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America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

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Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're spinning in 180s fast enough to make somebody dizzy. It's clear that what's happening isn't some "triumph of individual liberty". So why is it happening? Economics is often given as a reason, but that's also not supported by data. There is an extremely strong inverse relationship between fertility and income. And the reason for that, as you seemingly were already acknowledging yourself not long ago, is culture…

Ok. You get to be king of a hypothetical Western country. How would you reverse dropping fertility rates while respecting individual freedom? I’m open to being wrong.

I don't think culture changes from the top, but rather from you and I. And that eventually leads to the top. Lincoln, for instance, did not end slavery - society ended slavery. Had it not been Lincoln it would have been somebody else imminently, perhaps done far more gracefully. Of course the top can enact change through forceful measures, and they can also try to influence culture, but more often than not they are products of us all.

And the idea for cultural shift is not hard or illogical in the least. Get rid of the consumerist mindset and you're probably 99% of the way there. Of course the problem there is that consumerism maximizes profits for corporations and GDP for politicians. Further emphasizing that the change must start with you and I. Like you said, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that infinite economic growth isn't really a realistic or even desirable goal.

There also seems to have been a collaborated push against traditional norms, which was probably just the natural extreme of expressions of freedom rather than any grand conspiracy - in fact Plato discussed this exact phenomena in his arguments against democracy thousands of years ago. And traditional norms should not define us, but they should be the norm. And indeed they already are, but you'd never know that if you paid any attention to marketing, media, and so on. Basically I think we want to create a society that walks a more reasonable middle ground rather than being on one extreme of norms = dogma, or on the other extreme of anti-norms = dogma.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#72
post #30
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In exchange for 100k in debt? Library is free.

The 100K is a big problem. The library doesn't even approximate a substitute. Maybe you are a genius, but almost everyone needs teachers. Even experts need people to teach them new things, to mentor them, etc. They also need labs and equipment. Also, the library you need for real reasearch is not free. It only exists in academia. Your local public library doesn't give you access to nearly the same resources, nor the…

You are 100% correct about the quality of the resources in a local library. That’s an artificial barrier to learning though. Aaron Swartz died because of this. JSTOR is a crime against humanity.

Libgen is a solution to that.

I agree there is value to learning with experts but not at the cost we are expected to pay these days. The labs and equipment are a tiny fraction of the tuition a student pays and many disciplines do not require anymore more than pen and paper and the aforementioned resources. Why should a math and economics major pay the same as a biochem student? Because the majority of the cost is the bureaucracy and the fancy real estate investments.

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