generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

The problem with putting the brakes on the idea of a "cool job" is that you've then forfeited creative pursuits to the wealthy (and, tbh, that's already happened for the most part) and I'm not sure that further dividing opportunities by class is a wonderful thing.

and, this is kinda thinking longer-term, but outside of careers that require highly technical skillsets, creative pursuits are basically the only other thing that can't be outsourced or automated

nah Lamp, never heard of it, but I'll look it up!

one thing I've gotten clearer about by means of this thread is that I need to get clearer how "pragmatic" or "technocratic" arguments for the welfare state are best interwoven with "moral" arguments; I mean talking this shit out helps me get clearer on what I'm confused about; so I've come around on thinking that the technocratic arguments miss the point.

though still lol @ "I cited a statistic, I can't be wrong"

nah my point was that relative poverty is just an arbitrary static that doesn't have to relate to consumption, if the bottom 20% of the population is 'relatively poor' then it doesn't matter how much brunch they eat etc. etc.

I have gotten in w/ you on this before but there is no 'argument for the welfare state'. 'the welfare state' is not something that can exist in a vacuum, it's just a way of framing some aspects of government spending. gov't spending is 40% of the american gdp - not really that far behind a lot of countries w/ 'huge socialist welfare states' - we just spend our money in poor and ineffective ways, often because we're afraid to admit how much of it is 'welfare'.

This is an interesting model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_the_welfare_state

Hadn't heard of the 'three worlds' model before. (Fwiw, the US is the least welfare-state-ish of the welfare states according to that model.)

The problem with putting the brakes on the idea of a "cool job" is that you've then forfeited creative pursuits to the wealthy

I think the issue is that either we need to take concrete steps to actually make creative careers feasible for the general population (cf arts funding in Northern Europe) or we need to stop telling kids that they can do anything they set their minds to.

although it may in fact be true that no one tells this to kids anymore

IDK I lived in an environment where school, parents, everyone said 'just live with your parents and go to the cheap state university and get a nursing degree or a pharmacy degree so you can live comfortably.' But if you're one of those dummies like me that thinks as a teenager ART MATTERS and a LIFE OF THE MIND MATTERS and also that you have to go to college ––––– then your whole college career plays out like that one nightmarish scene in Mary Poppins where they want to spend money on feeding the pigeons, except instead of a small amount of money on feeding the pigeons, it's thousands on an illustration degree.

What I'm saying is humanities-minded teenagers entering college may not be very prone to pragmatic messages coming from boring asshole adults.

I'm still not tbh! God damn me.

well lots of boring asshole adults also might not actually know that much about the job market or what it will be like 20 years from now

Schools should really start hiring soothsayers, it's true.

'BEHIND THE EAGLE'S NEST A GREAT ASHE HATH FALLEN'
'So...nursing's a bad career then?'

IDK I lived in an environment where school, parents, everyone said 'just live with your parents and go to the cheap state university and get a nursing degree or a pharmacy degree so you can live comfortably.' But if you're one of those dummies like me that thinks as a teenager ART MATTERS and a LIFE OF THE MIND MATTERS and also that you have to go to college ––––– then your whole college career plays out like that one nightmarish scene in Mary Poppins where they want to spend money on feeding the pigeons, except instead of a small amount of money on feeding the pigeons, it's thousands on an illustration degree.

― does Red Stripe work like poppers? (Abbbottt), Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What I'm saying is humanities-minded teenagers entering college may not be very prone to pragmatic messages coming from boring asshole adults.

― does Red Stripe work like poppers? (Abbbottt), Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:38 PM (44 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, yeah, I'm probably the extreme example of this tbh.

(Paid for my first two degrees though.)

Still, it seems much rarer for someone in India to pursue a PhD in music composition, no matter how art-minded they are. So what's the difference?

I guess the educational cost is the real problem. There's no reason it should cost $120,000 to develop the writing skills and cultural capital to become a freelance internet journalist, and if it didn't, people would be more free to try it, fail and retrain at something else.

yup

I'm probably just bitter at my classically unrealistic boomer parents, who not only gave me bad advice but are not in great financial shape themselves, in part as a result of living their advice.

I know people who sincerely advocate that we should stop or at least greatly reduce the funding for non-practical degrees. (Virtually all schools are 'state schools' here.) While this basically goes against everything I stand for, this would at least be one way of addressing the situation.

3xpost

I mean that cost though is a really bizarre historical anomaly. It seems like a total market failure.

The $120K figure is a reference to an article posted earlier? Is that just tuition (at a private school obv)?

$120K was just taking a stab at what an NYU student might take on in loans. NYU costs much more than that in tuition alone, not to mention high COL in New York.

yeah 'market failure' is the right word here. higher ed has managed to 'compete' on everything but price because it's such a hard to define and measure investment.

I think there has always been a veblen good aspect to it too - expensive schools feel 'worth it' because they are expensive schools

I think the loan industry is a big part of the distortion too, just like it was in the housing bubble.

yeah I think it also compares well w/ the health care crisis in that it's easy to confuse 'best in the world' w/ 'wait we were just spending exponentially more money on this'

(I can't actually say I regret my choices though so I'm not even sure what my point was now.)

There's no reason it should cost $120,000 to develop the writing skills and cultural capital to become a freelance internet journalist, and if it didn't, people would be more free to try it, fail and retrain at something else.

That still requires a middle-class with the income and time to do these things and that's probably the real hurdle.

The way my life is going, I think I can pull it off, but I also don't want to have kids. Not because of the free time/income, but that's a nice bonus.

well this is sorta a different issue but a lot of 'freelance internet journalists' coulda had full-time gigs in the same field in a previous generation. a lot of this is due to bigger structural changes - it's probably easier than ever to get paid *some money* to do *some writing* but harder than ever to get a job w/ health insurance if you want to sell your writing abilities.

'sell your writing abilities' sounds awkward but I didn't want to say ~be a writer~

that previous generation was a historical anomaly, though, right?

well post-ww2 america was def a situation that isn't coming back anytime soon, idk if I'd say anomaly, but the economy is definitely changing in some fundamental ways - globalizing, digitizing, trending towards contract labor - that are going to be 'the new normal'

and some people are gonna benefit a lot from the new normal, the 'winners' are gonna win even more than they did in the old normal. apple is kinda digging the new normal, for example. but we have a culture and political system rooted in the old normal - 'you get health insurance from your job.' 'you live one place for lon periods of time.' 'you can always find some decent-paying work if you get desperate.'

long periods*

'you live one place for lon periods of time.'

What is the feasible alternative to this?

(Afaict, I'm living the alternative but it doesn't feel very feasible.)

re. moving a lot, we're moving this spring & having to sell a house & I wouldn't want to do this super often b/c we've acquired bullshit that has to be moved & the house has to be maintained & it's all very complicated, & if we were just renters & didn't have much stuff it would be sooooooooo much easier (I'm not talking about the psychological burdens, which obviously vary a lot)---but if we're gonna rely heavily on consumption & housing then a nation of renters without much stuff is tricky---guess American corporations are relying on Asian consumption rising enough to make up for our losses but still

renting is still consumption and people in NYC find ways to consume despite small apartments, for example, brunch. there are ways to build a consumer economy that don't depend on building mini-castles and filling them w/ stuff.

how, exactly? where is the money to buy brunch going to come from if not, ultimately, from manufacturing? surely we can't build an economy on you reading the ads on my blog & me reading the ads on your blog, & then tipping 20% at brunch whilst sexxxting on our iphones

(gen limbo slash)

Best. Economy. Evaaaar.

how many people do you know who work in manufacturing euler? manufacturing made up 11% of our gdp in 2009, why would it be more important than anything else? why is 'creating the supply of nikes' more important than 'creating the supply of iphone apps' or 'creating the supply of brunch' or 'creating the supply of legal services?'. when somebody pays somebody else for legal services they are 'creating economic activity' that's no more or less real than paying somebody for a physical object.

so the money to buy brunch comes from bloggers who sell ads to people who sell legal services to people who make brunch...I just don't see how this works. to provide services the people who buy the services need to get their money from somewhere & it can't just come from service providers. I'm just dense on economic things but I can't puzzle through this one.

Sent from my iPhone

END FIAT CURRENCY

so the money to buy brunch comes from bloggers who sell ads to people who sell legal services to people who make brunch...I just don't see how this works.

it works...more or less like this? the production of physical objects is cheap and simple and highly efficient and mechanized - this is why poor people can have huge tvs - production of legal services and brunch is not, and if you are going through a divorce 'legal services' are worth a lot more to you than a cool pair of shoes, despite being 'an abstract thing'.

like, you yourself are a service provider, you provide educational services, people find value in your educational services and pay money for it and receive something in return. that is, effectively, 'creating money'. if you made shoes, they would receive shoes in return, instead they receive an education. shoes might be more tangible than 'an education', but that doesn't make them inherently 'worth more', an MBA from Harvard is certainly 'worth more' than a pair of shoes despite being a completely abstract form of value.

and the economic gains from turning leather into a shoe is just a small part of the process of getting that shoe here. somebody in china can make the shoe but it's still worthless until someone transports it here. and it's worthless before a company convinces you that you need to buy it. and it's worthless until some dude at a counter can hand it to you for cash. you can consider everything manufacturing if you frame it 'manufacturing a piece of leather in china all the way to your house in the form of a brand-name shoe'.

let's be real. the collapse of american manufacturing does have a fair amount to do with why things are pretty screwed up. the "service economy" people talked about turned out to be based on people selling houses to one another, and there's no indication that one is necessarily coming back. you do have "service economies" to a degree in countries with dual economies where for those with expat money, labor is so cheap that they can basically pay people to do everything for them -- but that's sort of the opposite of a modern phenomenon.

well it's part of the same big picture, and yes there were a lot of service jobs that were created directly or indirectly by the housing bubble but that doesn't mean that service jobs wouldn't have also been created by a better allocation of resources. and in the longer-term the amount of people we need to be 'manufacturing' was going to decline even if we were the only country in the world:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/S3wzGvaJcBI/AAAAAAAAMy4/Ont4pK4djUE/s400/mfg.jpg

When people look out on the closed dockyards like Frank Sobatka and mutter that "we used to build shit in this country", I think the physical manufacturing is actually only a small part of it. People point to Germany and say look at how much they're physically producing, but the real difference it makes there - and what it used to make here - was the decent wages for trained or semi-skilled workers. Unfortunately, with the decline of manufacturing, that pay grade has pretty much evaporated for a certain class of Americans. Whereas earlier generations could live decent lives working at a car plant in Detroit, and then afford to send their kids to college/give them the freedom to create techno, now its basically "Wal-mart/Taco bell/Fuck you".

As i'm a believer that it was that particular reading of the 70s economic slowdown as "workers get paid too much/unions are strangling us and as a result profit margins are smaller and nobody will invest for such a low return" - and the subsequent deregulation and bust-up of unions - that led to wage stagnation while allowing more money to flow/be created by the financial services sector (in addition to the flooding of the market of easy credit to mask the wage stagnation for the workers), I don't think resurrecting the manufacturing industry will do nearly as much as people hope because there's still no reason for companies to pay the kind of wages that gave us that level of PPP in the 50s and 60s. They'd probably get health insurance, though...