The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program — John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
This isn’t going to end well.
Rand, the placement office here at the “U” tells me that there is an uptick in employment for especially EE’s, perhaps for other engineering and STEM disciplines, but I am not so sure of the long term outlook.
But suppose you do “the right thing” of sweating through Dif Eq, Multi-variate Calculus, Java programming, etc. etc. instead of, dunno, whatever kind of trendy major with lots of gut courses.
Are you telling me that if you work hard at a “serious” major at the U that there is a clear path to success? Last I checked, my classmates in the private sector are enjoying their early retirements whereas a certain member of the Northwestern Tech Institute Class of ’77 still has a job as he is one of your parasites-moochers-thugs in the public sector.
The thing is, Rand, that the Left demonizes The Rich! The Rich!, which these days means just about anyone who has saved for their retirement and won’t end up on Medicaid when they live long enough for progressive neurological disease to catch up to them and are “locked down” in a nursing home in their twilight years. The Right is now demonizing, dunno, just about everyone else who still has a job these days.
When is the Right going to catch wise that demonizing or scapegoating any group is a Leftie-Loser’s game, politically speaking. I always though the Right (broadly the Conservative-Libertarian coalition put together by the late Bill Buckley) was better than the left, intellectually and morally.
Has it come down to that we have given up on economic prosperity, view everything as a zero-sum situation, and what distinguishes Left from Right is which group of “priviliged” we lay into?
You seem to have missed the point: too many youngsters are trying to join the parasite class. The host is neither healthy nor large enough to support them all now. They’ve been bamboozled into squandering their collage years and money on degrees to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter if one is employed and in a STEM discipline and part of the “57%” paying Federal Income Tax, if one is a public employee, one is tarred with the same brush as having it too good. Which is true of classmates and other people I have known in terms of having it a lot less good — RF engineers (show of hands, how many people here have had fun in their Intro to Electric and Magnetic Fields class or even know what I am talking about) who were driving late model cars on their corporate salary premium over the public sector (in engineering) and are now out on the street.
Creative destruction. Who needs to keep RF engineers employed at Motorola along with their corporate pensions when we can get our commo gear and other kewl toys from China? Creative destruction. Who needs the U when our political leaders and leaders-to-be have had minimal post-high school formal education? Creative destruction. Who needs an Engineering College if you can learn about co-variant and contra-variant vector projections, a topic that impinges on everything from channel equalizers on com systems, stress-strain in bulk materials, and General Relativity on You Tube from one of those Khan Academy lectures?
It is just so convenient to hang the degrees-to-nowhere label on a graduate in Applied Basket Weaving. These are lazy, stupid young people who want the world handed to them. But you think kids with Physical Sciences majors have smooth sailing?
As a recent STEM major who graduated into a six-figure income, I must recuse myself from answering that question. But I have no shortage of respect and sympathy for those who came before and are perhaps receiving the golden handshake. The fellows working at NIST, DOC or hell, even Obama himself are good, decent family men who love their children very much. There. Is that what you wanted to read? I can engage in all the happy talk you desire, but none of it will change the reality that statism is a black hole that swallows all that go near. Ignoring the situation does not change it.
Has it come down to that we have given up on economic prosperity, view everything as a zero-sum situation, and what distinguishes Left from Right is which group of “priviliged” we lay into?
Ummmmmm…
No. Not sure how you infer this.
The Left has The Rich! The Rich! as their bogiemen, but watch how policies aimed at tapping into the Motherload of Hoarded Wealth works its way down the food chain (the AMT).
The Right has a long list of other bogiemen and social scapegoats — follow the link to Chicago Boyz on your blog roll. Let’s see, there are union members, school teachers, university instructors, police officers, Social Security and Medicare recipients, Medicaid recipients (the same people, much of Medicaid pays for nursing homes of profoundly impaired seniors when their money runs out, which promises to do sooner given the beating retirement savings have taken in the markets), people who borrowed too much money against their house, unemployed recent college grads with student loan debt who think the world should be handed to them and so on.
There are reasons not to have unions in public sector employment, there are reasons some people should not go to college instead of taking on large amounts of debt, there are reasons people should not have heeded the Siren song of corporate lending America and borrowed against every dime in their home equity, there are reasons to place limits of what percentage of GNP should go to Social Security and Medicare. But people find themselves in those situations, and they are our fellow Americans.
But just as the President’s problem as that every speech he utters seems to be a public scolding of Congress, corporations, the American people choosing to do exactly what he wants, every other comment over at Chicago Boyz is some kind of Ayn Randian scolding of the moochers/thugs/parasites/leaches who are bringing our economy down.
Mister M, check your check your Strauss & Howe and put on a raincoat: it’s getting visceral out there…
In the private sector, employers look for people with the skills that will make money. The actual skills being sought vary from employer to employer and from job to job. If someone lacks those skills, they’re going to have a hard time finding a good job even when the economy is booming. When the economy is bad, they’ll have a hard time finding any job at all. It’s really as simple as that. It’s amazing how many young people who’ve been told their whole life that their excrement has no odor and that everyone is a winner can’t grasp the simple facts of employment (which have not changed for generations).
Well, don’t you remember all those books and articles about the new economy and everything you dinsaurs knew was hopelessly outdated? Oh, and that one article that stood out about a whole new generation of people growing up with the idea of a boss being weird?
Yes, I remember laughing at those fools when those articles were written. I’m all in favor of ambitious people striking out to create new businesses. Those people have guts. How much of the dot-bomb bubble was caused by http://WWW.DumbAssIdea.Com (like selling 50 pound bags of dog food priced lower than the neighborhood supermarket but not high enough to cover the shipping costs) and how much was outright fraud?
Stupidity can and should be painful. A lot of those kids are learning a painful lesson today while the OWS crowd wants everyone else to pay for their stupid mistakes.
That is the problem, though. The OWS crowd is a bunch of kids who think that life should be handed to them—
But who taught them to think this?
Is it their fault that the establishment spent their high school careers telling them, over and over again, “do this this and this, take THIS college course and you’ll have it MADE” and when they got out, they found out they’d been scammed into tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt?
They’re ignorant man-children… precisely as we raised them.
What’s this “we” business? You gotta mouse in your pocket?
I taught my sons no such thing. Unfortunately, there were too many people who were saying that drivel but I did my best to counter it. I remember watching “Fight Club” with my youngest son many years ago. It had a line in there about how they all expected to be doctors, pro athletes or rock stars and how disappointed they were when it didn’t happen. Who told them such ridiculous things? It sure wasn’t me.