generation limbo thread - limbo in the sand

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/education/duncan-calls-for-urgency-in-lowering-college-costs.html

Just before Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street spawned the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which asks for zero interest on student debt, federally financed public higher education and the forgiveness of all existing debt. At Occupystudentdebtcampaign.com, the campaign asks donors to sign a Pledge of Refusal, which promises that when a million signatures have been gathered, all will cease to make their debt payments.

as absurd as it sounds, if something like this turned into a credible threat, I think it could actually get something done.

get something done meaning 'congress allows student loans to be discharged via bankruptcy' which is gonna happen one day, it's mostly a question when

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/nearly-50-of-the-young-people-in-greece-and-spain-are-unemployed/249286/

was there discussion someone of dealbook's 'wall st. lose their lustre' series while i was non ilx??

ugh someone = someWHERE

I think I might have linked it on the sandbox ows or quiddities thread

also the long new yorker piece on peter thiel - thought there was some quasi-interesting stuff in there on the dangers/problems of elite thinking/'meritocracty'

is that this week's new yorker? I have a copy and a trainride ahead of me

oh that makes sense (xp)

one of the things that seems sorta worth discussing more often is that even current high wage/high status white collar jobs are coming under threat from globalization/mechanization and what that means abt the 'elite'/how ppl think abt 'work'

i think so - its not the newest issue but the second newest. its sorta dumm cuz theil has all sorts of lousy ideas and preconceptions but at the same time i really strongly sympathize with this underlying belief that the current system is terrible and that elite colleges are ruining the world

one of the things that seems sorta worth discussing more often is that even current high wage/high status white collar jobs are coming under threat from globalization/mechanization and what that means abt the 'elite'/how ppl think abt 'work'

ya totally, this subject fascinates me, esp when we're talking 20-30 years from now

I think there's this almost religious belief among a lot of (not all) economists that eventually new jobs will appear just cause they always have but I'm totally willing to believe that we're going to have to deal w/ a society w/ massive permanent unemployment

worrying abt ~~jobs~~ is imo sorta missing the point, policy wise, we really need to worry abt ~~wages~~

haha are, lol micro, ~~prices~~

well those are kinda two (kinda) separate problems

like - we're short on crappy min wage jobs and we also have too many crappy min wage jobs

sure atm but its probably sorta justifiable to believe that the economy will eventually create more jobs (maybe, probably, fingers crossed) but not jobs that will pay anything like the ones theyre replacing

yeah right now it's just an AD thing and there will be 'more jobs' but the demand / wage premium for generic white collar labor is pretty clearly on a downward path

one thing in particular that I find interesting is the social attitudes towards unemployment - like we've always been a society where it's morally wrong to be a healthy bodied unemployed person. it doesn't matter what you do as long as you're a 'productive member of society'. will that get more flexible over time or will people grow even more resentful w/ a permanent unemployed / temp employed class if we grow the safety net, which I think on some level will be inevitable.

ideally i think some kind of minimum guaranteed income will be necessary, not just economically but environmentally as well, and society will have to come to terms with the idea that some ppl will essentially be paid to do nothing

otm. I got into an argument w/ Euler about this very subject on another thread. I think unemployment benefits will eventually be transformed into min guaranteed income but we're gonna have to jump through a lot of hoops before the idea becomes socially acceptable. tbh I think that means 'a lot of people are going to have to suffer'. which is already happening and I think the wearethe99 blog is important because it's made what was before now a private shame into a shared public shame.

except the people who administrate unemployment benefits see it as their task to keep people from partaking of the benefits guaranteed to them by law and damned if they're going to allow that to change

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/nearly-50-of-the-young-people-in-greece-and-spain-are-unemployed/249286/

― iatee, Thursday, December 1, 2011 1:41 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

a whole 50!

zero interest on student debt

this interests me -- i mean the basic idea of collecting interest on student loan debt is basically fraud

at least up until a certain time. i mean, when you have 20k+ in debt, 6 months of interest free amnesty doesn't really amount to shit.

it should be, idk, 6 years or something. or 16.

except the people who administrate unemployment benefits see it as their task to keep people from partaking of the benefits guaranteed to them by law and damned if they're going to allow that to change

― remy bean in exile, Thursday, December 1, 2011 5:55 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

yeah that's why I think some serious cultural change is gonna have to happen first. I actually didn't qualify for unemployment the last time my contract ended cause I made too much money the last quarter I was employed at that job. had I been fired two weeks earlier or received my last check a week later, I'd have qualified. and I mean there was nothing I could do, as absurd as the situation was, the rules were fairly clear cut. it was rough but I'm young and was in a more flexible situation than some people. what does a 59 y/o who's been unemployed for 2 years do? hopefully what he does is make his sitaution well publicized, but there's the aforementioned social shame thing.

*nods*

I'm currently in a situation where I'm going to have to get rid of just about everything I own so that my husband can get disability.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/the-smaller-lies/

I got into an argument w/ Euler about this very subject on another thread

fwiw i think some of euler's complaints were valid in that argument, i dont know if hes reading this but i think hes to an extent right abt attitudes/values on a personal level just, yeah, on a larger policy level we need to readjust the way we think abt the value of work, what a persons role in sociery is &C &c &c even w/in 'capitalism'

one of the things i worry abt esp r.e. that blog post you just linked is the way the refusal of the right/the 'elite' to engage w/ 'reality' outside of ideology is that it fosters the sort of radical nihilism that is a lot more dangerous than #ows or 'class warfare' or w/e... its like theres an incredible blindness to history here

gahh

yeah I feel like what bush did w/ foreign policy - 'if we believe it it's true' / 'we create our own reality' etc. has taken hold w/ economic thinking too.

wrt guaranteed minimum wage, I also struggle with the degree to which what's at stake here is "security". Eg is it "we did what we were supposed to do & now we deserve a secure lifestyle in response"? (or even if you didn't do what you were supposed to do?)

like one of my "things" with generation limbo is to what extent risk-taking is accepted. What's the right balance for an individual, or for a society, between security and risk? & what happens to those who risk & lose? & I dunno! In my early 20s in the mid 90s, secure jobs were the easiest thing in the world for a college grad with a reasonable record. I dunno how many entrepreneurs we ended up being. esp in dot com days it wasn't so risky to start a server business or w/e. & I sometimes thing gen limbo dreams of having those 90s jobs back, the steady secure ones...even though in those days whether you were selling out in becoming a corporate drone was a big moral question.

How unfair would it be to characterize gen limbo as people who want to sell out but no one's buying?

cos if that's even sorta right, I think it explains some of my (gens?) disconnect here

It' is sorta right. But the ideology that permits/acknowledges "selling out" isn't available unter current conditions; any work for limbo-ers is good work.

im not really sure!! i mean, i think theyre both multiple arguments/povs and multiple flavors of essentially the same pov one of which is def 'we did everything right, played by the rules and all we got is unmanageable debt and a job serving coffee' where doing the right thing was supposed to mean decent wages and job security.

but one of the arguments too is that through legislation and globalization risk/rewards have become p skewed - even stuff like changing bankruptcy laws to favor creditors and the consolidation of makes it harder to take risks that pay off big or that match the potential reward idk

it may seem weird to kinda eulogize the choice of being an office drone i guess but in retrospect the idea of just coming in for 40 hours a week and getting dental coverage for yr kids and three weeks vacation is like, i mean, its sad to think youll never have that option

^ otm

this is pretty speculative and half remembered but one of things i may rc abt studies in behavioral economics is that most ppl are p risk averse and so while policy can impact the ability of entrepreneurs to succeed its a lot harder to create the type of person that is going to want to become and entrepreneur in the first place?

some evidence that we have a naturally entrepreneurial culture:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/143573/entrepreneur-mindset-common-china.aspx

but despite that and all the talk of small business, we actually are a country where an overwhelming # of people work for large firms. there's an argument that that's not a terrible thing for the economy overall (vs. italy right now).

otoh even if people are fundamentally risk averse (I know I am) we can change that as much by adjusting the risk - in a world where 20 somethings didn't have to worry about health insurance and crushing debt, and say, the gov't provides easy access to start-up capital.
combine that w/ what you could call the cultural entrepreneurial streak and I think we'd have the best of both worlds.

here's an article on norway w/r/t this subject: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html

otoh even if people are fundamentally risk averse (I know I am) we can change that as much by adjusting the risk - in a world where 20 somethings didn't have to worry about health insurance and crushing debt, and say, the gov't provides easy access to start-up capital.

haha this sentence is a mess, let me try again:

"otoh even if people are fundamentally risk averse, changing the risk is gonna be as important as changing the chance for success. in a world where 20 somethings didn't have to worry about health insurance and crushing debt, and say, the gov't provides easy access to start-up capital, even risk averse people are gonna have less at risk."

How unfair would it be to characterize gen limbo as people who want to sell out but no one's buying?

+

It' is sorta right. But the ideology that permits/acknowledges "selling out" isn't available unter current conditions; any work for limbo-ers is good work.

I think this is a complicated thing to measure, I've seen some evidence that gen limbo is less concerned w/ traditional material/career success but I think it's hard to isolate that attitude from what's happened to the economy. there are limits to what you can say when you're talking about a 'generation' as a demographic group. there are plenty of 22 y/os dying to sell out (see: dealbook article about bitter ppl who can't get a finance job), there are plenty of others who aren't. as a whole you can prob argue that there's been a cultural shift of some sort, but measuring that is pretty hard. and what does sell out even mean? who's 'the man' at this point? in 2011 even the shitty min wage jobs usually means working for a large multinational.

yeah i think p much all research agrees that the u.s. is an excellent place to be an entrepreneur and that, all things considered, its a p entrepreneurial culture

one of the things that i think is maybe impt is that like, starting a small business selling expensive handmade hammers is fine but its not like its an unalloyed big picture good: lots of small business keep prices high and are fairly unproductive. and i think thats a vialbe argument that theres a kind of social/cultural/economic bias towards starting those kind of small businesses rather than the big idea/big future firms that really create jobs/wealth?? idk

hard times generation from 60 minutes

what does sell out even mean? who's 'the man' at this point? in 2011 even the shitty min wage jobs usually means working for a large multinational.

haha, yeah, there's definitely a generation gap at play here!

from fbilx while sandbox was down:

iatee what do u mean
25 minutes ago · Like

sarahel i mean that the concept of "selling out" is still something i'm wary/mindful of -- as whoever it was (mennen?) posted -- that was an issue for "us" 20-somethings in the mid-90s. And it hasn't entirely gone away - at least for me.
23 minutes ago · Like

hoos Yeah I mean the people I roll with feel tend to feel like there's no "true kvlt" whatever to sell out anymore.
14 minutes ago · Like

iatee again I think the problem is w/ what 'selling out' means. like, is getting an office job just for health care, 'selling out' or is it, ya know...getting health care...

it depends on the office.

well i mean unless we're talking about actually in-your-face morally offensive shit, i think a lot of us unemployed and severely underemployed people would happily swallow any kind of sanctimony in exchange for health benefits and a steady paycheck.

in other words there's no way i'd work for chick-fil-a but burger king is still on the table

like honestly i think the question of selling out is kinda class-informed? viz it's not an ethical trespass to earn your bread a certain way if earning your bread is all you can afford/have time to do

that's a good point and its worth putting in the context of the tea party / OWS divide. like, we see someone working as part of an organization that's bad for the country vs. they see a hardworking person w/ a job.

tru

one of the things that i think is maybe impt is that like, starting a small business selling expensive handmade hammers is fine but its not like its an unalloyed big picture good: lots of small business keep prices high and are fairly unproductive. and i think thats a vialbe argument that theres a kind of social/cultural/economic bias towards starting those kind of small businesses rather than the big idea/big future firms that really create jobs/wealth?? idk

I think you have to look at the artisan hammer thing as a third wave thing like

1) you buy hammers from local manufacturer / store ->
2) you buy cheaper hammers via mass production / chain retail / etc.
3) you (voluntarily) buy more expensive artisan brooklyn hammers. hammers as a luxury good.

as long as #3 is a supplement to #2 then we're not really gonna suffer in the same way from the inefficiencies of having lots of small firms. *but* at the same time this 'post-walmart economy' depends on having enough people w/ lots of disposable income and people willing to pay more than they could for things.

which might not mesh w/ other economic realities

i guess the point is that the economy as a whole doesnt really suffer if fewer ppl choose to start mfg and selling $300 scissors but it does need ppl to keep inventing facebook or w/e

does your dad run exxon mobil? can he put together ikea furniture? xps

http://www.quickanded.com/2011/12/credits-credentials-and-collective-consciousness.html

this is also interesting

i'm taking that course!

also signed up for the human-computer interaction course in january

what do you think of it so far?

some of it goes over my head, so i'm not exactly pulling a 4.0, but it's really enlightening overall. highly recommend future outings.

haha feeling kinda queasy thinking abt the 'opportunities for intimate engagement' @ stanford

theres probably a better thread for this but:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/the-politics-of-the-1-percent/#more-20281

haha well this thread has been pretty flexible and I think can be used to discuss anything relating to how we're systemically fucked in the long-term

I think the key part on that article is this:

The 1 percent cares more about deficits than the economy. When asked to name the most important problem facing the country, 32 percent of respondents said the deficit and 11 percent said the economy. By contrast, in an April 2011 CBS News/New York Times poll, 49 percent of Americans said the economy or jobs and only 5 percent said the deficit.

if wall st. (and friends) spent its political capital and PR money pushing for fiscal stimulus - which would actually help them most really - they'd be (slightly) harder to demonize. same dynamic exists w/ big business and universal health care - who would benefit most from not having to worry about health care spending? and yet.

this is ultimately why it's hard to take anything they do or say in good faith.

don't they care mostly about inflation, though?

well I said 'wall street' and not 'rich people' because although all superrich are rentiers on a certain level and have reasons not to want inflation, the financial sector ultimately depends on "productive capitalism"/economic growth (whether or not it creates it itself is up for debate) and has a lot more to lose from a double dip recession than from moderate inflation.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff87/English

Fourth, today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations

*head explodes*

Has anyone here done a masters in ol' Britisherland? How did you pay for it? Student loans? How much did all factor up to cost? I r starting to look at courses to maybe take up next year. And starting to pay off debt in the hope to mebbe save some too.*

*Of course I might just change my mind a fuck off travelling for 6 months instead with savings.

look into cheaper EU degrees maybe? brits can do that, right?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/12/future-0

that's a good article! Is undervaluing the welfare of future generations related to declining interest in having children in the global North?

depends on your views on the 'welfare of existence' I guess

eh I think that's too abstract: I just mean that if you have kids then you have a p concrete reason not to want the environment to go to pot. I don't have enough experience to know if the opposite's the case & I suspect sample matters a lot here since its not just liberal-types who go kidless

there are stronger trends that go in the other direction, like very religious people have more kids, very religious people more often than not buy the conservative belief package w/r/t global warming. poorer people have more kids, less likely to be highly-educated. etc.

p skeptical of religious=don't care about environment claim

I hate to be this guy, but literal zero percent interest on student loans is basically like paying someone to borrow money (time value of money, inflation, etc.). Plus your incentive would be to pay it off absolutely as slowly as possible.

I guess if the government is the only lender in the game, that's all fine because you don't have to give the government incentives to lend. But then there's another problem, which is that schools will just take advantage of the endless flow of money by jacking up tuition insanely (which, to be fair, is already sort of what happens). Better solution: take more of the money that would go to loans and instead just massively subsidize public universities in every state.

http://rpgp.berkeley.edu/religion_global_warming

BTW this fits into my new theory that public-private hybrid solutions are always the worst of both worlds. Fully private universities that couldn't rely on public-backed loans would at least have to compete for your money and keep tuition reasonable; proper public universities would be run for the public good and not the bottom line. But when private schools have access (indirectly) to public funds, it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

1. p old poll
2. not worrying about global warming != not caring about environment

ake more of the money that would go to loans and instead just massively subsidize public universities in every state.

this itself is

a. a good idea
b. not enough to stop tuition inflation

1. p old poll
2. not worrying about global warming != not caring about environment

you don't think there is a correlation between
a. being religious and being consevative
b. being conservative and being skeptical about global warming / environmental issues?

I don't think it's a natural aspect of 'being religious', but it's something that exists today on some level

xpost -- Yeah but zero percent loans would INCREASE tuition inflation.

as a public u employee I applaud massive subsidies

think state control of health care costs through state-run public options could help keep tuition down---though IHE had an article p recently showing that it's not faculty costs tht are mot responsible for tuition jacking but rather admin costs & building costs for fancier facilities

Well I know one of the going theories, one that I find convincing is like this: (1) universities are driven by rankings (2) rankings are heavily dependent on spending (3) the current loan system provides a nearly unlimited supply of money, so (4) the incentive is to jack up tuition to capture that supply of money, then spend it on stuff that will keep you competitive in the rankings arms race.

So that would comport with costs coming from fancier facilities and the like.

I think there's lots of room between "global warming" & " environmental" issues---the former is politicized (dumbly for the right, duh) but that right-wingers aren't generally "mmmm more coal in the air, smells like victory". Rich right-wingers, yes, but there aren't enough of them to sway elections

I hate to be this guy, but literal zero percent interest on student loans is basically like paying someone to borrow money (time value of money, inflation, etc.). Plus your incentive would be to pay it off absolutely as slowly as possible.

the first part is not necessarily a bad thing if we're operating w/ the assumption that more people getting a higher education is good for society/the economy/etc. second part shouldn't matter because loan payments should be automatic/income-based.

I think there's lots of room between "global warming" & " environmental" issues---the former is politicized (dumbly for the right, duh) but that right-wingers aren't generally "mmmm more coal in the air, smells like victory". Rich right-wingers, yes, but there aren't enough of them to sway elections

uhhh are you sure bout that

the *1* GOP candidate willing to speak out on environmental issues (huntsman) already backtracked on it cause it got him nowhere

at this very moment the gop is holding a TAX CUT hostage for an oil pipeline. A TAX CUT.

the first part is not necessarily a bad thing if we're operating w/ the assumption that more people getting a higher education is good for society/the economy/etc. second part shouldn't matter because loan payments should be automatic/income-based.

― iatee, Tuesday, December 20, 2011 5:07 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Permalink

Right, but you're basically just providing an indirect subsidy and not really a "loan" in the traditional sense. It seems like it would be more efficient to just provide a direct subsidy. Unless you think there's some value in having students pay something back -- sort of to feel *ownership* of their education or something.

well I agree but the bigger issue is that states aren't gonna be doing these huge direct subsidies anytime soon and the federal government can't directly subsidize them in the same manner

But if the fed govt just loans out money to everybody at 0% you're just going to wind up with universities charging whatever they want and profiting from the bonanza. Public money flowing into private hands, bubble economics, etc.

Maybe the federal govt could set some kind of conditions for accepting federal loan money. Not likely to happen, but none of these things are.

I dunno my money's on a serious overhaul within the next 10 years, higher ed prices are not sustainable atm

and yes, conditions would be key and would allow the gov't to actually keep prices in check, another way this issue compares well w/ health care.

look into cheaper EU degrees maybe? brits can do that, right?

― iatee, Tuesday, 20 December 2011 14:35 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

crazily i dont think i will blossom in a classroom where everyone is speaking a different language

there are some places w/ degrees in english, it's the age of erasmus

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/12/economic-geography

i thought this was a p interesting post, although im still sorta chewing it over. i think a the central conclusion is offbase but idk

he makes a few sweeping statements but by central conclusion do you mean 'The picture that emerges is one in which employment growth in high productivity, tradable industries is constrained at the rate of housing supply growth in skilled cities.'?

cause that almost seems like a given to me, but again, I start out w/ a lot of the same assumptions that RA does. (I think he's 100% otm w/ the silicon valley, could really be an amazing place right now if it had properly urbanized and diversified its economy, in some ways it would be the most important city in the world if it were a city where artists, poor immigrants (etc.) could live instead of a bunch of office parks, freeways and plain looking million dollar houses.)

and this "Value creation in high productivity cities continues, but a lot of that value is siphoned off through taxes and transfered to residents of low productivity cities, who use it to buy non-tradable services" is a statement at the core of my political beliefs

otoh some things he says about population transfer need more evidence. I don't think this is a given:

"Migrating workers—even those who continue to work in a tradable sector—are those that were least involved in the process of idea creation in their old city, and they therefore contribute little to the development of a new spillover cluster in their new city."

well i think that employment can (and does!) grow faster than the rate of housing growth although im not digging through stats to prove this

i feel to dull to really post in depth abt this but i think there a couple of central assumptions abt the nature of high productivity jobs/job growth in tradable industries that are flawed in this analysis although the stuff abt income transfers is good i think

I don't think he's arguing that employment can't grow faster than housing, just that very expensive housing / an overall housing shortage will have a negative effect on growth. (and a place like SV could fairly easily fix that shortage - it's ultimately a legal problem not an economic one.)

reading it again I think we're just interpreting 'constrain' differently but he prob shoulda said 'constrained by' not 'constrained at'

yeah i realized that at some point too. i keep writing things and then giving up on them but: i think in part this argument tries to have 'friction' effects both ways - i.e. his argument abt the marginal worker vs the idea of the spillover effects (cities as economic aggregators?). idk its all a tangle atm, and while i think hes essentially right abt the big things (and theres lots of good data out there backing this up) im not sure that migration/housing is all that impt...

actually: i think the real problem is that, for a bunch of reasons, low job growth is intrinsic to 'high productivity tradable industries' at least atm so im less concerned abt value being 'siphoned' off by transfers or limited by housing stock?

yeah I agree, I think RA's going for a single narrative when there are really a lot of things going on. he's an urbanist and so he's gonna be tempted by the most urbanist-friendly narrative. but yeah the macro level productivity-eating-up-job growth, automation, outsourcing, there are lots of things going on for sure. (I'm more concerned about the lack of urban housing stock when it comes to future resource depletion / need for transportation efficiences than w/r/t economic productivity but I think he's trying to attract the Economist audience?)

this is just econ not really limboish but I'm finding it interesting, not always convincing but a different pov, dude comes from the notre dame heterodox school:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-mirowski-the-seekers-or-how-mainstream-economists-have-defended-their-discipline-since-2008-%E2%80%93-part-i.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-mirowski-the-seekers-or-how-mainstream-economists-have-defended-their-discipline-since-2008-%E2%80%93%C2%A0part-ii.html

and relating to what hurting was talking about earlier:

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/could-dismantling-the-submerged-state-surrounding-student-debt-pay-for-free-colleges/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/27/us-studentdebt-middleage-idUSTRE7BQ0T620111227