – means of entrenching their privilege and power. ..."
"... Unequal corporate hierarchies – what Jeffrey Nielsen calls rank-based organizations – can demotivate junior employees. ..."
"... "Economic inequality leads to less trust" say (pdf) Eric Uslaner and Mitchell Brown. ..."
"... Inequality can prevent productivity-enhancing changes, as Sam Bowles has described . We have good evidence that coops can be more efficient than hierarchical ones, but the spread of them is prevented by credit constraints. ..."
"... Inequality can cause the rich to be fearful of future redistribution or nationalization, which will make them loath to invest. ..."
"... Inequalities of power – in the sense of workers' voices being less heard than they were in the post-war period and trades unions becoming less powerful – have allowed governments to abandon the aim of truly full employment and given firms more ability to boost profits by suppressing wages and conditions. That has disincentivized investments in labour-saving technologies. ..."
"... The high-powered incentives that generate inequality within companies can backfire . As Benabou and Tirole have shown (pdf) , they encourage bosses to hit measured targets and neglect less measurable things that are nevertheless important for a firm's success such as a healthy corporate culture. ..."
"... High management pay can entrench what Joel Mokyr calls the "forces of conservatism" which are antagonistic to technical progress. ..."
"... Erik Brynjolfsson signalled the "winner take all" dynamics of Silicon Valley as an example on how technology drives inequality nowadays. ..."
By Chris Dillow, an economics writer at Investors Chronicle. He blogs at Stumbling and Mumbling,
and is the author of New Labour and the End of Politics. Follow him on Twitter: @CJFDillow. Originally
published at
Stumbling and Mumbling
; cross posted from
Evonomics
I welcome Professor Sir Angus Deaton's report into
inequality
.
I especially like its
emphasis
(pdf)
upon the causes of inequality:
To understand whether inequality is a problem, we need to understand the sources of inequality, views
of what is fair and the implications of inequality as well as the levels of inequality. Are present
levels of inequalities due to well-deserved rewards or to unfair bargaining power, regulatory failure or
political capture?
I fear, however, that there might be something missing here – the impact that inequality has upon
economic performance.
My chart shows the point. It shows the 20-year annualized rate of growth in GDP per worker-hour. It's
clear that this was much stronger during the relatively egalitarian period from 1945 to the mid-70s than it
was before or since, when inequality was higher.
This might, of course, be coincidence: maybe WWII caused both a backlog
of investment and innovation which allowed a subsequent growth spurt and a desire for greater
equality.
Or it might not. This is not the only evidence for the possibility that inequality is bad for growth.
Roland Benabou gave the
example
(pdf)
of how egalitarian South Korea has done much better than the unequal Philippines. And IMF
researchers have
found
(pdf)
a "strong negative relation" between inequality and the rate and duration of subsequent growth
spells across 153 countries between 1960 and 2010.
Correlations, of course, are only suggestive. They pose the question: what is the mechanism whereby
inequality might reduce growth? Here are eight possibilities:
1. Inequality encourages the rich to invest not innovation but in what Sam Bowles calls "
guard
labour" (pdf)
– means of entrenching their privilege and power. This might involve restrictive copyright
laws, ways of
overseeing
and
controlling workers, or the corporate rent-seeking and lobbying that has led to what Brink Lindsey and
Steven Teles call the "
captured
economy.
" An especially costly form of this rent-seeking was banks' lobbying for a "too big to fail"
subsidy
.
This encouraged over-expansion of the banking system and the subsequent crisis, which has had a massively
adverse
effect
upon economic
growth
.
2. Unequal corporate hierarchies – what Jeffrey Nielsen
calls
rank-based
organizations – can demotivate junior employees. One study of Italian football teams, for example, has
found
that
"high pay dispersion has a detrimental impact on team performance." That's consistent with a study of
Bundesliga and NBA teams by Benno Torgler and colleagues which
found
that
"positional concerns and envy reduce individual performance."
3. "Economic inequality leads to less trust"
say
(pdf)
Eric Uslaner and Mitchell Brown. And we've good evidence that less
trust
means
less
growth
.
One reason for this is simply that if people don't trust each other they'll not enter into transactions
where there's a risk of them being ripped off.
4. Inequality can prevent productivity-enhancing changes, as Sam Bowles has
described
.
We have good evidence that coops can be more
efficient
than
hierarchical ones, but the spread of them is prevented by credit constraints. Poverty
reduces
education
levels by making it impossible to afford books, or encouraging bright but poor students to leave earlier
than they should, and women and BAME people might avoid careers for which they are otherwise well-suited
because of a lack of role modelss
5. Inequality can cause the rich to be fearful of future redistribution or nationalization, which will
make them loath to invest. National Grid is belly-aching, maybe rightly, that Labour's plan to nationalize
it will delay
investment
.
But it should instead ask: why is Labour proposing such a thing, and why is it
popular
?
6. Inequalities of power – in the sense of workers' voices being less heard than they were in the
post-war period and trades unions becoming less powerful – have allowed governments to abandon the aim of
truly full employment and given firms more ability to boost profits by suppressing wages and conditions.
That has disincentivized investments in labour-saving technologies.
7. The high-powered incentives that generate inequality within companies can
backfire
.
As Benabou and Tirole have
shown
(pdf)
, they encourage bosses to hit measured targets and neglect less measurable things that are
nevertheless important for a firm's success such as a healthy corporate culture. Or they might crowd out
intrinsic
motivations
such
as professional ethics. Big bank bonuses, for example, encouraged mis-selling and
rigging
markets
rather than productive activities.
8. High management pay can
entrench
what
Joel Mokyr
calls
the
"forces of conservatism" which are antagonistic to technical progress. Reaping the full benefits of new
technologies often requires organizational change. But why bother investing in this if you are doing very
nicely thanks to the
increased
(pdf)
market
power
of
your firm? And if you have, or hope to have, a big salary from a corporate bureaucracy why should you set up
a new company?
My point here is that what matters is not so much the level of inequality as the effect it has. And it
might well be a pernicious one. If inequality has contributed to weaker growth, then it is very likely to
have
contributed
to
the rise of populism and to
Brexit
and
the divisions with which both are associated. In this way, inequality does political damage too.
From this perspective, pointing out that the Gini coefficient has been flat for years (which is
true
if
we ignore housing costs) is like saying that because the bus has stopped moving we need not care about the
man who has been run over by it. It misses the main point.
Very good analysis on the consequences of inequality. I miss a conclusive one:
disengagement
.
It is, in part, an objective of the wealthy because it discourages political participation of the masses. It
is also root of populist movements. But maybe the most critical consequence of disengagement now is the
difficulty to implement social changes badly needed to fight climate change.
The reason why there is inequality is because that is what people in power want. So while there are many
reasons why inequality is a problem to be resolved I believe that the only way to deal with it is to use
power. The power of the ballot at the election. Voting for people with history of serving other interests
than the electorate and then trying to reason with them to get them to change their mind is a bad idea.
Is there anyone who believes that the powers that be will change simply by presenting logical arguments
to them?
The healthcare situation in the US is the best example. There are few, if any, logical arguments to have
a healthcare system as the US has. Is there really anything to do but to elect people who will change it? Or
is there a possibility to change the minds of the politicians who maintains it?
There is more to do than just elect the "right" people to office, which is important. As we painfully
know, elected leaders have a rather sorry record of making change, so simple reliance on the ballot is
inadequate. We need resilience, mutual aid and organizational support in the polis, independent of the
political class. This in order to not only elect good leaders, but also to hold them accountable from day
one. To create such requires the long work of organizing. Organizing is not just advocacy (lobbying,
e.g.) nor just mobilizing (mass demos, e.g.), it is about changing lives. When done properly, organizing
changes politics and its possibilities in fundamental ways. But when done right, it is literally one
person at a time over time. No quick fixes, no easy solutions. Are we up to this or not? That is the
question facing us all.
High levels of inequality lead to the economy being demand-limited rather than capital-limited. Now
either one can choke off economic growth, but monetary stimulus is more sustainable when it operates on the
latter than the former. Buliding a new factory and employing more people in it is hopefully* going to be
better for the economy in the long term than loaning cash strapped people money to be paid back with
interest.
*But not always, look at all that dark fiber installed during the dot com boom.
We are paying off our existing debt we built up while raising kids. It doesn't matter how much cheap
debt Mr. Powell and Mr. Dimon want to throw at us, we aren't going to use it and will continue paying off
the old debt. the bank calculators tell us we could take on hundreds of thousands of debt to buy a bigger
house, fancy cars etc. but that is not happening. One of the key reasons is that we look at the political
uncertainty and know that ultimately the best defense is low debt levels and well-diversified savings.
The high student debt levels many people have taken on means they are not taking on much new debt. so
they used the debt to pay the universities but that is probably not as productive for the economy as
buying condos, houses, cars, etc.
Many other people have been taking on debt because they don't make enough to cover their ongoing
expenses. In a recession, that debt is likely to be high risk.
Corporations have been issuing lots of covenant-light junk bonds because Mr. Bernanke and Powell have
provided inexpensive money. Many of those will likely go south in a recession creating a bigger issue.
Unlike the dark fiber, most of that has not been for long-term capital projects so is unlikely to provide
that economic stimulus in the future.
And a big part of the reason debt levels are so high is because the wealthy have much more money to
lend than they can find productive uses for. High debt levels are the direct result and evidence of a
greater concentration of wealth than is optimal.
It is pretty clear that the period of low income inequality from WW II to the early 80s coincided with
the giant productivity bump. So when Trump says "Make America Great Again" which I have assumed relates to
that post-WW II boom, is he calling for reduced inequality and better sharing of wealth across the society?
Or does he assume that the policies that lead to reduced productivity growth are what make America great?
While the stats aren't strong, my understanding is that the Gilded Age of the 1870s was another classic
period of concentrated wealth that then started a period of frequent depressions from the 1880s to WW II,
including the Panic of 1908 and the Great Depression. The Great Depression was preceded by a brief period of
high inequality in the Roaring 20s that was not erased until after the 1937 stock market drop and the
beginning of WW II.
I think the most interesting thing about inequality is how much distortion a short period of it can put
into a society. It appears that it takes 2-3 decades for society to fully recover from each decade of high
inequality. This is similar to the relative rates of stock market recovery compared to a stock market drop.
My primary hope is that we can come out of this period of inequality without a major global conflict. I
suspect that the retiring of the baby boomers and the stress that puts on the system will lead to the
realization of many retirees that they are on the menu instead of picking from the menu. That will likely
begin to change their voting patterns in the coming decade coinciding with the growing political clout of
the millenials.
Point #6 has me confused (that's not so difficult to do). The section ends with this sentence:
"That has disincentivized investments in labour-saving technologies."
Huh? I've been under the impression that not only labor-saving but labor-eliminating tech. is a very big
deal. A big selling point for automation is that by eliminating jobs & job-related expenses it more than
pays for itself.
You point to the interesting debate on technology and jobs. IMO labour-saving techs mostly shift jobs.
Whether it destroys more or less than those created is open to many informed and uninformed discussions.
It almost certainly ends in higher productivity, but what about inequality? For some time technology
raised all boats but lately not. I would argue that technology itself is not the evil. Erik Brynjolfsson
signalled the "winner take all" dynamics of Silicon Valley as an example on how technology drives
inequality nowadays.
The big question is what happens to those doing the jobs that are left? If they share in the
benefits of productivity growth through higher wages, they can buy more of OTHER products and services
which creates demand and provides employment for those creating those products. But If they do not get
higher wages, those displaced are competing for jobs with other displaced workers and depressing
wages. The economy simply works better, with fewer speculative bubbles and more economic security for
the vast majority when productivity gains are linked to rising pay, as they were in the post-war
period. How to achieve this is a non-trivial question, but increasing the minimum wage and capital
gains taxes are a start.
Some of the jobs have been automated. However, many have gone overseas to cheaper labor. Instead of
keeping the jobs in country and using automation to reduce the labor cost and increase productivity, they
just shipped everything off. In some cases where they kept the work in country, they simply moved the
jobs to non-union states where the workers would work for much less.
If all you are concerned about is earnings per share, it doesn't really matter where or how the work
gets done as long as you reduced the cost per unit revenue.
Someone, please remind me why we all need more growth in our economy. So far as I was aware, it was
capitalism's need for constant growth that was a major cause of climate change. Whilst inequality has
dreadful effects in other ways, surely lowering overall growth might be a good thing for the natural world.
Infinite growth on a finite planet can go on only so long without serious consequences – or so it seems. The
much-vaunted and much-hated Green New Deal takes as given that there is such a thing as green growth. Is
there?
"... Still this is a clear and provable case of racket. Academic racket but still a racket. ..."
"... But even minor prosecution of those academic rentiers is impossible under neoliberalism as regulators are captured and corrupted. ..."
"... And students mostly are too badly informed and too naïve to shop around and find a better price. Which is still possible. For example using community college for the first two years and then transferring credits to a state university. And if student is talented enough he always can get masters at Ivy League school later and it will cost less. ..."
"... 8% insurance policy, ..."
"... The explosion in administrative employment and the resulting bureaucratic bloat and costs is ridiculous and unsustainable, including the promised pension and benefit payouts in the years to come. ..."
"... Young people borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to attend private, for-profit colleges (???) or to study the humanities, social sciences, or business is a waste of time and money for the vast majority. ..."
"... Most urban/suburban high schools have evolved into what might be described as college preparatory girls schools where a large majority of males are marginalized as necessary nuisances and the vast majority of kids learn little that is practical to participating as gainfully employed and self-supporting adults. ..."
"... But that is not an accident, of course. Feminization and infantilization of the society and economy has been underway coincident with deindustrialization and financialization since the 1970s-80s. ..."
"... The cost containment of colleges is the same as what is needed for healthcare. The government should intervene since it is the principal financier in more ways than one. ..."
"... To my knowledge and experience with Federal Direct Loans, students can go into forbearance at any time. There is also a 3 year window of no interest accumulation. After the 3 years, interest accumulates. ..."
The private enterprise system is built to limit overborrowing by sharing risk between lenders and borrowers. ... They charge more
interest when they take on more risk. Because most loans can be discharged in bankruptcy, lenders share the cost of default. ...
But the federal student loan program doesn't work that way. Those ads that run on bus stop signs and on late-night television
- "No Cash? No Credit? No Problem!" - are essentially the Department of Education's official policy on student loans.
On the front end, the department is the world's nicest, most accommodating lender. Interest rates ... are lower than banks charge...
Borrowing for college is essentially an entitlement...
When the loan bill finally comes due, the federal government transforms into a heartless loan collector. You don't need burly
men with brass knuckles to enforce debts when you have the Internal Revenue Service..., which can and will follow you as long as
you live.
The government acts this way because the federal student loan program has been removed from the norms and values of prudent lending.
Because the Department of Education doesn't consider risk, it takes no responsibility. If life, luck and bad choices leave you ...
in the hole, it's all on you. ...
Most college students ... pay back their loans and enjoy the fruits of their degrees. But most pack-a-day smokers don't die of
lung cancer. And most people who bought cars with Takata airbags from 2002 to 2008 weren't killed by shrapnel from explosions. Nevertheless,
we still regard small risks of catastrophic outcomes as problems to be solved. ...
Just one quick comment. We need to solve the student loan problem for existing loans, but I wish talk about how to address this
problem going forward was more about how to provide adequate funding for colleges so that large loans aren't needed in the first
place rather than focusing on how to change the loan program itself.
The cost containment of colleges is the same as what is needed for healthcare. The government should intervene since it is the
principal financier in more ways than one.
=== end of quote ===
Very true. May be even the idea of the net of eligible providers (in network vs out of network) can be borrowed form healthcare.
As this is a public good, it should be severe punishment including jail terms for inflating the cost of education. For example
I think Mankiw should be at investigated using RICO act for the cost of his textbook. But I think that students who enroll into Mankiw
class are already second rate students because at this point they should do some research about who Mankiw really is and avoid his
classes like a plague.
Still this is a clear and provable case of racket. Academic racket but still a racket.
But even minor prosecution of those academic rentiers is impossible under neoliberalism as regulators are captured and corrupted.
And students mostly are too badly informed and too naïve to shop around and find a better price. Which is still possible. For
example using community college for the first two years and then transferring credits to a state university. And if student is talented
enough he always can get masters at Ivy League school later and it will cost less.
Please note that quality of university education is already very problematic. Switching to preparing "ready for jobmarket" graduates
backfired. I would say that quality now is dismal as student lacks fundamentals. They are now kind of "bug of tricks" degree holders.
So the idea of cost control of college education can't be refuted with the hypothesis that it will lower the quality of education.
Essentially what Ivy league college degree buys is the first place in a heap of resumes to major companies (some companies simply
discard resumes from applicant who do not have Ivy League education).
Now about subsidies. Neoliberal colleges are for profit business with academic sharks no different that sharks in chemical or
pharmaceutical companies. They do not care about education, only about lining this own pockets. As simple as that.
That means that in a current environment any "broad" subsidies will result in raising of the cost of education. I would make subsidies
more focused, subject to means test as well as passing a qualifying exam similar to GED. After all at this point the society invests
some money into student.
djb
so is he saying that we shouldn't give student loans unless a bank would loan the money
that's means many people who can now afford college wont be able to
and this:
"Most college students don't end up like Ms. Kelley. They pay back their loans and enjoy the fruits of their degrees. But most
pack-a-day smokers don't die of lung cancer. And most people who bought cars with Takata airbags from 2002 to 2008 weren't killed
by shrapnel from explosions. Nevertheless, we still regard small risks of catastrophic outcomes as problems to be solved."
is he kidding me??? My student loans required an 8% insurance policy, money I didn't even get to use, came out before
I could pay tuition room and board, but I still owed it. The fact that most people pay their student loans means the government doesn't
lose anything from student loans
Dan Berg
Rather than "provide adequate (more) funding (taxes)for colleges" - how about ways to reduce cost? Beginning with the absurd costs
of textbooks; administrative bloat; disparities between tenured and part-time teachers; etc
Here is where Greg Mankiw will tell you he needs to charge $300 a book for his text because he wants his kids to be rich.
A Thomas
And how does anyone propose to remedy monies being deducted from Social Security for delinquent student loans when the person
(victim) cannot make timely payments because of AGE DISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT. While illegal, it is practiced by a majority of
employers. Often the Soc Sec recipient is reduced to living at poverty level - even though they want to work and would if they could
find paying employment.
Or does anyone want to remedy this? Just let the "old folks" starve and become homeless!!!!!!
RGC
"As a senator from Delaware -- a corporate tax haven where the financial industry is one of the state's largest employers -- Biden
was one of the key proponents of the 2005 legislation that is now bearing down on students like Ryan. That bill effectively prevents
the $150 billion worth of private student debt from being discharged, rescheduled or renegotiated as other debt can be in bankruptcy
court.
Biden's efforts in 2005 were no anomaly. Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion of the struggling
middle class -- a man who famously commutes on Amtrak and mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers -- the Delaware lawmaker
has played a consistent and pivotal role in the financial industry's four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to shield
themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s."
80-85% of jobs today and in the future will not require post-secondary training or a university credential. If accelerating automation
and elimination of service employment (retail, health care, education, gov't, legal, etc.) continues apace as anticipated, including
middle- and upper-income employment, there will be still fewer jobs requiring post-secondary "education" that pay what was once perceived
as breadwinner compensation.
Universities all over the US have since the 1970s-80s become costly public jobs programs primarily for females at low or no productivity
and increasing cost to the private sector (as in the case of "health" care). The explosion in administrative employment and the
resulting bureaucratic bloat and costs is ridiculous and unsustainable, including the promised pension and benefit payouts in the
years to come.
Young people borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to attend private, for-profit colleges (???) or to study the humanities,
social sciences, or business is a waste of time and money for the vast majority.
Most urban/suburban high schools have evolved into what might be described as college preparatory girls schools where a large
majority of males are marginalized as necessary nuisances and the vast majority of kids learn little that is practical to participating
as gainfully employed and self-supporting adults.
But that is not an accident, of course. Feminization and infantilization of the society and economy has been underway coincident
with deindustrialization and financialization since the 1970s-80s.
there should be a subsidy for college, because otherwise people tend to underinvest in education. Individuals are often liquidity
constrained or just short sighted.
But IMO we are doing the subsidies all wrong. We are offering subsidized loans and tax deductions. We should instead be using
plain old grants more often. That's how you ensure access to people who would otherwise lack it.
But the grants should be relatively small. They should just be sufficient to coverage get of a public university education, without
a little t of extra amenities. The critics of higher ed who say that subsidies are driving up the costs are half right. It's really
consumer preferences, for the most part. But that doesn't mean government should contribute to that problem, of that taxpayers should
pay limitless amounts. Some price pressure should still be left to exist.
The cost containment of colleges is the same as what is needed for healthcare. The government should intervene since it is the
principal financier in more ways than one.
There is a movement afoot from the Jason Delisles, Matt Chingos, and the Beth Akers of both the New America Foundation and Brookings
who advocate interest rates do not matter, higher interest rates make sense for advanced degrees, and student loans should be risk
sensitive using Fair Market Valuation techniques.
Getting a student loan is like checking into a Roach Motel. You can sign in via your signature; but, you can never check out without
paying it off. If you default, it gets worst for you as stated in the story. So the risk to the Federal Gov and taxpayers is minimal.
Indeed some would tell you, the Gov makes more money in default than in payoff. I also think there is more to the story than being
revealed.
The highest default rate is with those who have student loans of < $10,000 [~39% of them have loans of less than $10,000 (NY Fed)]
and are the result of Community Colleges. Potentially these are people attempting to improve their status in life. Student loan borrowers
with $100,000 of debt had a default rate of 18% and are also the higher earners after graduation.
To my knowledge and experience with Federal Direct Loans, students can go into forbearance at any time. There is also a 3 year
window of no interest accumulation. After the 3 years, interest accumulates. The 3 year window of no interest accumulation needs
to be expanded to cover what we experienced since 2008 and perhaps go as long as 10 years. The 20-25 life time of IBR should be shortened
to 10 - 15 years. This is not like students ordered up a 2008 recession, they were penalized unknowingly and were encouraged to seek
a college education of sorts. The same holds true for those returning to college to better themselves.
Not only does student debt hurt the student, it is also playing out in the overall economy as I reported using NY Fed information
at AB. Households with Student Loan Debt are a higher risk than those without Student Loan Debt. They are buying fewer homes and
autos than households without Student Loan debt.
State financing has decreased. In Michigan it has gone from ~60% to ~30% with families picking up the load through various sources.
Perhaps expanding the public service to erase college debt after 10 years would make more sense than doing so with strings attached.
Colleges do not appear to be cost sensitive to what the market may bear. There has always been a need for them and like healthcare
colleges are allowed to increase as needed in cost without question. If you can not pay it upfront, you can always borrow it seems
to rule. The new programs was supposed to hold colleges accountable for default rates. From the get-go, the administration let some
of them off the hook.
According
to a
brand new Pew survey, approximately 7 out of every 10 Americans believe that "debt is a necessity
in their lives", and approximately 8 out of every 10 Americans actually have debt right now.
Most of us like to think that "someday" we will get out of the hole and quit being debt slaves, but
very few of us ever actually accomplish this.
That is because the entire system is
designed to trap us in debt before we even get out into the "real world" and keep us in debt until
we die. Sadly, most Americans don't even realize what is being done to them.
In America today, debt is considered to be just part of normal life. We go
into debt to go to college, we go into debt to buy a vehicle, we go into debt to buy a home, and
we are constantly using our credit cards to buy the things that we think we need.
As a result, this generation of Americans is absolutely swimming in debt. The
following are some of the findings of
the Pew survey that I mentioned above
*"8 in 10 Americans have debt, with mortgages the most common liability."
*"Although younger generations of Americans are the most likely to have debt (89 percent of
Gen Xers and 86 percent of millennials do), older generations are increasingly carrying debt into
retirement."
*"7 in 10 Americans said debt is a necessity in their lives, even though they prefer not to
have it."
Most of us wish that we didn't have any debt, but we have bought into the lie that it
is a necessary part of life in America in the 21st century.
It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make
each month, and U.S. households are
more than 11 trillion dollars in debt at this point.
When it comes to government debt, that is easy for us to blame on someone else, but all of this
household debt is undoubtedly something that we have done to ourselves.
It all starts at a very early age for most of us. When we are still in
high school, we are endlessly told about how important a college education is. All of the authority
figures in our lives insist that we should just try to get into the best school that we possibly
can and to not even worry about how much it will cost.
So many of us go into staggering amounts of debt before we even get out into the working world.
We had faith that the "good jobs" that were being promised to us would be there when we graduated.
Unfortunately, in this day and age those "good jobs" end up being a mirage more often than not.
But whether or not we can find a good job, we still have to pay off all that debt.
According to new data that was recently released, the total amount of student loan debt in the
United States has risen to a grand total 1.2 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, that
total has
more than doubled over the past decade.
Right now, there are approximately
40 million Americans that are paying off student loan debt. For many of them, they will
keep making payments on this debt until they are senior citizens.
Another way that they get you while you are still in school is with credit card debt.
I got my first credit card while I was in college, and nobody ever taught me about the potential
dangers.
Today, the average U.S. household that has at least one credit card has approximately
$15,950 in credit card debt.
So let's say that you have that much credit card debt and you are paying an annual interest rate
of 17 percent. If you only pay the minimum payment each month, it will take you 229 months
to pay your credit card off, and during that time you will have paid $13,505.82 in interest charges.
In other words, you will almost have paid twice as much for everything that you originally bought
with your credit card by the time it is all said and done.
This is why banks love to give you credit cards. If they can get back nearly twice as much
money as they originally give you, they get rich and you get poor.
Most of us get loaded down with even more debt when we go to buy a vehicle. Instead of saving
up and getting what we can afford, many of us end up getting the largest loans that we can qualify
for.
In a
previous article, I discussed the fact that the average auto loan at signing in America
today is
approximately $27,000. In order to get the monthly payments down to a level where we can
afford them, many of these auto loans are now being stretched out for six or seven years.
In fact, the number of auto loans that exceed 72 months
has hit at an all-time high of 29.5 percent.
It is the same thing with home loans.
In the old days, it was extremely rare for a mortgage to be stretched over 30 years, but today
that is pretty much the standard.
Sadly, most people don't understand how much money this is costing them.
If you take out a $300,000 mortgage at 3.92 percent and stretch it over 30 years, you will end
up paying back a grand total of $510,640.
In other words, you will pay for two houses by the time you are done.
Yes, we all need somewhere to live, and there are definitely negatives to renting as well.
But it is very important that we all understand what is being done to us.
And I haven't even discussed one of the most insidious forms of debt yet.
Have you noticed that most doctors and most hospitals will never tell you how much something is
going to cost in advance?
They get us when we are at our most vulnerable. When there is something wrong with us physically,
we are often desperate to get help. So we don't ask too many questions and we just go along
with whatever they say.
But then later we get the bill and we are often
completely shocked by what they have charged us.
If you are completely unethical, it is a great business model. People that are extremely
desperate and needy come to you and you don't even have to tell them how much your services are going
to cost. And then once they leave, you send them an absolutely outrageous bill for whatever
you feel like charging.
Frankly, I don't know how a lot of people working in the medical field live with themselves.
In their extreme greed, they are ruining the lives of millions of ordinary American families.
One very disturbing study found that
approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either currently have medical bill problems
or are paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills
from about 30 million of us each and every year.
Most of us will spend our entire lives paying off debt.
That is why we are called debt slaves – our hard work makes others extremely wealthy.
ebworthen
All by design. The great lie is that you should "work hard and be responsible".
Yeah? Why? Because it feeds the beast in Wall Street and Washington? The bailouts and free money
for the banks/corporations/insurers wiped that idea off the slate.
Give me sound money and start producing again while offering me interest on my savings and we
can start talking about responsibility. The example set by Wall Street and Washington is that
debt is good, so what the fuck do they expect regular folks to do, keep carrying their bags?
Fuck you assholes, to Hell and back on a bed of nails.
European American
I must confess. I declared bankruptcy back in the late 80's. Not proud of that time in my life
but it was legal and it literally saved me. Since then, "If I can't buy that product/service with
the cash in my wallet, then I wasn't suppose to have it." has been my philosophy for the last
25 years, and even though the State stills owns my real estate, more or less (various taxes),
I'm basically free. Debt is a killer of ones mental, physical and emotional immune system. I highly
recommend avoiding IT at all costs. Debit card is the only plastic money in my wallet, along with
some fiat currency. My bank is the color of Gold and SIlver.
Welcome to the club. Been a member for about that long myself.
I knew I'd like the financial freedom. I knew I'd like how much money it saved me.
What it took a few years debt-free to understand was that in a world measured in debt, I
would become invisible. I can not be viewed using their technology any more. I'm
a steath bomber with glider wings and a zero coefficient of drag.
If the 100th monkey effect applies here, we will be part of an awakened populace that watches
the ctrl+alt+del of USD and the resultant house of cards.
As we know debt is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is worth becoming an indentured
servent for a payout later.
We take out a loan, or at least most of us, for a house. This helps us build up equity
instead of wasting it all on rent every month. By retirement people should own their
home outright and not have to pay rent during their retirement. Most smart people are
even able to downsize and stick some money in their savings.
A large percentage of people take out a loan for school. We have all read articled
of idiots getting a 4 year degree in women's studies at a fancy private school, having a loan
of $120,000, and never being able to pay it off. But the smart people who go to school
maybe a state school, for a degree that is marketable do better than those without a degree.
A reliable car can help us save time, thus money, getting to and from work and other places.
The key buying something basic and reliable and not a brand new sports car.
I'm glad we have the ability to borrow money. It has helped me immensily in my own
personal life. And I would say, I would be worse off without it.
Ugh. You all know my screen name, what it stands for and my opinions on debt. Posting
up on this subject borders on the tedious for me, but for those who haven't heard it yet, here
it is....
If you have a valid financial reason for going into debt, that is to say you have a well-considered
goal for your debt exposure, debt is not necessarily bad. For instance, if you are going
to be a professional photographer you might need to buy some cameras and photography equipment
that will be necessary for you to exist in that world. You are INVESTING in yourself.
Nothing wrong with using debt for that if you can't pay as you go straight out of pocket.
Further down the totem pole is something like buying a house. A collateralized obligation.
One you have the USE of the asset while you pay it off. I'm less enthusiastic about this
sort of stuff but if it's a necessity (like having a place to live) I can't fault you for
doing it. BUT IT WILL NEVER MAKE YOU MORE PRODUCTIVE OR INCREASE YOUR EARNING POWER.
You feeling me on this? The key here is to pay that bitch down as fast as possible and minimize
your interest expense because it's a pure dead-weight loss to you.
ANYTHING else, you don't need to go into debt over. So just don't. Better to do
without than go into debt over anything beyond this point.
There really are very few exceptions to these simple rules (unless you are a government in
which case everything is an excuse to go into debt since you're just spending other people's money).
We should object to the neoliberal complete "instumentalization" of education: education became just a mean to get nicely paid job.
And even this hope is mostly an illusion for all but the top 5% of students...
And while students share their own part of responsibility for accumulating the debt the predatory behaviour of neoliberal universities
is an important factor that should not be discounted and perpetrators should be held responsible. Especially dirty tricks of ballooning
its size and pushing students into "hopeless" specialties, which would be fine, if they were sons or daughters of well to do and parent
still support then financially.
Actually neoliberalism justifies predatory behaviour and as such is a doomed social system as without solidarity some members of
financial oligarchy that rules the country sooner or later might hand from the lampposts.
Notable quotes:
"... It also never ceases to amaze me the number of anti-educational opinions which flare up when the discussion of student loan default arises. There are always those who will prophesize there is no need to attain a higher level of education as anyone could be something else and be successful and not require a higher level of education. Or they come forth with the explanation on how young 18 year-olds and those already struggling should be able to ascertain the risk of higher debt when the cards are already stacked against them legally. ..."
"... There does not appear to be much movement on the part of Congress to reconcile the issues in favor of students as opposed to the non-profit and for profit institutes. ..."
"... It's easy to explain, really. According to the Department of Education ( https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans ) you're going to be paying off that loan at minimum payments for 25 years. Assuming your average bachelor's degree is about $30k if you go all-loans ( http://collegecost.ed.gov/catc/ ) and the average student loan interest rate is a generous 5% ( http://www.direct.ed.gov/calc.html ), you're going to be paying $175 a month for a sizable chunk of your adult life. ..."
"... Majoring in IT or Computer Science would have a been a great move in the late 1990's; however, if you graduated around 2000, you likely would have found yourself facing a tough job market.. Likewise, majoring in petroleum engineering or petroleum geology would have seemed like a good move a couple of years ago; however, now that oil prices are crashing, it's presumably a much tougher job market. ..."
"... To confuse going to college with vocational education is to commit a major category error. I think bright, ambitious high school graduates– who are looking for upward social mobility– would be far better served by a plumbing or carpentry apprenticeship program. A good plumber can earn enough money to send his or her children to Yale to study Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. ..."
"... A bright working class kid who goes off to New Haven, to study medieval lit, will need tremendous luck to overcome the enormous class prejudice she will face in trying to establish herself as a tenure-track academic. If she really loves medieval literature for its own sake, then to study it deeply will be "worth it" even if she finds herself working as a barista or store-clerk. ..."
"... As a middle-aged doctoral student in the humanities you should not even be thinking much about your loans. Write the most brilliant thesis that you can, get a book or some decent articles published from it– and swim carefully in the shark-infested waters of academia until you reach the beautiful island of tenured full-professorship. If that island turns out to be an ever-receding mirage, sell your soul to our corporate overlords and pay back your loans! Alternatively, tune in, drop out, and use your finely tuned research and rhetorical skills to help us overthrow the kleptocratic regime that oppresses us all!! ..."
"... Genuine education should provide one with profound contentment, grateful for the journey taken, and a deep appreciation of life. ..."
"... Instead many of us are left confused – confusing career training (redundant and excessive, as it turned out, unfortunate for the student, though not necessarily bad for those on the supply side, one must begrudgingly admit – oops, there goes one's serenity) with enlightenment. ..."
"... We all should be against Big Educational-Complex and its certificates-producing factory education that does not put the student's health and happiness up there with co-existing peacefully with Nature. ..."
"... Remember DINKs? Dual Income No Kids. Dual Debt Bad Job No House No Kids doesn't work well for acronyms. Better for an abbreviated hash tag? ..."
"... I graduated law school with $100k+ in debt inclusive of undergrad. I've never missed a loan payment and my credit score is 830. my income has never reached $100k. my payments started out at over $1000 a month and through aggressive payment and refinancing, I've managed to reduce the payments to $500 a month. I come from a lower middle class background and my parents offered what I call 'negative help' throughout college. ..."
"... my unfortunate situation is unique and I wouldn't wish my debt on anyone. it's basically indentured servitude. it's awful, it's affects my life and health in ways no one should have to live, I have all sorts of stress related illnesses. I'm basically 2 months away from default of everything. my savings is negligible and my net worth is still negative 10 years after graduating. ..."
"... My story is very similar to yours, although I haven't had as much success whittling down my loan balances. But yes, it's made me a socialist as well; makes me wonder how many of us, i.e. ppl radicalized by student loans, are out there. Perhaps the elites' grand plan to make us all debt slaves will eventually backfire in more ways than via the obvious economic issues? ..."
It also never ceases to amaze me the number of anti-educational opinions which flare up when the discussion of student loan
default arises. There are always those who will prophesize there is no need to attain a higher level of education as anyone could
be something else and be successful and not require a higher level of education. Or they come forth with the explanation on how young
18 year-olds and those already struggling should be able to ascertain the risk of higher debt when the cards are already stacked
against them legally. In any case during a poor economy, those with more education appear to be employed at a higher rate than
those with less education. The issue for those pursuing an education is the ever increasing burden and danger of student loans and
associated interest rates which prevent younger people from moving into the economy successfully after graduation, the failure of
the government to support higher education and protect students from for-profit fraud, the increased risk of default and becoming
indentured to the government, and the increased cost of an education which has surpassed healthcare in rising costs.
There does not appear to be much movement on the part of Congress to reconcile the issues in favor of students as opposed
to the non-profit and for profit institutes.
Ranger Rick, November 9, 2015 at 11:34 am
It's easy to explain, really. According to the Department of Education (
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans
) you're going to be paying off that loan at minimum payments for 25 years. Assuming your average bachelor's degree is about $30k
if you go all-loans ( http://collegecost.ed.gov/catc/ ) and the
average student loan interest rate is a generous 5% ( http://www.direct.ed.gov/calc.html
), you're going to be paying $175 a month for a sizable chunk of your adult life.
If you're merely hitting the median income of a bachelor's degree after graduation, $55k (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77
), and good luck with that in this economy, you're still paying ~31.5% of that in taxes (http://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/taxing-wages-20725124.htm
) you're left with $35.5k before any other costs. Out of that, you're going to have to come up with the down payment to buy a
house and a car after spending more money than you have left (http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxann13.pdf).
Louis, November 9, 2015 at 12:33 pm
The last paragraph sums it up perfectly, especially the predictable counterarguments. Accurately assessing what job in demand
several years down the road is very difficult, if not impossible.
Majoring in IT or Computer Science would have a been a great move in the late 1990's; however, if you graduated around
2000, you likely would have found yourself facing a tough job market.. Likewise, majoring in petroleum engineering or petroleum
geology would have seemed like a good move a couple of years ago; however, now that oil prices are crashing, it's presumably a
much tougher job market.
Do we blame the computer science majors graduating in 2000 or the graduates struggling to break into the energy industry, now
that oil prices have dropped, for majoring in "useless" degrees? It's much easier to create a strawman about useless degrees that
accept the fact that there is a element of chance in terms of what the job market will look like upon graduation.
The cost of higher education is absurd and there simply aren't enough good jobs to go around-there are people out there who
majored in the "right" fields and have found themselves underemployed or unemployed-so I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of
many people in my generation.
At the same time, I do believe in personal responsibility-I'm wary of creating a moral hazard if people can discharge loans
in bankruptcy. I've been paying off my student loans (grad school) for a couple of years-I kept the level debt below any realistic
starting salary-and will eventually have the loans paid off, though it may be a few more years.
I am really conflicted between believing in personal responsibility but also seeing how this generation has gotten screwed.
I really don't know what the right answer is.
Ulysses, November 9, 2015 at 1:47 pm
"The cost of higher education is absurd and there simply aren't enough good jobs to go around-there are people out there who
majored in the "right" fields and have found themselves underemployed or unemployed-so I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of
many people in my generation."
To confuse going to college with vocational education is to commit a major category error. I think bright, ambitious high
school graduates– who are looking for upward social mobility– would be far better served by a plumbing or carpentry apprenticeship
program. A good plumber can earn enough money to send his or her children to Yale to study Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer.
A bright working class kid who goes off to New Haven, to study medieval lit, will need tremendous luck to overcome the
enormous class prejudice she will face in trying to establish herself as a tenure-track academic. If she really loves medieval
literature for its own sake, then to study it deeply will be "worth it" even if she finds herself working as a barista or store-clerk.
None of this, of course, excuses the outrageously high tuition charges, administrative salaries, etc. at the "top schools."
They are indeed institutions that reinforce class boundaries. My point is that strictly career education is best begun at a less
expensive community college. After working in the IT field, for example, a talented associate's degree-holder might well find
that her employer will subsidize study at an elite school with an excellent computer science program.
My utopian dream would be a society where all sorts of studies are open to everyone– for free. Everyone would have a basic
Job or Income guarantee and could study as little, or as much, as they like!
Ulysses, November 9, 2015 at 2:05 pm
As a middle-aged doctoral student in the humanities you should not even be thinking much about your loans. Write the most
brilliant thesis that you can, get a book or some decent articles published from it– and swim carefully in the shark-infested
waters of academia until you reach the beautiful island of tenured full-professorship.
If that island turns out to be an ever-receding mirage, sell your soul to our corporate overlords and pay back your loans!
Alternatively, tune in, drop out, and use your finely tuned research and rhetorical skills to help us overthrow the kleptocratic
regime that oppresses us all!!
subgenius, November 9, 2015 at 3:07 pm
except (in my experience) the corporate overlords want young meat.
I have 2 masters degrees 2 undergraduate degrees and a host of random diplomas – but at 45, I am variously too old, too qualified,
or lacking sufficient recent corporate experience in the field to get hired
Trying to get enough cash to get a contractor license seems my best chance at anything other than random day work.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef, November 9, 2015 at 3:41 pm
Genuine education should provide one with profound contentment, grateful for the journey taken, and a deep appreciation
of life.
Instead many of us are left confused – confusing career training (redundant and excessive, as it turned out, unfortunate
for the student, though not necessarily bad for those on the supply side, one must begrudgingly admit – oops, there goes one's
serenity) with enlightenment.
"I would spend another 12 soul-nourishing years pursuing those non-profit degrees' vs 'I can't feed my family with those paper
certificates.'
jrs, November 9, 2015 at 2:55 pm
I am anti-education as the solution to our economic woes. We need jobs or a guaranteed income. And we need to stop outsourcing
the jobs that exist. And we need a much higher minimum wage. And maybe we need work sharing. I am also against using screwdrivers
to pound in a nail. But why are you so anti screwdriver anyway?
And I see calls for more and more education used to make it seem ok to pay people without much education less than a living
wage. Because they deserve it for being whatever drop outs. And it's not ok.
I don't actually have anything against the professors (except their overall political cowardice in times demanding radicalism!).
Now the administrators, yea I can see the bloat and the waste there. But mostly, I have issues with more and more education being
preached as the answer to a jobs and wages crisis.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef -> jrs, November 9, 2015 at 3:50 pm
We all should be against Big Educational-Complex and its certificates-producing factory education that does not put the
student's health and happiness up there with co-existing peacefully with Nature.
"You must be lazy – you're not educated."
"Sorry, you are too stupid for our elite university to admit, just as your brother was too poor for our rich club to let
in."
"I am going to kill you intellectually. I will annihilate you intellectually. My idea will destroy you and I don't have
to feel sorry at all."
Kris Alman, November 9, 2015 at 11:11 am
Remember DINKs? Dual Income No Kids. Dual Debt Bad Job No House No Kids doesn't work well for acronyms. Better for an abbreviated
hash tag?
debitor serf, November 9, 2015 at 7:17 pm
I graduated law school with $100k+ in debt inclusive of undergrad. I've never missed a loan payment and my credit score
is 830. my income has never reached $100k. my payments started out at over $1000 a month and through aggressive payment and refinancing,
I've managed to reduce the payments to $500 a month. I come from a lower middle class background and my parents offered what I
call 'negative help' throughout college.
my unfortunate situation is unique and I wouldn't wish my debt on anyone. it's basically indentured servitude. it's awful,
it's affects my life and health in ways no one should have to live, I have all sorts of stress related illnesses. I'm basically
2 months away from default of everything. my savings is negligible and my net worth is still negative 10 years after graduating.
student loans, combined with a rigged system, turned me into a closeted socialist. I am smart, hard working and resourceful.
if I can't make it in this world, heck, then who can? few, because the system is rigged!
I have no problems at all taking all the wealth of the oligarchs and redistributing it. people look at me like I'm crazy. confiscate
it all I say, and reset the system from scratch. let them try to make their billions in a system where things are fair and not
rigged...
Ramoth, November 9, 2015 at 9:23 pm
My story is very similar to yours, although I haven't had as much success whittling down my loan balances. But yes, it's
made me a socialist as well; makes me wonder how many of us, i.e. ppl radicalized by student loans, are out there. Perhaps the
elites' grand plan to make us all debt slaves will eventually backfire in more ways than via the obvious economic issues?
University of Phoenix is a typical diploma mill designed for producing debt-slaves... Private equity sharks like Mark DeFusco
try to devour weaker colleges, which no longer get enough state support.
The game plan is to strips assets like land and buildings. Essentially nobody can stop them.
Notable quotes:
"... Mr. DeFusco, 51, is a veteran of the for-profit-college industry. For the past five years, he's been a deal maker with Berkery Noyes, an investment bank that handles many mergers and acquisitions of education and information companies that often don't get publicized. From 2002 to 2005, as a new wave of private-equity investors came onto the scene, he was president of Vatterott College, a privately held institution based in St. Louis. He was a top manager at the University of Phoenix for 10 years before that, at a time when it was broadening its footprint and becoming the national powerhouse it is today. ..."
"... Voluble and refreshingly unslick, Mr. DeFusco was the guy on the PBS Frontline documentary College Inc. who, with just a little coaxing, memorably discussed how "very, very well" he and his University of Phoenix colleagues made out financially as the university expanded. "I did better than I ever imagined," he said on the show. ..."
"... It wasn't a pipe dream, he says. Working with a colleague with years of experience at Catholic colleges, Jack P. Calareso, president of Anna Maria College, he had identified 25 Catholic colleges, with enrollments ranging in size from 400 to 3,000, as acquisition targets. ..."
"... Two East Coast private-equity investors, he says, "committed more resources than I could spend"-about $500-million over four years. And he says they weren't the sort of investors looking for a fast buck. (The investors asked him not to reveal their identities; Mr. Calareso, who sat in on some of the meetings with investors and colleges, confirmed the details of the venture in an interview.) ..."
"... The idea, Mr. DeFusco says, was to operate the colleges with "a portfolio view," taking advantage of their strengths and economies of scale on things like marketing and student recruiting, keeping their Catholic mission, investing in new programs and facilities where it made sense, and eventually scrapping some programs that underperformed. ..."
Courtesy of Frontline, (c) 1995-2010 WGBH Educational Foundation
Mark DeFusco has worked with an investment bank and was a top manager at the U. of Phoenix.
Mark DeFusco has a new gig, and it may speak volumes about the evolving higher-education landscape and the fate of financially struggling
private colleges.
Until a few months ago, Mr. DeFusco was working with major investors on plans to buy and bundle up ailing regionally accredited colleges.
Now, believing that the once-friendly climate for such nonprofit conversions has grown chilly, he's shifted gears. Instead of buying
up troubled colleges, he's going to work with two veteran academics at the University of Southern California to form a consultancy focused
on saving them.
"I've been very busy these last five years telling for-profit businesses what's valuable" about themselves, says Mr. DeFusco. The
goal of the consultancy is to help nonprofits capitalize on their most valuable traits, too.
"We don't want to see potentially good assets fail," says Mr. DeFusco of the new venture, which will be run out of Southern Cal's
Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis and headed by Mr. DeFusco and the professors Guilbert C. Hentschke and William G. Tierney.
Considering how Mr. DeFusco has been in the thick of the education industry's most important trends for two decades, this latest
move is worth watching.
Mr. DeFusco, 51, is a veteran of the for-profit-college industry. For the past five years, he's been a deal maker with Berkery
Noyes, an investment bank that handles many mergers and acquisitions of education and information companies that often don't get publicized.
From 2002 to 2005, as a new wave of private-equity investors came onto the scene, he was president of Vatterott College, a privately
held institution based in St. Louis. He was a top manager at the University of Phoenix for 10 years before that, at a time when it was
broadening its footprint and becoming the national powerhouse it is today.
Voluble and refreshingly unslick, Mr. DeFusco was the guy on the PBS Frontline documentary College Inc. who, with just
a little coaxing, memorably discussed how "very, very well" he and his University of Phoenix colleagues made out financially as the
university expanded. "I did better than I ever imagined," he said on the show.
Until a few months ago, he thought he might have found another gold mine of a business, one that would be not only lucrative for
him and his enthusiastic investors, but also, he says, beneficial to higher education writ large.
His plan was to form an investor-backed "roll-up"-a company comprising several small nonprofit colleges that it would buy, and then
continue to operate, but with a single back-office operation for administrative functions.
"You could really have efficiencies" without each college having its own bursar, its own registrar, he says, replaying a theme that
many higher-education reformers before him have espoused.
It wasn't a pipe dream, he says. Working with a colleague with years of experience at Catholic colleges, Jack P. Calareso, president
of Anna Maria College, he had identified 25 Catholic colleges, with enrollments ranging in size from 400 to 3,000, as acquisition targets.
"I wanted to get to them before they got onto your list," he says, referring to
the list published in The Chronicle
last year citing the 100-plus nonprofit colleges that had failed the Department of Education's financial-responsibility test.
On Second Thought
Two East Coast private-equity investors, he says, "committed more resources than I could spend"-about $500-million over four
years. And he says they weren't the sort of investors looking for a fast buck. (The investors asked him not to reveal their identities;
Mr. Calareso, who sat in on some of the meetings with investors and colleges, confirmed the details of the venture in an interview.)
The idea, Mr. DeFusco says, was to operate the colleges with "a portfolio view," taking advantage of their strengths and economies
of scale on things like marketing and student recruiting, keeping their Catholic mission, investing in new programs and facilities where
it made sense, and eventually scrapping some programs that underperformed.
"I really wanted to get into heaven," he says. And the moves might have helped keep some traditional colleges alive, along with the
values they perpetuate. "When my kids go to college, I hope there is still tenure and there's still academic freedom."
Mr. DeFusco says he had support from two bishops and actually had in hand three letters of intent from colleges willing to be acquired.
(He wouldn't name them.) Then his lawyers advised him in early spring that the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association
of Colleges and Schools, a regional accreditor that had been known for allowing such conversions over the past five years, had begun
to take a tougher line. Eighteen of his 25 targets were in that accreditors' region.
The Higher Learning Commission rejected the conversion of nonprofit Dana College in July and of Rochester College in February, based
on new policies it adopted in June 2009 and toughened in February.
Mr. DeFusco says he got the message. Before that commission approves another conversion, he believes, "it's going to be a couple
of years-guaranteed."
Sylvia Manning, president of the commission since June 2008, says the new policy does not ban nonprofit-to-for-profit conversions-in
fact the continued reaccreditation of two converted institutions, Waldorf College in January and the College of Santa Fe in October,
came after the policy was adopted in June.
It was under her predecessor Steven D. Crow that institutions including the American College of Education (formerly Barat College),
Grand Canyon University, and Ashford University (formerly the Franciscan University of the Prairies) were acquired by companies and
allowed to significantly shift their emphasis to online education while keeping their accreditation.
She allows that in general, the new policy creates a much higher bar than what existed under her predecessor.
"It's quite possible people are reading this and are saying, 'Oh my God,'" Ms. Manning says, The new standards are not intended to
block purchases or keep new owners from introducing new styles of management and curricula to the institutions they're acquiring, she
says. "We're not saying you can't change them," she says of the colleges. But for colleges' accreditation to transfer upon a sale, "you
can't transform them."
Ms. Manning says she never spoke with Mr. DeFusco and declined to comment on his assessment of her commission's stance, or of his
sense that other regional accreditors are following suit. "My guess is that he's doing his own reading of tea leaves," says Ms. Manning.
A New Deal
Mr. DeFusco says many of the forces that would have made his roll-up venture a success lead him to believe that his shift in gears
toward a hands-on consulting project focused on struggling colleges will also keep him very busy, albeit probably with a smaller payday.
"A lot of schools are in trouble," says Mr. DeFusco. In the course of his research for his new venture, he and his team estimated
that 15 to 45 colleges could fail each year for the next five years.
Too many colleges are discounting their tuition too heavily in pursuit of students, needlessly holding onto underutilized property
that could better used to raise capital ("In this climate, those buildings are an anchor that drown you," he says), and maintaining
administrative functions that could be better handled through outsourcing or collaboration.
Worse, he says, many boards of trustees are unaware of the severity of their institutions' problems. If you were on the board of
a for-profit company operating like that, "you'd be sued," he says.
A tad less bluntly, Southern Cal's Mr. Tierney, a professor of higher education, echoes much of Mr. DeFusco's concern about the prospects
for higher education, especially in the near term. "Some of us are getting very sober about a rebound," he says. The policy-analysis
center has had a long interest in business-focused approaches and the role of markets in higher education. Mr. Tierney and Mr. Hentschke
have written or co-edited two books on for-profit colleges.
So the idea of teaming up with Mr. DeFusco (who himself received a Ph.D. from Southern Cal) to work as turnaround consultants and
help some colleges "stop the bleeding" was appealing, says Mr. Tierney. This month Mr. DeFusco will join the university as a senior
research associate at the center.
Although there is no shortage of consultants already mining this territory-Bain, Huron, the Education Advisory Board, and advisers
organized by the Association of Governing Boards, to name just a few-Mr. Tierney says the combination of Mr. DeFusco's business experience
and his and Mr. Hentschke's understanding of academic culture and the role of shared governance gives their venture a niche. Also, he
notes, it may be the first such higher-education consulting group to operate from within a university.
The consultants will help with short-term strategies, governance, and operational audits. They will also offer "workout" expertise;
workout is the term used when companies go out of business. As a university effort, the consultancy can also call upon the expertise
of other academics in the School of Education and the rest of the university. The consulting entity will pay a portion of its earnings
as overhead to Southern Cal in return for administrative support.
Mr. Tierney says he hopes to begin signing up clients by Labor Day. "If nobody calls by January 1, well, then this was an interesting
idea."
It all seems pretty fast-paced to Mr. Tierney. But that's been a lesson in itself for Mr. DeFusco, as he prepares to immerse himself
more directly in traditional academe. "August off?" he responded incredulously when Mr. Tierney told him the schedule. August is when
colleges are sweating the most over whether enough students will show up to cover the budget. "This is your most important month," he
says.
For higher education, this new gig may or may not be a bellwether. For Mr. DeFusco, it will certainly require some adjusting.
"... Despite somewhat different tactics, both the Republicans and the Democrats, as parties of Wall Street, aim to impose austerity on the working class in order to deal with the fiscal crisis of the state. The aim is to cut domestic programs and public services, and teacher unions are a prime target. Merit pay for teachers and union "flexibility" is a part of the Obama administration's education program. From this perspective, compliant union officials are a means to instruct teachers and other public employees to make concessions "voluntarily." This approach was articulated by a Wisconsin public official who defended teacher and other public unions' right to exist because unions have been a means to negotiate concessions in wages and benefits peacefully. But some ideologically driven Republican legislators want to go further to make deep cuts in the education budget and break teacher unions and organized labor entirely. This would eliminate the remaining organized working-class resistance against the attempt to make workers pay for the crisis, and would undermine a key support for the Democratic Party. ..."
Jammed into a thundering crowd of thousands of chanting people in Madison, Wisconsin, it looks
like a dam has broken. The new Wisconsin Tea Party governor brazenly accelerated what has been a
bipartisan agenda to undermine public education and weaken teacher and other public employee unions.
His "budget repair bill"-an assault on public employee unions, schools, and low-income health care-was
met with immediate, massive, determined resistance that began with a walkout by Madison public school
teachers.
Over three weeks, thousands of teachers, social workers, firefighters, and public and private
sector workers of every stripe have demonstrated in communities across the state and piled into busses
headed to the state capital. Protesters occupied the capital building for more than two weeks. Two
of the rallies were estimated at over one hundred thousand people. There were many signs, such as
"Recall Walker," "If you can read this, thank a teacher," and "Stop the War on Workers," but also
something more: handmade signs saying "This is Class War" and "End Corporate Greed." A young woman
at the rally on March 11 after the state legislature passed the governor's union-busting bill, held
up a placard proclaiming, "Teacher by Day, Freedom Fighter by Night."
As I write this, in March 2011, a sleeping giant is stirring. The broad U.S. working class has
absorbed blow after blow, concessions and job losses one after the other, stagnating wages for thirty
years, and two wars costing trillions of dollars. The greatest capitalist crisis since the Great
Depression brought a trillion-dollar bailout of the biggest banks and investment houses, the loss
of ten million homes to foreclosure by the banks, and 10 percent official unemployment. A broad process
of structural adjustment is under way to make the working and middle classes pay for the crisis created
by Wall Street. But recent attempts at the state level to impose austerity measures may be just too
much for people to take. The attack on public workers and sell-off of public assets-from schools,
to municipal utilities, to bridges and roads-may go too far. This is a watershed moment.
Despite somewhat different tactics, both the Republicans and the Democrats, as parties of
Wall Street, aim to impose austerity on the working class in order to deal with the fiscal crisis
of the state. The aim is to cut domestic programs and public services, and teacher unions are a prime
target. Merit pay for teachers and union "flexibility" is a part of the Obama administration's education
program. From this perspective, compliant union officials are a means to instruct teachers and other
public employees to make concessions "voluntarily." This approach was articulated by a Wisconsin
public official who defended teacher and other public unions' right to exist because unions have
been a means to negotiate concessions in wages and benefits peacefully. But some ideologically driven
Republican legislators want to go further to make deep cuts in the education budget and break teacher
unions and organized labor entirely. This would eliminate the remaining organized working-class resistance
against the attempt to make workers pay for the crisis, and would undermine a key support for the
Democratic Party.
In Wisconsin, union responses to the Tea Party agenda were mixed. Despite the fact that their
own data show real earnings for Wisconsin teachers declined by 2.3 percent over the last decade,1
the leadership of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and some other unions gave in to Walker's
demand for financial concessions early on. They drew the line, however, at automatic union dues collection
and the right to bargain collectively over working conditions such as class size, that affect children's
learning. Their slogan was "It's not about the money, it's about our rights [to bargain collectively]."
Other labor organizations, notably the South Central Federation of Labor in Wisconsin and the National
Nurses United, put the blame on Wall Street and called for closing corporate tax loopholes. The nurses
union said, "Working people did not create the recession or the budgetary crisis facing federal,
state and local governments-and there can be NO more concessions, period."2
There is a long and complex road ahead with no clear outcome. But education is the frontline in
class warfare by the rich against the working class. The assault on public education, teachers, and
their unions has been evolving over the past thirty years as part of the neoliberal restructuring
of the global capitalist economy, but the current crisis of capitalism has accelerated this assault.3
Education has been a key sector in the neoliberalization of social policy and the neoliberal political
economy of cities. The resistance to these policies has been broad at classroom and school levels
and in a growing movement of education activists allied with parents and students. Education, for
those in power, plays a key role in social reproduction of the labor force and in ideological legitimation
of the social order. Those who, conversely, have seen education as a way to strengthen democratic
participation in society and human liberation have always contested these goals. There is a rich
history of people of color, women, workers, educators, and social movements fighting for democratic,
inclusive, liberatory education. The crisis and the accelerated assault on teachers and public education
are sharpening the contest over the right to public education and the role of education in society.
In this article, I review the neoliberal project to restructure education, particularly its relationship
to neoliberal urban development, and responses to it. I discuss implications of privatization and
austerity measures for public education and its function in social reproduction. I argue that this
crisis is a moment of danger but also opportunity, not only to defend public education, but also
to reshape it as part of the struggle for a new social order based on human liberation.
Neoliberal Restructuring of Public Education
When President Obama appointed Arne Duncan, former-CEO of Chicago Public Schools, to head the
U.S. Department of Education in 2008, he signaled an intention to accelerate a neoliberal education
program that has been unfolding over the past two decades. This agenda calls for expanding education
markets and employing market principles across school systems. It features mayoral control of school
districts, closing "failing" public schools or handing them over to corporate-style "turnaround"
organizations, expanding school "choice" and privately run but publicly funded charter schools, weakening
teacher unions, and enforcing top-down accountability and incentivized performance targets on schools,
classrooms, and teachers (e.g., merit pay based on students' standardized test scores). To spur this
agenda, the Obama administration offered cash-strapped states $4.35 billion in federal stimulus dollars
to "reform" their school systems. Competition for these "Race to the Top" funds favored states that
passed legislation to enable education markets.
Race to the Top, although originating in U.S. government, is actually part of a global neoliberal
thrust toward the commodification of all realms of existence. In a new round of accumulation by dispossession,
liberalization of trade has opened up education, along with other public sectors, to capital accumulation,
and particularly to penetration of the education sectors of the periphery (e.g., Latin America, parts
of Asia, Africa). Under the Global Agreement on Trade in Services, all aspects of education and education
services are subject to global trade.4
The result is the global marketing of schooling from primary school through higher education. Schools,
education management organizations, tutoring services, teacher training, tests, curricula online
classes, and franchises of branded universities are now part of a global education market. Education
markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by
opening the public sector to capital accumulation. The roughly $2.5 trillion global market in education
is a rich new arena for capital investment.5
In the United States, charter schools are a vehicle to commodify and marketize education. Charter
schools are publicly funded but privately operated. They eliminate democratic governance, and, although
they may be run by nonprofit community organizations or groups of teachers or parents, the market
favors scaling up franchises of charter school management organizations or contracting out to for-profit
education management organizations that get management fees to run schools and education programs.6
For example, EdisonLearning, a transnational for-profit management organization, claims it serves
nearly one-half million students in twenty-five states in the United States, the United Kingdom,
and Dubai.7
The market mechanisms and business management discourses and practices that are saturating public
education in the United States are all too familiar to teachers and students worldwide. Globally,
nations are restructuring their education systems for "human capital" development to prepare students
for new types of work and labor relations.8
This policy agenda has been aggressively pushed by transnational organizations such as the World
Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Objectives
and performance targets are the order of the day, and testing is a prominent mechanism to steer curriculum
and instruction to meet these goals efficiently and effectively.
In the United States, the neoliberal restructuring of education is deeply racialized. It is centered
particularly on urban African American, Latino, and other communities of color, where public schools,
subject to being closed or privatized, are driven by a minimalist curriculum of preparing for standardized
tests. The cultural politics of race is also central to constructing consent for this agenda. As
Stephen Haymes argues, the "concepts 'public' and 'private' are racialized metaphors. Private is
equated with being 'good' and 'white' and public with being 'bad' and 'Black.'"9
Disinvesting in public schools, closing them, and opening privately operated charter schools in African-American
and Latino communities is facilitated by a racist discourse that pathologizes these communities and
their public institutions. But "failing" schools are the product of a legacy of educational, economic,
and social inequities experienced by African Americans, Latinos/as, and Native Americans.10
Schools serving these communities continue to face deeply inequitable opportunities to learn, including
unequal funding, curriculum, educational resources, facilities, and teacher experience. High stakes
accountability has often compounded these inequities by narrowing the curriculum to test preparation-producing
an exodus of some of the strongest teachers from schools in low-income communities of color.11
Neoliberalization of public education is also an ideological project, as Margaret Thatcher famously
said, to "change the soul," redefining the purpose of education and what it means to teach, learn,
and participate in schooling. Tensions between democratic purposes of education and education to
serve the needs of the workforce are longstanding. But in the neoliberal framework, teaching is driven
by standardized tests and performance outcomes; principals are managers, and school superintendents
are CEOs; and learning equals performance on the tests with teachers, students, and parents held
responsible for "failure." Education, which is properly seen as a public good, is being converted
into a private good, an investment one makes in one's child or oneself to "add value" in order better
to compete in the labor market. It is no longer seen as part of the larger end of promoting individual
and social development, but is merely the means to rise above others. Democratic participation in
local schools is rearticulated to individual "empowerment" of education consumers-as parents compete
for slots in an array of charter and specialty schools. In Chicago, twelve thousand parents and students
attended the 2010 "High School Fair" sponsored by Chicago Public Schools, and six thousand attended
the "New Schools Expo" of charter and school choice options. The political significance of this neoliberal
shift stretches beyond schools to legitimize marketing the public sector, particularly in cities,
and to infuse market ideologies into everyday life.
Nowhere did the rollback of social welfare policies and public institutions occur with greater
force than in hurricane-devastated New Orleans. In the words of George Lipsitz, the aftermath of
hurricane Katrina ushered in an orgy of "legalized looting to enable corporations to profit from
the misfortunes of poor people."13
Education was at the leading edge. The state at all levels, in alliance with local and national capital
and neoliberal think tanks, took advantage of the chaos wreaked by Katrina and the exodus of low-income
working-class African Americans from the city to dismantle their public schools. This was a strategic
move to exclude low-income African Americans from the city altogether. They not only had no homes
to return to, they had no schools. Before Katrina hit in August 2005, there were sixty-three thousand
students in New Orleans public schools; about twenty-four thousand began classes there in the fall
of 2008.14
Just weeks after the hurricane, the state of Louisiana took over one hundred public schools and
began turning over millions of dollars of taxpayer money to private organizations to run them. The
state dismissed all forty-five hundred public school teachers, broke the city's powerful black-led
teachers' union, and dismantled the school system's administrative infrastructure.15
Right-wing foundations quickly issued reports calling for vouchers, and President Bush proposed $1.9
billion for K-12 students with $488 million targeted for vouchers to be used in schools anywhere
in the country. An influential report by the Urban Institute hailed New Orleans as an opportunity
for a grand experiment to decentralize and privatize the public school system through vouchers and
charter schools.16
Less than a month after the hurricane devastated the city, the U.S. Department of Education gave
the state of Louisiana $20.9 million to reopen existing charter schools and open new ones, and nine
months later, the department gave the state an additional $23.9 million for new charter schools,
most in New Orleans. Prior to Katrina, there were five charter schools in the city. After the hurricane,
the state took over most of the schools and established the Recovery School District, an open arena
for charter schools. Of the fifty-five schools opened in New Orleans in 2006-2007, thirty-one were
public charter schools.17
In 2010, out of eighty-eight public schools in New Orleans, sixty-one were charters run by a variety
of operators.18
The pro-market Fordham Foundation judged New Orleans the best city in the United States for charter
school expansion.19
All this was done by government fiat guided by think tanks such as the Urban Institute, and backed
by corporate foundations such as the Gates Foundation. Excluded were the working-class African American
and Latino/a parents, students, teachers, and community members, many of whom had been literally
excluded from the city itself by redevelopment policies that made it impossible to return.20
It would be hard to deny that New Orleans's schools were in bad shape before the hurricane. In
1997 per-pupil school funding was 16 percent lower than the average of poorly funded urban districts
nationally.21
The New Orleans situation reflects a long-term pattern of disinvestment in inner-city areas, beginning
with cuts in federal funding to cities in the 1980s, followed by the shift to an entrepreneurial
model of urban governance that prioritizes attracting private investment, tourism, and real estate
investment.22
Today charter schools in New Orleans are part of creating a "good business climate" in a "revitalized"
(gentrified) whiter New Orleans.
Chicago–Disinvestment, Privatization, and Gentrification
Chicago is another exemplar of the logic of disinvestment and privatization that is playing out
in urban school districts.23
Chicago's Renaissance 2010 education plan was carried out in partnership with the state and the Commercial
Club of Chicago, an organization of the powerful corporate and financial interests in the city. The
object was to close public schools and expand charter schools. It has become a national model enshrined
in the propagandistic claim of "the Chicago Miracle." Across African-American communities, the mayoral-appointed
school board has closed schools on the grounds of low achievement. Others, particularly in gentrifying
Latino/a communities, have been closed for low enrollment, despite evidence to the contrary. The
board has replaced neighborhood schools with charter schools or selective enrollment schools that
most neighborhood children are unable to attend. School closings have resulted in increased mobility,
spikes in violence, and neighborhood instability as children are transferred to schools out of their
neighborhoods.24
Moreover, Renaissance 2010 has not increased educational opportunities for most students, with 80
percent of displaced students attending schools no better than the ones that were closed.25
This policy eliminates schools that are anchors in their communities, contributing to further
disinvestment. In gentrifying areas, closing neighborhood schools and replacing them with schools
branded for the middle class facilitates the displacement of working-class families. Chicago, like
New Orleans, is an example of the intertwining of education policy and neoliberal urban development.
Real estate development is a pivotal sector in urban economies, and closing neighborhood public schools
in disinvested areas to open up elite, selective-enrollment public schools or prestigious charter
schools is part of the neoliberal restructuring of urban space.26
This nexus of education policy and real estate development is located in the spatial logics of capital-the
physical location of production facilities, the built environment of cities, and places of consumption
are devalued and selectively rebuilt in order to establish a "new locational grid" for capital accumulation.27
In other disinvested, low-income neighborhoods, students attending under-resourced and struggling
public schools are a ready consumer base for the proliferation of charter schools, particularly large
charter school chains that target these areas.
In response, parents, teachers, and students are challenging school closings and market solutions,
and are demanding democratic participation and community-driven processes to improve public schools
and increase resources. In fall 2010, parents at an elementary school in a Mexican immigrant community
in Chicago occupied a school field house for forty-three days to force the school board to agree
to construct a school library. In 2001 parents in another working-class Mexican neighborhood were
compelled to conduct a nineteen-day hunger strike to get a new high school in their community, after
the school board had used funds allocated for their school to build two state-of-the-art, selective-enrollment
high schools in gentrifying areas of the city. Both of these actions followed years of petitioning
the mayor-appointed board of education with no results. Organized resistance to neoliberal policies
has prevented some school closings and, most significantly, also spawned a progressive caucus that
won the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, the third largest teachers' union local in the
country.
The "Good Sense" in Neoliberal Education Policy
Yet some measures to reign in teacher unions have support on the ground, as teachers and parents
have gravitated to privately run charter schools and vouchers. Certainly venture philanthropists
(such as the Gates and Fordham Foundations), charter school operators, business federations (such
as Chicago's Commercial Club), and politicians of both parties have deployed enormous economic, political,
and symbolic resources to promote education markets and performance pay for teachers as the only
alternative to struggling neighborhood public schools and "bad" teaching.28
They have raised the cap on charter school expansion, funded charter school ventures, and established
policies like those in New Orleans and Chicago to expand education markets. However, neoliberal policies
are not simply imposed from above. They also materialize through the actions of parents and teachers
navigating a disinvested, degraded, and often racist public school system. Looked at this way, neoliberalism
is a process that works its way into the discourses and practices of schools, through the actions
of not only elites, but also marginalized and oppressed people acting in conditions not of their
own making.
Tom Pedroni demonstrates this in his study of African-American parents' participation in the Milwaukee
voucher movement.29
Pedroni interprets the participation of African-American parents in the voucher program against a
background of prolonged struggles and failures to win a modicum of educational equity and respect
for their children and themselves as public school parents. Pedroni argues that, for these parents,
the identity of educational consumer offers greater dignity and agency than that of citizen-supplicant
to an unresponsive and racist public school system that has never fully included African-American
children. Like charter school parents and teachers I interviewed in Chicago, Pedroni proposes that
parents see themselves as education consumers in the face of a post-welfare state that offers no
real alternative.30
Drawing on Gramsci's theory of "good sense" in the ideological construction of hegemonic social alliances,
this insight is an opening to reframe the struggle to defend public education by drawing on the real
concerns of parents who ally themselves with education markets.
There is no point in romanticizing public schools (or other welfare state institutions). While
they have provided free universal education and spaces where people can make claims for justice,
and are sometimes empowering and liberating, they have historically been saturated with inequalities
and exclusions.31
The benefits the white middle class has had from public schools have often been allowed it to ignore
a thoroughly inequitable public school system. Critical education scholars have long criticized public
schools for reproducing a stratified labor force and the dispositions and ideologies that support
capitalism, racism, and gender oppression. Exclusionary, paternalistic, disrespectful, even brutal
treatment of African American, Latino/a, and other people of color and women at the hands of public
housing authorities, public hospitals, the police and judicial systems, public welfare agencies,
elected officials, city agencies, and schools make existing public institutions deeply problematic
places. And teacher union leaders have too often failed to take up progressive causes and ally themselves
with working-class parents and communities of color.32
Understanding the appeal of charter schools, choice, and teacher accountability is essential to
build alliances not only to defend public education in this period but to develop a program for democratic
and just public schools, as well. Resisting predatory neoliberal policies requires acknowledging
and grappling with the exclusions and inequities of public institutions.33
This raises the questions: What of public education do we wish to defend; what must be reconstructed,
and how can it fulfill its democratic potential?34
Structural Adjustment and Education
As the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-08 hit, the Bush and Obama administrations, in league with
Wall Street, moved swiftly to socialize the losses of investors through massive taxpayer funded bailouts.
This was followed by furloughs (wages cuts) for public workers and worker concessions in the bailed-out
private sector (e.g., auto) under the rationale that "there is no alternative" and "we all have to
sacrifice."
As the crisis continues to reverberate, states and municipalities face fiscal crises of monumental
proportions. The loss of tax revenues combined with government losses in the financial markets have
thrown state budgets across the country into massive debt. Public worker pension funds, health insurance
benefits, and funding for public services are in real trouble. At the time of this writing, California
has a projected budget deficit of $28 billion over the next eighteen months.35
Instead of raising taxes on the rich and corporations, state governments are selling off public assets
and imposing austerity measures on the poor, workers, and the middle class, with public-sector workers
an immediate target. The state of California is instituting draconian cuts in education, health,
and programs for youth and the elderly. This scenario is repeated in state legislatures and city
halls across the country. In Wisconsin, Walker pushed through $100 million in tax cuts to corporations,
while his bill would cut over $800 million for education alone.36
The broad working class is expected to endure repeated reductions in wages, pensions, and hard-won
benefits, drastic cuts in public services, and further loss of personal assets, particularly homes,
while municipal services and infrastructure such as bridges and roads are sold off to investors.
City governments are particularly hard hit by the crisis because of their reliance on real estate
taxes, housing markets, and investments in financial markets. Urban school districts have already
laid off thousands of teachers, increased class sizes, pushed to reduce teacher pensions, and cut
out music, gym, kindergarten, bilingual programs, after-school and youth programs, and more. These
austerity measures are certain to hit hardest those least able to bear them, low-income schools of
color, where these are the very programs that offer some hope.37
Dangers and Opportunities of the Present Moment
Social austerity ultimately creates contradictions for capital as well. As capital continues to
flow into the inflated financial sector at the expense of the productive sector, and as the state
pays for the crisis with cuts in education and general social welfare, there is an unfolding crisis
of social reproduction.38
Public education plays an important role in the reproduction of the labor force, political legitimation,
and social stability. The problem with franchising and contracting out schools to an assortment of
private operators is that the state has less control over these functions of schools. Inflated class
sizes, cuts in education programs, and teachers' eroding salaries and working conditions can only
degrade public education, particularly in low-income schools. This will exacerbate an already two-tiered
education system. Detroit's Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb (a graduate of the Broad Foundation's
Superintendent Academy) has proposed closing half the district's schools and putting up to sixty
students in a classroom.39
Under Governor Walker's plan, two thousand Wisconsin teachers and school staff would lose their
jobs, and the average teacher would lose $5500 to $7000 in net compensation. The average 2011 teacher
salary in Wisconsin is $50,627.40
According to a new report by the OECD (Paine & Schleicher, 2011), the pay, working conditions, and
qualifications of U.S. teachers are already low in comparison with those of teachers in other advanced
economies.41
From the standpoint of capital, serious disinvestment in public education has consequences for the
preparation of its workforce. It also has implications for social stability, with more students in
affected schools dropping out. The security state is a looming presence in this scenario.
Wisconsin foreshadows the political cost of undermining the living standards and expectations
of those who have come to be defined as "middle class," such as teachers. The Tea Party agenda is
laying bare the capitalist offensive against the working class. A twenty-foot long banner proclaiming,
"Tax the Rich" hung from the third floor of the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda throughout the people's
occupation. With leaflets and treatises plastering the walls of the capitol, rallies filled with
home-made placards, and hours of conversation between unlikely allies, the three-week-long Wisconsin
occupation and rallies were a giant democratic political forum. And this was replicated in town squares
throughout the state. For many, this was their first political protest.
The results of this politicization are yet to be seen, but the budget bills themselves are making
connections for people between cuts in education and the assault on teacher unions with those of
other public- and private-sector workers and farmers. Legions of firefighters and their families
from towns around the state marched militantly through the capitol building, fists pumping the air
as they chanted, "The workers united will never be defeated."
In addition to slashing state aid to public schools by nearly $834 million, Walker has proposed
sweeping changes to Medicaid-funded programs including BadgerCare, which provides health coverage
to low-income Wisconsin families, and a $96 million cut in aid to local governments, including cities,
towns, and counties. At the rally of over one hundred thousand on March 12, farmers, in a show of
"Farm Labor Unity," drove their tractors to Madison for a "tractorcade" around the capitol building.
Roughly eleven thousand farmers receive BadgerCare. This is a compelling moment to connect attacks
on education to the capitalist crisis, particularly the parasitic financialization, war spending,
and tax cuts for the rich that have looted the public coffers, bankrupted states, and threaten our
schools. This is, moreover, an opportunity to expose the crisis-ridden logic of capitalism itself
and to engage in serious discussion about the world we wish to see.
The Potential of an Education Movement
In the past few years, a multifaceted education movement in and outside classrooms has emerged
against neoliberal education restructuring and in resistance to racism, gender and heterosexist oppression,
and militarization of schools. Liberatory education projects and social-justice-oriented schools
have sprouted up in cracks in the public system. There are freedom schools and popular education
projects outside public schools, and community-based youth activist organizations across the country.
The immigrant rights movement and organized opposition to the criminalization of youth through the
"school to prison pipeline" have begun to link political and educational issues. Organizations of
activist teachers and community educators in a number of cities have joined together to form national
networks. (The Education for Liberation Network and Teacher Activist Groups are examples.) These
groups have joined parents and students in community coalitions to stop school closings and privatization,
prevent mayoral takeovers of urban school districts, defend undocumented students, and challenge
high-stakes testing. With the victory of a progressive caucus to lead the Chicago Teachers Union,
there is also a significant progressive force in the heart of the American Federation of Teachers.
Although there is some overlap, these various streams are not yet organized around a coherent program
or analysis of the problem.42
The outpouring of teachers and other workers against union busting and austerity budgets has changed
the terrain. Thousands of people who have never attended a protest before are in the streets and
engaged politically. So far, this motion is mainly defensive, and some are willing to make concessions
to help capitalism extricate itself from the crisis.43
On the one hand, there is the possibility that the protests will be subsumed by the electoral politics
of the Democratic Party, much like the current focus in Wisconsin on recalling Republican legislators,
or diverted to scapegoating people of color and immigrants. On the other hand, the challenge to taken-for-granted
living standards opens a space to see social arrangements differently. This is a moment that can
reveal the systemic connections between the bailout of Wall Street and social privations, a moment
to connect attacks on workers with other social struggles-particularly to see the common threads
between wars for domination, oppression of people of color, and the unfolding austerity regime.44
Buried in Governor Walker's proposed 2012-2013 budget is a measure to repeal access to in-state
tuition for undocumented students and eliminate Food Share benefits (food stamps) for documented
("legal")immigrants.45
How Wisconsin's majority white teachers, union members, and farmers will respond will be important.
Bridging deep divisions along lines of race, ethnicity, and immigrant status, and challenging racial
oppression are central to building a counter-hegemonic alliance with the power to defeat austerity
measures and move toward a proactive politics that challenges capitalism itself. Although it is only
now coalescing, a movement that links education with immigrant rights and other social struggles
can play an important role in teacher unions and in student community, and parent organizations.
In classrooms, critical educators are positioned to help young people understand why their schools
are under attack and to "connect the dots" to the structural crisis of capitalism. Revitalized teacher
unions are in a strategic position to insist that Wall Street pay for the crisis. Although the U.S.
context is different, there is much to learn from social movement teacher unionism outside the United
States (e.g., in Oaxaca, Honduras, and South Africa) and its central role in social struggles for
democracy, against neoliberalism, and for social liberation.46
This is a moment not simply to defend the public education we have, but to advocate for a just, inclusive,
democratic, humanizing education that prefigures the society we wish to have-one premised not on
exploitation but on the full development of human beings in social solidarity.
Pauline Lipman (plipman [at] uic.edu) is an education activist and professor of educational
policy studies at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her latest book is The New Political Economy
of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (2011).
"... Well, we all know thats ********. The real unemployment rate is 21.2% (shadow stats). ..."
"... Fields of occupation that do make money are saturated. You get your foot in the door via 2 ways: sheer luck or you know someone in that field. ..."
"... Most jobs offered are at minimum wage. Another big secret that is never told. The average hours worked in the US is 34.5. Part time. Also, missing here is what kind of degree students in the study are graduating with. So I assume this is bachelor degrees. Something looked upon today as increasingly like an associate's degree, meaning if you really want to risk more debt & RISK that you MIGHT find a job when you graduate, you will need a Masters or a doctorate. This increases your loan burden to 60,000 for your average masters or more. 100,000+ for a doctorate. ..."
"... Student loans and the increasing need for a Masters degree is a major scam to accrue more debt slavery. A Masters DOES NOT increase your chances Today of a job in your field of study. Ten years ago my daughter graduated with 8 friends and only 2 got jobs in their chosen fields of study, one a teacher who doesn't make much at 37,000 a year and the other went on to get a doctorate and did get a job in her chosen field of study at great pay but with nearly 200,000 in student loan debt ..."
"... Parents need to get involved in all facets of determining aptitude and major selection that can pay dividends in the job market. Too many kids just go to college as an extension of high school with the "I'll figure it out later" attitude. These are also the ones you see working as cashiers ..."
American students carry an aggregate pile of student loan debt equivalent to roughly $1.5 trillion,
a
generational burden
that has helped contribute to plunging birth rates, lower home-ownership rates among young
people, and even lower rates of stock ownership, as more young people dedicate more financial resources to paying down
debt.
But to gauge
exactly
how much a students' finances factor into their decisions
about which school to attend and which majors to choose,
MidAmerica Nazarene University surveyed 2,000 recent graduates from around the country to learn more about how they
financed their degrees, and how much they will owe after graduation.
Given the cost of higher education in the US, the majority of students answered that post-grad job prospects influenced the
major they selected (those who answered 'no' either really enjoy studying STEM, or majored in gender studies).
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It might seem surprising given the financial stakes, but the survey also showed that more than 60% of recent grads didn't
have jobs lined up when they received their diplomas.
For those who did choose their careers based on financial considerations, a majority said they would have picked another
line of work if finances weren't a consideration (but hey, we can't all be artists).
Once upon a time, there wasn't as much of a correlation between a students' field of study and their eventual chosen career
(investment bankers who studied English at Middlebury College wound up on Wall Street thanks to 'Uncle Jim's' connections).
But as the world of higher education becomes increasingly costly and cut throat, situations like this are becoming
increasingly rare.
One of the more telling data points in the study was the gauge of graduates' feelings about the job market.
Even
with unemployment at multi-decade lows, a majority of graduates had a negative outlook on the job market.
PhD Millionaire who called Dotcom crash, housing bust, and market's surge since '09 is now predicting a 'cash
panic' in 2019. Here's how to prepare.
Sponsored By Stansberry Research
The overwhelming majority of students took out loans to pay for some or all of college, with 71% taking out loans and the
average amount borrowed equivalent to just over $25,000.
In addition to taking on loans, most college students receive at least some help from family members or other sources, as
only one-quarter of respondents said they completely self-financed their degree.
On average, students expect to pay off their loans in 9.5 years, meaning that most of these students will be in their
mid-30s when they finally reach a zero balance.
Imagine what that number would be if students had no help from their families?
Even with unemployment at multi-decade lows, a majority of
graduates had a negative outlook on the job market."
Well, we
all know thats ********. The real unemployment rate is 21.2% (shadow
stats).
There is a gap here as to why these graduates don't have jobs
lined up when they graduate, which is not mentioned in the article.
1. Fields of occupation that do make money are saturated. You get
your foot in the door via 2 ways: sheer luck or you know someone in
that field.
2. Most jobs offered are at minimum wage. Another big secret that
is never told. The average hours worked in the US is 34.5. Part time.
Also, missing here is what kind of degree students in the study are
graduating with. So I assume this is bachelor degrees. Something
looked upon today as increasingly like an associate's degree, meaning
if you really want to risk more debt & RISK that you MIGHT find a job
when you graduate, you will need a Masters or a doctorate. This
increases your loan burden to 60,000 for your average masters or
more. 100,000+ for a doctorate.
3. Student loans and the increasing need for a Masters degree is a
major scam to accrue more debt slavery. A Masters DOES NOT increase
your chances Today of a job in your field of study. Ten years ago my
daughter graduated with 8 friends and only 2 got jobs in their chosen
fields of study, one a teacher who doesn't make much at 37,000 a year
and the other went on to get a doctorate and did get a job in her
chosen field of study at great pay but with nearly 200,000 in student
loan debt.
Before offshoring Americans not cut out for college went to work
at the local plants like their parents did. The propaganda ever since
has been you're a nobody and has been, only to attend college
accruing tens of thousands of debt, to wind up in some **** minimum
wage job because you can't find one in YOUR field of study or you can
and learn that starting pay is minimum wage but you take whatever is
offered because if you don't you're in trouble when loans come due 6
months later.
And that right there turns promising young people into debt
slaves. Just as is planned by *** oligarchs at the FED RESERVE.
Parents need to get involved in all facets of determining aptitude
and major selection that can pay dividends in the job market. Too
many kids just go to college as an extension of high school with the
"I'll figure it out later" attitude. These are also the ones you see
working as cashiers who damn near have a **** hemorrhage when they
have to make change without the help of the register. Do your kids a
solid and work with them in their career quests and by all means, get
involved with their education and most important, read to them when
they're young. It is ******* criminal to charge tremendous
tuition and graduate students ill prepared for the challenges of
life. Then again if you got the cash, you can probably buy a degree
from some Cuck in the Dean's office!
when I graduated College (Cumlaude btw) nobody lined up to hand me
decent job with nice salary. AND we didn't have Lyft or Uber back
then. so what's changed besides the fact that we have Uber and
Lyft?
Here in shitinois, there is harper college, which is free if you pay
your real estate taxes and maintain good grades. Why the **** would
anyone pay for a university to bend you over.
Because the economy never recovered from 2008-2009. The only thing
that came out of that crisis is cheaper and easier debt.
People
bash millennials but then neglect to acknowledge the generation that
raised them. This **** storm started with the Baby Boomers and has
only gotten worse.
Here's things most millennials weren't doing in 2008/2009:
1.) Buying more house than they could afford with those great
teaser rates
2.) Selling mortgages for houses people couldn't afford.
3.) Running TBTF banks.
4.) Using derivatives to hedge derivatives to hedge derivatives.
5.) Working in Washington, voting to bail out said TBTF banks,
even though we operate in a "capitalist" country.
I'm not making up excuses for my situation because I'm not saddled
with loan debt, have a good job, and am self-supporting. But let's
lay the blame where it should be. On the Boomers. The generation
that had it the easiest out of all of them and basically contributed
nothing positive to society other than piling up debt.
What should be pointed out imo, is that a major amounts of Graduates
have just went thru 4-6 years of a Liberal Borg.
They are
un-hire-able, brain washed, worthless air breathing parasites.
Those who have interned or worked at firms within their chosen
profession, built relationship's, showed ability to perform and
contribute, will be hired if not already.
Those Libtard Borg stooges will have to go back to Mom's Basement
for further instruction..............
very wrong. american engineers and computer science graduates stay
jobless while corps hire from india and china. look at youtube
vids of google staff meetings...
Not wrong at all, I have worked with freshly graduated
Mechanical and Electrical Engineers. For years they were
actually put with me once per month for a full 5 days. 3 at a
time usually for training.
Everything I stated above is 100
% spot on, Fact. They usually are complete idiots. Not worth
having around, at all.
There is nothing more useless than a newly graduated
engineer. I was useless when I graduated with my BSCHE 40+
years ago. It takes around five to ten years before an
engineer is really contributing.
I actually had a few but each and everyone of them grew
up within family trades, or worked at a trade so they had
great hands on experience way prior to going to College.
Most put their way through school or contributed at
similar trades to sharpen their skills.
I was very
similar and was lucky to have some guide me in the
correct direction at that age imo. It did help, a
lot...........
So social justice gender studies doesn't have a real job? Well No
****!!!!
These universities aren't teaching these kids ANYTHING of
any use for the real world and employers know that! Within the next
few years, a liberal degree in whatever will be completely useless.
Enjoying payback your loans dumbasses
The next generation better be taking notes and looking at a trade
for high school!
I have a a job for a fresh college grad. If you are cute, haven't
slept with all the college athletes, have a non-land-whale decent
body and can cook a meal that doesn't taste like crap.
Reply to my comment here and I have an opening for a sugar bay - aka
sexy college girl wifey ;)
In return I will provide you with a free place to live, feed you,
take care of you and this will be a temporary arrangement until you
can prove that you won't leave me with 50% of my life savings by
going to court.
Roomate prenup shall be signed electronically before you move in with
me.
They don't have jobs lined up because the want ads aren't hiring
300lb, green and purple haired, nose ring wearing, transgendered
justice warrior promoting, half-vegan, pedo, ***, basket weavers for
their company.
I didn't either. Took the whole summer off to party. Sometime
around September I started looking for a job. Not one God damned job
offered for an economist (that was my major). What a rip, I
thought. So I ended up where everyone else ends up- sales. It was
at that job I actually got an education.
Most college grads had no buisness going to college in the first
place.
Some of the dumbest people got into these colleges. Then
they took out loans so they could get a job to pay off their student
loan debt. Congratulations, you played yourselves.
Out of high school they would have had the ability to dig
ditches. But after 4 years of liberal arts and feminism
training, they aren't even capable of stringing together a
coherent sentence.
How about showing WHICH majors these idiots went for and then
correlate that to the jobs and salaries that are ACTUALLY available
for those majors......a major in Art History WON"T FIND A JOB... .a
Engineering major is ALREADY GETTING OFFERS, their junior year. QUIT
WASTING MONEY ON WORTHLESS DEGREES. That alone solves EVERY problem
in this article
In this article, we explore commodities and consumption , two concepts that
are central to critiques of the neoliberal university. By engaging with these concepts, we
explore the limits of neoliberal logic. We ground this conceptual entanglement in Marxist and
post-Marxist traditions given our understanding of neoliberalism both as an extension of and as
a meaningfully different form of capitalism. As colleges and universities enact neoliberal
economic assumptions by focusing on revenue generation, understanding students as customers,
and construing their faculty as temporary service providers, the terms commodity and
consumption have become commonplace in critical higher education literature. When
critiques concerning the commodification and consumption of higher education are connected with
these theoretical and conceptual foundations, they not only become more effective but also
provide a more meaningful guide upon which current and future scholars can build.
"... The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan "let's get governments off our backs"), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.) ..."
"... The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are temporarily disadvantaged, let's say by being deprived of their fish. ..."
"... the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs "freely" pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a "world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core." ("A Brief History of Neoliberalism.") ..."
"... Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture's way of thinking, institutions that don't regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles -- privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in the 21st century university, where (according to Henry Giroux) the "historical legacy" of the university conceived "as a crucial public sphere" has given way to a university "that now narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical." ("Academic Unfreedom in America," in Works and Days.) ..."
"... This new narrative has been produced (and necessitated) by the withdrawal of the state from the funding of its so-called public universities. If the percentage of a state's contribution to a college's operating expenses falls from 80 to 10 and less (this has been the relentless trajectory of the past 40 years) and if, at the same time, demand for the "product" of higher education rises and the cost of delivering that product (the cost of supplies, personnel, information systems, maintenance, construction, insurance, security) skyrockets, a huge gap opens up that will have to be filled somehow. ..."
"... Faced with this situation universities have responded by (1) raising tuition, in effect passing the burden of costs to the students who now become consumers and debt-holders rather than beneficiaries of enlightenment (2) entering into research partnerships with industry and thus courting the danger of turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of profits and (3) hiring a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts who as members of a transient and disposable workforce are in no position to challenge the university's practices or agitate for an academy more committed to the realization of democratic rather than monetary goals. In short , universities have embraced neoliberalism. ..."
Here is an often cited definition by Paul Treanor: "Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which
the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous
relationship with the production of goods and services . . . and where the operation of a
market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for
all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs."
("Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition.")
In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions -- questions of negligence law -- are
thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can
the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an
injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same
action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but
rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss
of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don't you and I sit down
and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory's operations than is lost as a
consequence of their effects?
As Ronald Coase put it in his classic article, "The Problem of Social Cost" (Journal of Law
and Economics, 1960): "The question to be decided is: is the value of the fish lost greater or
less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible?" If
the answer is more value would be lost if my factory were closed, then the principle of the
maximization of wealth and efficiency directs us to a negotiated solution: you allow my factory
to continue to pollute your stream and I will compensate you or underwrite the costs of your
moving the stream elsewhere on your property, provided of course that the price I pay for the
right to pollute is not greater than the value produced by my being permitted to continue.
Notice that "value" in this example (which is an extremely simplified stand-in for
infinitely more complex transactions) is an economic, not an ethical word, or, rather, that in
the neoliberal universe, ethics reduces to calculations of wealth and productivity. Notice too
that if you and I proceed (as market ethics dictate) to work things out between us -- to come
to a private agreement -- there will be no need for action by either the government or the
courts, each of which is likely to muddy the waters (in which the fish will still be dying) by
introducing distracting moral or philosophical concerns, sometimes referred to as "market
distortions."
Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of
state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and
Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state
interventions -- governmental policies of social engineering -- are "presented as the problem
rather than the solution" (Chris Harman, "Theorising Neoliberalism," International Socialism
Journal, December 2007).
The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan "let's get governments off
our backs"), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership
and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication
systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent
to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.)
The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of
human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are
temporarily disadvantaged, let's say by being deprived of their fish.
The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in
which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which
individual entrepreneurs "freely" pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice,
fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.
Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more
just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but
the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy
houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism,
David Harvey explains, delivers a "world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting
but hollow at its core." ("A Brief History of Neoliberalism.")
Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and
priorities become embedded in a culture's way of thinking, institutions that don't regard
themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal
principles -- privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the
proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in
the 21st century university, where (according to Henry Giroux) the "historical legacy" of the
university conceived "as a crucial public sphere" has given way to a university "that now
narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical." ("Academic
Unfreedom in America," in Works and Days.)
This new narrative has been produced (and necessitated) by the withdrawal of the state from
the funding of its so-called public universities. If the percentage of a state's contribution
to a college's operating expenses falls from 80 to 10 and less (this has been the relentless
trajectory of the past 40 years) and if, at the same time, demand for the "product" of higher
education rises and the cost of delivering that product (the cost of supplies, personnel,
information systems, maintenance, construction, insurance, security) skyrockets, a huge gap
opens up that will have to be filled somehow.
Faced with this situation universities have responded by (1) raising tuition, in effect
passing the burden of costs to the students who now become consumers and debt-holders rather
than beneficiaries of enlightenment (2) entering into research partnerships with industry and
thus courting the danger of turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of profits and (3)
hiring a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts who as members of a
transient and disposable workforce are in no position to challenge the university's practices
or agitate for an academy more committed to the realization of democratic rather than monetary
goals. In short , universities have embraced neoliberalism.
Meanwhile, even those few faculty members with security of employment do their bit for
neoliberalism when they retire to their professional enclaves and churn out reams of
scholarship (their equivalent of capital) that is increasingly specialized and without a clear
connection to the public interest: "[F]aculty have progressively . . . favored professionalism
over social responsibility and have . . . refused to take positions on controversial issues";
as a result they have "become disconnected from political agency and thereby incapable of
taking a political stand" (McClennen, Works and Days).
... ... ...
Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012,
he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the
University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author
of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own
Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to
Revolution” will be published in 2014.
"... finance...is not value added....it is value SUBTRACTED! ..."
"... A job at McDonald's then was merely a job you had to make a little money on the side while attending colleges that were FREE to very low cost. Now, McDonald's is one of many low wage jobs in this GIG economy that are utilized as life sustaining. ..."
"... Production of debt instead of production of things. US is one of the largest producers of debt. Financialization as planned by the bankers. ..."
when you can create $10 Trillion out of thin air and then give it to a select few...what
did you think would happen. Instead of arresting the criminal bankers....we rescued them!
They are criminal by nature and are programmed to steal ever more! I know hundreds of NYC
bankers and lawyers.....they are NOT NICE PEOPLE!
This is one time that a ZH headline was not click bait. Not only is FIRE bigger than manufacturing, even .GOV is bigger than manufacturing now
too. We're fucked, big time.
Another boomer who lives in a state of alternate reality. Boomers were privy to government jobs and manufacturing in the US aplenty. They also were
privy to government subsidies that don't exist today.
A job at McDonald's then was merely a job you had to make a little money on the side while
attending colleges that were FREE to very low cost. Now, McDonald's is one of many low wage
jobs in this GIG economy that are utilized as life sustaining.
Offshoring, the disappearance of government subsidies and social programs (thanks to
boomers love for BILL CLINTON), wealth inequality (See the FED/Obama bank bailout/QE),
stagnant wages, student loan debt, 22 TRILLION US DEBT, & 9/11 & 17 years of WAR
& MORE WAR, has caused this country to become BANKRUPT.
Living in your parents basement, or with roommates, one paycheck from the streets to
living on the streets is how it is for that kid YOU destroyed through your voting for
sociopaths who took away the very jobs and entitlements YOU were privy to that no longer
exist.
I like your sarcasm, but the truth is something different entirely. Median home in 2000 - 164K. Now - 313K. Median income during the same period rose 3k. Clarified.
Bs. If they feared that then they wouldn't have ever raised rates effectively killing the
refi market and putting downward pressure on prices for the past 2 years.
Yeah it is. I wouldn't have a kid and raise it in this country today if my life depended on it. May be
that's why birth rates in the US are at historic lows.
if the country was run by shoe shine boys there would be shoe shine palaces on every
corner and a law requiring everyone to get a shoeshine 3 times/day. the usa is run by
banksters. you get the result described.
Curse of consumerist car-focussed societies everywhere. Same for Japan, China. Don't think
that skin pigments will protect against it, though.
The only counter-trends are societies like the Amish, or maybe orthodox Jews. Their
inoculation against most aspects of consumer society has the side effect of exponential
population growth.
We originally posted this chart in February 2011 ,
which we just updated also breaking out the real estate industry from FIRE (finance,
insurance, and real estate). It is still just as shocking as it was back when we first
produced it.
Economy Jumps The Shark. The U.S. economy jumped the shark in 1990 when FIRE overtook the manufacturing sector in
terms of its contribution to GDP.
DETROIT (WWJ) – According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are
"functionally illiterate." The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional
Workforce Fund on Wednesday.
WWJ Newsradio 950 spoke with the Fund's Director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, who explained exactly
what this means.
"Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job -- those types of basic everyday
(things). Reading a prescription; what's on the bottle, how many you should take just your
basic everyday tasks," she said.
"I don't really know how they get by, but they do. Are they getting by well? Well, that's
another question," Tyler-Ruiz said.
Some of the Detroit suburbs also have high numbers of functionally illiterate: 34 percent
in Pontiac and 24 percent in Southfield.
"For other major urban areas, we are a little bit on the high side We compare, slightly
higher, to Washington D.C.'s urban population, in certain *** codes in Washington D.C. and in
Cleveland," she said.
Tyler-Ruiz said only 10 percent of those who can't read have gotten any help to resolve
it.
The report will be used to provide better training for local workers.
The key factor here is that the USA is a neoliberal state which means profits before people
and outsourcing to area with lower labor cost. Like leopard can't change its spots, neoliberalism
can't change it "free movement of goods and labor" principles, or it stop being
neoliberalism.
No jobs will come back to the USA as financial oligarchy is transnational body that uses the
USA military as an enforcer for their gang. It does not care one bit about the common people in
the USA.
Pause on the sound and fury for necessary precision. Even if the Trump administration slaps
25% tariffs on all Chinese exports to the US, the IMF has projected that would trim just a
meager slither – 0.55% – off China's GDP. And America is unlikely to profit,
because the extra tariffs won't bring back manufacturing jobs to the US – something that
Steve Jobs told Barack Obama eons ago.
What happens is that global supply chains will be redirected to economies that offer
comparative advantages in relation to China, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia
and Laos. And this redirection is already happening anyway – including by Chinese
companies.
BRI represents a massive geopolitical and financial investment by China, as well as its
partners; over 130 states and territories have signed on. Beijing is using its immense pool of
capital to make its own transition towards a consumer-based economy while advancing the
necessary pan-Eurasian infrastructure development – with all those ports, high-speed
rail, fiber optics, electrical grids expanding to most Global South latitudes.
The end result, up to 2049 – BRI's time span – will be the advent of an
integrated market of no less than 4.5 billion people, by that time with access to a Chinese
supply chain of high-tech exports as well as more prosaic consumer goods.
Anyone who has followed the nuts and bolts of the Chinese miracle launched by Little
Helmsman Deng Xiaoping in 1978 knows that Beijing is essentially exporting the mechanism that
led China's own 800 million citizens to, in a flash, become members of a global middle
class.
As much as the Trump administration may bet on "maximum pressure" to restrict or even block
Chinese access to whole sectors of the US market, what really matters is BRI's advance will be
able to generate multiple, extra US markets over the next two decades.
We don't do
'win-win'
There are no illusions in the Zhongnanhai, as there are no illusions in Tehran or in the
Kremlin. These three top actors of Eurasian integration have exhaustively studied how
Washington, in the 1990s, devastated Russia's post-USSR economy (until Putin engineered a
recovery) and how Washington has been trying to utterly destroy Iran for four decades.
Beijing, as well as Moscow and Tehran, know everything there is to know about Hybrid War,
which is an American intel concept. They know the ultimate strategic target of Hybrid War,
whatever the tactics, is social chaos and regime change.
The case of Brazil – a BRICS member like China and Russia – was even more
sophisticated: a Hybrid War initially crafted by NSA spying evolved into lawfare and regime
change via the ballot box. But it ended with mission accomplished – Brazil has been
reduced to the lowly status of an American neo-colony.
Let's remember an ancient mariner, the legendary Chinese Muslim Admiral Zheng He, who for
three decades, from 1405 to 1433, led seven expeditions across the seas all the way to Arabia
and Eastern Africa, reaching Champa, Borneo, Java, Malacca, Sumatra, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz,
Aden, Jeddah, Mogadiscio, Mombasa, bringing tons of goods to trade (silk, porcelain, silver,
cotton, iron tools, leather utensils).
That was the original Maritime Silk Road, progressing in parallel to Emperor Yong Le
establishing a Pax Sinica in Asia – with no need for colonies and religious proselytism.
But then the Ming dynasty retreated – and China was back to its agricultural vocation of
looking at itself.
They won't make the same mistake again. Even knowing that the current hegemon does not do
"win-win". Get ready for the real hardcore yet to come.
The Swine fever is sweeping china hog farms and since the start of 2019 200+ millions hogs
have been culled. Chinese hog production is down from 2016 high of 700 million to below 420
million by the end of the year. The fever is not under control.
Soybeans from Ukraine are unloaded at the port in Nantong, in eastern China. Imports of
soy used to come from the US, but have slumped since the trade war began. Should point out
that the Ukraine soy production matures at a different time of the year than the US soybean.
The USA planting season starts in Late april, may and june. Because of the harvest time
differences worldwide the USA supplies 80% of the late maturing soybeans needed by
October/Nov and December.
Perhaps this is one of the "casualties" ( https://www.rt.com/news/459355-us-austria-embassy-mcdonalds/
) of economic war given the significance of China and just how important it is to the U.S. in
it's purchases of $USD to maintain the illusion of it's reserve currency status and
"vigor"...
Surprised this didn't happen first at the U.S. Embassies in Russia and China?... Obviously
Ronald McDonald has turned into a charity of sorts helping out Uncle $am in his ailing
"health" these dayz!...
SUPER SIZE ME!... Cause I'm not lovin it anymore!... I'm needin it!!!!
I've never understood this "jobs aren't coming back" argument. Do you really think that it
will stop tariffs? They're happening. Better start preparing.
Oh, right, tariffs WILL bring back American jobs! Then why didn't the Administration
impose them fully in 2017? Why negotiate at all; just impose all the tariffs!?! lol
Pepe is correct as usual. Even if America tariffs the world the jobs aren't coming back as
corporations will be unable to turn profits in such a highly taxed country like America would
be. What could happen however is America can form an internal free market again going
isolationist with new home grown manufacturing.
You VERY obviously have ZERO knowledge of Chinas history and its discoveries/inventions
etc USED BY THE WEST.
I suggest that you keep your eyes open for "History Erased-China" on Y Tube. The series
shows what would happen in todays world if countries and their contributions to the world did
not happen.
"Excessive zeal" is really a problem with people on their first job. But at the same the
companies try to pressure new hires to do more.
Notable quotes:
"... "Patience is the one word I would tell [new grads] to think about and remember," Wolfe says. "You're not going to know everything walking in the door, especially if you've just graduated college. Really be a sponge and ask tons of questions." ..."
A new pack of college grads are gearing up to enter the job market -- this year, 1.9 million people will
graduate with a bachelor's degree, and another 1 million will graduate with a master's or
doctorate degree, according to the National
Center for Education Statistics .
It's important to have
your resume ready and your interview skills polished as you start the application process.
It typically takes five months to find a job, according to a
study by Ranstad Recruiting . But once you secure a position, it's important to prepare for
the professional world by keeping your expectations in check, says Paul Wolfe , senior vice president at Indeed .
"Patience is the one word I would tell [new grads] to think about and remember," Wolfe
says. "You're not going to know everything walking in the door, especially if you've just
graduated college. Really be a sponge and ask tons of questions."
Merely having a net worth of $1 million, it seems, doesn't mean you're wealthy. In Charles
Schwab's annual Modern Wealth Survey, the amount people said it took to be considered rich
averaged out to $2.3 million. That, the company said, is "more than 20 times the actual median
net worth of U.S. households."
It's also a very slight drop from the $2.4 million average in the two previous iterations of
the survey.The older one gets, the higher the bar goes, predictably. Among baby boomers
(roughly age 55 to 73), the average net worth you need to be considered wealthy is $2.6
million, 35% higher than what millennials envision as the admission price to the
plutocracy.
For someone to be deemed merely financially comfortable, the required net worth shrinks
significantly. The average amount was $1.1 million, and only Generation Z (about age 9 to age
22, though Schwab's sample was 18 to 22) cited a number below $1 million ($909,600, to be
exact.)
The Schwab survey, which took a national sample of 1,000 Americans between the ages of 21
and 75, also revealed that the majority of Americans really crave real estate. More than 50% of
respondents across generations said that if they got a $1 million windfall, they'd spend it,
and the most popular purchase would be a place to live -- particularly among millennials
(roughly age 22 to 37). Those millennials also took issue with the premise of the survey. More
than three-quarters of them said their personal definition of wealth was really about the way
they live their lives, rather than a discrete dollar amount.
Nevertheless, 60% of them aren't all that worried, since they plan to be wealthy within one
to 10 years. The survey results suggest an interesting strategy to help them get there --
ignore their friends' social media posts.
How's that? Well, it seems virtual covetousness has taken on a life of its own for the
digital generation. According to the survey, overspending because of what they see on social
media (in tandem with the ease with which it takes your cash) was the largest "bad" influence
on how they managed their money.
And the negative influence of social media on spending is only going to grow. In March,
Instagram announced that it's testing a shopping feature called Checkout that lets users buy
things directly within the app, rather than being directed to a retailer's website. So much for
one-stop shopping. Now you won't even have to stop.With 59% of the Americans surveyed saying
they live paycheck to paycheck, instant gratification comes with a high price. While a strong
economy and low unemployment are helping consumers stay current on their debt payments, the
largest U.S. banks are seeing losses on credit cards outpace those of auto and home loans at a
rate not seen in at least 10 years.And when the bottom does finally fall out, the last thing
most Americans will be thinking of is whether they qualify as wealthy.
To contact the author of this story: Suzanne Woolley in New York at
[email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rovella at
[email protected]
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
"... I see a lot of people saying, "They should just move to where the jobs are." 1) They would need accurate and defined information about where the jobs are that are looking for their skills 2) They would need some money to get there 3) They would need a place to stay and the rents and mortages are sky high 'where the jobs are' 4) They would have to be welcome. Two previous mass migrations within the USA come to mind: Black Americans out of the South and the dust bowl migrations to California. They were not welcomed with "open arms". ..."
"... I think the author understates the importance of Corporations being Good Citizens and Good Persons. ..."
"... My father was selected to go to Akron for training and if he passed the tests and did well in the training he might get a chance at Managing a Firestone Store. He was gone for weeks at a time for this process and was even required to go to Akron for more training after becoming a store manager. My father was an intelligent person but did not have a college degree. But I can see now that Firestone did an outstanding job training their store managers in all aspects of the job. Just think about that for a while. ..."
"... Corporations today hate themselves because its only about the money. I guess the point I am trying to make is this loss of Corporate Responsibility to the Nation and its Citizens was something that did exist but is now long gone. ..."
"... All across the West you can find old ghost towns. Towns that flourished until the gold or silver ran out of the local hill. The towns then were deserted. The similar thing can happen when a major employer runs out of "gold'. What the article ignores is all of the other reasons towns die. ..."
"... I would much rather rural stay rural and not become urban. There is more to the quality of life than a constant red hot economy. ..."
"... "The schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, liberals get elected and raise taxes, etc." One only needs to look at Kansas to see that this sentence is flawed. It needs to be changed and re-ordered to properly represent cause and effect. "Conservatives cut taxes, the schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, etc." ..."
"... The days of being qualified for good, well paying work without having more than a mediocre high school are in the past. This doesn't necessarily mean college because the trades require more education than ever before. Cutting school funding to pay for tax cuts is a loser's game. Trickle down economics has failed. ..."
I recently read and reviewed Tim Carney's
excellent book Alienated America , a sort of combination of the "how we got Trump" genre with the sociological works of
researchers like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray. Carney's exploration of the Trump phenomenon, and his grappling with the timeless
question of economic security versus personal responsibility in regard to the formation of virtue, family, and community, are among
the best you'll find. There is a deeper subtext in his book, however, that is not excavated. But first, a quick recap.
As in most treatments of inequality, geographic immobility, deindustrialization, and related issues, Alienated America
features the requisite visits to faded old towns with ghostly main streets, and paeans to the blue-collar jobs that once allowed
men with high school educations to comfortably own homes, raise families, and retire with pensions.
Through a long analysis, including a fascinating visit to a fracking camp in North Dakota -- awash in money but utterly lacking
in neighborliness and community -- Carney concludes that wealth alone does not produce human flourishing. It is rather community
and what social researchers call "civil society" that makes the American Dream possible. Obviously, money helps, but it is not sufficient,
nor, in Carney's telling, even necessary.
... ... ...
Indeed,
large
numbers of human settlements never do, and never have . A one-dimensional, economically undiversified city is essentially a housing
tract for a factory or a wharf or whatever industry drives its economy. What is left when that economic engine breaks down? A company
town without a company. This is the fate that has befallen many of America's declining places, and it is hard to argue that this
economic reality doesn't play a direct role in the decline of the family and of civil society. Is this a "materialist" explanation?
Perhaps. But it may also be true.
There are those who
admirably hope and work
for revival, for restoration in places like Gary, Detroit, or any number of gutted small towns. But many of the buildings in
these ghostly, empty blocks, even with their mighty and almost pleasantly timeworn facades, are far beyond the point where renovation
is economical. For now, poverty is a sort of preservative. More money, for many hollowed-out cities, would simply mean more demolition.
The unwinding of rural and post-industrial America is a human tragedy, not to be written off, much less tacitly celebrated. Yet the
facts of the post-industrial landscape may not care about remaining working-class feelings. This does not mean that any of these
places "
deserve to die ." But it may well mean that their collapse is beyond the ability of policy -- or church -- to alter.
Addison Del Mastro is assistant editor of The American Conservative . He tweets at@ad_mastro.
Interesting and probably spot on. It doesn't take a degree in economics or history to understand how prosperity came and went;
a passing knowledge of the 20th century will suffice. Dating back to the '20s we experienced a classic example of the boom/bust
cycle, with the bust of the 30s lasting basically the entire decade. The good times rwith the onset of WWII and continued afterward
because we, of all the major combatant nations, actually experienced minimal economic, social, and cultural disruption. The devastation
elsewhere was sufficient to provide us a head-start worth a couple decades of strong growth. It wound down around the beginning
of the 70s, coincident with the end of the Vietnam War. We retained some strong advantages, though, and they were sufficient to
provide more growth – on paper at least – even as today's yawning income-distribution gap began to open up. The the Cold War ended
and the days of free-trade saving the world (aka 'Globalism') commenced. It seemed great for awhile but now we're left holding
an empty bag and the rest of the world has sidelined our old industrial workforce through off-shoring for the sake of cheaper
labor. Nope, there's no turning back.
Re: The revival of the American Dream requires the re-churching of America.
Maybe, but it also requires jobs paying a living wage that offer a reasonable degree of long-term security (It's the latter
is lacking in short-lived fracking boom towns)
Having lived in the inner Chicago burbs since the mid 1970's I have watched Chicago turn from being an industrial powerhouse to
a have and have not economy. If you're working in professional/service sector or part of the management of multinational globalist
activity you're doing reasonably well. What's swept under the rug is that Chicago and their ilk hide the vast swaths of decayed
blight and human warehousing with pretty downtown / privileged few neighborhoods. Most of our once great second city serves little
purpose other than to provide housing for the poverty class. So called "Revitalization" only provides window dressing for the
parade of the chosen few.
Prior to living in Chicago, my folks lived in a small city in western IL that was a poster child for the small town decay referred
to above that Mr. Williamson thinks should die.
The town was famous for their productivity. Civic pride was evident in most all aspects of community life there. A major steel
mill anchored the economy as well as numerous smaller hardware manufacturers. The steel mill went belly up, the hardware manufacturers
became distributors of Asian made goods.
The gravy train just dried up. Times aren't so good now for the town that holds so many fond memories for me. Progress. I guess.
"Americans are the descendants of people who crossed oceans and continents for a better life, why are Americans who live
in this dying towns so different? I just don't get it."
Because there is no longer a place with a better life. People left families and homes because life could be dramatically better
someplace else.
An unemployed steel-worker used to making $60,000/year in a $100,000 house isn't going to find life somehow better making $8/hour
as a barista in San Francisco with a $2000/month rent.
I see a lot of people saying, "They should just move to where the jobs are."
1) They would need accurate and defined information about where the jobs are that are looking for their skills
2) They would need some money to get there
3) They would need a place to stay and the rents and mortages are sky high 'where the jobs are'
4) They would have to be welcome. Two previous mass migrations within the USA come to mind: Black Americans out of the South and
the dust bowl migrations to California. They were not welcomed with "open arms".
First let me say that I agree with the author almost 90+%. But I think the author understates the importance of Corporations
being Good Citizens and Good Persons. That is clearly what has happened to America. As the son of a former Firestone Store
Manager, I can attest that Firestone trained all of their store managers in Akron, OH.
My father was selected to go to Akron for training and if he passed the tests and did well in the training he might get
a chance at Managing a Firestone Store. He was gone for weeks at a time for this process and was even required to go to Akron
for more training after becoming a store manager. My father was an intelligent person but did not have a college degree. But I
can see now that Firestone did an outstanding job training their store managers in all aspects of the job. Just think about that
for a while.
The Company cared what the Company looked like everywhere, not just in Akron, OH. There was almost no turnover in my father's
store of employees. He was finally burnt out from dealing with the public in retail sales but they promoted him to District Manager
a job that he kept till he passed away. No employer today gives a crap about any employee or any client. Of course you can't learn
to love someone else till you learn to love yourself. Corporations today hate themselves because its only about the money.
I guess the point I am trying to make is this loss of Corporate Responsibility to the Nation and its Citizens was something that
did exist but is now long gone.
While some will surely say I am crazy, I strongly believe that a very high progressive tax rate on individuals and corporations
would help to change this attitude and at least get money into circulation. We also have to remove the corrupt and criminal group
that has taken over the US Corporations and with that the Governments both National and Local or the US is doomed.
All across the West you can find old ghost towns. Towns that flourished until the gold or silver ran out of the local hill.
The towns then were deserted. The similar thing can happen when a major employer runs out of "gold'. What the article ignores
is all of the other reasons towns die.
The schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, liberals get elected and raise taxes, etc. A town can survive with a big company
leaving, but if all of the social factors cause the best, brightest and hardest working people to pull up roots and leave, maybe
the town didn't die, it committed suicide.
I would much rather rural stay rural and not become urban. There is more to the quality of life than a constant red hot
economy. And really, today, many rural areas are more rural than they were a generation ago. Yes, farms are bigger and so
there are fewer people on more land and so many small rural towns have dried up. Personally, I love it. More room to hunt and
fish, less hectic, more fresh air, and more freedom.
"The schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, liberals get elected and raise taxes, etc." One only needs to look at
Kansas to see that this sentence is flawed. It needs to be changed and re-ordered to properly represent cause and effect. "Conservatives
cut taxes, the schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, etc."
The days of being qualified for good, well paying work
without having more than a mediocre high school are in the past. This doesn't necessarily mean college because the trades require
more education than ever before. Cutting school funding to pay for tax cuts is a loser's game. Trickle down economics has failed.
Access to the college is a privilege that typically is granted to children with high IQ. In
europlpe that is doene via entrance exams. If you pass you are in, if not, so be it. So the very
notion of college is discriminative in this sense, as it should be. All this posturing about
neighborhoods with bad schools does not change the fact that individual with high IQ can prosper
and pass entrance earn to the college even graduating from "bad schools", so mostly marginal
individual are affected.
But if you need to pay for the college that poor kids with high IQ are cut out. Forever. and
that's grossly unfair (as many things under neoliberalism)
Notable quotes:
"... As a matter of principle, an egalitarian society of the future that I'd want to help building would in fact contain free or inexpensive access to any level of education, at a high base standard of quality. Like, every school is a good school, there is a mechanism for tackling exceptions, and everyone can access whatever level of basic education or fundamental vocational training without having to pay for it in major financial hardship. (There are of course many ways to implement such a system.) ..."
"... I'm surprised at the number of people on this thread who seem to think the purpose of free university education is to help lift people out of poverty. How many times do you have to be shown that this upward mobility thing is a Ponzi scheme? The goal of free education is to ensure that poor people can get access to the same things rich people can, so that everyone is able to live a fulfilling life. ..."
"... Harry @82 -- my understanding is that while the NHS has improved health outcomes for everyone, it has also (counter-intuitively) increased health inequality. More affluent people are better able to take advantage of healthcare. The interventions which tend to reduce health inequality are things like clean water and closing the sewers, not universal access to care. ..."
"... (*) Under German law, students can sue their parents if they have the means but refuse to fund an adequate education. But of course you would rather not sue your parents. ..."
"... Poor children should be able to go to university. That's a simple statement of what is right. Warrens offering a fix for ONE of the two big barriers to doing that. Her fix also helps middle class kids. Lucky them! Why should a poor kid care? ..."
"... I think focusing on high income parents is a bit misleading. Yes the very poorest don't go to college, but plenty of kids from median income, and sub-median income, households do. And plenty of kids are graduating from college and getting jobs that don't pay particularly well, and probably will never pay brilliantly. ..."
"... Also once again: we target income inequality, not variation. We don't oppose a program because 30% of the population won't use it. If you're going to make that your yardstick for public investment then you should at least try to address the consequences for public funding of women's health, childcare, and indeed universal health coverage! ..."
@Christina.H
"Having grown up and gone to university in Germany it is simply incomprehensible to me that
there is tuition supporters on the political left in the U.S".
"Having grown up in the US, Italy and Germany and gone to university in Germany -(for
FREE) I very well understand -- that there are tuition supporters on the so called political
left in the U.S. -- as firstly -- if you ever have grown up in a family where most of the
members have such a emotional -(and funny) attachment to "their schools" -(and universities)
-- as "them Anglo-Saxons" you very well understand that:
2. -- how far the so called "left" in the U.S. is -- concerning "being progressive" -- so
"many moons" behind the European Left -- which get's illustrated by this what did Nia Psaka
write: "one of those supposedly-left-but-actually-right arguments that I get so tired
of."
"Opportunity cost" is bearing a huge load in the argument, and it can't take the weight
Is there an opportunity cost in the sense that the US can't afford to do Warren's plan and
also spend the same amount on prek-12 ? No.
Is there an opportunity cost politically? Also no. An administration that can create a new
wealth tax ex nihilio to free wage slaves from debt bondage -- for this what this is -- is
also an administration that can spend huge sums on prek-12 at the same time
We're left with an opportunity cost for airing policy ideas during a campaign. Here there
*are* actual trade offs involved; attention / time is limited etc.
What we're left with is an argument that "Warren's proposal for universal prek and writing
down college debt / cheap state college is crowding out talk during the campaign for
increased k-12 spending"
Which rests on the assumptions 1) "a campaign which talks about universal prek / fixing
college debt won't increase k-12 spending on the same scale once in power unless it's talked
about during the campaign"
and
2) "the best way to get k-12 spending talked about during the campaign is to denigrate the
fixing college debt proposal"
Neither of which, at least to me, is obvious or that coherent.
Contrast this with a shrewd political calculation for *not* mentioning massive k-12
funding increases during the campaign. It's a charged issue which cuts across usual
infra-coalition groups, so the effect of bringing it up is complex and the positives are
mitigated more than prek / college. And, as explored above, an admin which can do prek /
college can also do k-12. (The Arne Duncan example cuts both ways; the 08 campaign wasn't
caught over massive changes in fed education policy, but it still happened.)
Lastly, prek/fixing college debt are *overwhelmingly popular*. It's *tremendous political
terrain to occupy*. It gets people used to spending huge sums of money on education, and it
does so in a way that even non-brain-worked Republicans have to nod in agreement makes good
fiscal sense.
Muddying those waters based on the dubious assumptions above, and ignoring the other
political dynamics, seems unwise.
Somehow I thought the main topic of the OP was how Warren's plan would increase
inequality, which still strikes me as highly dubious, especially as argued in the link.
Apparently the real topic is supposed to be how funding public college tuition for all
students increases inequality by diverting funds from primary education (and maybe
secondary?)
I'm not convinced the implicit premise that a poor education is the main generator of
inequality. I rather think lack of high-paying jobs, unemployment, inordinate rewards to
owners of property, a multitude of secondary forms of exploitation such as higher prices for
necessities in poor neighborhoods and so on, endlessly, have much more to do with that.
Improvements to primary and secondary education like Warren's improvements to tertiary
education, are a reform, of minor effect in the end as regards to reducing inequality.
Insofar as some colleges and universities graduate credentials more acceptable to the
bosses, credentialism is not to be reformed by increasing funding to preK12 schooling. The
fact that you can't say "a degree from a comprehensive regional university is worth as much
as a degree from a public flagship" also reduces all benefit of education to simple monetary
returns. Further, it abstracts from the benefits to social mobility in the lower ranks of
society. Personally I think economic anxiety fuels status anxiety, that the prospect of no
change or even descent goads people into seeking scapegoats who will be the historical
ones.
In short, I tend to think the primary inequality in other words is in property.
Further the massive funding increases imagined as the alternative excluded by Warren will
still have their effects undercut but a multitude of structural deficits. The lesser revenues
from the poor districts are bad enough. Any reform that could help that would be desirable.
But in the long run the suburbs need to be reintegrated into urban life, the elite need to be
reintegrated into common life and those areas where social decay has rotted the fabric of
society need to be rebuilt. And by the way, those rotted areas also include rural ones and
deindustrialized ones as well as inner cities.
The break in the pipeline comes well before college. Poor neighborhoods have bad schools
and rich neighborhoods have good schools, because they're locally funded. This is not to
say that the cost of education from a state college is not a problem, but rather that there
is a bigger problem which might be easily solved with a lot of money.
I think it's even harder than equalizing funding. According to Ballotpedia's
analysis of spending in America's largest school districts , the Baltimore City Public
School System actually spends more per student than the Palo Alto Unified School District.
But it has a lower graduation rate and I suspect that their graduates would not fare well
against the Palo Alto graduates on measures of academic skills. Comparisons like this are a
right-wing favorite for showing that the "real" problem is not insufficient spending on
students but actually unions, or bureaucracy, or big city corruption
I think that the problem is that some school districts have much harder jobs than others,
because some students live desperate lives outside of school. Desperation among students is
not uniformly distributed across school districts.
Some students start the school year prepared to acquire and apply academic knowledge from
day 1. Some students start with a raft of unmet basic needs. Like food, shelter, and
safety.
You can deliver more education-per-dollar if the schools just focus on education and
medical services/psychological counseling/basic nutrition/law enforcement are well-handled
elsewhere. That seems to me the greatest advantage of affluent school districts, charter
schools, and schools in other developed nations: they don't have to compensate as often for
overwhelming problems in their students' lives that come from outside the campus. Affluent
districts also having newer books, more electives, and less crowded classrooms is just
the icing on the cake.
Ben2@72 writes of "tools to resist " This would be one of the nonmonetary benefits to
Warren's college reform excluded from Baum and Turner's presentation. It's one reason why I
think the benefit of the college education to the lower income families isn't measured by the
extra $7 700 higher (not highest, though,) income families would receive. But even solely in
money terms, I still fancy that most under $35 000 families will find $2 300 makes a bigger
difference in meeting necessities than the over $120 000 families will get from $11 000.
To quote from the link, again:
""'Free tuition' is the opposite of progressive policymaking
It's presented as leveling the playing field. It would worsen economic inequality."
Baum and Turner's essential criticism is about the money payments, discussed in a
misleading way. Two working parents, both with an income about $60 000, would get maybe, at
most, $11 000 in a year. IN US politics this is supposed to be middle class, but I think real
middle class people own property (not a mortgage.) No, I don't think we're talking about
Warren making the world more unequal.
Most of the other thrown in criticisms, like the different monetary values of credentials
from regional comprehensive vs. public flagship, do indeed implicitly assume that educational
inequality is a prime cause, if not the cause, of inequality. I still haven't followed the
logic of how Warren's college reform makes this worse.
Warren's plan is a school voucher plan for that part of the school system that isn't free.
Extra subsidies to some parents when there is a publicly provided alternative, as in primary
and secondary education, does actually have the regressive effects wrongly claimed by Baum
and Turner. Doing away with this bug in Warren's proposed college system could be resolved by
price controls to equalize college tuitions, which requires public provision of schools in
the long run to keep the system from collapsing, which to be effective would probably require
in the long run some sort of industrial policy giving a better idea of labor needs. And that
might end up giving students stipends to go into areas where anticipated needs are highest.
Etc. Etc.
I think one of the reasons this policy proposal isn't discussed in these terms, and comes
across as progressive, is that it is being framed not as higher education funding, but as
debt relief.
And I think that the levels of debt that people get themselves into just for wanting an
education in line with their interests and talents (even leaving aside the whole aspects of
preparing for certain types of jobs) is, to me, a problem. As a first generation higher
education graduate (from Europe, now living in the US) with no family money this sort of
situation would have put me into even more of a state of permanent anxiety. College graduates
of not even very long ago talk of times where you could finance a year of tuition at a solid
state school by working through the summer. This time is very far from the realities of
today, even in places where in-state tuition is considered "affordable" (as in the
institution I consider my home).
As a matter of principle, an egalitarian society of the future that I'd want to help
building would in fact contain free or inexpensive access to any level of education, at a
high base standard of quality. Like, every school is a good school, there is a mechanism for
tackling exceptions, and everyone can access whatever level of basic education or fundamental
vocational training without having to pay for it in major financial hardship. (There are of
course many ways to implement such a system.)
I'm not really fundamentally feeling much in conflict with Harry's argument, though,
because OF COURSE PreK-12 has the bigger impact for fighting inequality. So we'd disagree
about priorities, mostly. (I hope, because I hope that inexpensive access to tertiary and
non-tertiary post-secondary education is also something Harry subscribes to.)
A twist, though, is that I'm not sure it's only money that K-12 is missing. Sure, there
are means-starved districts that first and foremost need MONEY. But others have, at least on
an international scale, a lot of funding, but it doesn't lead to good educational outcomes.
The reasons for this are myriad: For good outcome, you also need high-quality curricula,
teaching being a valued profession, and students who are psychologically and physically in a
position to focus on learning. Schools alone can't heal traumatized communities. So much as I
will always join the cries for more funds for education, it would be a mistake to think you
can just throw money at the problem, at least not through the channels that money has been
used traditionally.
I'm surprised at the number of people on this thread who seem to think the purpose of free
university education is to help lift people out of poverty. How many times do you have to be
shown that this upward mobility thing is a Ponzi scheme? The goal of free education is to
ensure that poor people can get access to the same things rich people can, so that everyone
is able to live a fulfilling life.
Also I'm surprised at the number of people who, after the last 30 years of vicious
anti-poor rhetoric from the right and from "centrists" (i.e. crypto-rightists), still think
it's a good idea to propose programs that target only the very poor through tight means
testing. Yes, they are ultimately more "progressive" since they definitely help the poor more
than those on middle incomes. They are also extremely vulnerable to political attack because
the majority of the population doesn't benefit from them.
I mean, does anyone on here seriously think that if the UK National Health Service (NHS)
were designed only to benefit people on welfare, it would still be around now after Thatcher?
The only thing that stopped her from completely killing it was the fact that her own
constituency depended on it.
Also, imagine someone in the Labour left in 1944, talking like Harry (and others) about
the NHS: saying that this universal health coverage thing is not progressive because middle
class people would also benefit. They would be laughed out of the party room. It's madness to
talk this way. If something -- education, healthcare, transportation, environmental
protection -- is a public good you fund it publicly so everyone can afford it and access it,
and then no matter how much the rich and their centrist shills may hate it, they'll never be
able to cancel it.
Harry @82 -- my understanding is that while the NHS has improved health outcomes for
everyone, it has also (counter-intuitively) increased health inequality. More affluent people
are better able to take advantage of healthcare. The interventions which tend to reduce
health inequality are things like clean water and closing the sewers, not universal access to
care.
This is also part of why I think an absolute prioritarian/progressivism is misguided.
Beyond the working poor who were helped by the NHS, just less than the middle and upper
classes were, the genuinely worst off people are another group entirely: the mentally ill,
homeless, addicted, those trapped in domestic violence and sex trafficking, etc. They will
often fail to benefit from even generally downward distribution programs because the problems
with reaching and helping them are technical and complex. But we should not wait on the
problems resolution or, worse yet, political resolution before pursuing other moderate forms
of downward distribution aimed at helping eg the working poor.
With respect to Warren's proposal, it is not maximally progressive but is more progressive
than the status quo and additionally strikes me as an excellent way to convince lower middle
through upper class people that they, too, are part of the Great Society, which is important
given that their political influence is considerable. People still wax nostalgic about the
days that a tradesman's kid could go to a flagship state school on summer job money and enter
into the professional world -- despite the fact that a tradesman's kid, and presumably
bright, is far from the worst off, that still seems worth bringing back.
Isn't it true that the wealthy can get substantial tax reductions by deducting educational
expenses, and those deductions are higher the wealthier the parents and the more expenses
their education? If I understand correctly, those tax savings need to be counted against the
benefits that would accrue to the wealthy.
I studied at University in Germany on a means tested benefit (for living expenses --
remember there was and is no tuition) which unfortunately was converted to a repayable grant
in the 1980s and later to 50% repayable. Wealthy parents of students could actually get
higher benefits from tax deductions than the poor students could get from this program. I
wouldn't have begrudged the affluent kids the same benefit that I enjoyed -- in fact I felt
it was unfair that they had to depend on their parents while I was entitled to my own money
(*). But I think it exceedingly unfair that their parents could get those tax deductions.
Best would be to raise the taxes and fund a living wage for all.
(*) Under German law, students can sue their parents if they have the means but refuse to
fund an adequate education. But of course you would rather not sue your parents.
Mrmister is wrong, the NHS helped all people in Britain including the very poor.
Harry, I don't get your response. Are you trying to say that free education only helps the
most educated? This is true in the trivial sense that it only helps people who can qualify
for university. Similarly free cancer care only helps those with cancer! What of it? Unless
you think anyone who wants to go to university should be allowed in, this is irrelevant.
Perhaps you're trying to imply that warrens proposal only helps the wealthy because only the
wealthy get good high school? Well yes, and the nhs gave better health outcomes to wealthier
people and non-smokers, so what? That's not an argument against making it universal, it's an
argument for banning smoking. You shouldn't conflate the problems in high school funding with
university funding, because the upshot of that is that the few poor kids (of whom I am one)
who manage to fight free of our shit high school education have done it for nothing because
we can't get into uni because it's too expensive. Yes it's better to do both! But as people
above have observed it's hard for the federal govt to fix secondary education (fuck, they
can't even stop school shootings!) So fix what you can and come back to the next stages
later. America has sooooo many problems that it's madness to oppose fixing the ones you can
because some people who are benefiting from an inequality the federal govt can't fix will
benefit a little more from its efforts to fix the ones it can fix.
Poor children should be able to go to university. That's a simple statement of what is
right. Warrens offering a fix for ONE of the two big barriers to doing that. Her fix also
helps middle class kids. Lucky them! Why should a poor kid care?
I think focusing on high income parents is a bit misleading. Yes the very poorest don't go to
college, but plenty of kids from median income, and sub-median income, households do. And
plenty of kids are graduating from college and getting jobs that don't pay particularly well,
and probably will never pay brilliantly.
Secondly there is the way that college has increased very rapidly in the past 10 years,
mostly at the state level. There are a range of reasons for this, but a generation of
students have been forced to pay more money than previous generations for higher education,
during a period when college education is becoming necessary for a wider range of jobs.
Thirdly there is the debt element. Not only is student debt becoming a more and more
significant problem (affecting career choices and the economy), but the way that students are
unable to escape it even into bankruptcy is an outrage.
I don't particularly care if wealthier parents also benefit from this. The solution would
seem to be to tax them more. And one could also craft this in ways which would be less
helpful to them (for example focus solely on state colleges and remove tax savings for
education).
I also think we should spend more on K-12 schooling, preschool and a range of other
things. I don't see these two things as particularly incompatible. The advantage of this
policy is (like healthcare) is that it is good politics as it would have a quick and
measurable impact, which would build political credibility (which could then be used for
tougher fights, like increased taxation for education, infrastructure, transport, etc). There
was an interesting interview with one of Corbyn's ex-advisors recently, who pointed out that
you can't just raise taxes immediately. Instead you have to build people's trust that taxes
will be used in ways that benefit them, and that will then change the way people think about
taxes. This is one way to change that conversation.
You also need to be careful interpreting recent studies like those by Dixon et al (I used
to work with Anna and I know the context of her studies). The NHS has gone backward since the
end of the Labour government, and a lot of studies published in the last 10 years are
actually showing the consequence of Tory attacks on the system, not the long-term outcomes of
the NHS as a whole. Also the NHS was massively underfunded relative to European systems
during the Thatcher era, and that has long-term implications for the structure of the system
and its effects on inequality, which New Labour was not in power long enough to reverse.
Harry I think this is important:
Warren or any other President in the near future is going to do more than one big thing
altogether, let alone in education, and I want people to take seriously the opportunity
cost of this being the one big thing in education.
But I think you're underestimating how transformative the end of student debt will be for
a lot of poor people. And given that a lot of the other strategies you identify are not
feasible for the federal government (due to the states), I think you overstate this issue in
this case.
The problem with "vouchers" in a K-12 context is that they are used to steal funding from
public schools and give it to private and/or religious schools. They're a scam. If you are
doing vouchers for public college, they don't have that problem. (Leo Casey has this right.)
Also, on means testing. I think that means testing is largely a bad idea. If you are
funding things from a progressive income tax, then the very rich are getting much less back
than they are putting in, and that's fine. Also, it's easy for means testing to be made
demeaning to recipients of the aid. If everyone gets and has to use vouchers*, that can't
happen. Also, implementing means testing isn't free, and a lot of the time, it'll cost as
much as it saves. And finally, if you can force rich folks to declare the benefit as income,
you can tame much of it back in taxes (this works great for the sort of childbearing
encouragement programs the Japanese ought to be implementing, i.e. direct, generous, flat
rate (same amount for any child) child support payments to everyone who has a child.)
*: In my fantasy world here, the vouchers are more of payments to the schools for
educating people than benefits to the students. Sort of like how Obamacare only pays insurers
if they actually pay for medical care. (Obamacare is way more wonderful than you think.)
TJ 93: "There are some tax breaks available, but these income out for a couple at earned
income of around $230,000"
Can you tell us how much in annual college cost an affluent family could at the most
deduct? And is it restricted to tuition? Until what age do the parents get a dependent
deduction for a child in college and how much does it save them in taxes?
I don't know the details of the plan discussed here but if it is true that the parents can
save taxes by having a child in college/uni (as is the case in Germany) then it would seem
fair to me to publicly fund the college expenses for everybody while at the same time denying
affluent parents the deduction (as is not the case in Germany).
Also, on means testing. I think that means testing is largely a bad idea.
Means testing for education specifically is a problem because basically nobody has "means"
when they're twenty. [and absolutely nobody has means when they're fifteen]. Practically when
people say means-testing here they mean -- although they may not recognise it or admit it --
parental means testing, and
Remember: the core of opposition to welfare is that it weakens dependence on rich
relatives and other patronage networks, and thus reduces the ability of abusers to find
people willing to subject themselves to abuse. Because education and student means-testing
effectively means parental means-testing, a means-testing framework basically eliminates the
children-of-the-rich -- a-fortiori the children-of-rich-abusers -- from protection. Of
course the abusers are OK with means-tested welfare here, it leaves their targets
unprotected. [see slavery: more expensive and lower productivity than free labour, but you
can rape people and beat them to death, which some find more attractive than money, enough to
fight a war over.]
[which is to say: if you make a model of right-wing thinking that supposes the sole
motivation of right-wingers is to emotionally and physically abuse people and to create
spaces and situations where that can happen, you get something that's like 90% accurate to
what the actual right actually propose and implement. I mean, slavery! Free workers are more
productive and cost about the same or less [lower overheads through savings in chains] but
you can't rape them or beat them to death and that was worth fighting a war over.]
[I did once consider an education voucher that was structured with a taper like some
welfare payments: for every extra dollar put in by the parents/holder, the voucher goes down
fifty cents ]
[vouchers rely on individual selection, of course, and there are well-known problems with
quality guarantees here with education, given the long timeframes and &c]
[the thought just struck me that the education and professional-development elements of
employment -- which have to be hugely important if we're not doing lifetime jobs -- are also
underserved by market self-regulation ]
Harry, what is this? You say it's means tested and you also say it doesn't help the poor. Are
you saying warrens plan is means tested to ensure it only goes to the wealthy? Because that
doesn't seem likely to me.
Also once again: we target income inequality, not variation. We don't oppose a program
because 30% of the population won't use it. If you're going to make that your yardstick for
public investment then you should at least try to address the consequences for public funding
of women's health, childcare, and indeed universal health coverage!
@
"I want the most talented kids taking the course they're most suited for."
Me too -- and as "Free Public Education" in "Civilised Western Democracies" wants exactly
the same thing -- there is no reason -- for anybody -- to support any kind of educational
system which depends on "privatized" -- aka "privately financed" education" -- as it allows
"Rich kids --
even if they are NOT the most talented --
to become doctors and vets".
So "the most talented kids" should become doctors and vets --
Right? --
And they only can become doctors and vets -- if they don't have to buy themselves into
becoming doctors and vets.
Right?
As buying yourself -(without talent) into "better education" --
(of whatever level) --
is only possible in a society where school kids and students have to pay for their
education.
Right?
It's like currently trying to get a Green Card for my homeland -(or a permit to reside in
the UK)
You can buy it with absolutely NO talent.
Or in other words:
That's why (civilised and social) countries like France -(or Germany) never will go back to
any type of education where -- YOUR -(or your families) dough matters MORE -- than your
talent.
One of the major ("policies"?) in fighting inequality!
"... It's not obvious to me that universal access to college education is a progressive goal. ..."
"... I think it is extremely important to understand where Warren is coming from on this. Warren initially became active in politics because she recognized the pernicious nature of debt and the impact it had on well-being. I ..."
"... Warren's emphasis in this particular initiative, it seems to me, is to alleviate debt so that individuals can pursue more advanced functionings/capabilities. ..."
"... The more a college degree is the norm, the worse things are for people without one. Making it easier to get a college degree increases the degree to which its the norm, and will almost inevitably have the same impact on the value of a college degree as the growth in high-school attendance (noted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt above) had on the value of a high school degree. ..."
"... The debate on this subject strikes me as misguided because it says nothing about what students learn. A good high school education should be enough to prepare young people for most kinds of work. In most jobs, even those allegedly requiring college degrees, the way people learn most of what they need to know is through on the job training. Many high school graduates have not received a good education, though, and go to college as, in effect, remedial high school. ..."
by Harry on May 6, 2019 Ganesh Sitaraman argues in
the Garun that, contrary to appearances, and contrary to the criticism that it has earned,
Elizabeth Warren's college plan really is progressive, because it is funded by taxation that
comes exclusively from a wealth tax on those with more than $50 million in assets. Its
progressive, he says, because it redistributes down. In some technical sense perhaps he's
right.
But this, quite odd, argument caught my eye:
But the critics at times also suggest that if any significant amount of benefits go to
middle-class or upper-middle class people, then the plan is also not progressive. This is
where things get confusing. The critics can't mean this in a specific sense because the plan
is, as I have said, extremely progressive in the distribution of costs. They must mean that
for any policy to be progressive that it must benefit the poor and working class more than it
benefits the middle and upper classes. T his is a bizarre and, I think, fundamentally
incorrect use of the term progressive .
The logic of the critics' position is that public investments in programs that help
everyone, including middle- and upper-class people, aren't progressive. This means that the
critics would have to oppose public parks and public K-12 education, public swimming pools
and public basketball courts, even public libraries. These are all public options that offer
universal access at a low (or free) price to everyone.
But the problem isn't that the wealthy get to benefit from tuition free college. I don't
think anyone objects to that. Rather, the more affluent someone is, on average, the more they
benefit from the plan. This is a general feature of tuition-free college plans and it is built
into the design.
Sandy Baum and Sarah Turner explain:
But in general, the plans make up the difference between financial aid -- such as the Pell
Grant and need-based aid provided by states -- and the published price of public colleges.
This means the largest rewards go to students who do not qualify for financial aid. In plans
that include four-year colleges, the largest benefits go to students at the most expensive
four-year institutions. Such schools enroll a greater proportion of well-heeled students, who
have had better opportunities at the K-12 level than their peers at either two-year colleges
or less-selective four-year schools. (Flagship institutions have more resources per student,
too.) .
For a clearer picture of how regressive these policies are, consider how net tuition --
again, that's what most free-tuition plans cover -- varies among students at different income
levels at four-year institutions. For those with incomes less than $35,000, average net
tuition was $2,300 in 2015-16; for students from families with incomes between $35,000 and
$70,000, it was $4,800; for those between $70,000 and $120,000, it was $8,100; and finally,
for families with incomes higher than $120,000, it was more than $11,000. (These figures
don't include living expenses.)
Many low-income students receive enough aid from sources like the Pell Grant to cover
their tuition and fees. At community colleges nationally, for example, among students from
families with incomes less than $35,000, 81 percent already pay no net tuition after
accounting for federal, state and institutional grant aid, according to survey data for
2015-16. At four-year publics, almost 60 percent of these low-income students pay
nothing.
If you take progressivism to mean "improvement of society by reform", Warren's plan is
clearly progressive. It reduces the pie going to the rich, greatly improves the lot of
students who are less than rich, and doesn't harm the poor.
Who cares – as long as this plan -(and hopefully an even more extended plan) puts an
end to a big part of the insanity of the (stupid and greedy) US education system?
In other words – let's call it "conservative" that might help to have it passed!
The difficulty with the plan as proposed is not whether it is progressive or not but that it
targets the wrong behavior – borrowing for education. If the goal is to make education
more accessible – subsidize the university directly to either facilitate point of
admission grants in the first place or simply bring down tuition cost to all attendees.
Under this proposal (assuming one thinks Warren would win and it could get passed) the
maximizing strategy is to borrow as much as one possibly can with the hope/expectation that
it would ultimately be forgiven. If that's the "right" strategy, then it would benefit those
with the greatest borrowing capacity which most certainly is not students from low income
families but is in fact families which could probably pay most of the cost themselves but
would choose not to in order to capture a benefit they couldn't access directly by virtue of
being 'too rich' for grants or other direct aid.
"Rather, the more affluent someone is, on average, the more they benefit from the plan. "
This doesn't seem like a fair description of what's going on. If Starbucks gives a free muffin to everyone who buys a latte, it's theoretically helping
the rich more than the poor under this way of looking at things. The rich can afford the
muffin; the poor can't. So the rich will get more free muffins. But the rich don't give a
crap. They can easily just buy the damn muffin in the first place. They're not really being
helped, because the whole damn system helps them already. They're just about as well off with
or without the free muffin.
Same here. My kid's going to Stanford. I'm effin rich and I don't give a crap about
financial aid. If it was free I'd have an extra 75k a year, but how many Tesla's do I need
really? How many houses in Hawaii do I need? But when I was a kid I was lower middle class. I
didn't even apply to Stanford because it was just too much. Yeah, I could have gone rotc or
gotten aid, but my parents just couldn't bust out their contribution. Stanford just wasn't in
the cards. And Stanford's a terrible example, it had needs blind admissions and can afford
to just give money away if it wants.
I don't understand the fear, in certain areas of what's apparently the left, of giving
benefits to people in the middle of the income/wealth curve.
The expansion of the term "middle class" doesn't help with this, nor does the expansion of
education. These debates often sound as if some of the participants think of "middle class"
as the children of physicians and attorneys, who moreover are compensated the way they were
in the 1950s.
The ability to switch between "it's reasonable to have 100% college attendance within 5
years from now" and "of course college is only for the elite classes" is not reassuring to
the average more or less educated observer (who may or may not be satisfied, depending on
temperament and so on, with the answer that of course such matters are above her head).
The actual plan is for free tuition at public colleges. So not "the most expensive
four-year institutions" that Baum and Turner discuss. [HB: they're referring to the most
expensive 4-year public institutions]
There's also expanded support for non-tuition expenses, means-tested debt cancellation,
and a fund for historically black universities, all of which make the plan more progressive.
And beyond that, I could argue that, for lower-income students on the margin of being able to
attend and complete school, we should count not only the direct financial aid granted, but
also the lifetime benefits of the education the aid enables. But suffice it to say, I think
you're attacking a caricature.
the college plan does not actually offer 'universal access'
Given that something like one third of Americans gets a college degree, Warren's plan
seems good enough. It's not obvious to me that universal access to college education is a
progressive goal.
I think it is extremely important to understand where Warren is coming from on this. Warren
initially became active in politics because she recognized the pernicious nature of debt and
the impact it had on well-being. If you are trying to get out from under the burden of debt
your capabilities for flourishing are severely restricted, and these restrictions can easily
become generational. One of the more difficult debts that people are facing are student
debts. This was made especially difficult by the 2005 bankruptcy bill which made it close to
impossible for individuals to get out from under student debt by entering in to Chapter 7
bankruptcy.
Warren's emphasis in this particular initiative, it seems to me, is to alleviate debt so
that individuals can pursue more advanced functionings/capabilities. So if you think that the
definition of progressive is creating situations where more individuals in a society are
given greater opportunities for flourishing then the plan does strike me as progressive (an
Aristotelian interpretation of Dewey such as promoted by Nussbaum might fall in this
direction). There is another issue however that might be closer to the idea of helping those
from lowest social strata, something that is not being discussed near enough. Internet
technologies helped to promote online for profit universities which has (and I suppose
continues to) prey and those most desperate to escape poverty with limited resources. The
largest part of their organizations are administrators who help students to secure loans with
promises of high paying jobs once they complete their degrees. These places really do prey on
the most vulnerable (homeless youth for instance) and they bait individuals with hope in to
incurring extremely high debt. The loan companies are fine with this I am guess because of
the bankruptcy act (they can follow them for life). This is also not regulated (I think you
can thank Kaplan/Washington Post for that). Warren's initiative would help them get out from
under debt immediately and kick start their life.
I agree k-12 is more important, but it is also far more complicated. This plan is like a
shot of adrenaline into the social blood stream and it might not even be necessary in a few
years. I think it dangerous to make the good the enemy or the perfect, or the perfect the
critic of the good.
– and how cynical does one have to be – to redefine a plan canceling the vast
majority of outstanding student loan debt – as some kind of ("NON-progressive") present
for "the rich"?
But even apart from that, the argument of the post seems like it would suggest that many
things that we currently fund publicly are not progressive in a problematic way. Everything
from arts to national parks to math research "benefits" the rich more than the poor. There's
possibly a case that public provision of these goods is problematic when we as a society
could spend that money on those who are more disadvantaged. But that's a very strong claim
and implicates far more than free college.
Finally, it's worth comparing the previous major expansion of education in the US. The
point at which high school attendance was as widespread as college attendance is now (about
70% of high school graduates enroll in college of some form right away) was around 1930, well
after universal free high school was available. I think moving to universal free college is
an important step to raise those rates, just as free high school was.
It strikes me that the argument made here against a universal program of tuition free college
is not all that different than an argument made against social security -- that the benefits
go disproportionately to middle class and professional class individuals. Since in the case
of Social Security, one has to be in gainfully employed to participate and one's benefits
are, up to a cap, based on one's contributions, middle class and professional class
individuals receive greater benefits. Poor individuals, including those who have not been
employed for long periods of time, receive less benefits. (There are quirks in this 10 second
summary, such as disability benefits, but not so much as to alter this basic functioning.)
Every now and again, there are proposals to "means test" social security, using this
functioning as the reasoning. A couple of points are worth considering.
First, it is the universality of social security that makes it a political 'third rail,'
such that no matter how it would like to do away with such a 'socialist' program, the GOP
never acts on proposals to privatize it, even when they have the Presidency and the
majorities that would allow it to get through Congress. The universality thus provides a
vital security to the benefits that poor and working people receive from the program, since
it makes it politically impossible to take it away. Since social security is often the only
pension that many poor and working people get (unlike middle class and professional class
individuals who have other sources of retirement income), the loss of it would be far more
devastating to them. There is an important way, therefore, that they are served by the
current configuration of the system, even given its skewing.
Second, and following from the above, it is important to recognize that the great bulk of
proposals to "means test" Social Security come from the libertarian right, not the left, and
that they are designed to undercut the support for Social Security, in order to make its
privatization politically viable.
Most colleges and universities "means test" financial aid for their students, which is one
of the reasons why it is generally inadequate and heavily weighted toward loans as opposed to
grants. I think it is a fair generalization of American social welfare experience history to
say that "means tested" programs are both more vulnerable politically (think of the Reagan
'welfare queen' narrative) and more poorly funded than universal programs.
There are additional argument about the skewing of Social Security benefits, such as the
fact that they go disproportionately to the elderly, while those currently living in poverty
are disproportionately children. This argument mistakes the positive effects of the program
-- before Social Security and Medicare the elderly were the most impoverished -- for an
inegalitarian design element.
The solution to the fact that children bear the brunt of poverty in the US is not to
undermine the program that has lifted the elderly out of poverty but to institute programs
that address the problem of childhood poverty. Universal quality day care, for example,
provides the greatest immediate economic benefits to middle class and professional class
families who are now paying for such services, but it provides poor and working class kids
with an education 'head start' that would otherwise go only to the children of those families
that could afford to pay for it. And insofar as day care is provided, it makes it easier for
poor and working class parents (often in one parent households) to obtain decent
employment.
So the failings of universal programs are best addressed, I would argue, by filling in the
gaps with more universal programs, not 'means testing' them.
To the extent that Warren's 'free tuition' proposal addresses only some of the financial
disadvantages of poor and working people obtaining a college education, the response should
not be "oh, this is not progressive," but what do we do to address the other issues, such as
living expenses. It is not as if there are no models on how to do this. All we need to do is
look at Nordic countries that provide post-secondary students both free tuition and living
expenses.
Having grown up and gone to university in Germany it is simply incomprehensible to me that
there is tuition supporters on the political left in the U.S. It's true that free college
isn't universal in the same sense free K-12 education is. But neither are libraries (they
exclude those who are functionally illiterate completely, and their services surely go mostly
to upper middle class people who have opportunity and education to read regularly), for
example. Neither are roads – the poor overwhelmingly live in inner cities, often take
public transport – it's middle class suburbanites that mostly profit. Speaking of
public transport, I assume Henry opposes rail; it is very middle class, the poor use buses.
(The last argument actually has considerable traction in Los Angeles, it's not completely far
fetched.)
I agree that Warren's free college and debt forgiveness plans would not be very progressive,
but I'd propose that I think the dynamic mechanism built in would make it worse than a static
analysis shows.
(Note that most of my siblings and in-laws do not have college degrees; this perspective
is based on my own observations.)
The more a college degree is the norm, the worse things are for people without one. Making
it easier to get a college degree increases the degree to which its the norm, and will almost
inevitably have the same impact on the value of a college degree as the growth in high-school
attendance (noted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt above) had on the value of a high school degree.
(We're already seeing this: many positions that used to require a college degree now require
a specific degree, or a masters degree.) This will increase age discrimination, and further
worsen the position of the people for whom college is unattractive for reasons other than
money.
To give a particular example of a mechanism (idiosyncratic, but one I know specifically).
Until a couple decades ago, getting a KY electrician's license required 4 years experience
under a licensed electrician, and passing the code test. Then the system changed; now it
requires a 2-year degree and 2 years experience, OR 8 years experience. This was great for
colleges. The working electricians don't think the new electricians are better prepared as
they used to be, but all of a sudden people who don't find sitting in a classroom for an
additional 2 years attractive are hugely disadvantaged. Another example would be nursing
licenses; talk to any older LPN and you'll get an earful about how LPN's are devalued as RNs
and BSNs have become the norm.
I suspect tuition reform will be complex, difficult and subject to gaming. Being simple
minded I offer an inadequate but simple palliative. Make student loan debt dischargeable in
bankruptcy. You can max out your credit cards on cars, clothes, booze or whatever and be able
to discharge these debts but not for higher education.
The inability to even threaten bankruptcy gives all the power to collection companies.
Students have no leverage at all. The threat of bankruptcy would allow for negotiated
reductions in principal as well as payments.
Bankruptcy does carry a lot of negative consequences so it would offset the likely
objections about moral hazards, blah, blah. I would also favor an additional method of
discharging student debt. If your debt is to a for-profit school that can't meet some minimum
standards for student employment in their field of study then total discharge without the
need for bankruptcy. For-profit vocational schools intensively target low income and minority
students without providing significant value for money.
Progressivity looks much better if the program sticks to free community college, at least
until there is universal access to 4-year schools. That's what Tennessee did (IIRC the only
example that is actually operational).
Harry: it doesn't seem as if you responded to my comment. I'll try again.
1. A policy is progressive if it is redistributive.
2. Warren's plan is redistributive.
3. Thus, Warren's plan is progressive.
Comments about how effective the redistribution is are fine, but to claim a non-ideal
distribution framework invalidates the program's claims to being progressive seems spurious.
And I don't think this definition of progressive is somehow wildly ideosyncratic.
To whine that free college is somehow not progressive because not everyone will go to college
is a ridiculous argument, one of those supposedly-left-but-actually-right arguments that I
get so tired of. To assume that the class makeup of matriculators will be unchanged with free
college is to discount knock-on effects. This is a weird, weird post. I guess I'm going back to ignoring this site.
The debate on this subject strikes me as misguided because it says nothing about what
students learn. A good high school education should be enough to prepare young people for
most kinds of work. In most jobs, even those allegedly requiring college degrees, the way
people learn most of what they need to know is through on the job training. Many high school
graduates have not received a good education, though, and go to college as, in effect,
remedial high school.
Readers who attended an average American high school, as I did long ago, will know that
there are certain students, especially boys, who are itching to be done with school. It is
far more productive to give them a decent high school education and have them start working
than to tell them they need another two to four years of what to them is pointless
rigamarole.
Rather than extending the years of education, I would reduce the high school graduation
age to 17 and reduce summer vacations by four weeks, so that a 17 year old would graduate
with as many weeks of schooling as an 18 year old now. (Teachers would get correspondingly
higher pay, which should make them happy.)
Harry Truman never went to college. John Major became a banker and later prime minister of
Britain without doing so. Neither performed noticeably worse than their college-educated
peers. If a college education is not necessary to rise to the highest office in the land, why
is it necessary for lesser employment except in a few specialized areas?
An experiment that I would like to see tried is to bring back the federal civil service
exam, allowing applicants without college degrees who score high enough to enter U.S.
government jobs currently reserved for those with college degrees.
Not all specialties are created equal. It is clear that a person who take loan to became
obtain a degree in communications is deeply misguided as chances to get a well paying job with
this specially are close to zero. Many "humanitarian" specialties are similar -- unemployment is
almost guaranteed and if a person was misled we should prosecute greedy university administrators
and jail some of them. Such specialties should have a disclaimer: employment is difficult to
obtain. Unemployment is almost garanteed. Take the courses at your own risk.
At the same time for STEM degrees Warren proposal makes more sense as people who enrolled
into those specialties tried a more realistic approach, but probably job market turned bad or
level of talent is not enough or both. while people in this specialties are needed but their
chances for employment are crippled by the flow of H1B applicants so part of those costs should
be subsidized by fees for large H1B employers, such as Microsoft and Google. Or something like
that.
At the same time why we should forgive a person the debt if the particular person specialized
in, say, dance? What is the social value of oversupply of dancers? So probably subsidies should
be selective and limited to STEM specialties and selected "high social value" humanitarian
specialties.
So the loan forgiveness is a crippled, somewhat unfair but still a reasonable approach.
But the key problem is not loads but greed of neoliberal educational institutions. Cost of
tuition skyrocketed after 1980 and that's not accidental: this is drect result of neoliberalism
corruption of higher education. The ability of government to prosecute "too greedy" colleges is
important. Limits of salary of administrators and especially president and vice president and
deens are critical.
Notable quotes:
"... The total cost of Warren's plan would be $1.25 trillion over 10 years, with the debt forgiveness portion consisting of a one-time cost of $640 billion. Warren plans to pay for her plan by imposing an annual tax of 2 percent on all families that have $50 million or more in wealth. ..."
"... Warren is right to focus attention on the matter of student loans. This is a major issue for young people and experts have been warning of a crisis for years. ..."
"... After all, they are victims of a scam perpetrated by the education cartel and the federal government. ..."
"... Here's how it works: the education cartel sells the lie that only those with four-year college degrees can succeed in life. Then they steer everyone with a pulse towards a university. ..."
"... The government steps in and subsidizes student loans that allow almost anyone to go to college, regardless of their ability to pay the loans back. ..."
"... College is not for everyone and there's no reason to keep promoting that idea. ..."
"... Reduce the overabundance of administrators. The number has exploded since the 1990s. ..."
"... A lot of required courses are just padding to make the experience drag on for four years. That creates unneeded expenditures of time and money. ..."
"... several nations currently do offer virtually free college educations & I don’t believe their diplomas are of less value for it. ..."
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren recently jolted the Democratic presidential primary
race by tackling one of the most important issues of our time: student loans and the cost of
higher education. Warren called for
canceling up to $50,000 of student loan debt for every American making under $100,000 a
year. In addition, she would make two- and four-year public college tuitions free for all new
students.
The total cost of Warren's plan would be $1.25 trillion over 10 years, with the debt
forgiveness portion consisting of a one-time cost of $640 billion. Warren plans to pay for her
plan by imposing an annual tax of 2 percent on all families that have $50 million or more in
wealth.
Warren is right to focus attention on the matter of student loans. This is a major issue
for young people and experts have been warning of a crisis for
years.
But in most cases, it isn't right to blame student loan borrowers for their predicaments.
After all, they are victims of a scam perpetrated by the education cartel and the federal
government.
Here's how it works: the education cartel sells the lie that only those with four-year
college degrees can succeed in life. Then they steer everyone with a pulse towards a
university.
The government steps in and subsidizes student loans that allow almost anyone to go to
college, regardless of their ability to pay the loans back. These loans are a trap, and
not just with regard to their cost. The government, which
took over the student loan industry , forbids borrowers from discharging that debt in
bankruptcy proceedings.
How do such cheap and easy student loans affect universities? For starters, they have caused
a proliferation of degrees that offer poor returns on
investment . In addition, they have led to the dilution of the value of previously
marketable degrees such as those in the humanities and international relations, as more
students enter those programs than could ever hope to work in their respective fields. For
example, in 2013, half of all those who had graduated from college were working in jobs that
did not require degrees .
But worst of all, the easy access to student loans has destroyed the price mechanism, which
is so important for determining the real supply and demand of a product. Since government is
the ultimate payer, tuition has been pushed sky high. The rate of tuition increase has
actually
outpaced inflation threefold .
Is Elizabeth Warren's plan the solution? No! It will only make things worse.
For starters, the wealth tax that she would use to fund her plan is likely
unconstitutional . But even if it was upheld by the Supreme Court, it would still be bad
policy. Countries that have imposed wealth taxes like France and Sweden have found that the
rich simply
leave and take their assets with them rather than pay more.
As for the idea of universal student loan debt forgiveness, it is a bad policy on the
merits. For starters, it does not make economic sense to forgive the debts of those who will
earn at least $17,500 more a year than those who don't go to college.
Also, although the student loan bubble has been inflated by the actions of both the
education cartel and government, at the end of the day, loans are a contract. Those who are
able to pay them down should and not be bailed out.
... ... ...
Finally, we need to promote alternatives to college. There are many well-paying jobs out
there that
don't require degrees . There are also apprentice programs offered by organizations like
Praxis . We should encourage
entrepreneurship, which is how so many in this country have lifted themselves out of poverty.
College is not for everyone and there's no reason to keep promoting that idea.
Kevin Boyd is a freelance writer based in Louisiana. He is a contributor to The
Hayride, a southern news and politics site. He has also been published in , The Federalist, The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution , and The New York Observer among other publications.
How to make college cost effective. Two major reforms
1. Reduce the overabundance of administrators. The number has exploded since the
1990s.
2. Restructure college. Most programs don’t need to be four years long. Most can be
cut to 2 1/2 – 3 years. A chemistry student should be taking courses required for a
chemistry degree, nothing more (unless he/she wants to). A lot of required courses are just
padding to make the experience drag on for four years. That creates unneeded expenditures of
time and money.
After doing the above, then maybe we can talk about “free” college.
I personally believe that we should each pay our own way through life as much as possible,
but several nations currently do offer virtually free college educations & I don’t
believe their diplomas are of less value for it.
I agree with you that other avenues like trades should be encouraged. A four year degree
isn’t necessary for everyone.
"... Most student debt is held by people with balances on the lower end of the scale, with only 0.8 percent of the U.S. population owing more than $100,000, according to Deutsche Bank economists. They have labeled the issue as a "micro problem" for individuals, rather than a macro problem for the economy. ..."
"... Yet that still equates to 2.8 million people with around $495 billion in debt as of March, according to Department of Education data. Even more worrying is that it's an increase of almost $61 billion since the end of 2017. ..."
"... In the second scenario, loans are shown over a 20-year term with rates at 7 percent. Monthly payments are smaller but the overall burden is bigger, with total interest payments on $100,000 of debt rising above $86,000. ..."
The $1.6 trillion in U.S. student debt may not pose a direct threat to the economy, but it's causing anguish that goes far beyond
financial concerns for the people who owe it.
One in 15 borrowers has considered suicide due to their school loans, according to a survey of 829 people conducted last month
by Student Loan Planner, a debt advisory group.
Most student debt is held by people with balances on the lower end of the scale, with only 0.8 percent of the U.S. population
owing more than $100,000, according to Deutsche Bank economists. They have labeled the issue as a "micro problem" for individuals,
rather than a macro problem for the economy.
Yet that still equates to 2.8 million people with around $495 billion in debt as of March, according to Department of Education
data. Even more worrying is that it's an increase of almost $61 billion since the end of 2017.
Student loans are the second-biggest kind of debt in America behind home mortgages and often more expensive to service relative
to the amount owed because interest rates are generally higher. Not to mention that unlike buying a home, an education isn't a tangible
asset that can be sold.
It's also turning into a hot political issue as next year's presidential election approaches. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed
a plan to cancel loans for many borrowers, while former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper addressed some of the knock-on effects for
the economy in a presentation at the Milken Institute conference earlier this week.
"Of course millennials would love to buy a house," Hickenlooper said April 30 in Los Angeles. But, "they're buried in debt!"
The following scenarios show the monthly costs associated with different levels of student debt. The first envisages a 10-year
loan at 6 percent. To put the figures into perspective, a 30-year mortgage of $400,000 at current interest rates would cost about
$2,000 per month.
In the second scenario, loans are shown over a 20-year term with rates at 7 percent. Monthly payments are smaller but the
overall burden is bigger, with total interest payments on $100,000 of debt rising above $86,000.
Lobbying and campaign finance are two forms of legalized bribery. Citizens United
legalized political corruption for corporations and showed the complete corruption of the
Supreme Court which decided it. Astroturfed political organizations, the manufacture of
"popular consent", are another form of corruption in politics. The hiding of contributors to
these and other groups gives cover to their corruption.
The media are corrupt, even a lot of the blogosphere is. It is all propaganda all the
time, just segmented and tailored to different audiences of rubes.
Universities are corrupt. They no longer fulfill an educational mission rather they are
purveyors of the status quo. They are corrupt in their corporate structure, in their
alliances with other corporations, and in their foisting of debt on to their
students.
Academia is corrupt. There is the whole publish or perish thing that results in most of
academia's research product being worthless and useless. This is even before we get to the
quack sciences like economics. Academic economics is completely corrupt. The dominant
politico-economic system of our times is kleptocracy. Yet almost no academic economist will
acknowledge it let alone make it central to their point of view.
The judicial system and the judiciary are corrupt. How else to explain our two-tiered
justice system? The great criminals of our times, the largest frauds in human history, are
not only not prosecuted, they are not even investigated. And how can anyone take the Supreme
Court to be anything but corrupt? This is an institution that except for a couple of decades
around the Warren Court has, for more than 200 years, always been on the side of the haves
against the have-nots, for the powerful, against the powerless, pro-slavery, pro-segregation,
and anti-worker. How can anyone take decisions like Bush v. Gore or Citizens United to be
anything other than corrupt, politics dressed up as legal thinking?
In a kleptocracy, all the institutions, at least those controlled by the rich and elites,
are put into the service of the kleptocrats to loot or justify and defend looting and the
looters. So corruption is endemic and systemic.
Brain Drain and the Polarization of America
The highly educated are concentrating together, depriving struggling communities and dividing the country.
By
Rachel Sheffield and Scott Winship
•
May 3, 2019
Detroit, Michigan | Credit:
Hotforphotog; Shutterstock
Are we more divided as a nation today than we were before? Our
new
research
within the Joint Economic Committee's Social Capital Project suggests that we are. The findings indicate
that Americans are more frequently dividing themselves geographically and along lines of education. Highly educated
Americans have increasingly moved to a handful of states over the last several decades, leaving other places behind.
This "brain drain" has clear economic implications. Beyond economics though, it's also likely draining social capital
from many places, as communities lose talent and resources that would help support civic institutions. Brain drain and
educational sorting exacerbate political and cultural divides as well: Americans segregate themselves into communities
where they more frequently reside near those similar to themselves, decreasing the likelihood of rubbing shoulders with
those who see the world differently.
The Rust Belt, the Plains, and some states in New England are experiencing high levels of brain drain.
It's not news that highly educated Americans are more likely to move. America's highly educated have consistently
been more prone to pack up their bags and seek opportunity outside their hometowns. But surprisingly, there have been
few attempts to quantify the magnitude of the problem and assess whether it is getting worse. To rectify that, we
created brain drain measures that compare the share of people leaving their birth states who are highly educated to
either the highly educated share of people staying in their birth states or the share entering the states who are highly
educated. We found that today, highly educated movers in the U.S. tend to leave certain states and regions of the
country at higher rates than in the past and concentrate in a smaller group of states that are home to booming
metropolitan areas. This leads to growing geographic divides between areas that are thriving and places that struggle.
With fewer states retaining and attracting talent, more areas are left behind.
A handful of states have become exclusive destinations for the highly educated. They not only hold onto more of their
homegrown talent, but they also gain more highly educated adults than they lose. These talent-magnet states are along
the West Coast, as well as the Boston-Washington corridor.
Advertisement
Beyond the coasts, a few other states, like Texas, are retaining their homegrown talent while simultaneously winning
a balance of talent from elsewhere.
These "brain gain" states are like an elite club whose members trade among themselves. For example, California draws
the greatest share of its highly educated entrants from other brain gain states: New York, Illinois, and Texas, which
are ranked third, fourth, and eighth, respectively, on net brain gain. New York pulls in highly educated entrants
primarily from New Jersey (ranked sixth on net brain gain) and California. Massachusetts (ranked second) is also among
its top five sending states. The most common origins of Texas's entrants include California, Illinois, and New York. New
Jersey draws its highly educated from the likes of New York, Massachusetts, California, and Illinois. New York and New
Jersey are among Massachusetts' most common sending states. New York, New Jersey, California, and Virginia (ranked
seventh) are among the top states sending highly educated natives to Maryland.
On the opposite side of the coin are the many states that are not only bleeding highly educated adults but failing to
attract others to replace them. Rust Belt states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri -- are
particularly plagued by brain drain. Several Plains states -- Iowa and the Dakotas -- as well as states in New England -- Vermont
and New Hampshire -- are also experiencing high levels of brain drain. Although this is hardly a new phenomenon for the
Rust Belt, it's become a worsening problem over the last 50 years for the other high brain-drain states mentioned.
Brain drain's effects on state economies are obvious. Places that lose more of their highly educated adults are
likely going to be economically worse off than those that retain or attract highly educated adults. And if the highly
educated are concentrating in fewer areas, then more parts of the country will be prone to economic stagnation. But
beyond the economic implications, brain drain also has an impact on social capital. If areas are drained of their most
highly educated, those left behind may struggle to support churches, athletic leagues, parent-teacher associations,
scouting groups, and so forth. These institutions matter for the well-being of communities, as they bring people
together in purposeful relationships, ultimately creating the social fabric of our nation.
Another way that brain drain's educational divides can deplete social capital is by creating deeper political and
cultural divides between Americans. The highly educated more often hold liberal political views compared to those with
less than a college education. America's major metropolitan areas (many of the states that win the highly educated are
home to thriving cities) tend to
vote Democratic
,
while most other areas of the country
vote Republican
. Those living in urban areas are also more likely to hold
liberal
political views
, whereas those living in rural areas are more commonly conservative.
Thus, as a result of brain drain and self-sorting, Americans are now more likely to live in communities where they
are isolated from people who hold different ideologies and values. Less association between people of different
viewpoints can exacerbate political divides, as people become more steeped in their own beliefs. When those who are
different are further away, it is easier to cast them as a faceless group of opponents upon whom all blame for America's
problems belongs, rather than as neighbors with whom to find common ground. Ultimately, social segregation weakens the
idea that, as Americans, we share something important in common with one another.
A growing federal government only adds to the problem of geographic divide. Naturally, neither heartland
traditionalists nor coastal cosmopolitans want to be ruled by the other camp. However, with more power at the national
level, national elections have higher stakes for everyone. Each camp feels threatened when its party loses control. With
less association among those with different viewpoints, political discourse turns into fever-pitched discord.
The strength of our relationships is crucial to the strength of our nation. Americans will have to work to make their
communities places in which not only the most highly educated benefit, but others as well. We must find ways to reach
across the divides that separate us.
Rachel Sheffield is a senior policy advisor in the chairman's office of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress,
and Scott Winship is the executive director of the committee.
As is usual, the headline economic number is always the
rosiest number .
Wages for production and nonsupervisory workers accelerated to a 3.4 percent annual pace,
signaling gains for lower-paid employees.
That sounds pretty good. Except for the part where it is a lie. For starters, it doesn't account for
inflation .
Labor Department numbers released Wednesday show that real average hourly earnings, which
compare the nominal rise in wages with the cost of living, rose 1.7 percent in January on a
year-over-year basis.
1.7% is a lot less than 3.4%. While the financial news was bullish, the
actual professionals took the news differently.
Wage inflation was also muted with average hourly earnings rising six cents, or 0.2% in April
after rising by the same margin in March. Average hourly earnings "were disappointing," said Ian Lyngen, head of U.S. rates strategy at
BMO Capital Markets in New York.
Secondly, 1.7% is an average, not a median.
For instance, none of this applied to you if you are an
older
worker .
Weekly earnings for workers aged 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher in the first quarter of 2019
than they were in the first quarter of 2007, after accounting for inflation, they found.
For comparison, earnings rose 4.7% during that same period for workers between the ages of 35
and 54.
On the other hand, if you worked for a
bank your wages went up at a rate far above average. This goes double if you are in
management.
Among the biggest standouts: commercial banks, which employ an estimated 1.3 million people in
the U.S. Since Trump took office in January 2017, they have increased their average hourly wage
at an annualized pace of almost 11 percent, compared with just 3.3 percent under Obama.
Finally, there is the reason for this incredibly small wage increase fo regular workers.
Hint: it wasn't because of capitalism and all the bullsh*t jobs it creates.
The tiny wage increase that the working class has seen is because of what the capitalists said
was a
terrible idea .
For Americans living in the 21 states where the federal minimum wage is binding, inflation
means that the minimum wage has lost 16 percent of its purchasing power.
But elsewhere, many workers and employers are experiencing a minimum wage well above 2009
levels. That's because state capitols and, to an unprecedented degree, city halls have become
far more active in setting their own minimum wages. ... Averaging across all of these federal, state and local minimum wage laws, the effective minimum
wage in the United States -- the average minimum wage binding each hour of minimum wage work --
will be $11.80 an hour in 2019. Adjusted for inflation, this is probably the highest minimum
wage in American history. The effective minimum wage has not only outpaced inflation in recent years, but it has also
grown faster than typical wages. We can see this from the Kaitz index, which compares the
minimum wage with median overall wages.
So if you are waiting for capitalism to trickle down on you, it's never going to happen.
span y gjohnsit on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 6:21pm
Thousands of South Carolina teachers rallied outside their state capitol Wednesday, demanding
pay raises, more planning time, increased school funding -- and, in a twist, more legal
protections for their freedom of speech SC for Ed, the grassroots activist group that organized Wednesday's demonstration, told CNN
that many teachers fear protesting or speaking up about education issues, worrying they'll
face retaliation at work. Saani Perry, a teacher in Fort Mill, S.C., told CNN that people in
his profession are "expected to sit in the classroom and stay quiet and not speak [their]
mind."
To address these concerns, SC for Ed is lobbying for the Teachers' Freedom of Speech Act,
which was introduced earlier this year in the state House of Representatives. The bill would
specify that "a public school district may not willfully transfer, terminate or fail to renew
the contract of a teacher because the teacher has publicly or privately supported a public
policy decision of any kind." If that happens, teachers would be able to sue for three times
their salary.
Teachers across the country are raising similar concerns about retaliation. Such fears
aren't unfounded: Lawmakers in some states that saw strikes last year have introduced bills
this year that would punish educators for skipping school to protest.
Millennial and generation Z workers are becoming increasingly miserable with their jobs and careers. Since we are told several
times a day by the media that the economy is booming, why are so many young workers so disastrously melancholy all the time?
"When you're struggling with your mental health it can be much harder to stay in work or manage your spending, while being
in debt can cause huge stress and anxiety – so the two issues feed off each other, creating a vicious cycle which can destroy
lives," said Helen Undy the institute's chief executive.
"Yet despite how connected these problems are, financial services rarely think about our mental health, and mental health
services rarely consider what is happening with our money."
So why are we constantly being told everything is fine? The mainstream media loves to say that the U.S. is nearly ten years into
one of the longest economic expansions in history, unemployment is the lowest it's been in almost half a century, and employees have
more job choices than they've had in years. But there's just one problem. That's not actual truthful when taking all of the data
into consideration. Sure, unemployment is low the way the government calculates it, but there's a reason for that.
102 million Americans are no longer "in the workforce" and therefore, unaccounted for.
When a working-age American does not have a job, the federal number crunchers put them into one of two different categories.
Either they are categorized as "unemployed" or they are categorized as "not in the labor force".
But you have to add both of those categories together to get the total number of Americans that are not working.
Over the last decade, the number of Americans that are in the "unemployed" category has been steadily going down, but the number
of Americans "not in the labor force" has been rapidly going up.
In both cases we are talking about Americans that do not have a job. It is just a matter of how the federal government chooses
to categorize those individuals. –
Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog
That could partially explain the misery some are feeling, but those who have jobs aren't happy either. They are often reeling
from student loan and credit card debt. Being depressed makes shopping feel like a solution, but when the bill comes, the depression
once again sets in making this a difficult cycle to break for so many just trying to scrape by.
Depression and suicide rates are rising sharply
and other than putting the blame on superficial issues, researchers are at a loss as to the real reason why. But could it possibly
be that as the elite globalists continue to take over the world and enslave mankind, people are realizing that they aren't meant
to be controlled or manipulated, but meant to be free?
There's something we are all missing all around the globe. Could it possibly be free will and a life of freedom from theft and
violent coercion and force that's missing?
When even your own article lies to everyone... so the modern person that does well are those who lie the best and are the best
con artists. Trump is an example. Low talent High con.
Example the US unemployment number.
Only the pool of unemployed that is Presently eligible for unemployment benefits is counted in the Unemployment number. That
means self employed, commissioned workers, contractors etc are not included in the pool of unemployment even if they are out of
work because they are unemployment ineligible.
Thus, over time, as unemployment benefits are lost, the unemployment pool shrinks. This is called a mathematical regression.
How far does it shrink? To the point of equilibrium which is roughly 4% in which new persons enter the work force to the same
extent of those losing benefits and being removed and become invisible.
Thus, Unemployment is a bogus number grossly understating truthful Unemployment. This method was first used under Obama and
persists today under the Orange poser.
Nepotism and Affirmative action
Why would this make people unhappy? Chronic underemployment. Advancement is mostly by nepotism or affirmative action the flip
side of the same coin. The incoming Harvard Class this year was 30% legacy student... and 30% affirmative action and the rest
be damned. Happy?
Feminism has gripped the workplace.
Men hate working for female bosses. They don't trust them, they don't trust their judgment which often looks political and
never logical. Men feel those women were promoted because of gender.
I saw this years ago in a clean room at National Semiconductor. A woman was put in charge of a team of roughly 30 white nerd
males. She was at them constantly for not locking doors behind them and other menial infractions. She could not comprehend the
complexity of the work or how inspiration operates but she would nag them and bully them.
At another facility there was a genius that would come to work and set up a sleeping bag and go to sleep under his desk. He
was a Unix programmer and system engineer. So when something went wrong they would wake him and he would get up, solve the problem
and go back to sleep.
Then the overstuffed string of pearls showed up as the new unit boss. She was infuriated that somebody would dare sleep on
the clock and so blatantly. So she would harass him and wake him. Then one day she got so mad she started kicking him while he
was sleeping. He grabbed his sleeping bag and briefcase and stormed out.
Ultimately the woman's boss took her to task and explained to her that it didn't matter if that employee slept under his desk
because when he worked to solve problems only he could solve he saved the company millions. She was fired. As a token stipulation
the sleeping genius came back and a sign was posted on his desk. "Kicking this employee is grounds for immediate dismissal."
Usually the nerd walks and just gets replaced by some diversity politician and string of pearls then sets the tone by making
the workplace ****. Women simply are not as intelligent as men and pretending they are just wrecks morale of the people who are
really intelligent. The rise of the shoulder padded woman string of pearls bully is a scourge to one and all.
Simple answer: because people are spineless and terrible negotiators.
Long answer: for years the adage has been "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" or "find a good job and
never leave" or "work your way to the top" or "be a hard worker, trust your leadership, keep your head down, and don't make waves."
********.
If you do what you love, you'll learn to hate it. Welcome to misery.
Upward mobility doesn't happen unless you leave. If you're a good little productive worker drone, management has no incentive
to give you more than 1-3% raises every year to keep you 'loyal.' Once you've wasted 20 or so years being a robot, welcome to
misery.
Nobody gets promoted unless you're a useless ***-kisser who fails to be productive and hasn't done anything egregious enough
to get canned. Once you've been passed by for that promotion you want enough times, welcome to misery.
The people making the decisions at the top are the useless ***-kissers that can't do what you do but they talk a good game.
Most of them are case studies in the Peter Principle. Once you realize that the 'top' consists of nothing but fuckwads, welcome
to misery.
The only way to get ahead and get what you want out of a career is to develop the skills you need and market yourself top someone
who'll pay you what you're worth.
Develop strong negotiation skills early, know your market value, and don't be afraid of change.
Employer loyalty is a farce; if you think your employer is loyal to you, I've got some oceanfront property in New Mexico to
sell you.
Less than a month ago, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio was
warning the world that there would be a "revolution" unless the country could fix its
income inequality problem. He's also been repeatedly claiming that capitalism is broken.
Broken, that is, for everyone other than Ray Dalio , who was last year's best paid hedge
fund manager, according to DealBook ; and
since hedge funders generate the highest current income of all "workers", he was effectively
the highest paid American in 2018 (this, of course, excludes capital gains and other
non-current income), when it is estimated that Dalio earned $2 billion over the last 12 months
, up from a reported $1.3 billion in 2017.
Dalio beat out other big names like Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who earned $1.5
billion, Ken Griffin of Citadel, who earned $870 million, David Shaw of D.E. Shaw, who earned
$500 million, Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management, who earned $465 million and Steve Cohen
of Point72, who earned a tiny, by his standards, $70 million.
Of course, this raises the obvious question of whether or not Dalio is doing enough to
reform a system that he rails against. "As most of you know, I'm a capitalist, and even I think
capitalism is broken," Dalio wrote on Twitter in early April.
He then defended the hedge fund business model to NPR last week, stating: "If you were to ask
the pensioners and you were to ask our clients, who are teachers or firemen, whether we've
contributed to their well-being, they would say that they, we, contribute."
Andrew Ross Sorkin questioned whether or not Dalio is putting his money where his mouth is:
"...the magnitude of the hedge fund managers' compensation raises a very basic question about
whether capitalism is 'broken'. Even if Mr. Dalio took home $500 million, the rest of his
income could pay 10,000 families $150,000 each. "
For a little over a year now, Dalio has been warning any journalist who will listen that the
looming market crash and economic downturn, which always seems to be between a year or two
years away, will stress the fraying fabric of our disintegrating capitalist system to the point
where it simply breaks apart. Central banks, already out of ammo from their pre-crisis stimulus
programs will be powerless to pull us back from the precipice, and with our federal debt burden
already so heavy, Congress will have little wiggle room to spend us out of the mess (that is,
unless they finally cave to the MMTers).
But in his latest 18-page treatise entitled "Why
and How Capitalism Needs To Be Reformed (Part 1)" , published - as per usual - on LinkedIn,
Dalio kicks his fearmongering approach up to '11', surpassing redistributive rhetoric of Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and going straight for Vladimir Lenin.
According to Dalio, the flaws in the American capitalist system are breeding such horrific
inequality between the wealthy and the poor that at some point in the not-too-distant future,
the only sensible recourse for the unwashed masses will be a bloody revolution.
To support this theory, Dalio points to statistics showing that the bottom 60% of Americans
are lagging further and further behind the top 40% in the areas of education, social mobility,
assets, income and - crucially - health. American men earning the least will likely die ten
years earlier than those making the most.
In previous essays, Dalio has
warned about the threat of economic populism (the anti-establishment trend that helped
deliver both Brexit and President Trump's stunning upset victory over Hillary Clinton). Now,
he's apparently identifying with populists of a different stripe (namely, those on the left).
All of these sources of inequality, Dalio argues, represent an "existential threat" to the
American economy, that will only be exacerbated by falling competitiveness relative to other
nations and the "high risk of bad conflict."
Conveniently absolving himself and his fellow billionaires of any blame for this sad state
of affairs, Dalio claimed that the cause of this sad state of affairs was simply a poorly
designed system that can, with a little effort, be corrected.
"These unacceptable outcomes aren't due to either a) evil rich people doing bad things to
poor people or b) lazy poor people and bureaucratic inefficiencies, as much as they are due
to how the capitalist system is now working," Dalio said.
Maybe we're just conservative old fashioned pragmatists, but isn't there a bit of extremely
convenient hypocrisy in calling for socialism in the year that capitalism made you the
best paid person in America? And, if we're mistaken, why isn't Dalio shelling out his billions
for the cause he so loudly has been advocating for?
That's brilliant. The middle class is getting blown away like dust in the wind, and one
dude makes an estimated $2 Billion in 12 months betting on a rigged game. It this what has
become of the American dream?
The New York Times has an
illuminating article today summarizing recent research on the gender effects of
mandatory overwork in professional jobs. Lawyers, people in finance and other
client-centered occupations are increasingly required to be available round-the-clock, with
50-60 or more hours of work per week the norm. Among other costs, the impact on wage inequality
between men and women is severe. Since women are largely saddled with primary responsibility
for child care, even when couples ostensibly embrace equality on a theoretical level, the
workaholic jobs are allocated to men. This shows up in dramatic differences between typical
male and female career paths. The article doesn't discuss comparable issues in working class
employment, but availability for last-minute changes in work schedules and similar demands are
likely to impact men and women differentially as well.
What the article doesn't point out is that the situation it describes is a classic prisoners
dilemma.* Consider law firms. They compete for clients, and clients prefer attorneys who are
available on call, always prepared and willing to adjust to whatever schedule the client throws
at them. Assume that most lawyers want sane, predictable work hours if they are offered without
a severe penalty in pay. If law firms care about the well-being of their employees but also
about profits, we have all the ingredients to construct a standard PD payoff matrix:
There is a penalty to unilateral cooperation, cutting work hours back to a work-life balance
level. If your firm does it and the others don't, you lose clients to them.
There is a benefit to unilateral defection. If everyone else is cutting hours but you don't,
you scoop up the lion's share of the clients.
Mutual cooperation is preferred to mutual defection. Law firms, we are assuming, would
prefer a world in which overwork was removed from the contest for competitive advantage. They
would compete for clients as before, but none would require their staff to put in soul-crushing
hours. The alternative equilibrium, in which competition is still on the basis of the quality
of work but everyone is on call 24/7 is inferior.
If the game is played once, mutual defection dominates. If it is played repeatedly there is
a possibility for mutual cooperation to establish itself, but only under favorable conditions
(which apparently don't exist in the world of NY law firms). The logical solution is some
form of binding regulation.
The reason for bringing this up is that it strengthens the case for collective action rather
than placing all the responsibility on individuals caught in the system, including for that
matter individual law firms. Or, the responsibility is political, to demand constraints on the
entire industry. One place to start would be something like France's
right-to-disconnect law .
*I haven't read the studies by economists and sociologists cited in the article, but I
suspect many of them make the same point I'm making here.
"... Amen. This attitude of fearing speech reflects a deeper problem which is valuing fear and cowardice as a virtue. ..."
"... The "fight" against "Hate Speech" is a cunning maneuver of Our Ivy-League overlords. They are materialists , living A Bucket List existence. Their lives are "felt" as a succession of positive and negative experiences. "God is dead. We are gods!" ..."
"... Thus if someone says for instance "migrants come to steal your job or reduce your salary" this is not purely hate as it has a persuasive intent so it can pass. Then if you "say migrants are ugly thieves" it has more hate content but still a persuasive intent so it can pass under this free speech rule. If you finally say "migrants are ugly" it is pure hate and forbidden. Did I get it? ..."
"... Slightly sideways, but another indication that neo-liberalism is just another religion: ..."
"... So when we come to considering the social environment inside a bourgeois institution like a university, we must consider it from a certain point of view, a certain framing, connected to its purposes and performance from the point of view of those who have relevant power. The primary purposes of most such institutions currently seem to be class filtering, indoctrination, and vocational training. ..."
"... This post makes an interesting encapsulation of Neoliberalism: "life is an accumulation of moments of utility and disutility". I am not convinced this formulation is sufficient to characterize Neoliberalism. How well would this formulation distinguish between Neoliberals and Epicures? ..."
"... All about the motive, eh? That is neoliberal–i.e. sure we wrecked the economy and bombed the smithereens out of some foreign countries but we meant well. ..."
"... Shutting off debate is the worst way to prepare for a society that is undergoing undying stresses and even deformations of freedoms plastered over the word democracy. ..."
"... The neoliberal preference for comparing measurable effects, scoring them as costs or benefits, is the standard MBA religion. Why if you can't measure it, it mustn't exist! ..."
"... The problem is just about anything "becomes" "hate speach" as a means of censorship. Calling out Isrial's influence on US politics becomes antisimitism. Being critical of Hillary is misogany. Hell, not liking Campain Marvel is an example of hate speach. Recently negative reviews of the movie were removed from Rotten Tomatos as an example. ..."
"... An example of how this plays out mentioned in comments is about the conflating of anti-Israel and antisemitic being the one and the same ..."
From this jaundiced perspective, what makes the proposed "neo-liberal speech"
Marketplace(TM) inauthentic is that it bases it's existence upon the realm of 'social
ephemera.'
If the long run winners in the hurly burly of ideological struggle are at present unknown,
then it behooves us to place no limits upon the nature of the originating "entry level"
concepts, memes, etc. Such early selection is a purely serendipitous process. Then, not
reason, nor "utility" determines the eventual outcome, but chance. Now there's a philosophy
for you. Chaos Theory as Political determinate.
Sorry, no. How we feel is up to us. We are not machines and we are not robots. We are in
charge of our emotions and our reactions.
What I find astonishing about this line of argument is that it completely ignores thousands
of years of wisdom literature, from ancient India through Greece and Rome to the mystics of
different traditions up to today's Cognitive Behavior Therapies , all of which remind us' in
different ways, that whilst we cannot control the outer world, we can control our reactions
to it. If I didn't know better I would think that the current ´don't say that it makes
me unhappy' movement was a Russian plot to destroy the West by promoting a epidemic of mental
illness.
Amen. This attitude of fearing speech reflects a deeper problem which is valuing fear and
cowardice as a virtue. It reminds me of the male attitude towards upper class women in
Victorian times as hopelessly in need of protection from crude language and the dirt from the
hoi poloi.
Sometimes I feel like being part of the alt-right because this perverse form of
political correctness is way too Maoist for my taste.
The "fight" against "Hate Speech" is a cunning maneuver of Our Ivy-League overlords. They
are materialists , living A Bucket List existence. Their lives are "felt" as a succession of
positive and negative experiences. "God is dead. We are gods!"
"The decor is fabulous. The waiters hair is unkempt. We had to wait to be seated. My fork
was not polished. The soup was delicious. The crab was over salted "
The empty lives of "the feelers".
The People of the Land watch incredulously; this slow motion train wreck.
'we can control our reactions to it.' – Indeed we can with training and with that on
occasion it's good to listen to those that are [family blog] because it's good to know what's
going on inside their heads. It also good to know where they are. Hate to say it but the
founders of this country really encouraged free speech and then all loyalists were rounded
out of it or made extremely miserable.
Thus if someone says for instance "migrants come to steal your job or reduce your salary"
this is not purely hate as it has a persuasive intent so it can pass. Then if you "say
migrants are ugly thieves" it has more hate content but still a persuasive intent so it can
pass under this free speech rule. If you finally say "migrants are ugly" it is pure hate and
forbidden. Did I get it?
Ya, but its all free speech. You'd need to say a lot more than 'ugly'. The whole notion of
'hate speech' is problematic. As it usually is associated with illegal actions, i.e., crimes
it has not become a first amendment issue but it should be. Historically, one had a right to
say what one wanted and historically, the people often did everything, up to and including,
killing one for doing it. The question then becomes what speech is tolerated in what manner.
There are no absolute answers, just absolute people.
Slightly sideways, but another indication that neo-liberalism is just another
religion:
>what affect does salmon restoration have on your sense of preference satisfaction, on
your utility or disutility?
What affect does it have on the salmon, (family blog) what *I* feel, is my reaction. And
saying that, I do notice the further hogwash where "utility" which sounds all manly and
right-thinking is actually all about our tender feelings.
'What affect does it have on the salmon, (family blog) what *I* feel, is my
reaction. '
That's what 'utility' means: 'stuff I like', such as getting basic survival needs met, and
so on up. Most people don't care about the utility of the salmon because the salmon have no
power, not because they lack feelings. So generally we only consider people's feelings
about the salmon.
So when we come to considering the social environment inside a bourgeois institution like
a university, we must consider it from a certain point of view, a certain framing, connected
to its purposes and performance from the point of view of those who have relevant power. The
primary purposes of most such institutions currently seem to be class filtering,
indoctrination, and vocational training.
These purposes (utilities) seem to be damaged or
impeded by certain kinds of speech and other social practices, so those forms of speech and
practice are likely to be restrained or forbidden on the institution's turf. I don't see how
the ruling class and other elites can do otherwise if they want to preserve their system as
it stands, which of course most of them do because it is the system which supports their way
of life and privileges.
Few are able to have their errors explained without feeling bad about being wrong. I hate
being wrong, don't you? And yet I'd rather learn of, and from, my mistakes than cheerfully
continue being wrong.
Therefore, in the spirit of the Golden rule, I have to say "no one should have the right
to make us feel bad." is WRONG. If that means I am speaking hate, and need to be ignored and
de-platformed and possibly further censured by society I've never been that social anyway.
Fuck 'em.
I tend to think it would always be better if people just said what they were really
thinking, instead of trying to figure out what they can say that will be politically
correct.
If what they have to say is hateful, at least you know where they are really coming from,
and you can treat them accordingly going forward.
This post makes an interesting encapsulation of Neoliberalism: "life is an accumulation of
moments of utility and disutility". I am not convinced this formulation is sufficient to
characterize Neoliberalism. How well would this formulation distinguish between Neoliberals
and Epicures?
"Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism insofar as it declares pleasure to be its sole
intrinsic goal, the concept that the absence of pain and fear constitutes the greatest
pleasure, and its advocacy of a simple life, make it very different from "hedonism" as
colloquially understood."
Is 'utility' greatly different than 'pleasure' as Epicures frame that word?
I do like the last sentence of the post: "It's the greatest power of an ideology that it
can seep into the worldview of those who claim to oppose it." I think that applies to all too
many of those debating about how to deal with Climate Chaos in terms of the economic costs,
price per kilowatt, carbon taxes, or jobs lost or created. Economic issues are not
unimportant but some of the consequences of Climate Chaos are clearly "priceless" to ape a
recent credit card commercial.
I think Peter Dorman is being coy. In 2017 at his college there was the "Day of Absence"
Controversy. A biology professor refused to cancel his classes on the Day of Absence and
became the subject of much rage. He and his wife left the college and taught else where.
I
remember the Free Speech movement of the earl 60s. At some public universities, members of
the communist party were banned from speaking on campus. We protested this ban. Eventually
the bans were lifted. Nobody cared whose feeling were hurt.
The topic of free speech per se free speech was excellently covered by Howard Zinn in his
talk "Second Thoughts on the First Amendment". [I received a copy of the mp3 of this speech
as a premium from my contribution to Pacifica Radio WBAI. The lowest price mp3 or written
transcript for the speech was at https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/zinh006/
transcript for $3 or mp3 download for $5.]
Zinn's speech made it clear that free speech was no simple matter contained within the
meaning of the words 'free speech'. There are questions of the intent of speech -- the
effects of a speech bad feelings? inciting a riot -- capacity for speech that spreads fear
spreading unwarranted panic the classic yelling "Fire" in a crowded building -- questions of
the forum? There is free speech on a street corner and free speech on television, and they
differ greatly in kind, and there is defamatory and slanderous speech.
I am open to allowing any speech. I heard enough unpleasant and upsetting speech from my
ex-wife to last several lifetimes but my ears grew deaf to the sounds she made and remained
acute to other speech, even became more acute. The equation between speech and money our
'Supremes' made is little short of the complete debasement of the Supreme Court as a forum of
jurisprudence. The 'prudence' must be expunges from any characterizations of their judgments
FAVORABLE or otherwise. The Supreme Court does not interpret the laws of the land. Like our
Legislatures they are 'bought' and 'bot' to the whims of money.
All about the motive, eh? That is neoliberal–i.e. sure we wrecked the economy and
bombed the smithereens out of some foreign countries but we meant well.
My library just put a sign next to the entrance saying "This is a safe space–no
racism or sexism allowed." I haven't bothered to object to what was doubtless considered
boilerplate–nor will I–but that's a highly political statement and especially for
a library where free speech should be paramount. For example some claim that Huckleberry Finn
is racist (and it is a bit). Off the shelves? Once you start judging motives then the slope
is quite slippery.
IMHO we should be worrying about the real dangers and abuses and not the imagined ones.
Those college students need thicker skins.
Unfortunately death is guaranteed. It is unavoidable. We all try to avoid it. And most of
us try to not be responsible for causing it (in humans). But there are systemic ills that
magnify the risks of mortality (lead in water supply etc). And the limits to "paying
attention" are part of those systemic ills. Deliberately ignoring someone, of course, is
callous.
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too. A translation of the famed passage by Voltaire, Essay on Tolerance
In college, an antidote to what is called "hate speech" used to be teach-ins. Setting
these up could be an exercise in arguments or debates, depending on the vehemence and
sanctimony of participants, and taking part in the selection of moderators and agendas, but
it could be done so long as there were those dedicated to hearing, sharing and holding onto
the value of information and debate.
Shutting off debate is the worst way to prepare for a society that is undergoing undying
stresses and even deformations of freedoms plastered over the word democracy.
Heard on Democracy Now this afternoon, that U Mass Amherst will be allowing an
appearance/discussion re Palestine with Roger Waters and others, to go on regardless of
protests against.
I'd suggest the dispute is theological. Everyone wants a "higher power" to bless their
particular approach. The neoliberal preference for comparing measurable effects, scoring them
as costs or benefits, is the standard MBA religion. Why if you can't measure it, it mustn't
exist!
The whole approach doesn't require too much thinking, and has the imprimatur of "science"
and "reason" both Excellent gods, all. Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years makes a
good case for the way our confusion of monetary with ethical comparisons has managed to
bamboozle humanity for literally thousands of years. You see rich people deserve their
wealth. They are good , and you can tell by the amount of money they have. See!
Some speech has as its primary purpose making others suffer, through insult or
instigating fear, and has little or no persuasive intent. That's hate speech, and I don't
see a problem with curtailing it.
The problem is just about anything "becomes" "hate speach" as a means of censorship.
Calling out Isrial's influence on US politics becomes antisimitism. Being critical of Hillary
is misogany. Hell, not liking Campain Marvel is an example of hate speach. Recently negative
reviews of the movie were removed from Rotten Tomatos as an example.
You might imagin that a line could be drawn some where. But when ever you draw that line,
it always migrates over time.
Isn't part of the question what intellectually backs up drone strikes that demonstrably
cause innocent casualties along with the various physical aggressions against the enemy by
the empire.
Mirror shot time with Nuremberg principles in the background for the now grizzled
neo leaders one hopes.
I can imagine a professor at Evergreen State College having firm views of freedom of
speech after what has been happening to that place over the past coupla years. Last year it
ranked as one of the worst colleges in the US for free speech-
A college tailored to the demands of these extremist students would be a very sterile
place indeed for original thinking. In college, ideas are supposed to undergo savage debate
and examination to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Of course at this point I will not
bring up the fact that CalPERS's Marcie Frost is a graduate from here as being an example of
what is being produced.
Those more recent students will find themselves in a radically new environment when they
graduate. It will be called the real world. But I have no doubt that many of them will be
able to junk their ideas when it comes to earning a living as those ideas would have served
their purpose of giving them power while in college.
An example of how this plays out mentioned in comments is about the conflating of anti-Israel
and antisemitic being the one and the same. But if you give this idea a pass, who is to say
that in a generation's time that a new wave of students may define pro-Israeli as being
anti-American? It could happen you know. Until a few years ago the obvious flaw of conflating
two such different identities would have been taken down promptly but no longer. And why?
Because it has been found to be an expedient tactic, especially by politicians. A way of
shutting down critics and right-thinkers. But there will be blowback for making this part of
the norm and I predict that it will be massive.
Of course at this point I will not bring up the fact that CalPERS's Marcie Frost is a
graduate from here as being an example of what is being produced.
A point to remember is that to obtain a conscientious objector status (which I had in
1971) one had to object to ALL war as a pacifist and not just the Vietnam War
Try telling that to a bunch of WW2 vets on your draft board!
"Middle class" households (in the 61 st to 99 th
percentiles of the size distribution) rely mainly on
wage incomes.
Bottom 60% households rely roughly equally on
wages and fiscal transfers net of taxes. They
appear to have negative saving and negligible
wealth.
After transfers and capital gains, the share of the
top 1% has risen, while the bottom 60% income
share has been stable. Hence the middle class
has been squeezed.
As has been mentioned at NC before, historian Walter Scheidel did not find prior eras when
lessening income equality occurred peacefully.
I find it noteworthy that Scheidel is an historian, not an economist or political science
professor, so he is somewhat outside the normally viewed expert classes quoted in
op-eds/media.
Scheidel sees violent transformations and demographic contractions as, historically, the
only drivers to lessen inequality.
"Development tends to increase resource inequality (Agrarianism; Industrialism)"
"Violent shocks are the only factors capable of significantly reducing resource inequality
(for a while)"
"Violence: Mass-mobilization wars, Transformative revolutions, State collapse"
"Demographic contraction: Pandemics"
"Other factors are exotic or ineffective (abolition of slavery, migration, financial
crises)"
Sheidel has that financial crises CAN lessen inequality, at least temporarily.
In the USA, in 2008 crisis, the political class prevented this from happening as they
"avoided a new great depression"
When one looks at the current political system and control of the media in the USA, it can
be postulated that the small rays of hope (such as Bernie, AOC or liberal economists) may be
tolerated by those in control because they offer some cheap palliative "hope" to the
masses.
Yves closing comment " I would not give self-reform much hope." may be an excellent
prediction.
I believe the extremely wealthy are looking to game the system, keeping the rabble at bay
as inexpensively as possible, using the top 10% as buffers.
Despite the lowest unemployment rates since the late 1960s, the American economy is failing
its citizens. Some 90 percent have seen their incomes stagnate or decline in the past 30
years. This is not surprising, given that the United States has the highest level of
inequality among the advanced countries and one of the lowest levels of opportunity -- with
the fortunes of young Americans more dependent on the income and education of their parents
than elsewhere.
But things don't have to be that way. There is an alternative: progressive capitalism.
Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron; we can indeed channel the power of the market to
serve society.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's regulatory "reforms," which reduced the ability of
government to curb the excesses of the market, were sold as great energizers of the economy.
But just the opposite happened: Growth slowed, and weirder still, this happened in the
innovation capital of the world.
The sugar rush produced by President Trump's largess to corporations in the 2017 tax law
didn't deal with any of these long-run problems, and is already fading. Growth is expected to
be a little under 2 percent next year.
This is where we've descended to, but not where we have to stay. A progressive capitalism
based on an understanding of what gives rise to growth and societal well-being gives us a way
out of this quagmire and a way up for our living standards.
Standards of living began to improve in the late 18th century for two reasons: the
development of science (we learned how to learn about nature and used that knowledge to
increase productivity and longevity) and developments in social organization (as a society,
we learned how to work together, through institutions like the rule of law, and democracies
with checks and balances).
Key to both were systems of assessing and verifying the truth. The real and long-lasting
danger of the Trump presidency is the risk it poses to these pillars of our economy and
society, its attack on the very idea of knowledge and expertise, and its hostility to
institutions that help us discover and assess the truth.
There is a broader social compact that allows a society to work and prosper together, and
that, too, has been fraying. America created the first truly middle-class society; now, a
middle-class life is increasingly out of reach for its citizens.
America arrived at this sorry state of affairs because we forgot that the true source of
the wealth of a nation is the creativity and innovation of its people. One can get rich
either by adding to the nation's economic pie or by grabbing a larger share of the pie by
exploiting others -- abusing, for instance, market power or informational advantages. We
confused the hard work of wealth creation with wealth-grabbing (or, as economists call it,
rent-seeking), and too many of our talented young people followed the siren call of getting
rich quickly.
Beginning with the Reagan era, economic policy played a key role in this dystopia: Just as
forces of globalization and technological change were contributing to growing inequality, we
adopted policies that worsened societal inequities. Even as economic theories like
information economics (dealing with the ever-present situation where information is
imperfect), behavioral economics and game theory arose to explain why markets on their own
are often not efficient, fair, stable or seemingly rational, we relied more on markets and
scaled back social protections.
The result is an economy with more exploitation -- whether it's abusive practices in the
financial sector or the technology sector using our own data to take advantage of us at the
cost of our privacy. The weakening of antitrust enforcement, and the failure of regulation to
keep up with changes in our economy and the innovations in creating and leveraging market
power, meant that markets became more concentrated and less competitive.
Politics has played a big role in the increase in corporate rent-seeking and the
accompanying inequality. Markets don't exist in a vacuum; they have to be structured by rules
and regulations, and those rules and regulations must be enforced. Deregulation of the
financial sector allowed bankers to engage in both excessively risky activities and more
exploitive ones. Many economists understood that trade with developing countries would drive
down American wages, especially for those with limited skills, and destroy jobs. We could and
should have provided more assistance to affected workers (just as we should provide
assistance to workers who lose their jobs as a result of technological change), but corporate
interests opposed it. A weaker labor market conveniently meant lower labor costs at home to
complement the cheap labor businesses employed abroad.
We are now in a vicious cycle: Greater economic inequality is leading, in our money-driven
political system, to more political inequality, with weaker rules and deregulation causing
still more economic inequality.
If we don't change course matters will likely grow worse, as machines (artificial
intelligence and robots) replace an increasing fraction of routine labor, including many of
the jobs of the several million Americans making their living by driving.
The prescription follows from the diagnosis: It begins by recognizing the vital role that
the state plays in making markets serve society. We need regulations that ensure strong
competition without abusive exploitation, realigning the relationship between corporations
and the workers they employ and the customers they are supposed to serve. We must be as
resolute in combating market power as the corporate sector is in increasing it.
If we had curbed exploitation in all of its forms and encouraged wealth creation, we would
have had a more dynamic economy with less inequality. We might have curbed the opioid crisis
and avoided the 2008 financial crisis. If we had done more to blunt the power of oligopolies
and strengthen the power of workers, and if we had held our banks accountable, the sense of
powerlessness might not be so pervasive and Americans might have greater trust in our
institutions.
There are many other areas in which government action is required. Markets on their own
won't provide insurance against some of the most important risks we face, such as
unemployment and disability. They won't efficiently provide pensions with low administrative
costs and insurance against inflation. And they won't provide an adequate infrastructure or a
decent education for everyone or engage in sufficient basic research.
Progressive capitalism is based on a new social contract between voters and elected
officials, between workers and corporations, between rich and poor, and between those with
jobs and those who are un- or underemployed.
Part of this new social contract is an expanded public option for many programs now
provided by private entities or not at all. It was a mistake not to include the public option
in Obamacare: It would have enriched choice and enhanced competition, lowering prices. But
one can design public options in other arenas as well, for instance for retirement and
mortgages. This new social contract will enable most Americans to once again have a
middle-class life.
As an economist, I am always asked: Can we afford to provide this middle-class life for
most, let alone all, Americans? Somehow, we did when we were a much poorer country in the
years after World War II. In our politics, in our labor-market participation, and in our
health we are already paying the price for our failures.
The neoliberal fantasy that unfettered markets will deliver prosperity to everyone should
be put to rest. It is as fatally flawed as the notion after the fall of the Iron Curtain that
we were seeing "the end of history" and that we would all soon be liberal democracies with
capitalist economies.
Most important, our exploitive capitalism has shaped who we are as individuals and as a
society. The rampant dishonesty we've seen from Wells Fargo and Volkswagen or from members of
the Sackler family as they promoted drugs they knew were addictive -- this is what is to be
expected in a society that lauds the pursuit of profits as leading, to quote Adam Smith, "as
if by an invisible hand," to the well-being of society, with no regard to whether those
profits derive from exploitation or wealth creation.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's regulatory "reforms," which reduced the ability of government
to curb the excesses of the market, were sold as great energizers of the economy. But just
the opposite happened: Growth slowed, and weirder still, this happened in the innovation
capital of the world....
Part of this new social contract is an expanded public option for many programs now provided
by private entities or not at all. It was a mistake not to include the public option in
Obamacare: It would have enriched choice and enhanced competition, lowering prices. But one
can design public options in other arenas as well, for instance for retirement and mortgages.
This new social contract will enable most Americans to once again have a middle-class
life....
Very good and smart from one of our greatest economists. (I don't think laypeople fully
appreciate Joe Stiglitz's greatness as a theorist) "Progressive capitalism" is a good phrase,
in part because it does involve reviving a lot of the original progressive agenda
Socialist! Capitalist! Economic Systems as Weapons
in a War of Words https://nyti.ms/2ZncMwz
NYT - Andrew Ross Sorkin - April 19, 2019
The economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses Bernie Sanders, social policy and how we define
ourselves -- and one another.
Joseph Stiglitz settled into a booth at his favorite diner on the Upper West Side last
week with a curious, almost satisfied smile on his face.
He won a Nobel Prize nearly two decades ago for identifying the inequities and
imperfections in market economies and has spent a career warning of the perils of wealth
concentration, railing against monopoly power and championing higher taxes.
At last, a lot of people seem to be listening.
"It's been a long fight," he said.
The cause has been taken up by the new stars of the left, like Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and can trace much of its current momentum to the rumpled rabble-rousing of
Senator Bernie Sanders. The policy points Mr. Stiglitz talks about -- a higher minimum wage,
a public option for health insurance and more -- could just as easily come from the mouths of
any of those seeking to unseat President Trump in 2020.
And yet they demonstrate how the words we choose to talk about our economic priorities are
almost as important as the priorities themselves.
Last year, for the first time in a decade, a Gallup poll showed that Democrats had a more
positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism. Those two words may play a pivotal
role in our next election: Some Democrats have embraced the label of socialist, one long
attacked by Republicans. And even some of those who have profited most from American-style
free markets have worried about their sustainability, with the billionaire investor Ray Dalio
going so far as to say that "capitalism is broken."
Mr. Stiglitz, stabbing his fork into his salad, said he believed there had been a critical
misunderstanding of the terms themselves -- and the economic theories behind them -- that had
allowed for their weaponization.
"The meanings of the words have changed over time," said Mr. Stiglitz, the chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton and a former chief economist of the
World Bank. And the words have become the subject of a branding battle crossing political and
generational divides.
The professor in Mr. Stiglitz shared a history lesson that reached back to the early 20th
century, about how socialism and communism became linked. And he made the case that Mr.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, wasn't actually a socialist -- at least as
the identity has long been defined.
Mr. Sanders's agenda -- which drew a fair share of cheers during a Fox News
town-hall-style meeting this week -- is not focused on "ownership of the means of production"
or a statist system, Mr. Stiglitz said. "He's really concerned about the social contract of
health, education," he added.
It is not surprising that Mr. Sanders's supporters trend young, a group for which the word
"socialism" holds no fears of conflict with the Soviets or baggage associated with the Berlin
Wall.
"Some people are trying to attach more emotions to the historical legacy of socialism
, which was never the same as communism, but in the United States those distinctions have
gotten blurred," Mr. Stiglitz said.
The attacks from the right have been anything but subtle. Just this month, Mr. Trump
declared, "We're going into the war with some socialists." And Republicans have posited that
Venezuela's challenged economy is the inevitable result of any movement in the policy
directions embraced by the left.
The word leaves a bad taste even in the mouths of many on the left, including Nancy
Pelosi, the speaker of the House, who lived through the height of the Cold War. "I do reject
socialism as an economic system," she said on "60 Minutes" last weekend. "If people have that
view, that's their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party."
(In Europe, Mr. Stiglitz said, similarly minded politicians might rightly be called social
democrats. A simple switch in word order emphasizes the "social" instead of "socialist.")
It all comes back to semantics, Mr. Stiglitz said. And perception was on his mind when
titling his new book, "People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of
Discontent," which is to be published next week.
In it, he maps out a plan that he calls a "social contract" to improve jobs, health,
education, housing and retirement. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if it turned into the
economic platform for a presidential candidate.
Mr. Stiglitz proposes using a combination of market forces and government nudges -- a
higher minimum wage and an expanded earned-income tax credit, for example -- to help the
poorest among us. He also supports a "public option" to improve competition in the private
sector in areas like health care and even retirement savings.
That's not to say he views government as a panacea. For example, he wants to see the
mortgage industry privatized. "In a private-sector economy, to have this huge piece of the
economy that's not run by the private sector is odd," he said. Still, he also recommends a
public option so that the government could support the mortgage market in certain cases.
Mr. Stiglitz said he had chosen "progressive capitalism" for his book's title because he
worried about triggering a visceral reaction to the word "socialism."
"I'm trying to avoid some of the emotions that are still attached," he said. "I try in my
title to use progressive capitalism to try to say I believe in a market economy, but I also
believe in government regulation."
Even as popular figures on the left have embraced the label of socialist -- Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America -- others have sought, like
Mr. Stiglitz, to underscore their capitalist views. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend,
Ind., who formally announced his candidacy for president this week, calls himself a proponent
of "democratic capitalism."
If the evolving meaning of socialism strikes you as an inventive bit of rebranding, Mr.
Stiglitz believes the conservative idea of American capitalism as an unfettered free-market
system is itself a myth.
"There is no Darwinian capitalism," he said. "Everybody would say you need some degree of
regulation of banks. I mean, no one is talking about real laissez-faire banking."
Even the word "capitalist" has evolved, Mr. Stiglitz said. It is only since the late 20th
century and the rise of the economist Milton Friedman, he contends, that "capitalist" stopped
being a dirty word. It was once used in what he called "a pejorative way."
Capitalists were "people who were exploiting workers," he said.
That is an opinion, of course. And it is a view that is not hard to come by in some
circles now, either.
Language changes, and as convenient as it can be to use linguistic shorthand, it's
important to remember that beneath the words are ideas -- the things we should be talking
about.
Event Location:
Fordham University – Lincoln Center Campus
140 West 62 Street, McNally Amphitheatre | Ground Floor
... Stiglitz has long sounded the alarm about growing economic inequality in the United
States. As chief economist of the World Bank and Chairman of Clinton's Council of Economic
Advisors, he saw first-hand the toll that financial deregulation, globalization and
government inaction can take on a community. This has played out over and over again in
cities and towns across the United States, feeding into the resentment that fueled Donald
Trump's election in 2016. The question we should ask ourselves today, Stiglitz says, is "What
can we do about it?"
In his new book, People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of
Discontent, Stiglitz answers that question by laying out a 21st Century Social Contract to
rebuild the American middle class and reinvigorate the American economy. Many candidates will
likely use Stiglitz's timely advice in their 2020 presidential campaigns.
Prof. Stiglitz will be interviewed by Bruce Greenwald, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of
Finance and Asset Management at Columbia Business School and the academic co-director of the
Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing. Described by The New York Times as "a guru
to Wall Street's gurus," Greenwald is an authority on value investing with additional
expertise in productivity and the economics of information.
I know: who cares about the education of our kids as the redacted Mueller Report dominates the airwaves on CNN, MSNBC, and similar
cable "news" networks?
I care. I spent fifteen years as a history professor, teaching mostly undergraduates at technically-oriented colleges (the
Air Force Academy
; the Pennsylvania College of Technology). What I experienced was the slow death of education in America. The decline of the ideal
of fostering creative and critical
thinking ; the abandonment of the notion of developing and challenging young people to participate intelligently and passionately
in the American democratic experiment. Instead, education is often a form of
social control , or merely
a means to an end, purely
instrumental rather than inspirational.
Zombie education .
Nowadays, education in America is about training for a vocation, at least for some. It's about learning for the sake of earning,
i.e. developing so-called marketable skills that end (one hopes) in a respectable paycheck. At Penn College, I was encouraged to
meet my students "at their point of need." I was told they were my "customers" and I was their "
provider ." Education,
in sum, was transactional rather than transformational. Keep students in class (and paying tuition) and pray you can inspire them
to see that the humanities are something more than "filler" to their schedules -- and their lives.
As a college professor, I was lucky. I taught five classes a semester (a typical teaching load at community colleges), often in
two or three subjects. Class sizes averaged 25-30 students, so I got to know some of my students; I had the equivalent of tenure,
with good pay and decent benefits, unlike the adjunct professors of today who suffer from low pay and few if any benefits. I liked
my students and tried to challenge and inspire them to the best of my ability.
All this is a preface to Belle Chesler's stunning article at
TomDispatch.com , "Making American Schools Less Great Again: A Lesson in Educational Nihilism on a Grand Scale." A high school
visual arts teacher, Chesler writes from the heart about the chronic underfunding of education and how it is constricting democracy
in America. Here she talks about the frustrations of classes that are simply too big to teach:
[ Class sizes grew so large ] I couldn't remember my students' names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments
we're supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all, I was unable to provide the emotional support I
normally try to give my students. I couldn't listen because there wasn't time.
On the drive to work, I was paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience of that year
was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional
identity were all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction and adult mentorship, as well as access
to vital resources -- not to mention a loss of faith in one of America's supposedly bedrock institutions, the public school
The truth of the matter is that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its children is refusing to
invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a grand scale.
Nihilism, indeed. Why believe in anything? Talk about zombie education!
What America is witnessing, she writes, is nothing short of a national tragedy:
Public schools represent one of the bedrock institutions of American democracy. Yet as a society we've stood aside as the very
institutions that actually made America great were gutted and undermined by short-term thinking, corporate greed, and unconscionable
disrespect for our collective future.
The truth is that there is money for education, for schools, for teachers, and for students. We just don't choose to prioritize
education spending and so send a loud-and-clear message to students that education doesn't truly matter. And when you essentially
defund education for more than 40 years, you leave kids with
ever less faith in American
institutions, which is a genuine tragedy.
Please read all of her article here at
TomDispatch.com . And ask yourself, Why are we shortchanging our children's future? Why are we graduating gormless zombies rather
than mindful citizens?
Perhaps Trump does have some relevance to this article after all: "I love the poorly educated,"
sayeth Trump . Who says Trump always lies?
Now if these six words "gainful employment in a
recognized occupation" magically disappeared (psst and they did), what would it take for a
career
education program to lose its eligibility for federal student aid under DeVos? . . . a
for-profit institution could not lose its financial lifeline or federal student aid no matter
how poorly it performed its mission as spelled out in a statute to prepare students for
"gainful employment in a recognized occupation" resulting from that education as stipulated
previously.
One hundred percent of students could be dropped from their career program with all of them
deeply in debt, or perhaps no single graduate landing a job in their field of training, and
still . . . still the federal government would keep the pipeline of guaranteed federal student
loans and Pell Grants flowing in to the school.
With DeVos's reversal, the NYT surmised: "Executives in the for-profit education industry
would be sleeping better, secure in the knowledge that even the worst schools and programs were
no longer at risk of "magically" being thrown off the taxpayer-backed gravy train, no matter
how epically they failed and robbed their students." This AB author took liberty and added
words to make his point.
Under Obama, "the Job Training industry was on its heels. Under DeVos, they had been given a
magical new life, a second chance by the department," said Eileen Connor, the director of
litigation at Harvard Law School's Project on Predatory Student Lending.
Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office,
has made it an agency priority to unfetter schools offering training in professional jobs and
trades by eliminating restrictions on them and also nonprofits. She also allowed a growing
number of for-profit schools to magically evade those loosened rules by converting to
nonprofits.
That is what the Los Angeles Pentecostal megachurch's affiliate Dream Center wanted to do in
2017 when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation . . . change it from
for-profit to nonprofit and use the profits to fund its other programs. One year after taking
over a chain of for-profit schools, dozens of Dream Center schools are near bankruptcy and
others have been sold with a hope they can survive.
Collectively
Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes have ~26,000 students in
programs resulting in associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and
psychology. Fourteen campuses of mostly Art Institute schools have a new owner after an
arranged transfer involving private equity. Another 40 or so others are now under the control
of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open
by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students to pay operating expenses.
Federal funding for Argosy ceased from the Department of Education when the court-appointed
receiver discovered school officials had taken about $13 million owed to students at 22
campuses and used it for payroll expenses, etc. Lauren Jackson seeking a doctorate at Argosy's
Illinois School of Professional Psychology in Chicago did not receive the $10,000 she was due
in January. She was paying expenses for herself and her 6-year-old daughter with borrowed money
and GoFundMe donations.
26,000 students being defrauded by schools offering programs meant to teach them a skill
leading to "gainful employment in a recognized occupation" is only a start to which DeVos has
failed to account for in the Department of Education. DeVos does profit by this failure due to
her own dabbling in areas feeding off of these failures. There is money to be made in preying
on defrauded students, so many of them, and larger than the baby boomer generation. The most
tragic consequence of conservatives'
abandonment of federal accountability of career programs is just that and the devastating
personal toll it will take on hundreds of thousands of hopelessly indebted students" for whom
there is no relief.
"... The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said: "The middle class is increasingly only a dream for many. This bedrock of our democracies and economic growth is not as stable as in the past." ..."
"... Only incomes in the top 25% were able to outpace this rate on an annual basis, according to the Atlanta Fed. For everyone else, a greater share of income must be allocated to property taxes, leaving less to spend on everything else. ..."
"... Equity ownership in companies, both public and private, is also sliding for the upper middle class. The share of equity ownership for citizens in the 50th to 90th percentile of net worth has fallen and the top 1% of Americans still own the majority of shares. ..."
"... By the end of 2018, net worth as a share of the U.S. total had shrunk considerably for the upper middle class. During the course of just one generation, U.S. wealth held by households from the 50th to the 90th percentile fell from 35.2% of the total to 29.1%. Most of this wealth has been transferred to the top 1% of U.S. households. ..."
"... Stefano Scarpetta, OECD director of employment, labor and social affairs said: "There is a risk of a spiral to the extent that the middle class is the one main sources of political and economic stability." ..."
New data from the Federal Reserve detailing citizens' net worth shows that the issue of being "left behind" has now spread to
all Americans aside from the top 10%, according to
Bloomberg . This means that even the upper middle class is starting to feel the pain of income stagnation. The growth of upper
middle class income continues to lag behind that of those both lower and higher than them on the socioeconomic ladder, according
to the data.
The cost of many items purchased by the upper middle class, including things like college education and cars, is outpacing inflation.
That is causing upper middle class households to tap into more expensive forms of debt. The debt these households is taking on is
shifting from mortgages to credit with higher financing costs.
In addition, the overall middle class' share of total income is
falling while home prices have increased faster than median incomes.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said: "The middle class is increasingly only a dream for many. This
bedrock of our democracies and economic growth is not as stable as in the past."
Credit card rates recently hit a "generational high" despite the low prime rate. The spread between the prime rate and credit
card interest rates is at its highest point in almost 10 years.
2018 property taxes rose by 4% annually, on average, according to an analysis of more than 87 million U.S. single family homes
by ATTOM Data Solutions.
Todd Teta, chief product officer for ATTOM Data Solutions
said
: "Property taxes levied on homeowners rose again in 2018 across most of the country. While many states across the country have imposed
caps on how much taxes can go up, which probably contributed to a slower increase in 2018 versus 2017. There are still many factors
at play that can contribute to local property tax hikes, and without major changes in the way a community runs public services, tax
rates must rise to pay for them."
Only incomes in the top 25% were able to outpace this rate on an annual basis, according to the Atlanta Fed. For everyone
else, a greater share of income must be allocated to property taxes, leaving less to spend on everything else.
Equity ownership in companies, both public and private, is also sliding for the upper middle class. The share of equity ownership
for citizens in the 50th to 90th percentile of net worth has fallen and the top 1% of Americans still own the majority of shares.
By the end of 2018, net worth as a share of the U.S. total had shrunk considerably for the upper middle class. During the
course of just one generation, U.S. wealth held by households from the 50th to the 90th percentile fell from 35.2% of the total to
29.1%. Most of this wealth has been transferred to the top 1% of U.S. households.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has said that the middle class is "essential" for growth and countries
where it thrives are healthier, more stable, better educated and have lower crime rates while boasting higher life satisfaction.
The OECD defines middle class as households with incomes between 75% and and 200% of the national median. Over the last 3 decades,
incomes have increased 33% less than the average of the richest 10%, according to the OECD. Real income of the middle class has grown
only 0.3% a year since the financial crisis.
Stefano Scarpetta, OECD director of employment, labor and social affairs said: "There is a risk of a spiral to the extent
that the middle class is the one main sources of political and economic stability."
Rising to the middle class is also getting tougher. More skills are needed, as more than 50% of middle income workers are
now in high skilled occupations, up from about 33% two decades ago.
"It's a wake up call. Overall there is a need to really focus on targeted policy intervention for those with specific problems.
General policies may not work very well," Scarpetta concluded.
Work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week: Jack Ma demands of his staff at Alibaba
Welcome to Globalism, you are now seeing managers from non-western countries bringing their values into the western organizations
as they climb the ladder. Not all countries share the same cultural values and work ethics.
7 Signs that you may have become a Corporate Slave
1. You sleep less than an average of 6 hours every night.
2. Part of your daily routine involves turning the floor lights on, when you arrive, and off, when you leave.
3. You have never attended your daughter's dance recital.
4. You can't remember the last time you had a day off, let alone a vacation with your family.
5. You are constantly anxious about your performance, or rather the way it is perceived by your manager.
6. You feel you cannot talk to your manager, your HR or your colleagues about your grievances.
Our political whores...******* us into poverty, day after day, year after year. I hope I am alive to see (and take part in)
the day people get fed up enough to actually reach critical mass and DO something about it.
It used to be easy to buy subservience with bread & circuses, but now even those things are growing out of reach. Hopefully
we reach critical mass breaking point and the political whores' minions (the boys in blue, etc..) don't have the capacity to stop
what transpires. Nothing less than a cathartic release of blood will do for me personally speaking.
What is mind boggling is that one sees how Republicans and Democrats caused this by deregulating (finance, trade, immigration,
etc) and allowing multinationals free reign and yet...you have Trump supporting assholes blaming "communist democrats" when this
is all a result of the private sector running wild.
The neoliberal war on labor in the USA is real. And it is especially real for It folk over 50. No country for the old
men, so to speak...
Notable quotes:
"... Obviously you need a financial cushion to not be earning for months and to pay for the training courses. ..."
"... Yeah, people get set in their ways and resistant to make changes. Steve Jobs talked about people developing grooves in their brain and how important it is to force yourself out of these grooves.* ..."
"... Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. ..."
"... The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a person in a wheelchair. ..."
"... IBEW (licensed electricians) has no upper age limit for apprentices They have lots of American engineers who applied in their 30s after realizing most companies want diverse HI-B engineers. ..."
"... At 40+, I still can learn advanced mathematics as well as I ever did. In fact, I can still compete with the Chinese 20 year olds. The problem is not mental horsepower, it's time and energy. I rarely have time to concentrate these days (wife, kids, pets), which makes it hard to get the solid hours of prime mental time required to really push yourself at a hard pace and learn advanced material. ..."
"... That's a huge key and I discovered it when I was asked to tutor people who were failing chemistry. I quickly discovered that all it took for most of them to "get it" was to keep approaching the problem from different angles until a light came on for them and for me the challenge of finding the right approach was a great motivator. Invariably it was some minor issue and once they overcame that, it became easy for them. I'm still astonished at that to this day. ..."
"... Sorry man, English teaching is huge, and will remain so for some time to come. I'm heavily involved in the area and know plenty of ESL teachers. Spain for me, and the level of English here is still so dreadful and they all need it, the demand is staggering and their schools suck at teaching it themselves. ..."
"... You have to really dislike your circumstances in the US to leave and be willing to find some way to get by overseas. ..."
"... We already saw this in South Africa. Mandela took over, the country went down the tubes, the wealthy whites left and the Boers were left to die in refugee camps. They WANT to leave and a few went to Russia, but most developed countries don't want them. Not with the limited amount of money they have. ..."
"... Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country except for blacks and rednecks I have met in the Philippines who were stationed there in the military and have a $1000 a month check. Many of them live in more dangerous and dirty internal third worlds in America than what they can have in Southeast Asia and a good many would be homeless. They are worldly enough to leave. ..."
" He's 28 years old getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the
skilled trades as well. What then?"
I know a UK guy (ex City type) who retrained as an electrician in his early 50s.
Competent guy. Obviously no one would take him on as an apprentice, so he wired up all his
outbuildings as his project to get his certificate. But he's getting work now, word gets
around if you're any good.
Obviously you need a financial cushion to not be earning for months and to pay for the
training courses.
Yeah, people get set in their ways and resistant to make changes. Steve Jobs talked about
people developing grooves in their brain and how important it is to force yourself out of
these grooves.*
I know a Haitian immigrant without a college degree who was working three jobs and then
dropped down to two jobs and went to school part time in his late 40's and earned his degree
in engineering and is a now an engineer in his early 50's.
*From Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp.330-331:
"It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something
amazing," Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate
interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. "Of course, there are some people who are
innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare." The
interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs's most poignant ruminations were about growing
old and facing the future:
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really
etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like
grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of
have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a
tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. . .
.
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look
back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and
throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to
continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to
go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere.
Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
"fluid intelligence" starts crystallizing after your 20's". Nonsense, I had
a great deal of trouble learning anything from my teen years and 20's because I didn't know
how to learn. I went for 30 years and eventually figured out a learning style that worked for
me. I have learned more and mastered more skills in the past ten years ages 49-59 than I had
in the previous 30.
You can challenge yourself like I did and after a while of doing this (6 months) you will
find it a lot easier to learn and comprehend than you did previously. (This is true only if
you haven't damaged your brain from years of smoking and drinking). I constantly challenged
myself with trying to learn math that I had trouble with in school and eventually mastered
it.
The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the
muscles of a person in a wheelchair.
IBEW (licensed electricians) has no upper age limit for apprentices They have lots of
American engineers who applied in their 30s after realizing most companies want diverse HI-B
engineers.
Upper age limits for almost every occupation disappeared decades ago in America because of
age discrimination laws.
I can't see how any 28 year old could possibly be too soft to go into any kind of manual
labor job.
@anonymous
Yeah, there was a recent study showing that 70 year olds can form neural connections as
quickly as teenagers.
At 40+, I still can learn advanced mathematics as well as I ever did. In fact, I can still
compete with the Chinese 20 year olds. The problem is not mental horsepower, it's time and
energy. I rarely have time to concentrate these days (wife, kids, pets), which makes it hard
to get the solid hours of prime mental time required to really push yourself at a hard pace
and learn advanced material.
This is why the Chinese are basically out of date when they are 30, their companies assume
that they have kids and are not able to give 110% anymore.
eventually figured out a learning style that worked for me.
That's a huge key and I discovered it when I was asked to tutor people who were failing
chemistry. I quickly discovered that all it took for most of them to "get it" was to keep
approaching the problem from different angles until a light came on for them and for me the
challenge of finding the right approach was a great motivator. Invariably it was some minor
issue and once they overcame that, it became easy for them. I'm still astonished at that to
this day.
The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you
waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a
person in a wheelchair.
Yeah. He's 28 years old and apparently his chosen skillset is teaching
EASL in foreign countries. That sector is shrinking as English becomes the global lingua
franca and is taught in elementary schools worldwide. He's really too old and soft for his
Plan B (military), and getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled
trades as well. What then?
do you know anything first hand about the teaching- english- as-a- second- language
hustle?
Asking sincerely – as I don't know anything about it. However I kinda suspect that
'native speakers' will be in demand in many parts of the globe for some time to come [as an
aside – and maybe Linh has written of this and I missed it – but last spring I
was in Saigon for a couple of weeks and, hanging out one day at the zoo & museum complex,
was startled to see about three groups of Vietnamese primary-school students being led around
by americans in their early 20s, narrating everything in american english . Apparently
private schools offering entirely english-language curriculum are the big hit with the middle
& upper class elite there. Perhaps more of the same elsewhere in the region?]
At any rate the young man in this interview has a lot more in the way of qualifications
and skill sets than I had when I left the States 35 years ago, and I've done just fine. I'd
advise any prospective expats to get that TEFL certificate as it's one extra thing to have in
your back pocket and who knows?
PS: "It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship"
– well, yes it can. Everyone knows that the best passport on earth is from Northwest Euroland, one of those places with free university education and free health care and where
teenage mothers don't daily keel over dead from heroin overdoses in Dollar Stores .. Also
more places visa-free
When
you left the States 35 years ago, the world was 3 billion people smaller. The labor market
has gotten a tad more competitive. I don't see any indication of a trade or other refined
skillset in this article.
People who teach EASL for a living are like people who drive cars for a living: you don't
do it because you're really good at teaching your native language, you do it because
you're not marketable at anything else.
I think being Australian is the best citizenry you can have. The country is far from
perfect, but any lower middle class American white like myself would prefer to be lower
middle class there than in Detroit or Phoenix, where being lower income means life around the
unfettered urban underclass that is paranoia inducing.
Being from the US is not as bad as being Bangladeshi, but if you had to be white and urban
and poor you'd be better off in Sydney than Flint.
The most patriotic Americans have never been anywhere, so they have no idea whether
Australia or Tokyo are better. They have never traveled.
Yeah. He's 28 years old and apparently his chosen skillset is teaching
EASL in foreign countries. That sector is shrinking as English becomes the global lingua
franca and is taught in elementary schools worldwide. He's really too old and soft for his
Plan B (military), and getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled
trades as well. What then?
do you know anything first hand about the teaching- english- as-a- second- language
hustle?
Asking sincerely – as I don't know anything about it. However I kinda suspect that
'native speakers' will be in demand in many parts of the globe for some time to come [as an
aside – and maybe Linh has written of this and I missed it – but last spring I
was in Saigon for a couple of weeks and, hanging out one day at the zoo & museum complex,
was startled to see about three groups of Vietnamese primary-school students being led around
by americans in their early 20s, narrating everything in american english .
Apparently private schools offering entirely english-language curriculum are the big hit
with the middle & upper class elite there. Perhaps more of the same elsewhere in the
region?]
At any rate the young man in this interview has a lot more in the way of qualifications
and skill sets than I had when I left the States 35 years ago, and I've done just fine. I'd
advise any prospective expats to get that TEFL certificate as it's one extra thing to have in
your back pocket and who knows?
ps: "It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship"
– well, yes it can. Everyone knows that the best passport on earth is from Northwest
Euroland, one of those places with free university education and free health care and where
teenage mothers don't daily keel over dead from heroin overdoses in Dollar Stores ..
People who teach EASL for a living are like people who drive cars for a
living: you don't do it because you're really good at teaching your native language, you do
it because you're not marketable at anything else.
well that's the beauty of it: you don't have to be good at anything other than just being
a native speaker to succeed as an EASL teacher, and thousands more potential customers are
born every day. I'd definitely advise any potential expats to become accomplished, and, even
better, qualified, in as many trades as possible. But imho the real key to success as a long
term expat is your mindset: determination and will-power to survive no matter what. If you
really want to break out of the States and see the world, and don't have inherited wealth,
you will be forced to rely on your wits and good luck and seize the opportunities that arise,
whatever those opportunities may be.
Sorry man, English teaching is huge, and will remain so for some time to
come. I'm heavily involved in the area and know plenty of ESL teachers. Spain for me, and the
level of English here is still so dreadful and they all need it, the demand is staggering and
their schools suck at teaching it themselves.
You are one of those people who just like to shit on things:) and people make a lot of
money out of it, not everyone of course, like any area. But it's perfectly viable and good to
go for a long time yet. It's exactly that English is the lingua Franca that people need to be
at a high level of it. The Chinese market is still massive. The bag packer esl teachers are
the ones that give off this stigma, and 'bag packer' and 'traveller' are by now very much
regarded as dirty words in the ESL world.
Most Americans lack the initiative to move anywhere. Most will complain but will never
leave the street they were born on. Urban whites are used to adaptation being around other
cultures anyhow and being somewhat street smart, but the poor rural whites in the exurbs or
sticks whose live would really improve if they got the hell out of America will never move
anywhere.
You have to really dislike your circumstances in the US to leave and be willing to find
some way to get by overseas.
Lots of people will talk about leaving America without having a clue as to how hard this
is to actually do. Australia and New Zealand are not crying out for white proles with high
school education or GED. It is much more difficult to move overseas and stay overseas than
most Americans think.
Except of course for the ruling elite. And that is because five-star hotels look the same
everywhere and money is an international language.
We already saw this in South Africa. Mandela took over, the country went down the tubes,
the wealthy whites left and the Boers were left to die in refugee camps. They WANT to leave
and a few went to Russia, but most developed countries don't want them. Not with the limited
amount of money they have.
Australia and NZ would rather have refugees than white people in dire circumstances.
Even immigrating to Canada, a country that I worked in, is much much harder than anyone
imagines.
Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country except for
blacks and rednecks I have met in the Philippines who were stationed there in the military
and have a $1000 a month check. Many of them live in more dangerous and dirty internal third
worlds in America than what they can have in Southeast Asia and a good many would be
homeless. They are worldly enough to leave.
But most Americans whose lives would be vastly improved overseas think they are living in
the greatest country on earth.
Inequality of opportunity, income inequality, and economic growth - VoxEU: "Simon Kuznets
famously argued that inequality is beneficial for economic growth at an early stage of
development... but is harmful at a later stage."
Where did Kuznets say this? I find him saying inequality varies. I find other people
saying the benefit or harm from inequality varies.
Anybody got a link to Kuznets saying the benefit or harm varies?
If we can't have (and don't actually want) total equality or total inequality, what is the
right amount of inequality?
Anemic economic growth and the gutting of middle class jobs have given new impetus to a
debate over "optimal inequality," a concept dating back at least six decades to a legendary
speech given in 1954 at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association by Simon
Kuznets, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, who asked, "Does inequality in the distribution of
income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?"
Kuznets's research into the relationship between inequality and growth laid the foundation
for modern thinking about what has become a critical question: Has inequality in this country
reached a tipping point at which it no longer provides an incentive to strive and to
innovate, but has instead created a permanently disadvantaged class, as well as a continuing
threat of social instability? ...
Economic Growth and Income Inequality
By SIMON KUZNETS
The central theme of this paper is the character and causes of long-term changes in the
personal distribution of income. Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or
decrease in the course of a country's economic growth? What factors determine the secular
level and trends of income inequalities?
These are broad questions in a field of study that has been plagued by looseness in
definitions, unusual scarcity of data, and pressures of strongly held opinions. While we
cannot completely avoid the resulting difficulties, it may help to specify the
characteristics of the size-of-income distributions that we want to examine and the movements
of which we want to explain.
Five specifications may be listed. First, the units for which incomes are recorded and
grouped should be family-expenditure units, properly adjusted for the number of persons in
each-rather than income recipients for whom the relations between receipt and use of income
can be widely diverse. Second, the distribution should be complete, i.e., should cover all
units in a country rather than a segment either at the upper or lower tail. Third, if
possible we should segregate the units whose main income earners are either still in the
learning or already in the retired stages of their life cycle-to avoid complicating the
picture by including incomes not associated with full-time, full-fledged participation in
economic activity. Fourth, income should be defined as it is now for national income in this
country, i.e., received by individuals, including income in kind, before and after direct
taxes, excluding capital gains. Fifth, the units should be grouped by secular levels of
income, free of cyclical and other transient disturbances.
For such a distribution of mature expenditure units by secular levels of income per
capita, we should measure shares of some fixed ordinal groups-percentiles, deciles,
quintiles, etc. In the underlying array the units should be classified by average income
levels for a sufficiently long span so that they form income-status groups-say a generation
or about 25 years. Within such a period, even when classified by secular income levels, units
may shift from one ordinal group to another. It would, therefore, be necessary and useful to
study separately the relative share of units that, throughout the generation period of
reference, were continuously within a specific ordinal group, and the share of the units that
moved into that specific group; and this should be done for the shares of "residents" and
"migrants" within all ordinal groups. Without such a long period of reference and the
resulting separation between "resident" and "migrant" units at different relative income
levels, the very distinction between "low" and "high" income classes loses its meaning,
particularly in a study of long-term changes in shares and in inequalities in the
distribution. To say, for example, that the "lower" income classes gained or lost during the
last twenty years in that their share of total income increased or decreased has meaning only
if the units have been classified as members of the "lower" classes throughout those 20
years-and for those who have moved into or out of those classes recently such a statement has
no significance.
Furthermore, if one may add a final touch to what is beginning to look like a statistical
economist's pipe dream, we should be able to trace secular income levels not only through a
single generation but at least through two-connecting the incomes of a given generation with
those of its immediate descendants. We could then distinguish units that. throughout a given
generation, remain within one ordinal group and whose children-through their generation-are
also within that group, from units that remain within a group through their generation but
whose children move up or down on the relative economic scale in their time. The number of
possible combinations and permutations becomes large; but it should not obscure the main
design of the income structure called for-the classification by long-term income status of a
given generation and of its immediate descendants. If living members of society-as producers,
consumers, savers, decision-makers on secular problems-react to long-term changes in income
levels and shares, data on such an income structure are essential. An economic society can
then be judged by the secular level of the income share that it provides for a given
generation and for its children. The important corollary is that the study of long-term
changes in the income distribution must distinguish between changes in the shares of resident
groups-resident within either one or two generations-and changes in the income shares of
groups that, judged by their secular levels, migrate upward or downward on the income
scale.
Even if we had data to approximate the income structure just outlined, the broad question
posed at the start-how income inequality changes in the process of a country's economic
growth-could be answered only for growth under defined economic and social conditions. And,
in fact, we shall deal with this question in terms of the experience of the now developed
countries which grew under the aegis of the business enterprise. But even with this
limitation, there are no statistics that can be used directly for the purpose of measuring
the secular income structure. Indeed, I have difficulty in visualizing how such information
could practicably be collected-a difficulty that may be due to lack of familiarity with the
studies of our colleagues in demography and sociology who have concerned themselves with
problems of generation or intergeneration mobility and status. But although we now lack data
directly relevant to the secular income structure, the setting up of reasonably clear and yet
difficult specifications is not merely an exercise in perfectionism. For if these
specifications do approximate, and I trust that they do, the real core of our interest when
we talk about shares of economic classes or long-term changes in these shares, then proper
disclosure of our meaning and intentions is vitally useful. It forces us to examine and
evaluate critically the data that are available; it prevents us from jumping to conclusions
based on these inadequate data; it reduces the loss and waste of time involved in mechanical
manipulations of the type represented by Pareto-curve-fitting to groups of data whose
meaning, in terms of income concept, unit of observation, and proportion of the total
universe covered, remains distressingly vague; and most important of all, it propels us
toward a deliberate construction of testable bridges between the available data and the
income structure that is the real focus of our interest.
The working class' struggle to just survive while the very wealthy splurged on glitter during
the 'Gilded Age' brought Brandies to speak of 'involuntary servitude' and lead to Teddy
Roosevelt's 'trust busting' else there be 'a revolution'. During the Gilded, capitalism, a
creation of the capitalist, was touted by the capitalist gilded as essential to growth giving
them an excuse to use armies to bust anti-capitalist unions.
Teddy may have prevented a revolution, saved democracy, and capitalism; and Franklin may
have saved democracy and capitalism; both using most non-capitalistic means.
In economics, a Kuznets curve represents graphically the hypothesis advanced by Simon
Kuznets in the 1950s and 1960s that as an economy develops, a natural cycle of economic
inequality occurs, driven by market forces which at first increase inequality, and then
decrease it after a certain average income is attained.
Determinants of cross-country income inequality: an augmented Kuznets hypothesis
By Branko Milanovic
Summary
Why does income inequality differ among countries? Using a sample of 80 countries from the
1980s, the author shows that two types of factors explain variations in income inequality.
The first are factors that are, in the short term, independent of economic policies and are
included in the standard formulation of the Kuznets' curve: * the level of per capita income
and the country's regional heterogeneity. From the viewpoint of economic policy, these are
"given" factors, resulting in a "given inequality." The second group of factors are the
social-choice factors reflected in the size of social transfers and of state sector
employment, both of which reduce inequality. For this sample, the reduction amounts to about
a quarter of "given" inequality. The importance of social-choice factors rises as the level
of income rises. The divergence between actual inequality and the inequality predicted by the
standard Kuznets' curve therefore systematically widens as a society develops. This
discrepancy is systematic, the author contends. Inequality in richer societies decreases not
only because of economic factors but also because societies choose less inequalities as they
grow richer.
In economics, a Kuznets curve graphs the hypothesis that as an economy develops, market
forces first increase and then decrease economic inequality. The hypothesis was first
advanced by economist Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and '60s.
The East Asian miracle has been used to criticize the validity of the Kuznets curve
theory. The rapid economic growth of eight East Asian countries -- Japan, South Korea, Hong
Kong, Taiwan, Singapore (Four Asian Tigers), Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia -- between
1965 and 1990, was called the East Asian miracle (EAM). Manufacturing and export grew quickly
and powerfully. Yet simultaneously, life expectancy was found to increase and population
levels living in absolute poverty decreased. This development process was contrary to the
Kuznets curve theory. Many studies have been done to identify how the EAM was able to ensure
that the benefits of rapid economic growth were distributed broadly among the population,
because Kuznets' theory stated that rapid capital accumulation would lead to an initial
increase in inequality. Joseph Stiglitz argues the East Asian experience of an intensive and
successful economic development process along with an immediate decrease in population
inequality can be explained by the immediate re-investment of initial benefits into land
reform (increasing rural productivity, income, and savings), universal education (providing
greater equality and what Stiglitz calls an "intellectual infrastructure" for productivity),
and industrial policies that distributed income more equally through high and increasing
wages and limited the price increases of commodities. These factors increased the average
citizen's ability to consume and invest within the economy, further contributing to economic
growth. Stiglitz highlights that the high rates of growth provided the resources to promote
equality, which acted as a positive-feedback loop to support the high rates of growth. The
EAM defies the Kuznets curve, which insists growth produces inequality, and that inequality
is a necessity for overall growth.
Across the US, suicide rates, drug overdoses and other "deaths of despair" are soaring - and
recently contributed to the third-straight year of life-expectancy decline. Meanwhile,
millennials, saddled with debt and suffering with a paucity of marketable skills, are putting
off parenthood and homeownership as they toil away in expensive urban centers, surrendering
more than half of their monthly income to rent and debt service.
With the outlook on the future of American society as grim as it has ever been (thanks to
widening economic inequality, the dire warnings of climate alarmists, and the erosion of
confidence in American institutions, among other reasons), it shouldn't come as a surprise that
Americans - particularly young Americans - are extremely stressed out.
Though stress can be an amorphous concept, researchers at WalletHub have tried to quantify
stress-level trends across the US, incorporating data from average hours worked per week to
personal bankruptcy rate to share of adults getting adequate sleep and using these data to
assign a score to individual states.
Their study turned up an interesting result: It showed that states in the Deep South tended
to be the most stressed, followed by expensive coastal states like New York and California,
with the sleepy Midwest and plain states bringing up the rear.
Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness
offered in basic civics textbooks -- we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens
can truly shape our politics -- no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them
believe that the
economy and political
system are both rigged. They also think that money has an
outsized influence on
politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80% of Republicans. And
careful studies confirm what the public believes.
None of this should be surprising given the stark economic inequality that now marks our society. The richest 1% of American households
currently account for
40% of the country's wealth, more than the bottom 90% of families possess. Worse yet, the top 0.1% has cornered about
20% of it, up from 7% in the
mid-1970s. By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% has since then fallen from 35% to 25%. To put such figures in a personal light,
in 2017,
three men -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates -- possessed more wealth ($248.5 billion) than the bottom 50% of Americans.
Over the last four decades, economic disparities in the U.S.
increased substantially and are now greater
than those in other wealthy democracies. The political consequence has been that a tiny minority of extremely wealthy Americans wields
disproportionate influence, leaving so many others feeling disempowered.
What Money Sounds Like
Two recent headline-producing scandals highlight money's power in society and politics.
The first involved super-affluent
parents who used their wealth to get their manifestly unqualified children into highly selective colleges and universities that previously
had reputations (whatever the reality) for weighing the merits of applicants above their parents' wealth or influence.
The second concerned Texas Senator Ted Cruz's reported failure to reveal, as election laws require, more than
$1 million in low-interest loans that he received for his 2012 Senate campaign. (For that lapse, the Federal Election Commission
(FEC) fined Senator Cruz a modest
$35,000.) The funds came from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, the latter his wife's longtime employer. News of those undisclosed loans,
which also cast doubt on Cruz's claim that he had funded his campaign in part by liquidating the couple's assets, only added to the
sense that favoritism now suffuses the politics of a country that once prided itself on being the world's model democracy. (Journalists
covering the story couldn't resist pointing out that the senator had often lambasted Wall Street's "
crony capitalism
" and excessive political influence.)
The Cruz controversy is just one reflection of the coming of 1% politics and 1% elections to America at a moment when the first
billionaire has been ensconced in the Oval Office for more than two years, posing as a populist no less.
Since the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in
Citizens
United v. Federal Election Commission , money has poured into politics as never before. That's because the Court
ruled that
no limits could be placed on corporate and union spending aimed at boosting or attacking candidates running for political office.
Doing so, the justices determined in a 5-4 vote, would be tantamount to restricting individuals' right to free speech, protected
by the First Amendment . Then came the Court's
2014 McCutcheon
v. Federal Election Commission decision (again 5-4), which only increased money's influence in politics by removing the aggregate
limit on an individual's contribution to candidates and to national party committees.
In an age when money drives politics, even ex-presidents are cashing in. Fifteen years after Bill Clinton departed the White House,
he and Hillary had amassed a net worth of $75 million -- a
6,150% increase in their wealth. Barack
and Michelle Obama's similarly soared from $1.3 million in 2000 to
$40 million last year
-- and they're just warming up. Key sources of these staggering increases include sky-high speaking fees (often paid by large corporations),
including
$153 million for the Clintons between February 2001 and May 2016. George W. Bush also made
tens of millions of dollars in this fashion and, in 2017, Obama received
$400,000 for a single
speech to a Wall Street firm.
No wonder average Americans believe that the political class is disconnected from their day-to-day lives and that ours is, in
practice, a democracy of the rich in which money counts (and counts and counts).
Cash for College
Now let's turn to what those two recent scandals tell us about the nexus between wealth and power in America.
First, the school scam. Parents have long hired pricey tutors to coach their children for the college admissions tests, sometimes
paying them hundreds of dollars an hour, even
$1,500 for 90 minutes of high-class prep. They've also long tapped their exclusive social and political
connections to gin up razzle-dazzle internships to embellish those college applications. Anyone who has spent as much time in
academia as I have knows that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. So has the practice of "
legacy admissions " -- access to elite schools especially for the kids of alumni of substantial means who are, or might prove
to be,
donors . The same is true of privileged access to elite schools for the kids of mega-donors. Consider, for instance, that
$2.5
million donation Charles Kushner made to Harvard in 1998, not long before his son Jared applied. Some of the folks who ran Jared's
high school
noted
that he wasn't exactly a whiz-bang student or someone with sky-high SAT scores, but -- surprise! -- he was accepted anyway.
What's new about the recent revelations is that they show the extent to which today's deep-pocketed helicopter parents have gone
into overdrive, using brazen schemes to corrupt the college admissions process yet more. One unnamed parent spent a cool
$6.5 million to ensure
the right college admitted his or her child. Others paid hefty amounts to get their kids' college admissions test scores
falsified or even hired
proxies to take the tests for them.
Famous actors and financial
titans made huge payments
to university sports coaches, who then lied to admissions officers, claiming that the young applicants were champions they had recruited
in sports like water polo, crew, or tennis. (The kids may have known how to swim, row, or play tennis, but star athletes they
were not .)
Of course, as
figures on the growing economic inequality in this country since the 1970s indicate, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack
the connections or the cash to stack the deck in such ways, even assuming they would do so. Hence, the public outrage, even though
parents generally understand that not every aspirant can get into a top school -- there aren't enough spots -- just as many know
that their childrens' future happiness and sense of fulfillment won't depend on whether they attend a prestigious college or university.
Still, the unfairness and chicanery highlighted by the admissions scandal proved galling, the more so as the growing crew of fat
cats corrupting the admissions process doubtless also preach the gospel of American meritocracy. Worse, most of their kids will undoubtedly
present their fancy degrees as proof that quality wins out in our society, never mind that their starting blocks were placed so far
ahead of the competition.
To add insult to injury, the same parents and children may even portray admissions
policies designed to help students who lack wealth or come from underrepresented communities as violations of the principles
of equal opportunity and fairness, democracy's bedrock. In reality, students from low-income families, or even those of modest means,
are startlingly less likely to be admitted to top private universities than those from households in the top 10%. In fact, applicants
from families in the top 1% are now 77
times more likely than in the bottom 20% to land in an elite college, and
38 of those schools admit more kids from families in that top percentage than from the bottom 60%.
Buying Politics (and Politicians), American-Style
Now, let's return to the political version of the same -- the world in which Ted Cruz swims so comfortably. There, too, money
talks, which means that those wealthy enough to gain access to, and the attention of, lawmakers have huge advantages over others.
If you want political influence, whether as a person or a corporation, having the wealth needed to make big campaign contributions
-- to individuals or groups -- and to hire top-drawer lobbyists makes a world of difference.
Official data on the distribution of family income in the
United States show that the overwhelming majority of Americans can't play that game, which remains the preserve of a tiny super-rich
minority. In 2015, even with taxes and government-provided benefits included, households in the lowest 20% accounted for only about
5% of total income. Their average income -- not counting taxes and government-provided assistance -- was only $20,000. The share
of the bottom 50% -- families making
$61,372 or less --
dropped from 20% to 12% between 1978 and 2015. By contrast, families in the top 1% earned nearly 50% of total income, averaging
$215,000 a year -- and that's only income, not wealth. The super-rich have plenty of the latter, those in the bottom 20% next to
none.
Before we proceed, a couple of caveats about money and political clout. Money doesn't always prevail. Candidates with more campaign
funds aren't guaranteed victory, though the time politicians spend raising cash leaves no doubt that they believe it makes a striking
difference. In addition, money in politics doesn't operate the way simple bribery does. The use of it in pursuit of political influence
works more subtly, and often -- in the new era opened by the Supreme Court -- without the slightest need to violate the law.
Still, in Donald Trump's America, who would claim that money doesn't talk? If nothing else, from inaugural events -- for Trump's
inaugural
$107 million was raised from a host of wealthy
donors with no limits on individual payments, 30 of which totaled $1 million or more -- to gala fundraisers, big donors get numerous
opportunities to schmooze with those whose campaigns they've helped bankroll. Yes, there's a limit --
currently
$5,600 -- on how much any individual can officially give to a single election campaign, but the ultra-wealthy can simply put their
money
into organizations formed solely to influence elections as well as into various party committees.
Individuals, companies, and organizations can, for instance, give money to political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs.
Though bound by rules
, both entities still have lots of leeway. PACs face no monetary limits on their independent efforts to shape elections, though they
can't accept corporate or union money or take more than $5,000 from individuals. They can provide up to $5,000 to individual election
campaigns and $15,000 per party committee, but there's no limit on what they can contribute in the aggregate. Super PACs have far
more running room. They can rake in unlimited amounts from a variety of sources (as long as they're not foreign) and, like PACs,
can spend limitless sums to shape elections, providing they don't give money directly to candidates' campaigns.
Then there are the dark money groups, which can receive
financial contributions from any source, American or foreign. Though their primary purpose is to push policies, not individual campaigns,
they can engage in election-related work, provided that no more than half their funds are devoted to it. Though barred from donating
to individual campaigns, they can pour unlimited money into Super PACs and, unlike PACs and Super PACs, don't have to disclose who
gave them the money or how much. Between 2008 and 2018, dark money groups spent
$1 billion to influence elections.
In 2018 , 2,395 Super PACs were
working their magic in this country. They raised $1.6 billion and spent nearly $809 million. Nearly 78% of the money they received
came from 100 donors . They,
in turn, belonged to the wealthiest 1%, who provided 95% of what those Super PACs took in.
As the 2018 congressional elections kicked off, the four wealthiest Super PACs alone had
$113.4 million on hand to support candidates they favored, thanks in substantial measure to business world donors. In that election
cycle, 31 individuals ponied up more than $5 million
apiece, while contributions from the top four among them ranged from almost $40 million to $123 million.
The upshot: if you're running for office and advocate policies disliked by wealthy individuals or by companies and organizations
with lots of cash to drop into politics, you know from the get-go that you now have a problem.
Wealth also influences political outcomes through the lobbying industry. Here again, there are rules, but even so, vast numbers
of lobbyists and eye-popping amounts of lobbying money now are at the heart of the American political system. In
2018 alone , the 50 biggest lobbying outfits, largely representing big companies, business associations, and banks, spent $540
million, and the grand total for lobbying that year alone was $3.4 billion.
Nearly 350 of those lobbyists were
former legislators from Congress. Officials departing from senior positions in the executive branch have also found
artful ways to circumvent presidential directives that prohibit them from working as lobbyists for a certain number of years.
Do unions and public interest groups also lobby? Sure, but there's no contest between them and corporations.
Lee Drutman of the New America think tank notes that, for every dollar the former spent in 2015, corporate donors spent $34.
Unsurprisingly, only one of the top 20 spenders on lobbying
last year was a union or a public-interest
organization.
The sums spent by individual companies to gain political influence can be breathtaking. Take now-embattled
Boeing
. It devoted $15 million to lobbying in 2018 -- and that's not counting its campaign contributions, using various channels. Those
added another $8.4 million in the last two-and-a-half years. Yet Boeing only placed 11th among the
top 20 corporate spenders on lobbying
last year. Leading the pack: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at $94.8 million.
Defenders of the status quo will warn that substantially reducing money's role in American politics is sure to threaten democracy
and civil liberties by ceding undue power to the state and, horror of horrors, putting us on the road to "socialism," the right wing's
bogeyman du jour . This is ludicrous.
Other democracies
have taken strong steps to prevent economic inequality from subverting their politics and haven't become less free as a result. Even
those democracies that don't limit political contributions have adopted measures to curb the power of money, including bans on television
ads (a huge expense for candidates in American elections:
$3 billion
in 2018 alone just for access to local stations), free airtime to allow competitors to disseminate their messages, and public funds
to ease the financial burden of election campaigns.
Compared to other democracies, the United States appears to be in a league of its own when it comes to money's prominence in
politics.
Those who favor continuing business as usual like to point out that federal "matching funds" exist to help presidential candidates
not be steamrolled by competitors who've raised mounds of money. Those funds, however, do no such thing because they come with
stringent limits on total spending. Candidates who accept matching funds for a general election cannot accept contributions from
individuals. Moreover, matching funds are capped at $20 million, which is a joke considering that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent
a combined
$1.2 billion in individual contributions alone during the 2012 presidential election. (
Super PACs spent another $350 million
to help Romney and $100 million to back Obama.)
A New American Tradition?
Rising
income inequality ,
wage stagnation , and
slowing social mobility
hurt ordinary Americans economically, even as they confer massive social and political advantages on the mega-rich -- and not just
when it comes to college admissions and politics either.
Even the Economist , a publication that can't be charged with sympathy for left-wing ideas,
warned recently of the threat economic inequality poses to the political agency of American citizens. The magazine cited studies
showing that, despite everything you've heard about the power of small donations in recent political campaigns, 1% of the population
actually provides a quarter of all the money spent on politics by individuals and 80% of what the two major political parties raise.
Thanks to their wealth, a minuscule economic elite as well as big corporations now shape policies, notably on taxation and expenditure,
to their advantage on an unprecedented scale.
Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support stricter laws to prevent wealth from hijacking politics and want
the Citizens United ruling
overturned . But then just how much does the voice of the majority matter? Judging from the many failed efforts to pass such
laws, not much.
The empirical evidence is similarly mixed. Barro (2000) finds that for developed economies
income inequality raises growth. On the other hand, Berg et al. (2012, 2018) find that income
inequality tends to reduce the duration of growth spells. Forbes (2000) and Panizza (2002) find
no systematic effect.
The missing link: Inequality of opportunity
In recent work (Aiyar and Ebeke 2018), we point to the neglected role of equality of
opportunity in mediating this relationship. Our hypothesis is simple. In societies where
opportunities are unequally distributed – where the material circumstances of parents act
as binding constraints on the opportunities available to their children – income
inequality exerts a greater drag on growth. Any increase in income inequality tends to become
entrenched, limiting the investment opportunities – broadly defined to include investment
in children – available to low-income earners, thereby retarding long-term aggregate
growth. On the other hand, in societies with a more equal distribution of opportunities, an
increase in income inequality can be more easily reversed and need not constrain investment
opportunities and growth. To the extent that inequality of opportunity matters in this way, its
omission from standard regressions of growth on income inequality leads to misspecification,
which can help explain the inconclusive nature of the empirical literature to date.
... ... ...
...we can think of at least three lines of enquiry for future research, which
our results suggest might be of first order importance.
First, unequal access to education can limit low-income children from realising their
full capabilities. This is clearly a tragedy for reasons that extend far beyond mere
economics, but by permanently reducing the productivity of a segment of society it can also
retard economic growth.
Second, unequal access to labour markets is often seen between amply protected 'insiders'
and unemployed or precariously employed 'outsiders'. An increase in income inequality will
tend to most strongly affect those on the wrong side of this barrier, with hysteresis effects
translating this into a permanent output loss.
Third, unequal access to finance can prevent low-income people from entrepreneurship
opportunities and human capital investment, with an obvious retarding impact on growth.
"... "The decision to close our local stores is a difficult one," said Lifeway Chief Executive Officer Brad Waggoner. "While we had hoped to keep some stores open, current market projections show this is no longer a viable option." ..."
"... And yes, Internet retailing has been growing, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. retail sales. In addition, it is important to point out that Internet retailers had a very disappointing holiday season just like brick and mortar retailers did. ..."
"... Ultimately, the truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily slowing down in recent months. During the months of December, January and February, the amount of stuff being moved around the country by truck, rail and air was lower than during all of those same months a year earlier. The following comes from Wolf Richter ..."
"... Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get rougher for the U.S. economy in the months ahead. So more retail workers are going to get laid off, more stores are going to close, and there are going to be a lot more stories about our ongoing "retail apocalypse" in the mainstream media. ..."
Just like we witnessed during the last recession, major retailers are laying off tens of
thousands of workers, and it looks like this will be the worst year for store closings in all
of U.S. history. Many are referring to this as
"the retail apocalypse" , and without a doubt this is one of the toughest stretches for
retailers that we have ever seen. But many believe that what we have witnessed so far is
just the beginning . After all, if
retailers are struggling this much now, how bad will things be once the next recession really
gets rolling? Of course the truth is that things have been rocky for the retail industry for
quite a few years, but the numbers are telling us that this crisis is really starting to
accelerate.
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, retail layoffs were up a whopping 92 percent
in January and February compared to the same period a year ago. The following comes from
NBC News
More than 41,000 people have lost their jobs in the retail industry so far this year -- a
92 percent spike in layoffs since the same time last year,
according to a new report.
And the layoffs continue to mount, with JCPenney announcing this week it would be closing
18 stores in addition to three previously announced closures, as part of a "standard annual
review."
Yes, competition from Internet commerce is hurting the traditional retail industry, but it
certainly doesn't explain a 92 percent increase.
And very few retailers have been able to avoid this downsizing trend. At this point, even
the largest retailer in the entire country has begun "quietly closing
stores"
Walmart is closing at least 11 US stores across eight states.
The stores include one Walmart Supercenter in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Walmart
Neighborhood Market stores in Arizona, California, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Virginia, and Washington.
For decades, Wal-Mart has been expanding extremely aggressively.
They have plenty of cash, and so the only way that it would make sense for them to close
stores is if they anticipated that we are heading into a recession.
The company was unable to find a buyer for the retail business and will begin winding down
its operations beginning this week, the company said in statement released Monday. The
decision to liquidate will bring an end to the brick-and-mortar business that began in 1962
with one location in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Lifeway Christian Bookstores announced last week it would be closing the doors of all 170
brick and mortar stores, in a pivot to focusing on digital and e-commerce.
"The decision to close our local stores is a difficult one," said Lifeway Chief Executive
Officer Brad Waggoner. "While we had hoped to keep some stores open, current market
projections show this is no longer a viable option."
Whenever I do an article like this, I always have some readers that try to convince me that
this is only happening because of the growth of Internet retailing.
And yes, Internet retailing has been growing, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent
of all U.S. retail sales. In addition, it is important to point out that Internet retailers had
a very disappointing holiday season just like brick and mortar retailers did.
Ultimately, the truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily slowing down in recent
months. During the months of December, January and February, the amount of stuff being moved around
the country by truck, rail and air was lower than during all of those same months a year
earlier. The following comes from
Wolf Richter
Now it's the third month in a row, and the red flag is getting more visible and a little
harder to ignore about the goods-based economy: Freight shipment volume in the US across all
modes of transportation – truck, rail, air, and barge – in February fell 2.1%
from February a year ago, according to the
Cass Freight Index , released today. The three months in a row of year-over-year declines
are the first such declines since the transportation recession of 2015 and 2016.
I have a feeling that when we get the final numbers for March that they will show that this
streak has now extended to four months.
Right now, unsold goods
are starting to pile up in U.S. warehouses at a rate that we haven't seen since the last
recession. Many retailers that are barely clinging to life will simply not survive if economic
conditions continue to deteriorate.
Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get rougher for the U.S. economy in
the months ahead. So more retail workers are going to get laid off, more stores are going to close, and there
are going to be a lot more stories about our ongoing "retail apocalypse" in the mainstream
media.
"... Professor Weinstein is an avowed liberal with a long history of progressive thinking. As a young man, he was the center of another controversy when he blew the whistle regarding the exploitation of black strippers by a college fraternity. Regardless, his refusal to participate in what can be described as a "no-white-people-day" ironically earned him the brand "racist" by the student body. He was essentially removed from the campus on the threat of physical harm. ..."
"... Bret Weinstein is on the left, politically, but the leftist students and administration attacked him for not being left enough . Imagine now, how the college may have treated a person who leaned right. As it turns out, there are quite a few examples. ..."
"... Dr. Peterson is a psychology professor, clinician, and best-selling author. He is also, perhaps, today's most controversial academic. He burst into the public consciousness after he opposed bill C-16 in Canada. The bill added gender expression and gender identity to the various protections covered by the Canadian Human Rights Act. ..."
"... One example comes from Queens University. While Dr. Peterson gave a lecture, student protestors broke windows, tried to drown him out with noisemakers and drums, and one protestor told others to burn down the building with Dr. Peterson and the attendees locked inside. ..."
In March 2017, young people armed with baseball
bats prowled the parking lots of Evergreen State College. They hoped to find Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, and presumably
bash his brains in. Bret had caught the ire of the student body after he refused to participate in an unofficial "Day of Absence,"
in which white students and faculty were told to stay home, away from the campus, while teachers and students of color attended as
they normally would. In prior years, people of color voluntarily absented themselves to highlight their presence and importance on
campus. In 2017, the event's organizers decided to flip the event, and white people were pressured to stay away from the school.
In a letter to the school's administration, Bret explained why he opposed
the idea:
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order
to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first
is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force,
and an act of oppression in and of itself
On a college campus, one's right to speak -- or to be -- must never be based on skin color.
When word of Professor Weinstein's objection got out, enraged student activists began a hostile takeover of the school, and the
college president ordered the campus police force not to intervene. Professor Weinstein was told, in essence, that nobody would protect
him from young people with baseball bats. The police warned Professor Weinstein that their hands were tied and that he should stay
off campus for his own safety.
Professor Weinstein is an avowed liberal
with a long history of progressive thinking. As a young man, he was the center of another controversy when he
blew the whistle regarding the exploitation of black
strippers by a college fraternity. Regardless, his refusal to participate in what can be described as a "no-white-people-day" ironically
earned him the brand "racist" by the student body. He was essentially removed from the campus on the threat of physical harm.
And its core, the story of Bret Weinstein and Evergreen State College is about a college's descent into total chaos after someone
presented mild resistance to a political demonstration.
Bret Weinstein is on the left, politically, but the leftist students and administration attacked him for not being left enough
. Imagine now, how the college may have treated a person who leaned right. As it turns out, there are quite a few examples.
Before discussing what the Wilfrid Laurier University did to a woman named Lindsay Shepherd, it's important to know about Jordan
Peterson.
Dr. Peterson is a psychology professor, clinician, and best-selling author. He is also, perhaps, today's most controversial academic.
He burst into the public consciousness after he opposed bill C-16 in Canada. The bill added gender expression and gender identity
to the various protections covered by the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Dr. Peterson objected to the bill because it set a new precedent -- requiring citizens to use certain pronouns to address people
with non-traditional gender identities. Dr. Peterson calls transexual
people by whatever gender they project , as long as he feels like they're asking him to do so in good faith, but he's wary of
people playing power games with him, and he saw something dangerous about the government mandating which words he must use. He believed
that under C-16, misgendering a person could be classified as hate speech, even it was just an accident.
Having spent much of his life considering the dangers that exist at the furthest ends of the political spectrum -- Nazi Germany
on the far right, the Soviet Union on the far left -- Dr. Peterson has developed a tendency to see things in apocalyptic terms.
In bill C-16, he saw what he considered the seeds of a serious threat to the freedom of expression -- a list of government-approved
words -- and decided it was a hill worth dying on.
He's controversial, verbose, discursive, sometimes grouchy, and almost incapable of speaking the language of television sound-bites.
He makes it easy for critics to attack and misrepresent him -- and ever since he took a stance against C-16, he's been subjected
to student protests and journalistic hit-pieces.
One example comes from Queens University. While Dr. Peterson gave a lecture, student protestors broke windows, tried to drown
him out with noisemakers and drums, and one protestor told others to burn down the building with Dr. Peterson and the attendees locked
inside.
Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with his opinions, Dr. Peterson should have the right to express them without other
people suggesting that he be murdered with fire. Furthermore, people should be able to talk about what he says.
Enter the case of Lindsay Shepherd.
While working as a teacher's aid at Wilfrid Laurier University, Lindsay Shepherd showed students two clips from public access
television featuring Jordan Peterson debating someone over bill C-16. After showing the clips, she asked her students to share their
thoughts.
Days later, the school called her into a meeting with a panel of three superiors. They said that they had gotten a number of complaints
from students. Lindsay asked how many complaints they had received, and was told that the number was confidential.
The panel claimed that she had created a toxic environment by showing the clips and facilitating a discussion without taking a
side against Dr. Peterson's view. They said it was as if she had been completely neutral while showing one of Hitler's speeches.
The panel thought the clip probably violated the Human Rights Code, and they demanded Shepherd to submit all of her future lesson
plans ahead of time so that they could be vetted.
Although one student expressed some concern about the class, the number of formal complaints that the administrators had received
was actually zero.
During their discussion, Lindsay said:
The thing is, can you shield people from those ideas? Am I supposed to comfort them and make sure that they are insulated away
from this? Is that what the point of this is? Because to me that is against what a university is about.
Lindsay found herself at the mercy of school administrators whose brittle spirits couldn't bear to present students with opinions
that they might have found offensive. She had believed that universities were places where people could explore ideas. On that day,
the panel showed her just how wrong she'd been.
And she caught it all on tape.
Over the past few years, the news has become littered with stories of schools overrun by children while hand-wringing professors
and administrators do everything possible to placate them. Recently, a group called "The Diaspora Coalition"
staged a sit-in at Sarah Lawrence.
Their demands
included, among other things, that they get free fabric-softener. The origin of their grievance was an
op-ed published in the
New York Times about the imbalance between left-leaning and right-leaning school administrators.
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business,
sums the phenomenon up tidily :
You get kids who are much more anxious and fragile, much more depressed, coming onto campus at a time of much greater political
activism -- and now these grievance studies ideas about, 'America's a matrix of oppression,' and, 'look at the world in terms
of good versus evil.' it's much more appealing to them, and it's that minority of students, they're the ones who are initiating
a lot of the movements
Every day, or at least every week, I get an email from a professor saying, 'you know, I used a metaphor
in class and somebody reported me.' and once this happens to you, you pull back. You change your teaching style
What we're seeing
on campus is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors. And once we can't trust each other, we can't do
our job.
We can't risk being provocative, raising uncomfortable ideas. We have to play it safe, and then everybody suffers.
To understate it, President Donald Trump is a deeply troubling human being. However, he may have done a good thing on Thursday,
March 21st, when he signed an
executive order that requires public schools to "foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse
debate."
Schools that don't comply may lose government-funded research grants.
In theory, the order will compel colleges to prevent scenes like those at Evergreen State and Sarah Lawrence. Schools will have
serious financial incentives to protect their professors from mobs of unruly children. If all goes well, students will learn to engage
with controversial opinions without resorting to baseball bats or demanding Snuggle Plus fabric softener.
One would be remiss if they didn't consider the hidden or unintended consequences of the new policy, though. The executive order
is vague, and it gives no criteria for judging whether an institution complies with its requirements. Instead, the specific implementation
is left for structures lower on the hierarchy to decide. Hopefully, nobody decides that Young Earth theories must be taught alongside
evolution.
The policy could very well become a tool by which the dominant political party punishes schools that lean in the opposite direction.
Since there is a 12-to-1 imbalance between liberals and conservative college administrators right now, it would be a Republican administration
punishing liberal colleges.
This is hardly a perfect solution -- but at least it's an effort to address the problem. The stability of our society depends
on an endless balancing act between the left and the right. The political landscape of academia has tilted too far left, and it's
clearly becoming insular and unstable. Now it's necessary to push things back toward the center.
Hopefully, this recent executive order does more good than harm.
Postscript
After the events at Evergreen State College, the school was forced to settle with Bret Weinstein and his wife, who was also a
professor there. The college paid the couple $500,000. Enrollment at the college is said to have dropped "catastrophically."
After the events at Wilfrid Laurier University, the school released several letters of apology. It is being sued for millions
of dollars by Lindsay Shepherd and Jordan Peterson.
Forty professors endorsed the demands made by the Diaspora Coalition at Sarah Lawrence, and several others endorsed challenging
Samuel Abrams's tenure -- Abrams being the person who wrote the op-ed that appeared in the New York Times.
The bad news is that almost half of Americans approaching retirement have nothing saved in a
401(k) or other individual account. The good news is that the new estimate, from the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, is slightly better than a few years earlier.
Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined
contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released
Tuesday. That's an improvement from the 52 percent without retirement money in 2013.
Two in five of such households did have access to a traditional pension, also known as a
defined benefit plan. However, 29 percent of older Americans had neither a pension nor any
assets in a 401(k) or IRA account.
The estimate from the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, is a brief update to a more
comprehensive 2015 report
on retirement savings in the U.S. Both are based on the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer
Finances.
The previous report found the median household, age 65 to 74, had about $148,000 saved, the
equivalent of an inflation-protected annuity of $649 a month.
But sophistication of intelligence agencies now reached very high level. Russiage was pretty dirty but pretty slick operation. British
thre letter againces were even more devious, if we view Skripals poisoning as MI5/Mi6 "witness protection" operation due to possible
Skripal role in creating Steele dossier. So let's keep wanting the evnet. The election 2020 might be event more interesting the Elections
of 2016. Who would suggest in 2015 that he/she elects man candidate from Israel lobby instead of a woman candidate from the same lobby?
Notable quotes:
"... The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an attack on them. ..."
"... Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue's appeals, Adorno wrote, 'have been standardised, similarly to the advertising slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business'. Trump's background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared him perfectly for his present role. ..."
"... the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority. ..."
"... The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds. ..."
"... Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well as strength. The agitators' boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. ..."
"... Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that 'a few get rich first' to protection for the least advantaged. ..."
"... Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent approval ratings, half say they 'strongly approve' and are probably lost to the Democrats. ..."
One might object that Trump, a billionaire TV star, does not resemble his followers. But this misses the powerful intimacy that he
establishes with them, at rallies, on TV and on Twitter. Part of his malicious genius lies in his ability to forge a bond with people
who are otherwise excluded from the world to which he belongs. Even as he cast Hillary Clinton as the tool of international finance,
he said:
I do deals – big deals – all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance.
These are hard-driving, vicious cut-throat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table
and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage.
With these words he brought his followers into the boardroom with him and encouraged them to take part in a shared, cynical exposure
of the soiled motives and practices that lie behind wealth. His role in the Birther movement, the prelude to his successful presidential
campaign, was not only racist, but also showed that he was at home with the most ignorant, benighted, prejudiced people in America.
Who else but a complete loser would engage in Birtherism, so far from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Harvard aura that elevated
Obama, but also distanced him from the masses?
The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but
it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an
attack on them. 'The fascist leader's startling symptoms of inferiority', Adorno wrote, 'his resemblance to ham actors and asocial
psychopaths', facilitates the identification, which is the basis of the ideal. On the Access Hollywood tape, which was widely assumed
would finish him, Trump was giving voice to a common enough daydream, but with 'greater force' and greater 'freedom of libido' than
his followers allow themselves. And he was bolstering the narcissism of the women who support him, too, by describing himself as
helpless in the grip of his desires for them.
Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far
more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue's appeals, Adorno wrote, 'have been standardised, similarly to the advertising
slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business'. Trump's background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared
him perfectly for his present role. According to Adorno,
the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them
psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than
by any intrinsic superiority.
To meet the unconscious wishes of his audience, the leader
simply turns his own unconscious outward Experience has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use
of his irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their sensitivity.
All he has to do in order to make the sale, to get his TV audience to click, or to arouse a campaign rally, is exploit his own
psychology.
Using old-fashioned but still illuminating language, Adorno continued:
The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous
spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance,
functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds.
Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well
as strength. The agitators' boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was
particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. As with the Birther movement or Access
Hollywood, Trump's self-debasement – pretending to sell steaks on the campaign trail – forges a bond that secures his idealised status.
Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the
neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic
Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that 'a few get rich first' to protection for the least advantaged.
Yet no one who lived through the civil rights and feminist rebellions of recent decades can believe that an economic programme
per se is a sufficient basis for a Democratic-led politics.
This holds as well when it comes to trying to reach out to Trump's supporters. Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent
approval ratings, half say they 'strongly approve' and are probably lost to the Democrats. But if we understand the personal
level at which pro-Trump strivings operate, we may better appeal to the other half, and in that way forestall the coming emergency.
One source said some of the parents are being
given a short window to consider a deal or potentially face additional charges.
It's unclear which parents prosecutors hope to seek out for cooperation, but sources said
authorities were interested in getting a better picture of how the scam worked. The sources
requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
"... The divisions can always be jacked up. "My opponent is a white nationalist!" and so he doesn't just think you're lazy, he wants to kill you. Convince average Americans to vote against their own interests by manipulating them into opposing any program that might benefit black and brown equally or more than themselves. ..."
"... Listen for what's missing in the speeches about inequality and injustice. Whichever candidate admits that we've created an apartheid of dollars for all deserves your support. ..."
The birth lottery determines which of those three bands we'll sink or swim together in,
because there is precious little mobility. In that bottom band,
81 percent face flat or falling net worths (
40 percent of Americans make below $15
an hour) and so aren't going anywhere. Education, once a vehicle, is now mostly a tool for the
preservation of current statuses across
generations, to the point that it's worth paying bribes for. Class is sticky.
Money, not so much. Since the 9.9 percent have the most (except for the super wealthy at
least), they have the most to lose. At their
peak in the mid-1980s, the managers and technicians in this group held 35 percent of the
nation's wealth. Three decades later, that fell 12 percent,
exactly as much as the wealth of the 1 percent rose. A significant redistribution of wealth
-- upwards -- took place following the 2008 market collapse, as bailouts, shorts,
repossessions, and new laws helped the top end of the economy at cost to the bottom. What some
label hardships are to others business opportunities.
The people at the top are throwing nails off the back of the truck to make sure no one else
can catch up with them. There is a strong zero sum element to all this. The goal is to
eliminate the competition
. They'll have it all when society is down to two classes, the 1 percent and the 99 percent,
and at that point we'll all be effectively the same color. The CEO of JP Morgan
called it a bifurcated economy. Historians will recognize it as feudalism.
You'd think someone would sound a global climate change-level alarm about all this. Instead
we divide people into
tribes and make them afraid of each other by forcing competition for limited resources like
health care. Identity politics sharpens
the lines, recognizing increasingly smaller separations, like adding letters to LGBTQQIAAP.
Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, herself with presidential ambitions,
is an example of the loud voices demanding
more division . Contrast that with early model Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National
Convention, who pleaded, "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and
Asian America; there's the United States of America."
The divisions can always be jacked up. "My opponent is a white nationalist!" and so he
doesn't just think you're lazy, he wants to kill you. Convince average Americans to vote
against their own interests by manipulating them into opposing any program that might benefit
black and brown equally or more than themselves. Keep the groups fighting left and right and
they'll never notice the real discrimination is up and down, even as massive economic forces
consume all equally. Consumption becomes literal as Americans die from alcohol, drugs, and
suicide in record numbers
.
Meanwhile, no one has caught on to the fact that identity politics is a marketing tool for
votes, fruit flavored vape to bring in the kiddies. Keep that in mind as you listen to the
opening cries of the 2020 election. Listen for what's missing in the speeches about inequality
and injustice. Whichever candidate admits that we've created an apartheid of dollars for all
deserves your support.
** The author doesn't really drive for Uber but his conversation with the Spaniard was
real.
Mr Van Buren. This piece nails it. The Democrats made a huge mistake focusing on race and
LGBTQ instead of class. Their stated goal should be to replace race based affirmative action
with class-based programs.
If there is serious violence coming to America it will come during the next major
recession/financial crisis. The ARs will come out of the closet when, during the next
financial crisis, the elites are bailed out (again), yet the riff raff lose their homes and
pickups to foreclosure.
I am very pessimistic in this area. I believe the elites, in general, are agnostic to SJW
issues, abortion, job loss, BLM, religious liberty, and on and on. The look at the riff raff
with amusement, sparring over such trivial things. Meanwhile, the river of cash keeps flowing
to their bank accounts.
Imagine if the digital transfer of money was abolished. Imagine if everybody had to have
their money in a local bank instead of in an investment account of a major bank. Imagine if
Americans saw, day after day, armored vehicles showing up at local banks to offload sacks of
currency that went to only a few individual accounts held by the very rich.
Instead, the elites receive their financial statements showing an ever increasing hoard of
cash at their disposal. They see it, but nobody else does. However, if everybody saw the
river of wealth flowing to the elites, I believe things would change. Fast. Right now this
transfer of wealth is all digital, hidden from the view of 99.99% of Americans and the IRS.
And the elites, the banking industry, and the wealth management cabal prefer it that way.
It's easy to propose the ultimate goal of the elites is to have a utopian society to
themselves, where the only interaction they have with the riff raff is with subservient
technicians keeping it all running. Like the movie Elysium.
When feudalism comes to America, it will be justified by Libertarianism. With government
defined as the bad guy, there's nothing to stop the 1% from organizing everything to their
own benefit.
On the other side of the political spectrum, identity politics emphasizes people's
differences and tribal affiliations over their shared citizenship. This prevents them from
making common cause.
Fundamentally, these trends make the body politic so weak that it becomes susceptible to
takeover by authoritarians that represent narrow interests.
"His skin was clearly a few shades darker than mine, though he pointed out that was only
because my relatives came from the cold part of Europe and he came from the sunny part."
The Spanish in Europe got their color from the Moorish invasion, not the sun.
More of my annoying trivia that has little to do with the subject of an article.
Welp, the Democratic Party, by and large, believes all Americans regardless of class, race,
religion, and gender should have guaranteed equal access to affordable healthcare, a
substantial minimum wage, education and the rest.
Stacy Abrams wants these items too, along with equal access to the voting franchise.
"Until slavery was ended in the United States, human beings were legally considered
capital, just like owning stocks and bonds today. But the Spaniard knew enough about history
to wonder what reparations would be offered to the thousands of Chinese treated as animals to
build the railroads or the 8,000 Irish who died digging the New Basin Canal or the whole
families of Jews living on the Lower East Side of New York who were forced to employ their
children to make clothing for uptown "white" stores. Later in the same century, wages were
"voluntarily" cut to the bone at factories in Ohio to save jobs that disappeared anyway after
the owners had wrung out the last profits."
That would be an excellent point if your inner Spaniard concluded reparations should be
offered to the others as well, but ends up being merely tendentious if he contends that no
one gets reparations.
But will you like it if the Democratic Party makes that part of their platform too?
I was born in Middletown, Ohio alongside the elegiacal hillbillies, who, by the way,
didn't care for the blacks on the other side of the tracks anymore than my Armco-employed
grandfather did, and certainly the business owners who disappeared the jobs and cut wages
while voting for the so-called free traders were of the same ilk.
I didn't know any Democrats among any of my family's circle and, by the way, Middletown
might as well have been south of the Mason Dixon anyway for all the white Democrats in town
who gave not a crap about their fellow black citizens, certainly not the business owners who
disappeared the jobs while voting for the so-called free traders.
It was the Republican Party (Larry Kudlow, I'm gunning for you) who championed creative
destruction and the red tooth and claw of unfettered worldwide competition without asking, in
fact jumping for joy, what the unintended consequences would be because the consequences were
intended smash the unions for all, cut wages and benefits and hand the booty to shareholders,
move operations to lower-tax, lower wage, environmentally unregulated parts of the globe to
manufacture them thar high margin MAGA hats for the aggrieved.
What a beautiful grift!
Hello, Marianas.
That Democrats jumped on the bandwagon is no credit to them, especially while assuming the
prone position as the republican party frayed the safety net.
True, the republicans laid off everyone, regardless of race, gender, and class and then
cut everyone's benefits.
As the Spaniard rightly understood, one can look way back into our history and see that the
moneyed class has always used identity politics in economic control games to divide and
conquer. That the Republicans rail on this as some evil creation of the modern Democrat is
laughable at best. That the sheep who follow the party mouth pieces of the moneyed class in
this media age can still be so easily manipulated is rather pitiful. Making common cause for
the general welfare has never really sunk in as an American value.
Divide and conquer remains our true ethos. As the dole gets evermore paltry the only
seeming options remaining are common cause for a common good or greater violence. One
requires us to find a contentment beyond the delusional American dream of becoming that 1 to
10%. The other just requires continued anger, division and despair.
Ironically the view that race/culture isn't at all important and should be disregarded in
view of the class division (a "distraction"), is pretty much endorsing the classic Marxist
critique.
It's easy to notice divide and conquer when it's hate against those of the same class but are
of a different culture/race.
But what's *difficult* to notice is identifying with the elites of your race in a positive
way.
A lot of people, especially with the onset of realityTV, tend to think rich people are just
like them (albeit a little smarter). The methods and systems to keep power aren't considered.
They're made non-threatening. So many billionaires and politicians act effete today to stoke
this image.
" Whether your housing is subsidized via a mortgage tax deduction "
This jumped off the screen. I wonder how many people even realize that. Probably the same
number who still believe that social security is a "forced savings".
Not to put too fine a point on it but clearly we are wasting our time arguing. As long as the
current system of government remains in effect it will be same old same old.
Many changes are in order–starting with this archaic remnant of a bygone era called
"The Two Party System".
Spaniards are indeed Hispanic. The definition of Hispanic relates to a linguistic grouping
– that is, relating to Spain or Spanish speaking countries. Your friend would indeed
qualify for all sorts of preferences according to the definition.
As to being a POC, I could not locate any definition as to what threshold of skin tone
qualifies someone as a POC. I wager none yet exists but will be forthcoming.
Johann
As for the skin tone of Spaniards, many in the south have the Moorish influence,however,
in the rest of the country skin tones range from light beige to very fair. Rather similar to
Italians, actually.
First, kudos to Van Buren for getting a Seamless delivery while driving. That's not easy to
coordinate. Second, I look forward to more conservative policies addressing poverty, drug
addiction and access to health care. This article adds to the 10-year rant against what
Democrats have done or want to do.
Like nearly every Republican of the last 10 years, Van Buren offers none here. But I'm
sure once the complaining is out of his system, they will arrive.
Your Spaniard friend also has it all wrong. The real division line is between those willing
to initiate coercion for their own self-righteousness and those who refuse to. Anyone that
supports government is one-in-the-same, regardless of color or class.
Thirty years ago I'd be asking who printed the canned response pamphlet to give prepared
talking points to enable anyone to provide quick sharp tongued witty criticisms of anything
they may encounter that didn't tow the party line.
Now I gotta ask where do I download the Trollware to accomplish the same thing.
The Moors were a tiny class of invaders who left rather little imprint on the Spanish genome.
That was true of the Romans and the Goths as well. Spanish genes are mostly the genes of the
pre-Roman population: the Iberians in the south (who maybe migrated from North Africa), Celts
in the north, and the indigenous Basques along the Pyrenees.
What happened to "a rising tide lifts all boats"? We've been promised for decades that the
wealth generated by those at the very top would "trickle down." This was a cornerstone of
Reaganism that has been parroted ever since.
There have been naysayers who say that that theory was fantasy and that all we would have
is increased wealth disparity and greater national deficits.
"... Was the American Middle Class a Cold War thing? ..."
"... The British middle class seems to have been mostly people living on investments -- not in the manorial style, but with enough to have a flat, and a servant -- in a style that you might associate with Sherlock Holmes. A middle class that included people with jobs definitely seems post-WWII, and, of course, since the wage stagnation starting in the mid 1970's, it's mostly ended by now. ..."
feel that being middle class is not what
it once was and that we are all running in place as fast as we can to stay the same, to quote Alice in
Wonderland's Red Queen," Brenda Madison, an art director and graphic designer in Laguna Beach (Orange
County), told me. "Never did I think I would worry that Social Security and Medicare may not be available in
my future or that a medical injury or unexpected repair would bankrupt us."
She and her husband, now in their middle years, "are not sure we will be able to retire in our home."
Patricia Moore is a single mother of three who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles and a
licensed vocational nurse working in hospice about to take the licensing exam to be a registered nurse. Due
to a shortage of space, she sleeps on the couch and is "still struggling to make ends meet." Her rent is
$1,598 a month, her pay is about $3,200, and her student loan payback is $375 a month. Moore recently has
had to resort to a GoFundMe campaign so she could stay home with her daughter during a monthlong health
crisis, and has at times had to donate plasma. She said she is unable to provide "the extras for her kids."
Moore began to enter her youngest son in focus groups in office buildings or hotels in neighborhoods like
Beverly Hills. Sometimes he would make $75 an hour and the whole family would eat from buffets, the kind
with cantaloupe, and maybe they'd also get a gift card. At first, he tested toys and then video games but
also an MRI to map his brain. It was only because of these gigs that Moore could finally say, "Go buy
yourself something," to her children.
These were Americans for whom the meaning of middle-class life had altered from something stable to
implied economic fragility.
Their burdens were the price of health and child care, educational debt or a housing market gone berserk.
They wanted job security, pensions and Social Security and unions, but these things seemed like a fantasy
out of a mid-century American novel like "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." The middle class' long
historical association with the status quo -- strongly identifying with institutions or corporations,
rejecting restive discontent -- has made their new wobbliness all the more startling to them.
But when did that vulnerability start? Toward the end of the past century into this one, there was a rise
in what author Barbara Ehrenreich has called a "fear of falling," an anxiety among the
professional-managerial class about downward mobility. I think of fear of falling as the opposite side of
the coin of American individualism and its historic promise of social and economic progress.
Since the 1980s, some members of the middle class have gone "from a kind of security to being reduced to
the kind of economic unstable state that working-class Americans have had to experience forever," explained
Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist at New York University who studies the middle-class financial experience.
The office or academic job started to resemble the precarious work life that working poor Americans have
long understood to be their lot, she said. And then there are the robots waiting in the wings to take their
ostensible share of middle-class jobs, and soon.
This new fragility is one theory to explain the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Trump voters were
sometimes mistaken for all hillbilly elegiac or Rust Belt proletariat. In truth, an estimated
38 percent of white people
with bachelor degrees voted for the man -- closer to "office worker elegy."
Indeed, as much as Trump's messaging has been jingoistic or racist, he has also been addressing middle-class
anxiety when he continually repeated that the system is "rigged."
While some have protested that Trump's success has more to do with loss of status or rank bigotry, Johns
Hopkins University sociologist
Stephen
L. Morgan has conducted studies that reveal one substantial motivator of the Trump vote was
economic. He noted that a successful national Democratic candidate would be one who appealed "to people who
have not fared well in the postindustrial economy," such as those in some once-prosperous areas of the
Midwest.
Ordinary middle-class people's struggles can be, of course, ameliorated by broad shifts, such as adopting
a form of universal basic income or a flat monthly cash stipend for familial caregivers of their young or
elderly kin. And we should at least explore adopting Medicare for all, to address rising health care costs.
We also need to more effectively push for longer paid parental leave -- or, in many cases, any paid parental
leave.
But if we can't get relief from federal programs or our employers, we will need to craft local or state
solutions. Retaining rent stabilization laws is key in our cities, as is building more affordable housing
for, say, teachers and municipal workers, so they can continue to live in the places they serve.
Finally, I saw when reporting my book that, when squeezed, people revealed their financial woes to
others, they tended to then recognize that their obstacles were partially systemic. That, in turn, meant
they didn't simply internalize their real-world burdens into self-punishment. They seemed more able to patch
together personal solutions -- small-scale child care fixes like sharing pickup with their neighbors, for
instance.
Simply voicing hopes and difficulties, and making them audible for their leaders to name and address, is
a small part of what must happen for things to change. Although for some, these needed transformations may
seem to be coming too late.
As Madison put it, "We are trying not to think too much about the future."
My ground level observations indicate that there is a lot of "denial" going on in the minds of the
putative 'middle class.'
One major barrier to the public 'conversations' about the economic malaise affecting America today is the
still prevalent custom of shaming the victims of bad luck. I see this tying all the way back to the
Calvinist theological concept of "Election," which is an aspect of "Predestination." In effect, one suffers
in life because the Deity chooses to make it so. Thus, those who do well in life can "legitimately" look
down on those who suffer. It is a perfect excuse for callousness of heart.
We read Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" in class in my High School. Written
around 1900, it still has merit as a descriptive and predictive tome.
Some of what is perceived as shaming, may just be understood as trying to understand how those with
good professions etc. end up that way (and no I don't judge those without "good professions" – I don't
think we choose our fate to any real degree see. It's just takes more to understand why is all). Now from
the inside some good professions are not really, or have become so niche that that is the story but
This:"Finally, I saw when reporting my book that, when squeezed, people revealed their financial woes to
others, they tended to then recognize that their obstacles were partially systemic. That, in turn, meant
they didn't simply internalize their real-world burdens into self-punishment. They seemed more able to patch
together personal solutions -- small-scale child care fixes like sharing pickup with their neighbors, for
instance."
commiseration is new, in my experience. not too long ago, one didn't speak about economic difficulties in
polite company at least in the middle class(poor people, oth, sometimes do)
that they're finding such behaviour is worrying, as it means the precariousness is spreading which causes
cognitive dissonance, since it's counterintuitive according the the Narrative we're all supposed to cling
to.
to wit, in my recent exposure to network tv in hotels and dr's offices, i note that -- like in the Matrix–a
grand illusion of the late 90's is laid across the world.
I hear locally upper middle class soccer moms having lunch, and it's oneupmanship all around everything's
fine, and we went to the most wonderful resort, in our new suv, and our son married a doctor and they
honeymooned as missionaries (!) but it's all nonsense, and everyone knows it.(the quick flash of panic in
their eyes, "will the card work?")
That was the norm not so long ago all the way down to the dregs of the former middle class. i see the
rending of that pretension the misty veil of utopian just-worldism as what's at the root of so many of these
dislocations an eruptions of late.
"Believe Real Hard" just doesn't cut it any more, and those soccer moms don't know how to think about it.
Per Ambrit's reference to Calvinism, at some point reality intrudes and one must climb down from the pillar.
Becoming They and The Other. It can't happen to me -- I am a Exceptional! ™ (and white). Could Compassion be on the horizon– on the wax as more and more realize they are in the global
Lemming-fall rat-race to the bottom ?
They're not attending/joining churches because that costs money and they don't have the money.
Once there are more "churches" that only cost what people can afford, more people will attend. Just
a prediction.
it's not all illusions, a part of the population is doing pretty well, they take vacations and crap
(who even has ANY paid time off anymore anyway? not me. even STAYCATIONS are off the table! Heck getting
a cold is pretty much off the table ..). But others
But yea the Big Lie Narrative of these times is that the economy is doing well, Trump's economic
performance will get him reelected (this economy is total garbage, so F trump and the horse he rode in
on), unemployment is low and other BS.
Lots of sad reading here. But seriously – $117,400 a year qualifies as "low income."? I know that it is
true but at the same time that is so stupid on the face of it. I do have to admit here to a weakness for
nostalgia – especially for places that I have never experienced but have read about. Sometimes out of idle
curiosity I might flick through a few videos like that on America in earlier times and you can see one such
clip at
Having said this, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if neoliberalism had spluttered out during the
1970s as a nonstarter of an idea and instead a different timeline had formed. In this one, instead of wages
flate-lining back in the 70s, they had kept apace with GDP like they had the previous thirty years. People,
more secure in their wages, would never have embarked on the credit boom like they did when wages dropped.
In this timeline too the rich are still taxed at 70% which mopped up all the surplus that would otherwise
have instead gone on to founding think tanks and money in politics. With an affluent population, there was
never was a need to import so much from China and the unions were still strong enough to stop industries
being shipped off to there. It would have been a completely different America.
But that is another timeline and we are instead in one where people will soon be in a position where they
have nothing else to lose. And that is a very dangerous proposition that. And they still have potentially a
very powerful weapon – their numbers. And their votes.
The 70s were going to be a very tough decade: The loss of our huge post-WW2 advantages in
manufacturing, oil shocks, a very expensive war to pay for, and Watergate probably fits in their
somewhere.
I am not sure what we did in the 70s and after was exactly neoliberalism, but any restraint shown in
the face of the new realities (Carter and his sweaters, Bush breaking his tax pledge) were massively
unpopular, and I think that was going to be the case in general – regardless of what path we went down.
The very idea that neo-liberalism was the cause (as opposed to an interaction with) of the root
problems I think is indicative of over optimism about our situation. Contrary, I do think it is very
reasonable to say that neo-liberalism made the problems worse.
The distinction is important, you can reject our current situation and policies, and still not be
particularly convinced that the opposing voices are being more realistic.
After reading "Democracy in Chains" by Nancy MacLean, I'm leaning toward neoliberalism as a cause.
It kicked into high gear with Reagan's election in 1980, and Bill Clinton made sure there was no
stopping it.
In reference to this from the original post: "In truth, an estimated 38 percent of white people
with bachelor degrees voted for [Trump]," I have to say, I think you call those people Republicans,
and don't kid yourself. They will do it again.
Carla, thank you, exactly so. The technique of it all was quite insidious, as it was an appeal
disguised and self righteous to greed to a two groups: baby boomers and their parents sociology
primed for such pitches. Once that genie got out of the bottle there was no getting it back in.
So, will the millenials kill-off the Genie for good .. or will they, in their turn, rub that
lamp all the more, to parlay their 3 wishes towards other equally speciously sparklely endeavors
??
we can't 'rub the lantern'; when those in power in 1981 set off down the neoliberal road,
the conditions of their wish were fulfilled by debt-enslavement of everyone who came after
them to support enriching those who clawed their way to the top.
the only millennial oligarch is Zuckerberg and I don't think anyone believes he is going
to maintain his power even half as long as, say, Bill Gates. the only millenials who believe
in neoliberalism are paid shills for the elite like Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk and by the
same Zuckerberg:Gates ratio, they have less than half as much power as a Rush Limbaugh.
Neoliberalism is dead, we're in the gramscian interregnum, at this point I just hope and
plead with the infinite that we get Bernie in 2020 instead of Cotton/Creshaw primarying Trump
or something awful like that because the familyblogging Democrats refuse to pass the torch in
favor of one more term of grift.
Rev Kev, who I was responding to, correctly noted that the 1970s were when wages began to drop.
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton of course come later. This doesn't mean that their policies were not
problematic, but it does make it difficult to blame them as the causal agents of something that
started in the 1970s.
If you want to blame Johnson/Nixon and their Vietnam War policies, that would make some sense,
but they don't seem to me to be poster children for Neoliberalism with one being associated with
the Great Society and the other the author of price controls to suppress inflation.
When things get a bit tough (and note that in the 70's for all the hype they were not in fact
that tough – until govt policy of a NL kind stepped in) – then you have policy choices. If you
go NL, then that is a choice, and causally so. (It was usual to hide this causality in TINA.)
Financialization of the housing market creates obscene rents, leading to less household formation,
then the need to "do something" about population decline. Japan is 20 years ahead of us in that regard,
Indeed it does here in the SF Bay Area. The surprise of it all is part of the denial – the wife and I
look at our family income (usually 10-20% less than that) and are straight up perplexed that it doesn't
go as far as it "should". We certainly have a pleasant enough middle-class life, but it feels precarious
in a way that we never expected. And we only have that because we have subsidized housing (we live in a
house the family has owned for years, so are paying well below the insane market rates). If we had to pay
market rates we would be poor, or close to it.
We certainly rant to one another about the systemic issues behind this situation, but there are a lot
of California liberals who bitterly cling to questionable ideas like a balanced budget or Kamala Harris.
I've been wondering when I'll hear a candidate advocating lower home and rent prices – where I live we
absolutely need that if we're to keep a semblance of civilization and democracy.
You have hit on a major 'disrupter' of the body social. "Civilization and democracy" are being
willfully sacrificed to the Gods of Profit. That betrayal is a core part of neo-liberalism.
Re; lower home and rent prices. For the last 40 years, as the prosperous Great Lakes region became
the rust belt, we who live here have been constantly told: if you want a job, just MOVE to where the
jobs are.
Now are we allowed to say to the mortgage-or-rent-impoverished middle class folks who live on the
coasts, "If you want lower house and rent prices, just move to where the lower priced houses and
apartments are" ? We got plenty of room for y'all here, honest. And we're mostly midwest-nice, too.
But seriously – $117,400 a year qualifies as "low income."?
If you are very lucky, and I mean
lucky
, you might find an old junior one bedroom apartment
for the low, low price of $1,500 a month. No patio, no dishwasher, no nothing except a parking spot. This
is not exaggeration, sarcasm or humor, but reality. In some places in California it's closer to three
thousand dollars.
Most of us Californians do not make even fifty thousand and, if we do, we have to live closer to the
cities where the well paying jobs are. I keep waiting for the housing bust to arrive for last time the
rents dropped as much as thirty percent. Hopefully, I will still be in my apartment, or at least in an
apartment when that happens.
Another factor is cities not allowing for higher density housing. If somebody has a brownstone or
something similar, they will fight tooth and nail against that 6 story apartment building that would
allow a lot more people to live in the neighborhood. Under-investment in rapid mass transit also hurts
workers commuting to jobs and forces far more cars on the roads and parking spaces.
it was certainly precarious in the great depression, seems to thrive in boom periods. the white middle
class, and some of the black middle class did well in the 50's and early 60's. that was when the us was
economically at the pinnacle of the world, and i think that was because most of the other first world
economies were rebuilding from the rubble of ww2.
The only item I can think of that was an import from the Soviet Union and on retail shelves for
sale here during the Cold War, was Stolichnaya vodka, and as far as the Peoples Republic of China
goes, fireworks.
If I didn't finish the food on my plate, my parents would admonish me with tales of people starving
to death in China, and indeed they were.
For me as a child, the starvation place was Africa. I wonder about the psychological motivations
that made our parents ignore the suffering right nearby in our own neighborhoods and focus instead
on some far away place.
Today, that starvation is all around us. I personally feel guilty now that we cannot give very much
to beggars and homeless etc. due to our own straitened circumstances. The myth of "The Exceptional
Ones" (TM) is still a strong part of the social narrative today.
I try to do my infinitesmal part, ambrit .. by taking any surplus from the garden, when there
IS a surplus that is .. and donate it to the local foodbank. Last year it was 5 full lugs of
grapes fresh off the vine, a few yrs before that it was an over abundance of beets. This season
it might be potatoes THATs My lifestyle !
All on less than a $35,000 yr combined income. But that means no trips to Cancun, no new Car
every couple of years, no DeathCare expenditures, and no mortgage.
I feel humbled every time I make a delivery, especially when I see families in obvious distress
w/ young children .. looking for sustenance that they cannot otherwise afford to buy .. it
breaks my heart.
Yes to that. We got a bumper crop of 'volunteer' Muscadines last year. They made good
jelly. I should build a trellis or wire support network for the vines this year. With this
weather, we should get another good crop.
Living the 'prepper' life has it's compensations.
Our's were primarily muscat as well, what we donated. I ended up canning the rest,
turning them into muscat conserves half of which we've already given away to friends and
aquaintances. The other grapes, the Mars variety, became raisins, for home consumption.
Everyone should learn how to can .. cuz you never know when just-in-time .. just STOPS
!
Possibly this was a major influence. When the USA had identified large foreign enemies that must be
countered (Russia and China) there was an impetus to build in America and keep the USA population engaged
with the Russian and "Red" Chinese threat.
The USA was also an oil exporter until 1971, which allowed some control of oil prices.
Globalization was not prominent and I remember the poor quality Japanese tools of the 1960's (and
Chinese manufactured stuff rarely seen by me (firecrackers?))
Furthermore we had two large countries that economically were not as advanced as the USA and were not
viewed as particularly successful with their flawed Communist systems.
Effectively, China and Russia were playing the game with one hand tied behind their back.
This may also have allowed USA unions to be strong, increasing wages for union and non-union workers.
Perhaps the USA is currently making some other countries focus inwardly on their countries as the USA
did in the 1950's and 1960's.
By forcing sanctions on various countries (Iran, Russia, Venezuela) the USA may make them less
dependent on global resources and more like the more self sufficient USA of the 50's and 60's.
Very, very possibly. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I'm reading a lot of
fin de siècle
novels
and literature, e.g. Booth Tarkington.
The British middle class seems to have been mostly people living
on investments -- not in the manorial style, but with enough to have a flat, and a servant -- in a style
that you might associate with Sherlock Holmes. A middle class that included people with jobs definitely
seems post-WWII, and, of course, since the wage stagnation starting in the mid 1970's, it's mostly ended
by now.
"While some have protested that Trump's success has more to do with loss of status or rank bigotry, Johns
Hopkins University sociologist Stephen L. Morgan has conducted studies that reveal one substantial motivator
of the Trump vote was economic. He noted that a successful national Democratic candidate would be one who
appealed "to people who have not fared well in the postindustrial economy," such as those in some
once-prosperous areas of the Midwest."
But this is circular reasoning, why would people in the "middle class" think that Trump's policies are
better for them than Clinton's policies?
It's not like Trump is a sort of middle class guy himself, in facts H. Clinton is probably more "middle
classey" than Trump.
Plus, what does the term "middle class" mean specifically? How are these people different from "working
class" or small bourgoise?
Middle class to me growing up, meant that the school custodian across the street and 3 doors down from
us, could afford to buy a home, or you played little league with the son of a gas station owner, who made
enough from his 2 service bays always full (cars weren't nearly as reliable in the 60's) to also own a
home.
My doubt about the middle class is this: it is a term that various schools/sociologists/economists
used to mean very different things, so when someone speaks of the middle class it's difficult for me
to understand what he/she is speaking about.
For example:
1) In marxism it generally means the small bourgoise, meaning the small shopkeeper, the farmer who
owns his land etc;
2) at times, it just means people of the working class who have good jobs, that is different from
the definition (1). The disappearence of the middle class just means the disappearence of good jobs;
3) sometimes (wrongly IMHO) "workers" are supposed to be only blue collar and only without high
education, so "middle class" means people who have a degree and are white collars;
etc.
At times these categories can somehow mix but the class interest of someone who is a small business
owner is different from the class interest of someone who has a good employee job which might be
different from the interest of someone who could have a degree and a sucky white collar job.
So this very general idea of middle class is very confusing IMHO.
@MisterMr -- I think that because EVERYTHING in the good ole US of A is about money, the
understanding of a term like "middle class" becomes just about money, too.
When I was young (yes, a long time ago), I was given to understand that "middle class" meant
basically people with white collar jobs or jobs that required some professional accreditation:
teachers, nurses, lawyers, accountants, etc. "Working class" meant people with blue-collar jobs,
even if some of them regularly made more money than a teacher or, say, a nurse. "Upper class"
included high-earning professionals, CEO's, and of course those with inherited wealth. Poor, then
as now, was the one thing you definitely didn't want to be.
But, as I said, money has obliterated all those fine distinctions of snobbery. Now there is only
one: $.
The label of "Middle Class" in America can be used as either for the social class or for the
economic class with the white collar workers generally being both and the blue collar workers
being, before the 1950s, working class with working class wages. For about two decades the high
and low ends of the income range collapsed with most people being squeezed into the economic
middle class regardless of social class.
Now, income disparity has destroyed the economic middle class and the classic pyramid shaped
map of the social and economic system reappearing. The tiny wealthy elites; the slightly larger
service and professional class providing what the elites want; the small number of bureaucrats,
lawyers, doctors, mechanics, religious workers and so that any large societies need just to
function at all; the greatest numbers are the laboring class, and I don't mean the working
class.
The mental map of most Americans is stuck on the almost flat pyramid of 1970 in which all
classes were getting wealthier collapsing together economically, with the exception of the
wealthy not gaining wealth at the same rate as the bottom 99%. Even the poorest blacks finally
started to improve economically.
That picture is buried somewhere deeeep in our collective heads where the only real
differences was what type of job you were going to have and where mistakes, failure, and
disaster did not mean poverty. At worst, it meant a change of work or a temporary set back or a
change of social class but not economic class.
Find that image in your head, yank it out, put a stake in its heart, burn it, and scatter the
ashes. That picture died around 1973. Whatever the truth of that image it is long dead.
But too many people are trying to pretend that we are not living in a zero sum game of winner
take all.
Trump had the advantage that he was not tagged, directly or indirectly, with Bill Clinton's NAFTA,
welfare reform or supporting "Free trade" that seemed to only work well in economists' minds (TPP).
Clinton also supported the Iraq War, Libya and other military adventures, and Trump couldn't vote
for/against these operations that directly affected their communities.
Campaigning Trump called these wars "mistakes" while Hillary C would not.
Someone summed the election as "With Hillary you know you are screwed, with Trump you might not be."
Thanks, however it is a fact that a situation of bad economy and increasing inequality, that
ideally is supposed to be the main reason to vote left, is causing an upsurge in right-leaning
populism instead.
there is no populist right that brings home the bacon in the U.S. either as far as I can see.
Theoretically there could be, but theoretically a lot of things, including much more plausibly
and likely the rise of a left that brings home the bacon. IOW the trains don't even run on time
now.
Trump's economy is scarcely better than Obama's (depends on which year though, in the worst of the
Great Recession only then was it worse). So if it's really about the economy: then Trump will lose the
next election.
IMHO it IS about the economy, but not in the direct sense we mean: if the economy goes on as it is,
Trump will be able to spin it as good, whereas a democrat would be toast.
But I expect a recession to hit earlier, in which case I think Trump will not be re-elected.
Whenever I read articles illustrating the dawning awareness of the middling classes to their extreme
precarious social status, I can't help but marvel at the audacity of elites jumping to the front of the
protest line proclaiming their desire to "lead" the distraught masses. Even more so, those same distraught
workers giving their oppressors the opportunity to do so. That is the definition of a dysfunctional society-
rewarding failure. The elites might think themselves clever, and exceptional, for dreaming up such scams,
but that dynamic alone goes a long way to explaining the rapid decline of America's prominence in the world.
America is consumed by a cynical rot that has firmly entered into the body politic. There is no easy way
to excise this cancer, but the answer must lie in some form of national mission. The current American
leadership have chosen a militaristic vision of conquest for the nation masked with a marketing program of
bringing democracy to the world. This contradictory scam will not work, and there is ample evidence showing
just how destructive and impotent this strategy truly is. The rest of the world is moving on, and if
Americans don't wise up to the the destructive nature of their system, they will be left behind.
Corporations must be in the service of the nation, not the other way around. Corporations must be allowed
to die and change, the nation, and its people must prevail over time. It is an obscene contradiction that
the American system is reversing this dynamic. The people are allowed to die, while the corporations, and
those that control them are allowed to persist.
As a working class American, my only desire at this point is for an American elite leadership that has a
vision larger and broader than worshiping a bank account. If American workers don't demand a better
leadership, history will show them to be worse than peasants, they will be proven to be willful consumerist
dupes.
America is in an identity crisis- a cultural crisis. That does not bode well for the nation and makes it
ill equipped to deal with other nations and the world's problems- let alone our own.
"The current American leadership have chosen a militaristic vision of conquest for the nation masked
with a marketing program of bringing democracy to the world."
That train officially left the station around 1898.
1. The author doesn't really explore how rent extraction through housing is the single biggest destroyer
of American household wealth, with housing costs outpacing wages almost everywhere.
2. "Explore" Medicare for all? Build "affordable" housing, but only for certain deserving individuals
like teachers?
It's disappointing that the author chooses to end this with such centrist Dem proposals.
There needs to be a right to housing, which means a right to build housing: abolish any zoning that
excludes dense residential development. Seize land by eminent domain if necessary.
===There needs to be a right to housing, which means a right to build housing: abolish any zoning that
excludes dense residential development. Seize land by eminent domain if necessary===
Thanks Joe. While I am not an expert in housing, the lack of affordable housing seems to be tied to:
1. As you say zoning laws that exclude dense residential development.
2. Land Use regulations which are probably tied to #1 above.
3. The high costs incurred by residential developers in navigating the byzantine and bureaucratic maze of
permits and regulations at the federal, state, and local levels.
4. The speculative nature of the housing market i.e. IMO the housing bubble is driven by monetary
policies and the actions of "behind the scenes" lever pullers. If housing is treated as a commodity by
the finance sector then the machinations of Wall Street can impact housing prices as they did in the 2008
crash.
5. To my point above, in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago there is a lot of empty office space and
light industrial space. So excess supply would tell you that the prices for these properties should go
down. Not the case. They are still expensive. If a homeowner is trying to sell their house they will
lower the price until it is sold or not sell it. But the same rules do not apply to businesses.
To #5 above, again if we "believe" what we are told in Econ 101 about free markets and supply and
demand then an excess supply should result in a downward price drop until the excess supply is cleared.
God help me! I just typed the previous sentence from memory as if verbatim from my Econ 101 class 30
years ago!! #head on desk! So if office and industrial prices are not dropping then someone has to be
holding the "bank notes" as is not concerned about if or when they sell.
Basically in short it seems zoning issues and cost issues are the big obstacles in dense residential
development. I am not an advocate of relaxing regulations which could result in shoddy and unsafe
construction but maybe there is a middle ground. Something needs to be done.
It's not just dense housing, it ALL housing .. in terms of livability (environs with nature as an
active component), and Affordable design/construction with energy efficiency in mind .. on a large
enough scale to benefit the public ! There is, for all practical purposes none of that to be had. As
it currently stands, you have to be richer than God to do ANYTHING other than the unimaginative and
wasteful development that has been built up to this point.
So instead of "Where's My flying car??" .. the question might now more accurately be "Where's My
passive solar, earthen-berm, strawbale, rammed-earth, or cob house/apartment???"
to expand and maybe add onto this, AirBnb/vacation rentals + rental 'business as income' (at
institutional eg Berkshire Hathaway and the associated securitized offerings as well as individuals
and small biz creating the 'income stream' via LLC pass through) is a major driver affecting the
speculation. What happened to all the foreclosures from a decade ago? They were turned into rentals,
they still exist.
I am all for an affordable housing mandate, but not in an Obamacare fashion by building tons more
housing at crappy inflated prices with some means-tested voucher all so the rentiers can keep their
profits. Destroy the rentiers and make housing right, make it a policy that is enforced with
regulations and limits on numbers of rental units.
==AirBnb/vacation rentals + rental 'business as income' (at institutional eg Berkshire Hathaway
and the associated securitized offerings as well as individuals and small biz creating the 'income
stream' via LLC pass through) is a major driver affecting the speculation===
To your point there was a recent article on NC that discussed your comment above.
Across the street from the townhouse subdivision where my wife and I live is a subdivision of
$275K – $350K houses. One of the more expensive houses was sold a year ago to a company that uses
it for a rental.
I talked to the previous owner frequently while walking our dog, and he sold the house after it
had been on the market for only about a month. As far as the previous owner was concerned the house
sold for close to his asking price so he was happy. He had no concern about selling the house to a
company that was going to use it for a rental. The previous owner had been living in that house in
that neighborhood for 25 years and seemed to know most everybody in his subdivision. He and his
wife raised their two sons in that house and also put a lot of time and effort into the landscaping
around the house.
The rental company that bought the house does the absolute minimal landscaping of the house and
barely mows the lawn on a semi regular basis. The company clearly does not have any regard for the
"appearance" of the house or the neighborhood. Which is a shame because the other houses near it
are well maintained which, due to the lack of landscape maintenance, makes the "rental company"
house an eyesore as far as grass, weeds, etc. are concerned.
I do not begrudge the previous owner for selling to the rental company. His asking price was met
so he was happy. And in the last few years, other houses in that subdivision have taken 1-2 years
to sell. What I have an issue with is these vulture rental companies acting as mercenaries and
treating houses and the neighborhood as so much fodder on a balance sheet.
One could also make the argument that without the rental company sticking it's nose where it
does not belong, the (ahem, cough, cough) free market would have been allowed to work somewhat. By
that I mean if this particular house had also taken a long time to sell like the others in that
neighborhood, and had subsequent price reductions in order to sell it, then maybe the average
housing price in that neighborhood/town/suburb would have gone down helping affordability.
"In fact, the typical CEO made a whopping 312 times their median employees' salary in 2017, according to the
Economic Policy Institute."
Note that is vs median salary not lowest paid.
The self serving disconnect between the management class and labor class is truly amazing.
Work is not valued. And the contribution to productivity is extracted and given to ownership. It's not
income inequality we should emphasize but simple fairness. Let's call it Income Fairness.
"fairness" is too vague and insubstantial a concept around which to base any kind of rights, much less
what some should get or we should do as a society.
we once thought it was "fair" as a society to enslave people. after we stopped that (and not because
it wasn't "fair", but as a political move), we thought it was "fair" to continue to deny them many of
their rights because they weren't "white".
huge numbers of us still think it is fair that people die from various issues caused by their
"unwillingness to work" or "unwillingness to work smarter". how many times do people say "if you don't
get more education, you can just shut up about earning enough to live on. working at McDonald's, you are
slacking and therefore can not demand anything. go to school, fool!" people argue all of the time that a
"living wage" is not fair, because a person who does low-value jobs isn't making enough money for their
employer to justify the wage (basically, profit produced by that employee would either be nil or zero).
and that is perfectly "fair" to these arguers.
fair is the idea that some deserve more and some less, due to something being "earned" by someone. it
is a nice idea to teach children. real world morality is much more complicated than that, and a society
of justice and laws and policies and bureaucracies can not be based around that. waaay too nebulous, and
open to interpretation. everyone -knows what "fair" is- when they see it, because everyone's definition
of "fairness" is different. as some kind of lofty ideal, it is fine. in practice, it is meaningless.
Is this simply a Rip van Winkle account of the middle-class situation that has been well-reported and
vigorously commented upon for some time? What am I missing?
The shift came when ol' Rip realized that the rumbling sound he heard was not the sound of the ghostly
sailors bowling but the sound of distant cannon fire.
The middle class stands upon the floor provided by the working class. And that floor is failing, as the
human capital of society is gradually, but with increasing rapidity, plundered, from the bottom up.
The poor used to have more than they do now, and be less dependent on government redistributions of
income.
Even the middle class owns less productive capital, as the small business owners who used to populate the
main streets of American towns have been driven out of business by the Walmarts. Those businessmen were the
social elites of their communities, giving those communities leadership, shape, structure and dimension.
Owning less productive capital, their communities pretty much hollowed out, the middle class have lost
much of their self sufficiency, and have become increasingly dependent on the whims of distant oligarchs.
First the Walmarts. Now the Amazons. And there will be even fewer resources available to support the
necessary services local communities provide.
The middle class are right to be afraid. The distant oligarchs and their bankers will only allow so much
debt before they pull out the rug.
Too bad no one paid attention what was happening to the working poor. Long ago, the 1% used to command 7%
of the nation's income. Now they command 21%. That 14% had to come from someone.
With almost 40 years of work under my belt, I have been passing along some advice to my kids to help them
navigate the current "middle class conundrums":
1. Owning a home is unlikely to make you wealthy. With just a few major city core exceptions, don't
expect it to go up by more than inflation over the decades. So buy or rent just what you need and do real
analysis of what you need and why.
2. Only live in a big expensive city if you need to for your chosen career. The smaller cities have a lot
of opportunity for people with good work habits, even in the "Rust Belt" and the living costs are far lower.
3. College degrees are useful. Getting them with large debt loads is a bad idea though. Don't take on
more student debt than about 2/3 of your expected starting salary for a four year degree and take on little
or not debt for a 2-year degree.
4. Going to a name-brand school is worthwhile if you don't have to rack up significant extra debt.
Otherwise, pick college and university by major and cost. Your internal traits make a far bigger difference
than the school you went to.
5. Only go to graduate school if your desired career path requires it. Otherwise, you are losing years of
earning power while incurring costs and debt. If you want a grad degree just for the joy of it, do it as
night school as a hobby.
6. Start a Roth IRA with monthly contributions early, even if it is only $50/month. It builds habits and
over the years will likely ensure you are in the top 25% in assets.
7. We are in a golden age of investing right now compared to 30 years ago. You can have worldwide,
multi-asset class diversified investments at an annual expense ratio of 0.25% which was unheard of at the
beginning of my career. So inexpensive Target Date funds or similar vehicles from companies like Vanguard
mean you can do fire-and-forget investing while you focus on the rest of your life.
8. Don't assume the full value of a company or state pension will be there when you retire. These are
rife with deliberate and accidental mismanagement and partial defaults are likely with many of them. Instead
save so that you are not reliant on them for a basic acceptable standard of living.
8. You don't need financial advisors for investing, just to help you with personal finance instead. But
that is not what they are usually selling, so 99% of the purported financial advisors are to be avoided as
they are hazardous to your finances.
10. Try to get a positive cash flow in your life as early as possible to dramatically reduce stress. That
is difficult if you have kids, large student loans, or large mortgage/rent costs, so those are the big
decisions you need to make on life-finance balance.
Regarding Social Security, it is currently structured to provide 75% to 80% of its current benefits
starting in 2034. That is still a significant safety net, but would require Congress to act to get it back
to around 100%.
Medicare is just part and parcel of the US healthcare cost issues. If the US can get down to less than
14% of GDP in healthcare expenditures while providing universal coverage, then the Medicare/Medicaid funding
issue effectively goes away. This is not impossible as the US is the only developed country that is above
14%.
Elizabeth Warren had a good speech at UC-Berkeley. She focused on the middle class family balance sheet
and risk shifting. Regulatory policies and a credit based monetary system have resulted in massive real
price increases in inelastic areas of demand such as healthcare, education and housing eroding purchasing
power. Further, trade policies have put U.S. manufacturing at a massive disadvantage to the likes of China,
which has subsidized state-owned enterprises, has essentially slave labor costs and low to no environmental
regulations. Unrestrained immigration policies have resulted in a massive supply wave of semi- and unskilled
labor suppressing wages.
Recommended initial steps to reform:
1. Change the monetary system-deleverage economy with the Chicago Plan (100% reserve banking) and fund
massive infrastructure lowering total factor costs and increasing productivity. This would eliminate
2. Adopt a healthcare system that drives HC to 10% to 12% of GDP. France's maybe? Medicare model needs
serious reform but is great at low admin costs.
3. Raise tariffs across the board or enact labor and environmental tariffs on the likes of China and other
Asian export model countries.
4. Take savings from healthcare costs and interest and invest in human capital–educational attainment and
apprenticeships programs.
5. Enforce border security restricting future immigration dramatically and let economy absorb labor supply
over time.
As I have said in other comments, I like Liz Warren a lot within the limits of what she is good at
doing (i.e. not President) such as Secretary of the Treasury etc. And I think she likes the media
spotlight and to hear herself talk a little to much, but all quibbling aside, can we clone her??? The
above comment and video just reinforce "Stick to what you are really good at Liz!".
I am not a Liz Warren fan boi to the extent Lambert is of AOC, but it seems that most of the time when
I hear Warren, Sanders, or AOC say something my first reaction is "Yes, what she/he said!".
RT CrossTalk host Peter Lavelle and The Duran's Alex Christoforou take a quick look at the college admissions scam revolving around
William Rick Singer, who was running a for-profit college-counseling program, where according to federal prosecutors, has a goal
focused on helping "the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school."
Arrest warrants for Hollywood stars, Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, were delivered on Tuesday following their alleged involvement
in a college-entrance-exam cheating scandal.
According to CNN,
the women were two of around 50 people who were the subject of
federal indictment
following an extensive FBI investigation named "Operation Varsity Blues."
Loughlin's husband, Mossimo Giannulli, was also implicated, and was arrested early on Tuesday morning.
TMZ reported
that Huffman was arrested by seven armed FBI agents. Her husband, William H. Macy, has not been charged in connection to the case.
Loughlin, Giannulli, and Huffman are all facing charges of felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.
Huffman is accused of spending $15,000 on an organization that allegedly helped her daughter cheat on her SATs. Loughlin and Giannulli
are accused of paying $500,000 to get their daughters into University of Southern California as recruits for the crew team for which
neither of Loughlin's daughters rowed crew.
All three were recorded by the FBI on phone calls discussing their plans to alter or lie about their children's college applications.
Is there anything left in this country that has not been deeply tainted by corruption?
By now you have probably heard that dozens of people have been arrested for participating in a multi-million dollar college admissions
scam. Enormous amounts of money were paid out in order to ensure that children from very wealthy families were able to get into top
schools such as Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas and the University of Southern California.
And as The Economic Collapse blog's Michael Snyder writes, we should certainly be disgusted by these revelations, but
we shouldn't be surprised. Such corruption happens every single day on every single level of society in America. At this point our
nation is so far gone that it is shocking when you run into someone that actually still has some integrity.
The "mastermind" behind this college admissions scam was a con man named William Rick Singer. He had been successfully getting
the kids of wealthy people into top colleges for years using "side doors", and he probably thought that he would never get caught.
But he did.
There were four basic methods that Singer used to get children from wealthy families into elite schools. The first two methods
involved bribes
Bribing college entrance exam administrators to allow a third party to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams, in some
cases by posing as actual students,' is the first.
Bribing university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as purported athletic recruits – regardless
of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport,' is the second.
Because many of these kids didn't even play the sports they were being "recruited" for, in some cases Photoshop was used to paste
their faces on to the
bodies of real athletes
In order to get non-athletic kids admitted to college as athletes, Singer often had to create fake profiles for them. Sometimes
this involved fabricating resumes that listed them having played on elite club teams, but to finish the illusion Singer and his
team would also use Photoshop to combine photos of the kids with actual athletes in the sport.
A number of college coaches became exceedingly wealthy from taking bribes to "recruit" kids that would never play once they got
to school, but now a lot of those same coaches are probably going to prison.
'Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that the grades earned in those
classes would be submitted as part of the students' application,' is the third.
The fourth was 'submitting falsified applications for admission to universities that, among other things, included the fraudulently
obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities.'
Of course the main thing that the media is focusing on is the fact that some celebrities are among those being charged in this
case, and that includes
Lori Loughlin from "Full House"
It was important to "Full House" star Lori Loughlin that her kids have "the college experience" that she missed out on, she
said back in 2016.
Loughlin, along with "Desperate Housewives" actress Felicity Huffman, is among those
charged in a scheme in which parents allegedly bribed college coaches and insiders at testing centers to help get their children
into some of the most elite schools in the country, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Despite how cynical I have become lately, I never would have guessed that Lori Loughlin was capable of such corruption.
After all, she seems like such a nice lady on television.
But apparently she was extremely determined to make sure that her daughters had "the college experience", and so Loughlin and
her husband shelled out
half a million dollars in bribes
Loughlin and Giannulli 'agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits
to the USC crew team – despite the fact that they did not participate in crew – thereby facilitating their admission to USC,'
according to the documents.
As bad as this scandal is, can we really say that it is much worse than what is going on around the rest of the country every
single day?
Of course not.
We are a very sick nation, and we are getting sicker by the day.
William Rick Singer had a good con going, and he should have stopped
while he was ahead
"This book is full of secrets," he said in Chapter 1 before dispensing advice on personal branding, test-taking and college
essays.
But Singer had even bigger secrets, and those would cost up to $1.2 million.
But like most con men, Singer just had to keep pushing the envelope, and in the end it is going to cost him everything.
The ironic thing is that our colleges and universities are pulling an even bigger con. They have convinced all of us that a college
education is the key to a bright future, but meanwhile the quality of the "education" that they are providing has deteriorated dramatically.
I spent eight years in school getting three degrees, and so I know what I am talking about. For much more on all this, please see
my recent article entitled
"50 Actual College Course Titles That Prove That America's Universities Are Training Our College Students To Be Socialists" .
I know that it is not fashionable to talk about "morality" and "values" these days, but the truth is that history has shown us
that any nation that is deeply corrupt is not likely to survive for very long.
Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through
a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Today, we are neither moral or religious.
What we are is deeply corrupt, and America will not survive if we keep going down this path.
"... Yang promises a universal entitlement, not dependent on income, that he calls a "freedom dividend." To be funded through a value added tax , Yang claims that it would reduce the strain on "health care, incarceration, homeless services, and the like" and actually save billions of dollars. Yang also notes that "current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally." ..."
"... Yang is justifying the need for such a program because of automation . Again, VDARE.com has been exploring how automation may necessitate such a program for many years . Yang also discussed this problem on Tucker Carlson's show , which alone shows he is more open to real discussion than many progressive activists. ..."
"... Indeed, journalists, hall monitors that they are, have recognized that President Trump's online supporters are flocking to Yang, bringing him a powerful weapon in the meme wars. ..."
"... it is ominous for Trump that many of the more creative and dedicated people who formed his vanguard are giving up on him. ..."
Yang is a businessman who has worked in several fields, but was best known for founding
Venture for America , which helps college graduates become entrepreneurs.
However, he is now gaining recognition for his signature campaign promise -- $1,000 a month for every American.
Yang promises a
universal entitlement, not dependent on income, that he calls a "freedom dividend." To be funded through a
value added tax , Yang claims that it would
reduce the strain on "health care, incarceration, homeless services, and the like" and actually save billions of dollars. Yang also
notes
that "current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally."
As Yang himself notes, this is not a new idea, nor one particularly tied to the Left. Indeed, it's been proposed by several prominent
libertarians because it would replace the far more inefficient welfare system.
Charles Murray called for
this policy in 2016. [ A
guaranteed income for every American, AEI, June 3, 2016]
Milton
Friedman suggested a similar policy in a 1968 interview with William F. Buckley, though
Friedman called it a
"negative income tax."
It's also been proposed by many nationalists, including, well, me. At the January 2013 VDARE.com Webinar, I
called for a "straight-up minimum income for citizens only" among other policies that would build a new nationalist majority
and deconstruct Leftist power. I've
retained that belief ever since and argued for it here for years.
However, I've also made the argument that it only works if it is for
citizens
only and is combined with a restrictive immigration policy. As I previously
argued in a piece attacking Jacobin'sdisingenuous
complaints about the "reserve army of the unemployed," you simply can't support high wages, workers' rights, and a universal
basic income while still demanding mass immigration.
Yang is also directly addressing the crises that the Trump Administration has seemly forgotten. Unlike Donald Trump himself, with
his endless boasting about "low black and Hispanic unemployment," Yang
has directly spoken about the demographic
collapse of white people because of "low birth rates and white men dying from
substance
abuse and suicide ."
Significantly, President Trump himself has never once specifically recognized the plight of white Americans.
...He wants to make
Puerto Rico a state . He
supports a path to citizenship for illegal
aliens, albeit with an 18-year waiting period and combined with
pledges to secure the border
and deport illegals who don't enroll in the citizenship program. He
wants to create a massive bureaucratic system to track
gun owners, restrict
gun ownership , and require various "training" programs for licenses. He wants to
subsidize local journalists with taxpayer
dollars...
... ... ...
Indeed, journalists, hall monitors that they are, have recognized that President Trump's online supporters are flocking to
Yang, bringing him a powerful weapon in the meme wars. (Sample meme at right.) And because many of these online activists are
"far right" by Main Stream Media standards, or at least Politically Incorrect, there is much hand-waving and wrist-flapping about
the need for Yang to decry "white nationalists." So of course, the candidate has dutifully done so, claiming "racism and white nationalism
[are] a threat to the core ideals of what it means to be an American". [
Presidential candidate
Andrew Yang has a meme problem, by Russell Brandom, The Verge, March 9, 2019]
But what does it mean to be an American? As more and more of American history is described as racist, and even national
symbols and the national anthem are targets for protest, "America" certainly doesn't seem like a real country with a real identity.
Increasingly, "America" resembles a continent-sized shopping mall, with nothing holding together the warring tribes that occupy it
except money.
President Trump, of course, was elected because many people thought he could reverse this process, especially by limiting mass
immigration and taking strong action in the culture wars, for example by promoting official English. Yet in recent weeks, he has
repeatedly endorsed more legal immigration. Rather than fighting, the president is content to brag about the economy and whine about
unfair press coverage and investigations. He already seems like a lame duck.
The worst part of all of this is that President Trump was elected as a response not just to the Left, but to the failed Conservative
Establishment. During the 2016 campaign, President Trump specifically
pledged to protect
entitlements , decried foreign wars, and argued for a massive infrastructure plan. However, once in office, his main legislative
accomplishment is a tax cut any other Republican president would have pushed. Similarly, his latest budget contains the kinds of
entitlement cuts that are guaranteed to provoke Democrat attack ads. [
Trump said he wouldn't cut Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare . His 2020 budget cuts all 3, by Tara
Golshan, Vox, March 12, 2019] And the president has already backed down on withdrawing all troops from Syria, never mind Afghanistan.
Conservatism Inc., having learned nothing from candidate Donald Trump's scorched-earth path to the Republican nomination, now
embraces Trump as a man but ignores his campaign message. Instead, the conservative movement is still promoting the same tired slogans
about "free markets" even as they have appear to have lost an
entire
generation to socialism. The most iconic moment was Charlie Kirk, head of the free market activist group Turning Point USA, desperately
trying to tell his followers not to cheer for Tucker Carlson because
Carlson had suggested a nation should be treated like a
family, not simply a marketplace .
Thus, especially because of his cowardice on immigration, many of President Trump's most fervent online supporters have turned
on him in recent weeks. And the embrace of Yang seems to come out of a great place of despair, a sense that the country really is
beyond saving.
Yang has Leftist policies on many issues, but many disillusioned Trump supporters feel like those policies are coming anyway.
If America is just an economy, and if everyone in the world is a simply an American-in-waiting, white Americans might as well get
something out of this System before the bones are picked clean.
National Review ' s Theodore Kupfer just claimed the main importance of Yang's candidacy is that it will prove meme-makers
ability to affect the vote count "has been overstated" [
Rise of the pink hats,
March 12, 2019].
Time will tell, but it is ominous for Trump that many of the more creative and dedicated people who formed his vanguard
are giving up on him.
So much stuff going on.. it's shaping up to be a very interesting weekend.
But, let me start with a diversion...
There is a story of the Great Scottish King – Robert the Bruce. Having been defeated by the
English multiple times, his family captured and executed, (or in the case of his daughter, left
suspended in an open cage thru the winter), his army was scattered, the clans turned against him,
on his own and without any support - he was on the verge of giving up. As he contemplated a bleak
future, he watched a spider struggle to construct a web in the dank cave he was hiding in. The
beastie failed again and again.. Finally, Bruce reached his decision. If the Spider succeeded, he
would carry on.
He went on to become Scotland's Greatest King.
Try, Try, Try again ?
Perhaps Scotland will pull an unlikely win at Twickenham
on Saturday? She-who-is-now-Mrs-Blain did warn me not to
"
bore everyone about Brexit
",
but needs must.
Even though a No-Deal Brexit is ruled out in the short-run, where do we go from here?
Or,
perhaps, Theresa May is set to surprise us all. She really doesn't know when to give
up.
The scuttlebutt round Westminster is she's going to take her Brexit agreement back to
the House for a third time – and is currently scaring the Rees-Moog loonies with the threat of a
long extension leading to NO-Brexit and second referendum, and the Remoaners with the threat of a
short-extension leading to No-Deal Brexit. At least 70 Labour MPs want to avoid a second referendum
and could, perhaps, vote with her.
Of course, my above simplistic analysis ignores the EU.
"It is a very grand plan, but what about the Germans?" asked a famous Polish General in
WW2...
How the EU reacts to the likely request for an extension is going to be fascinating..
Meanwhile, there is a bit of a political stramash brewing in the US after a number of
fund managers and "actresses" (heaven forbid) were arrested for fraudulently bribing universities
to give their kids places.
Some of my more "right of centre" US correspondents are full of
righteous indignation that such obvious Democrats - on the basis the whole of Hollywood are goddam-lefty-commies
- are dishonestly getting their kids opportunities they don't merit. Bribery, criminal corruption,
hidden influence, the haves and have nots. Oops I think one of their heads just indignantly
exploded.
But this is important stuff.
Firstly, isn't it obvious that any society with an
ounce of common sense would make education the core of its development strategy? It's the single
most important factor likely to improve an economy and raise the prospects of its population. Yet,
here in the UK, the government has seen fit to chain students to years of debt and penury for
pretty average university courses? Its madness. In the States, its gone a step further – another
way for the rich to raise themselves higher.
The fact the monied and the wealthy across US society think its somehow
acceptable to pay-to-play for the top educational places and they advantages these confer for life,
sums up a moral corruption and is yet another symptom of the entitlement and pernicious income
inequality now at the core of the "Land of the Free".
As a chum told me
yesterday.. "its last stage empire" stuff. Its neither a Democrat or Republican thing – although it
doesn't help when the President is such a clearly negative role model. If its ok for the boss to
lie and cheat.. then what I do wrong?
(You could argue nepotism is the ultimate and absolute corruption – the rich ensuring the rich
get the best of everything and deny deserving poorer folk places they've earned. But, where does
guilt begin? What's so different from those of us who paid over expensive school fees to give our
kids the best chance in life? I could just about afford it. Single Parent in Brixton could not. My
kids got a better start. Whether the Brixton kid now runs past them is entirely their
responsibility now )
Its stories like this that are stoking the inequality bonfire. If it burns out of
control then markets will have nothing to say as the global reset is pressed!
They know, however, that they've been conned, played, and they're absolute fools in the
game.
Thank you Mr. Black for the laugh this morning. They know exactly what they have been
doing. Whether it was deregulating so that Hedge funds and vulture capitalism can thrive, or
making sure us peons cannot discharge debts, or making everything about financalization. This
was all done on purpose, without care for "winning the political game". Politics is
economics, and the Wall Street Democrats have been winning.
For sure. I'm quite concerned at the behavior of the DNC leadership and pundits. They are
doubling down on blatant corporatist agendas. They are acting like they have this in the bag
when objective evidence says they do not and are in trouble. Assuming they are out of touch is
naive to me. I would assume the opposite, they know a whole lot more than what they are letting
on.
I think the notion that the DNC and the Democrat's ruling class would rather lose to a
like-minded Republican corporatist than win with someone who stands for genuine progressive
values offering "concrete material benefits." I held my nose and read comments at the kos straw
polls (where Sanders consistently wins by a large margin) and it's clear to me that the
Clintonista's will do everything in their power to derail Bernie.
Keynes' "animal spirits" and the "tragedy of the commons" (Lloyd, 1833 and Hardin, 1968)
both implied that economics was messier than Samuelson and Friedman would have us believe
because there are actual people with different short- and long-term interests.
The behavioral folks (Kahnemann, Tversky, Thaler etc.) have all shown that people are even
messier than we would have thought. So most macro-economic stuff over the past half-century has
been largely BS in justifying trickle-down economics, deregulation etc.
There needs to be some inequality as that provides incentives via capitalism but
unfettered it turns into France 1989 or the Great Depression. It is not coincidence that the
major experiment in this in the late 90s and early 2000s required massive government
intervention to keep the ship from sinking less than a decade after the great unregulated
creative forces were unleashed.
MMT is likely to be similar where productive uses of deficits can be beneficial, but if the
money is wasted on stupid stuff like unnecessary wars, then the loss of credibility means that
the fiat currency won't be quite as fiat anymore. Britain was unbelievably economically
powerfully in the late 1800s but in half a century went to being an economic afterthought
hamstrung by deficits after two major wars and a depression.
So it is good that people like Brad DeLong are coming to understand that the pretty
economic theories have some truths but are utter BS (and dangerous) when extrapolated without
accounting for how people and societies actually behave.
I never understood the incentive to make more money -- that only works if money = true value
and that is the implication of living in a capitalist society (not economy)–everything
then becomes a commodity and alienation results and all the depression, fear, anxiety that I
see around me. Whereas human happiness actually comes from helping others and finding meaning
in life not money or dominating others. That's what social science seems to be telling us.
" He says we are discredited. Our policies have failed. And they've failed because
we've been conned by the Republicans."
That's welcome, but it's still making excuses. Neoliberal policies have failed because
the economics were wrong, not because "we've been conned by the Republicans." Furthermore, this
may be important – if it isn't acknowledged, those policies are quite likely to come
sneaking back, especially if Democrats are more in the ascendant., as they will be, given the
seesaw built into the 2-Party.
Might be right there. Groups like the neocons were originally attached the the left side of
politics but when the winds changed, detached themselves and went over to the Republican right.
The winds are changing again so those who want power may be going over to what is called the
left now to keep their grip on power. But what you say is quite true. It is not really the
policies that failed but the economics themselves that were wrong and which, in an honest
debate, does not make sense either.
"And they've failed because we've been conned by the Republicans.""
Not at all. What about the "free trade" hokum that DeJong and his pal Krugman have been
peddling since forever? History and every empirical test in the modern era shows that it fails
in developing countries and only exacerbates inequality in richer ones.
That's just a failed policy.
I'm still waiting for an apology for all those years that those two insulted anyone who
questioned their dogma as just "too ignorant to understand."
It's intriguing, but two other voices come to mind. One is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To
Waste by Mirowski and the other is Generation Like by Doug Rushkoff.
Neoliberalism is partially entrepreneurial self-conceptions which took a long time to
promote. Rushkoff's Frontline shows the Youtube culture. There is a girl with a "leaderboard"
on the wall of her suburban room, keeping track of her metrics.
There's a devastating VPRO Backlight film on the same topic. Internet-platform
neoliberalism does not have much to do with the GOP.
It's going to be an odd hybrid at best – you could have deep-red communism but enacted
for and by people whose self-conception is influenced by decades of Becker and Hayek? One place
this question leads is to ask what's the relationship between the set of ideas and material
conditions-centric philosophies? If new policies pass that create a different possibility
materially, will the vise grip of the entrepreneurial self loosen?
Partially yeah, maybe, a Job Guarantee if it passes and actually works, would be an
anti-neoliberal approach to jobs, which might partially loosen the regime of neoliberal advice
for job candidates delivered with a smug attitude that There Is No Alternative. (Described by
Gershon). We take it seriously because of a sense of dread that it might actually be powerful
enough to lock us out if we don't, and an uncertainty of whether it is or not.
There has been deep damage which is now a very broad and resilient base. It is one of the
prongs of why 2008 did not have the kind of discrediting effect that 1929 did. At least that's
what I took away from _Never Let_.
Brad DeLong handing the baton might mean something but it is not going to ameliorate the
sense-of-life that young people get from managing their channels and metrics.
Take the new 1099 platforms as another focal point. Suppose there were political measures
that splice in on the platforms and take the edge off materially, such as underwritten
healthcare not tied to your job. The platforms still use star ratings, make star ratings seem
normal, and continually push a self-conception as a small business. If you have overt DSA plus
covert Becker it is, again, a strange hybrid,
Your comment is very insightful. Neoliberalism embeds its mindset into the very fabric of
our culture and self-concepts. It strangely twists many of our core myths and beliefs.
This is nothing but a Trojan horse to 'co-opt' and 'subvert'. Neoliberals sense a risk to
their neo feudal project and are simply attempting to infiltrate and hollow out any threats
from within.
There are the same folks who have let entire economics departments becomes mouthpieces for
corporate propaganda and worked with thousands of think tanks and international organizations
to mislead, misinform and cause pain to millions of people.
They have seeded decontextualized words like 'wealth creators' and 'job creators' to
create a halo narrative for corporate interests and undermine society, citizenship, the social
good, the environment that make 'wealth creation' even possible. So all those take a backseat
to 'wealth creator' interests. Since you can't create wealth without society this is some
achievement.
Its because of them that we live in a world where the most important economic idea is
protecting people like Kochs business and personal interests and making sure government is not
'impinging on their freedom'. And the corollary a fundamental anti-human narrative where
ordinary people and workers are held in contempt for even expecting living wages and conditions
and their access to basics like education, health care and living conditions is hollowed out
out to promote privatization and become 'entitlements'.
Neoliberalism has left us with a decontextualized highly unstable world that exists in a
collective but is forcefully detached into a context less individual existence. These are not
mistakes of otherwise 'well meaning' individuals, there are the results of hard core ideologues
and high priests of power.
Two thumbs up. This has been an ongoing agenda for decades and it has succeeded in
permeating every aspect of society, which is why the United States is such a vacuous,
superficial place. And it's exporting that superficiality to the rest of the world.
I read Brad DeLong's and Paul Krugman's blogs until their contradictions became too
great. If anything, we need more people seeing the truth. The Global War on Terror is into its
18th year. In October the USA will spend approximately $6 trillion and will have accomplish
nothing except to create blow back. The Middle Class is disappearing. Those who remain in their
homes are head over heels in debt.
The average American household carries $137,063 in debt. The wealthy are getting richer.
The Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates families together have as much wealth as the
lowest half of Americans. Donald Trump's Presidency and Brexit document that neoliberal
politicians have lost contact with reality. They are nightmares that there is no escaping. At
best, perhaps, Roosevelt Progressives will be reborn to resurrect regulated capitalism and debt
forgiveness.
But more likely is a middle-class revolt when Americans no longer can pay for water,
electricity, food, medicine and are jailed for not paying a $1,500 fine for littering the
Beltway.
A civil war inside a nuclear armed nation state is dangerous beyond belief. France is
approaching this.
"... Buying beautiful clothes at full retail price was not a part of my childhood and it is not a part of my life now. It felt more illicit and more pleasurable than buying drugs. It was like buying drugs and doing the drugs, simultaneously."" ..."
"... "Erie Locomotive Plant Workers Strike against Two-Tier" [ Labor Notes ]. "UE proposed keeping the terms of the existing collective bargaining agreement in place while negotiating a new contract, but Wabtec rejected that proposal. Instead it said it would impose a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires and recalled employees up to 38 percent less in wages, institute mandatory overtime, reorganize job classifications, and hire temporary workers for up to 20 percent of the plant's jobs. ..."
"... Workers voted on Saturday to authorize the strike." • Good. Two-tier is awful, wherever found (including Social Security). ..."
"[S]hopping with T was different. When she walked into a store, the employees greeted her by name and began to
pull items from the racks for her to try on. Riding her coattails, I was treated with the same consideration, which is how I
wound up owning a beautiful cashmere 3.1 Philip Lim sweater that I had no use for and rarely wore, and which was eventually
eaten by moths in my closet.
Buying beautiful clothes at full retail price was not a part of my childhood and it is not a part of my life now. It
felt more illicit and more pleasurable than buying drugs. It was like buying drugs and doing the drugs, simultaneously.""
"Erie Locomotive Plant Workers Strike against Two-Tier" [
Labor
Notes ]. "UE proposed keeping the terms of the existing collective bargaining agreement in
place while negotiating a new contract, but Wabtec rejected that proposal. Instead it said it
would impose a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires and recalled employees up to 38
percent less in wages, institute mandatory overtime, reorganize job classifications, and hire
temporary workers for up to 20 percent of the plant's jobs.
Workers voted on Saturday to
authorize the strike." • Good. Two-tier is awful, wherever found (including Social
Security).
"... Forgot to add. If any are looking for a copy of that "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" book mentioned near the beginning of this article and do not want to fork over the hard stuff to Bezos, you can find it also at Project Gutenberg in several different formats here- http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3178 ..."
"... When inequality reaches its zenith it will be in parallel with many other disasters that we know are coming ..."
"... When the average yearly salary is $31K? There is no disposable income, as that astounding collective debt figure attests. ..."
"... "Keep in mind that historically, the levelers of inequality have been war, financial crises, protracted battles by workers to get better incomes and workplace protections, and, of course, revolutions." ..."
"... So strikes will work -- which is why they are forbidden. And maybe it is time to get truly creative with shopping strikes and boycotts–Starbucks and Amazon would learn from being shunned or, even better, forced into bankruptcy. ..."
I sometimes wonder if our elite have taken to heart this section from George Orwell's
"1984"-
But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen
moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the
High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by
conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
And that is the real purpose of all this surveillance in our lives. The reason why the
governmental and commercial sector is silencing dissent by banishing it from all social
media. The sidelining of all democratic participation in western countries and entities like
the EU. To cement their overlordship.
It won't work. Why? Because of Newton's third law – For every action, there is an equal
and opposite reaction. Historically, the more repression there is, the bloodier the reaction
and the French revolution is the best example of this. Here is a good lesson for our elites.
Never cheat a person that has nothing to lose. That's good advice that.
Forgot to add. If any are looking for a copy of that "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today"
book mentioned near the beginning of this article and do not want to fork over the hard stuff
to Bezos, you can find it also at Project Gutenberg in several different formats here-http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3178
When inequality reaches its zenith it will be in parallel with many other disasters that
we know are coming: climate change with all of its severe storms and warming of the planet,
toxic plastic pollution, resource depletion, environmental degradation, loss of arable land,
loss of animals and fish, insect depletion, super bugs and antibiotic resistance, threat of
nuclear war and other wars, climate refugees, rising sea levels, and on and on and on. The
thing is that we may not live long enough to revolt against wealth inequality!
Yves Smith. Great article from the always insightful Nomi Prins. The figures on household
income and general indebtedness are something to commit to memory for the next time one of
our earnest upper-middle friends goes on and on about retraining and relocating. How? When
the average yearly salary is $31K? There is no disposable income, as that astounding
collective debt figure attests.
The note up top from YS is sobering indeed: "Keep in mind that historically, the levelers
of inequality have been war, financial crises, protracted battles by workers to get better
incomes and workplace protections, and, of course, revolutions."
Which is the least painful and most effective? Strikes. And general strikes. Now that
everything in the U S of A is on-line, monetized (including us), and dollar denominated, the
only recourse we have is to withhold labor. (Or to stop shopping.)
So strikes will
work -- which is why they are forbidden. And maybe it is time to get truly creative with
shopping strikes and boycotts–Starbucks and Amazon would learn from being shunned or,
even better, forced into bankruptcy.
Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today's thin veneer of
political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that's hiding in plain
sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and
Darwinian components to it.
In terms of Newton's first law of motion: those in
power will remain in power unless acted upon by an external force. Those who are wealthy will
only gain in wealth as long as nothing deflects them from their present course. As for Darwin,
in the world of financial evolution, those with wealth or power will do what's in their best
interest to protect that wealth, even if it's in no one else's interest at all.
In George Orwell's iconic 1945 novel, Animal Farm ,
the pigs who gain control in a rebellion against a human farmer eventually impose a
dictatorship on the other animals on the basis of a single commandment
: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." In terms of the
American republic, the modern equivalent would be: "All citizens are equal, but the wealthy are
so much more equal than anyone else (and plan to remain that way)."
Certainly, inequality is the economic great wall between those with power and those without
it.
As the animals of Orwell's farm grew ever less equal, so in the present moment in a country
that still claims equal opportunity for its citizens, one in which
three Americans now have as much wealth as the bottom half of society (160 million people),
you could certainly say that we live in an increasingly Orwellian society. Or perhaps an
increasingly Twainian one.
After all, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a classic 1873 novel that put an
unforgettable label on their moment and could do the same for ours. The Gilded Age: A Tale
of Today depicted the greed and political corruption of post-Civil War America. Its
title caught the spirit of what proved to be a long moment when the uber-rich came to dominate
Washington and the rest of America. It was a period saturated with robber barons, professional
grifters, and incomprehensibly wealthy banking magnates. (Anything sound familiar?) The main
difference between that last century's gilded moment and this one was that those robber barons
built tangible things like railroads. Today's equivalent crew of the mega-wealthy build
remarkably intangible things like tech and electronic platforms, while a grifter of a president
opts for the only new infrastructure in sight, a great wall to nowhere.
In Twain's epoch, the U.S. was emerging from the Civil War. Opportunists were rising from
the ashes of the nation's battered soul. Land speculation, government lobbying, and shady deals
soon converged to create an unequal society of the first order (at least until now). Soon after
their novel came out, a series of recessions ravaged the country, followed by a 1907 financial
panic in New York City caused by a
speculator-led copper-market scam.
From the late 1890s on, the most powerful banker on the planet, J.P. Morgan, was called upon
multiple times to bail out a country on the economic edge. In 1907, Treasury Secretary George
Cortelyou provided him with
$25 million in bailout money at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt to stabilize
Wall Street and calm frantic citizens trying to withdraw their deposits from banks around the
country. And this Morgan did -- by helping his friends and their companies, while skimming
money off the top himself. As for the most troubled banks holding the savings of ordinary
people? Well, they folded. (Shades of the 2007-2008 meltdown and bailout anyone?)
The leading bankers who had received that bounty from the government went on to cause the
Crash of 1929 .
Not surprisingly, much speculation and fraud preceded it. In those years, the novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald caught
the era's spirit of grotesque inequality in The Great Gatsby when one of his characters
comments: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." The same
could certainly be said of today when it comes to the gaping maw between the have-nots and
have-a-lots.
Income vs. Wealth
To fully grasp the nature of inequality in our twenty-first-century gilded age, it's
important to understand the difference between wealth and income and what kinds of inequality
stem from each. Simply put, income is how much money you make in terms of paid work or any
return on investments or assets (or other things you own that have the potential to change in
value). Wealth is simply the gross accumulation of those very assets and any return or
appreciation on them. The more wealth you have, the easier it is to have a higher annual
income.
Let's break that down. If you earn $31,000 a year, the median salary for an
individual in the United States today, your income would be that amount minus associated taxes
(including federal, state, social security, and Medicare ones). On average, that means you
would be left with about $26,000 before other expenses kicked
in.
If your wealth is $1,000,000, however, and you put that into a savings account paying
2.25%
interest , you could receive about $22,500 and, after taxes, be left with about $19,000,
for doing nothing whatsoever.
To put all this in perspective, the top 1% of Americans now take home, on average, more than
40 times the incomes of the bottom 90%. And if you head for the top 0.1%, those figures only
radically worsen. That tiny crew takes home more than 198 times the income of the
bottom 90% percent. They also possess
as much wealth as the nation's bottom 90%. "Wealth," as Adam Smith so classically noted
almost two-and-a-half-centuries ago in The Wealth of Nations , "is power," an adage that seldom, sadly, seems outdated.
A Case Study: Wealth, Inequality, and the Federal Reserve
Obviously, if you inherit wealth in this country, you're instantly ahead of the game. In
America, a third to nearly a half of all wealth is
inherited rather than self-made. According to a New York Times investigation, for
instance, President Donald Trump, from birth, received an estimated
$413 million (in today's dollars, that is) from his dear old dad and another
$140 million (in today's dollars) in loans. Not a bad way for a "businessman" to begin
building the empire (of bankruptcies
) that became the platform for a presidential campaign that
oozed into actually running the country. Trump did it, in other words, the old-fashioned
way -- through inheritance.
In his megalomaniacal zeal to declare a national emergency at the southern border, that
gilded millionaire-turned-billionaire-turned-president provides but one of many examples of a
long record of abusing power. Unfortunately, in this country, few people consider record
inequality (which is still growing) as another kind of abuse of power, another kind of great
wall, in this case keeping not Central Americans but most U.S. citizens out.
The Federal Reserve, the country's central bank that dictates the cost of money and that
sustained Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 (and since), has finally
pointed out that such extreme levels of inequality are bad news for the rest of the country. As
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at a
town hall in Washington in early February, "We want prosperity to be widely shared. We need
policies to make that happen." Sadly, the Fed has largely contributed to increasing
the systemic inequality now engrained in the financial and, by extension, political system. In
a recent research paper , the Fed
did, at least, underscore the consequences of inequality to the economy, showing that "income
inequality can generate low aggregate demand, deflation pressure, excessive credit growth, and
financial instability."
In the wake of the global economic meltdown, however, the Fed took it upon itself to reduce
the cost of money for big banks by chopping interest rates to zero (before eventually raising
them to 2.5%) and buying $4.5 trillion in Treasury and mortgage bonds to lower it further. All
this so that banks could ostensibly lend money more easily to Main Street and stimulate the
economy. As Senator Bernie Sanders noted though, "The
Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the
largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world a
clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone
else."
The economy has been treading water ever since (especially compared to the stock market).
Annual gross domestic product growth has not surpassed
3% in any year since the financial crisis, even as the level of the stock market
tripled , grotesquely increasing the country's inequality gap. None of this should have
been surprising, since much of the excess money went straight to big banks, rich investors, and
speculators. They then used it to invest in the stock and bond markets, but not in things that
would matter to all the Americans outside that great wall of wealth.
The question is: Why are inequality and a flawed economic system mutually reinforcing? As a
starting point, those able to invest in a stock market buoyed by the Fed's policies only
increased their wealth exponentially. In contrast, those relying on the economy to sustain them
via wages and other income got shafted. Most people aren't, of course, invested in the stock
market, or really in anything. They can't afford to be. It's important to remember that nearly
80% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.
The net result: an acute post-financial-crisis increase in
wealth inequality -- on top of the income inequality that was global but especially true in the
United States. The crew in the top 1% that doesn't rely on salaries to increase their wealth
prospered fabulously. They, after all, now own
more than half of all national wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds, so a soaring
stock market disproportionately helps them. It's also why the Federal Reserve
subsidy policies to Wall Street banks have only added to the extreme wealth of those
extreme few.
The Ramifications of Inequality
The list of negatives resulting from such inequality is long indeed. As a start, the only
thing the majority of Americans possess a greater proportion of than that top 1% is a mountain
of debt.
The bottom 90% are the lucky owners of about three-quarters of the country's household debt.
Mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and credit-card debt are cumulatively at a
record-high $13.5 trillion .
And that's just to start down a slippery slope. As Inequality.org reports, wealth and
income inequality impact "everything from life expectancy to infant mortality and obesity."
High economic inequality and poor health, for instance, go hand and hand, or put another way,
inequality compromises the overall health of the country. According to academic findings,
income inequality is, in the most literal sense, making Americans sick. As one study put it ,
"Diseased and impoverished economic infrastructures [help] lead to diseased or impoverished or
unbalanced bodies or minds."
Then there's Social Security, established in 1935 as a federal supplement for
those in need who have also paid into the system through a tax on their wages. Today, all
workers contribute 6.2% of their annual earnings and employers pay the other 6.2% (up to a cap
of $132,900 ) into the Social
Security system. Those making far more than that, specifically millionaires and billionaires,
don't have to pay a dime more on a proportional basis. In practice, that means about 94%
of American workers and their employers paid the full 12.4% of their annual earnings toward
Social Security, while the other 6% paid an often significantly smaller fraction of their
earnings.
According to his
own claims about his 2016 income, for instance, President Trump "contributed a mere 0.002
percent of his income to Social Security in 2016." That means it would take nearly
22,000 additional workers earning the median U.S. salary to make up for what he doesn't
have to pay. And the greater the income inequality in this country, the more money those who
make less have to put into the Social Security system on a proportional basis. In recent years,
a staggering $1.4 trillion
could have gone into that system, if there were no arbitrary payroll cap favoring the
wealthy.
Inequality: A Dilemma With Global Implications
America is great at minting millionaires. It has the highest concentration of them, globally
speaking, at 41%. (Another 24% of that millionaires' club can be found in Europe.) And the top
1% of U.S. citizens earn 40 times the national average and
own about 38.6 % of the country's total wealth. The highest figure in any other developed
country is "only" 28%.
However, while the U.S. boasts of epic levels of inequality, it's also a global trend.
Consider this: the world's richest 1% own 45% of total wealth on
this planet. In contrast, 64% of the population (with an average of
$10,000 in wealth to their name) holds less than 2%. And to widen the inequality picture a bit
more, the world's richest 10%, those having at least $100,000 in assets, own 84% of total
global wealth.
The billionaires' club is where it's really at, though. According to Oxfam, the richest
42 billionaires have a combined wealth equal to that of the poorest 50% of humanity. Rest
assured, however, that in this gilded century there's inequality even among billionaires. After
all, the 10 richest among them possess $745
billion in total global wealth. The next 10 down the list possess a mere $451.5 billion , and why even
bother tallying the next 10 when you get the picture?
Oxfam also recently
reported that "the number of billionaires has almost doubled, with a new billionaire
created every two days between 2017 and 2018. They have now more wealth than ever before while
almost half of humanity have barely escaped extreme poverty, living on less than $5.50 a
day."
How Does It End?
In sum, the rich are only getting richer and it's happening at a historic rate. Worse yet,
over the past decade, there was an extra perk for the truly wealthy. They could bulk up on
assets that had been devalued due to the financial crisis, while so many of their peers on the
other side of that great wall of wealth were economically decimated by the 2007-2008 meltdown
and have yet to fully
recover .
What we've seen ever since is how money just keeps flowing upward through banks and massive
speculation, while the economic lives of those not at the top of the financial food chain have
largely remained stagnant or worse. The result is, of course, sweeping inequality of a kind
that, in much of the last century, might have seemed inconceivable.
Eventually, we will all have to face the black cloud this throws over the entire economy.
Real people in the real world, those not at the top, have experienced a decade of ever greater
instability, while the inequality gap of this beyond-gilded age is sure to shape a truly messy
world ahead. In other words, this can't end well.
I read a stat in Mother Jones magazine that 90% of Americans have an average income of
$31,000 a year and the richest .1 percent have an average income of $27 million dollars. So
how does one pay all these living expenses and various debts with $26,000 after taxes? The
Trump tax cuts just exacerbated the problem by giving more money to the wealthy and
practically nothing to the 90% (at the bottom, which is almost everyone else). A good book on
the subject of wealth inequality is "Billionaire's Ball."
"... While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. ..."
"... Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders' energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood" path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy. ..."
"... In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism. ..."
"... We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism. ..."
"... While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."' ..."
In Chapter 1, we traced the rise of our neoliberal conjuncture back to the crisis of liberalism during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, culminating in the Great Depression. During this period, huge transformations in capitalism proved impossible
to manage with classical laissez-faire approaches. Out of this crisis, two movements emerged, both of which would eventually shape
the course of the twentieth century and beyond. The first, and the one that became dominant in the aftermath of the crisis, was the
conjuncture of embedded liberalism. The crisis indicated that capitalism wrecked too much damage on the lives of ordinary citizens.
People (white workers and families, especially) warranted social protection from the volatilities and brutalities of capitalism.
The state's public function was expanded to include the provision of a more substantive social safety net, a web of protections for
people and a web of constraints on markets. The second response was the invention of neoliberalism. Deeply skeptical of the common-good
principles that undergirded the emerging social welfare state, neoliberals began organizing on the ground to develop a "new" liberal
govemmentality, one rooted less in laissez-faire principles and more in the generalization of competition and enterprise. They worked
to envision a new society premised on a new social ontology, that is, on new truths about the state, the market, and human beings.
Crucially, neoliberals also began building infrastructures and institutions for disseminating their new' knowledges and theories
(i.e., the Neoliberal Thought Collective), as well as organizing politically to build mass support for new policies (i.e., working
to unite anti-communists, Christian conservatives, and free marketers in common cause against the welfare state). When cracks in
embedded liberalism began to surface -- which is bound to happen with any moving political equilibrium -- neoliberals were there
with new stories and solutions, ready to make the world anew.
We are currently living through the crisis of neoliberalism. As I write this book, Donald Trump has recently secured the U.S.
presidency, prevailing in the national election over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Throughout the election, I couldn't
help but think back to the crisis of liberalism and the two responses that emerged. Similarly, after the Great Recession of 2008,
we've saw two responses emerge to challenge our unworkable status quo, which dispossesses so many people of vital resources for individual
and collective life. On the one hand, we witnessed the rise of Occupy Wall Street. While many continue to critique the movement for
its lack of leadership and a coherent political vision, Occupy was connected to burgeoning movements across the globe, and our current
political horizons have been undoubtedly shaped by the movement's success at repositioning class and economic inequality within our
political horizon. On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party
was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was
perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-,
it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.
Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering.
Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in
the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories of
good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election, Trump effectively
tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality, channeling political
anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism (corporate diversity,
political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie Sanders, Trump was a crisis
candidate.
Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders'
energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood"
path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy.
Universal health care. Free higher education. Fair trade. The repeal of Citizens United. Trump offered a different response to
the crisis. Like Sanders, he railed against global trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, Trump's
victory was fueled by right neoliberalism's culture of cruelty. While Sanders tapped into and mobilized desires for a more egalitarian
and democratic future, Trump's promise was nostalgic, making America "great again" -- putting the nation back on "top of the world,"
and implying a time when women were "in their place" as male property, and minorities and immigrants were controlled by the state.
Thus, what distinguished Trump's campaign from more traditional Republican campaigns was that it actively and explicitly pitted
one group's equality (white men) against everyone else's (immigrants, women, Muslims, minorities, etc.). As Catherine Rottenberg
suggests, Trump offered voters a choice between a multiracial society (where folks are increasingly disadvantaged and dispossessed)
and white supremacy (where white people would be back on top). However, "[w]hat he neglected to state," Rottenberg writes,
is that neoliberalism flourishes in societies where the playing field is already stacked against various segments of society,
and that it needs only a relatively small select group of capital-enhancing subjects, while everyone else is ultimately dispensable.
1
In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg
argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many
concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.
We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left
neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested
in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right
and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political
philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism.
While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking
with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the
chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'
Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, put it this way:
The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness
of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately
great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under
capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.4
I think that, for the first time in the history of U.S. capitalism, the vast majority of people might sense the lie of liberal,
capitalist democracy. They feel anxious, unfree, disaffected. Fantasies of the good life have been shattered beyond repair for most
people. Trump and this hopefully brief triumph of right neoliberalism will soon lay this bare for everyone to see. Now, with Trump,
it is absolutely clear: the rich rule the world; we are all disposable; this is no democracy. The question becomes: How will we show
up for history? Will there be new stories, ideas, visions, and fantasies to attach to? How can we productively and meaningful intervene
in the crisis of neoliberalism? How can we "tear a hole in the grey curtain" and open up better worlds? How can we put what we've
learned to use and begin to imagine and build a world beyond living in competition? I hope our critical journey through the neoliberal
conjuncture has enabled you to begin to answer these questions.
More specifically, in recent decades, especially since the end of the Cold War, our common-good sensibilities have been channeled
into neoliberal platforms for social change and privatized action, funneling our political energies into brand culture and marketized
struggles for equality (e.g., charter schools, NGOs and non-profits, neoliberal antiracism and feminism). As a result, despite our
collective anger and disaffected consent, we find ourselves stuck in capitalist realism with no real alternative. Like the neoliberal
care of the self, we are trapped in a privatized mode of politics that relies on cruel optimism; we are attached, it seems, to politics
that inspire and motivate us to action, while keeping us living in competition.
To disrupt the game, we need to construct common political horizons against neoliberal hegemony. We need to use our common stories
and common reason to build common movements against precarity -- for within neoliberalism, precarity is what ultimately has the potential
to thread all of our lives together. Put differently, the ultimate fault line in the neoliberal conjiuicture is the way it subjects
us all to precarity and the biopolitics of disposability, thereby creating conditions of possibility for new coalitions across race,
gender, citizenship, sexuality, and class. Recognizing this potential for coalition in the face of precarization is the most pressing
task facing those who are yearning for a new world. The question is: How do we get there? How do we realize these coalitional potentialities
and materialize common horizons?
Ultimately, mapping the neoliberal conjuncture through everyday life in enterprise culture has not only provided some direction
in terms of what we need; it has also cultivated concrete and practical intellectual resources for political interv ention and social
interconnection -- a critical toolbox for living in common. More specifically, this book has sought to provide resources for thinking
and acting against the four Ds: resources for engaging in counter-conduct, modes of living that refuse, on one hand, to conduct one's
life according to the norm of enterprise, and on the other, to relate to others through the norm of competition. Indeed, we need
new ways of relating, interacting, and living as friends, lovers, workers, vulnerable bodies, and democratic people if we are to
write new stories, invent new govemmentalities, and build coalitions for new worlds.
Against Disimagination: Educated Hope and Affirmative Speculation
We need to stop turning inward, retreating into ourselves, and taking personal responsibility for our lives (a task which is ultimately
impossible). Enough with the disimagination machine! Let's start looking outward, not inward -- to the broader structures that undergird
our lives. Of course, we need to take care of ourselves; we must survive. But I firmly believe that we can do this in ways both big
and small, that transform neoliberal culture and its status-quo stories.
Here's the thing I tell my students all the time. You cannot escape neoliberalism. It is the air we breathe, the water in which
we swim. No job, practice of social activism, program of self-care, or relationship will be totally free from neoliberal impingements
and logics. There is no pure "outside" to get to or work from -- that's just the nature of the neoliberalism's totalizing cultural
power. But let's not forget that neoliberalism's totalizing cultural power is also a source of weakness. Potential for resistance
is everywhere, scattered throughout our everyday lives in enterprise culture. Our critical toolbox can help us identify these potentialities
and navigate and engage our conjuncture in ways that tear open up those new worlds we desire.
In other words, our critical perspective can help us move through the world with what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated
hope means holding in tension the material realities of power and the contingency of history. This orientation of educated hope knows
very well what we're up against. However, in the face of seemingly totalizing power, it also knows that neoliberalism can never become
total because the future is open. Educated hope is what allows us to see the fault lines, fissures, and potentialities of the present
and emboldens us to think and work from that sliver of social space where we do have political agency and freedom to construct a
new world. Educated hope is what undoes the power of capitalist realism. It enables affirmative speculation (such as discussed in
Chapter 5), which does not try to hold the future to neoliberal horizons (that's cruel optimism!), but instead to affirm our commonalities
and the potentialities for the new worlds they signal. Affirmative speculation demands a different sort of risk calculation and management.
It senses how little we have to lose and how much we have to gain from knocking the hustle of our lives.
Against De-democratization: Organizing and Collective Coverning
We can think of educated hope and affirmative speculation as practices of what Wendy Brown calls "bare democracy" -- the basic
idea that ordinary' people like you and me should govern our lives in common, that we should critique and try to change our world,
especially the exploitative and oppressive structures of power that maintain social hierarchies and diminish lives. Neoliberal culture
works to stomp out capacities for bare democracy by transforming democratic desires and feelings into meritocratic desires and feelings.
In neoliberal culture, utopian sensibilities are directed away from the promise of collective utopian sensibilities are directed
away from the promise of collective governing to competing for equality.
We have to get back that democractic feeling! As Jeremy Gilbert taught us, disaffected consent is a post-democratic orientation.
We don't like our world, but we don't think we can do anything about it. So, how do we get back that democratic feeling? How do we
transform our disaffected consent into something new? As I suggested in the last chapter, we organize. Organizing is simply about
people coming together around a common horizon and working collectively to materialize it. In this way, organizing is based on the
idea of radical democracy, not liberal democracy. While the latter is based on formal and abstract rights guaranteed by the state,
radical democracy insists that people should directly make the decisions that impact their lives, security, and well-being. Radical
democracy is a practice of collective governing: it is about us hashing out, together in communities, what matters, and working in
common to build a world based on these new sensibilities.
The work of organizing is messy, often unsatisfying, and sometimes even scary. Organizing based on affirmative speculation and
coalition-building, furthermore, will have to be experimental and uncertain. As Lauren Berlant suggests, it means "embracing the
discomfort of affective experience in a truly open social life that no
one has ever experienced." Organizing through and for the common "requires more adaptable infrastructures. Keep forcing the existing
infrastructures to do what they don't know how to do. Make new ways to be local together, where local doesn't require a physical
neighborhood." 5 What Berlant is saying is that the work of bare democracy requires unlearning, and detaching from, our
current stories and infrastructures in order to see and make things work differently. Organizing for a new world is not easy -- and
there are no guarantees -- but it is the only way out of capitalist realism.
Getting back democratic feeling will at once require and help us lo move beyond the biopolitics of disposability and entrenched
systems of inequality. On one hand, organizing will never be enough if it is not animated by bare democracy, a sensibility that each
of us is equally important when it comes to the project of determining our lives in common. Our bodies, our hurts, our dreams, and
our desires matter regardless of our race, gender, sexuality, or citizenship, and regardless of how r much capital (economic,
social, or cultural) we have. Simply put, in a radical democracy, no one is disposable. This bare-democratic sense of equality must
be foundational to organizing and coalition-building. Otherwise, we will always and inevitably fall back into a world of inequality.
On the other hand, organizing and collective governing will deepen and enhance our sensibilities and capacities for radical equality.
In this context, the kind of self-enclosed individualism that empowers and underwrites the biopolitics of disposability melts away,
as we realize the interconnectedness of our lives and just how amazing it feels to
fail, we affirm our capacities for freedom, political intervention, social interconnection, and collective social doing.
Against Dispossession: Shared Security and Common Wealth
Thinking and acting against the biopolitics of disposability goes hand-in-hand with thinking and acting against dispossession.
Ultimately, when we really understand and feel ourselves in relationships of interconnection with others, we want for them as we
want for ourselves. Our lives and sensibilities of what is good and just are rooted in radical equality, not possessive or self-appreciating
individualism. Because we desire social security and protection, we also know others desire and deserve the same.
However, to really think and act against dispossession means not only advocating for shared security and social protection, but
also for a new society that is built on the egalitarian production and distribution of social wealth that we all produce. In this
sense, we can take Marx's critique of capitalism -- that wealth is produced collectively but appropriated individually -- to heart.
Capitalism was built on the idea that one class -- the owners of the means of production -- could exploit and profit from the collective
labors of everyone else (those who do not own and thus have to work), albeit in very different ways depending on race, gender, or
citizenship. This meant that, for workers of all stripes, their lives existed not for themselves, but for others (the appropriating
class), and that regardless of what we own as consumers, we are not really free or equal in that bare-democratic sense of the word.
If we want to be really free, we need to construct new material and affective social infrastructures for our common wealth. In
these new infrastructures, wealth must not be reduced to economic value; it must be rooted in social value. Here, the production
of wealth does not exist as a separate sphere from the reproduction of our lives. In other words, new infrastructures, based on the
idea of common wealth, will not be set up to exploit our labor, dispossess our communities, or to divide our lives. Rather, they
will work to provide collective social resources and care so that we may all be free to pursue happiness, create beautiful and/or
useful things, and to realize our potential within a social world of living in common. Crucially, to create the conditions for these
new, democratic forms of freedom rooted in radical equality, we need to find ways to refuse and exit the financial networks of Empire
and the dispossessions of creditocracy, building new systems that invite everyone to participate in the ongoing production of new
worlds and the sharing of the wealth that we produce in common.
It's not up to me to tell you exactly where to look, but I assure you that potentialities for these new worlds are everywhere
around you.
Pharmaceutical pushers like Purdue Pharma "couldn't have done their dirty work" without
America's increasingly unbalanced economy
America's growing rate of economic inequality is more than a numerical ratio that worries
economists or a trendy political talking point. The phenomenon has been linked to human
tragedies ranging from higher murder
rates to growing
gaps in life expectancy .
Add death by opioids to the list.
In recent years, social scientists have been debating why more people have been dying from
drug overdoses. Does the increased availability of highly addictive opioids fully explain the
rise? Not entirely, it turns out.
Sociologist Shannon Monnat is author of a new study
with the Institute for New Economic Thinking that examines county-level drug deaths in the U.S.
Her research reveals that while overprescribing doctors, pharmaceutical pushers and illegal
dealers are highly significant, a big part of what makes a community susceptible to the opioid
scourge is recent patterns of economic distress -- the kind inflicted by decades of bad
policy.
A recent flurry of headlines about the billionaire Sackler family, whose members own Purdue
Pharma, the company that created the powerful opioid painkiller OxyContin, highlights the
ugliness of drug sales representatives promoting dangerously high doses to boost profits.
"Supply is certainly important," says Monnat, "but Big Pharma couldn't do its dirty work
without America's increasing economic inequality."
Monnat's research examines U.S. drug fatalities from 2000-02 and 2014-16, two-thirds of
which were caused by heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opiates. She concentrates on
non-Hispanic whites because other than American Indians, that group has suffered the highest
drug mortality rates of anybody over the last two decades.
Several of her findings complicate the common media narratives. Despite the characterization
of opioids as "hillbilly heroin," most deaths and the biggest increase in fatalities among
whites since 2000 were actually in urban counties. Rural areas saw fewer deaths overall, but
the rates varied widely from one region to another. Some rural counties have the highest opioid
mortality rates in the country, while others enjoy the lowest.
Why would opioids be raging through some predominately rural states, like Maine and
Kentucky, but not others, like Idaho and Iowa?
Among non-urban counties, drug mortality rates appear to spike in two types of places:
economically beaten-down communities centered on mining and distressed areas where people
increasingly depend on service jobs. In these corners of America, economic anxiety matters more
in terms of how many will die from opioid overdoses than supply factors, which tend to drive
death rates more around big cities.
Monnat explains how despair builds in areas like Appalachia, where residents have seen
mining jobs disappear and there are fewer ways for people without a college degree to make a
living. In regions where manufacturing jobs were once abundant, like Pennsylvania, people have
to rely on badly paid service jobs that offer few benefits.
Communities facing these challenges begin to implode. The best and brightest young people
tend to leave to find jobs elsewhere. Families break apart. The tax base shrinks and social
services disappear. Economic policies that support disinvestment in the public sphere, along
with those that disfavor workers and allow corporations -- like greedy pharmaceutical companies
-- to run roughshod over communities make everything worse. Distress spreads across
generations.
On the other hand, rural areas where people are more reliant on farming or where there are a
wider variety of jobs tend have a lower rate of death from opioids. The quality of labor
markets matters, it turns out. Monnat also thinks that that greater social cohesion in these
communities may help people stay more resilient when economic strains develop. Having a more
robust social safety net helps, too. Elsewhere, she has shown that places where religion
and sports are more of a focus also tend to have lower rates of drug fatalities. Maybe going to
church or rooting for the local team gives people meaning and a sense identity, which helps
them cope better when other sources of these human needs disappear.
The opioid crisis is really a "tale of two rural Americas," says Monnat. In places where
economic inequality has thrown more lives into chaos, a greater number of lives will be snuffed
out by this deadly strain of drugs. (Methamphetamines, she notes, cause slower deaths, so we
may not have the full story of their impact on drug fatalities yet).
Her findings suggest that no matter how well intentioned the efforts to limit supply or
provide treatment to the addicted, places where the economy isn't working for most people may
continue to see high opioid fatalities.
Research like hers underscores the reality that policymakers in both political parties are
going to have to move beyond the neoliberal framework popularized in the Reagan era that
promotes corporate deregulation, shrunken social safety nets, and trade and labor policies that
hurt ordinary workers. Such policies were meant to spark growth, but instead they have only
made a thin slice of people wealthy and socked America with inequality that has
disproportionately hit certain regions of the country.
Pro-worker policies, investments in public services like health and education, fairer tax
systems, and re-establishing sensible rules for how companies do business are all part of a
much-needed prescription for a healthier society.
We have a vicious circle going on here: the rich create drugs and in order to increase
profits from year to year describe the drugs as non-addictive, which proves false. The rich
pharmaceutical inventors and other distributors of drugs want more profits so they sell more
drugs again insisting on their non-addictiveness. The poor, who no longer have good-paying
jobs because these jobs have been moved overseas so that the companies can save money and
make bigger profit by paying overseas workers less, are filled with despair and depression
and are prescribed the "non-additive" drugs in order to maintain some degree of normality of
being. Hence, the pharmaceutical developers sell more and get richer and the drug users die a
miserable death too early. Nice, hey?
The opioid crisis is only one consequence of allowing selfish, ignorant libertarians to
make policy. Anyone older than 50 remembers a pre-Walmart country where most things were made
in the US. When most jobs are part-time, low-paid ones with no benefits, despair grows.
Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, Paul Ryan, and Christopher Cox, just to name a few, not to
mention the Cato Institute the members of which said things like:
Daniel J. Ikenson: "In fact, since China joined the WTO in 2001, U.S. exports to China
have more than doubled. And the notion that importing from and offshoring to China is
hollowing out American manufacturing is not supported by the facts."
Doug Bandow: "The silliest argument against PNTR is that Chinese imports would overwhelm
U.S. industry. In fact, American workers are far more productive than their Chinese
counterparts Moreover, Beijing's manufacturing exports to the United States remain small,
about half the level of those from Mexico."
Deroy Murdock professing that PNTR "will pressure China from inside and out" and that
"Americans will enjoy more Chinese-made apparel and appliances at reasonable prices if PNTR
passes."
I wish I had more time to read more on this. I wonder how deep the authors go in their
emphasis on "inequality" rather than "poverty" or "low incomes." I'm from the Boston area,
where the opioid crisis has hit hard, and there is low poverty but high inequality.
One thing about high inequality that I wish got discussed more here: it drives up the cost
of housing (and to a lesser extent, most other things), which totally undercuts the buying
power of wages. Massachusetts is moving toward a $15/hour statewide minimum wage (it's at
$12/hour now). I strongly suspect that residential rents will rise to suck up a large part of
that unless we have the kind of downturn that pushes luxury apartments into the lower rungs
of the market.
====One thing about high inequality that I wish got discussed more here: it drives up the
cost of housing (and to a lesser extent, most other things), which totally undercuts the
buying power of wages====
Thanks Joe. I agree with your comment completely. The cost of living drum is one I have
been banging on in comments on NC. In this country and the world we have a income and wealth
redistribution problem.
The solutions to the problem need to be addressed on multiple fronts. The fight for a
higher minimum wage, higher income taxes on the upper classes, and a wealth tax, etc, are
important but we also have to stop the soaring increase in cost of living. If we do not begin
to contain soaring prices for things such as housing, healthcare, transportation, college,
food, etc. where does it end?
In 1979 the average monthly rent in Chicago was $279. In 2019 the average rent in Chicago
is roughly $1200. Ten years from now when the average rent in Chicago is $2000 are we going
to raise the minimum wage to $20, $30? $30,000 for a new car, $40,000 for a new pickup truck,
$25,000 per year for college tuition and room and board, and soaring healthcare costs that
bankrupt many people.
To borrow concepts from I think Marx. What we are paying in the US for many basic needs is
exchange value and not use value. My father used to say that a car is something to take you
from Point A to Point B and it just depends on how much you want to pay. I live in the far
northwest suburbs of Chicago and I see a lot of GMC Yukons/Chevy Suburbans usually with one
person in it. A 2018 GMC Yukon is $50,000. That is obscene. Even if a person could afford it,
by paying it they are enabling the car manufacturers to charge what they want.
When I was in high school in the 70's you could buy a beater car for a couple thousand
dollars. Now?? Go to any used car lot but bring smelling salts with you. I would venture that
the supply of used cars far outstrips demand so something else is keeping car prices
high.
I am no economist or finance expert so I am light on solutions but something has to change
or the bubble will burst. As Lambert, Thomas Franks, and other have pointed out, many in
government are part of the affluent, credentialed, elitist upper classes so as I am not
optimistic for solutions from the government anytime soon. And I do not think socialist type
price controls are an answer but as I said that is out of my knowledge area.
Thanks again for your comment Joe! The other half of the inequality equation, costs of
living, needs to be addressed.
There is a good book called Dream Hoarders that discusses some of what I mentioned
above.
I will definitely check out that book. I thought I was the only one banging this
particular drum in comments. This problem is invisible to many because it disproportionately
affects the young (but is by no means limited to the young! I just listened to an NPR
interview with a retired woman who has to live with her brother! She cant even get subsidized
housing for retirees).
The cost of cars in inflation adjusted dollars is controversial because cars are just so
much more reliable now, apples and oranges comparisons are almost impossible. But the
national policy of encouraging SUV and pickup ownership is one of the most absurd aspects of
our national mismanagement. Imagine if you told someone in 1977 that the average car in the
21st century would be just as fuel inefficient (OK, not sure about the exact numbers).
As for rent control, what we had in Greater Boston before 1995 was both market driven
housing construction with few impediments to development and rent control. So there was
plentiful supply at reasonable cost. But rent control was abolished through a campaign funded
by small landlords who then took the opportunity to fight new construction so they could rent
gouge. Any incumbent fights competition and small landlords are no different. The insidious
thing was they mastered the language of community, preservation, smart growth, etc. that
appealed to the racist and classist sensibilities of many residents of affluent places like
Cambridge while giving them progressive cover.
Basically, this is a rehash of Monnat's little study which is far from convincing and
seems to be cherry-picking to support Case and Deaton's despair hypothesis. Case and Deaton
are more convincing.
If I was reviewing Monnat's paper, I would recommend major revisions to better explain how
slicing up her data pie does not render degrees of freedom impotent as far a significance
goes. So you can find both urban and rural counties with lots of ODs, and alas many more with
not so many – so what? That hardly justifies expounding on how economic factors cause
ODs.
This is why I condemn liberal/Dem ideology as much or more than Republican. Two major
parties to sell out Americans and America to corporations, banks, billionaires and an eternal
privatized war machine. Growth and progress ideologies building on and reinforcing the
pathological and ecocidal.
So god damned sure of themselves, so arrogant and condescending. Contempt does not even
begin to describe what I feel about the leadership of this empire.
Even now I can hear liberals and Dems justifying the economics that leads to such
destitution for so many.
In 1980, this particular letter to the editor was published in the NEJM. Two doctors
authored it. Everything said in it is true. I would not contest it.
"Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics
Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction
in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were
11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of
reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The
addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in
two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread
use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients
with no history of addiction. Jane Porter; Herschel Jick; MD Boston Collaborative Drug
Surveillance Program, Boston University Medical Center, Waltham, MA.
It was cited a few times from 1981 to 1988 each year."In 1989, the numbers of citations
doubled and at certain points tripled. From 1981 to 2017, this letter was cited 608 times.
72.2% (439) of the citations, quoted the letter or used it as evidence addiction was rare in
patients when treated with opioids such as oxycodone. 80.8% or 491 of the citations failed to
note the patients described in the letter were hospitalized at the time they received the
prescription." The median number of citations for a NEJM letter is 11 times.
OxyContin was introduced in 1996 by Purdue Pharma and aggressively sold to doctors. Sold
as a less-addictive alternative to other painkillers as it was made in a time-release
formulation, allowing for a slow onset of the drug, and not a hit all at once which is more
likely to lead to abuse. When used as prescribed, Oxycontin was safe. When ground up, it's
slow release characteristics were marginalized. Shortly after 1996, Porter and Jick's letter
citations doubled and continued to be cited in a positive fashion with few negative citations
and a failure to mention the hospital setting where the drugs were administered.
In 2007 in the pharmaceutical industry, "the manufacturer of OxyContin and three senior
executives of Purdue Pharma plead guilty to federal criminal charges that they misled
regulators, doctors, and patients about the risk of addiction associated with OxyContin. Even
then the lobbying to restrict state laws regulating opioids continued. From 2006 to 2015,
pharmaceutical companies spent $880 million in lobbying state and federal legislatures and
contributing to campaigns to prevent laws restricting Opioid prescriptions. Their lobbying
expenditures has outstripped those advocating for greater controls on prescriptions by 200
times giving them greater influence at the state level.
In 2018 law makers questioned Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith wanting to know why millions of
hydrocodone and oxycodone pills were sent (2006 to 2016) to five pharmacies in four tiny West
Virginia towns having a total population of about 22,000. Ten million pills were shipped to
two small pharmacies in Williamson, West Virginia. The number of deaths increased along with
the company and wholesaler profits.
This crap does end up in rural areas and it does impact the poor. As tends to happen with
public health epidemics, overdoses have an outsize effect in certain regions. For instance,
the biggest spike in fatalities by percentage occurred in Nebraska, North Carolina, New
Jersey, Indiana, and West Virginia (33.3%, 22.5%, 21.1%, 15.1%, and 11.2% rises,
respectively). But areas like Wyoming, Utah, and Oklahoma experienced declines of 9.2% to
33%.
These are just bits and pieces of what I have written on the topic of opioids and its
impact all over America. "60% of opioid deaths occur in those who were given a prescription
by a physician. The other 40% of deaths are caused by people who obtained opioids by "doctor
shopping," and receive multiple scripts at once.
Usually someone will show up and start to argue with your comments or the numbers of
deaths.
Wonder if it is possible to recreate a list of all of those who have died because
opioids/fentanyl overdose?
Remembering those we have lost (especially in such high numbers) reminds us of the collective
and specific areas of communal loss in this country (i.e. West Virginia etc.) instead of the
same type of sad individualized they-should-have-known-better pretension that often masks
addiction/substance use in this country, especially as the aim of neoliberalism's second
tenant -- please die -- is always operating.
Also, a running list might allow for more examination of each current death in context
(pusher, supplier, distribution and invisible institutions enabling system to perpetuate for
profit).
Did anyone mention the clipper ship barons who made fortunes off opium? The original
families locked into Skull & Bones (arguably a foreign intervention linked to Marxism,
the Rothschilds and later the CFR, the Trilateralists, and the Rhodes gang)? Or the massive
trafficking in illicit narcotgics by the nation's intelligence agencies?
I don't know about Marxism of all things being a connection unless you mean Karl Marx
started his work after seeing the misery of the Industrial Revolution; a revolution partially
fueled by the Chinese money the British got after starting and winning the Opium Wars. So I
guess opium is partly responsible for Marxism.
I don't agree. what, they couldn't afford "better" drugs where you would not OD? The
consumerism is what causes OD. Cheaper drugs just make it easier.
The drug culture has been around since the mid-70's in terms of hard drugs. That
correlates well the surge in single mother births and divorces. Matter of fact, everything
goes back to the mid-70's.
Not quite. It's confusing correlation with causation. The social problems might have
increased because of the increase in hard drugs. Maybe, but drugs and addiction was always
prevalent.
The British had an awful problem with alcohol especially gin in the general population
1700's, and later in 1800's with morphine, opium, and cocaine. The Americans had similar
problems, although not with the extremely cheap gin that used to be sold in Britain. After
the American Civil War addiction to morphine increased with the millions of injured
soldiers/addicts.
All of the older hard drugs were sold over the counter and with no prescription. Indeed,
they were added to everyday medicine. Teething problems? Womanly complaints? 14 hour work
shifts at the factory? They had the medicine just for you! Coca-Cola had cocaine in it
originally and (I believe) a pharmacist created it.
It was with such legislation as the Food and Drug Safety Act in the early 1900s, the
general improvement in working conditions, and having all the old addicts die, hopefully of
old age, that decreased the levels of addiction. The problem never went away. The hard drugs
were always around and used. It only declined and shifted to the more socially acceptable
alcohol and nicotine. You might say that those manufacturers won the lobbying wars.
I realize that opiods are the topic here. But crystal meth has to be included in any
discussion regarding drugs and death. Also, I wonder if crystal meth and its cousins are more
prevalent in those places where opiods are less of an issue.
If it makes money, neoliberalism deregulated it. In the case of fentanyl, prescription
restrictions were ignored. FDA looked the other way. Manufacturers and prescribers got
richer.
China is now meeting the users demand for the drug. The enablers of this have all imbibed
the global aristocrat's contempt of the little people. Lexus lanes, housing, medical care,
student loans, casinos and drugs are all extortion schemes to extract what little wealth that
is left. Poor Americans are dying earlier with $15,000 of debt.
"... Administration bloat and academic decline is another prominent feature of the neoliberal university. University presidents now view themselves as CEO and want similar salaries. ..."
This book is the collection of more than dozen of essays of various authors, but even the
Introduction (Privatizing the Public University: Key Trends, Countertrends, and Alternatives)
is worth the price of the book
Trends in neo-liberalization of university education are not new. But recently they took a
more dangerous turn. And they are not easy to decipher, despite the fact that they are
greatly affect the life of each student or educator. In this sense this is really an
eyes-opening book.
In Europe previously higher education as assessable for free or almost free, but for
talented student only. Admission criteria were strict and checked via written and oral
entrance exams on key subjects. Now the tend is to view university as business that get
customers, charge them exorbitant fees and those customers get diploma as hamburgers in
McDonalds at the end for their money. Whether those degree are worth money charged, or not
and were suitable for the particular student of not (many are "fake" degrees with little or
no chances for getting employment) is not university business. On the contrary marketing is
used to attract as many students as possible and many of those student now remain in debt for
large part of their adult life.
In other words, the neoliberalization of the university in the USA creates new, now
dominant trend -- the conversion of the university into for-profit diploma mills, which are
essentially a new type of rent-seeking (and they even attract speculative financial capital
and open scamsters, like was in case of "Trump University" ). Even old universities with more
than a century history more and more resemble diploma mills.
This assault on academic freedom by neoliberalism justifies itself by calling for
"transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates used
utter perversion of those terms. In the Neoliberal context, they mean "total surveillance"
and "rampant rent-seeking."
Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the
future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity. As this is about your future earning
potential, it is logical that for a chance to increase it you need to take a loan.
Significantly, in the same period per capita, spending on prisons increased by 126 percent
(Newfield 2008: 266). Between the 1970s and 1990s there was a 400 percent increase in charges
in tuition, room, and board in U.S. universities and tuition costs have grown at about ten
times the rate of family income (ibid.). What these instances highlight is not just the
state's retreat from direct funding of higher education but also a calculated initiative to
enable private companies to capture and profit from tax-funded student loans.
The other tendency is also alarming. Funds now are allocated to those institutions that
performed best in what has become a fetishistic quest for ever-higher ratings. That creates
the 'rankings arms-race.' It has very little or nothing to do with the quality of teaching of
students in a particular university. On the contrary, the curriculums were "streamlines" and
"ideologically charged courses" such as neoclassical economics are now required for
graduation even in STEM specialties.
In the neoliberal university professors are now under the iron heel of management and
various metrics were invented to measure the "quality of teaching." Most of them are very
perverted or can be perverted as when a measurement becomes a target; teachers start to focus
their resources and activities primarily on what 'counts' rather than on their wider
competencies, professional ethics and societal goals (see Kohn and Shore, this volume).
Administration bloat and academic decline is another prominent feature of the neoliberal
university. University presidents now view themselves as CEO and want similar salaries. The
same is true for the growing staff of university administrators. The recruitment of
administrators has far outpaced the growth in the number of faculty – or even students.
Meanwhile, universities claim to be struggling with budget crises that force to reduce
permanent academic posts, and widely use underpaid and overworked adjunct staff – the
'precariat' paid just a couple of thousand dollars per course and often existing on the edge
of poverty, or in real poverty.
Money now is the key objective and the mission changed from cultural to "for profit"
business including vast expenses on advancement of the prestige and competitiveness of the
university as an end in itself. Ability to get grants is now an important criteria of getting
the tenure.
It is unclear how long this vulnerability exists, but this is pretty serious staff that shows
how Hillary server could be hacked via Abedin account. As Abedin technical level was lower then
zero, to hack into her home laptop just just trivial.
Microsoft also patched
Exchange against a vulnerability that allowed remote attackers with little more than an
unprivileged mailbox account to gain administrative control over the server. Dubbed
PrivExchange, CVE-2019-0686 was publicly disclosed last month , along with
proof-of-concept code that exploited it. In Tuesday's
advisory , Microsoft officials said they haven't seen active exploits yet but that they
were "likely."
This is a constructive suggestion that is implementable even under neoliberalism. As everything is perverted under
neoliberalism that might prompt layoffs before the age of 55.
Notable quotes:
"... Older workers often struggle to get rehired as easily as younger workers. Age discrimination is a well-known problem in corporate America. What's a 60-year-old back office worker supposed to do if downsized in a merger? The BB&T-SunTrust prospect highlights the need for a new type of unemployment insurance for some of the workforce. ..."
"... One policy might be treating unemployed older workers differently than younger workers. Giving them unemployment benefits for a longer period of time than younger workers would be one idea, as well as accelerating the age of Medicare eligibility for downsized employees over the age of 55. The latter idea would help younger workers as well, by encouraging older workers to accept buyout packages -- freeing up career opportunities for younger workers. ..."
The proposed merger between SunTrust and BB&T makes sense for both firms -- which is why
Wall Street sent both stocks higher on Thursday after the announcement. But employees of the
two banks, especially older workers who are not yet retirement age, are understandably less
enthused at the prospect of downsizing. In a nation with almost 37 million workers over the age
of 55, the quandary of SunTrust-BB&T workforce will become increasingly familiar across the
U.S. economy.
But what's good for the firms isn't good for all of the workers. Older workers often
struggle to get rehired as easily as younger workers.
Age discrimination is a well-known problem in corporate America. What's a 60-year-old back
office worker supposed to do if downsized in a merger? The BB&T-SunTrust prospect
highlights the need for a new type of unemployment insurance for some of the workforce.
One policy might be treating unemployed older workers differently than younger workers.
Giving them unemployment benefits for a longer period of time than younger workers would be one
idea, as well as accelerating the age of Medicare eligibility for downsized employees over the
age of 55. The latter idea would help younger workers as well, by encouraging older workers to
accept buyout packages -- freeing up career opportunities for younger workers.
The economy can be callous toward older workers, but policy makers don't have to be. We
should think about ways of dealing with this shift in the labor market before it happens.
Trigger warning: This post contains the discussion of depression and other mental
health issues, and suicide. If you or anyone you know needs help or support for a mental
health concern, please don't suffer in silence. Many countries have confidential phone
helplines (in Australia you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, for example);this organisationprovides
worldwide support, whilethis websitecompiles a
number of helpline sites from around the world.
I am writing today from a place of anger; from a rage that sits, simmering on the surface of
a deep well of sadness. I didn't know Dr. Malcolm Anderson, the senior accountancy lecturer
from Cardiff University whose death, after falling from the roof of his university building,
was last week ruled
a suicide . I obviously have no way to know the complexity of his feelings or what sequence
of events led up to his decision to end his own life. However, according to the results of an
inquest, we can know what Dr. Anderson wanted his university to understand about his death
– that it was, at least in part, because of the pressures of his academic work.
The media reports that Dr. Anderson had recently been appointed to Deputy Head of his
department, significantly increasing his administrative load. Nonetheless, he was still
teaching 418 students and needed to mark their work within a 20-day turnaround. To meet that
deadline, he would have needed to work approximately 9 hours a day without food or toilet
breaks, for 20 days straight, and not do ANY other kind of work during that time (such as the
admin that comes with being a Deputy Head). Practically impossible, given he was also a human
being, with a home life, and physical needs like food, in addition to work
responsibilities.
His wife, Diane, has been quoted saying that Dr. Anderson worked very long hours and often
took marking to family events. She has said that although he was a passionate educator who won
teaching awards every year, he had been showing signs of stress and had spoken to his managers
about his difficulty meeting deadlines. A colleague told the inquest that he was given the same
response each time he asked for help, and staffing cuts had continued.
A Marked
Problem
... ... ...
And look, I get it. To someone outside the academy, I'm sure the perception
remains that academics sit in leather armchairs, gazing out the gilded windows of our ivory
towers, thinking all day.
That has not been my experience, nor that of anyone I know.
My colleagues and peers have, however , experienced levels of anxiety and
depression that are
six times higher than experienced in the general population (Evans et al. 2018). They
report
higher levels of workaholism , the kind that has a negative and unwanted effect on
relationships with loved ones (Torp et al. 2018). The picture is often even bleaker for
women
,
people of colour , and other non-White, non-middle-class, non-males. So whether you think
academics are 'delicate woeful souls' or not, it's difficult to deny that there is a real
problem to be tackled here.
Obviously, marking load is only one issue amongst many faced in universities the world over.
But it's not bad as an illustration, partly because it's quantifiable . It's somewhat
ironic that the neoliberal metrics that we rail against, the audit culture that causes these
kinds of examples to happen, could also help us describe to others why they are a problem for
us. So quantifiability brings us to neoliberalism. How did neoliberalism become so pervasive
that it's almost impossible to imagine how the world could look different?
Neoliberalism,
then and now
These last two weeks I've been working out of the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research in Sweden,
which, by coincidence, is where Professor Cris Shore , anthropologist of
policy and the guest on our next podcast episode is
currently based. I was chatting to him the other day about the interview we recorded last
December, which centres around many of the ideas I'm discussing in this blog post. I had to
admit, I hadn't realised until we did that interview how angry many people still feel towards
the
Thatcher government for introducing neoliberal ideologies and practices into the public
sector. Despite doing a Ph.D. about modern university life, it hadn't fully registered for me
that events of the past , specifically the histories of politics and economics in 'the
West', were such active players in the theatre of higher education's present .
To understand today's neoliberal universities, let's explore a little history in the UK and
the US, two of the biggest influencers in the global higher education sector today. In 1979,
Margaret Thatcher rose to power on a platform of reviving the stagnant British economy by
introducing market-style competition into the public sector. This way, she claimed, she was
ensuring, that "the state's power [was] reduced and the power of the people, enhanced"
(Edwards,
2017) . For universities, this meant increased "accountability" and quality assurance
measures that would
drag universities out of their complacency .
Meanwhile, in the US, Ronald Reagan was also arriving at neoliberalism via a different path.
Americans historically don't trust central government (Roberts,
2007) , so in 1981, Reagan introduced tax cuts (especially for the rich) for the first time
in American history, therefore "protecting" the American people from the rapacious spending
habits of the state (Prasad,
2012) . In American universities, this manifested over the next 30 years in reduced public
spending on higher education, transferring the costs for tuition to student-consumers, and
encouraging partnerships with industry and endorsements from philanthropists (often with
agendas) to cover research costs (Shumway, 2017) .
Then in the 90s, there was a moral panic about the public sector caused by scandals such as
" the collapse of Barings
Bank in 1995 , the failures of the medical profession revealed by investigations into the
serial murders by Dr
Harold Shipman , and the numerous cases of child abuse
that have plagued the Catholic Church " (Shore, 2008) . Frankly, it
seems pretty understandable that people were looking for greater transparency, a bit of
accountability, and a whole lot less of, "leave it to the professionals, they seem like alright
blokes, don't they?" from their public sector.
The official rationale for [neoliberal ideologies and actions] appears benign and
incontestable: to improve efficiency and transparency and to make these institutions more
accountable to the taxpayer and public (and no reasonable person could seriously challenge
such commonsensical and progressive objectives). The problem, however, is that audit confuses
'accountability' with 'accountancy' so that 'being answerable to the public' is recast in
terms of measures of productivity, 'economic efficiency' and delivering 'value for money'
(VFM).
The trouble with neoliberalism and its offshoot, New Public Management , is that
much like the Newspeak of
Orwell's 1984 , the words that were used to sell it – quality, accountability,
transparency etc. – in practice, mean the opposite of what they appear to mean.
For example, as Chris Lorenz (2012) points out in an article that convincingly compares New Public
Management in universities to the outcomes of a Communist regime , there has been no
evidence, statistical or otherwise, that increasing 'quality control measures' in universities
has actually improved quality in universities by any objective criteria – and often just
the opposite.
What has "improved" in universities because of neoliberal practices is efficiency,
often through measures like restructures and reviews. Again, taking steps to save money and
time sounds like a positive. However, the problem with 'efficiency' is that, unlike its
counterpart 'effectiveness' (the ability to bring about a specific effect), 'efficiency' has no
end point – it is a goal unto itself. As Lorenz phrases it, "efficient, therefore, is
never efficient enough," (2012, p. 607).
Bringing this back, then, to issues of mental health and increasing workloads on campus. Liz
Morrish of Academic
Irregularities pointed out last week that when tragedies such as the death of Malcolm
Anderson occur in universities, the most common response is for said university to announce a
review. As anticipated, two days after the results of Dr. Anderson's inquest were first
reported in the media, Cardiff University
announced that they would be reviewing the 'support, information, advice and specialist
counselling' available to all staff, but also urged any academic "who has any concerns
regarding workload, to raise them with their line manager, in the first instance, so all
available advice and support can be offered."
This platitude has been taken by many online as exactly that – a platitude. Several commenters
on Twitter have pointed out that providing more mental health support doesn't actually
reduce workload, while others have noted that there has been no discussion by Cardiff U of
attempting to fix the underlying cause. I agree with them, and it's part of the reason I'm so
angry. Malcolm Anderson could easily be any one of us.
Yet, I have to admit, I'd also hate to be part of the executive team at Cardiff University
right now. Can you imagine the anguish of knowing that someone had taken their life, and held
you directly responsible? You'd have to feel so helpless, so powerless in the shadow of
neoliberal forces that permeate every last aspect of the global higher education sector. I
don't know, I haven't been a Vice Chancellor, maybe you wouldn't have to feel that way. But
it's easy to imagine how one could.
The path to neoliberal hell is paved with good
intentions
So, what's the answer? I wish I knew. What I do know is that anthropological thinking has a
lot to offer in the exploration of big immutable mobiles
2 like neoliberalism. As Sherry Ortner asks in her 2016 article " Dark anthropology and
its others: Theory since the eighties ", who better to question the power structures
inherent in 'dark' topics such as neoliberalisation or colonialism than anthropologists? Yet,
she urges an approach that also acknowledges the possibility of goodness in the world,
quoting from the opening to Michael Lambek's Ordinary Ethics as rationale:
Ethnographers commonly find that the people they encounter are trying to do what they
consider right or good, are being evaluated according to criteria of what is right and good,
or are in some debate about what constitutes the human good. Yet anthropological theory tends
to overlook all this in favor of analyses that emphasize structure, power, and interest.
(Lambeck, 2010, p. 1)
And this is where I have to deviate from the majority of the neoliberal university critiques
I've read. In these pieces, it's all too common to read criticisms of academic managers, or
administrators, or university 'service providers' as if they are The Reason that neoliberal
ideologies get enacted in university contexts. But usually, they're just human beings too, also
subject to KPIs and managerial demands and neoliberal ideologies.
Having worked at different times as an educator, a researcher, and a communications manager
in various universities for more than 10 years, and now having conducted fieldwork at a
university for my PhD, I have had the chance to observe and conduct research on at least nine
different university campuses, in at least five countries. Based on those experiences, I am in
complete agreement with Lambek: the majority
3 of non-academics that I have encountered, in every type of department, and at every
level of universities from Level 1 administrative officers to Presidents and Vice Chancellors,
"are trying to do what they consider right or good" (2010, p. 1).
They demonstrate, both through words and their actions, their beliefs that education is
valuable, and that students are important as human beings, not just as cash cows. They are
often working long hours themselves, trying to keep up with the demands that neoliberal
university life is placing on them. I just can't get on board with the idea that they are,
universally, the villains of the neoliberal horror story.
It seems much more likely, to me, that neoliberal ideologies continue to get enacted and
reinforced by academic managers because these practices have become the norm. Throughout and
because of the historical growth pattern neoliberalism has experienced, these ideologies have
put down roots, and these roots have become so entangled with other aspects of university life
as to be inseparable. For many working-aged people, neoliberalism is the water we were born
swimming in. Even presented with its inadequacies, it's difficult to imagine an
alternative.
What I can agree with the critics about, however, is that non-academics often don't
understand or appreciate – or perhaps remember (if they had worked in that capacity in
the past) – the demands of being an academic, just like academics don't tend to
understand or appreciate the demands that non-academics within the university are facing.
In their recently published book
Death of the Public University (2017), Susan Wright and Cris Shore refer to the idea of
'Faculty Land' – a place synonymous with 'La La Land', where non-academic employees of
universities think academics live. This really resonates with what I saw on fieldwork at
an international university in Vietnam, but not only from administrators – academics
too.
As I've said in a previous
post , all the actors in universities are trying to abrogate responsibility sideways or
upwards until they can only blame 'the neoliberal agenda', and once they get there, all they
can see is a towering, monolithic idea , and it becomes like trying to have a fist fight
with a cloud. Most people don't ever get to that point though, because the world feels more controllable if
we believe that there is another human to blame .
The thing is though, blaming others almost never works . It doesn't make things
better, it just creates a greater divide between groups, encourages isolationism and othering,
and decreases the likelihood that either side will ever want to work together to fix the
problem.
Dr Anderson's tragic death, and the similarly tragic statistics that tell us that the
collective mental health of our academics is in crisis, should be a wake up call to all
of us who work or study in universities, in any capacity. Whether it will be remains to be
seen.
Again: If you or anyone you know needs help or support for a mental health concern,
please don't suffer in silence . Sometimes talking about things with an objective
outsider can help.
If you work in a university with a counselling service, consider seeking them out.
Many have emergency sessions set aside each day.
Many countries have confidential phone helplines (in Australia you can call
Lifeline on 13 11 14, for example).
If you (or your department) have the financial means, psychologists who
specialise in working with HDR students and academics, such asDr Shari Walsh of Growth
Psychologysometimes offer Skype appointments. (I have had Skype sessions with
Shari myself; she's lovely. PS. I don't get anything out of plugging her services, I
just think what she offers is valuable.)
Yes, I know, this is a structural problem and we shouldn't have to take care of it as
individuals (see Grace Krause's moving
poem about this here ). But in the meantime, while we work on that, please seek help
if you need it .
"... Neoliberalism has transformed education from a social good into a production process where the final product is a reserve army of workers for the information economy. What David Harvey calls the "state-finance nexus" pushes universities to play the part by withholding state funds until they expand their enrollment and increase the number of college graduates entering the workforce.[13] In 2012, the Obama Administration identified increasing the number of undergraduate STEM degrees by one million over the next decade as a 'Cross-Agency Priority Goal' on the recommendation of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). ..."
"... The present relationship between the university and the state flows from the dynamics of financialization. As financialization transforms the role of the United States in the global economy, it appropriates higher education to suit the needs of finance capital. Compared to the ever-expanding administrative apparatus responsible for managing contracts and investments, programs outside of STEM and business fields are considered superfluous. Humanities programs are often downsized and tenure tracks closed to push professors into permanent part-time employment arrangements.[15] Meanwhile, schools like Northeastern and MIT are surrounded by high-tech and business firms that rely on students and research facilities for cheap labor and productive capital. ..."
"... The position of financial and credit institutions as the financiers of America's productive infrastructure has far-reaching consequences for social institutions like universities with the potential to absorb surplus capital in the form of credit or produce the 21st-century 'information' workforce. Students, and faculty at universities like Northeastern will struggle against market pressures on universities to attract outside investors while downsizing education for as long as the U.S. economy is dominated by finance. ..."
Last month at Northeastern University, the adjunct union reached a
tentative agreement with the university administration to avert a planned walkout after
more than a year of unsuccessful negotiations. Those familiar with the adjunct campaign know
that adjunct professors are contingent workers who comprise more than half of the teaching
staff at Northeastern and are paid a couple thousand dollars for each class that they teach.[1]
From a budgetary standpoint, contingent workers are economical because they are easily replaced
and therefore can be paid less. Still, at a school like Northeastern University with an
operating budget of more than $2.2 billion, it is hard to argue that more than half of all
professors need to earn poverty wages for the school to remain profitable.[2]
In today's neoliberal landscape -- a term which refers to the coordinated effort by capital
and financial interests after the 1980s to privatize public institutions and deregulate markets
-- Northeastern is not unusual in its treatment of adjunct professors. The neoliberal
university model of high tuitions, bloated administrative departments, and upscale student
facilities -- along with assaults on the job security and pay of professors -- is the new norm.
It is the image of a thoroughly financialized economy that has transformed the relationship
between universities and the state.
From the 19th century through the 1970s, the relationship between universities and the state
remained constant. There was an informal arrangement of mutual independence: Academics operated
autonomously with state funding on the understanding that they were willing to pursue research
in which the state had an interest, such as medicine or space exploration.[3] Underlying this
arrangement was the assumption that as a social good, education should drive public research
and development.
The story of how universities became neoliberalized begins with the economic crisis of the
1970s and the subsequent free-market discourse that invoked capitalism's insatiable need for
economic growth in order to equate the interests of working people with the interests of
financiers.
In the three decades after World War II, the U.S. established economic hegemony over the
global capitalist world. The Fordist
compromise between strong manufacturers and a strong, suburbanizing working class yielded
unprecedented wage growth.[4] However, the Fordist model could not last forever. As a general
rule, whenever compound economic growth falls below three percent, people
begin to get scared . In order to sustain three percent compound growth, there must be no
barriers to the continuous expansion and reinvestment of capital.
The suburbanization of postwar America did sustain high demand for American-made automobiles
and home products, but reinvestment in manufacturing eventually became difficult for capital
because a widely-unionized and militant working class created a labor shortage (i.e. near-full
employment) which drove up wages and hurt profitability.[5][6] To the extent that productivity
could be improved by technological innovations, organized labor insisted on "productivity
agreements" that ensured that machines would not be used to undermine wages or benefits. To
make matters worse for U.S. manufacturers, monopolies like the Big Three auto companies were
broken by foreign imports from a newly rebuilt Europe and Japan.[7]
In The Grundrisse , Karl Marx remarked that "every limit [to capital accumulation]
appears as a barrier to be overcome."[8] For Marx, sustained capital accumulation requires an
"industrial reserve army" to keep the cost of labor (i.e. wages) from impeding profitability.
To restore profits, American capital had to discipline labor by drawing from the global working
population. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 addressed U.S. labor scarcity by
abolishing immigration quotas based on nationality so that cheap labor would flood the market
and drive down wages.[9] However, it proved more effective for manufacturing capital to simply
relocate to countries with cheaper labor, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s capital did just
that -- first to South Korea and Thailand, and then to China as wages in those countries became
too high.[10]
"Globalization" entailed removing barriers to international capital relocation such as
tariffs and quotas in order to construct a global market where liquid money capital could flow
internationally to wherever it yielded the most profits. Of course, wage suppression eventually
lowers consumer demand. The neoliberal solution was for financial institutions to sustain
middle-class purchasing power through credit. In The Enigma of Capital , David Harvey
writes that "the demand problem was temporarily bridged with respect to housing by
debt-financing the developers as well as the buyers. The financial institutions collectively
controlled both the supply of, and demand for, housing!"[11]
The point of this history though, is that the financialization of the American economy,
through which financial markets came to dominate other forms of industrial and agricultural
capital, served as the backdrop for the transformation of higher education into what it is
today. Neoliberal ideology reframed the social value of higher education as a tool for building
the next workforce to serve the new "information economy" -- a term that emerged in the midst
of globalization to describe the role of U.S. suburban professionals in the global economy.
Simultaneously, finance capital repurposed universities as points of capital accumulation and
investment.
The discourse around the information economy sought to rationalize the offshoring of
manufacturing from the U.S. The idea was that due to globalization, America has reached a stage
of development where its participation in the global economy is as a white-collar work force,
specializing in technology and the spread of information.[12] In this telling, there is nothing
to critique about the deindustrialization of the American economy because it was inevitable. It
was then simple to realign the social goals of universities with the economic goals of Wall
Street because the state repression of radical civil rights movements on the Left and the
emergent free-market discourse of the Right formed a widespread perception of the state as
inherently
problematic . State research and development at universities was easily dismissed as
inefficient, which cleared space for a neoliberal redefinition of higher education.
Neoliberalism has transformed education from a social good into a production process
where the final product is a reserve army of workers for the information economy. What David
Harvey calls the "state-finance nexus" pushes universities to play the part by withholding
state funds until they expand their enrollment and increase the number of college graduates
entering the workforce.[13] In 2012, the Obama Administration identified increasing the number
of undergraduate STEM degrees by one million over the next decade as a 'Cross-Agency Priority
Goal' on the
recommendation of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
(PCAST).
At the same time that neoliberalism transforms education into a production process for
high-tech workers, it transforms the university itself into a site for surplus capital
absorption through the construction of new labs, facilities, and houses to draw wealthy
students and faculty capable of attracting federal grants. In December 2015, Northeastern filed
a letter of intent with the Boston Redevelopment Authority to propose building a residence hall
for approximately 800 students. The Boston Globe
reported that the project is currently under review by American Campus Communities, the
largest developer of private student housing in the U.S. To an economizing university
administrator, private developers are very appealing because they assume the debt generated by
construction projects. The circular process whereby a large university endowment comprised of
financial assets is used to contract a debt-financed independent developer reveals how
neoliberalism integrates universities into the circulatory system of capital as circuits of
accumulation and investment.[14]
The present relationship between the university and the state flows from the dynamics of
financialization. As financialization transforms the role of the United States in the global
economy, it appropriates higher education to suit the needs of finance capital. Compared to the
ever-expanding
administrative apparatus responsible for managing contracts and investments, programs
outside of STEM and business fields are considered superfluous. Humanities programs are
often
downsized and tenure tracks closed to push professors into permanent part-time employment
arrangements.[15] Meanwhile, schools like Northeastern and MIT are surrounded by high-tech and
business firms that rely on students and research facilities for cheap labor and productive
capital.
The position of financial and credit institutions as the financiers of America's
productive infrastructure has far-reaching consequences for social institutions like
universities with the potential to absorb surplus capital in the form of credit or produce the
21st-century 'information' workforce. Students, and faculty at universities like Northeastern
will struggle against market pressures on universities to attract outside investors while
downsizing education for as long as the U.S. economy is dominated by finance.
IMHO there is no economics, only "political economy" and mathiness and "cult of measurement" especially with all those some
fuzzy metrics currently in use, are just a part of the ideological smokescreen over "naked neoliberalism." Like shaman dances
around the fire. Impressive and useless simultaneously.
In other words, many current practitioners of neoliberal economic theories (including but not limited to neoclassical
economics) are practicing pseudoscience and are, directly or indirectly, bought and paid by financial oligarchy. That does not
exclude possibility of some, occasional, useful insight.
Notable quotes:
"... The counterargument that I will elaborate here, is that neoliberalism and social democracy should be treated as two distinct and internally consistent thought and value systems. The integrity of the two ideologies must neither be reduced to practices/policies, which occasionally may overlap, nor to individual representatives, who, over the course of a lifetime, can move from one pole to the other. ..."
"... Robbins Report ..."
"... Underpinning this analysis is a bleak diagnosis of what purpose the university system and its employees serve. It is a diagnosis that Fuller, by his own admission, has gleaned from the Virginia-style neoliberal Gordon Tullock. ..."
"... The task assigned to the university, i.e. to certify bodies of trustworthy knowledge, is not called for by any intrinsic property of that knowledge (it being true, safe etc.), but is rather a form of rent-seeking. The rent is extracted from the university's state-induced monopoly over the access rights to future employment opportunities. Rent-seeking is the raison-d'être of the university's claim to be the royal road to knowledge. ..."
"... Granted, the cynical reading of the university system as a rent-seeking diploma-mill has a ring of truth to it when we, for instance, think of how students are asked to pay higher and higher tuition fees, while the curriculum is successively being hollowed-out. ..."
"... this is the result of the consecutive waves of university reforms since the 1990s to ground knowledge production on market principles. If university employees behave like self-interested rent-seekers, it is because they are forced to do so by the incentive structures that have been imposed on them. ..."
"... Thirty years of neoliberal politics have created the conditions under which categories such as "human capital" and "rent-seeking" start to make good sense... ..."
The counterargument that I will elaborate here, is that neoliberalism and social democracy
should be treated as two distinct and internally consistent thought and value systems. The
integrity of the two ideologies must neither be reduced to practices/policies, which
occasionally may overlap, nor to individual representatives, who, over the course of a
lifetime, can move from one pole to the other.
Neoliberalism and the university system
Fuller's argument pivots on the mixed legacy of Lionel Robbins. On the one hand, Robbins'
credentials as a neoliberal are firmly established by his decision to recruit Friedrich Hayek
to the LSE. On the other hand, Robbins authored the government report whereby many regional
universities in the UK were founded, in keeping with a classic social democratic agenda of
enrolling more students from the working class. This encourages Fuller to draw an arc from the
1963 Robbins
Report to university reforms of a more recent date (and with a more distinct,
neoliberal flavour).
The common denominator of all the reforms, Fuller says, is the ambition to enhance human
capital. Alas, the enhancement of human capital is blocked on all sides by incumbent traditions
and rent-seeking monopolies. From this problem description – which Fuller attributes to
the neoliberals, but which is also his own – follows the solution: to increase the
competition between knowledge providers. Just as the monopoly that Oxbridge held over higher
education was offset by the creation of regional universities in the 1960s, so is the current
university system's monopoly over knowledge acquisition sidelined by reforms to multiply and
diversify the paths to learning.
Underpinning this analysis is a bleak diagnosis of what purpose the university system and
its employees serve. It is a diagnosis that Fuller, by his own admission, has gleaned from the
Virginia-style neoliberal Gordon Tullock.
The task assigned to the university, i.e. to certify
bodies of trustworthy knowledge, is not called for by any intrinsic property of that knowledge
(it being true, safe etc.), but is rather a form of rent-seeking. The rent is extracted from
the university's state-induced monopoly over the access rights to future employment
opportunities. Rent-seeking is the raison-d'être of the university's claim to be the
royal road to knowledge.
In this acid bath of cynicism, the notions of truth and falsehood are dissolved into the
basic element that Tullock's world is made up of – self-interest. This reasoning lines up
with a 19 th century, free market epistemology, according to which the evolutionary
process will sift out the propositions that swim from those that sink. With a theory of
knowledge like that, university-certified experts have no rationale for being. Their knowledge
claims are just so many excuses for lifting a salary on the taxpayers' expense. It bears to
stress that this argument can easily be given a leftist spin, by emphasising the pluralism of
this epistemology. This resonates with statements that Steve Fuller has made elsewhere , concerning the
claimants of alternative facts.
Granted, the cynical reading of the university system as a rent-seeking diploma-mill has a
ring of truth to it when we, for instance, think of how students are asked to pay higher and
higher tuition fees, while the curriculum is successively being hollowed-out. However, as was
pointed out to Fuller by many in the audience in Lancaster, this is the result of the consecutive waves of university
reforms since the 1990s to ground knowledge production on market principles. If university employees behave like self-interested
rent-seekers, it is because they are forced to do so by the incentive structures that have been imposed on them.
Thirty years of neoliberal politics have created the conditions under which categories such
as "human capital" and "rent-seeking" start to make good sense...
... ... ...
The author would like to thank Adam Netzén, Karolina Enquist Källgren and
Eric Deibel for feedback given on early drafts of this blog post, and especially Steve Fuller,
for having invited a response to his argument.
"... Higher education was being made to conform to the norms of efficiency, value for money, customer service, audit and performance targets. One of the consequences of this was the substitution of the authority of the academic, which is based on his or her professional knowledge of the discipline, for the authority of the line manager. ..."
"... I don't think that there has been a more sinister assault on academic freedom than this colonisation of higher education by neoliberalism. It justifies itself by calling for "transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates with a perverted sense of these words (since what it really means is "discipline and surveillance" and "value for money"). ..."
"... Let me explain. One of the central aspects of neoliberalism is the disappearance of the distinction between the worker and the capitalist. In the neoliberal setting, the worker is not a partner of exchange with the capitalist. She does not sell her labour-power for a wage. ..."
"... The labourer's ability to work, her skill, is an income stream. It is an investment on which she receives a return in the form of wages. The worker is capital for herself. She is a source of future earnings. In the neoliberal market, as Michel Foucault remarks, everyone is a capitalist. ..."
"... Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity. ..."
Many
of the students I have taught in Britain and South Africa see higher education as a place where
they "invest" in themselves in the financial sense of the word. "Going to university," one
student said, was a way of "increasing" his "value" or employability in the labour market.
This perception of the university has not arisen by chance.
Capitalism entered a new phase with the Thatcher and Reagan governments in Britain and the
United States during the 1980s. The managerial practices used to run businesses were applied to
the public sector, in particular to education and healthcare.
This reform of the public sector (called "new public management")
introduced a new way of thinking about the university.
Higher education was being made to conform to the norms of efficiency, value for money,
customer service, audit and performance targets. One of the consequences of this was the
substitution of the authority of the academic, which is based on his or her professional
knowledge of the discipline, for the authority of the line manager.
Since then, everything has come to depend on audits and metric standards of so-called
quality assessment (student satisfaction, pass rates, league tables, et cetera). Academics have
little, if any, say on whether departments should continue to exist, what degrees and courses
should be on offer and even what kind of assessment methods should be used.
I don't think that there has been a more sinister assault on academic freedom than this
colonisation of higher education by neoliberalism. It justifies itself by calling for
"transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates with a
perverted sense of these words (since what it really means is "discipline and surveillance" and
"value for money").
Its effect, if not its aim, has been to commodify higher education and produce a new kind of
social identity. This is the identity of the self as entrepreneur.
Let me explain. One of the central aspects of neoliberalism is the disappearance of the
distinction between the worker and the capitalist. In the neoliberal setting, the worker is not
a partner of exchange with the capitalist. She does not sell her labour-power for a wage.
The labourer's ability to work, her skill, is an income stream. It is an investment on which
she receives a return in the form of wages. The worker is capital for herself. She is a source
of future earnings. In the neoliberal market, as Michel Foucault remarks, everyone is a
capitalist.
Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the
future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity.
How did we get to this situation?
The modern university came into existence at the start of the 19th century as an extension
of the state. The aim of the state during the colonial and imperial age was to constitute the
identity of the national subject. As a public institution, the university was designed to teach students to see their life in
a specific way. They would learn to see that it is only as members of a national community and
culture that their individual life has a meaning and worth. This was the aim of the educational programme that German philosophers such as Wilhelm von
Humboldt and Johann Gottlieb Fichte envisaged for the University of Berlin. For them, science
was in the service of the moral and intellectual education of the nation.
Established in 1810, the University of Berlin was the first modern university. It was
founded on the principles of academic freedom, the unity of research and teaching, and the
primacy of research over vocational training. It functioned as the prototype for universities in both the United States and Europe during
the second half of the 19th century.
Once transnational corporations started to control more capital than nation-states in the
1980s, the university ceased to be one of its principal organs. It lost its ideological mission
and entered the market as a corporation. It started to encourage students to think of
themselves as customers rather than as members of a nation. This history shows that the university is today the site of two competing social
identities.
On the one hand, because of globalisation, the student who enters university sees herself as
someone who is there to increase her human capital, as an enterprise to invest in.
It must be remarked that, for the entrepreneur (taken as a social figure) who invests in
herself, differences of class, religion, ethnicity or race are phantasms of a bygone age. The
differences in the name of which wars were waged and social movements organised in the past
have no more meaning in her eyes than cheap advertising.
There is, for her, something improper or inauthentic about them, as Giorgio Agamben says of
the new petty bourgeoisie in The Coming Community. Like Britain's former prime minister, David
Cameron, she is sceptical of multiculturalism.
On the other hand, the university has not ceased to draw on its modern role as a producer,
protector and inculcator of national identity and culture. Much of what is going on today in
South African universities under the name of decolonisation and Africanisation draws on this
heritage and understanding of the modern university, even if tacitly. That is why students will
politicise themselves by identifying with an ethnicity or nationality.
Nationalism was an emancipatory political project during the anti-colonial struggles of the
second half of the 20th century. It was not tribalist or communalist.
According to Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, its aim was to extend the
size of the social, cultural and political group. It was not to restrict it or to separate it
from others. Nationalism was a political programme divorced from ethnicity.
Is this political nationalism a viable way of resisting neoliberalism today? Can it gainsay
the primacy of economic rationality and the culture of narcissist consumerism, and restore
meaning to the political question concerning the common good? Or has nationalism irreversibly become an ethnic, separatist project? It is not easy to say. So far, we have witnessed one kind of response to the social
insecurities generated by the global spread of neoliberalism. This is a return to ethnicity and
religion as havens of safety and security.
When society fails us owing to job insecurity, and, concomitantly, with regard to housing
and healthcare, one tends to fall back on one's ethnicity or religious identity as an ultimate
guarantee.
Moreover, nationalism as a political programme depends on the idea of the state. It holds
that a group defined as a "nation" has the right to form a territorial state and exercise
sovereign power over it. But given the decline of the state, there are reasons to think that
political nationalism has withdrawn as a real possibility.
By the "decline of the state" I do not mean that it no longer exists. The state has never
been more present in the private life of individuals. It regulates the relations between men
and women. It regulates their birth and death, the rearing of children, the health of
individuals and so forth. The state is, today, ubiquitous.
What some people mean by the "decline of the state" is that, with the existence of
transnational corporations, it is no longer the most important site of the reproduction of
capital. The state has become managerial. Its function is to manage obstacles to liberalisation
and free trade.
Perhaps that is one of the challenges of the 21st century. How is a "nation" possible, a
"national community" that is not defined by ethnicity, on the one hand, and, on the other, that
forsakes the desire to exercise sovereign power in general and, in particular, over a
territorial state?
The university is perhaps the place where such a community can begin to be thought.
Rafael Winkler is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University
of Johannesburg
Is anyone else tired of the longest, least productive waste of war in American history ? What
have we achieved, where are we going with this ? More war.
We are being fed a fairy tale of war about what men, long dead, did. And the reason they did
it. America is being strangled by the burden of belief that now is like then.
By the patrician men and women administrators, posturing as soldiers like the WW2 army, lie
for self profit. Why does anyone believe them ? Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, each an economic
decision, rather than a security issue.
Capitalists need their options regulated and their markets ripped from their control by the
state. Profits must be subject to use it to a social purpose or heavily taxed. Dividends
executive comp and interest payments included
Well done! Much clearer than your usual. There are several distinct motivations for taxes. We
have been far enough from fairness to workers, for so long, that we need to use the tax
system to redistribute the accumulated wealth of the plutocrats.
So I would say high marginal rates are a priority, which matches both objectives. Wealth
tax is needed until we reverse the massive inequality supported by the policies of the last
40 years.
Carbon tax and the like are a different thing, use of the tax code to promote a particular
policy and reduce damage to the commons.
"...we need to use the tax system to redistribute the accumulated wealth of the plutocrats.
So I would say high marginal rates are a priority..."
Forgive me, but high marginal rates (which I hugely favor) don't "redistribute the
accumulated wealth" of the plutocrats. If such high marginal rates are ever enacted, they'll
apply only to the current income of such plutocrats.
You merged paragraphs, and elided the next one. The way I see it, high rates are a
prerequisite to prevent the reaccumulation of obscene wealth, and its diversion into
financial gambling.
But yes that would be a very slow way to redistribute what has already accumulated.
Didn't mean to misinterpret what you were saying, sorry. High rates are not only "a
prerequisite to prevent the reaccumulation of obscene wealth," they are also a reimposition
of fair taxation on current income (if it ever happens, of course).
Wealth tax is needed until we reverse the massive inequality supported by the policies of the
last 40 years. Carbon tax and the like are a different thing, use of the tax code to promote
a particular policy and reduce damage to the commons.
"
more wisdom as usual!
Although wealth tax will be unlikely, it could be a stopgap; could also be a guideline to
other taxes as well. for example, Elizabeth points out that billionaires pay about 3% of
their net worth into their annual tax bill whereas workers pay about 7% of their net worth
into their annual tax bill. Do you see how that works?
it doesn't? this Warren argument gives us a guideline. it shows us where other taxes
should be adjusted to even out this percentage of net worth that people are taxed for. Ceu,
during the last meltdown 10 years or so ago, We were collecting more tax from the payroll
than we were from the income tax. this phenomenon was a heavy burden on those of low net
worth. All this needs be resorted. we've got to sort this out.
and the carbon tax? may never be; but it indicates to us what needs to be done to make
this country more efficient. for example some folks, are spending half a million dollars on
the Maybach automobile, about the same amount on a Ferrari or a Alfa Romeo Julia
quadrifoglio, but the roads are built for a mere 40 miles an hour, full of potholes.
What good is it to own a fast car like that when you can't drive but 40 -- 50 miles an
hour? and full of traffic jams. something is wrong with taxation incentives. we need to get a
better grid-work of roads that will get people there faster.
Meanwhile most of those sports cars just sitting in the garage. we need a comprehensive
integrated grid-work of one way streets, roads, highways, and interstates with no traffic
lights, no stop signs; merely freeflow ramp-off overpass interchanges.
Jesus Christ said, in so many words, that a man's worth will be judged by his generosity and
his avarice.
" 24And the disciples were amazed at His words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children,
how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to pass through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." 26They were even more
astonished and said to one another, "Who then can be saved?"
"... I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example) ..."
"... Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users. ..."
"... If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck. (Or you become a second class citizen, being told that you have to rely on GNOME extensions that may break on every single new version of GNOME.) ..."
"... As a result, many traditional GNOME users have moved over to Cinnamon, XFCE, KDE, etc. But as systemd starts subsuming new functions, components like network-manager will only work on systemd or other components that are forced to be used due to a network of interlocking dependencies; and it may simply not be possible for these alternate desktops to continue to function, because there is [no] viable alternative to systemd supported by more and more distributions. ..."
So what do Linux's leaders think of all this? I asked them and this is what they told
me.
Linus Torvalds said:
"I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues
with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and
compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary
logs, for example) , but those are details, not big issues."
Theodore "Ted" Ts'o, a leading Linux kernel developer and a Google engineer, sees systemd as
potentially being more of a problem. "The bottom line is that they are trying to solve some
real problems that matter in some use cases. And, [that] sometimes that will break assumptions
made in other parts of the system."
Another concern that Ts'o made -- which I've heard from many other developers -- is that the
systemd move was made too quickly: "The problem is sometimes what they break are in other parts
of the software stack, and so long as it works for GNOME, they don't necessarily consider it
their responsibility to fix the rest of the Linux ecosystem."
This, as Ts'o sees it, feeds into another problem:
" Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small
subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of
interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to
attract less technically sophisticated users.
If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck.
(Or you become a second class citizen, being told that you have to rely on GNOME extensions
that may break on every single new version of GNOME.) "
" As a result, many traditional GNOME users have moved over to Cinnamon, XFCE, KDE,
etc. But as systemd starts subsuming new functions, components like network-manager will only
work on systemd or other components that are forced to be used due to a network of
interlocking dependencies; and it may simply not be possible for these alternate desktops to
continue to function, because there is [no] viable alternative to systemd supported by more
and more distributions. "
Of course, Ts'o continued, "None of these nightmare scenarios have happened yet. The people
who are most stridently objecting to systemd are people who are convinced that the nightmare
scenario is inevitable so long as we continue on the same course and altitude."
Ts'o is "not entirely certain it's going to happen, but he's afraid it will.
What I find puzzling about all this is that even though everyone admits that sysvinit needed
replacing and many people dislike systemd, the distributions keep adopting it. Only a few
distributions, including Slackware ,
Gentoo , PCLinuxOS , and Chrome OS , haven't adopted it.
It's not like there aren't alternatives. These include Upstart , runit , and OpenRC .
If systemd really does turn out to be as bad as some developers fear, there are plenty of
replacements waiting in the wings. Indeed, rather than hear so much about how awful systemd is,
I'd rather see developers spending their time working on an alternative.
"... By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans. ..."
"... Kleber filed suit, pursuing claims for both disparate treatment and disparate impact under the ADEA. The Chicago Tribune notes in Hinsdale man loses appeal in age discrimination case that challenged experience caps in job ads that "Kleber had out of work and job hunting for three years" when he applied for the CareFusion job. ..."
"... Unfortunately, the seventh circuit has now held that the disparate impact section of the ADEA does not extend to job applicants. .Judge Michael Scudder, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority 8-4 opinion, which reverses an earlier 2-1 panel ruling last April in Kleber's favor that had initially overruled the district court's dismissal of Kleber's disparate impact claim. ..."
"... hiring discrimination is difficult to prove and often goes unreported. Only 3 percent have made a formal complaint. ..."
"... The decision narrowly applies to disparate impact claims of age discrimination under the ADEA. It is important to remember that job applicants are protected under the disparate treatment portion of the statute. ..."
"... I forbade my kids to study programming. ..."
"... I'm re reading the classic of Sociology Ain't No Makin It by Jay MacLeod, in which he studies the employment prospects of youths in the 1980s and determined that even then there was no stable private sector employment and your best option is a government job or to have an excellent "network" which is understandably hard for most people to achieve. ..."
"... I think the trick is to study something and programming, so the programming becomes a tool rather than an end. ..."
"... the problem is it is almost impossible to exit the programming business and join another domain. Anyone can enter it. (evidence – all the people with "engineering" degrees from India) Also my wages are now 50% of what i made 10 years ago (nominal). Also I notice that almost no one is doing sincere work. Most are just coasting, pretending to work with the latest toy (ie, preparing for the next interview). ..."
"... I am an "aging" former STEM worker (histology researcher) as well. Much like the IT landscape, you are considered "over-the-hill" at 35, which I turn on the 31st. ..."
"... Most of the positions in science and engineering fields now are basically "gig" positions, lasting a few months to a year. ..."
The case was brought by Dale Kleber, an attorney, who applied for a senior position in
CareFusion's legal department. The job description required applicants to have "3 to 7 years
(no more than 7 years) of relevant legal experience."
Kleber was 58 at the time he applied and had more than seven years of pertinent experience.
CareFusion hired a 29-year-old applicant who met but did not exceed the experience
requirement.
The purpose of the ADEA is to prohibit employment discrimination against people who are 40
years of age or older. Congress enacted the ADEA in 1967 because of its concern that older
workers were disadvantaged in retaining and regaining employment. The ADEA also addressed
concerns that older workers were barred from employment by some common employment practices
that were not intended to exclude older workers, but that had the effect of doing so and were
unrelated to job performance.
It was with these concerns in mind that Congress created a system that included liability
for both disparate treatment and disparate impact. What's the difference between these two
concepts?
According to the EEOC:
[The ADEA] prohibits discrimination against workers because of their older age with
respect to any aspect of employment. In addition to prohibiting intentional discrimination
against older workers (known as "disparate treatment"), the ADEA prohibits practices that,
although facially neutral with regard to age, have the effect of harming older workers more
than younger workers (known as "disparate impact"), unless the employer can show that the
practice is based on an [Reasonable Factor Other Than Age (RFAO)]
The crux: it's much easier for a plaintiff to prove disparate impact, because s/he needn't
show that the employer intended to discriminate. Of course, many if not most employers are
savvy enough not to be explicit about their intentions to discriminate against older people as
they don't wish to get sued.
District, Panel, and Full Seventh Circuit Decisions
The district court dismissed Kleber's disparate impact claim, on the grounds that the text
of the statute- (§ 4(a)(2))- did not extend to outside job applicants. Kleber then
voluntarily dismissed his separate claim for disparate treatment liability to appeal the
dismissal of his disparate impact claim. No doubt he was aware – either because he was an
attorney, or because of the legal advice received – that it is much more difficult to
prevail on a disparate treatment claim, which would require that he establish CareFusion's
intent to discriminate.
Or at least that was true before this decision was rendered.
Unfortunately, the seventh circuit has now held that the disparate impact section of the
ADEA does not extend to job applicants. .Judge Michael Scudder, a Trump appointee, wrote the
majority 8-4 opinion, which reverses an earlier 2-1 panel ruling last April in Kleber's favor
that had initially overruled the district court's dismissal of Kleber's disparate impact
claim.
The majority ruled:
By its terms, § 4(a)(2) proscribes certain conduct by employers and limits its
protection to employees. The prohibited conduct entails an employer acting in any way to
limit, segregate, or classify its employees based on age. The language of § 4(a)(2) then
goes on to make clear that its proscriptions apply only if an employer's actions have a
particular impact -- "depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to deprive any individual of em- ployment
opportunities or otherwise adversely affect[ing] his status as an employee." This language
plainly demonstrates that the requisite impact must befall an individual with "status as an
employee." Put most simply, the reach of § 4(a)(2) does not extend to applicants for
employment, as common dictionary definitions confirm that an applicant has no "status as an
employee." (citation omitted)[opinion, pp. 3-4]
By contrast, in the disparate treatment part of the statute (§ 4(a)(1)):
Congress made it unlawful for an employer "to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any
individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation,
terms, conditions, or privi- leges of employment, because of such individual's age."[opinion,
p.6]
The court compared the disparate treatment section – § 4(a)(1) – directly
with the disparate impact section – § 4(a)(2):
Yet a side-by-side comparison of § 4(a)(1) with § 4(a)(2) shows that the
language in the former plainly covering appli-cants is conspicuously absent from the latter.
Section 4(a)(2) says nothing about an employer's decision "to fail or refuse to hire any
individual" and instead speaks only in terms of an employer's actions that "adversely affect
his status as an employee." We cannot conclude this difference means nothing: "when 'Congress
includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another' -- let
alone in the very next provision -- the Court presumes that Congress intended a difference in
meaning." (citations omitted)[opinion, pp. 6-7]
The majority's conclusion:
In the end, the plain language of § 4(a)(2) leaves room for only one interpretation:
Congress authorized only employees to bring disparate impact claims.[opinion, p.8]
People 55 or older comprised 22.4 percent of U.S. workers in 2016, up from 11.9 percent in
1996, and may account for close to one-fourth of the labor force by 2022, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The greying of the workforce is "thanks to better health in older age and insufficient
savings that require people to keeping working longer," according to the Chicago Tribune.
Yet:
numerous hiring practices are under fire for negatively impacting older applicants. In
addition to experience caps, lawsuits have challenged the exclusive use of on-campus
recruiting to fill positions and algorithms that target job ads to show only in certain
people's social media feeds.
Unless Congress amends the ADEA to include job applicants, older people will continue to
face barriers to getting jobs.
The Chicago Tribune reports:
The [EEOC], which receives about 20,000 age discrimination charges every year, issued a
report in June citing surveys that found 3 in 4 older workers believe their age is an
obstacle in getting a job. Yet hiring discrimination is difficult to prove and often goes
unreported. Only 3 percent have made a formal complaint. Allowing older applicants to
challenge policies that have an unintentionally discriminatory impact would offer another
tool for fighting age discrimination, Ray Peeler, associate legal counsel at the EEOC, has
said.
The decision narrowly applies to disparate impact claims of age discrimination under the
ADEA. It is important to remember that job applicants are protected under the disparate
treatment portion of the statute. There is no split among the federal appeals courts on this
issue, making it an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review, but the four judges in
dissent read the statute as being vague and susceptible to an interpretation that includes
job applicants.
Their conclusion: "a decision finding disparate impact liability for job applicants under
the ADEA is unlikely in the near future."
Alas, for reasons of space, I will not consider the extensive dissent. My purpose in writing
this post is to discuss the majority decision, not to opine on which side made the better
arguments.
There were 3 judges who dissented in whole and one who dissented in part. Of the three
full dissensions, two were Clinton appointees (including the Chief Justice, who was one of
the dissenters) and one was a Reagan appointee. The partial dissenter was also a Reagan
appointee.
"depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or
otherwise adversely affect[ing] his status as an employee."
–This language plainly demonstrates that the requisite impact must befall an
individual with "status as an employee."
So they totally ignore the first part of the sentence -- "depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to
deprive any individual of employment opportunities " -- "employment opportunities" clearly
applies to applicants.
Its as if these judges cannot make sense of the English language. Hopefully the judges on
appeal will display better command of the language.
I agree. "Employment opportunities," in the "plain language" so meticulously respected by
the 7th Circuit, must surely refer at minimum to 'the chance to apply for a job and to have
one's application fairly considered'. It seems on the other hand a stretch to interpret the
phrase to mean only 'the chance to keep a job one already has'. Both are important, however;
to split them would challenge even Solomonic wisdom, as I suppose the curious decision
discussed here demonstrates. I am less convinced that the facts as presented here establish a
clear case of age discrimination. True, they point in that direction. But a hypothetical
58-year old who only earned a law degree in his or her early 50s, perhaps after an earlier
career in paralegal work, could have legitimately applied for a position requiring 3 to 7
years of "relevant legal experience." That last phrase, is of course, quite weasel-y: what
counts as "relevant" and what counts as "legal" experience would under any circumstances be
subject to (discriminatory) interpretation. The limitation of years of experience in the job
announcement strikes me as a means to keep the salary within a certain budgetary range as
prescribed either by law or collective bargaining.
Almost like the willful misunderstanding of "A well regulated militia being necessary to
the security of a free State "? Of course, that militia also meant slave patrols and the
occasional posse to put down the native "savages," but still.
Being pro-Labor will not get you Federalist Society approval to be nominated to the bench
by Trump.
This decision came down via the ideological makeup of the court, not the letter of the
law.
Their stated pretext is obviously b.s.. It contradicts itself.
I'm re reading the classic of Sociology Ain't No Makin It by Jay MacLeod, in which he
studies the employment prospects of youths in the 1980s and determined that even then there
was no stable private sector employment and your best option is a government job or to have
an excellent "network" which is understandably hard for most people to achieve. So I'm
genuinely interested in what possible options there are for anyone entering the job market
today or God help you, re-entering. I am guessing the barriers to entry to those trades are
quite high but would love to be corrected.
what is the point of being jackpot ready if you can't even support yourself today? To
fantasize about collapse while sleeping in a rented closet and driving for Uber? In that case
one's personal collapse has already happened, which will matter a lot more to an individual
than any potential jackpot.
Plumbers and electricians can make money now of course (although yea barriers to entry do
seem high, don't you kind of have to know people to get in those industries?). But
permaculture?
I think the trick is to study something and programming, so the programming becomes a tool
rather than an end. A couple of my kids used to ride horses. One of the instructors and stable owners said
that a lot of people went to school for equine studies and ended up shoveling horse poop for
a living. She said the thing to do was to study business and do the equestrian stuff as a
hobby/minor. That way you came out prepared to run a business and hire the equine studies
people to clean the stalls.
Do you actually see that many jobs requiring something and programming though? I haven't
really. There seems no easy transition out of software work which that would make possible
either. Might as well just study the "something".
Programming is a means to an end, not the end itself. If all you do is program, then you
are essentially a machine lathe operator, not somebody creating the products the lathe
operators turn out.
Understanding what needs to be done helps with structured programs and better input/output
design. In turn, structured programming is a good tool to understand the basics of how to
manage tasks. At the higher level, Fred Brooks book "The Mythical Man-Month" has a lot of
useful project management information that can be re-applied for non computer program
development.
We are doing a lot of work with mobile computing and data collection to assist in our
regular work. The people doing this are mainly non-computer scientists that have learned
enough programming to get by.
The engineering programs that we use are typically written more by engineers than by
programmers as the entire point behind the program is to apply the theory into a numerical
computation and presentation system. Programmers with a graphic design background can assist in creating much better user
interfaces.
If you have some sort of information theory background (GIS, statistics, etc.) then big
data actually means something.
the problem is it is almost impossible to exit the programming business and join another
domain. Anyone can enter it. (evidence – all the people with "engineering" degrees from
India) Also my wages are now 50% of what i made 10 years ago (nominal). Also I notice that almost
no one is doing sincere work. Most are just coasting, pretending to work with the latest toy
(ie, preparing for the next interview).
Now almost every "interview" requires writing a coding exam. Which other profession will
make you write an exam for 25-30 year veterans? Can you write your high school exam again today? What if your profession requires you to
write it a couple of times almost every year?
I am an "aging" former STEM worker (histology researcher) as well. Much like the IT
landscape, you are considered "over-the-hill" at 35, which I turn on the 31st. While I do not
have children and never intend to get married, many biotech companies consider this the age
at which a worker is getting long in the tooth. This is because there is the underlying
assumption that is when people start having familial obligations.
Most of the positions in
science and engineering fields now are basically "gig" positions, lasting a few months to a
year. A lot of people my age are finding how much harder it is to find any position at all in
these areas as there is a massive pool of people to choose from, even for permatemp work
simply because serfs in their mid-30s might get uppity about benefits like family health
plans or 401k
I am 59 and do not mind having employers discriminate against me due to age. ( I also need
a job) I had my own business and over the years got quite damaged. I was a contractor
specializing in older (historical) work.
I was always the lead worker with many friends and
other s working with me. At 52 I was given a choice of very involved neck surgery or quit. (
no small businesses have disability insurance!)
I shut down everything and helped my friends
who worked for me take some of the work or find something else. I was also a nationally
published computer consultant a long time ago and graphic artist.
Reality is I can still do
many things but I do nothing as well as I did when I was younger and the cost to employers
for me is far higher than a younger person. I had my chance and I chose poorly. Younger
people, if that makes them abetter fit, deserve a chance now more than I do.
I'm sorry for your challenges but I don't think there were many good careers you could
have chosen and it would have required a crystal ball to know which were the good ones.
Americans your age entered the job market just after the very end of the Golden Age of labor
conditions and have been weathering the decline your entire working lives. At least I entered
the job market when everyone knew for years things were falling apart. It's not your fault.
You were cheated plain and simple.
I don't see how it's possible to predict the labor market years in advance. Why blame
yourself for poor choices when so much chance is involved?
With a Jobs Guarantee, such questions would not arise. I also don't think it's only a
question of doing, but a question of sharing ("experience, strength, and hope," as AA -- a
very successful organization! -- puts it, in a way of thinking that has wide
application).
Unelected plutocrat and his international syndicate funded by former IBM artificial
intelligence developer and social darwinian. data manipulation electronic platforms and
social media are at the levels of power in the USA. Anti justice, anti enlightenment,
etc.
Since the installation of GW Bush by the Supreme Court, almost 20 yrs. ago, they have
tunneled deeply, speaking through propaganda machines such as Rush Limbaugh gaining traction
.making it over the finish line with KGB and Russian oligarch backing. The net effect on us?
The loss of all built on the foundation of the enlightenment and an exceptional nation no
king, a nation of, for and by the people, and the rule of law. There is nothing
Judeo-Christian about social darwinism but is eerily similar to National Socialism (Nazis).
The ruling againt the plaintiff by the 7th circuit in the U.S. and their success in creating
chaos in Great Britain vis a vis "Brexit" by fascist Lafarge Inc. are indicators how easy
their ascent.
ows how powerful they have become.
Where are the Bipartisan Presidential Candidates and Legislators on oral and verbal
condemnation of Age Discrimination , along with putting teeth into Age Discrimination
Laws, and Tax Policy. – nowhere to be seen , or heard, that I've noticed;
particularly in Blue ™ California, which is famed for Age Discrimination of
those as young as 36 years of age, since Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed anyone over 35, over
the hill in the early 2000's , and never got crushed for it by the media, or the
Politicians, as he should have (particularly in Silicon Valley).
I know those Republicans are venal, but I dare anyone to show me a meaningful Age
Discrimination Policy Proposal, pushed by Blue ™ Obama, Hillary, even
Sanders and Jill Stein. Certainly none of California's Nationally known (many well over
retirement age) Gubernatorial and Legislative Democratic Politicians: Jerry Brown, Gavin
Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Ro Khanna (or the
lesser known California Federal State and Local Democratic Politicians) have ever addressed
it; despite the fact that homelessness deaths of those near 'retirement age' have been
frighteningly increasing in California's obscenely wealthy homelessness 'hotspots,' such as
Silicon Valley.
Such a tragic issue, which has occurred while the last over a decade of Mainstream News
and Online Pundits, have Proclaimed 50 to be the new 30. Sadistic. I have no doubt this is
linked to the ever increasing Deaths of Despair and attempted and successful suicides of
those under, and just over retirement age– while the US has an average Senate age of
65, and a President and 2020 Presidential contenders, over 70 (I am not at all saying older
persons shouldn't be elected, nor that younger persons shouldn't be elected, I'm pointing out
the imbalance, insanity, and cruelty of it).
Further, age discrimination has
been particularly brutal to single, divorced, and widowed females , whom have most
assuredly made far, far less on the dollar than males (if they could even get hired for the
position, or leave the kids alone, and housekeeping undone, to get a job):
Patrick Button, an assistant economics professor at Tulane University, was part of a
research project last year that looked at callback rates from resumes in various
entry-level jobs. He said women seeking the positions appeared to be most affected.
"Based on over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in
hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less
evidence of age discrimination against men," according to an abstract of the study.
Jacquelyn James, co-director of the Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, said age
discrimination in employment is a crucial issue in part because of societal changes that
are forcing people to delay retirement. Moves away from defined-¬benefit pension plans
to less assured forms of retirement savings are part of the reason.
> "Based on over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination
in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less
evidence of age discrimination against men," according to an abstract of the study.
Well, these aren't real women, obviously. If they were, the Democrats would
already be taking care of them.
From the article: The greying of the workforce is "thanks to better health in older age
and insufficient savings that require people to keeping working longer," according to the
Chicago Tribune.
Get on the clue train Chicago Tribune, because your like W and Trump not knowing how a
supermarket works, that's how dense you are. Even if one saved, and even if one won the luck
lottery in terms of job stability and adequate income to save from, healthcare alone is a
reason to work, either to get employer provided if lucky, or to work without it and put most
of one's money toward an ACA plan or the like if not lucky. Yes the cost of almost all other
necessities has also increased greatly, but even parts of the country without a high cost of
living have unaffordable healthcare.
Benefits may be 23-30% or so of payroll and represent another expense management
opportunity for the diligent executive. One piece of low-hanging fruit is the age-related
healthcare cost. If you hire young people, who under-consume healthcare relative to older
cohorts, you save money, ceteris paribus. They have lower premiums, lower loss experience and
they rebound more quickly, so you hit a triple at your first at-bat swinging at that fruit.
Yes, metaphors are fungible along with every line on the income statement.
If your company still has the vestiges of a pension or similar blandishment, you may even
back-load contributions more aggressively, of course to the extent allowable. That added
expense diligence will pay off when those annuated employees leave before hitting
the more expensive funding years.
NB, the above reflects what I saw and heard at a Fortune 500 company.
A reason why the court system is overburdened is lack of clarity in laws and regulations.
Fix the disparity between the two sections of the law so that courts don't have to decide
which section rules.
It amazes me how often the government will give itself exemptions to its own laws and
principles, and also how often "progressive" nonprofits and political groups will also give
themselves such exemptions, for instance, regarding health insurance, paid overtime, paid
training, etc. that they are legally required to provide.
There are specific physical demands in things like policing. So it doesn't make much sense
to hire 55 year old rookie policemen when many policemen are retiring at that age.
Its an interesting quandary. We have older staff that went back to school and changed
careers. They do a good job and get paid at a rate similar to the younger staff with similar
job-related experience. However, they will be retiring at about the same time as the much
more experienced staff, so they will not be future succession replacements for the senior
staff.
So we also have to hire people in their 20s and 30s because that will be the future when
people like me retire in a few years. That could very well be the reason for the specific
wording of the job opening (I haven't read the opinion). I know of current hiring for a
position where the firm is primarily looking for somebody in their 20s or early 30s for
precisely that reason. The staff currently doing the work are in their 40s and 50s and need
to start bringing up the next generation. If somebody went back to school late and was in
their 40s or 50s (so would be at a lower billing rate due to lack of job related experience),
they would be seriously considered. But the firm would still be left with the challenge of
having to hire another person at the younger age within a couple of years to build the
succession. Once people make it past 5 years at the firm, they tend to stay for a long time
with senior staff generally having been at the firm for 20 years or more, so hiring somebody
really is a long-term investment.
"... This interview with Henry Giroux was conducted by Mitja Sardoč, of the Educational Research Institute, in the Faculty of the Social Sciences, at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. ..."
"... Not only does it define itself as a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas. In this instance, it has defined itself as a form of commonsense and functions as a mode of public pedagogy that produces a template for structuring not just markets but all of social life. ..."
"... In this sense, it has and continues to function not only through public and higher education to produce and distribute market-based values, identities, and modes of agency, but also in wider cultural apparatuses and platforms to privatize, deregulate, economize, and subject all of the commanding institutions and relations of everyday life to the dictates of privatization, efficiency, deregulation, and commodification. ..."
"... Since the 1970s as more and more of the commanding institutions of society come under the control of neoliberal ideology, its notions of common sense – an unchecked individualism, harsh competition, an aggressive attack on the welfare state, the evisceration of public goods, and its attack on all models of sociality at odds with market values – have become the reigning hegemony of capitalist societies. ..."
"... What many on the left have failed to realize is that neoliberalism is about more than economic structures, it is also is a powerful pedagogical force – especially in the era of social media – that engages in full-spectrum dominance at every level of civil society. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's promotion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence to its ability to willingness and success in making education central to politics ..."
"... The Crisis of Democracy, ..."
"... At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a desire to undermine the university's commitment to the truth, critical thinking, and its obligation to stand for justice ..."
"... Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done everything possible to eliminate higher education as a space where students can realize themselves as critical citizens ..."
"... It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory, words, meaning, and politics. Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense. ..."
"... Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of the fittest mode of behavior. ..."
"... First, higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good in order to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic impulses. Educators need to initiate and expand a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, a site that makes a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage. ..."
"... The ascendancy of neoliberalism in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. ..."
"... It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. ..."
"... First, too little is said about how neoliberalism functions not simply as an economic model for finance capital but as a public pedagogy that operates through a diverse number of sites and platforms. ..."
"... I define neoliberal fascism as both a project and a movement, which functions as an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys, the commanding institutions of a democracy while undermining its most valuable principles ..."
"... As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. In addition, it transforms the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization, and law and order to discredit the critical press and media, undermine civil liberties while ridiculing and censoring critics. ..."
This interview with Henry Giroux was conducted by Mitja Sardoč, of the Educational Research Institute, in the Faculty of the
Social Sciences, at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Mitja Sardoč: For several decades now, neoliberalism has been at the forefront of discussions not only in the economy and
finance but has infiltrated our vocabulary in a number of areas as diverse as governance studies, criminology, health care, jurisprudence,
education etc. What has triggered the use and application ofthis'economistic'ideologyassociatedwith the promotion of effectiveness
and efficiency?
Henry Giroux: Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of the times and has established itself as a central feature
of politics. Not only does it define itself as a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the hands
of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas. In this instance, it has defined itself as a form of commonsense
and functions as a mode of public pedagogy that produces a template for structuring not just markets but all of social life.
In this sense, it has and continues to function not only through public and higher education to produce and distribute market-based
values, identities, and modes of agency, but also in wider cultural apparatuses and platforms to privatize, deregulate, economize,
and subject all of the commanding institutions and relations of everyday life to the dictates of privatization, efficiency, deregulation,
and commodification.
Since the 1970s as more and more of the commanding institutions of society come under the control of neoliberal ideology,
its notions of common sense – an unchecked individualism, harsh competition, an aggressive attack on the welfare state, the evisceration
of public goods, and its attack on all models of sociality at odds with market values – have become the reigning hegemony of capitalist
societies.
What many on the left have failed to realize is that neoliberalism is about more than economic structures, it is also is a
powerful pedagogical force – especially in the era of social media – that engages in full-spectrum dominance at every level of civil
society. Its reach extends not only into education but also among an array of digital platforms as well as in the broader sphere
of popular culture. Under neoliberal modes of governance, regardless of the institution, every social relation is reduced to an act
of commerce.
Neoliberalism's promotion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence to its ability to willingness and success in making
education central to politics. It also offers a warning to progressives, as Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that the left has underestimated
the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front."
Mitja Sardoč: According to the advocates of neoliberalism, education represents one of the main indicators of future economic
growth and individual well-being.How – and why – education became one of the central elements of the 'neoliberal revolution'?
Henry Giroux: Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site of struggle over which there are
very high stakes regarding how young people are educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and future should
be most valued and privileged. Higher education in the sixties went through a revolutionary period in the United States and many
other countries as students sought to both redefine education as a democratic public sphere and to open it up to a variety of groups
that up to that up to that point had been excluded. Conservatives were extremely frightened over this shift and did everything they
could to counter it. Evidence of this is clear in the production of the Powell Memo published in 1971 and later in The Trilateral
Commission's book-length report, namely, The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. From the 1960s on the, conservatives,
especially the neoliberal right, has waged a war on education in order to rid it of its potential role as a democratic public sphere.
At the same time, they sought aggressively to restructure its modes of governance, undercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge
that was instrumental to the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers, and reduce the function of higher education
largely to training students for the global workforce.
At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a desire to undermine the university's commitment to the truth, critical
thinking, and its obligation to stand for justice and assume responsibility for safeguarding the interests of young as they
enter a world marked massive inequalities, exclusion, and violence at home and abroad. Higher education may be one of the few institutions
left in neoliberal societies that offers a protective space to question, challenge, and think against the grain.
Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done everything possible to eliminate higher education
as a space where students can realize themselves as critical citizens, faculty can participate in the governing structure, and
education can be define itself as a right rather than as a privilege.
Mitja Sardoč: Almost by definition, reforms and other initiatives aimed to improve educational practice have been one of
the pivotal mechanisms to infiltrate the neoliberal agenda of effectiveness and efficiency. What aspect of neoliberalism and its
educational agenda you find most problematic? Why?
Henry Giroux: Increasingly aligned with market forces, higher education is mostly primed for teaching business principles
and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in a neoliberal-based audit culture. Many
colleges and universities have been McDonalds-ized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity resulting in curricula that
resemble a fast-food menu. In addition, faculty are subjected increasingly to a Wal-Mart model of labor relations designed as Noam
Chomsky points out "to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility". In the age of precarity and flexibility, the majority
of faculty have been reduced to part-time positions, subjected to low wages, lost control over the conditions of their labor, suffered
reduced benefits, and frightened about addressing social issues critically in their classrooms for fear of losing their jobs.
The latter may be the central issue curbing free speech and academic freedom in the academy. Moreover, many of these faculty are
barely able to make ends meet because of their impoverished salaries, and some are on food stamps. If faculty are treated like service
workers, students fare no better and are now relegated to the status of customers and clients.
Moreover, they are not only inundated with the competitive, privatized, and market-driven values of neoliberalism, they are also
punished by those values in the form of exorbitant tuition rates, astronomical debts owed to banks and other financial institutions,
and in too many cases a lack of meaningful employment. As a project and movement, neoliberalism undermines the ability of educators
and others to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and the civic courage necessary to
make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical.
As an ideology, neoliberalism is at odds with any viable notion of democracy which it sees as the enemy of the market. Yet, Democracy
cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective, and independent – qualities that are indispensable
for students if they are going to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday
life, institutional reform, and governmental policy.
Mitja Sardoč: Why large-scale assessments and quantitative data in general are a central part of the 'neo-liberal toolkit'
in educational research?
Henry Giroux: These are the tools of accountants and have nothing to do with larger visions or questions about what matters
as part of a university education. The overreliance on metrics and measurement has become a tool used to remove questions of responsibility,
morality, and justice from the language and policies of education. I believe the neoliberal toolkit as you put it is part of the
discourse of civic illiteracy that now runs rampant in higher educational research, a kind of mind-numbing investment in a metric-based
culture that kills the imagination and wages an assault on what it means to be critical, thoughtful, daring, and willing to take
risks. Metrics in the service of an audit culture has become the new face of a culture of positivism, a kind of empirical-based panopticon
that turns ideas into numbers and the creative impulse into ashes. Large scale assessments and quantitative data are the driving
mechanisms in which everything is absorbed into the culture of business.
The distinction between information and knowledge has become irrelevant in this model and anything that cannot be captured by
numbers is treated with disdain. In this new audit panopticon, the only knowledge that matters is that which can be measured. What
is missed here, of course, is that measurable utility is a curse as a universal principle because it ignores any form of knowledge
based on the assumption that individuals need to know more than how things work or what their practical utility might be.
This is a language that cannot answer the question of what the responsibility of the university and educators might be in a time
of tyranny, in the face of the unspeakable, and the current widespread attack on immigrants, Muslims, and others considered disposable.
This is a language that is both afraid and unwilling to imagine what alternative worlds inspired by the search for equality and justice
might be possible in an age beset by the increasing dark forces of authoritarianism.
Mitja Sardoč: While the analysis of the neoliberal agenda in education is well documented, the analysis of the language
of neoliberal education is at the fringes of scholarly interest. In particular, the expansion of the neoliberal vocabulary with egalitarian
ideas such as fairness, justice, equality of opportunity, well-being etc. has received [at best]only limited attention. What factors
have contributed to this shift of emphasis?
Henry Giroux: Neoliberalism has upended how language is used in both education and the wider society. It works to appropriate
discourses associated with liberal democracy that have become normalized in order to both limit their meanings and use them to mean
the opposite of what they have meant traditionally, especially with respect to human rights, justice, informed judgment, critical
agency, and democracy itself. It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory,
words, meaning, and politics. Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and
celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense.
Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of
the fittest mode of behavior.
The vocabulary of neoliberalism operates in the service of violence in that it reduces the capacity for human fulfillment in the
collective sense, diminishes a broad understanding of freedom as fundamental to expanding the capacity for human agency, and diminishes
the ethical imagination by reducing it to the interest of the market and the accumulation of capital. Words, memory, language and
meaning are weaponized under neoliberalism.
Certainly, neither the media nor progressives have given enough attention to how neoliberalism colonizes language because neither
group has given enough attention to viewing the crisis of neoliberalism as not only an economic crisis but also a crisis of ideas.
Education is not viewed as a force central to politics and as such the intersection of language, power, and politics in the neoliberal
paradigm has been largely ignored. Moreover, at a time when civic culture is being eradicated, public spheres are vanishing, and
notions of shared citizenship appear obsolete, words that speak to the truth, reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis
also begin to disappear.
This makes it all the more difficult to engage critically the use of neoliberalism's colonization of language. In the United States,
Trump prodigious tweets signify not only a time in which governments engage in the pathology of endless fabrications, but also how
they function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism designed to animate his base in a glut of shock while reinforcing a culture
of war, fear, divisiveness, and greed in ways that disempower his critics.
Mitja Sardoč: You have written extensively on neoliberalism's exclusively instrumental view of education, its reductionist
understanding of effectiveness and its distorted image of fairness. In what way should radical pedagogy fight back neoliberalism
and its educational agenda?
Henry Giroux: First, higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good in order to reclaim its egalitarian
and democratic impulses. Educators need to initiate and expand a national conversation in which higher education can be defended
as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, a site that makes
a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage. At the same time, the discourse on defining higher education
as a democratic public sphere can provide the platform for a more expressive commitment in developing a social movement in defense
of public goods and against neoliberalism as a threat to democracy. This also means rethinking how education can be funded as a public
good and what it might mean to fight for policies that both stop the defunding of education and fight to relocate funds from the
death dealing military and incarceration budgets to those supporting education at all levels of society. The challenge here is for
higher education not to abandon its commitment to democracy and to recognize that neoliberalism operates in the service of the forces
of economic domination and ideological repression.
Second, educators need to acknowledge and make good on the claim that a critically literate citizen is indispensable to a democracy,
especially at a time when higher education is being privatized and subject to neoliberal restructuring efforts. This suggests placing
ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility, and compassion at the forefront of learning so as to combine knowledge, teaching,
and research with the rudiments of what might be called the grammar of an ethical and social imagination. This would imply taking
seriously those values, traditions, histories, and pedagogies that would promote a sense of dignity, self-reflection, and compassion
at the heart of a real democracy. Third, higher education needs to be viewed as a right, as it is in many countries such as Germany,
France, Norway, Finland, and Brazil, rather than a privilege for a limited few, as it is in the United States, Canada, and the United
Kingdom. Fourth, in a world driven by data, metrics, and the replacement of knowledge by the overabundance of information, educators
need to enable students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. They need to
become border crossers who can think dialectically, and learn not only how to consume culture but also to produce it. Fifth, faculty
must reclaim their right to control over the nature of their labor, shape policies of governance, and be given tenure track lines
with the guarantee of secure employment and protection for academic freedom and free speech.
Mitja Sardoč: Why is it important to analyze the relationship between neoliberalism and civic literacy particularly as an
educational project?
Henry Giroux: The ascendancy of neoliberalism in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy,
a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making.
It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion
of any sense of shared citizenship. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic
institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing.
As these institutions vanish – from public schools and alternative media to health care centers– there is also a serious
erosion of the discourse of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. At the same time reason and truth are
not simply contested, or the subject of informed arguments as they should be, but wrongly vilified – banished to Trump's poisonous
world of fake news. For instance, under the Trump administration, language has been pillaged, truth and reason disparaged, and words
and phrases emptied of any substance or turned into their opposite, all via the endless production of Trump's Twitter storms and
the ongoing clown spectacle of Fox News. This grim reality points to a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will,
and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding
of education as a public good. What we are witnessing under neoliberalism is not simply a political project to consolidate power
in the hands of the corporate and financial elite but also a reworking of the very meaning of literacy and education as crucial to
what it means to create an informed citizenry and democratic society. In an age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the
anti-democratic forces governing all the commanding economic and cultural institutions of the United States, truth is viewed as a
liability, ignorance becomes a virtue, and informed judgments and critical thinking demeaned and turned into rubble and ashes. Under
the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and
science is confused with pseudo-science. Traces of critical thought appear more and more at the margins of the culture as ignorance
becomes the primary organizing principle of American society.
Under the forty-year reign of neoliberalism, language has been militarized, handed over to advertisers, game show idiocy, and
a political and culturally embarrassing anti-intellectualism sanctioned by the White House. Couple this with a celebrity culture
that produces an ecosystem of babble, shock, and tawdry entertainment. Add on the cruel and clownish anti-public intellectuals such
as Jordan Peterson who defend inequality, infantile forms of masculinity, and define ignorance and a warrior mentality as part of
the natural order, all the while dethroning any viable sense of agency and the political.
The culture of manufactured illiteracy is also reproduced through a media apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle
of violence. Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of neoliberal zombie
politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations, and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding
institutions that now control American society. In the age of manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work than simply an absence
of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can the reign of manufactured illiteracy be solely attributed to the rise of the new social
media, a culture of immediacy, and a society that thrives on instant gratification. On the contrary, manufactured illiteracy is political
and educational project central to a right-wing corporatist ideology and set of policies that work aggressively to depoliticize people
and make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their
lives. There is more at work here than what Ariel Dorfman calls a "felonious stupidity," there is also the workings of a deeply malicious
form of 21 st century neoliberal fascism and a culture of cruelty in which language is forced into the service of violence
while waging a relentless attack on the ethical imagination and the notion of the common good. In the current historical moment illiteracy
and ignorance offer the pretense of a community in doing so has undermined the importance of civic literacy both in higher education
and the larger society.
Mitja Sardoč: Is there any shortcoming in the analysis of such a complex (and controversial) social phenomenon as neoliberalism
and its educational agenda? Put differently: is there any aspect of the neoliberal educational agenda that its critics have failed
to address?
Henry Giroux: Any analysis of an ideology such as neoliberalism will always be incomplete. And the literature on neoliberalism
in its different forms and diverse contexts is quite abundant. What is often underplayed in my mind are three things.
First, too
little is said about how neoliberalism functions not simply as an economic model for finance capital but as a public pedagogy that
operates through a diverse number of sites and platforms.
Second, not enough has been written about its war on a democratic notion
of sociality and the concept of the social.
Third, at a time in which echoes of a past fascism are on the rise not enough is being
said about the relationship between neoliberalism and fascism, or what I call neoliberal fascism, especially the relationship between
the widespread suffering and misery caused by neoliberalism and the rise of white supremacy.
I define neoliberal fascism as both
a project and a movement, which functions as an enabling force that weakens, if not destroys, the commanding institutions of a democracy
while undermining its most valuable principles.
Consequently, it provides a fertile ground for the unleashing of the ideological
architecture, poisonous values, and racist social relations sanctioned and produced under fascism. Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin
and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worse excesses of capitalism with fascist
ideals – the veneration of war, a hatred of reason and truth; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the
suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture which promotes lies, spectacles, a demonization of the other, a discourse of decline,
brutal violence, and ultimately state violence in heterogeneous forms. As a project, it destroys all the commanding institutions
of democracy and consolidates power in the hands of a financial elite.
As a movement, it produces and legitimates massive economic
inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems.
In addition, it transforms the political state into the corporate state, and uses the tools of surveillance, militarization, and
law and order to discredit the critical press and media, undermine civil liberties while ridiculing and censoring critics.
What critics
need to address is that neoliberalism is the face of a new fascism and as such it speaks to the need to repudiate the notion that
capitalism and democracy are the same thing, renew faith in the promises of a democratic socialism, create new political formations
around an alliance of diverse social movements, and take seriously the need to make education central to politics itself.
"... The Bilderberg set call people like you either their "dogs" (if you are in politics or the military) or the "dead." ..."
"... What do you mean "where criminals mingle with ministers". That is assuming that ministers are not criminals. Considering that there will be ministers from the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK, I'd suggest that there is a near 100% certainty that some, if not all, the ministers there are criminals. ..."
"... That one group of almost-certainly-criminals meets another group of almost-certainly-criminals is hardly surprising. That the whole shebang is protected by the host's police force is even less so ..."
Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss,
David Petraeus, who's just been handed a $100,000
(£64,000) fine and two years' probation for leaking classified information.
Petraeus now works for the vulturous private equity firm KKR, run by Henry Kravis, who does arguably Bilderberg's best impression
of Gordon Gecko out of Wall Street. Which he cleverly combines with a pretty good impression of an actual gecko.
... ... ...
"Can I go now?" Another no. So I continued my list of criminals. I moved on to someone closer to home:
René Benko, the Austrian real estate baron, who had a conviction
for bribery upheld recently by the supreme court. Which didn't stop him making the cut for this year's conference. "You know Benko?"
The cop nodded. It wasn't easy to see in the glare of the searchlight, but he looked a little ashamed.
... ... ...
I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular
attendee at Bilderberg, and he's heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank's board of directors, Rona Fairhead.
Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank's busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.
A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC "a bank beyond shame" after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while
at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay £28m in fines to Swiss regulators
investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer,
George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy – he'll
go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.
High up on this year's conference agenda is "current economic issues", and without a doubt, one of the biggest economic issues
for Osborne at the moment is the future and finances of Europe's largest bank. Luckily, the chancellor will have plenty of time at
Bilderberg to chat all this through through with Flint, Levey and Fairhead. And the senior Swiss financial affairs official, Pierre
Maudet, a member of the Geneva state council in charge of the department of security and the economy. It's all so incredibly convenient.
Let's see, maybe because we have read over their leaked documents from the 1950s in which they discussed currency manipulation
and GATT. Everything they have discussed in their meetings over the past decades has almost come to fruition. There are elected
officials meeting with criminals such as HSBC. Did you even read the article? If you did, and you are not het up or whatever you
call it, then you are of a peasant mentality, and there is no use talking to you.
The Bilderberg set call people like you either their "dogs" (if you are in politics or the military) or the "dead." I won't
be looking for your response because you have confirmed that you do not matter.
Carpasia -> MickGJ 12 Jun 2015 10:52
Thank you for your comment, my good man. Hatred is human, and helps us all to avoid pain, for pain, especially unnecessary
pain, is allowed to be hated by the agreement of all, if nothing else is. I would hate to be beaten by Nazis. Thus, I would avoid
going to a place where that could occur. That is how hatred works for me. It is the only way it can work, and not be pernicious
to the self and others.
I distrust the international order as it is the means, harnessed by money, whether corporate or state or individual or monarchical,
by which this world is being destroyed. Could things have been better? Jesus is on one end of the spectrum, and Lord Acton on
the other, of the spectrums of viewpoints from which that could be properly assessed.
If the corruption at the heart of the international
order is not regulated properly, this world will come to an end, not the end of the world itself, but the end of the world as
we know it. This is happening now. The world is finite.
I am not a xenophobe. In my experience, the people that are most likely to hurt me, and thus deserve fear, are those closest.
Perhaps that is a cynical way of describing it, but anyone who thinks honestly about it would accede to the notion that it is
the people who "love" us that hurt us the most, for we agree too be vulnerable to them. It is the matrix of love.
As for Austria and Bavaria, I have visited both places and they were, both, the cleanest locales I have ever seen, with Switzerland
having to be mentioned in the same breath, of course.
I take a certain liberty in writing. I am not damning the human race, or strangers to me. If I did not entertain, but caused
offence, I apologize to you. I do not possess omniscience, and my words will have to speak for themselves.
Thank you, again.
DemonicWarlordSlayer 12 Jun 2015 08:02
"How Geo Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power" in the UK Guardian >
"Did Geo H W Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team" at Veterans Today >
"9/11 Conspiracy Solved, Names, Connections, Details" on youtube....dot-to-dot of the
Demonic Warlord's Crimes Against Humanity....end feudalism.
Carpasia 12 Jun 2015 07:09
Excellent article.
I visited Austria once, and I know of what he speaks. It was the one place I have ever visited that I thought I would be jailed
if I littered. I was wandering at the time, but I tentatively had a meal of chicken and departed henceforth.
Austrians are an interesting lot, to be sure. That they are perfect goes without saying. Their main virtue is that they do
not travel, and that strangers, which we call tourists these days, are not welcomed. If only we were all like that, the world
would be a far better place.
Austrians do everything well, including crime. Some of the greatest crimes in the world have been committed by Austrians, but
their crimes did not include not having their papers.
During World War 2, and I pass over Hitler, the German machine of death had an unusually high proportion of Austrians in commanding
roles assisting it. It can not be explained away by saying they were some kind of faux Germans, and so it matters not. Indeed,
if anything, Germans are faux Austrians, looked at in the broad brush of history. Men of many nations joined the Germans and adorned
themselves with the Death's Head, but many Austrians might as well have tattooed it onto their foreheads. I know of what I speak,
for I read on it, and will justify if questioned.
Reinhard Heydrich is an epitome of this, in the true sense of the word. Kurt Waldheim was another, too young too rise too far
before the Ragnarok of May of 1945, but government of the world was not out of his reach, a man who had materially assisted the
transportation of the Jews of Thessaloniki to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and, when challenged, was unrepentant, not as a racist,
but as something worse even, as a man whose great virtue was that he followed orders. It is order that the Austrians value over
everything. Even crime is ordered.
In the common-law west we think criminals are disordered beasts to be locked up. We do not give them papers. They are registered
only to warn us of their existence, and we do not like to let them travel, as much as we could benefit by their absence, because
we think they flee to license, and we think it wrong to inflict them upon innocents abroad. In Austria, the criminal is the man
with no papers. If he has papers, all is well, and he is no criminal, whatever he has done.
colingorton 12 Jun 2015 03:19
What do you mean "where criminals mingle with ministers". That is assuming that ministers are not criminals. Considering that
there will be ministers from the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK, I'd suggest that there is a near 100%
certainty that some, if not all, the ministers there are criminals.
That one group of almost-certainly-criminals meets another group of almost-certainly-criminals is hardly surprising. That the
whole shebang is protected by the host's police force is even less so.
How far can all this mutual back scratching go? It seems that the only alternative left is far too drastic, but there really
seems to be no place for a legal alternative, does there?
"... The return to the industrial relations and tax policies of the early 19th century has been spearheaded by people who speak the language of equality, respect, participation, and transparency. ..."
"... Branko Milanovic is the author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization and of the forthcoming Capitalism, Alone, both published by Harvard University Press. He is senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. An earlier version of this post has previously appeared in Milanovic's blog . ..."
The return to the industrial relations and tax policies of the early 19th century has
been spearheaded by people who speak the language of equality, respect, participation, and
transparency.
You will find me eager to help you,
but slow to take any step.
-- Euripides, Hecuba
Thousands of people with a combined wealth of several
hundred billion dollars, perhaps even close to a trillion, are gathering this week in Davos.
Never in world history, quite possibly, has the amount of wealth per square foot been so high.
This year, for the seventh or eighth consecutive time, one of the principal topics addressed by
these captains of industry, billionaires, employers of thousands of people across the four
corners of the globe, is inequality. Even the new "hot" topics of the day -- trade wars and
populism -- are in turn related, or even caused by inequality of income, wealth, or political
power.
Only in passing, and probably on the margins of the official program, will the global elites
gathered in Davos get into a discussion of the tremendous monopoly and monopsony power their
companies have. Neither will they publicly mention companies' ability to play one jurisdiction
against another in order to avoid taxes, ban organized labor within their ranks, use government
ambulance services to carry workers who have fainted from the heat (to save expenses on air
conditioning), make their workforce complement its wages through private charity donations, or
perhaps pay an average tax rate of between 0-12 percent.
Some participants, if they are from the emerging market economies, can also exchange
experiences on how to delay payments of wages for several months while investing these funds at
high interests rates, save on labor protection standards, or buy privatized companies for a
song and then set up shell companies in the Caribbean or Channel Islands.
It is just that somehow, the "masters of the universe" who gather annually in Davos never
managed to find enough money, or time, or perhaps willing lobbyists to help with the policies
many will agree, during the official sessions, should be adopted. For example, increasing taxes
on the top 1 percent and on large estates, providing decent wages or not impounding wages,
reducing gaps between CEO compensation and average pay, spending more money on public
education, making access to financial assets more attractive to the middle and working class,
equalizing taxes on capital and labor, reducing corruption in government contracts and
privatizations.
Actually, when policies that are supposed to make some headway in counteracting rising
inequality are finally proposed, such as the one made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
of 70 percent marginal tax on extra high-incomes (above $10 million annually), they are
quick to argue that such policies will do more harm than good. One is left, to put it
mildly, puzzled: If they are against a most obvious and rather modest proposal, what policies
do they have in mind to fight inequality? In reality they have none, except for the vacuous
talk of "social inclusion," "prosperity for all" and "trickle-down economics."
Not surprisingly, nothing has been done since the Global Financial Crisis to address
inequality. Rather, the opposite has happened. Donald Trump has, as promised, passed a historic
tax cut for the wealthy; Emmanuel Macron has discovered the attraction of latter-day
Thatcherism; the Chinese government has slashed taxes on the rich and
imprisoned the left-wing students at Peking University who supported striking workers. In
Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro seems to consider praise for torture and the rising stock market as the
ideal mélange of modern capitalism.
Bizarrely, this return to the industrial relations and tax policies of the early 19th
century has been spearheaded by people who speak the language of equality, respect,
participation, and transparency. The annual gathering in Davos, in that regard, is not just a
display of the elites' financial superiority. It is also supposed to showcase their moral
superiority. This is in line with a longstanding trend: Over the past fifty years, the language
of equality has been harnessed in the pursuit of the most structurally inegalitarian policies.
It is much easier (and profitable), apparently, to call journalists and tell them about
nebulous schemes whereby 90 percent of wealth will be -- over an unknown number of years and
under unknowable accounting practices -- given away as charity than to pay suppliers and
workers reasonable rates or stop selling user data. They are loath to pay a living wage, but
they will fund a philharmonic orchestra. They will ban unions, but they will organize a
workshop on transparency in government.
And next year, as inequality continues to rise and the state of Western middle classes
continues to deteriorate, the same elites will be back in Davos, talking about inequality and
populism in grave tones. A new record in dollar wealth per square foot may be reached, but the
topics of discussion within the conference halls, and on the margins, will remain the same.
Branko Milanovic is the author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of
Globalization and of the forthcoming Capitalism, Alone, both published by Harvard University
Press. He is senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the Graduate
Center, City University of New York. An earlier version of this post has previously appeared in
Milanovic's blog .
RW: Well at this point I think it really depends on what indexes you're looking at. The
biggest thing that's kept this economy going in the last few years should make everybody
tremble. It's called debt, let me give you just a couple of examples.
Ten years ago, at the
height of the crash, the total debt carried by students in the United States was in the
neighborhood of $700 billion, an enormous sum.
What is it today? Over twice that,
one-and-a-half trillion dollars.
The reason part of our economy hasn't collapsed is that
students have taken up an enormous amount of debt that they cannot afford, in order to get
degrees which will let them get jobs whose incomes will not allow them to pay back the debts.
And forget about getting married, forget about having a family.
We have paid an enormous price in hobbling the generation of people who would have otherwise
lifted this economy and made us more productive. It is a disastrous mistake historically, and
if you face that, and if you add to it the increased debt of our businesses, and the increased
debt of our government, you see an economy that is held up by a monstrous increase in debt, not
in underlying productivity, not in more jobs that really produce anything, but in debt.
That should frighten us because it was the debt bubble that burst in 2008 and brought us the
crash. It is as if we cannot learn in our system to do other than we've always done and that's
taking us into another crash coming now.
LC: Yeah. This is the land of the free, but it seems like most of us are chained down by
debt peonage.
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to have real effect. ..."
An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr
Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at
least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have
indoctrinated rather than educated.
As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the
primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their
fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to
have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I
see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.
People who are kicked out of their IT jobs around 55 now has difficulties to find even
full-time McJobs... Only part time jobs are available. With the current round of layoff and job
freezes, neoliberalism in the USA is entering terminal phase, I think.
A survey by
Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found on average Americans are retiring at age
63, with more than half indicating they retired sooner than they had planned. Among them, most
retired for health or employment-related reasons.
... ... ...
On April 3, 2018, Linda LaBarbera received the phone call that changed her life forever. "We
are outsourcing your work to India and your services are no longer needed, effective today,"
the voice on the other end of the phone line said.
... ... ...
"It's not like we are starving or don't have a home or anything like that," she says. "But
we did have other plans for before we retired and setting ourselves up a little better while we
both still had jobs."
... ... ...
Linda hasn't needed to dip into her 401(k) yet. She plans to start collecting Social
Security when she turns 70, which will give her the maximum benefit. To earn money and keep
busy, Linda has taken short-term contract editing jobs. She says she will only withdraw money
from her savings if something catastrophic happens. Her husband's salary is their main source
of income.
"I am used to going out and spending money on other people," she says. "We are very generous
with our family and friends who are not as well off as we are. So we take care of a lot of
people. We can't do that anymore. I can't go out and be frivolous anymore. I do have to look at
what we spend - what I spend."
Vogelbacher says cutting costs is essential when living in retirement, especially for those
on a fixed income. He suggests moving to a tax-friendly location if possible.
Kiplinger ranks Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Florida as the top five
tax-friendly states for retirees. If their health allows, Vogelbacher recommends getting a
part-time job. For those who own a home, he says paying off the mortgage is a smart financial
move.
... ... ...
Monica is one of the 44 percent of unmarried persons who rely on Social Security for 90
percent or more of their income. At the beginning of 2019, Monica and more than 62 million
Americans received a 2.8 percent cost
of living adjustment from Social Security. The increase is the largest since 2012.
With the Social Security hike, Monica's monthly check climbed $33. Unfortunately, the new
year also brought her a slight increase in what she pays for Medicare; along with a $500
property tax bill and the usual laundry list of monthly expenses.
"If you don't have much, the (Social Security) raise doesn't represent anything," she says
with a dry laugh. "But it's good to get it."
"... The inquiry follows a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report said that Wells Fargo charged students the highest fees of 573 banks examined. ..."
"... "When granted the privilege of providing financial services to students through colleges, Wells Fargo used this access to charge struggling college students exorbitant fees," Warren said in a statement. "These high fees, which are an outlier within the industry, demonstrate conclusively that Wells Fargo does not belong on college campuses." ..."
Elizabeth Warren is demanding that Wells Fargo & Co. be kicked off college campuses, a market the bank has said is among its fastest-growing.
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts and likely presidential candidate said Thursday that she requested more information
from Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer Tim Sloan and from 31 colleges where the bank does business. The inquiry follows a Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau report said that Wells Fargo charged students the highest fees of 573 banks examined.
"When granted the privilege of providing financial services to students through colleges, Wells Fargo used this access to charge
struggling college students exorbitant fees," Warren said in a statement. "These high fees, which are an outlier within the industry,
demonstrate conclusively that Wells Fargo does not belong on college campuses."
Warren has been a vocal critic of Wells Fargo -- including repeatedly calling for Sloan's ouster -- since a series of consumer
issues at the company erupted more than two years ago with a phony-accounts scandal.
Wells Fargo is "continually working to improve how we serve our customers," a bank spokesman said in an emailed statement Thursday.
"Before and since the CFPB's review on this topic, we have been pursuing customer-friendly actions that support students," including
waiving service fees on some checking accounts offered to them.
A reputation for overcharging students could further harm Wells Fargo's consumer-banking strategy. The San Francisco-based bank
has identified college-age consumers as a growth opportunity, and John Rasmussen, head of personal lending, said last year that Wells
Fargo
may expand into the refinancing of federal student loans.
"Winners Take All" is one of
several recently published books raising difficult
questions about how the world's
biggest donors approach their giving. As someone who studies, teaches and believes in
philanthropy, I believe these writers have started an important debate that could potentially
lead future donors to make make a bigger difference with their giving.
Giridharadas to a degree echoes
Ford Foundation President Darren Walker , who has made a stir by denouncing a "
paradox of privilege " that "shields (wealthy people) from fully experiencing or
acknowledging inequality, even while giving us more power to do something about it."
Like Walker , Giridharadas finds it hard to shake the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who
spoke of "the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary."
To avoid changes that might endanger their privileges, mega-donors typically seek what they
call win-win solutions. But however impressive the quantifiable results of those efforts may
seem, according to this argument, those outcomes will always fall short. Fixes that don't
threaten the powers that be leave underlying issues intact.
As long as school systems are funded locally, based on property values, students in wealthy
communities will have advantages over those residing in poorer ones. However, creating a more
equal system to pay for schools would take tax dollars and advantages away from the rich. The
wealthy would lose, and the disadvantaged would win.
So it's possible to see the
nearly $500 million billionaires and other rich people have pumped into charter schools and
other education reform efforts over the past dozen years as a way to dodge this problem.
Charters have surely made a difference for some kids, such as those in rural
Oregon whose schools might otherwise have closed. But since the bid to expand charters
doesn't address
childhood poverty or challenge the status quo – aside from diluting the power of
teacher
unions and raising the stakes in
school board elections – this approach seems unlikely to help all schoolchildren.
Indeed, years into the quest to fix this problem without overhauling schoolPaying for Tuition
Bloomberg's big donation raises a similar question.
He aims to make a Johns Hopkins education more accessible for promising low-income students.
When so many Hopkins
alumni have enjoyed success in a wide range of careers, what can be wrong with that?
Well, paying tuition challenges millions of Americans, not just the thousands who might
attend Hopkins .
Tuition, fees, room and board at the top-ranked school cost about $65,000 a year.
Only 5 percent
of colleges and universities were affordable , according to the Institute for Higher
Education Policy, a nonpartisan global research and policy center, for students from families
earning $69,000 a year or less.
Like Giridharadas, the institute argues paying for college is "largely a problem of
inequity."
Bloomberg's gift will certainly help some people earn a Hopkins degree. But it does nothing
about the bigger challenge of making college more affordable for all in a country where student
debt has surpassed $1.5
trillion .
One alternative would be to finance advocacy for legislative remedies to address
affordability and inequity. For affluent donors, Giridharadas argues, this could prove to be a
nonstarter. Like most of what he calls " win-lose
solutions ," taking that route would lead to higher taxes for the wealthy.
Subsidies for Gifts from the Rich
Similarly, who could quibble with Bezos spending $2 billion to fund
preschools and homeless shelters? Although he has not yet made clear what results he's
after, I have no doubt they will make a difference for countless Americans.
No matter how he goes about it, the gesture still raises questions. As Stanford University
philanthropy scholar Rob Reich explains in his new book "
Just Giving ," the
tax break rich Americans get when they make charitable contributions subsidizes their favorite
causes.
Or, to phrase it another way, the federal government gives initiatives supported by Bezos
and other wealthy donors like him preferential treatment. Does that make sense in a democracy?
Reich says that it doesn't.
The elected representatives in democracies should decide how best to solve problems with tax
dollars, not billionaires who are taken with one cause or another, the Stanford professor
asserts.
That's why I think it's so important to ask the critical questions that Giridharadas and
Reich are raising, and why the students taking my philanthropy classes this semester will be
reading "Winners Take All" and "Just Giving."
Editor's note: Johns Hopkins University Press provides funding as a member of The
Conversation US, which also has a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. The Gates Foundation
is a funder of The Conversation Media Group.
None of the common tactics of the "reformers" have scientific backing. So (union-busting)
charter schools, merit pay (because teachers are motivated by money), and testing kids until
their eyeballs bleed are all bogus, and do not have an impact on educational outcomes.
The plutocrats have even funded a propaganda film called "Waiting for Superman" in which
Michelle Rhee applies "tough love" to reform failing Washington D.C. schools, firing lots of
teachers because their students' test scores didn't make the cut, etc.
Waiting for Superman touts the Finnish schools as the ones to emulate and they are very
good ones, too. Omitted from their account is the fact that Finnish teachers are tenured,
unionized, respected and quite well paid.
So what does correlate with educational outcomes? Childhood poverty. In Finland, only 2%
of their children are poor. In the U.S. it's 23%.
The problem is systemic, not the teachers, or the types of schools.
In some sense this is nothing new. Back when Pittsburgh was a network of steel mills and
mine tailings Carnegie funded meuseums, libraries, arboretums, and strike-breakers who shot
workers that complained. He was public about the need to "give back" and made a point of
demanding that the places were open on Sundays because he forced his workers to do 12 hour
days six days a week.
No doubt he may have felt he was helping, and no doubt the institutions have been and
still are a positive benefit, but they also did nothing to attack the root cause of the
suffering nor did they make any fundamental change in society. That would upset his apple
cart. By the same token the fact that private donors needed to fund public institutions was
based upon the simple fact that they had all the money.
It is also notable that some of the more recent endeavors such as Gates' tech-driven
charter schools, or Facebook's donation to the same, or for that matter Apple's donation of
iPads to LAUSD have a direct commercial component. The intial gift may be free but in the end
it is market-making as much of the cash routes back to the company. They may genuinely
believe in the solution but the financial connection is also clear.
More interesting though Pierre Omidyar who combined his business and "philanthropy" more
directly by putting money into a foundation that then invests in startups he runs which "do
social good" or which sell technology to those that do so.
Ultimately Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos may have more to play with than Carnegie ever dreamed
of but at the end of the day much of what they are doing is the same, starving necessary
institutions of funds, smoothing out the rough edges of their PR (especially when, like
Bezos, they are in the crosshairs), and then peddling "solutions" that look good but only
reinforce the conditions that make them rich.
" have a direct commercial component. The intial gift may be free but in the end it is
market-making as much of the cash routes back to the company."
How true, but you might not even be cynical enough. Back in 2012 (I believe) there was
reportage about large banks quitely lobbying Bloomberg to make big cuts to the New York
City's funding of local charities and non-profits. Several million dollars were cut as a
result of the austerity lobbying by the banks. The same week the food pantry where I
volunteered, which lost $40,000 of City funding if memory serves me correctly, received a
"generous" gift of a folding table from Citibank. My wife who at the time worked at a large
non-profit dedicated to community issues in the South Bronx, had to attend a presentation by
a Citibank employee with a name like "How the Nonprofit Community Has Failed the Community".
Her attendance was a courtesy demanded in exchange for a several thousand dollar donation
from Citibank to her nonprofit. Her non-profit lost much more in funding from the City due to
the banks' lobbying efforts, and surprise surprise, what was the main thrust of the Citibank
presentation? How micro-finance lending can help historically marginalized communities of
course! My wife's organization was engaged in several programs aimed at encouraging and
aiding entrepreneurship and financial literacy. Citibank saw local non-profits that were
helping the community keep their collective heads above the water as competition. Their
programatic work was harmful to the bank's business model of luring people into odious debt
by promulgating an environment of despair and desperation.
Beware of billionaires and bankers bearing gifts. Their vast fortunes should be trimmed
down to size with taxation/force and distributed democratically according to the needs of the
community, not the whims of the market or the misguided opinions of non-expert, know-it-all
billionaires who have never lived nor worked in the communities they claim to care about.
Charity makes people supplicants which is a form of servitude. "Thank you kindly, sir, for
you gracious gift." That is not a "free" society. We should have a society where no one needs
some good folks' trickle downs. A basic guaranteed income might work better than the system
we have now especially with an affordable heath care system. It would eliminate food banks
and homeless shelters and jobs involving making lists and forms and graphs for the Medical
Insurance Business. And it would eliminate a lot of other stupid and bullsh*t jobs. Yes, I've
been rereading David Graeber's "Bullsh*t Jobs."
Several years ago I collected signatures for Move to Amend, an organizations which
advocates for an anti-corporate personhood amendment to the US Constitution. I learned two
things:
1. ordinary citizens 'get it' about corporations running the show, and they are enthusiastic
about bringing them to heel, and
2. ordinary citizens who work in 501(c)3 non-profits are far less enthusiastic about the
possible withering away of their cozy corporate dole.
So, while the giant vampire squids of the world drift lazily along on a fine current of their
own making, keep in mind that there are huge schools of pilot fish that depend on their
leavings for survival. All of these small fish will surely resist any effort to tenderize
this calamari.
No one said it better than William Jewett Tucker, a contemporary critic of Carnegie:
"I can conceive of no greater mistake, more disastrous in the end to religion if not to
society, than of trying to make charity do the work of justice."
This was a terrific post on a very important issue.
Even in my insignificant little burg we have experienced this problem first-hand. A local
Charter School was doing a very good job of "keeping out the brown people" and publishing a
"walk of shame" of all who made "voluntary" contributions to their coffers, thus "outing"
those who didn't (the California constitution forbids schools that spend public money from
requiring fees). They even went so far as to hire a Head of School from one of the last
Mississippi Segregation Acadamies, just in case their "mission" wasn't clear. Admission was
by lottery ("because lotteries are fair!"), unless you happened to be on their
massively bloated and self-appointed Board (including influential local officials, quelle
surprise !). Those with learning differences or languages other than English were
"strongly discouraged" from even applying.
The Charter covered their operating budget with all those "voluntary" contributions, and
had sequestered all the cash squeezed out of the local public schools, in order to buy an
office building (because kids just love preparing for the world of work by going to
school in office buildings!). A local billionaire whose name rhymes with "Netflix" bailed
them out with a $10M donation for the building when it appeared that some in authority might
look askance at who would be the beneficiaries of this insider real estate deal using
skimmed-off public monies.
Scratch a Charter School and 9 times out of 10 there's a real estate deal underlying it
("Because, the children !"). Billionaires should have no more influence than any
other individual voter in making public policy.
Grrrrr, Charter Schools are making me angry. The real estate deal(s), you mention are
absolutely true. Here's another sweet scheme in Arizonia: "The Arizona Republic has reported
that Rep. Eddie Farnsworth stands to make about $30 million from selling three charter
schools he built with taxpayer money.
The toothless Arizona State Board for Charter Schools approved the transfer of his for-profit
charter school to a new, non-profit company. He might collect up to $30 million -- and maybe
even continue running the operation in addition to retaining a $3.8 million share in the new
for-profit company.
The Benjamin Franklin charter schools operate in wealthy neighborhoods. The 3,000 students
have good scores and the schools have a B rating. But that's not surprising, since most of
the parents have high incomes and college educations. If the schools are like most charters
in the state, they're more racially segregated than the campuses in the surrounding school
districts. The state pays the charter schools $2,000 per student more than it pays
traditional school districts like Payson -- which is supposedly to make up for the charter's
inability to issue bonds and such.
However, converting the charters to a non-profit company will enable the schools to avoid
property taxes and qualify for federal education funds. Taxpayers will essentially end up
paying for the same schools twice, since taxpayers have footed the bills for the lease
payments to the tune of about $5 million annually. Now, the new owners will use taxpayer
money to finance the purchase of buildings already paid for by taxpayers."
Stevenson school in Mountain View CA, a public school with PACT (parents and children
together), has a lottery. Its students are 70% white. Across the street, Theuerkauf, which
does not have PACT, is 30% white and no lottery. And a huge difference in the two schools
test scores. Smells illegal.
Also, Google took the former building of the former PACT program hosting school, which
resulted in this grotesque distortion of the supposed public service the school district
provides.
As a former NYC public school teacher who fought against the billionaire-funded hostile
takeover of public education for two decades, I'm gratified to see the beginnings of a
harsher critique of so-called philanthropy, in education and everywhere else.
But the next hurdle is to overcome the tic of always qualifying critique and pushback with
talk of the "good intentions" of these Overclass gorgons. Their intention are not "good" in
the way most human beings construe that word, and are the same as they've always been:
accumulation and establishing the political wherewithal to maintain/facilitiate the same.
This hustle does the added trick of getting the public to subsidize it's own impoverishment
and loss of political power (as in Overclass ed reformers funding efforts to eliminate local
school boards).
When there is near-total congruence between your financial/political interests and the
policies driven by your "philanthropy," the credibility of your "good intentions" transacts
at an extremely high discount, no matter how much you try to dress it up with vacuous and
insipid social justice cliches. For a case in point, just spend five minutes researching the
behavior and rhetoric of Teach For America.
Malanthropy (n): the systemic use of non-profit, tax-exempt entities to facilitate the
economic and political interests of their wealthy endowers, to the detriment of society at
large. See also, Villainthropy.
The critical thing, I have found, is to see "philanthropy" and charitable endeavor as a
cornerstone of capitalism, without which the system would–without any doubt–fail.
Engels and others documented, contemporary scholars have continued to document, the way that
the wives of the first factory owners established almshouses and lying in hospitals where the
deserving poor were separated from the undeserving, dunned with religion and political cant,
and channelled into various forms of work, including reproductive labor. A very big piece of
the neoliberal puzzle involves the rise of the NGO during the Clinton/Blair period, and its
integration with works of the like of the IMF and USAID, the increasing sophistication of
this enterprise which has at times also included union-busting (see Grenada in the aftermath
of the US invasion) and worse. As a State Department function, the Peace Corps integrates the
best of charity, grassroots capitalism, and good old Protestant cant.
I've read the Winners Take All book and it's terrific! Even if you understand the general
outlines, the author will make you see things differently because of his intimate knowledge
of how this ecosystem works. Highly recommended! Also recommend his twitter account,
@AnandWrites
He's really good on "pinkerizing" too, and "Thought Leaders" and how they comfort the
comfortable.
Voters around the world revolt against leaders who won't improve their lives.
Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the Washington Post
that savaged Donald Trump's character and leadership. Romney's attack and Trump's response
Wednesday morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the
two men. It's even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican
nomination in 2020. We'll see.
But for now, Romney's piece is fascinating on its own terms. It's well-worth reading. It's a
window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.
Romney's main complaint in the piece is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and divisive
leader. That's true, of course. But beneath the personal slights, Romney has a policy critique
of Trump. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian
civil war. Romney doesn't explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He doesn't appear
to consider that a relevant question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We
know that. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.
Corporate tax cuts are also popular in Washington, and Romney is strongly on board with
those, too. His piece throws a rare compliment to Trump for cutting the corporate rate a year
ago.
That's not surprising. Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain
Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an
existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt,
extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions.
Romney became fantastically rich doing this.
Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the
private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It's how they run the
country.
Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a finance-based economy and an internationalist
foreign policy as the "mainstream Republican" view. And he's right about that. For generations,
Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while
simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars. Modern Democrats generally support those
goals enthusiastically.
There are signs, however, that most people do not support this, and not just in America. In
countries around the world -- France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and many others
-- voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a
decade ago. These are not isolated events. What you're watching is entire populations revolting
against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.
Something like this has been in happening in our country for three years. Donald Trump rode
a surge of popular discontent all the way to the White House. Does he understand the political
revolution that he harnessed? Can he reverse the economic and cultural trends that are
destroying America? Those are open questions.
But they're less relevant than we think. At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest
of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How
do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.
The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning
cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones,
or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They
haven't so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide
are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be
summed up in GDP is an idiot.
The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It's happiness.
There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence.
Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your
children. They're what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.
But our leaders don't care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to
the people they rule. They're day traders. Substitute teachers. They're just passing through.
They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can't solve our problems. They don't even
bother to understand our problems.
One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything
else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture,
meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this.
Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party
who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words,
functionally libertarian. They don't care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the
markets function. Somehow, they don't see a connection between people's personal lives and the
health of our economy, or for that matter, the country's ability to pay its bills. As far as
they're concerned, these are two totally separate categories.
Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, and yet
reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you'll hear them say, is that the
American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the
libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct.
The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They
refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.
Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined.
Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies
possible. You can't separate the two. It used to be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The
evidence is now overwhelming. How do we know? Consider the inner cities.
Thirty years ago, conservatives looked at Detroit or Newark and many other places and were
horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but disappeared in poor
neighborhoods. The majority of children were born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule.
Crime and drugs and disorder became universal.
What caused this nightmare? Liberals didn't even want to acknowledge the question. They were
benefiting from the disaster, in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a ready
explanation for inner-city dysfunction and it made sense: big government. Decades of
badly-designed social programs had driven fathers from the home and created what conservatives
called a "culture of poverty" that trapped people in generational decline.
There was truth in this. But it wasn't the whole story. How do we know? Because virtually
the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways,
rural America now looks a lot like Detroit.
This is striking because rural Americans wouldn't seem to have much in common with anyone
from the inner city. These groups have different cultures, different traditions and political
beliefs. Usually they have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives,
mostly.
Yet, the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar to anyone who visited downtown
Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A
terrifying drug epidemic. Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen? You'd
think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they're not. They
don't have to be interested. It's easier to import foreign labor to take the place of
native-born Americans who are slipping behind.
But Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here's a big part
of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but
disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools
and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made
more than men.
Now, before you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after
study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don't want to marry them.
Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don't. Over big populations, this causes a drop
in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably
follow -- more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the
next generation.
This isn't speculation. This is not propaganda from the evangelicals. It's social science.
We know it's true. Rich people know it best of all. That's why they get married before they
have kids. That model works. But increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in
America can afford.
And yet, and here's the bewildering and infuriating part, those very same affluent married
people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much
nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight
malaria in Congo. But working to raise men's wages in Dayton or Detroit? That's crazy.
This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our
mindless cultural leaders act like it's still 1961, and the biggest problem American families
face is that sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or
Facebook executives.
For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it's more
virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own
kids.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that our
first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there. Sandberg herself is
one of America's biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this has made her rich.
We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.
They're day traders. Substitute teachers. They're just passing through. They have no skin in
this game, and it shows.
What's remarkable is how the rest of us responded to it. We didn't question why Sandberg was
saying this. We didn't laugh in her face at the pure absurdity of it. Our corporate media
celebrated Sandberg as the leader of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: "Lean
In." As if putting a corporation first is empowerment. It is not. It is bondage. Republicans
should say so.
They should also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all
commerce is good. Why is it defensible to loan people money they can't possibly repay? Or
charge them interest that impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor neighborhoods collect
400 percent annual interest.
We're OK with that? We shouldn't be. Libertarians tell us that's how markets work --
consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it's also
disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans,
whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.
And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, as our leaders should, if it
would break your heart to see them high all the time. Which they are. A huge number of our
kids, especially our boys, are smoking weed constantly. You may not realize that, because new
technology has made it odorless. But it's everywhere.
And that's not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get rich from marijuana,
marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry politicians have legalized or
decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana
industry. His fellow Republicans seem fine with that. "Oh, but it's better for you than
alcohol," they tell us.
Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the point. Try having dinner with a 19-year-old who's
been smoking weed. The life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped in their own heads. Do you want
that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are our leaders pushing it on us? You know the
reason. Because they don't care about us.
When you care about people, you do your best to treat them fairly. Our leaders don't even
try. They hand out jobs and contracts and scholarships and slots at prestigious universities
based purely on how we look. There's nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes
close.
Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate
as someone who's living off inherited money and doesn't work at all. We tax capital at half of
what we tax labor. It's a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of our rich people do.
In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment income. He
paid an effective federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners,
the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But
for everyone else, it's infuriating.
Our leaders rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax code is based on
the principles of the free market. Please. It's based on laws that the Congress passed, laws
that companies lobbied for in order to increase their economic advantage. It worked well for
those people. They did increase their economic advantage. But for everyone else, it came at a
big cost. Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you favor one child over another, your kids
don't hate you. They hate each other.
That happens in countries, too. It's happening in ours, probably by design. Divided
countries are easier to rule. And nothing divides us like the perception that some people are
getting special treatment. In our country, some people definitely are getting special
treatment. Republicans should oppose that with everything they have.
What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A decent country. A cohesive
country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate the forces of change purely for their own
profit and amusement. A country you might recognize when you're old.
A country that listens to young people who don't live in Brooklyn. A country where you can
make a solid living outside of the big cities. A country where Lewiston, Maine seems almost as
important as the west side of Los Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting
outside and picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that respects itself. And
above all, a country where normal people with an average education who grew up in no place
special can get married, and have happy kids, and repeat unto the generations. A country that
actually cares about families, the building block of everything.
What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For now, those leaders will
have to be Republicans. There's no option at this point.
But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a
religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool
to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do
not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys
families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
Internalizing all this will not be easy for Republican leaders. They'll have to unlearn
decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate propaganda. They'll likely lose donors
in the process. They'll be criticized. Libertarians are sure to call any deviation from market
fundamentalism a form of socialism.
That's a lie. Socialism is a disaster. It doesn't work. It's what we should be working
desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we're going to get, and very soon unless a
group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that
protects normal people.
If you want to put America first, you've got to put its families first.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on January 2,
2019.
"... America's "ruling class," Carlson says, are the "mercenaries" behind the failures of the middle class -- including sinking marriage rates -- and "the ugliest parts of our financial system." He went on: "Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society." ..."
"... He concluded with a demand for "a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement." ..."
"... The monologue and its sweeping anti-elitism drove a wedge between conservative writers. The American Conservative's Rod Dreher wrote of Carlson's monologue, "A man or woman who can talk like that with conviction could become president. Voting for a conservative candidate like that would be the first affirmative vote I've ever cast for president. ..."
"... The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Growing Broke ..."
"... Carlson wanted to be clear: He's just asking questions. "I'm not an economic adviser or a politician. I'm not a think tank fellow. I'm just a talk show host," he said, telling me that all he wants is to ask "the basic questions you would ask about any policy." But he wants to ask those questions about what he calls the "religious faith" of market capitalism, one he believes elites -- "mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule" -- have put ahead of "normal people." ..."
"... "What does [free market capitalism] get us?" he said in our call. "What kind of country do you want to live in? If you put these policies into effect, what will you have in 10 years?" ..."
"... Carlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald Trump, whose populist-lite presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as "the smoke alarm ... telling you the building is on fire, and unless you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it." ..."
"... Trump borrowed some of that approach for his 2016 campaign but in office has governed as a fairly orthodox economic conservative, thus demonstrating the demand for populism on the right without really providing the supply and creating conditions for further ferment. ..."
"... Ocasio-Cortez wants a 70-80% income tax on the rich. I agree! Start with the Koch Bros. -- and also make it WEALTH tax. ..."
"... "I'm just saying as a matter of fact," he told me, "a country where a shrinking percentage of the population is taking home an ever-expanding proportion of the money is not a recipe for a stable society. It's not." ..."
"... Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that labor needs economic power, he told me, "Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed." ..."
"... But Carlson's brand of populism, and the populist sentiments sweeping the American right, aren't just focused on the current state of income inequality in America. Carlson tackled a bigger idea: that market capitalism and the "elites" whom he argues are its major drivers aren't working. The free market isn't working for families, or individuals, or kids. In his monologue, Carlson railed against libertarian economics and even payday loans, saying, "If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street" -- sounding very much like Sanders or Warren on the left. ..."
"... Capitalism/liberalism destroys the extended family by requiring people to move apart for work and destroying any sense of unchosen obligations one might have towards one's kin. ..."
"... Hillbilly Elegy ..."
"... Carlson told me that beyond changing our tax code, he has no major policies in mind. "I'm not even making the case for an economic system in particular," he told me. "All I'm saying is don't act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God or a function or raw nature." ..."
"All I'm saying is don't act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God."
Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged
monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.
America's "ruling class," Carlson says, are the "mercenaries" behind the failures of the middle class -- including sinking
marriage rates -- and "the ugliest parts of our financial system." He went on: "Any economic system that weakens and destroys families
is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society."
He concluded with a demand for "a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate
the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement."
The monologue was stunning in itself, an incredible moment in which a Fox News host stated that for generations, "Republicans
have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars." More
broadly, though, Carlson's position and the ensuing controversy reveals an ongoing and nearly unsolvable tension in conservative
politics about the meaning of populism, a political ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.
Moreover, in Carlson's words: "At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone too. The country will remain.
What kind of country will be it be then?"
The monologue and its sweeping anti-elitism drove a wedge between conservative writers. The American Conservative's Rod Dreher
wrote of Carlson's monologue,
"A man or woman who can talk like that with conviction could become president. Voting for a conservative candidate like that would
be the first affirmative vote I've ever cast for president." Other conservative commentators scoffed. Ben Shapiro wrote in
National Review that Carlson's monologue sounded far more like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren than, say, Ronald Reagan.
I spoke with Carlson by phone this week to discuss his monologue and its economic -- and cultural -- meaning. He agreed that his
monologue was reminiscent of Warren, referencing her 2003
bookThe Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Growing Broke . "There were parts of the book that I disagree
with, of course," he told me. "But there are parts of it that are really important and true. And nobody wanted to have that conversation."
Carlson wanted to be clear: He's just asking questions. "I'm not an economic adviser or a politician. I'm not a think tank
fellow. I'm just a talk show host," he said, telling me that all he wants is to ask "the basic questions you would ask about any
policy." But he wants to ask those questions about what he calls the "religious faith" of market capitalism, one he believes elites
-- "mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule" -- have put ahead of "normal people."
But whether or not he likes it, Carlson is an important voice in conservative politics. His show is among the
most-watched television programs in America. And his raising questions about market capitalism and the free market matters.
"What does [free market capitalism] get us?" he said in our call. "What kind of country do you want to live in? If you put
these policies into effect, what will you have in 10 years?"
Populism on the right is gaining, again
Carlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald
Trump, whose populist-lite
presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as "the smoke alarm ... telling you the building is on fire, and unless
you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it."
Populism is a rhetorical approach that separates "the people" from elites. In the
words of Cas
Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia, it divides the country into "two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people
on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other." Populist rhetoric has a long history in American politics, serving as the focal
point of numerous presidential campaigns and powering William Jennings Bryan to the Democratic nomination for president in 1896.
Trump borrowed some of that approach for his 2016 campaign but in office has governed as a fairly orthodox economic conservative,
thus demonstrating the demand for populism on the right without really providing the supply and creating conditions for further ferment.
When right-leaning pundit Ann Coulter
spoke with Breitbart Radio about Trump's Tuesday evening Oval Office address to the nation regarding border wall funding, she
said she wanted to hear him say something like, "You know, you say a lot of wild things on the campaign trail. I'm speaking to big
rallies. But I want to talk to America about a serious problem that is affecting the least among us, the working-class blue-collar
workers":
Coulter urged Trump to bring up overdose deaths from heroin in order to speak to the "working class" and to blame the fact
that working-class wages have stalled, if not fallen, in the last 20 years on immigration. She encouraged Trump to declare, "This
is a national emergency for the people who don't have lobbyists in Washington."
Ocasio-Cortez wants a 70-80% income tax on the rich. I agree! Start with the Koch Bros. -- and also make it WEALTH tax.
These sentiments have even pitted popular Fox News hosts against each other.
Sean Hannity warned his audience that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's economic policies would mean that "the rich people
won't be buying boats that they like recreationally, they're not going to be taking expensive vacations anymore." But Carlson agreed
when I said his monologue was somewhat reminiscent of Ocasio-Cortez's
past comments on the economy , and how even a strong economy was still leaving working-class Americans behind.
"I'm just saying as a matter of fact," he told me, "a country where a shrinking percentage of the population is taking home
an ever-expanding proportion of the money is not a recipe for a stable society. It's not."
Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent
a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that
labor needs economic power, he told me, "Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and
figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed."
"I think populism is potentially really disruptive. What I'm saying is that populism is a symptom of something being wrong," he
told me. "Again, populism is a smoke alarm; do not ignore it."
But Carlson's brand of populism, and the populist sentiments sweeping the American right, aren't just focused on the current
state of income inequality in America. Carlson tackled a bigger idea: that market capitalism and the "elites" whom he argues are
its major drivers aren't working. The free market isn't working for families, or individuals, or kids. In his monologue, Carlson
railed against libertarian economics and even payday loans, saying, "If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation
of Americans, whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street" -- sounding very much like Sanders or Warren on the left.
Carlson's argument that "market capitalism is not a religion" is of course old hat on the left, but it's also been bubbling on
the right for years now. When National Review writer Kevin Williamson
wrote
a 2016 op-ed about how rural whites "failed themselves," he faced a massive backlash in the Trumpier quarters of the right. And
these sentiments are becoming increasingly potent at a time when Americans can see both a booming stock market and perhaps their
own family members struggling to get by.
Capitalism/liberalism destroys the extended family by requiring people to move apart for work and destroying any sense
of unchosen obligations one might have towards one's kin.
At the Federalist, writer Kirk Jing
wrote of Carlson's
monologue, and a
response
to it by National Review columnist David French:
Our society is less French's America, the idea, and more Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" (involving a very different
French). The lowest are stripped of even social dignity and deemed
unworthy of life . In Real America, wages are stagnant, life expectancy is crashing, people are fleeing the workforce, families
are crumbling, and trust in the institutions on top are at all-time lows. To French, holding any leaders of those institutions
responsible for their errors is "victimhood populism" ... The Right must do better if it seeks to govern a real America that exists
outside of its fantasies.
J.D. Vance, author of
Hillbilly Elegy
, wrote that the [neoliberal] economy's victories -- and praise for those wins from conservatives -- were largely meaningless
to white working-class Americans living in Ohio and Kentucky: "Yes, they live in a country with a higher GDP than a generation ago,
and they're undoubtedly able to buy cheaper consumer goods, but to paraphrase Reagan: Are they better off than they were 20 years
ago? Many would say, unequivocally, 'no.'"
Carlson's populism holds, in his view, bipartisan possibilities. In a follow-up email, I asked him why his monologue was aimed
at Republicans when many Democrats had long espoused the same criticisms of free market economics. "Fair question," he responded.
"I hope it's not just Republicans. But any response to the country's systemic problems will have to give priority to the concerns
of American citizens over the concerns of everyone else, just as you'd protect your own kids before the neighbor's kids."
Who is "they"?
And that's the point where Carlson and a host of others on the right who have begun to challenge the conservative movement's orthodoxy
on free markets -- people ranging from occasionally mendacious bomb-throwers like Coulter to writers like
Michael Brendan Dougherty -- separate
themselves from many of those making those exact same arguments on the left.
When Carlson talks about the "normal people" he wants to save from nefarious elites, he is talking, usually, about a specific
group of "normal people" -- white working-class Americans who are the "real" victims of capitalism, or marijuana legalization, or
immigration policies.
In this telling, white working-class Americans who once relied on a manufacturing economy that doesn't look the way it did in
1955 are the unwilling pawns of elites. It's not their fault that, in Carlson's view, marriage is inaccessible to them, or that marijuana
legalization means more teens are smoking weed (
this probably isn't true ). Someone,
or something, did this to them. In Carlson's view, it's the responsibility of politicians: Our economic situation, and the plight
of the white working class, is "the product of a series of conscious decisions that the Congress made."
The criticism of Carlson's monologue has largely focused on how he deviates from the free market capitalism that conservatives
believe is the solution to poverty, not the creator of poverty. To orthodox conservatives, poverty is the result of poor decision
making or a
lack of virtue that can't be solved by government programs or an anti-elite political platform -- and they say Carlson's argument
that elites are in some way responsible for dwindling marriage rates
doesn't make sense .
But in French's response to Carlson, he goes deeper, writing that to embrace Carlson's brand of populism is to support "victimhood
populism," one that makes white working-class Americans into the victims of an undefined "they:
Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes -- civil rights, women's
rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual
revolution, etc. -- and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are
doing to you .
And that was my biggest question about Carlson's monologue, and the flurry of responses to it, and support for it: When other
groups (say, black Americans) have pointed to systemic inequities within the economic system that have resulted in poverty and family
dysfunction, the response from many on the right has been, shall we say,
less than
enthusiastic .
Really, it comes down to when black people have problems, it's personal responsibility, but when white people have the same
problems, the system is messed up. Funny how that works!!
Yet white working-class poverty receives, from Carlson and others, far more sympathy. And conservatives are far more likely to
identify with a criticism of "elites" when they believe those elites are responsible for the
expansion of trans
rights or creeping secularism
than the wealthy and powerful people who are investing in
private prisons or an expansion
of the
militarization of police . Carlson's network, Fox News, and Carlson himself have frequently blasted leftist critics of market
capitalism and efforts to
fight
inequality .
I asked Carlson about this, as his show is frequently centered on the turmoils caused by "
demographic change
." He said that for decades, "conservatives just wrote [black economic struggles] off as a culture of poverty," a line he
includes in his monologue .
He added that regarding black poverty, "it's pretty easy when you've got 12 percent of the population going through something
to feel like, 'Well, there must be ... there's something wrong with that culture.' Which is actually a tricky thing to say because
it's in part true, but what you're missing, what I missed, what I think a lot of people missed, was that the economic system you're
living under affects your culture."
Carlson said that growing up in Washington, DC, and spending time in rural Maine, he didn't realize until recently that the same
poverty and decay he observed in the Washington of the 1980s was also taking place in rural (and majority-white) Maine. "I was thinking,
'Wait a second ... maybe when the jobs go away the culture changes,'" he told me, "And the reason I didn't think of it before was
because I was so blinded by this libertarian economic propaganda that I couldn't get past my own assumptions about economics." (For
the record, libertarians have
critiqued Carlson's
monologue as well.)
Carlson told me that beyond changing our tax code, he has no major policies in mind. "I'm not even making the case for an
economic system in particular," he told me. "All I'm saying is don't act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God or a
function or raw nature."
And clearly, our market economy isn't driven by God or nature, as the stock market soars and unemployment dips and yet even those
on the right are noticing lengthy periods of wage stagnation and dying little towns across the country. But what to do about those
dying little towns, and which dying towns we care about and which we don't, and, most importantly, whose fault it is that those towns
are dying in the first place -- those are all questions Carlson leaves to the viewer to answer.
"... The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents. ..."
"... "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge. ..."
Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic
Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.
The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine
and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.
This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science
but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and
provide fundamental knowledge.
We All Have a Stake in the Stock Market, Right? Guess Again
By PATRICIA COHEN
Take a deep breath and relax.
The riotous market swings that have whipped up frothy peaks of anxiety over the last week
-- bringing the major indexes down more than 10 percent from their high -- have virtually no
impact on the income or wealth of most families. The reason: They own little or no stock.
A whopping 84 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent
of households. And that includes everyone's stakes in pension plans, 401(k)'s and individual
retirement accounts, as well as trust funds, mutual funds and college savings programs like
529 plans.
"For the vast majority of Americans, fluctuations in the stock market have relatively
little effect on their wealth, or well-being, for that matter," said Edward N. Wolff, an
economist at New York University who recently published new research * on the topic....
What I could find says 401(k)s have $5.6T, IRAs have $2.5T, and when you add in pensions, the
total is $29 trillion. Not sure when those numbers are from.
Hard to know what part of that is stocks vs. bonds.
As of last April, US stock markets had $34 trillion and the rest of the world $44 trillion
equiv.
So, if IRA, 401(k) and retirement plans have almost as much wealth as the total of us
stocks, and that is 16% of all stocks... does that mean we
1) Americans own a lot more foreign stocks than foreigners own american stocks
or
2) 84% of retirement assets are bonds?
There is, what? $50 trillion is US debt, much of it backed by bonds.
So, $30 trillion retirement assets, $24.5T bonds and $5.5 trillion stocks... such that
$5.5T is 16% of $34T?
"And it certainly made most Americans poorer. While 2/3 of the corporate tax cut may have
gone to U.S. residents, 84 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the
population. Everyone else will see hardly any benefit."
Wildly unsubstantiated first sentence, though the rest seems likely true. Whether the bulk
went to tax cuts for domestic or foreign national or into the furnace, there was indeed some
sliver that actually went to the rest of us.
Efficiency of what, I might ask? Efficiency of shipping goods halfway around the world from
where people work for less in less safe environments is really the efficiency of theft by
capitalists, not the efficiency of production. Taking from the land and sea and dumping waste
into the land, sea, and air is the efficiency of theft by capitalists too, not the efficiency
of resource use. We are very efficient at making billionaires from externalized costs. We
continue to cheaply sell ourselves out because the price is right. Ask Paine what lies hidden
in the price?
I would prefer unhiding externalized costs and allocating domestic labor to pay those costs,
not with taxes, but with production of domestic goods and the elimination of pollutants and
managed use of limited resources. That's just me and entirely off the subject when it comes
to macroeconomics.
In any case, I am also for Paine's KLV full employment macroeconomics. If anything KLV
macro is more accessible both politically and intellectually than the kinds of price
movements that would be required to place environmentally sustainable caps on carbon
emissions or the commercial menhaden catch. A nominal interest rate for interbank lending
that was maintained by the Fed to persist at just the rate of inflation except for lower when
necessary to recover from a recession is not a terrible thing. The consequence of braking the
economy just to avoid hitting some inflation target is reckless driving. As we know the crash
victims are always labor.
You need to separate Paine's economics from his politics. He believes a peoples' party can
deliver that. It cannot. It will not. As efficiency goes out the door when a small,
unregulated group controls everything. Not to say our version of capitalism has anywhere near
the government regulation I think it needs to reach your(and my) goals. But it is light years
ahead of Paine's dreams.
Paine's economics are insightful and useful. Paine's politics are bifurcated. Paine is as
much for a progressive liberal democrat as he is for an enlightened communist dictator. Which
do you think has a greater chance of actually ever existing in this century?
I'm all in on Paine's economics, but I believe his politics make him an opponent to ever
coming up with progressive liberal democrats running the country.
All or nothing with him, and that makes it beyond hard to move towards that goal. Many in
here like that. I admire them for going through their life without once ever settling for
anything but perfect. I never had that opportunity.
A bunch of small steps are necessary, as the Founders insured that. Raging against those
facts are immense negatives. And it is why Reps win elections.
I am largely in concurrence with you, but I do have some specific caveats.
At least in my part of the country Paine's far left politics are not representative of
anything that we come into contact with in public life. Your politics are bit left of us
here. I am the far left in these parts. Paine's more populous left side is barely represented
by any group in my reality. So, for me, Paine is a unique curiosity reminiscent of my
socialist friends from the 60's and early 70's for which I have seen no analog since the
introduction of Disco and double-knit leisure suits.
The EV crowd in general is a microcosm of nerdiness rather than a microcosm of well
informed constituencies of the US unrepresentative "democracy." There is nothing unsettling
about it. This crowd is as normal as the characters of "Big Bang Theory."
Republicans win elections because they get the most votes. The VA voter turnout for 2018
was almost 60%, well above 2014 and 2010 midterms which were just above 40%. Most people
think that Trump is the most politically divisive POTUS in history, but I think nothing in my
life has done more to unify the Democratic Party given they can curb their enthusiasm about
beating Trump in 2020 enough to not rip the party apart over who gets the spoils.
Turnout for POTUS election in VA has been above and sometimes well above 70% for every
POTUS election since 1975 except for 2000. Turnout for VA gubernatorial elections has been
between 40% and 50% for each election from 1997 up through 2017, but ran much higher before
motor voter stopped the purging of voter registration rolls. VA elects state legislators in
off years for statewide elections with just over 30% of voters showing up.
"...My point is that when you reduce the cost of doing business, or reduce the credit
worthiness of a borrower, you will see greater inefficiency.
Digging holes and filling them in is one way to spend money. Building a road or a building
is another.
Which would you prefer?"
[While I would prefer bridges to digging holes and filling them, my hesitation in
answering this question was with the assumption that lower interest rates generate more
wasteful investment, despite that I know it to be true in some contexts. Speculation is the
problem more than real projects by far. Diversity among investments can be a very good thing.
Failure in this context is just a consequence of innovation by trial and error, one of the
more efficient means. Besides, for private investment the risk spread limits useless
excursions, while the state needs conscious limits on pork perhaps, but pork is also a useful
medium of political exchange. Uncle's discretionary spending is a very small pot of
gold.]
" Many in here like that. I admire them for going through their life without once ever
settling for anything but perfect. I never had that opportunity.
A bunch of small steps are necessary, as the Founders insured that. Raging against those
facts are immense negatives. And it is why Reps win elections."
The New Deal.
The Great Society.
Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid.
EMichael would have argued against all of them as overreaching.
His excuse for the Democrats was that past Presidents had large majorities in
Congress.
He would say the country is too conservative and racist. But they like those programs
now.
"Lower interest make business plans much easier. In doing so, risks are taken that should not
be taken, thus increasing inefficiency.
This is especially true when the planners carry absolutely no financial risk themselves on
a project."
[I understood what you were going for and do not doubt that you have specific instances for
which you are sure that is true. For a few years prior to 2008 then I am sure that was true,
but those "animal spirits" were drunk on more than just low interest rates. There was a
specific sequence of events that played out over a long period of time bringing the US
economy to the precipice of financial system euphoria over the infallibility of markets.
Lenders and borrowers and especially middlemen stared down into the abyss and then kept on
truckin'. Then we all heard a big splat!
Now is not then. Some future now may be then again if we forget about then, but it takes a
lot of stupid to get there, not just low interest rates. Taking a bit more risk, but without
the stupid is how we learn from failure to achieve greater success.
If either the dot.com splat or the mortgage splat were not clearly visible at least three or
four years before the splat then either you need a new prescription for your eye glasses or
you need to step out of that fog that you were living in.
"success through failure" has become a norm of American business, with the PotUS as the
perfect example.
He never got into the casino, steak, wine, water, university, etc. businesses with intent
on making money in those businesses. Heck, he barely breaks even on the condo and golf
businesses.
He creates the towers and golf resorts to promote the name, and promotes the name to be
able to lease it to doomed businesses which he starts with the intent of losing money on the
leasing of his name. I suspect the most profitable thing he's ever done was "realty tv" host
and having a book ghost-written in his name.
And yes, low interest rates DO create easy money, and much of it does find its way into
"success through failure" investments. Why would you loan money to a business that you know
was a scam just created to accumulate debt then go bust? Because you can securitize the debt
and sell it off to Main Street suckers to eat the loss.
Why else "success through failure". Well, I've worked for a company that dumped a lot of
money into a venture it knew was doomed long-term. Why? Because it intended to go IPO, and it
needed the (unprofitable) revenue from the doomed venture to pump its price in the IPO.
I think we'd all agree that "success through failure" is terrible and wish it would go
away. Problem is, it works.
Regarding "Success through failure" I was thinking in terms of the dot.com boom from which
sprang the broadband Internet and Amazon. Out there in Phoenix AZ where you and EMichael live
things must be really crazy. Back in 70's Phoenix was the yuppy Mecca. What happened?
True, not all of the dot.com was bad investment. Just most.
We got a lot of housing built during the housing boom too. Too bad most of it was
2000-3000 sqft McMansions on golf courses, 50 miles from any jobs.
"Out there in Phoenix AZ where you and EMichael live things must be really crazy."
1970 Phoenix metro had 1 million people. Today we're at 4.75 million.
Politics are a mess. Big money is pushing to constantly lower taxes, but now people are
pushing back wanting more funding for schools. Surprisingly, we've passed phased in $12
minimum wage and medical marijuana (recreational failed by less than 1%), and now have split
representation at the federal level indicating a move toward liberal.
And yet, we'll still very Republican in the state house and go highly conservative on many
other issues such as animal rights. A recent "green energy initiative" failed ugly.
So, to sum it up... Pretty Liberal, but Very CONservative, with a HUGE swing vote that
goes this-way-and-that in random directions and on different issues...
...but in general want low taxes, are hate big government...
...except on the things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, education,
transportation, police, fire, courts, justice system, boarder security, anti-terrorism, and
the rest of stuff government actually spends almost all of its money on...
... but are all for getting rid of all the wasteful government that practically doesn't
really exist...
... and we definitely want religious freedom, as long as that religion is Christianity and
the freedom is to force their views onto others, and not allow other religions to have a
place in society.
No one notices that the biggest factor in the housing bubble was bush ordering the OCC to
take regulation of national banks out of the hands of the states.
The population increase? People would have to be somewhere, and unlike coastal California
with those stupid oceans, bays and mountains... Phoenix has plenty of open space.
2000-3000 sqft mcmansions 50 miles from jobs? Probably true. Without the housing bubble we
would have hit the wall on housing and caused massive rent spike a decade ago instead of a
few years ago. With that massive rent increase then instead of now, meaning that a decade ago
we would have seen the in-building of small apartments and condos that we are now
getting.
Net, we probably would have been better off with more in-building of smaller, multi-family
units instead of massive sprawl of McMansions.
Don't complain too much. The "massive sprawl of McMansions" is a sure sign of widespread
prosperity. Here in eastern Henrico County VA we have the massive sprawl of McCracker boxes
instead although not just crackers live in them. McMansions are usually on at least 1/2 acre
lots, while McCracker boxes are built so close together that most of the time there was not
room left for a driveway and people park on the street except that some of those streets are
actually the highways to the neighboring cracker box town. On street parking is just one sign
of poverty. There are also drug related shootings just like in the big city.
In eastern Henrico there are only a few small McMansion developments in prime real estate
overlooking the flood plain of the James River where there is any such high ground in eastern
Henrico near the river. Chesterfield County across the James River has the advantage of very
high ground near the James River at River's Bend, a.k.a, Meadowville, where there is plenty
room for a golf course and marina as well as loads of McMansions and high-end apartment
buildings. High and dry western Henrico County is where they build the McMansions along with
all the exclusive high end shopping. The "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands" was probably sad
because her basement flooded whenever it rained:<)
I was adding a tad to the "inefficiencies" discussion caused by disconnecting loan
origination from loss risk.
I got my piece of the giant federal government giveaway needed to clean up the mess. In
2011 I bought a 1000 sqft condo for $48K that I now have leased out for a nice cash-flow
positive $600+ a month and true after-tax profit of about the same $600 a month (add $100 of
the payment that is principal reduction, then subtract 22% income tax on $500 a month ($700
profit - $200 depreciation)).
If you notice the purchase price doesn't match the depreciation, yeah, I've done over $20K
in additional capital improvements that increase the base including new roof, new HVAC,
replaced all aluminum windows and doors with high-E, gutted and replaced the kitchen and both
baths. Summer cooling bill was cut by more than half from ~$300 to ~$125 by the new windows
and doors and more efficient HVAC, increasing the monthly rent accordingly.
I've only been spending abut $400 of that $600 profit, letting the rest accumulate for
maintenance, repairs, upgrades.
Oh, I also save about $250 a month on the mortgage of my primary by locking in 3% interest
rate.
Not big deals in the grand scheme, but the boom->crash->rent squeeze worked out okay
for me personally.... for now.
To be perfectly honest, it is exactly those kinds of houses that the Phoenix market needs
a lot more of.
Switching from those to McMansions, then hardly any construction at all for 6 or 7 years,
is why there is such a crunch on housing, and skyrocketing rents and house prices now.
Even now they aren't building many of those small single family homes.
They are building redevelopment/in-fill condos in downtown/near ASU in Tempe and
apartments in the middle-burbs.
The Tax Cut and the Balance of Payments (Wonkish)
Lots of financial maneuvering, signifying nothing
By Paul Krugman
What tax cuts were supposed to do
A tax cut for corporations looks, on its face, like a big giveaway to stockholders, mainly
bypassing ordinary families: of stocks held by Americans, 84 percent are held by the
wealthiest 10 percent; * 35 percent of U.S. stocks are held by foreigners. **
The claim by tax cut advocates was, however, that the tax cut would be passed through to
workers, because we live in an integrated global capital market. There were multiple reasons
not to believe this argument in practice, but it's still worth working through its
implications....
The key point to realize is that in today's globalized corporate system, a lot of any
country's corporate sector, our own very much included, is actually owned by foreigners,
either directly because corporations here are foreign subsidiaries, or indirectly because
foreigners own American stocks. Indeed, roughly a third of U.S. corporate profits basically
flow to foreign nationals – which means that a third of the tax cut flowed abroad,
rather than staying at home. This probably outweighs any positive effect on GDP growth. So
the tax cut probably made America poorer, not richer.
And it certainly made most Americans poorer. While 2/3 of the corporate tax cut may have
gone to U.S. residents, 84 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the
population. Everyone else will see hardly any benefit....
Steven Rattner's Charts in the New York Times Don't Show He Says They Show
By Dean Baker
Steven Rattner used his New York Times column * to present a number of charts to show
Donald Trump's failures as president. While some, like the drop in enrollments in the health
care exchanges, do in fact show failure, others do not really make his case.
For example, he has a chart with a headline "paltry raise for the middle class." What his
chart actually shows is that middle class wages, adjusted for inflation, fell sharply in the
recession, but have been rising roughly 1.0 percent a year since 2014. They recovered their
pre-recession levels in 2017 and now are almost a percentage point above the 2008 level. This
is not a great story, but the picture under Trump is certainly better than under Obama. (This
wasn't entirely Obama's fault, since he inherited an economy that was failing.)
The chart shows more rapid growth at the bottom of the pay ladder and a modest downturn
under Trump for those at the top. By recent standards, this is not a bad picture, even if
Trump does not especially deserve credit for it. (He came in with an unemployment rate that
was low and falling.)
Rattner also presents as a bad sign projections for fewer Federal Reserve rate hikes.
While one basis for projecting fewer rate hikes is that the economy now looks weaker for 2019
than had been thought earlier in the year (but still stronger than had been projected in
2016), another reason is that inflation is lower than expected. Economists have consistently
over-estimated the impact that low unemployment would have on the inflation rate. With
inflation coming in lower than projected, there is less reason for the Fed to raise
rates.
Contrary to what Rattner is implying, this is a good development. It means that the
unemployment rate can continue to fall and workers at the middle and the bottom of the pay
ladder can continue to see real wage gains.
Rattner also shows us how growth projections for the U.S. and the world have been lowered
since June of 2018. It's not clear how much Trump can be held responsible for growth in the
EU (try blaming the European Commission's austerity drive) and the rest of the world, but his
argument about the U.S. is pretty weak. The 2.4 percent growth projection from December 2018
is actually up 0.1 percentage point from the June projection. More importantly, it is up from
a projection of 1.7 percent from January of 2017, the month Trump took office.
Then we have the chart showing the rise in the debt relative to GDP. While Rattner is
right that the tax cuts to the rich were a waste of resources, the higher debt to GDP ratio
is basically meaningless. (Japan's debt to GDP ratio is almost 250 percent and the current
interest rate on its long-term bonds is 0.00 percent.)
If anyone is seriously concerned about the debt that the government is passing on to
future generations then it is also necessary to include the rents associated with patent and
copyright monopolies. These monopolies are alternative mechanisms to direct funding that the
government uses to pay for services (i.e. research and creative work).
To take the most important case, suppose the government were the replace the $70 billion
(0.35 percent of GDP) in patent monopoly supported research that the pharmaceutical industry
conducts each year with direct funding of $70 billion. All research findings could then be
placed in the public domain and new drugs would sell at generic prices.
Rattner and his crew would count the $70 billion in addition spending as an addition to
the debt and deficit. However, when the industry is able to charge the public an extra $360
billion ** (1.8 percent of GDP) a year in higher drug prices due to patent monopolies and
related protections, Rattner and company choose to ignore the burden. This sort of groundless
debt fear mongering deserves only ridicule; it is not serious economic analysis.
Trump has done many awful things as president and threatens to do many more. But this is
not a reason to adopt Trumpian tactics, the data provide plenty of grounds to attack his
performance without playing games with it.
E.J. Dionne Provides Classic Example of Liberals Missing the Boat
By Dean Baker
I often rail against liberals who wring their hands over the unfortunate folks who have
been left behind by globalization and technology. E.J. Dionne gave us a classic example * of
such hand-wringing in his piece today on the need to help the left behinds to keep them from
becoming flaming reactionaries.
For some reason, it is difficult for many liberals to grasp the idea that the bad plight
of tens of millions of middle class workers did not just happen, but rather was deliberately
engineered. Longer and stronger patent and copyright protection did not just happen, it was
deliberate policy. Subjecting manufacturing workers to global competition, while largely
protecting doctors, dentists, and other highly paid professionals was also a policy
decisions. Saving the Wall Street banks from the consequences of their own greed and
incompetence was also conscious policy.
I know it's difficult for intellectuals to grasp new ideas, but if we want to talk
seriously about rising inequality, then it will be necessary for them to try. (Yeah, I'm
advertising my - free - book "Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy
Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer" ** again.) Anyhow, let's hope that in 2019 we can
actually talk about the policies that were put in place to redistribute income upward and not
just pretend that Bill Gates and his ilk getting all the money was a natural process.
"... By James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations, University of Texas at Austin. Originally published at the Institute of New Economic Thinking website ..."
Yves here. It's surprising to see Piketty and even more so, one of this co-authors, Gabriel
Zucman, make such strong claims for tax data as a way to measure income inequality. The rich
and super rich engage in tax avoidance and evasion, to the degree that Zucman has estimated
that 6% of the world's wealth is hidden. First, that wealth was hidden to avoid paying taxes on
it and/or to hide its criminal origins (such as looting governments). Second, the income on
hidden wealth is also by nature hidden.
By James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations,
University of Texas at Austin. Originally published at
the Institute of New Economic Thinking website
Thomas Piketty and his colleagues
[1] have produced a new exposition of their empirical work, entitled the World
Inequality Report 2018 (hereafter: WIR). Their purpose is to showcase the
exploration of income and wealth inequalities begun with the World Top Incomes
Database (Atkinson and Piketty 2010) and theorized in Piketty's epic Capital in the
XXI Century (2014) . In particular the WIR concentrates on the presentation of
measures and evidence; the stated goal is to inform a "deliberative process" with "more
rigorous and transparent information on income and wealth" than has been available to date. In
a review
article published on-line and open access in Development and Change on December
24, 2018, I initiate this "deliberative process" by examining the WIR data and the claims made
for it.
The ground-breaking, systematic and transparent methodology on which the WIR rests is
largely the use of tax records–specifically income tax records–mined to show the
income shares of tranches of the income-earning population: top one percent, top ten percent,
next forty percent, and bottom fifty percent are the usual divisions. These Piketty and his
colleagues argue are more complete, comprehensive, and comparable across countries and through
time than the generally-used alternative, which is household or person-based surveys.
The WIR authors write disparagingly of the "Gini index" -- the inequality measure most
prevalent in such surveys -- which they find too "technical" and not sufficiently intuitive.
But they also object to survey methods: "The main problem with household surveys, however, is
that they usually rely entirely on self-reported information about income and wealth. As a
consequence, they misrepresent top income and wealth levels, and therefore overall inequality."
(p. 29) This sweeping critique carries on for several pages, brushing aside a body of research
comprising thousands of papers and millions of survey observations, including the work of the
Luxembourg Income Studies, the World Bank, Eurostat, the Economic Commission for Latin America,
and the United States Census Bureau among scores of national data-collection agencies. It is a
repudiation of what almost every previous researcher has done in this field over fifty
years.
But are tax data really better? Where survey and tax measures both exist, and report
different results, should one systematically prefer a measure based on taxes? The answer
depends in part on the quality of the survey measures. But it also must depend in part
on the quality, consistency, length and continuity of the national tax record, and in
particular of the income tax. The WIR authors acknowledge that tax data have limits, in
particular they cannot cover income and wealth hidden from tax authorities in tax havens. But
the question of the quality of tax records goes much further than this.
My new essay examines the question from three points of view: the coverage provided by tax
data in the world economy, the consistency of tax data with other sources of information on
income inequality, and the peculiarities of tax-based measurement of inequality in the United
States. It goes on to make a comparison with measures drawn from other forms of administrative
data -- specifically payroll records, used by the University of Texas Inequality Project -- which are generally
more consistent with
records of inequality measured in household surveys than are the WIR's tax records.
In brief summary, the review shows that by comparison with payroll and survey data,
available records from tax files are relatively sparse, and biased toward wealthier countries
and those that were once British colonies, which imposed income tax. It shows that tax data are
far less consistent with survey and payroll records than are the latter two with each other.
And it shows that even within the United States, a country with good tax records by world
standards, changes in tax law distort the WIR's measures of changes in the top income shares,
while a misunderstanding of the nature of low-income tax filers in the US leads to a dramatic
but nonsensical claim that the earnings of the bottom 50 percent of Americans have "collapsed"
in recent decades.
Overall, the review casts doubt on claims by the authors of the World Inequality
Report to have produced major advances in the study of world economic inequality, and
documents that many of the findings touted in the Report as new and unprecedented have in fact
been reported in the literature for years, even decades in some cases.
[1] The credited co-authors are Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel
Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
Figure 1 Top One Percent Shares from the World Inequality Database, showing an
unacknowledged data break due to the US Tax Reform Act of 1986. Adjusting the data for the
change in the tax definition of income would show that the US top share tracks the UK and
Canada very closely. Low numbers for France and Italy are likely due to inferior tax recording
of high income persons, not an underlying condition of less inequality.
I do not see your and the essay's point about tax evasion impacting actual reported income
more harshly than surveys. Even in cases where answers to surveys are required by law, the
penalties and effort undertaken by enforcement agencies are going to be several orders of
magnitude greater in cases of tax evasion compared to incorrect survey answers. Furthermore
income taxes are frequently automated which makes correct or at least some reporting the
default case while the default state of surveys is no data at all. Only by taking action is
any data generated. While it is theoreticaly possible that surveys are more accurate because
the incentive of lower taxes is also stronger, the logic argument given here is not
self-evident and actual empirical data is needed for prove.
The critic regarding change in tax reporting over time is quite correct altough I am far
from certain that neither survey methods nor questions haven't changed over the last century.
A feature not talked about at all is samplesize which always favours actual tax data over
surveys given that everyone with an income over a small threshold must pay taxes.
The only empirical evidence provided in the essay is self-referential. If one proxy
(survey data) is faulty correlation between it and another proxy (payroll records) does not
prove that the first proxy is correct because it remains possible that both proxies have the
same deficiencies and are therefore correlated – instead of both being a good
approximation of reality.
This is not to say that the essay must be wrong or Piketty et al's assertions must be
right, but with only the information provided here a lack of evidence still exists in my
opinion.
this line towards the end: " nonsensical claim that the earnings of the bottom 50 percent
of Americans have "collapsed" in recent decades." is nonsensical itself. Anyone who doesn't
believe that low and middle income earners' incomes have collapsed is living in a very opaque
bubble, head firmly planted up *ss.
I earned $12.00 per hour in retail with only a high school education in the early 1980s.
I'm Canadian but I don't think the two countries are so different in this regard. In 2018
dollars, according to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator that is $26.00 per hour!! Do
you know anyone in retail with only a high school education earning $26.00 per hour today? My
husband, again, no high school, was making twice that amount in a steel mill in the eighties.
Know anyone earning almost $60 per hour in any kind of factory work today? I sure don't. That
includes the people who work in that factory now, it is mostly precarious contract work, at
much lower wages, the union having been busted long ago
Further, I went back to school in the late 80s and ended with my Masters in Library
Science, my first full-time job in the early 90s had me earning the 1990ish equivalent of
that $12.00 per hour, things were already going south. It took me quite a few more years to
outpace that 1980 retail wage. My husband and I are living proof that wages have collapsed. I
don't care how anecdotal that is, I know the truth, just by looking around and talking to
people.
It is beyond frustrating to have to argue against this stuff.
One question for the author. How do you account for the fact that payroll records, at
least as I understand them, generally omit capital gains which is where the upper income
generally get most of their real wealth. Stock buybacks and share disbursements are not
generally considered "payroll" as I understand it.
The advantage of tax is that it should, at least in theory, show money received by
individuals rather than just money sent out in one category.
Although he is certainly a giant, Knuth will never be able to complete this monograph - the
technology developed too quickly. Three volumes came out in 1963-1968 and then there was a lull.
January 10, he will be 81. At this age it is difficult to work in the field of mathematics and
system programming. So we will probably never see the complete fourth volume.
This inability to
finish the work he devoted a large part of hi life is definitely a tragedy. The key problem here is
that now it is simply impossible to cover the whole area of system programming and
related algorithms for one person. But the first three volumes played tremendous positive role
for sure.
Also he was distracted for several years to create TeX. He needed to create a non-profit and
complete this work by attracting the best minds from the outside. But he is by nature a loner,
as many great scientists are, and prefer to work this way.
His other mistake is due to the fact that MIX - his emulator was too far from the IBM S/360, which became the standard de-facto
in mid-60th. He then realized that this was a blunder and replaced MIX with more modem emulator MIXX, but it was
"too little, too late" and it took time and effort. So the first three volumes and fragments of the fourth is all
that we have now and probably forever.
Not all volumes fared equally well with time. The third volume suffered most IMHO and as of 2019 is partially obsolete. Also it was
written by him in some haste and some parts of it are are far from clearly written ( it was based on earlier
lectures of Floyd, so it was oriented of single CPU computers only. Now when multiprocessor
machines, huge amount of RAM and SSD hard drives are the norm, the situation is very different from late 60th. It requires different sorting
algorithms (the importance of mergesort increased, importance of quicksort decreased). He also got too carried away with sorting random numbers and establishing upper bound and
average
run time. The real data is almost never random and typically contain sorted fragments. For example, he overestimated the
importance of quicksort and thus pushed the discipline in the wrong direction.
Notable quotes:
"... These days, it is 'coding', which is more like 'code-spraying'. Throw code at a problem until it kind of works, then fix the bugs in the post-release, or the next update. ..."
"... AI is a joke. None of the current 'AI' actually is. It is just another new buzz-word to throw around to people that do not understand it at all. ..."
"... One good teacher makes all the difference in life. More than one is a rare blessing. ..."
With more than one million copies in print, "The Art of Computer Programming " is the Bible
of its field. "Like an actual bible, it is long and comprehensive; no other book is as
comprehensive," said Peter Norvig, a director of research at Google. After 652 pages, volume
one closes with a blurb on the back cover from Bill Gates: "You should definitely send me a
résumé if you can read the whole thing."
The volume opens with an excerpt from " McCall's Cookbook ":
Here is your book, the one your thousands of letters have asked us to publish. It has
taken us years to do, checking and rechecking countless recipes to bring you only the best,
only the interesting, only the perfect.
Inside are algorithms, the recipes that feed the digital age -- although, as Dr. Knuth likes
to point out, algorithms can also be found on Babylonian tablets from 3,800 years ago. He is an
esteemed algorithmist; his name is attached to some of the field's most important specimens,
such as the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string-searching algorithm. Devised in 1970, it finds all
occurrences of a given word or pattern of letters in a text -- for instance, when you hit
Command+F to search for a keyword in a document.
... ... ...
During summer vacations, Dr. Knuth made more money than professors earned in a year by
writing compilers. A compiler is like a translator, converting a high-level programming
language (resembling algebra) to a lower-level one (sometimes arcane binary) and, ideally,
improving it in the process. In computer science, "optimization" is truly an art, and this is
articulated in another Knuthian proverb: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Eventually Dr. Knuth became a compiler himself, inadvertently founding a new field that he
came to call the "analysis of algorithms." A publisher hired him to write a book about
compilers, but it evolved into a book collecting everything he knew about how to write for
computers -- a book about algorithms.
... ... ...
When Dr. Knuth started out, he intended to write a single work. Soon after, computer science
underwent its Big Bang, so he reimagined and recast the project in seven volumes. Now he metes
out sub-volumes, called fascicles. The next installation, "Volume 4, Fascicle 5," covering,
among other things, "backtracking" and "dancing links," was meant to be published in time for
Christmas. It is delayed until next April because he keeps finding more and more irresistible
problems that he wants to present.
In order to optimize his chances of getting to the end, Dr. Knuth has long guarded his time.
He retired at 55, restricted his public engagements and quit email (officially, at least).
Andrei Broder recalled that time management was his professor's defining characteristic even in
the early 1980s.
Dr. Knuth typically held student appointments on Friday mornings, until he started spending
his nights in the lab of John McCarthy, a founder of artificial intelligence, to get access to
the computers when they were free. Horrified by what his beloved book looked like on the page
with the advent of digital publishing, Dr. Knuth had gone on a mission to create the TeX
computer typesetting system, which remains the gold standard for all forms of scientific
communication and publication. Some consider it Dr. Knuth's greatest contribution to the world,
and the greatest contribution to typography since Gutenberg.
This decade-long detour took place back in the age when computers were shared among users
and ran faster at night while most humans slept. So Dr. Knuth switched day into night, shifted
his schedule by 12 hours and mapped his student appointments to Fridays from 8 p.m. to
midnight. Dr. Broder recalled, "When I told my girlfriend that we can't do anything Friday
night because Friday night at 10 I have to meet with my adviser, she thought, 'This is
something that is so stupid it must be true.'"
... ... ...
Lucky, then, Dr. Knuth keeps at it. He figures it will take another 25 years to finish "The
Art of Computer Programming," although that time frame has been a constant since about 1980.
Might the algorithm-writing algorithms get their own chapter, or maybe a page in the epilogue?
"Definitely not," said Dr. Knuth.
"I am worried that algorithms are getting too prominent in the world," he added. "It started
out that computer scientists were worried nobody was listening to us. Now I'm worried that too
many people are listening."
Thanks Siobhan for your vivid portrait of my friend and mentor. When I came to Stanford as
an undergrad in 1973 I asked who in the math dept was interested in puzzles. They pointed me
to the computer science dept, where I met Knuth and we hit it off immediately. Not only a
great thinker and writer, but as you so well described, always present and warm in person. He
was also one of the best teachers I've ever had -- clear, funny, and interested in every
student (his elegant policy was each student can only speak twice in class during a period,
to give everyone a chance to participate, and he made a point of remembering everyone's
names). Some thoughts from Knuth I carry with me: finding the right name for a project is
half the work (not literally true, but he labored hard on finding the right names for TeX,
Metafont, etc.), always do your best work, half of why the field of computer science exists
is because it is a way for mathematically minded people who like to build things can meet
each other, and the observation that when the computer science dept began at Stanford one of
the standard interview questions was "what instrument do you play" -- there was a deep
connection between music and computer science, and indeed the dept had multiple string
quartets. But in recent decades that has changed entirely. If you do a book on Knuth (he
deserves it), please be in touch.
I remember when programming was art. I remember when programming was programming. These
days, it is 'coding', which is more like 'code-spraying'. Throw code at a problem until it
kind of works, then fix the bugs in the post-release, or the next update.
AI is a joke. None
of the current 'AI' actually is. It is just another new buzz-word to throw around to people
that do not understand it at all. We should be in a golden age of computing. Instead, we are
cutting all corners to get something out as fast as possible. The technology exists to do far
more. It is the human element that fails us.
My particular field of interest has always been compiler writing and have been long
awaiting Knuth's volume on that subject. I would just like to point out that among Kunth's
many accomplishments is the invention of LR parsers, which are widely used for writing
programming language compilers.
Yes, \TeX, and its derivative, \LaTeX{} contributed greatly to being able to create
elegant documents. It is also available for the web in the form MathJax, and it's about time
the New York Times supported MathJax. Many times I want one of my New York Times comments to
include math, but there's no way to do so! It comes up equivalent to:
$e^{i\pi}+1$.
I read it at the time, because what I really wanted to read was volume 7, Compilers. As I
understood it at the time, Professor Knuth wrote it in order to make enough money to build an
organ. That apparantly happened by 3:Knuth, Searching and Sorting. The most impressive part
is the mathemathics in Semi-numerical (2:Knuth). A lot of those problems are research
projects over the literature of the last 400 years of mathematics.
I own the three volume "Art of Computer Programming", the hardbound boxed set. Luxurious.
I don't look at it very often thanks to time constraints, given my workload. But your article
motivated me to at least pick it up and carry it from my reserve library to a spot closer to
my main desk so I can at least grab Volume 1 and try to read some of it when the mood
strikes. I had forgotten just how heavy it is, intellectual content aside. It must weigh more
than 25 pounds.
I too used my copies of The Art of Computer Programming to guide me in several projects in
my career, across a variety of topic areas. Now that I'm living in Silicon Valley, I enjoy
seeing Knuth at events at the Computer History Museum (where he was a 1998 Fellow Award
winner), and at Stanford. Another facet of his teaching is the annual Christmas Lecture, in
which he presents something of recent (or not-so-recent) interest. The 2018 lecture is
available online - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cR9zDlvP88
One of the most special treats for first year Ph.D. students in the Stanford University
Computer Science Department was to take the Computer Problem-Solving class with Don Knuth. It
was small and intimate, and we sat around a table for our meetings. Knuth started the
semester by giving us an extremely challenging, previously unsolved problem. We then formed
teams of 2 or 3. Each week, each team would report progress (or lack thereof), and Knuth, in
the most supportive way, would assess our problem-solving approach and make suggestions for
how to improve it. To have a master thinker giving one feedback on how to think better was a
rare and extraordinary experience, from which I am still benefiting! Knuth ended the semester
(after we had all solved the problem) by having us over to his house for food, drink, and
tales from his life. . . And for those like me with a musical interest, he let us play the
magnificent pipe organ that was at the center of his music room. Thank you Professor Knuth,
for giving me one of the most profound educational experiences I've ever had, with such
encouragement and humor!
I learned about Dr. Knuth as a graduate student in the early 70s from one of my professors
and made the financial sacrifice (graduate student assistantships were not lucrative) to buy
the first and then the second volume of the Art of Computer Programming. Later, at Bell Labs,
when I was a bit richer, I bought the third volume. I have those books still and have used
them for reference for years. Thank you Dr, Knuth. Art, indeed!
@Trerra In the good old days, before Computer Science, anyone could take the Programming
Aptitude Test. Pass it and companies would train you. Although there were many mathematicians
and scientists, some of the best programmers turned out to be music majors. English, Social
Sciences, and History majors were represented as well as scientists and mathematicians. It
was a wonderful atmosphere to work in . When I started to look for a job as a programmer, I
took Prudential Life Insurance's version of the Aptitude Test. After the test, the
interviewer was all bent out of shape because my verbal score was higher than my math score;
I was a physics major. Luckily they didn't hire me and I got a job with IBM.
In summary, "May the force be with you" means: Did you read Donald Knuth's "The Art of
Computer Programming"? Excellent, we loved this article. We will share it with many young
developers we know.
Dr. Knuth is a great Computer Scientist. Around 25 years ago, I met Dr. Knuth in a small
gathering a day before he was awarded a honorary Doctorate in a university. This is my
approximate recollection of a conversation. I said-- " Dr. Knuth, you have dedicated your
book to a computer (one with which he had spent a lot of time, perhaps a predecessor to
PDP-11). Isn't it unusual?". He said-- "Well, I love my wife as much as anyone." He then
turned to his wife and said --"Don't you think so?". It would be nice if scientists with the
gift of such great minds tried to address some problems of ordinary people, e.g. a model of
economy where everyone can get a job and health insurance, say, like Dr. Paul Krugman.
I was in a training program for women in computer systems at CUNY graduate center, and
they used his obtuse book. It was one of the reasons I dropped out. He used a fantasy
language to describe his algorithms in his book that one could not test on computers. I
already had work experience as a programmer with algorithms and I know how valuable real
languages are. I might as well have read Animal Farm. It might have been different if he was
the instructor.
Don Knuth's work has been a curious thread weaving in and out of my life. I was first
introduced to Knuth and his The Art of Computer Programming back in 1973, when I was tasked
with understanding a section of the then-only-two-volume Book well enough to give a lecture
explaining it to my college algorithms class. But when I first met him in 1981 at Stanford,
he was all-in on thinking about typography and this new-fangled system of his called TeX.
Skip a quarter century. One day in 2009, I foolishly decided kind of on a whim to rewrite TeX
from scratch (in my copious spare time), as a simple C library, so that its typesetting
algorithms could be put to use in other software such as electronic eBook's with high-quality
math typesetting and interactive pictures. I asked Knuth for advice. He warned me, prepare
yourself, it's going to consume five years of your life. I didn't believe him, so I set off
and tried anyway. As usual, he was right.
I have signed copied of "Fundamental Algorithms" in my library, which I treasure. Knuth
was a fine teacher, and is truly a brilliant and inspiring individual. He taught during the
same period as Vint Cerf, another wonderful teacher with a great sense of humor who is truly
a "father of the internet". One good teacher makes all the difference in life. More than
one is a rare blessing.
I am a biologist, specifically a geneticist. I became interested in LaTeX typesetting
early in my career and have been either called pompous or vilified by people at all levels
for wanting to use. One of my PhD advisors famously told me to forget LaTeX because it was a
thing of the past. I have now forgotten him completely. I still use LaTeX almost every day in
my work even though I don't generally typeset with equations or algorithms. My students
always get trained in using proper typesetting. Unfortunately, the publishing industry has
all but largely given up on TeX. Very few journals in my field accept TeX manuscripts, and
most of them convert to word before feeding text to their publishing software. Whatever
people might argue against TeX, the beauty and elegance of a property typeset document is
unparalleled. Long live LaTeX
A few years ago Severo Ornstein (who, incidentally, did the hardware design for the first
router, in 1969), and his wife Laura, hosted a concert in their home in the hills above Palo
Alto. During a break a friend and I were chatting when a man came over and *asked* if he
could chat with us (a high honor, indeed). His name was Don. After a few minutes I grew
suspicious and asked "What's your last name?" Friendly, modest, brilliant; a nice addition to
our little chat.
When I was a physics undergraduate (at Trinity in Hartford), I was hired to re-write
professor's papers into TeX. Seeing the beauty of TeX, I wrote a program that re-wrote my lab
reports (including graphs!) into TeX. My lab instructors were amazed! How did I do it? I
never told them. But I just recognized that Knuth was a genius and rode his coat-tails, as I
have continued to do for the last 30 years!
A famous quote from Knuth: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it
correct, not tried it." Anyone who has ever programmed a computer will feel the truth of this
in their bones.
"... Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market. ..."
"... The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go? ..."
"... Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership. ..."
"... family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery. ..."
"... Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo. ..."
"... Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs. ..."
"... So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context. ..."
"... Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this. I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries. ..."
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle
for access to the basics
... ... ...
The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of
our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom.
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access
to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
... ... ...
Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing –
just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality
or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.
Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even
guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more
to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?
mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37
Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring
an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then
maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its
day, it has mutated into criminality.
Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23
In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now
we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.
The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees.
Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying
their own grave diggers.
mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17
I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend
a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser.
It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's
been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some
light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.
Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42
We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always
choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in
each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!
Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19
Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet
given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through
their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.
BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10
Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic
systems that have been tried from time to time.
I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not
having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.
brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52
As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy,
nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work
doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations.
I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial.
We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power,
we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."
Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31
Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we
need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04
You'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think
it should be rather than what it is.
It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism.
It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.
AmyInNH -> tommydog
They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?
And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have
many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations
can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based
green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment
insurance, etc.
Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the
fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.
No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion
that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The
linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college
graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed
stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero,
as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever),
and average black family wealth in the four figures.
The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to
racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college
graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing
jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become
homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.
But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white
ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply
not the case, and the difference does matter.
Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where
I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want,
but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling
to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed
oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.
If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of
economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that
blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have
enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit
of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.
Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no
reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless
or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many
of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.
But nor are they any better.
JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23
I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of
the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly
supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until
we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What
does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization
of markets and power?
Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill
others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power
is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability,
while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society.
A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice
prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few,
as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt,
and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the
people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?
AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15
You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side
of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.
And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly
isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.
Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53
Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out
your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.
The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension
fund go?
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government
also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled.
Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency
of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by
the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership
class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.
The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument
that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building
within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power
(power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited
from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies
and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules – policy changes they've used their
wealth to champion.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44
Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician
and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms – human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the
rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production – physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs,
like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely
on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and
for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through
the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule,
as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans
own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent
of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious
value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive
assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs
and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will
continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive
capital.
As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages
and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent
majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy
is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic
growth from the slavery of past savings.
I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives
are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP
class they too overwhelmingly belong to.
Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have
on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP
universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)
The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed
in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American
economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital
asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive
opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13
I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in
the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists
are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I
would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their
kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does
seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty
and without a father figure adds to the problem.
What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion
of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a
wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the
wealth is well-known in many countries.
nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59
Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you
are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and
rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32
Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive
taxation.
In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater
equality.
Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.
We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.
They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.
Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and
they have been doing nothing for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone
else doing all the work.
Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.
The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.
The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied
externally.
Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31
I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually
read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.
Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their
local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as
a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together
and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans
and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the
United States". That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking
around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.
Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino
population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more
money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.
family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300
to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans
to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.
soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26
It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people
and stole their land and wealth.
When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.
David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted
with the Leisure Class.
I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on
their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.
George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:
"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the
17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next
in line."
If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.
"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported
by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted
from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but
much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.
DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow
(miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting
pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for
their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say,
"life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender
or both.
Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally
enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most
in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these
facts help to fog the issue.
Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means
capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that
ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various
institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially
recognized as such.
HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just
mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME,
unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed
to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.
This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to
office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder:
If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again,
if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block,
often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary
changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk
about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it
has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism
by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal
contradictions.
mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08
Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might
find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.
Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere
in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that
you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have
a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt
to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.
Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to
qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state
that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage
of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your
employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.
You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but
you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that
toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap
pay.
Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really
live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.
Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08
The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by
Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term,
O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.
That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and
distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help
put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism.
Use it to build shared prosperity.
oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40
So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those
who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap
if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.
We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions,
for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist
societies and is wholly unequal by design.
Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus
value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't
an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.
As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were
won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements
to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful
beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even
permit us to believe there could be another, better way.
Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33
Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to
the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic
systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.
I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via
the capitalist countries.
VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29
Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity
or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation
if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.
In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to
favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.
The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't
end in starvation.
A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure
would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this.
If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no
one company can dominate and control markets.
Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27
Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption
of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26
The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society -
one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two
tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong
to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships
across class differences that are that large.
"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"
Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated
capitalistic system.
This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published
in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.
Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written
by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?
But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones
and how many ounces.
So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.
neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16
Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?
The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making
profits.
The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery
by capitalists.
Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction
is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as
the core ideology.
Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12
I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate
that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about
it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study
for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make
it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism
tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12
As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12
Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.
Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12
It's an equal opportunity plantation now.
Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11
The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.
Here is my list:
The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.
The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.
Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.
Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national
and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.
Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11
If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have
nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the
same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.
We created this mess and we can fix it.
Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03
Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from
their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments
to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.
Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48
As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or
credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1
vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful
and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that
capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42
"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not
have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."
Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal
government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow
on your own personal land.
Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free
to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.
"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism
eradicating poverty on a global scale?"
The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording
device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record
it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in
the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers
(44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).
However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households
in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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Here, the data are showing us something that we find to be very interesting. Namely, that those who spend more money on a low-ROI bachelor's degree often find their careers to be more 'meaningful' than your average engineer. Does this mean there's an inverse relationship between spiritual fulfillment and monetary compensation when it comes to ones' career path? Possibly. But would like to suggest another possible explanation.
During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America's richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent. [2]
