==I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.== I think this highlights the true question. Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? According to PEW, Americans believe colleges are for work training: "Americans are split on the main purpose of college, with 47% saying it is to teach work-related skills and 39% saying it is to help a student grow personal…
> Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? When college cost in the US what it did in the 1960s this sort of little bit false-dichotomy, little bit navel gazing question was at least fairly harmless. Now it's just fucking ridiculous even for most public schools.
This. For what is costs in 2019 college had better be opening a door to a lucrative career path.
Who's gonna make UBI happen? Where's the motivation for offering true UBI rather than precarious subsidies to "jobseekers"?
The huge mass of voters who can't get jobs?
At 1$/vote , those masses will be swayed by the social and "news and commentary" media at whomever pays to focus their ire. And that very news media can also sway people that 'their vote doesnt count'.
I remember when Fox News was running "ObamaCare is Evil Socialism", at the same time talking how the ACA was helping people. Or how they were railing about "illegals" while at the same time discussing Southern farmers' plight because there weren't enough immigrants to work on crops.
Only a couple generations ago, college was not a proxy for "middle class". Lots of blue-collar jobs (especially industrial ones) paid enough for a "middle class" lifestyle and financial security. Small businesses were competitive and many of their owners were not college educated either. College wasn't a necessary qualification for most blue-collar jobs, including some for which it now is (such as police work, in man…
> you could start out as a file clerk with a high school degree and work your way up into middle or even upper management (at least if you were white and male). That upwards mobility depends on one thing: that old people drop out of the workforce either by death or by pension, so that young people can rise up the ranks. Now, given that people in their 80s need to work (!) to survive, this "generational contract" is b…
This is the lump of labour fallacy. Rest assured that life will be harder for young people if a sizeable portion of the population is old, out of the labour force, and needs to be supported by a rising share of taxes from a small number of young workers.
We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.
In the short term yes, but in the long term it will benefit them too. If there is less work to be done in the world, then everyone will work less on average. I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen: • We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford coll…
As someone who's been on employment insurance before. I can't understand the appeal of ubi. Getting a small amount of money to do nothing is excruciating. It's really not a fun way to live.
I've seen people use UBI to mean "employment insurance" but that's misuse of the term.
From wikipedia: "A Basic Income would vary with age, but there would be no other conditions: so everyone of the same age would receive the same Basic Income, whatever their gender, employment status, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else."
So it's not a small amount of money to do nothing, but just an "extra" small amount of money coming out of either welfare budgets and/or additional taxes.
" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…
The other side of the coin is that college has become increasingly more and more expensive and there are now many times more people with bachelors degrees, so college is no longer the sure path to middle class it once was.
" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…
Sure, I'm not sure anyone actually denies this. College education was something only upper class folks could receive (especially a liberal arts degree with dubious value in society) due to it's expense. With the emergence of things like state schools, the barrier became lower. But the fact of the matter is higher paying jobs required college degrees, and the best chance for most people at a middle class lifestyle are those jobs. Well now, wages have stagnated for most jobs, the true value of a non-STEM college degree has becoming glaringly obvious, and opportunities for people to maintain a middle-class lifestyle are rapidly declining. The MBA has been serving as that proxy for how upper class you are especially from expensive prestigious universities. When the highest value of a degree is "the opportunity to network" that should tell you something. Now with the pressures of off-shoring manufacturing, automation, and growing immigrant populations willing to do low-skilled labor to survive, is it really at all surprising that many people are being shut out of the economy? It all comes down to a fundamentally broken economic model that values growth above all. Our population grew in tandem with our economy. Once automation of manufacturing processes took hold, we quickly started to need less people. The reality is we probably don't need 7 billion humans anymore, and we need to transition to a more efficient sustainable economic model that isn't aiming for growth above all.
Have there been studies of correlations between crime rates and the affordability of cities?
Found these briefly: " Recent years have witnessed widespread public concern and increased policy attention to issues of housing affordability. In 2015 a full one-half of U.S. households were paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. We identify multiple channels by which individual or family outcomes are inferior when rents increase faster than income. Research further suggests that rising rent burdens ma…
Can't read the first one, but the second one focuses on foreclosure rates which seems more indicative of an economic shock rather than general low affordability.
" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…
You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written…
I didn't know about these courses, and have been contemplating getting some certifications for a while. This looks like it might really help. Thanks for posting this!
