At some level I certainly agree with you, in that it’s very important to me, and I think a very important part of the American Dream, that there be opportunity, and that any kid who works hard and is talented can become a success. But you seem to be presenting it in a kind of black and white fashion, ie, as long as it’s POSSIBLE then things are OK. But there are shades of gray. There’s a bell curve of how talented and ambitious people are, with a big clump in the middle, etc. So even if things are still “fair” enough that the way-way-way-far-right-outliers on the bell curve can start with nothing and make it big, that’s almost meaningless by itself. The more important question is how much of a barrier to success being born poor is. It’s always been (and presumably always will be) at least somewhat of a barrier, but it could vary from being a minor barrier to a massively enormous barrier without being insurmountable, and you seem to be saying that as long as it’s not insurmountable, things are peachy.
I would also dispute your assertion that CEO’s brat has more of an up on others than he did years ago. Legacy admissions are smaller, if gone, at colleges. Many colleges admit students independent of financial need, and the work out the scholarships/loans afterwards. Then there’s the whole issue of race, and your typical black kid of 50 years, regardless of what his parents did, had restrictions on what he could accomplish that are largely gone in our society today. Not that racism doesn’t exist, but Jim Crow and segregations don’t.
But if you have some data to back up your assertion, I’ll happily change my mind.
I agree. I wouldn’t want to see an attempt at a simplistic solution like a law designating how much CEO’s can be paid.
What I’d like is an investigation of whether or not salaries are really being set by the market or are the results of a closed system. If it’s a closed system, I’d like to see financial regulations that would re-introduce market forces.
I’m still a fundamental believer in democracy. I feel that problems can be solved by democratic means. But part of the process is making the electorate aware of the issues and the facts.
You’re mixing up talent, family wealth, and ambition. Talent is something inherent. Not everyone is born with the same talents. Family wealth is something that doesn’t depend on the person. You’re born into the family you’re born in, you don’t pick it.
BUT ambition is wholly dependent on you. And, IMO, ambition can and often does trump both talent and family wealth. I believe in “Outliers” Malcolm Gladwell posited the “rule of 10,000” - that is, you have to spend 10,000 hours doing something in order to be able to excel at it. Note that it applies to extremely talented people as well. You can be very talented in something, but if you don’t invest the 10,000 hours into that endeavor, you won’t succeed. Unless you’re supremely talented and are having fun all throughout those 10,000 hours (there are very few such people), it takes ambition and determination to invest all that time into something.
So - I would consider it a “bad” society if for an average person ambition would get you nowhere because of your lack of attributes that you can do nothing about (such as talent or family wealth). US is not anywhere close to being such a society.
I am not a way-way-way-far outlier. Maybe just “way-far” 
But as I said, I know at least several hundred immigrants from former USSR in several cities in the US. They ALL succeeded (in the sense of being comfortable financially) with some being wild successes. Are they ALL outliers? Some are talented, some are not particularly. All came to the country pretty much broke. And the overwhelming majority didn’t speak any English when they came. The only unifying characteristic is the “self-selection” criteria - they were all ambitious enough to pick up and leave their old life behind forever to come to the US.
Not really. Parents and teachers can play a huge roll, especially very early on. It can be wholly dependent on you, but I doubt it usually is.
I disagree. But if that is stipulated, then the school system in the US should switch to teaching ambition, especially very early on.
But that had nothing to do with economics. Right. You and I are defining economics very differently, then.
I think you’re missing the point by jumping to a conclusion of what a plan of action should look like. The issue is that we are in a system (yes, society exists, and that college grad was in fact told to do what he did) that saddles great numbers of young people with debt when they are just starting out. It’s different in Europe, but that’s how it is in the USA.
Somebody told that college grad he had to go to college. He had to. And then the rewards he was promised were a lie.
This is where we fundamentally disagree. It matters not if someone “told” him to do x, he’s an adult and he chose to listen to that advice. Certainly, going to college is a good choice, but you’re a fool (the generic “you”, not you personally) if you think it’s an automatic meal ticket. Especially these days. Especially if, as was posited in the post I responded to, you majored in Sociology. Who the hell tells some HS graduate that it’s a wonderful idea to major in Sociology as a practical career choice?
OK, you tell me what the plan of action is.
Yeah, I’m curious about this, have asked someone I know who’s very knowledgeable about this kind of thing (a) whether I’m right, and (b) what the best data is. Hopefully I’ll get an answer…
Yes, they are smaller if they are gone. Are they gone?
And admitting regardless of need is a great way to drop a loan & obligation on a student who can’t pay it back. “But you have already used the service!”
I guess we do need mass loan forgiveness if that’s what’s been going down.
I don’t think the market is the great justifier & fixer here. Market forces are a thing to be understood scientifically, not an ethic to be mandated. We should be correcting the present market where it dries up opportunity for the future market.
This is a good answer to a lot of the objections in the thread. Not just democracy in form, but democratic authority, which is so often pooh-poohed on the right. The right to demand a better distribution of wealth is no more illegitimate than the right to control borders or to maintain armies.
Let’s not forget the unique position the US was in during the first decade or two after WWII. We were barely competing with Europe, much less Latin America, China and India.
I certainly witnessed a large number of people w/ ordinary backgrounds getting fabulously wealthy (or just pretty darn wealthy) in the go-go days of Silicon Valley. The US can still do that in certain niches, but we are going to be an ever shrinking part of the world GDP. It’s inevitable. We represented 50% of world GNP after WWII. That is not sustainable.
[QUOTE=foolsguinea]
I think you’re missing the point by jumping to a conclusion of what a plan of action should look like. The issue is that we are in a system (yes, society exists, and that college grad was in fact told to do what he did) that saddles great numbers of young people with debt when they are just starting out. It’s different in Europe, but that’s how it is in the USA.
[/QUOTE]
Whoa…what?? Young people are forced to go to college and take courses that are worthless in the market? By whom? Who tells them to do this…and puts a gun to their collective heads to make them do so? If it’s only someone telling him or her to take a certain line of courses to acquire a certain degree that it turns out there are few jobs or opportunities for later advancement, well…bummer, man. Why is it societies problem to find jobs for someone who wants to get a degree in history or the arts because someone told them that would be a kicking degree??
If someone told him that he had to jump off a cliff, and he did, who’s problem is it? The guy telling him to jump, or the guy who decides that jumping is a good idea? Unless he is being forced to jump at gun point, then I’d say the responsibility for jumping or not jumping is with the jumper. If someone tells you that it’s a good idea to help out a secret prince in Nigeria with a large monetary transfer, but it turns out that it was all really just a scam and you have lost your life savings, well…you probably shouldn’t just take any old advice you get. Perhaps you’ve learned a lesson there, and perhaps flipping burgers with your social sciences PHD will teach you the value of taking engineering courses next time. 
-XT
Repeal or reverse the following laws from the 1990’s and the Newt Gingrich Congress:
The legalization of derivatives (which had been outlawed under bucket shop laws previously, if I understand it correctly.)
The inability to void student loans in bankruptcy.
The lowered cap on number of medical residents paid for by the Medicare program (ostensibly to stave off an imaginary “doctor glut.”)
Also bring back usury laws (voided in 1979 by SCOTUS).
_
These are not outlandish proposals, unless you think the status quo post-1999 is necessarily better than the status quo in 1976 by some strange definition of conservative.
The rewards are hardly a lie. College grads can expect to make far more over a lifetime than high school grads.
That isn’t to say there aren’t massive problems here, though. For a couple generations now K-12 education results have stagnated, while college has until recently remained pretty uniformly accessible and of high quality. This has led to a creeping overcredentialization of society, where jobs that previously did not require a college degree first required them implicitly then explicitly, due at first to a large number of college grads and then by a basic distrust of the high school diploma as a credential.
At the same time, the large number of students financing their education via grants and loans has led colleges to have little incentive to keep costs down. When I attended college in the late 1980s I lived in a dorm with no air conditioning, and the amenities on campus were much more basic than today. Students today have dormitories and student unions that are palatial by comparison, but costs have exploded far beyond inflation and they leave with debt unimaginable to my generation or my parents’.
So I can understand recent grads in a soft economy being a little ticked off. I went through this to a degree myself - I left college before graduating in 1993, during a recession. I wound up joining the Navy rather than stand around doing nothing, and it took my some years to finish my degree. While I am happy with the outcome in my case I don’t pretend it was the way I wanted it at the time.
Except that the statistics continue to show that people who graduate college tend to earn more, have an easier time finding work, are less likely to get laid off, and more likely to find new work if they are.
xtisme, I was not clear. It wasn’t just anybody.
The kid’s parents; the management at companies he wanted to work at; his high school guidance counselor, whose job is to guide and counsel; his teachers; his high school principal; his peers; his peers’ parents; ETA: msmith537; US News and World Report; the media in general–all told him, “This is how you succeed, this is WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.”
I’m from an educated WASPish background; this is normal to us. You probably didn’t get that pressure, because we don’t push latinos into college.
Not for nothing is Occupy Wall Street heavily white and middle class. We were sold a bill of goods by everyone trying to help us grow up and make it. And now we’re having to pay back a debt we can’t even get out of through bankruptcy, for overpriced degrees.
P.S.: Mr Moto, you see what I mean, then.
How do any of those, other than the the 2nd one, even address the issue that was being discussed: The guy with (undefined) skills from 8 years of college who can’t get a job in today’s job market. And even then, how does that 2nd one help him get a job? For all we know, the guy majored in American Studies or Sociology. Wonderfully interesting fields, but hardly what one studies in order to ensure a good job prospect.
This post is absolutely spot on as well. Having wealth is great, and people should ideally be able to become as wealthy as they want. But in our world, power comes with wealth, and it’s not fair that through that power they have manipulated the system to continue accruing wealth at accelerating rates, while the poorest people are as poor or poorer than decades past.
I am not anti-capitalist or anti-rich. But I do support taxing the wealthy (as well as everyone) more than we do now, closing loopholes, etc, so that the poorest people have more power and therefore more social freedom.
[QUOTE=foolsguinea]
The kid’s parents; the management at companies he wanted to work at; his high school guidance counselor, whose job is to guide and counsel; his teachers; his high school principal; his peers; his peers’ parents; ETA: msmith537; US News and World Report; the media in general–all told him, “This is how you succeed, this is WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.”
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Well, in general their advice was good…college grads do, on average, make more than non-college grads. In the end, it’s still up to the person deciding to take a certain degree program to choose wisely. If the kids parents, the companies he wanted to go to, his HS GC, etc etc all told him that basket weaving was going to be the coming thing, and the obvious path to success, then I can certainly see why someone would orient towards basket weaving as a good career choice. And in the past that might be a valid excuse for someone to say that they had picked a bad path (though the obvious solution to this is to either go into the service and get them to pay for a better degree line or work, scrimp, save, borrow and choose more wisely the next time…this is actually what my sister did/is doing, since her first degree was in liberal arts, which qualified her to work really basic jobs), but today that’s hardly an excuse considering that we have the internet. It’s pretty easy with even a cursory search to figure out where the jobs are and what skill sets are in demand. Just go on Monster, or Careers or any of a dozen other sites and you can see what companies are looking for.
I’m old school and prefer ‘hispanic’, but it depends. Certainly in my family it wasn’t something that we were encouraged to do…we were encouraged to work hard and find good blue collar work. And vote Democrat of course. And go to church and wallow in guilt and sin. And a few other things I won’t mention. 
All of which advice I didn’t follow (you should see some of the family meetings when I used to discuss evolution with some of my aunts and uncles! :eek:).
As I said, in general it’s good advice. Going to college (assuming you choose wisely) can give you a definite leg up on folks who don’t. It’s like an automatic jump ahead in line. In IT I’ve seen people who were, frankly, far less qualified, hired over people who were incredible network engineers simply because the former had degrees and the latter didn’t. And I knew they were bad choices, but management just loves those sheep skins and puts a lot of weight on having one. My own degrees are simply pieces of paper…I don’t even use my first degree (in aero-space engineering) for more than something on my resume (hell, I don’t even launch model rockets anymore!), and my second degree (comp sci) is nearly as worthless, considering I’m not a software engineer and that was the main focus. But, what they give me is buy in to the club. With my experience AND the degrees it lets me advance far beyond where I would have been if I had no degrees at all.
-XT