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Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#61

Post by beccasanchez »

branchless wrote: post #56
beccasanchez wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the people in power ever institute this? It would ruin all of them.

The same reason they ever implement anything: because they are either worried about losing all their power / something even more "abrupt".

In all of history, the elite have never been more secure. They've never had anything close to the level of surveillance and policing as today. The police today are literally thousands of times more effective at their job than the time of the French Revolution.

No one with a clue is worried about anything "abrupt". Rebellion is literally impossible.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#62

Post by [deleted] »

branchless wrote: post #43
littletimmy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you suggest we modulate land price if not via the current system? How is land tax going to make things any easier? The US already has property tax - you want to raise it?

I've put that in my reply above. We need to have taxes to regress speculation which will see land prices fall and will replace much of income tax. Have a read of the link or many other sites on LVT. I think we also need to deal with money creation by private banks. This has been an absolute disaster since it became effectively unconstrained with the end of the gold standard. (not that I'm a gold bug). It's the issue…

[deleted]

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#63

Post by ryandrake »

germinalphrase wrote: post #23
crazy1van wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> underfunded education I was sympathetic to your argument until this part. It varies by region, but we spend what seems like a fortune on school. DC public schools spent over $18,000 per student in 2010 [0]. That's more than my state college tuition. Where does that money go? [0]: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_ins...

Not sure - but as a high school teacher I've been turned down to buy paperbacks (that actually have all their pages) for my classroom due to budget constraints. You're not wrong, and there is a lot of money in compulsory education (hence the push since the 80's to privatize)- but the macro view of educational budgeting doesn't necessarily speak to the direct effect of budgeting on classroom resources.

Don't worry, there's plenty of money for sports and administration. The Assistant Vice Principal doesn't have money problems.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#64

Post by ryandrake »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #53
sosuke wrote: post #24

It makes adults sick doesn't it? Why not children? I wonder what a society without that "drive for success" would look like. My first thought, maybe a little sad, is if everyone else didn't have that drive I might actually succeed.

Your sad thought is interesting because it suggests that children are being overworked in zero-sum games, ultimately gaining nothing, because all the other children are overworked too.

Similar to Prisoner's dilemma. We each can either over-work our kids or not. If nobody over-works their kids, everyone wins (nobody has an advantage, we create a better, less competitive society). If you over-work your kid and I don't, then my kid loses and your kid wins. If I over-work my kid and you don't, then my kid wins and your kid loses. Therefore, everyone chooses to over-work their kids, and everyone loses (nobody has a relative advantage, yet everyone's over-worked, over-competitive, and stressed to the limit).

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#65

Post by narrator »

branchless wrote: post #34
atomicfiredoll wrote: post #10

I can't help but feel like this is the inevitable conclusion for a society that's obsessed with working and financial success. It could be an interesting premise to explore. When a number of employers and the government don't value ensuring a healthy work/life balance, or even employee's health, how do you keep that same behavior out of the minds of people running school systems and classrooms? How do you ensure you…

The reason the system wants you to work hard is because they get a share of your labour for every part you are successful above subsistence. They get this through debt issuance, primarily via land prices. Fiat money costs absolutely zero to produce, they give it out freely and in return you pledge to give part of your labour for 30 years. If land prices were far lower we'd all be working 3 or 4 days a week. Employers…

The land thing is crazy. Buying at the right time means you get paid to live in your house. Then when you sell, they charge you capital gains so you can't buy the same house back with the money you just got.

The other thing that's crazy is how ridiculously cheap the same stuff is in countries with lower land prices, like South East Asia. A nice apartment with a pool on the beach is 1/10 the price of San Francisco. The food is cheaper, services are cheaper, etc ,etc. Meanwhile, people living in South Eat Asia running online businesses can make the same amount of money in the American economy. The manufacturing thing is even more mind blowing. The cost to manufacture in a developed country vs China is on the order of 20x cheaper. When Big Box stores like Ikea open in China they struggle because they can't charge western premiums for the stuff they're selling because of domestic competition and they have to lower prices by 50%[1]. That would be totally impossible in a developed countries!

Someone should go through the whole cost structure of a developing country manufacturing operation and figure out the reason they are so cheap. My hunch is it would come down to incredibly cheap food, provided by incredibly cheap land prices forming a foundation for incredibly cheap everything else. Garlic growers in the California central valley say that the price that the Garlic gets delivered packed and shipped at the grocery store from China is less than what it costs them to grow it before harvesting.[2]

[1].http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1300942/ikea-last-cra... [2].http://www.wbur.org/npr/11613477

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#66

Post by zepto »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #58
douche wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time this comes up, the answer I see trotted out is that increased land taxes will cause land prices to fall and rents will get cheaper. I don't understand how this makes any sense, at all. If the town raises the property taxes on my rental, guess what, the rent is going to go up at least as much as the tax increase.

> I don't understand how this makes any sense, at all. If the town raises the property taxes on my rental, guess what, the rent is going to go up at least as much as the tax increase. This is only true if the rent is based on the cost of the unit in terms of purchase price and upkeep. That's true in lower cost-of-living areas, but in expensive areas, the rent is high primarily because demand is outstripping supply, n…

This doesn't add up. If rent is so much higher than purchase plus upkeep, people will borrow money and buy, safe in the knowledge that they can just become a landlord and be cash-flow positive at any time. Or investors will simply buy the cheap properties and rent them. The demand for investment properties will drive up the purchase price and parity will be reached.

This is why house prices are just as insane in Silicon Valley as rents.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#67

Post by ryandrake »

atomicfiredoll wrote: post #10

I can't help but feel like this is the inevitable conclusion for a society that's obsessed with working and financial success. It could be an interesting premise to explore. When a number of employers and the government don't value ensuring a healthy work/life balance, or even employee's health, how do you keep that same behavior out of the minds of people running school systems and classrooms? How do you ensure you…

Funny, because an obsession with work is at odds with an obsession with financial success--they have nothing to do with one another. While hard work may help make one incrementally better off than the Joneses, when it comes to actual financial success, luck and family connections play a much bigger role. The whole "hard work makes you successful" narrative only furthers the interests of the already successful.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#68

Post by analog31 »

Many of the posts have to do with the expectations of business, society, etc. Maybe we parents have something to do with it too.

I should be happy. I'm educated, have interesting and rewarding work to do, have a roof over my head, and get to play music on the side. I've got two great kids, who are both smarter than me. What's wrong with that? Why should I be neurotic about success? Why should push myself and my kids harder than I was pushed? And make no mistake, I was pushed.

Because I can see that my class -- the middle class -- is vanishing, so the expectations of my generation are no longer valid. Get an OK degree in something worthwhile and work hard. Gone. I literally followed exactly the same education and career path as my father. That's gone.

We don't know what the future expectations will be, so we aim as high as possible. I don't know if this is a good thing, but it seems like what's happening. Not to mention, I grew up in a family culture that held education to be one of the highest values, so we were inclined to be demanding about education even before all hell broke loose.

Another thing I've noticed is that the school curriculum is more intensive and consuming, but not necessarily more advanced. My kids are ahead of where I was at the same age, in terms of simplistic milestones like Algebra. They have perfect GPA's. I sure as hell didn't. But the curriculum is more superficial and more based on drill work, worksheets, and computer busywork. They write more papers. That's good. Their papers are written to fill out a thing called a rubric, which is a glorified worksheet. That's bad. I recently found a copy of my 12th grade public school math textbook. More than half of the problems are proofs. Today there are no proofs. The proliferation of homework merely gives the illusion of a rigorous curriculum, and robs kids of the time that they could spend learning interesting things or just having fun. I learned things like programming and electronics while in high school, during the time when I was not doing homework.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#69

Post by dilemma »

ThomPete wrote: post #49

I wonder if this is as causal as people might think. The Scandinavian countries are known for their extremely lax culture especially when it comes to child education, yet same discussions are present there. Being poor is also making you sick. I wonder if it's more to do with our interpretation of sickness than with any actual change. I would still expect our kids to grow older than we ever where, but sure it doesn't…

In Scandinavia, doing double degrees, like one in Physics and another in Economics, at the same time is something people do to get ahead. There's also the unpaid internships, like everywhere else, and the teenager who can't sleep and has physical pain due to stress from the pressure to succeed.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#70

Post by chillwaves »

icanhackit wrote: post #51
branchless wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dominant culture says you are a loser. Well done to you for having the confidence to stick to your guns. Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent.

The dominant culture says you are a loser. Paradoxically I'm doing OK by society's standards. By valuing personal space and control over it I decided to get into the property game with my partner earlier in life, enabling us to purchase an inner city property before their prices exploded. Now I'm watching my friends work their arses off to live further away in the 'burbs. Often success comes down to timing...and an a…

>No rent, but you point remains: gotta work to live.

The irony is coupled with your statement about buying property. You don't pay rent, we pay you.

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