All our ills boil down to an overpopulation issue. It’s time to make some sacrifices at the altar. I think most people – even if unconsciously – know it. But the ubiquitous response is “hey, as long as that mushroom cloud doesn’t touch me.” Which is natural, I suppose.

PL: The dumb and moneyless tend to reproduce the most, for obvious reasons (impulsiveness, drug use, lack of care for consequences, lack of hope, adherence to religious dogma, etc…). I see very little chance of that self-correcting, even if we were to make birth control free for every American for life.

And the chainsaw that’s racing toward those cubicles dwellers in terms of increased layoffs is only going to make our problems more acute. Wall Street is betting right now that a large number of corporations can survive without middle class consumption – growing revenues with a mix of enhanced technology, increased productivity and exports. This will ultimately fail. There is a snapback coming where the companies will no longer be able to mine profits in this fashion. The problem is, it will not occur for a few more quarters, and in that interim, many more will have been laid off, and consumer sentiment will have fallen precipitously. Deflation will take hold and the Japanese “Slow Death” scenario will unfold. Just as companies will begin to think, “Hey, we need to focus on domestic revenue growth,” they’ll realize demand is all but totally absent. And all but impossible to resurrect.

In this regard, the market is driving the economy off a cliff. It’s transferring wealth from younger workers (and robbing them of years in the workforce in which they should be accruing career skills) to older investors, none of whom will be spending out of fear of tax increases and running out of retirement savings. Corporate management and the financial industry’s obsession with the short term is setting us up for a disaster in the long term. It’s obvious, everyone knows its happening, and no one is doing jack shit about it for exactly the reason you note… Everyone thinks he’ll be the winner at musical chairs – the guy who rides this fool’s rally to the peak and jumps out just shy of the critical moment where it all starts falling back to earth.

Now, please, provide “Part II: The Roadmap to Worth.”

For every drone passing the buck for the sake of job security, there are ten in training. I sometimes wake up on a cold sweat, dreading the potential reality that I’m one of “them.” My response is counter-productive, to say the least–bucking the traditional route of the law student, enjoying my 2L Summer as if I wasn’t fast-approaching my third year, having no relevant work experience to sell at the on-campus interviews, and experiencing an almost disingenuous anxiety because I won’t be able to land a job that I didn’t want in the first place…but that I “need” for the salary.

I need some anti-inspiration. Ehrenreich is a great start, but that won’t suffice to fully deprogram me…us. Lead the way, please. The stink of my own desperation is starting to make me nauseated.

PL: I can’t lead. That’s the criticism that has filled my email box over the years. It’s comical, really:

“You’re so negative!” No, you’ve a tin ear for comedy, and no appreciation for nuance.

“If you were so smart, you’d be doing something, not writing.” Who says I’m not?

“You just criticize everything. You’re a dick.” It’s all subjective. What can I do but draw the pictures and let people make the decisions for themselves?

Tenure is a myth

Diane Ravitch argued this in her book Death and Life of the Great American School System. Sure, tenure is arcane and probably doesn’t need to exist, but it doesn’t protect teachers. I live and work in a state where we have no tenure and our teachers unions are pitifully weak, and guess what? Incompetent teachers still exist and aren’t fired. If anything the tenure discussion is to distract people from SCHOOL ADMINISTRATIONS! SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS HAVE NO TENURE YET THEY RARELY IF EVER LOSE THEIR JOBS BEFORE TEACHERS AND MANY SERVE NO PURPOSE.

Have you ever been to a public school’s administration building? It is very similar to what philalawyer has described in this article. Many people running around trying to justify their jobs. We have coordinators for every subject. The Math coordinator is required to do two things:

1) Get teachers to create multiple choice tests for students in every school in the district to take for each level of math. Yes, that’s right, the teachers create the tests. The Coordinator just OKs them.

2) Send “items of interest” in math to the math teachers. These people rarely are seen in the actual school. They just exist to lead others into churning out binders full of “curriculum” and rules. This is true for all subjects, from English to Foreign Language. Gosh, there’s 100k in salary that could just be cut and no one would see a difference.

Ok, back to teachers. There is a popular myth perpetuated by EVERY politician that teachers are lazy and don’t do anything and that poor student performance is our fault. Yes, there are some teachers who suck at life, but in an industry where your starting salary is on average 36k a year and you can expect to spend 10 years at your job before getting a 10k raise, do you really expect to be getting the cream of the American workforce? This issue is compounded in the inner-city. Inner-city teaching is fucking hard. It is exhausting. It is 50 or 60 times more difficult and draining than teaching in the suburbs. So why is it that the compensation for this thankless job is about 20% less with worse benefits? Because property taxes fund the school systems in most states and the inner-cities have low property taxes compared to the wealthy suburbs. So why should anyone stay and teach in the inner-city when they could be making more money, have a better future and more benefits at the end of their career? There’s no reason whatsoever. I recently made this jump from the inner-city to a job that paid 20% more, gives me better benefits and I teach FEWER classes.

You talk about production, teachers produce quite a bit. Most teachers really are motivated and do expend a large amount of time and energy preparing for and executing 6 hours a day of meaningful and interesting teaching. And there is never a slow day for a teacher. There is never a day you can ignore the students and be pissed off at the world. It’s one of the few careers that forces you to deal with people. This is why having the summers off seems like a pretty good trade-off: there’s never a slow day for those 180 days we do work.

Ok, let’s talk about the evils of tenure some more. Sure some people are leeching the system. But something I recently realized is that the teacher one student might find lazy and incompetent, could be someone another student really connects with. If we all think back to our High School days, I’m sure there’s a teacher or two we could think of that “phoned it in”. Having worked at a bunch of different schools, I’d say that either:

a) That teacher was doing something for some student, it just wasn’t you

or

b) That teacher was 3 years from retirement and was just exhausted

Which brings us to teacher retirement. 30 years is a long time to be a teacher if you work in a school district that isn’t very nice. This is hardly an excuse for all teachers, but teaching is EXHAUSTING. In the military, you retire after 20 years and get benefits and money every month for the rest of your life. People can get out at 41 on officer retirement and take on a second career. 30 years teaching in a high-stress high-intensity environment can practically kill some people. I think if retirement age were lowered and teaching were seen more like a military service that a lot of these teachers who have given up from the stress of the job would go down.

A lot of it also has to do with principals. Good principals can make sure teachers aren’t lazy. Unfortunately, most principals are twice as lazy as any teacher and won’t be caught dead actually making sure teachers are doing their jobs. I taught for an entire year and had a principal come into my classroom once (despite the fact that I should’ve been formally observed multiple times BY LAW). I can’t say that I cared, because I knew I was working my ass off to do a good job, but what does that tell you for how often a principal would enter a “seasoned verteran’s” classroom if they only entered my room (a first year teacher) once?

To sum up, there is a lot of blame on teachers and tenure, but I dare you, go to a school’s main administration building and try to figure out what half those workers do besides taking 2 hour lunches. Politicians use teachers as a smoke screen for deeper societal problems because we’re easy targets. The majority of teachers work hard, perform their duties with professionalism and aplomb and care about how educated their students are.

And for the earlier poster, yes multiple choice tests are a problem, but there are many of us that DO teach critical thinking and problem solving skills. A lot of the time, however,–and this might be hard for many to hear–some students are not capable of problem solving and critical thinking. That’s another issue entirely, but we have to start realizing that just as some students are natural athletes, others are natural problems solvers and critical thinkers. We can teach the skill to an extent, but there’s only so much we as teachers can do. So, STOP BLAMING US FOR ALL YOUR PROBLEMS.

sum, ergo mereo (I am, therefore I deserve) A fitting motto for the fattened middle-class and their children alike.

PL: I wouldn’t know where to start commenting on something of this length, so I’ll leave it at this: You make some excellent points.

I’m glad I became a programmer for this very same reason: I don’t get to experience this, though I am aware of its existence and get to look down on it from my hill of professional abilities, interest in what I do and being good at my job.

I hope the finality of all this nonsense is that the UNIX/Linux (it really is that now) OS goes on to do great things for man kind (like running a spaceship), and I hope I am on the wagon having helped to build or contribute to that piece of software, even if marginally. In the meantime, I’ll be on the trenches, programming away the technological drivers that fuel this convoluted, weird and crazy business model we call “the economy.”

In the mean time, I have advice for everyone that might read this comment. If you want out of the nonsense, just find out what you love and do it. Or study math, study science and music. Eventually it’ll come to you. Just try and really become interested in everything that’s awesome and you will find the path.

Good luck. For sure expect this: whoever you are, where-ever you are, as a species we are heading into something new and unchartered, all of you can feel the electricity. The next months and years should be very interesting indeed. Pack tuna and whatever has omega3 and take lots of vitamins. Shit really is about to hit the fan.

PL: To borrow a line from Hitchens, “I find this [quite] persuasive.” I tip one to you.

Atlas Fucked: An Economic Handbook for the Inebriated

PL: None of Us Really Know Anything (And We’re All Full of Shit)

I really liked the piece, enough so that I IMed it to several people and brought it up in conversation with people even more. I agree with what someone else said that seeing this kind of stuff in a book would be beautiful. I had two questions for you: 1) What’s your take on IT with regards to the Fattened Middle? 2) Is Computer Science a dying field?

I ask because I’m getting set to graduate and have heard and seen all sorts of mixed things. Do programmers/IT folks in general constitute an overpaid group that needs to be brought back to reality?

Thanks.

PL: IT’s getting an oversized margin because luddites between 40 and 65 think IT work is impossibly complex, and being intelligent, IT folks do nothing to disabuse them of this perception. As the workforce gets younger with boomers retiring, IT will get cheaper at an increasingly fast clip. IT should milk the moment for all its worth. As that myth fades, so will the premium for their skill. So yes, short term they’re overpaid. Long term, however, it’ll all even out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

PL: Good luck. Reproducing’s sport among the uneducated, uber-religious and low incomed. The only people not having kids are those who ought to be doing so. I’d never have more than two. Society’s going to be so brutally stratified between the haves and have nots in the future that I want to ensure we’re in a position to give ours every leg up imaginable. It’s only rational.

I work in the conference services department for my university. 60 student staff summer workers under our Executive Director and two Managers. The student staff is split into four intra-department groups, each with their own managers. I was the manager of the largest staff (20 people) – the front desk/concierge.

A university is as bad as any large organization. I need keys for a new building we’re adding on for the rest of the summer? Email the director of the building. Get a response “Oh, I’m not aware. Let me check with my superiors.” Same woman who earlier in the summer said “This is my building, take care of it (some of our staff lives in it).”

Then since we’re the largest staff, I have two assistant managers. Each are included in everything I am, there’s no difference to our knowledge or power. But since I get paid a whopping $0.50/hr more and have a fancier title, they are just utter wastes of space. They, along with the other 17 members of my staff, are the least assertive people I’ve ever met. Any issue? Run to me/another superior. From day one I’ve tried to instill the message of self assertion and have failed somehow. It’s just amazing to me that so few people can stand up for themselves and make a damn decision.

I’m actually a pretty quite and introverted person all things considered, but I know when shit needs to get done. I don’t hesitate to act. I always think, “If one of my superiors comes and asks me why I did what I did, what will I say?” So when I get a phone call with my disgruntled manager bitching about a refund I issued giving our FY10 deficit, I can say “Look, the woman had to go to the ER and wasn’t able to stay here. Clearly she didn’t use our resources and deserves a refund.” The same thing goes when I screw up. I handle a bi-weekly schedule for 20 people. 20 different preferred days, 20 different summer class/commitment schedules. I’ve had a great track record, but one girl’s vacation I missed and didn’t give her off. I was able to lay it out straight and say, “Look, I screwed up your schedule, I know. Can I give you the entire next week off instead? I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.” That’s another thing lacking in day to day business – accountability.

I can rant about the lack of assertion, accountability, and follow through all day long from my former 50 hour/week waste of my time job. Luckily I had enough cash stored up where I no longer needed their bi-weekly check and was able to tell my manager to screw herself and walked away. PL – love when you do pieces like this. Read your site whenever there’s an update and try to spread the word to my friends. Keep it up

PL: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The only thing less popular in American society than child molestation is personal responsibility. Look at the goddamned FinReg bill… If you want to borrow money, you accept the risks in the contract, one of which is that the bank will provide you with totally unfair terms. It’s called a “bargain.” Don’t like it? Can’t understand it? Don’t borrow the money. Nobody made you buy that house…