Speaking of Tablet magazine and "broken".
1: Very interesting. I got to that article from a Vox podcast ("Sean Illing speaks with Alana Newhouse") and it now appears that the episode description has been removed -- maybe I'm just missing it, but I don't see it in the index here: https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area
The episode does show up here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5djVij1Bse6BPPTAJknUuQ
On the hanging out front, as a teenager one of my best friends lived in a house with just his stepdad (his mom died, and his brother's seriously disabled and had recently moved into a care home, so the house was too big for two people). It was a split-level with two doors, and he basically had one half of the house to himself. So I'd usually just show up to the door on his half of the house and walk in, but I never knew whether his dad would be ok with me just walking in like that. At one point I got there and did that, and he just wasn't there (he was just in the park across the street, but no cell phones). So I went out of his door, walked up to the other door and knocked so his dad could tell me where he went.
In addition to unstructured hanging out, we also played a *lot* of Fifa 96 and Bomberman 64.
I reacted negatively to the selection from the first piece because what does it mean to "believe in brokenness"? And then to name your ideology "brokenism"? Usually both of those syntactic places are where you put your ideals.
When I read it, I found my reaction justified, because thinking things are broken, while straightforward, says pretty much nothing about what principles you want a reconstitution to hold to. It could be a utopia combining the best of socialism with the best of free enterprise, or if could be installing a Great Leader who will make your race rise from the ashes of decadence.
Putting out Tucker Carlson an example of the "new" thinking is pretty rich. Following that immediately by saying Bernie Sanders is a "brokenist" and AOC is a "status-quoist" makes me think this person is halfway to red-brownism.
I don't know what red-brownism is, but I'm thinking menstruation. But my context clues are telling me otherwise.
Yes, I mostly think she's flailing from a philosophical perspective, but I also think that Noah Smith is strawmanning a bit in his description of doomers, and it's interesting to try to figure out how to actually put those two perspectives in contact with each other.
I'm a bit of a doomer. I've really just gotten very down about the future of US higher education in general, and my university in particular. I really do think we're just headed to a world where rich kids spend 4 years partying while hiring some poor kid in India to do all their schoolwork for them for cheap (well, the hard school work, Chat-GPT will do the easy stuff), while their classes are taught by people barely above minimum wage. Meanwhile, despite only being asked to do high school work and cheating on most of it, the students are somehow all stressed out and unhappy all the time. It gets even worse when I think about grad school. So many of our grad students just seem so unhappy and unable to function in the world. Meanwhile, the state government is increasingly set on just breaking things, as if everything is broken already, and the crazies on the board have installed a president who everyone with any sense seems to treat like they have the temperament and intelligence of a 5-year old child. Maybe I need to switch jobs, but I'm at a career stage where that's not so easy, and honestly I'm not sure where would be any better. And that's not even touching the housing crisis, or all the restaurants here getting bought up during the pandemic by a sucky corporation that ruins them.
Red = Commies, Brown = Nazis.
I used to say that Heebieville was the place where the far right and the far left met at the point at infinity, and probably smoked a joint there. I stopped saying it during the Trump years, but now I think that the trope applies to this.
I think it's extremely hard to live in a state that's being hijacked by rightwingers and barreling towards conservative nihilism. Both Utpetgi and my family in Florida fit this. Texas is extremely depressing, and I try to be judicious about how much state politics I take in, but the trajectory isn't as dizzyingly bad compared to 20 years ago.
It could be a utopia combining the best of socialism with the best of free enterprise, or if could be installing a Great Leader who will make your race rise from the ashes of decadence.
As was clear in the other thread, I think the risk of the latter -- which I think is very real, given the size and scope of the movement in favor of it -- makes entertaining the thought of burning shit down, even if it's way less than perfect, so dangerous that even talking/fantasizing about it is irresponsible. I agree that the former is the desired endpoint, but I think it can only be accomplished as a renovation, not a teardown/rebuild.
I used to think we were a bit of an exception to the barreling towards nihilism (conservative for sure, but sanely conservative, and accepting that having one moderately liberal important state institution was fine), but that really seems to be breaking down. And if the next governor is a crazy (which seems likely) things are going to get real bad.
12: I think that helps me get your perspective from the last thread, thank you. I still think your concern for the status quo is at a level that would have forestalled a renovation along the lines of the New Deal. (Which of course saw some rhetorical flirtation with strongman-ism, so at the time the risk would not have seemed zero.)
Anyway, it's increasingly hard to ignore the state government when you're at a state university. There's just a big attack on state universities across the board in a way that feels different from the previous 30 years (though maybe more stuff like this was happening during Vietnam?).
My favorite fantasy, escaping to an EU-funded boom in independent Scotland universities, is kinda burning down this month too. The free-fall in the UK, combined with Australia no longer being a viable option for personal reasons, has really done some harm to my ability to even have escapist fantasies.
(though maybe more stuff like this was happening during Vietnam?)
I'd known that Reagan had forcefully responded to protesters at Berkley, but I hadn't realized exactly what that entailed.
In his foreword to People's Park, Todd Gitlin explains that California's governor, Ronald Reagan, ran his 1966 campaign on making welfare "bums" go back to work and cleaning up "the mess in Berkeley". By the time he was running for re-election he had all but granted the national guard and law enforcement officers permission to shoot to kill: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with, no more appeasement."
I've literally never met anyone in math educated or working in ROI. Not sure if this is something weird about my field or something general about ROI academia, but it just doesn't seem viable. There's still Canada, but I don't think I could actually get a job at the places that are in appealing locations.
Not to mention that the housing crisis in Canada is pretty epic.
18 Yes, this is what Gil Scott-Heron was talking about in B-Movie, which is always worth a revisit.
I'm certainly not saying that the things Utetgi is seeing aren't real or aren't truly awful. The commitment of the right wing to destroying education lest it interfere with their vision of racist supremacy is only gaining steam. I live is a blue island in a red ocean, and the reds are spending as much time on performative stuff as they can. (Last session with guns of campus, this time it's all the ways to demonstrate how strongly they oppose trans-kids.) Fortunately, our courts have held up, so far, and the general public is going to reject the constitutional amendments that the right wingers want.
New ways of assessing college students are going to have to evolve. But it's always going to be the case that you put out the material and the explanations, some students are going to whine and others are going to cheat, and at the end of the day, most will learn enough to keep going. And in life, where most of the learning in most fields actually takes place, they'll learn or fail to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSOp507HJMA
I'm just glad the OP is several pages long because the first bit made me think I might have to RTFLinks for once.
Ryan in the first excerpt is one of those "I have no party. I have no ideology" people who votes Republican in every election, isn't he? Written before reading 5.
A friend just posted tuitions for a selection of public but out of state schools her kid is looking at. $49K a year? That feels doomish. Better expressed by 8 now that I'm catching up on the thread.
And yet that kind of money isn't enough to pay for enough classrooms to actually hold the students. We just got told we have to teach 40% of our intro-level classes outside of the hours of 9am-3pm because of classroom shortages. We're also only hiring for positions that pay $50k and teach over 700 student*credit-hours per semester.
That's truly awful, and the next years in education are going to be rough.
The silver lining is that the right wing's indoctrination effort will fail.
And yet that kind of money isn't enough to pay for enough classrooms to actually hold the students.
How is that possible? Perhaps worth noting that Noah Smith's latest post is crankier.
This post is going to be a bit of a rant, because honestly I'm pretty frustrated, and I want the rest of you to understand and share at least a little bit of that frustration.
...
All of these are versions of the same basic story. For decades, I've heard progressives, including my friends and relatives, bemoan America's unwillingness to spend money on things like transit and green energy. But now America is spending all the money, and things still aren't getting built, because of the country's broken system of permitting, land use, and development.
This is such an important point that it bears repeating. Money is not physical stuff. Just because you earmark $5 billion for a subway or $2 billion for a solar farm in some Excel spreadsheet somewhere doesn't mean a physical train or power plant has actually been created. If permitting holds up the process for years, then you still haven't built a damn thing. And if eventually construction does begin, but the cost balloons to absurd levels, that means that a pitifully inadequate amount of actual physical transit, or housing, or solar will be created, despite that huge flood of dollar signs in your spreadsheet.
For decades now, Americans have told ourselves that we're the richest nation on Earth, and that as long as we had the political will to write big checks, we could do anything we wanted. But that was never really true, was it? The inflation that followed the pandemic should have been a wake-up call -- we had all this excess cash, and we started spending it on physical goods, and mostly what happened was just that the price of the physical goods went up. And so R.I.P. to all that cash. From meaningless numbers on a spreadsheet you came, and to meaningless numbers on a spreadsheet you shall return.
I don't fully understand the problem, but I think part of it is that *buildings* are supposed to be paid from a separate fund, and the state mostly stopped putting any money into that fund decades ago. So buildings only get built now if you can specifically fundraise for them, and classrooms aren't exciting enough to get donors to give money for. People want their money to go to something higher impact or disruptive.
We have the same problem with dorms. Lots of students living in lounges and stuff because we keep increasing class sizes and not building or renovating dorms, and then they discovered several dorms had serious mold problems and had to be shut down, which then led to students living in lounges and other emergency places. Outside of first-years everyone moves off-campus, and since the undergrads are way way richer than the vast majority of townies, all housing gets converted to student housing and rental prices have doubled.
The silver lining is that the right wing's indoctrination effort will fail.
The campaign against airbags failed.
The campaign to pretend cigarettes were not a health threat failed.
The campaign to pretend global warming is a myth will eventually fail.
But right now I'm dooming on the millions of unnecessary deaths, that after educated people knew the truth perfectly well, it was one or two human generations before obvious reality finally overcame the financial interests of an (educated) few who deployed propaganda for their profit.
Lack of housing means that the staff, who are mostly paid $30k-$40k, all have to move outside of town. This means they need to park on campus, which either costs $45/mth for good parking, or $16/mth for shitty parking, and both kinds fill up unless you want to take an extra bus. So the student-facing staff decide to work from like 7am-3pm so they can arrive early enough to get the parking, and aren't around in the afternoon when the students actually want to talk to someone.
31: Usually Basketball here, but yes. One of our famous alums recently gave a bunch of money for a "state-of-the-art sports media and broadcast technology center."
Once you're starting out with a frame like this -- status quoist vs. brokenist -- it's pretty much impossible to go anywhere useful. David Brooks and Thomas Friedman have made good livings writing crap like this, though:
Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on--what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else--is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.
Smart, well-meaning people think it's un-nuanced to cast matters in good/evil terms, and as a result, they think it's over-simple to describe evil things as evil. They seek common ground where there is none and they misidentify the actual sources of conflict in society.
There is, in fact, a group of people who believe that "what used to work is not working for enough people anymore." They have a slogan: "Make America Great Again."
I also think that Noah Smith is strawmanning a bit
Yeah, Eric Levitz also finds it useful to cast Taylor Lorenz as the interlocutor on this issue.
But okay, fair enough, Lorenz really does represent a certain kind of liberal thinking that isn't fringe. It's not nutpicking to rebut Taylor Lorenz.
I think higher ed costs far more than people who hold power over budget allocations acknowledge, to the extent that increasing fees while also increasing enrollment doesn't come close to covering the costs that once were covered in state budgets.
This doesn't completely explain what's going on in private schools, but they've always been expensive and covered costs differently.
Smith's conclusion here is a bit dismaying in a way that he is unable to recognize:
Humanity made it through millennia of starvation and dire poverty, we made it through the Black Death and smallpox and Spanish Flu and the Mongol conquests and the World Wars and any number of economic depressions and the threa[t] of Cold War nuclear annihilation. We've probably got a good shot at making it through the next thing, too.
Here he is, listing things that we shouldn't worry about because human society has survived them. If human survival is your baseline, it's pretty easy to be an optimist.
In the end, what Smith is doing here is reassuring everyone that Smith is going to be just fine. I'm sure he's right.
37.last seems unfair. I am more inclined to think of the paragraph quoted in the OP as his conclusion:
The reason that we shouldn't exaggerate the threats from the aforementioned set of standard Millennial boogeymen is that there are other things we need to worry about. Capitalism isn't failing, but U.S. healthcare and infrastructure and housing and college education cost twice as much as in other developed countries. Covid isn't the new HIV, but U.S. life expectancy has fallen thanks in part to opiates, alcoholism, suicide, and endemic violence. Climate change isn't going to destroy human civilization in the next few years, but a world war might.
36.1 is undoubtedly a key part, tuition plus public funding has been steady or decreasing for decades. On the other hand, there are a lot of countries which do public education for less money than the US, and I'm not totally sure why. US academia does have a unique problem of tenure without mandatory retirement, which results in a lot of money being locked up that you can't do anything about, so everything else gets cut even more dramatically. Also education is labor-intensive, and the US has high labor costs due to how we deal with health care and retirement.
The other part of it is that US public education has historically been *better* and in higher demand than public education in most of the world, so the higher price partly translated into a better product.
A lot of the problems in American life come down to rent-seeking by incumbent elites. Everything is expensive in the US because everyone in a position to extort money from the system does, to the maximum degree possible. This is most famously the case in the medical system but it applies everywhere else too.
38: He spends some time saying "some people are worried about this when they should be worried about that." But I really do think he's setting human survival as his baseline, and I quote him accordingly. If humanity survives the way it did with the Black Death, in all likelihood the bad stuff is going to happen to other people, whose suffering is always easy to bear.
It's interesting to me that in all his discussion of Doomers, somehow the decay of Western democracy doesn't come up.
It's possible that I'm reading Smith in that framework because I had just read Campos persuasively mocking this Damon Linker piece in the NYT.
There's a certain kind of Establishment Liberal who is well-served by the belief that there really isn't any urgency about various impending catastrophes -- to the point of arguing that catastrophes are basically impossible because of the directionality of the arc of the universe or whatever.
Noah Smith originally intended to write a techno-optimist blog for example.
His most interesting posts are probably his series on developing countries, which is very informative and primarily interested in GDP growth rather than political institutions (he is an economist by training).
IMO conversations about change are about two things, hard to disentangle, simultaneously: 1) actual change. 2) Changing expectations/baselines.
Many people form rough heuristics of how the world works when they are young, and new information that goes against those heuristics is seed on barren ground. (eg Mexico and Senegal are poor countries, not middle-income; senior journalists are well-informed and wise). Heuristics coming from rapid improvements postwar followed by Reagan/Thatcher tax cuts and concessions to capital leave well-off people with the impression that things have always been getting better, and have always been pretty good. Thinking of the US as a northern version of South America (ie a place where progress and competence exist but are not widespread and never a passive expectation) strikes many americans as basically insulting. Mean reversion smells like failure here, but it's not.
I wish I had something positive and detailed to say about higher ed in the US. Cutting-edge science research is still happening here at an accelerating pace, but science education in much the world has always been shit-- "the exams are brutally hard, here are some sample questions, there's help available for the top 10% of this class." PS we really only care about effective sorting to identify top 1%.
in all likelihood the bad stuff is going to happen to other people, whose suffering is always easy to bear.
This is dismissive in a way that I didn't exactly intend. I, too, spend a lot of time not worrying about other people's problems, and am therefore in no position to get all sanctimonious about it.
The difference -- I'm thinking -- between me and Smith is that I don't feel particularly guilty about that and therefore feel no need to rationalize it.
40: You may be interested in the blog post (! So old fashioned!) by an academic consultant in Canada. He does a fair amount of international (and national) comparisons but this post is two short book reviews.
https://higheredstrategy.com/the-decline-of-american-higher-education/
Meanwhile, despite only being asked to do high school work and cheating on most of it, the students are somehow all stressed out and unhappy all the time. It gets even worse when I think about grad school. So many of our grad students just seem so unhappy and unable to function in the world.
Do you genuinely find this to be true of majorities in each category? If so, could you put a timeline on when and how things declined to this state?
Around 2005-2007, I would have said this described a recognizable, but minority of undergraduates I taught and fellow grad students in my (humanities) program.
Sorry that was me with the link
41 seems right to me too. I don't know if it's gotten worse or if we're just at a point where it's been happening long enough that it's more obvious.
45 also seems right, it takes a long time to change our internal narrative.
I feel like my generation is disgruntled because in the postwar period we're the first generation to be overall worse off than our parents and the important things like healthcare, education, childcare, and housing are the costs spiraling out of control. 9/11, 2008 and 2016 feel like opportunities that disparate forces of evil (finance capital, fascists, Christian fundamentalists, white supremacists etc.) have taken advantage of to make things worse in ways that don't really get fixed. Every real win, like Obamacare, feels a small step in the right direction that then triggers a reactionary backlash that makes a bunch of other things worse.
Also we're approaching middle age exhausted, debt burdened, and with young kids (having had them later and fewer than we'd like because we can't afford the families we want) while our parents are turning into really terrible selfish old people who we're going to have to take care of soon.
Anyways I'm just cranky and bitter because even though I'm objectively successful and lucky compared to my peers my life just feels really hard in material and immaterial ways that my parents' life wasn't at the same point.
I guess I do feel better when I compare myself to my students, who are all stressy messes who fall apart at the slightest thing. They are genuinely stressed out and anxious in a way I can't comprehend, even as an anxious stressed out person myself. I feel like there's no resilience, minimal problem solving ability, and no perspective to distinguish what is a real problem vs. minor annoyance. We've been asked to be really hand-holdy by the administration but honestly I think that might be making it worse. They're the generation that did their last years of HS on zoom.
It's gone from "white supremacy" to "white nationalism" because everyone involved in pushing it has looked around the room and decided metrics aren't the way to go.
48: I think the pandemic specifically has magnified the fraction of such wildly. The intensity of the pandemic effect makes it a little unclear whether it was an ongoing trend before that or not. But when I taught a first semester grad class last semester I would say a clear majority of the students were unable to consistently meet deadlines, majorly struggling to learn the material, and stressed out. The first phenomenon is very new, the second and third are not new but the proportion of the class went way up, and especially the number of people who are *both* struggling and stressed out went way up. (Of course you'd think there'd be some correlation between those populations, but I feel like in the past they didn't actually overlap as much as you'd expect.)
51 says what I was trying to say better. I think it really is a genuine difference, but also might just be specific to people who were in high school and college during the pandemic.
Part of what's going on is that we're still roughly expecting them to be able to succeed in classes aimed at someone of their age, when in reality they all spent 2 years learning nothing (and forgetting lots of stuff) while learning that no deadlines or requirements are important, and being stressed and lonely. They'd be better off we just decided to let them all do 2 more years of high school. I'm not sure how long the effect will persist. I feel like people in elementary school will be more caught up and functional by the time they get to college, but I'm less sure on the people who were middleschoolers during the pandemic.
Jammies and I have a shared belief that remote learning was worst for kids in the 8th-10th grade range. Just the worst combination of those years being key to learn some real foundational concepts, but having the least maturity to navigate a pretty difficult situation as far as high schoolers and college kids go. And the older ones didn't exactly do great under those circumstances, either.
54: I've felt for a while that there would be no shame in just having a 13th grade for a while. Tim had grade 13 in Ontario. They've since dropped it, but it's not unprecedented. It's just that it would cost money.
TBF it's not like we have enough teachers to suddenly just give the pandemic kids Grade 13.
I'm from the school of thought that says "The system isn't broken---its rigged," and I've been moving more and more into that camp since 2016.
The major systems of this country---the quasi-democratic electoral system, the carceral system, capitalism itself---all these things were designed to protect the interests of the people who were powerful at the time and they continue to protect the interests of the powerful today.
Newhouse's essay cuts so randomly across the ideological spectrum, because Newhouse doesn't seem to have a sense of why things are the way they are, so she can't tell the difference between different reasons why people might want radical change and how horrible some of the proposed changes are.
I head from an activist working in East Palestine that the Proud Boys and another far right militia are on the ground doing food drops and telling displaced people to blame brown people for this tragedy. They are saying that the train derailment is evidence that the government only cares about minorities and city people.
I'm told there isn't any counter-recruitment in East Palestine right now. No one is handing out aid and saying "this happened because of corporate greed and people not listening to the warnings the unions were giving." Antifa is limited to posting memes about punching Nazis and looking down on people they consider ignorant rednecks.
So, yeah, Brokenism doesn't even begin to describe the situation
the Proud Boys and another far right militia are on the ground doing food drops and telling displaced people to blame brown people for this tragedy. They are saying that the train derailment is evidence that the government only cares about minorities and city people.
Nationalists doing socialism. What could possibly go wrong?
57: ok. Then fund full time summer school for anyone who wants it and pay teachers 2x regular salary for the summer. So, 90k salary for 9 months, $40k for an 8-wk summer session. If we had actually wanted to mobilize with a war-like effort we could have done a lot; we just didn't want to.
Collectively, I think we wanted a few teachers to die.
The collective being the United States, not just this blog.
I've clicked-thru on both these articles and will read them today, but just from the OP, I thought that this book would be relevant:
https://www.amazon.com/Mortal-Republic-Rome-Fell-Tyranny/dp/0465093817
I think I've mentioned it before: Watts' thesis is that during the Social Wars, Sulla's time, right up to Caesar, Rome had lost the ability to negotiate between the patricians and plebeians over how to divide the spoils of the Republic. Eventually the inability to negotiate got so bad that civil wars broke out. And eventually that led to the rise of dictatorial rule, since at least he could force decisions. The analogy with the current time is somewhat obvious, or perhaps somewhat tendentious, depending upon one's point-of-view.
Speaking of brokenness, this response to the derailment is clearly the right thing for Democrats to do while also being unlikely to be the approach they take. But maybe that's just my doomerism.
Reading the link in 1 makes me think that Newhouse is not being naively incoherent. She is just using a soft sell to get Jewish people on board with the far right. I gotta remember that whenever a media person says they are neither left wing nor right wing, it means they are right wing.
I don't understand all the Jewish stuff, but I'm learning. I feel that it's kind of disrespectful that Tree of Life is still a Pokémon Go gym. But I don't feel it's so disrespectful that I don't have a Blissey there right now.
The Mamoswine someone else has there seems worse.
65: Good Lord, if that's what she's doing then naive incoherence would be better, a thousand times better. Maybe even six million times better.
Shell considered Churchill's support essential since he was probably the only person capable of winning over the Admiralty.77 Churchill was desperate for cash while searching for a new parliamentary seat, and he asked Shell and Burmah for £10,000 if his services proved unsuccessful and £50,000 if the merger was successful.Topically. ('the Admiralty had already judged his arguments as "entirely unsatisfactory."')
I think Long Time Lurker in 50, and RHC in 58, have it exactly right about what exactly is bad or worse, and the problems with the "brokenness" frame, respectively. First, LTL:
the important things like healthcare, education, childcare, and housing are the costs spiraling out of control.
This from LTL is key. It doesn't matter how great "the economy" is doing, if the 4 main components of The American Dream aka Middle Class Life are getting increasingly expensive -- I would add "retirement" to that, too. And when technocrats respond with, "well, these things aren't REALLY out of reach, because there are all these means-tested programs that mean the cost isn't what it looks like", they miss the point. Quality & affordable healthcare, education, childcare, and housing aren't just crucial to have, it's crucial that they be *secure* -- that you *know* you will be able to get them. If you have to do financial planning for your child's university education from their birth in order to feel "safe", you've already lost.
This is the main reason why I feel so much better about raising our daughter in Kakania rather than the USA. In America, even though I hate everything about "college applications-optimized childrearing", I would feel real pretty sure make sure was equipped to "win" in the economy, not because "winning" in this sense is so great, but because the potential consequences of "losing" are awful. Here, the extreme right certainly wants to narrow the circle of who counts as part of "us", but there aren't really serious attempts to whittle down what that "us" is entitled to as part of the social contract. And my god, that is such a relief.
Trapnel! How's the life among the southern goths?
Next, Helpy-Chalk in 58:
I'm from the school of thought that says "The system isn't broken---its rigged," and I've been moving more and more into that camp since 2016. ... Newhouse's essay cuts so randomly across the ideological spectrum, because Newhouse doesn't seem to have a sense of why things are the way they are, so she can't tell the difference between different reasons why people might want radical change and how horrible some of the proposed changes are.
This is exactly right. I've been skeptical about the empirics behind claims about increasing atomization and individualism, but there's a real "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" analog: what's needed is *strong political parties* (on the Left), but those have been out of fashion since the 60s. One can get into all sorts of interesting discussions of why parties are weakening across the OECD countries (see Peter Mair's Ruling the Void), but this is definitely not something limited to America (which has had weak parties for ages).
Moby! Things are objectively good, though I was stuck in a pit of despondency for awhile for the usual reasons (akrasia, etc). Might finally get my teaching degree this semester!
That's great. I'm actively engaged in the process of attempting to intergenerationallly recapitulate social status, but the other parents look at you funny if you say that instead of "college applications."
In fairness, "In November, Churchill withdrew his services and returned his £5,000 advance in order to run for Parliament in the upcoming General Election."
Another problem is we've outsourced a lot of the bureaucratic life management from institutions to individuals and told them that if they they don't try to absolutely maximize everything they're missing out. Even with company sponsored health insurance now you have to pick between plans that require complex calculations and forecasts about you and your family's health in the next year (don't even get me started on HSAs and FSAs). 401Ks, health plans, savings plans, investment accounts, car/house/renter's insurance, etc. It's up to the "consumer" to wade through complicated information and figure out how to do it, all the time getting messages telling you that you're doing it wrong. (Think of those financial services commercials that show how if you do Y you'll have 300K more for retirement than some schmoe who doesn't hire their financial planner). These systems are then designed to be as complicated and un-user friendly as possible.
As a somewhat trivial example, I have a dependent care account where I can withhold up to $5,000 pretax, an ostensible benefit of having a cushy white collar job. But I don't just get 5K in an account, I get it taken out in chunks from each paycheck. I can't use it to take out cash or zelle pay, I can only easily use it as a debit/credit card. Right there that makes paying for home daycare or a babysitter or even a nanny extremely difficult. Technically I can get reimbursed but it requires complicated paperwork and a long delay. Last year I set it up to pay for my son's aftercare at his preschool but first I had to figure out how much was taken out each paycheck and make sure my paycheck schedule aligned with my son's monthly preschool pay schedule so that there was enough in the account to cover the charge. Then the day before the childcare charge I'd have to log in and double check because having payment fail due to insufficient funds would create a giant headache. I spent multiple hours upfront figuring this out, plus it was a monthly chore to remember to do. And this is for a UMC "benefit." Multiply this across literally everything but make the stakes hire for lower income people and no wonder everyone is burnt out all the time.
(Another example because why not?) When I was on medicaid about 8 years ago as a grad student (Thanks Obama!), I wasn't just on medicaid. I had to pick from 30 different plans run by large health insurance companies, all of which were slightly sucky in different ways. One plan had great dental but the only hospital affiliated with it was 2 hours away from me. One had good prescription coverage but no dental, etc. etc.
Anyways, life sucks and we're asked to be executive managers in a way previous generations weren't, in ways that increasingly feel like we're getting an increasingly bad deal, and all the time we're being gaslit and told that we're lucky to have so much "choice" and "control" while also being told that if we do everything exactly right we'll "win" the system, where winning means we don't have to eat cat food when we're old. x trapnel gets it right that it's not that winning is amazing, it's just that losing seems so catastrophic.
78 is great. Academia has a similar thing where more and more random administration burden is placed directly on faculty. For example, booking travel and submitting reimbursements (fortunately we still have an accountant for the submission part, but in departments with less grants faculty deal directly with the reimbursement system themselves). Recently this has accelerated, I'm now responsible for taking out the trash and cleaning my office, and for making sure that my classrooms are stocked with chalk. We do all our own typesettting of our papers, yes LaTeX has made it easier, but departments used to have lots of typists and they just got rid of all of them rather than converting one of them into a position for LaTeX troubleshooting.
Also, you need to pick a real pseud if you want the welcome basket, I hear Wry Cooter is still available.
79: We had a doctor who used university purchasing to buy cyanide which he then used to murder his wife. If he had proper support, he probably would have realized how stupid that is as a way to commit a murder.
I've been skeptical about the empirics behind claims about increasing atomization and individualism
Is that still true? I was never sure about the empirical support for the "bowling alone" idea, but it seems like lately I see more and more survey data about, for example, the number of friends declining, and it seems to point in a consistent direction. But I haven't looked into the date enough to see if there is contradictory evidence that just isn't covered as much.
I've been skeptical about the empirics behind claims about increasing atomization and individualism
At the risk of becoming a one-trick pony, I think our atomized built environment is really coming to bite us. When friends are miles from each other and it's a huge social production to see them - and kids need rides from their parents - relationships are going to suffer.
Speaking of broken, Vanderbilt grad students couldn't afford housing, so they opened some new housing specifically for grad students... but it's outsourced and the rental companies require an income higher than any grad students make!
I think our atomized built environment is really coming to bite us.
Crazy that this David Roberts piece is more than seven years old.
Say you're a family with children and you don't regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.
One is living in a real place, a walkable area with lots of shared public spaces, around which one can move relatively safely and effectively without a car. It seems like a simple thing, but such places are rare even in the cities where they exist. (I live in North Seattle, undoubtedly coded as urban for census purposes, but my walkshed is pretty lame. Meanwhile, a few miles south of me they're building million-dollar single-family homes square in the middle of a perfect walkshed, right across from the zoo.)
A robust walkshed is an area in which a community of people regularly mingles doing errands, walking their dogs, playing in the parks, going to school and work, etc. Ideally, cities would be composed of clusters of such walksheds, connected by reliable public transit.
I have a good walkshed, but I don't use that term. I don't really talk much to people while walking.
Academia has a similar thing where more and more random administration burden is placed directly on faculty.
If this is happening simultaneously with more and more of universities' staffing budget and headcount going towards administrative staff rather than teaching staff (which I understand is also the case), it would be a perfect example of Parkinson's Law.
but it's outsourced and the rental companies require an income higher than any grad students make!
Vanderbilt seems to have a real problem delegating to amoral inhumans.
Our oldest went to the doctor in December to adjust his medication. They coded it as a physical but he'd already had one last year which means insurance wouldn't pay the $280, but would have paid if it had just been coded as a regular office visit because we hit our OOP max. But kid is 18 now so he has to fix it because they won't talk to me. So we have a series of texts and calls between me, him, insurance company (which only uses some sketchy secure email website instead of just sending a fucking email), practice billing office, and doctors office. It's all such a bunch of bullshit to deal with because someone made a mistake filling out a form, and any suggestion they should maybe take responsibility or reimburse us for wasted time would be met with derision or a call to security.
78: my hospital used to offer a lot of plans but now only 2. One with out of network benefit and one without. This is partly because they bought a health insurer and both options are run by that company.
86: Same here.
I'm friendly with my neighbors, i.e. I can chat with them casually and would let our kids play with each other, but I don't spend all that much time with them, especially not this time of year. It's been a mild winter but it's still too cold and dark too early to spend much leisure time outside. And who has leisure time anyway?
Everyone looks at me like I'm crazy when I express nostalgia for the pre-covid days when going to an office was the norm, and by now I've progressed to the point where I wouldn't want to actually go back there regularly myself, but I do miss social interaction of that type. Every friend I made after the age of 28 without my wife's help was once a co-worker.
I don't mind going to the office, but it's 3 miles from my house and we have free parking. But nobody else goes to our office, mostly because they live very far out.
I went in once last week because of computer problems at home, that was a crazy day in general, and didn't speak to a single person in the building. Personal or team-level choices wouldn't solve the problem for me, and higher-level decisions probably wouldn't solve it in a way I'd like.
I should go back to taking the bus, but it's harder to expense a bus trip when you aren't buying a monthly pass and it's hard to justify a monthly pass when you only go four times a month.
I miss biking to work. Not to be all nostalgic all the time, this isn't good for me, but not getting exercise isn't good for me either.
I would bike to work except that I fear death and don't like biking.