Bubbles bursting
The common denominator uniting protests in Libya, Bahrain, China, Iran and even Wisconsin is the mundane matter of money. Social policy — things we wanted and thought we could afford — whether food subsidies, biofuel manias or higher education bubbles, have created shortages and gluts that cannot now be resolved without changing the underlying policies themselves. In an article entitled, How the Higher-education Bubble Is Fueling Revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, the New American Explains how supply and demand affect the price of everything, even wages for new college graduates.
Would you like your college education to be free? Sure, who wouldn’t? Better question: Would you like the results of free education? Well, the people of Tunisia and Egypt are learning that whenever the government supplies something, it is never really “free.”
In Tunisia, “free” university education is guaranteed to anyone who passes the government’s exams at the end of high school. Largely as a result of this, the number of Tunisians who graduated college more than tripled in the last 10 years. This may sound like a good thing, but it has produced a glut of graduates.
Fifty-seven percent of young Tunisians entering the labor market are college educated. This is while only 30 percent of Americans earn a college degree by the time they are 27. Recent Tunisian college grads have an unemployment rate approximately three times higher than the national average of 15 percent. This is up nine-fold from 1994.
But the higher education bubble is not just about the glut of graduates, it is also about the price of the education product. As Forbes put it, “Just 10 years ago the cost of a four-year public college education amounted to 18% of the annual income of middle-income families. Ten years later, it amounted to 25% of that family’s average annual income. … Over the past 14 years the average debt for a graduating college student has doubled.” More broadly, education — even primary and secondary education — is requiring more and more taxpayer dollars or parent fees, to sustain. As CNN puts it, the education funding crisis is expected to grow beyond Wisconsin.
This week’s growing controversy about funding public education in Wisconsin is hardly an isolated incident, as 40 states are coping with budget shortfalls totaling $140 billion, which will threaten America’s 14,000 school districts for the next five years, one analyst said Thursday.
Concerns about funding kindergarten through 12th-grade systems were evident this week in Denver when big education’s stakeholders — the nation’s two largest teachers unions, a superintendents group, a school boards group and federal education officials — met to discuss labor-management cooperation, one participant said.
When the cost of paying unionized teachers increases from the kindergarten level on up while graduates at the end of the educational conveyor belt find themselves unable to parlay their credentials into jobs, one has the classic symptoms of a bubble that has to burst. Glenn Reynolds noted that the same signs which preceded the end of the real-estate bubble are happening to higher education.
It’s a story of an industry that may sound familiar.
The buyers think what they’re buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy….
A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt — debt that her degree in Religious and Women’s Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about $700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer’s assistant earning an hourly wage.
And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house, Munna can’t simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be expunged in a bankruptcy. She’s stuck in a financial trap.
Business Insider says, “If you had to sum up the education bubble in one misconception, it might be: ‘The average 22-year-old is a good credit risk for $150,000 in debt, collateralized by something completely intangible.’”
At its most basic nonpolitical level, the showdown in Wisconsin is about the price of teachers; about a bubble. It is about whether Wisconsin can continue to afford a union/monopoly supplied product whatever the disparity with the true market value of their ‘value added’ represents. And in other parts of the world it is about the price of food, energy, or the price of maintaining juntas, politburos, kings, emirs or presidents for life.
Bubbles are at the heart of many of the riots now being reported daily and globally throughout the world. Their frequency and persistence are a sign that they are cascading on to each other, like a collapsing house of cards. The growing crisis over the federal deficit, like unrest over food prices, fuel supplies and job allocations in the Middle East — even the troubles in China — are about prices which have been distorted by government policy and now seek an equilibrium it can’t attain.
What is in the way are the institutions and attitudes we’ve accumulated over the second half of the Twentieth Century. What is in the way are all the things we wanted and now find we can’t afford unless we change our institutions or modify our wants. We have accumulated, along with our entitlements, a vast pasture full of sacred cows which we have declared immortal. The 21st century was peculiar in that many regarded it as the permanent extension of the 20th, that End of History. All future time was dedicated by definition to the perfection of the 20th and the grazing of the sacred cows. The world had enumerated its rights in the hundred years just past and was going to devote the eternity following to enjoying them. But there was one problem.
Beyond the notions of “collective bargaining” rights, or “the right to food”, “right to migrate”, “right to carbon credits”, “right of return”, or the “right to welfare” or whatever rights people thought they had, was the crass question of whether the society on whose transfer payments were going to underwrite it could afford it. The unrest that is sweeping the world is underlain by a struggle between the core idea of market economics that you can’t get something for nothing and the fundamental promise of every statist politician that of course you can.
Now it looks as if the 20th century really can’t afford its promises without significant reform, however entrenched the sacred cows are. And whatever can’t be sustained, won’t be.
All the problems now besetting the EU, the Middle East, the US and Asia will find their basic settlement when those who can’t hang on to their rent-seeking arrangements finally let go. Their titles may vary: military men in Egypt, Ayatollahs in Iran, the dictator and his cronies in Libya, Eurocrats in Brussels, public sector unions in the United States. What they share in common is an attachment to a way of life that has now become unaffordable. They can try to hang on, but the handwriting is on the wall. It will all come tumbling down, and soon.
Some will do as well or better after the smash. But a few will never find their footing and spend their waning days looking back at their Golden Age. It is no use pretending that a fin de siecle brings no unhappy endings. We were never at the end of history. But we are — and for some time have been — at the end of the 20th. One day we may all miss Time and Newsweek or the Ivy Leagues the way we miss vaudeville. But there’s no way back.
“If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: ‘Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people’s books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you’- what should I say?
I should have an answer ready. ‘Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.’
To which he might reply: ‘But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!’
‘Has the twentieth century,’ I should ask, ‘done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven’t missed it – ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.”
— L.P. Hartley (The Go-Between)
Goodbye, 20th. But there’s still the twenty-first.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
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In NYC City College was “the poor man’s Harvard.” The City University, where CCNY was the flagship, was wrecked by Open Admissions. So great was the drive to admit everybody that even free tuition was sacrificed. For the masses of net consumers that does not matter since they do not pay anyway. With fees assigned to third party payers costs have soared while standards slumped.
Heard in the waiting room.
“They’ve srewed me over, they are screwing over my grandkids, and I’m getting close enough to the grave to the point where I want to take some with me.”
In their lust for the taxpayer funds the eduacation gate keepers in the US also pressured the teachers for less rigourus grading to keep the number of students up as long as possible to extract the maximum money. This has over the long run led to a further devaluing of the product. A hign school diploma is now worthless, and a college degree is about what a highschool degree was worth in the 1960′s.
UPDATE Leo’s interview has been postponed.
BTW, one our Belmont Club stalwarts, Leo Linbeck III is going to be interviewed by Dennis Praeger on Monday, 2 pm Eastern.
Egypt has had unemployed college graduates for decades. When I took a second job in 1980 as a bartender in the Washington, DC suburbs, I had several Egyptian busboys working with me, and all were college graduates.
India had this perennial problem as well, but India dealt with it in two ways that have been way more efective than Egypt’s: 1) when the Indian economy was abysmal many Indian graduates could get jobs overseas because of their highly marketable high-end skills, and 2) India finally went to a market economy and now can absorb a lot more of its graduates than used to be the case.
Wisconsin today. Maine tomorrow. The jig is up.
Poor people in some parts of S.Asia and Africa are sending their kids to private schools. No, really. I’ll try to locate a source (I vaguely recall one through Reason online). These schools are priced for what their market can bear, and apparently the kids get a better education than in the government-funded schools. Government schooling seems to suffer universally from similar disfunctions.
I wondering if the chosen one will soon be speaking out in support of the Chinese rioters? (I won’t hold my breath) Is the earth in birth pangs, the change is coming… are we entering into the last chapter of the Good Book? Will soon every man’s heart be filled with evil towards another (DNC against RNC, Progressive/Liberal against Conservative, Socialist against Freedom, Secular against Christian, Christian against Muslim…) will the strongman tremble with fear at every moments news. When Chaos reigns and the opposer claims his throne will you be ready?
Here are some sources on private schools in 3rd world areas:
http://enterprisingschools.com/markets/news/private-schools-poor-fill-gap-s-africa
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/5/private-schools-fill-poor-s-africa-neighborhoods/
http://www.enterprisingschools.com/markets/asia
Somewhere Francis Fukuyama is cringing and wishing he could collect every copy of a certain book he wrote- and burn it…
From a Tin Pan Alley hit (in 3/4 time) of 1919 (the year after the end of the war to end all wars):
I’m dreaming dreams,
I’m scheming schemes,
I’m building castles high.
They’re born anew,
Their days are few,
Just like a sweet butterfly.
And as the daylight is dawning,
They come again in the morning.
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams,
They fade and die.
Fortune’s always hiding,
I’ve looked everywhere,
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.
Contemporary recording here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr_DTozbH8E&feature=related
Wretchard: Beyond the notions of “collective bargaining” rights, or “the right to food”, “right to migrate”, “right to carbon credits”, “right of return”, or the “right to welfare” or whatever rights people thought they had, was the crass question of whether the society on whose transfer payments were going to underwrite it could afford it.
And the answer to that question comes in the form of facts on the ground. Doug posted data about budget shortfalls by state. It seems that only the red states Alaska, Arkansas, North Dakota and Wyoming are paying for what they take. So far the United States as a whole has been able to ignore the impending fiscal doomsday because the Fed can print money. Individual states cannot. Some states have constitutional requirements to balance the budget at least every two years. Others borrow money, but there’s a downside to doing that too:
“…After several downgrades in the last year, Illinois general obligation bonds are rated A1, with a negative outlook, by Moody’s. This is the lowest among the 50 states…”
In the free market this liability is overcome by offering higher interest rates on bonds.
“…Illinois, with the lowest credit rating of any state from Moody’s Investors Service, dangled yields higher than Mexico, which defaulted on debt in 1982, and Portugal, which costs more to insure against missed payments…”
If you want social peace the number of attorneys must be throttled back.
A Western legal education is centered on extreme argument to prevail in a win-lose, zero sum fight.
Too much ‘justice’ ends up with bizarre outcomes such as food for smelt and phosphates for swamps. ( California’s Central Valley Dust Ranch & Florida’s phosphate mining industry. )
The largest surge in new-wave degrees exist solely to extract economic rents created under victimology theory and Leftism.
Any woman with a minor in gender studies is no longer suitable marriage material. This trendy fashion is loaded with feminist agitprop and the only ‘market’ for its screeds is at the Federal Bench.
In twenty years we’ll have an army of spinsters railing at lost youth and vigor. Too late the truth comes.
I guess it’s not that easy to graduate from third-world status to first world, and just getting more college graduates is not enough.
Somebody tell this to Obama, who holds to the old bromide that more education will fix anything, even here in America.
Which is why I was very happy to see that the article mentions, we are already having that same problem here in the USA.
Of course for decades the joke has been about what one does with a liberal arts degree, but for over a decade now a science, technology, math, computer degree has meant hardly more, as all the jobs are sent overseas and to add to the insult cheap foreign graduates are brought to the US under H-1B and other visa programs.
–
So, is this really that “crisis of rising expectations” in Libya and elsewhere? I don’t know that I can quite believe that. I think it’s a wider cultural revolution.
And if they want it to succeed, my advice is that they dump Islam. At the least, it will have to be forced to reform hugely. And – it may be happening. Let’s be optimistic. Maybe in Egypt. Maybe in Libya. Maybe in Tunisia. Even one country gets it right, and it just might spread.
And if it all does go well, I will tend to credit Facebook, Twitter, the Internet generally, moreso than college degrees.
In my opinion some part of the problem is that the private sector is now competing on a global basis while the public sector has been completely insulated from any competition. Under these conditions the private sector doesn’t see why it should pay for the golden pay and benefits of the public sector.
It took the U.S. states to finally say enough is enough – all the other countries who thought that this could not be done are now looking at the leadership displayed in Wisconsin & New Jersey. Once the solution has been implemented in one place the precedent will be followed everywhere.
So far the United States as a whole has been able to ignore the impending fiscal doomsday because the Fed can print money. Individual states cannot.
The ability to print money is like the ability to pay by credit card. It does not create something out of nothing. There’s no free lunch. There is no free lunch.
It changes the due date of the bill, but it never extinguishes it. The Fed is now where no sane person would ever be, using Mastercard to pay for American Express and using American Express to pay for Mastercard. It is now borrowing to fund a deficit.
The idea that the states can be bailed out by the Feds is as sound as the belief by a man who cannot find anything left to pawn, that his worries are over because his cousin, who is using one credit card to pay off the other, will bail him out. Wrong. They are just rearranging the sh*t on the carpet. All of them in a hole and the only way out is to stop digging.
Most of the solutions to the current crisis are obvious. But they are also painful and mean, among other things, that people who are now in power will lose their jobs or go broke. Therefore the solutions will remain invisible even to Paul Krugman until the repo man carts away the sofa he’s sitting on, and even then he’ll cling to it with his fingernails.
To quote Robert Conquest’s book “The Dragons of Expectation”;
“An ever larger section of society is put through ‘high’ education. One element of this is educated in scientific and other specialized disciplines, though often unaccompanied by much in the way of ‘education’ proper. The other element is given a (shrinking) slice of ‘humanist’ training … a growing proportion of them have no option afterwards but to go into an increasingly large and less-educated academe or to seek jobs in the bureaucracy… At any rate, the state is to some extent creating a nonproductive class and providing nonproductive work for them.”
In other words, modern day education is the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone, with unceasing demands for their own versions of “stimulus” packages to keep the bubble inflating.
Note also that scientific professions are hardly immune to this, always seeking the latest version of the snail darter, CFC ban, or climate change urgency that will enable experts that know more and more about less and less to thrive at the public trough.
J. M. Barrie:
“The life of every man [read: "nation"] is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour [ie, right about now] is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn. My God do you learn … C.S. Lewis
We are at the start of the 21st century and disconsolation is the brutal experience from which we are now drawing, is as every other, in every other time. In another fifty years perhaps it will be hope, not disconsolation that springs the archers bow but we will never see the change.
Our lot is to draw the archers bow again and again, in different times only to learn that the arrow falls onto a different land….. Where our lessons must be learned again.
“When the cost of paying unionized teachers increases from the kindergarten level on up while graduates at the end of the educational conveyor belt find themselves unable to parlay their credentials into jobs, one has the classic symptoms of a bubble that has to burst.”
Perhaps the Tea Party came into being to get us back to Kansas. Back to the pioneer spirit to discover what we are really made of.
The mention of the bubble reminded me of the end of the Wizard of Oz – Glenda arrives in a bubble to inform Dorothy that all she has to do get home is click the heels of her red slippers together and repeat “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”.
That is probably the real attraction of Sarah Palin – she may be Glenda or Dorothy or both. She certainly has the ability to show that there is virtue in the pioneer spirit and family and old American values. She has some pretty mean slippers as well.
I think we are pretty safe from the Wicked Witch of the West (Pelosi) and her quest for the red slippers. If we could just get all the flying monkeys out of Madison . . .
I live in the third world city of Los Angeles. I send my only daughter to a private school. She is now a senior. When she started kindergarten, the tuition was less than one third it is now. And to my eyes, the quality of eduction provided at our school has markedly declined over those years. My income per hour is less of course than when she started school.
You may ask ‘why didn’t you send your daughter to a public school”? As it happens, my wife and I were heavily involved in our local public elementary school when our daughter was two and three. My wife was actually the PTA vice president, and we had keys to the school. We literally spent hundreds of hours trying to improve the school, hoping that our efforts would make the school good enough for our daughter to go there. After many disappointing events at that school, our breaking point was when we learned that our beloved LAUSD in late October of our last year helping, decided that one class that had a bilingual teacher with ten english speaking and ten spanish speaking kids needed fifteen additional Korean only speaking kids. Of course the teacher did not speak Korean. That and every other decision we knew about was always about the money. Not the kids. Never about the kids. And little was ever done to improve the dangerous environment the kids were expected to learn in.
The education system, both public and private, is a rent seeking scam. We hear from many public school parents how the teachers need more money. B.S. I ‘m a thinkin that $86 grand that teachers are getting for a 9 month a year job, with several weeks of vacation in between, is way too much mullah. Same goes for most bureaucrats. A thirty percent pay cut across the board would bring them down to average pay in the US. They deserve no more for the service they are providing.
Wretchard says: But the higher education bubble is not just about the glut of graduates, it is also about the price of the education product.
That is true of professional school education as well. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, the average cost of a year’s tuition in U.S. medical schools [for 2010] is $45,000 (Tufts charges over $50,000)– compared to $700 per year in 1959. Students are, however, advised to budget a total of $70,000 per year to cover the cost of books and equipment, food, housing, licensing examinations, and transportation to rotations as well as the tuition fees. An M.D. who borrows the full $280,000 to cover the cost of four years of med school will take 10 years to pay off the loans, assuming he or she can afford to repay $3200 per month. Most, of course, defer repayment until after they finish their residencies.
I wonder how much the Madison M.D.s who are handing out teachers’ sick-out excuses like candy still owe on their student loans.
I’m assuming that the tuition and loan stats for the J.D. crowd are horrific too, except that lawyers can begin their repayment some years earlier on average.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
x @ 9: LOL.
This afternoon on the radio, Brian Suits (sp?), doing “The Dark Secret Place” in which he very intelligently reviews war and military items every week, was just explaining why governments like Libya were in no real danger of falling, when he was interrupted by Al Jazeera carrying the Libyan ambassador to China live, resigning and calling on the military to oppose Kaddafi (sp?), then reports that civilians were slaughtering the foreign troops Kaddafi pays to support him, then that Kaddafi’s two sons had had a gunfight and one was dead, and that the Toureg tribe half a million strong that Kaddafi had armed to keep the Chad invaders at bay, were joining with a LARGER tribe, threatening to cut off oil and march on Tripoli.
“Ooops”, he said.
College educations are now mostly demanded by culture, not by any measure of productivity.
Consider the fallacy of “being there”. Schools enroll young adults at a time of growing independence and exploration. We expect that these people will learn and change in four years. They do this while they are in school, but I think the school should get little credit for being there at the time this happens.
Consider the fallacy of “it’s worth it”. The school presents a program of learning which requires large fees and almost full-time attendance. It certainly “is worth it” as compared to learning nothing, but that is a contrived comparison. There would be other options in a freer market for training and education.
There is no reason to allow this cultural monopoly to continue. Let employers do the testing that they need to select able people. Currently, employers are restricted by employment law, by the theory of Disparate Impact.
Support a system of incremental education and testing that does not require years of resident study, unless there is a proven need (eg. medical education). Allow for experiment and validation of approaches that deliver to students (of any age) the knowledge they need, in the subjects they want, in the amounts they need, with testing and validation.
College is an Expensive IQ Test
I want to know if when Illinois and California finally run out of money do the Feds bail them out? For that printing press to finally overheat and go full Weimar, doesn’t there have to be an alternative to the dollar? Does there have to be some place for everyone else to go? China? Europe? I doubt it. Or are the laws of physics stronger than I am giving them credit?
Right there is a part of the problem with the education system, and the bubble therein. “Stakeholder” is the sacred buzzword used in bureaucratic circles to denote those who have an interest in both the process, and the outcome. Look at that list. Are the children there? The parents? The business community that can be expected to employ the products of the education system? At least if that end of the bubble is not to happen.
I know that the subject was “labor-management cooperation”; but even in that venue the interests of those I listed still exist. And instead we have at that meeting nothing more or less than a collection of rent-seekers whose sole goal is to drain away everything of value that can be stolen for their own benefit, and who have institutional contempt for those not listed. q.v. Wisconsin over the last week.
Subotai Bahadur
25.
*doesn’t there have to be some place for everyone to go.
US Gov. Software Creates ‘Fake People’ on Social Networks to Promote Propaganda
The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage “fake people” on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues.
The contract calls for the development of “Persona Management Software” which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. The job listing was discussed in recently leaked emails from the private security firm HBGary after an attack by internet activist last week.
Click here to view the government contract (PDF)
According to the contract, the software would “protect the identity of government agencies” by employing a number of false signals to convince users that the poster is in fact a real person. A single user could manage unique background information and status updates for up to 10 fake people from a single computer.
The software enables the government to shield its identity through a number of different methods including the ability to assign unique IP addresses to each persona and the ability to make it appear as though the user is posting from other locations around the world.
Included in HBGary’s leaked emails was a government proposal for the government contract. The document describes how they would ‘friend’ real people on Facebook as a way to convey government messages. The document reads:
more, including pdf; http://tinyurl.com/4byjln9
When the markets wake up and see what is happening in Libya tomorrow how much more untenable will those $100,000 schools loans be for young women with degrees in Religious and Women’s Studies? And still our Universities are raising tuition at twice or thrice or four times the CPI.
The madness in the world is so obvious and so palpable birds in the trees must be able to sense it. Maybe that is what behind the recent flurry of dead birds failing from the skies is all about.
With oil over $100 on the spot market, and an Illinois bond offering to pay its current pensioners in the offing for next week it is not going to take very much to panic either the muni bond markets or the stock market. Obama is maneuvering for a government shutdown he thinks he will be able to make political hay on by putting the blame on the Republicans and now Libyan oil in jeopardy with the chaos there this could be the week from Hell in financial markets. Or all the cummulative bubbles might find some reason to keep inflated a little longer. The only thing I know for sure is that something will give soon and when the air goes out it is going to be spectacular.
#20 Unsk, re:
“The education system, both public and private, is a rent seeking scam. We hear from many public school parents how the teachers need more money. B.S. I ‘m a thinkin that $86 grand that teachers are getting for a 9 month a year job, with several weeks of vacation in between, is way too much mullah. Same goes for most bureaucrats. A thirty percent pay cut across the board would bring them down to average pay in the US. They deserve no more for the service they are providing.”
That’s only the half of it, and very literally so. What I learned during my involvement in the 1990′s California school choice movement was that for every education targeted dollar collected in local property taxes and sent to Sacramento (i.e. state capital), only $0.50 arrived back at the local school district, and of that, 40 cents ended up at the local school paying for salaries, supplies, and (heavily subsidized by bonds with discounted interest) infrastructure. While the core problem with the California school systems is liberal ideology, the baseline economic problem is that there’s a 60 percent overhead devoted to social change, while only 40 percent of the budget actually funds schools. “School choice”, i.e. passing the full $buck to the kids parents in form of an education voucher, is the only possible way out of the morass, but that options is dead and discredited in California.
Secular-Humanist progressives have destroyed the “California dream” – every part of it, and there’s no resuscitating that dream without utterly destroying every part of California socialism. As that degree of change is impossible within my lifetime, I’m leaving the state this year.
Old Salt
The analogy of ‘when in a hole, stop digging’ falters when the only tool is a shovel and the only command is ‘do something’
0bama seems to be following the aphorism ‘never iiss an opportunity to muss an opportunity’
Folks, it’s all about what Reynolds describes to a “t”.
“Schooled and credentialled, but not educated”.
Wisdom is the intersection (new math alert) of the subsets of educated, experienced, mature, and honest.
The NPR left, the bulk of ostensible eduators, and chunks of important industries (real estate for one) have become so caught up in credentialing that they are composedl argely of people who are uneducated, good at one narrowly defined skill, and barely literate enough to punch through the required list of things needed to get their certificate.
Lets face it. A chimp could get a masters in education from most places that offer one.
As a civilization we’ve forgotten what wisdom and education are really all about.
Time due to technological change is no longer on the Money Printers side.
The muni bonds recently took a hit because of trader’s fear that with the Wisconsin debacle that states wouldn’t be able to stop the hemorage and thus be able to pay out their bonds.
Financial information flows much faster than it used to and fears are driving investors to protect themselves against inflation and the possiblity of hyperinflation faster than governments can anticipate or understand.
A whirlpool of action and reaction is forming that will drag improvident nations, states, and whatevers down. The question now is not if things are going down but rather how much can be saved in the comming debabcle……
…That of course is the optomisitic veiwpoint.
In any part of the world, supply and demand left to themselves will allocate private goods and services efficiently and set the correct price for these goods and services. A private good is one, that if consumed by one person cannot be consumed by another – like ice cream. But government just has to interfere by deciding for us what private goods we really want – bio fuels, green power, etc – and so distorts the market with subsidies and insane regulations. These distortions end up reducing supplies of the things we really want, oversupplying things we don’t want, raising the cost of everything , making domestic production less competitive and wasting taxpayers money.
In theory, public employees should only be concerned with the production of public goods – goods that even if consumed by one person, are still available for consumption by others. National defense is a public good. Free markets have trouble in ensuring that the right amount of public goods is produced because of the free-rider problem caused by all those people who demand a good or a service but refuse to pay for it.
The crazy thing is, in our progressive Nanny societies, public servants have gained control of producing goods that may not be public goods. Education is an example – if I occupy a seat in a classroom, then you can’t – notwithstanding that the government pays for the education. My consumption of education affects your consumption. In the economic sense defined above, I think education is a private good. The laws of supply and demand should be used to determine how much is produced at what price. If the taxpayers agree to pay for a large chunk of education that is a separate issue. Right now teachers unions determine both the supply of education and the price, by government fiat and by union bullying and by subversion of the electoral process.
So I think the first step toward improving the production of all those private goods that have been hijacked by the public sector, including education, is to take away the public sector’s ability to determine supply and price. The next step is to create a market in these goods that will determine supply and price independent of government interference. If government then wants to pay for a chunk of that supply at the market price and the taxpayer is OK with that, then go for it.
The underlying force that we see bursting bubbles is over the world is the hard fact that incomes and expectations have become de-linked from output. A Grecian expectation is far bigger than a Grecian urn (sorry). In my opinion, the particular bubbles being burst in any one country depend on which markets have been distorted by government and which private goods have had their production hi-jacked by the public sector.
#34 westerncanadian
Education is an example – if I occupy a seat in a classroom, then you can’t – notwithstanding that the government pays for the education. My consumption of education affects your consumption.
Hillbuzz has been following the case of a student in Georgia who was benefiting from reduced college tuition for in-state residents when a routine traffic stop revealed her to be an illegal immigrant:
This is the story of a college student named Jessica Colotl, who also happens to be an illegal immigrant. Her parents brought her into the United States from southern Mexico almost 10 years ago (when she was 11 years old). They have lived here illegally ever since. She has attended public schools in Georgia and after graduating from Westlake High School, she went on to attend Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. She has been paying the reduced in-state tuition rate.
Back in May 2010, Jessica was stopped by campus police for “impeding the flow of traffic”. She was arrested when she could not produce a drivers license (she only had an outdated Mexican passport). That’s when her gig was up. The police turned her over to ICE . . . and the national media circus began. . . . She is supposed to be deported after her graduation in May but the pro-amnesty organizations are doing everything they can to stop that.
How many more Jessica Colotls are there out there who are illegally receiving benefits that are meant for American citizens?
Link includes excerpts from a news item in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: http://hillbuzz.org/2011/02/14/the-case-of-jessica-colotl-college-student-illegal-immigrant-indicted-on-felony-charges/
We are in the midst of an ongoing supply crunch which will lead to negative global GDP and send us into a great depression which will never end… that is what is going on. Our current food production rate relies on mined energy and mined chemical fertilizer, and when that starts to throttle down.. (throttle as in “choke”)…the population worldwide will fall to approach equilibrium with our lower food production rate. Against the backdrop of this slow-motion global train wreck, people just aren’t going to have any sympathy for public servant crapweasels who refuse to even accept a 12% buy-in on their Cadillac health care plan.
Anger on the streets: unrest in Iran, Algeria, Yemen, Morocco and China…
So far we have seen relatively little killing by those in power, but if that turns how much killing will we see?
A. Some
B. Some more
C. a bunch
D. a bunch more
I’ll tune in from Montana…… http://tinyurl.com/4jperhq
W: “All future time was dedicated by definition to the perfection of the 20th and the grazing of the sacred cows.”
Very nice.
35. PA Cat
“I’ll buy the world a coke”
State and Federal bankruptcy is the only hope to save this country. When the Sh*t hits the fan and Obama is printing worthless greenbacks with 50% per year inflation, we will all be taking the fall for not forcing our government officials to take the necessary steps right now to reign in spending. We will deserve what we get.
For all those who GOT SOMETHING FOR NOTHING all these years, I point you to Fransicso’s ‘Money’ Speech from Atlas Shruggs:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2158115/posts
Andrew M. #24
I have mentioned here before a memorable 1993 ABC TV report giving the example of 3 newly graduated college students who could not find suitable jobs. One majored in Art History, one in French, and one in International Studies.
They went to then-Labor Secty Robert Reich, and asked him an intelligent question: Should students be taking courses actually applicable to the available jobs?
The answer he gave was stunning. Reich said that no, students should take whatever, and then the companies that hire them will teach them what they need to know. Reich, a former university professor, who taught Wretchard, among many others, basically excused the educational establishment from producing anything of value. I guess it’s nice work if you can get it.
I will admit that I really did not start to learn engineering until my first job. But formal schooling had given me theoretical basis for that real learning experience, and my own personal studies had given me the interest and motivation to pursue that knowledge.
I figured Quaddaffi’s oil money and and water policies would insulate
him from the troubles of his neighbors. Looks like I figured
wrong.
It looks like we won’t see a repeat of Madison in the Lone Star State.
AUSTIN, Texas – Texas is preparing to give college students and professors the right to carry guns on campus, adding momentum to a national campaign to open this part of society to firearms.
Well maybe I’ll drag the Cobra up to Montana when the weather gets a might more hospitible,,,Gold headed over $1400/oz …..life is good…
Cobra pic ,,,, http://tinyurl.com/47e2xds
yeah,,,,
I wander through the dusty room
My mind enclosed by distant past
Dark furniture lost in the gloom
Ghosts whispering it could not last
So bright the glow of golden days
When all we wanted seemed so near
We counted not the many ways
The end would come for things held dear
So rich we were that those in need
Were given riches beyond worth
To caution words we paid no heed
We all were kings at time of birth
‘Tis painful now to see the way
The world’s become such bitter ground
How once was here but could not stay
The golden time we thought we found
I wander through the dusty room
That is my youth now in decay
And weep for things in coming gloom
That once were here but could not stay
Habu,
In parts of New York that .wav clip sounds like love talk.
Libya may be imploding or exploding, choose a side and argue.
Possibly what is happening across the world, especially in the Arab world, is that artificial post colonial states are dissolving back into their tribal components. This may be an essential but very dangerous step on the path to modernity.
In Libya the rebellion is centered on Benghazi the capital of Cyrenaica, one of the three parts of the country. It is also the stronghold of the Senussi religious sect, believed to hold the allegiance of about a third of the national population, and in the current troubles making common cause with the native Berbers against the true colonialists, the hypocritical revolutionary psuedo-socialist urban elite of Triploi. Idris, the monarch deposed by Ghaddafi (or Qaddafi or Khaddafy or Daffy Duck) was the leader of that community. They may have been the religious reformist pro-Western pragmatic Islamic group, neither unpredictably mystical Sufi nor unreliably manipulative Wahabbi that people have spent the last 40 years looking for. Or they may be just as bad as the other guys but only get to look good by comparison with Mr Green Book.
One thing is sure the US did wrong by not backing up our ally when we were sitting right there in Wheelus Air Force Base back in September 1969. Why did we let that happen? Was there anything going on that could explain this distraction by the new US administration? It sure could have set a bad precedent if the US wasn’t careful about such things going forward.
“doesn’t there have to be some place for everyone to go”
Yes, It’s called America. If that isn’t scary, nothing is.
One big problem is the Left refuses to accept that supply and demand exist. They think S & D are conservative plots to screw up their delusion of state control.
Massive brain melt when they find out S & D are as real and as unforgiving as gravity.
Certain atoms, like hydrogen, don’t like being separated from other atoms, like oxygen… that’s why when you see a “hydrogen car” rest assured that it took burning methane or propane pumped from the ground to separate the hydrogen so that some “environmentalist” can watch water dripping from the tailpipe. Now take this basic dog-and-pony-show process of appearance over substance and multiply it across the globe. That’s the second decade of the 21st Century in a nutshell.
#34 western canadian – that’s a really excellent analysis. You’ve made some great points.
I agree – a key problem with the economy is that ‘the money’ has been transfered from the domain of the private sector to the domain of the public sector. And the public sector, instead of focusing on taxing the citizen only for providing goods and services that are public, i.e., available to all (defense, roads etc)..has moved into providing private goods – education, health care. And these are not used by everyone. AND, importantly, more and more of the population has removed themselves from paying for the ‘free’ public services.
No system can maintain an output with a reduced input. This is just basic mechanics.
The public service unions have both expanded in size and scope and also, have increased the cost of services beyond the carrying cost of the private sector economy – and, the reduction in the size of the ratio of taxpayers has reduced the tax income to the state. The private sector simply cannot support this massive goliath that feeds on it.
This is what we see happening in the Middle East, which is collapsing because it set itself up, right from the start, as a socialist or tribal state, relying on raw resources (oil, Suez Canal) to fund its public economy…and its population has increased beyond its ability to support them.
Same thing in the West, which moved into socialism and the public provision of services after the World Wars, and has reached a critical threshold when the reduced private sector economy simply cannot sustain the public ‘entitlements’ and the public civil service employees and their ‘entitlements’.
The cracks and snaps, as these systems collapse in themselves, are not the end of the world, but a collapse of an unsustainable Imaginary Cloak that we dressed ourselves in a generation ago. It’s time to take off this cloak and re-enter the world of Reality.
Libya appears to be in full civil war mode with rumors flying all over.
It’s breaking so fast that it could be all over by Thursday.
This is not a monolithic issue.
In the us the problem is government subsidizing loans for college which drives the price up at the expense of students.
In Tunisia the problem is lack of economic freedom – lack of ability to start companies where college graduates could work, and educational freedom to study subjects that the students choose.
China cracks down on the word “Jasmine” used by social media to rally protestors. The communists are pissing their pants. Ghaddafi is already toast. Meanwhile, Iran is dinking around with their destroyers in the Suez Canal. They might want to look to their home front maybe.
Not just an idea of market economics but one of physics – natural law – OR the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics = TANSTAAFL = there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Gotta pay that piper somehow.
And the sorry state of what passes for edumacation in these Unites States. We are trying to hire technicians for a high tech industry. They have to possess an A.S. of some sort. We prefer Computer or Electronics Technology. Fresh diplomas cannot pass a basic skills test! Much less seasoned hands with up to a decade of experience! Educated idiots is what most of them are and they want to work on our Hi-Rel systems? Nah! Nah! Nah! (Channeling the AFLAC goat)
josh – “….but for over a decade now a science, technology, math, computer degree has meant hardly more…”
Have one in Math and Physics. With a lower one in Electroncis Tech and higher in Project Mgmt. I can always find some kind of work to do. The problem is thus. I was interviewing in my present technicians position a prospective technician and recent grad. I asked him:
“Well, is this something you want to do?” (Giving the dumb but well intentioned kid the out to ASK for the job)
His answer?
“Not sure. I want to keep my options open!”
I could help him with that!
The point being that if you are interviewing for a job cleaning toilets in the lowest whore house in town in spite of possessing a PhD and need a job you should treat that particular job as the ONE you WANT and HAVE TO HAVE. Being hungry focuses the mind.
I have personally witnessed, in one very busy recent year, American college students paying thousands in tuition to attend Aboriginal corroborees in Australia, and yoga classes in India (the local price I was paying for the same thing was a tiny fraction of what they were paying) as credit towards degrees. They call it ‘global education’ but the lucrative tuition fees Americans (but no one else) pays are, I suspect, encouraging dubious fringe operators. Certainly this looks like a bubble ready to burst.
“No Confirmation That Gadhafi Left Libya
A U.S. official said on Sunday that the State Department checked and couldn’t confirm reports that Col. Gadhafi had left Libya. The official said the U.S. has been in regular contact with Libyan officials over the past two days, urging an end of the use of force. But the official said Washington hasn’t been in direct contact with the Gadhafi family.
“We are continually assessing the situation on the ground and urging restraint,” said the senior U.S. official.
The highest level contact was Friday, the official said, when the State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for Near East affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, called Libyan Foreign Minister, Musa Kusa. The U.S.’s ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, has been out of Tripoli for more than a month in the wake of the leaking of diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks.
In one of the cables, Mr. Cretz wrote to the State Department about what he described as Col. Gadhafi’s erratic behavior, drawing a rebuke from the Libyan government. U.S. officials said Mr. Cretz was recalled, in part, due to concerns about his security in Tripoli.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703498804576156891544685066.html?mod=fox_australian
one thing is sure his a** is getting hot
I think that many countries would love to see him finishing like Mussolini , hanged by his feet
RWE #41
Reich said that no, students should take whatever, and then the companies that hire them will teach them what they need to know.
It’s happening on the health care front; Gerard at American Digest provides the bio (from the UW Department of Family Medicine, not Iowahawk) of one of the newfangled Hippocrateses providing sick-out excuses on the front lines in Madison:
Patrick McKenna grew up in the northern Wisconsin town of Antigo. After earning his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from UW-Madison, he took an untraditional path to medicine by first pursuing an MBA in Chicago and a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Alaska. Ultimately, though, his Wisconsin roots lured him back to The Dairy State to attend medical school at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Patrick’s leadership and commitment to public service are evidenced by his work during medical school as a LOCUS Fellow and with the MEDIC free clinics in Madison. He served as MEDIC Council president during his second year and received the 2006 McGovern-Tracy Scholar award, which recognizes medical students who exemplify values of community service and leadership while in training. He also has a passion for global health and served as both a member and co-chair of the UW Global Health Interest Group. In his spare time, Patrick enjoys athletics of all kinds, including basketball, broomball, running, bicycling, canoeing, and skiing. He also enjoys gardening, cooking, baking, and sewing, and he has strong interests in politics, rural policy, sustainability, and creative writing.
In other words, a perfect fit for Obamacare.
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/dr_fraudulent_yeah_im_a_r.php
Went out tonight and shoveled ten inches of snow off the driveway. By the time I got to the end of the driveway, there was an additional two inches at the beginning. So I shoveled it again; by the time I finished, there was another inch — so here I am.
What have I discovered in my absence? That George Bush may have lost New Orleans, but Obama has lost the world. That’s right up there with Chiang Kai-Shek losing China.
Toynbee’s interregnum has apparantly arrived; but if Wisconsin plays it right, they can pass Voter-ID, right-to-work, right-to-carry and mandatory ROTC on Tuesday’s regularly scheduled session before the missing Dems can find there way home.
As we sang in Viet Nam, “we’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do”. Most of us did to the chagrin of many, but that was their problem. As it turned out, what appeared to be hopeless was just another beginning.
RagnarD:53,
The point being that if you are interviewing for a job cleaning toilets in the lowest whore house in town in spite of possessing a PhD and need a job you should treat that particular job as the ONE you WANT and HAVE TO HAVE. Being hungry focuses the mind.
This should be tattooed on the back of every new graduates hand.!!!!
I nominate this as thread win!!!
I’m not worried. America has it’s own Joan of Arc waiting in the wings.
Joans big break was at Les Tourelles. The professionals we argueing over how to break the siege. Learned experts all arguing over left flank vs right, Enfilade vs pincer. Joan said “God is on our side, follow me! And off she rode, straight into the teeth of the defense. The boys followed her and the French won the first of a series of victories that would finish the 100 years war. Common sense over experts. Happens all the time.
Sara will wipe our tears, kiss the bobo and send us back to play. America is ready for a woman’s touch.
Hamburg has just slammed Angela Merkel & the CDU.
The $ 82,500,000 Euro down/ USD up bet is already coming in!
Both Ireland and Portugal are on life support — and the German public is revolting.
Daffy Duck figures to be too far behind the curve. He’s putting out end-of-the-world propaganda in such a manner that he looks to pull an Adolf.
Near as I can tell he’s managed to alienate everyone for years, meaning that he may have nowhere to go.
Teresita provokes an interesting thought. She describes this scenario where we face global negative GDP, causing a “throttle down” in capital flows. That starves industrial engines wherever they are found, causing a downward spiral in the production of essentials across the board. Interestingly, we arrive at Malthus through the back door. We’d get there not through exhaustion of resources, but ironically through exhaustion of capital. Boy wouldn’t that be something.
What’s worse is that, if such a thing begins to happen, you know the script that will be trotted out. Yes, expert management will be needed. Straight out of Hayek. We’ll need new powers for new managers to apply carefully targeted regulations. Only in this way can we pull out of this spiral. Sure as Sunday they’ll pull down on the stick, though, and together in a coordinated fashion. These types know nothing else.
Wowser what a prospective disaster!
r @ 53: And the sorry state of what passes for edumacation in these Unites States. We are trying to hire technicians for a high tech industry. They have to possess an A.S. of some sort. We prefer Computer or Electronics Technology. Fresh diplomas cannot pass a basic skills test! Much less seasoned hands with up to a decade of experience! Educated idiots is what most of them are and they want to work on our Hi-Rel systems? Nah! Nah! Nah!
Well, I have a couple of comments on that. First, all STEM salaries are now so low, that it’s a wonder you get any qualified candidates/graduates at all. Salaries need to be tripled, for our nation to survive. Second, I hear the same stories where I’ve been working and from the recruiters around town, BUT “follow the money”, everyone whines, and nobody offers more money for the best – so now, there are no best. This comes down to a management problem, they don’t know or won’t go where they have to, to maintain the company. It’s a huge social problem. It’s why our economy will not recover anytime soon, like the next ten years at least.
If some young punk doesn’t know enough to give the right answer in interview situations as you suggest, which is to *lie* and say, “I really want this job!”, then, well, whatever, y’know. Given the low salary and nonexistent job security, I can’t really blame him. It becomes my job to sell him on it, *I*’m not above that when it’s needed.
Blert
“and the German public is revolting”
No he is turning GREEN
Merkel has been sanctionned for not following her party stances, no bailing out ! and for having handled the crisis so badly
What’s odd is that its likely that the design margins could be restored to such an extent that even the parasitic government unions could be supported–if only the US collapsed its dependence on foreign energy. With abundant supplies of natural gas and now the news that technology has enabled the USA to have abundant supplies of oil– the USA could do this. But the very thing the democrats could embrace to relieve the pressure on their government unions–they won’t do.
This is a particular feature of the american socialists/democrats. The socialists in Brazil love oil. They seem to know oil pays government workers salaries.
That said, there’s no way the big oil and natural gas reserves won’t make their way to market and do all kinds of great things like strengthen the US dollar, and pull down the price of gas at the pump and top off government coffers, and relieve the US balance of payments.
All the good stuff above will happen for 5-10 years.
However, that stuff won’t happen in a timely way, that is in time to save a lot of seiu types from losing a lot of their gravy train. I’m not sad about this.
The current state of affairs is the result of a decade or so of pissing away a couple trillion dollars on bad real estate loans. Had these investment dollars been put into something productive-ie that had a return on investment-instead of a loss–the tax money would have been there to make government ends meet.
So lets do the math here.
1/) the demcrats caused the real estate bubble by forcing the government to force banks to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them.
2.)The economic implosion causes a massive reduction of in government revenues.
3.)the democrats refuse to adapt energy fiscal and regulatory policies that will ensure the return of economic growth and the growth of government revenues in a timely way. But instead insist on imposing more growth retarding energy controls, government regulation and government spending.
So what’s the consequence?
4.) The democrats now are worried that they’ll be stripped of their financial base in government union dues.
Wonder why they would be worried.
The question proper Russian nationalists have to ask themselves is–is the Duma adapting the kinds of policies that will enable Russia to adapt to lower oil prices in 5-10 years or so. That is–is the Duma adapting the kinds of policies that will result in a more diverse economy for Russia in 5-10 years–while maintaining oil & gas production. (New oil and natural gas extraction techniques invented in the USA will ensure that Russia has exploitable reserves beyond the foreseeable future ie more than 100 years– however US production won’t effect supply by lowering prices–for another 5-10 years.)
#46 Blast Fron the Past
One thing is sure the US did wrong by not backing up our ally when we were sitting right there in Wheelus Air Force Base back in September 1969. Why did we let that happen? Was there anything going on that could explain this distraction by the new US administration? It sure could have set a bad precedent if the US wasn’t careful about such things going forward.
It sure is a blast from the past to read about Gadhaffi this week; I was there as a military dependent in 1969 when the Revolutionary Council dealt a coup to King Idris, who was out of the country in Egypt. Why it happened was that like King Feisal of Egypt, he had no real power base, being a creation of the allies after WWII’s decolonization by Italy.
You are correct in that there are three provinces with different peoples/tribes/clans. In the 1960s, the lore was that, at the king’s death, civil war would break out among the Crown Princes, who were allied with different provinces. By the fall of 1969, the dynamic had changed, and rumors were rife that the Generals would stage a coup. The surprise was that the junior officers beat them to it.
Gadhaffi quickly eliminated any rivals among the original shadowy Revolutionary Council; a gun battle left a number dead and Gadhaffi shot within the first weeks.
Negotiations began with the agreement for Wheelus Base thrown into the trashcan by Gadhaffi; any talks were limited to how soon the Americans would pack up and leave.
Mind you, this was still the era of decolonization and self-determination for subject peoples; the Libyan Army had the guns and was not reluctant to eliminate anyone they saw as a threat initially.
Gadhaffi was a meglamanic from the beginning, proposing unions with Syria, Egypt, and the Sudan; he thought he was worthy of a larger subject population to rule.
After he kicked out the USAF, he nationalized the oil companies.
I’ve always wanted to read his psych file; he has some peculularities;-)
Libyan tribe threatens to cut oil exports soon
Sun Feb 20, 2011 10:43pm GMT
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFLDE71J0PP20110220?sp=true
off topic, but a thought -
Could wikileaks be responsible for all the latest happenings?
don’t trust anyone under 30 or gubermints ?
habu/28;
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2430695/posts
or just search [ cass sunstein nudge internet ] –no need to limit yourself to the freeper site. I linked it because it is almost exactly one year old.
But take a broader look, for sure. Take a look at who admires Obama’s regulatory policy czar’s ”cognitive infiltration” idea.
And (sorry wretchard), “Harvard, again”.
***
f47/67; wikileaks, or maybe the black sun of Revelations 6:12
(just kidding, heh heh…heh….heh. heh
Hamburg was about Hamburg. The German public is in the moment not really revolting and not turning more green than it was already. Merkels CDU was there until last year in a coalition with the Greens and they had a very popular gay major. This major made to many concessions towards the Greens especially concerning school politics (lowering the standards). In this case the conservatives in Hamburg turned against their own party, the CDU (which is in reality a joke and not a conservative party anymore) and defeated the school reform plans in a referendum. After that the gay major resigned and then the Greens broke up the coalition. They hoped to gain more power through new elections in a coalition together with the SPD, the social-democrats. To prevent this, quite some of the conservative electorate voted SPD (because it was clear, that the CDU will loose anyway). And now the SPD can rule alone and the Greens are annoyed. Ha ha.
Thomas
(born in Hamburg)
.48 Teresita
“…rest assured that it took burning methane or propane pumped from the ground to separate the hydrogen so that some “environmentalist” can watch water dripping from the tailpipe.”
You just pegged my droll meter, madam. Nice!
blert@60
Hamburg has just slammed Angela Merkel & the CDU.
There were a lot of local negatives concerning the last two CDU mayors in Hamburg, and there also was the recent controversy concerning plagiarism by the defense minister.
The SPD picked up 17 seats, and I think it may have been due to the popularity of their candiate Olaf Scholz compared to the unpopular CDU candidate Ahlhaus. The FDP picked up 9 seats, the Greens 2 and the Leftists stayed the same, however since the SPD won an absolute majority they won’t need a coalition with any of the weaker parties. That reduces the influence any of them will have.
I do think there is a wait and see attitude here about over-generalizing the results of the Hamburg election.
A factor to consider is that the winning SPD aren’t known to be bailout foes, which would belie the argument that Hamburg was voting against Merkel/CDU economic policies.
Only 57% voted, which is low by German standards.
The real bellwether will be the Baden-Württemberg state elections at the end of March. It should be a CDU stronghold, but protests over a planned expansion of Stuttgart’s railroad station that the frugal Swabs don’t think is economical has reduced her popularity.
RD@53: Fresh diplomas cannot pass a basic skills test!
While I wouldn’t question that assertion with a liberal arts candidate, I find that most of the entry level science and tech types are bright and reasonably skilled. Worst criticism I have is speed of performance, which can be learned (sometimes!)
you should treat that particular job as the ONE you WANT and HAVE TO HAVE. Being hungry focuses the mind.
It’s a funny modern quirk that must-have survival skills related to employment include the judgment to know when and the ability to know how to lie – with conviction. Some high percentage of all staff-level technical work requires mind-numbing attention to routine detail that the responsible person performs without comment. It’s called work. To ask that person to attach orgasmic pleasure to monotonous repetitive duties and assignments seems possibly unreasonable and undignified.
“Keeping one’s options open” is a smart thing to do in an economy where right-to-work laws, shifting industrial demographics, wage scales, and cost of living constraints encourage the adoption of a more nimble skill set and more flexible career objectives, not to mention a more nomadic life style. The alternative expectation is that your employer will take care of you for life.
Hamburg is in the german context special. It is and was always quite rich, quite international, quite liberal and quite anglophil. After the first world war there was in Hamburg a not so small movement for joining the Commonwealth and splitting from Germany
YBR:72,
It’s a funny modern quirk that must-have survival skills related to employment include the judgment to know when and the ability to know how to lie – with conviction.
Sorry dude, I don’t buy it. When I’m hungry and I need work to buy food, I ain’t lying when I very convincingly say, “Where are the cleaning supplies? I’ll get that cleaned right away for you.”
Have you ever been hungry? I mean really hungry without any government dole in the offing and no friends or family around to bail you out? As RagnarD says above, it certainly does sharpen the mind and puts things in perspective. If we (the USA) continue in the direction we are headed, the “most intelligent leaders in the world” are going to insure that each and every one of us has that opportunity.
Perspicacious Wretchard: “Therefore the solutions will remain invisible even to Paul Krugman until the repo man carts away the sofa he’s sitting on, and even then he’ll cling to it with his fingernails.”
This was most beautifully said. I can just picture it in my mind. On television, the repo men come in and begin dragging away the sofa. Krugman is clinging to it and being dragged along on the floor, all the while he’s screaming “this is my sofa! Don’t you hear me? THIS IS MY SOFA!” I had to lolliate on that one. But, wow, it does appear that I have lived long enough that I might even get to witness what in earlier times seemed utterly inconceivable: the financial economic collapse of the United States.
cowboy @ 61
“Teresita provokes an interesting thought. She describes this scenario where we face global negative GDP, causing a “throttle down” in capital flows. That starves industrial engines wherever they are found, causing a downward spiral in the production of essentials across the board. Interestingly, we arrive at Malthus through the back door. We’d get there not through exhaustion of resources, but ironically through exhaustion of capital. Boy wouldn’t that be something.”
Everybody confuses money with the thing it represents. If the meter rod were stolen from the National Bureau of Standars and shaved down I would not be any taller. I wouldn’t be any dumber and it would still take me the same number shovel strkes to shovel the drive way. I would be just as productive a “machine” as I was the day before in the terms of physics but there would be an information gap that would drive down market efficiency if I were selling my my snow shoveling services.
Imagine a world in which the meter rod varied daily of hourly or every couple of micro-seconds and you are trying to buy enough asphalte to pave the New Jersey Turnpike. You call up somebody in Brazil and say, “Hey Ben Bernanke is thinking of a co;or between puce and mauve that we will use for todays meter road and I would like price on enough asphalt to pave the New Jersey Turnpike.”
The guy on the other side of the line says yeah that cool I really want to sell you asphalt but the price depend on how much asphalt you need.
You reply, “Enough for the NJ Turnpike.”
“How much is that”
“Many kilometers”
“How many kilometers?’
“I don’t know it keeps changing”
“Quit wasting my time you poindexter”
That is the world we are living in only it is not the meter rod that keeps changing, but rather that nobody knows with any degree of certainty what a dollar represents – thanks to Ben, Bush, moral hazard, and of course our totally clueless president and his economic advisors.
Money is a medium, just like a language but once you fall through the looking glass and a word means just what you want it to mean or you become the last speaker of Esperanto the medium ceases to have value and when money ceases to have value we cannot value our exchanges so we stop trading.
The fact that commerce grinds to a halt though does not mean we are poorer only that we very shortly shall be poorer if we cannot quickly find a new medium of exchange.
I think that nature hates a vacume though and that a new currency will rapidly be found if the dollar falls as it seems it will. That is good news for the world and probably bad news for America markets of all kinds.
e@74: “Where are the cleaning supplies? I’ll get that cleaned right away for you.”
Job performance with a Service First attitude is a distinct issue from the one I addressed.
And, yes, “dude” I have.
And, no, I still “don’t buy it.”
W: “The common denominator uniting protests in Libya, Bahrain, China, Iran and even Wisconsin is the mundane matter of money… Their titles may vary: military men in Egypt, Ayatollahs in Iran, the dictator and his cronies in Libya, Eurocrats in Brussels, public sector unions in the United States. What they share in common is an attachment to a way of life [other people's property] that has now become unaffordable.”
The source of government power is other people’s property, which if taxed excessively must be eventually enforced by the use of courts, prisons and guns.
“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property… In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” Karl Marx
“The proletariat [lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled under-achievers] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, achieving, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Property is the source of government power. Excessive property confiscation (excessive taxation) is tyrannical government power because it is destructive of the individual’s God-given right to the fruit of his/her own labor in pursuit of happiness.
“Law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” Thomas Jefferson
“All the problems now besetting the EU, the Middle East, the US and Asia will find their basic settlement when those who can’t hang on to their rent-seeking arrangements finally let go.”
That’s a utopian goal. No wave of reform ever clears out all the rent-seekers or creates a perfect society. It’s too complicated, time consuming and eventually everyone else has to get back to earning a living. Much of the kicking and screaming (and conversely other people keeping their heads down) is now about rehearsing and asserting claims to be allowed to join the eventual ‘exempt’ class of survivors, which will remain numerous. Accept this now and avoid disappointment later.
Re: education bubble.
C. Christensen has published a great paper (at J. Podesta’s liberal think tank no less (!)) that the folks I support at AEI or Mercatus could have written:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/disrupting_college.html
I think it gets the challenge and policy recommendations mostly correct (from their point of view). Some errors in the details (like order of magnitude numbers between PCs (100s of millions a year and growing, not millions) and phones (at 10s of millions of smart handhelds so far) but that disruption is upon us in any case, esp. in terms of consuming content.
What’s missing is a more aggressive proposal for escaping and/or side-stepping the regulation, accreditation, credentialing nightmare/corruption. As well as addressing a more serious problem, our secondary (and elementary) education / warehousing system. Christensen hints at it (the Southwest Airlines example). And a reminder that most people don’t buy 1/4” drill – what they are really buying is a 1/4” hole (what we want is the result of an education, not a particular form). And he doesn’t credit J. Pournelle’s Iron Law, but “it’s in there.”
(1) At least one purpose (for the majority of students) of an education is to have the skills, attitude, intellect and judgment necessary to meet an employer’s need – and now that litigation has made personnel department evaluations of these items near impossible – there’s an opportunity for the candidate and a next-generation system to provide that assurance directly rather than having the hiring company guess.. I can imagine a student and employer-association funded bonding mechanism that guarantees performance (as determined by 3rd party testing, demonstration, oral exams, practical exams, experience, etc.) for some period of time (18 months or so – long enough to get over the first attrition bump) or the employer gets their money back. And dare the legacy education system to match that. Granted, the guilds will revolt and claim privilege and depending on party in charge, will carry the day for at least a while (we’re fortunate that the home schooling option still exists).
(2) In addition the disruptive (credentialing) system could reward tool use (or at least not penalize). What we’re interested in is the 1/4” hole. I am a fair to good driver. I have glasses that correct my vision to much better than average. As long as I wear glasses, my driver’s license is valid. I’d be happy to go to a doctor who was able to pass rigorous practical, paper and oral examinations whose detailed understanding was not his or her own but came from a tool like IBM’s “Watson” (in real time where required). I’d let them take their tools and network connections to the tests and as long as the result was similar to my glasses and driving I wouldn’t value the doctor with an encyclopedic memory any higher than the AI-augmented person (given the license stated these constraints). This could also make distance unimportant – if they can pass the suite of exams remotely, great (even remote surgery).
(3) I’d also recommend de-institutionalizing education – and turn it into small practices (like the typical doctors’ offices). GPs and specialists. Educators could put out their shingles that state their expertise, hours, and prices. Automate everything else (no administrative overhead to speak of, much less than doctors’ offices – their days will likely not be as long and they could choose to manage their business directly). These professional educators might choose to use their (now tax deductible) rooms in their homes (“you’re a visitor in my home, please behave – or go away.”) Return other school functions to the community – voluntary (self-funded) associations open to all, clubs, sports, etc. Perhaps retain a day care component when children need care outside of office hours, and/or for those who do not want to be educated (change the work rules for youngsters in this situation and place them in jobs – get up early, go to bed tired, jobs).
Christensen also reminds us that one of the most effective mechanism for (college) education is student-tutoring – for the tutor – you have to understand it to teach it, and even in grade school the older and more able children should all do this for the younger children. It not only helps both students with learning, it helps the tutor mature and teaches them patience. In all this the professional educator is now more of a coach, a personal trainer, using tools like the Khan-Academy for direct instruction, diagnosis and remediation, and is responsible to every child’s parent that employs them. They help every student progress past their individual best, as well as those who are better motivated by (or need to be humbled by) competition, to compete, fail, and be coached to perform beyond failure, both as individuals and teams. (Mr. Clinton being an example of a personality who likely was never challenged to the point of failure, to have to ask for help, and try and try again. A lot of intellect, but sadly little humility or judgment.)
I’d prefer parents to pay for education directly (and not levy a tax for education) – with the local community (as well as local educators matching doctors’ charity for children in need) standing in for parents when there is a tragedy (as they would for other needs).
Yes, I do dream.
How to Smoke Out the Democrats:
Rick Perry puts the squeeze on parasitic democrats…
In 2003 Texas Democrats fled to Ardmore, Oklahoma, in a rented bus. Now, Governor Rick Perry sent the Texas Rangers after them.
And the Democrat governor of Oklahoma would not allow the Texas Rangers to cross into his state.
So Governor Perry informed those Democrats that they would not be allowed to use their state credit cards to pay for their trip, nor would they be reimbursed for their expenses in Oklahoma, including the bus that took them there.
Once the runaway Democrats in Texas realized that they had to pay their own way that was the beginning of their caving in and coming back home.
So I’m wondering if Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has thought of pulling the plug on the credit cards of the runaway Democrats. ‘Cause make no mistake, I’m sure they have them.
I mean if we’re gonna have welfare debit cards, you know damn well that members of the state legislature have a state credit card as well. He-he-he-he.
– Limbaugh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Ds
–those Texas anti-democracy Democrats.
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