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Not the usual speaking topic, so I had to wing it. =)
Here is video from the Q&A. I try to address the elephant in the room, the possibility of an accelerating rich-poor gap. Hosted by SIEPR
26 responses to “Renewing the American Dream”
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Steve, I have no choice but to agree with you! However, would a widening gap split us apart?
From a slightly different angle, I posit that:
"Speaking of bubbles, a very real one is in education, where the situation is just as in healthcare, even including the need for a national system* similar to a single payer. Local budgets being already bankrupt and universities being so expensive relative to the earning power of their graduates, turn education into a luxury item. Besides costs, the other taboo in education is the quality of the graduates relative to the needs of an economy that is competitive beyond Twitter or American Idol–just ask the executives at Intel or Microsoft. We have run for so long an economy that functionally distorts education that even if we were able to correct the situation today, we’d still be 20 years away from the results. It was also with this second taboo in mind that, at one point in time, I pledged for turning the US universities in the 21st Century Ellis Island. Obama is considering instead the legalization of the millions of illegal low-skills/intensive laborers when a work permit, if anything less than repatriation, would be the way. So, between the pressures coming from 3rd world low wages and illegal immigrants, and considering the disappearance of the school as a leveling social force, we’ll converge quietly to a low station. Will polarization be internalized or tear us apart?
Why is education important in any revival scheme? To match human potential with the needs of the world. How responsible is Obama? At certain level, no more than any individual who’s put up with made-up stories about better education for several decades now. Oh well, we really have a chance to see how feedback works in capitalism, won’t we?"
imotion.blogspot.com/2010/08/let-professional-left-eat-ca…
I am also starting to think that it’s not so smart to scare away the financial elites either…
Thanks for sharing!
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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/luminance] "Glad you say that it can’t be resolved on the level of government and encourage the development of new ideas for dealing with that," with all due respect but all who are ahead of us are somehow in state-run educational systems. Moreover, they seem to be immune to "the development of new ideas for dealing with […]." Have you any idea about ‘everyday math?’ Whatever you feed into everyday math, the only thing coming out are sausages.
Education and health-care have run out of control, and this is according to ROIs, not impressions.
This conceptual split makes me think there cannot be a short-term solution.
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interesting discussion: uncertainties around taxes and expat taxes which are only in the US and Zimbabwe (? great paring here – was not really addressed in the further discussion), addressing the growing gap problem between rich and poor and innovative non-profits together with Bill Gates is a great alternative to rather stagnant government initiatives, also how Goldman adopted itself to the business practices in Japan… can relate to this, as well as the emphasis on diversity in a workforce. Actually, when the gap is growing between rich and poor it means that middle class is diminishing and when middle class is diminishing the democracy prospects are getting rather uncertain. Weaknesses in education system are also a part of the overall problem.
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Looked at the part where you comment Steve (thanks to Epp) and I want to thank you. Very touched I was….very touched.
denis
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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/luminance] Eppie, I happen to live in a place where participative democracy is still supposed to happen. Several of us have made our views known about math education. There is even a paper written, a very good one actually that would benefit readers way beyond our community… NOTHING HAPPENED! I take this back, for while we don’t have money for foreign languages anymore, the small district I live in has already decided to put $2M in smart-boards. I won’t bother you with the details.
So, I don’t know whom you are talking to when saying
In the meantime, if you wanted to, you could focus on the math situation (for example), if your feelings are especially strong and passionate about that. Vocalize your concerns and, better still, offer suggestions. Even better, involve others in a collective problem-solving process (synergy). In your own community at least. (I don’t know if that is actually the best route to go, but it would be a beginning. An actual step taken towards problem resolution even if, in the process, we learn that we need to take a different approach.)
No Eppie, we’ve been fed the "We are #1" myth for so long that we stopped learning. Moreover, I doubt my school district has a math teacher (elementary and middle school levels) who can extract square root.
Thanks for your thoughts, it’s good comparing notes.
Best to you, too!
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wanted to add one more thing about taxes, i have never heard anybody talking about the different cost of living in different areas in the US. There are several cities/areas where the cost of living is insanely high (like San Francisco, SV, Boston and a few more). Paying the same amount of taxes for upper middle class is not really fair in those circumstances… although we always here that everybody who is making above some magical amount is wealthy… and the cost of living is not taken into the account… thus middle class gets a lot of financial pressure (small business owners and entrepreneurs including)….plus California tax system is crazy any way… i wonder if there will be ever a more fair system… which can really encourage entrepreneurship…
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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/24270806@N06] considering how literal I took your words once to be, thanks for the key! 😉
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/solerena] people actually took into account what you are saying: imotion.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-obamas-tax-plan.html
I think, the other side would say, let the market make those who cannot afford to pack up and leave. What that kind of thinking does to communities it’s the stuff history is made with. On the other hand, think of the Chinese solution (and not only), the government limits drastically the number of internal migrants…
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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/luminance] Eppie, what can I say? There are people, especially in the US, who always go for ‘new and improved.’ I don’t happen to share this trait, at least when discussing education.
Moreover, considering how much we spend per pupil, why can’t we accommodate both systems? In fact, practice shows that what the successful countries do is not so much of the "new and improved" kind, and it also costs less.
I think the crisis in education is also fueled by a crisis in parenting. Often, it’s been parents who ask for what in effect are lower standards so that their kids are not hurt, whatever that means.
You may also want to have a look at the state of the nation, from the perspective of the NYTimes’ readers:
community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09…
P.S. "learn [math] with all their senses" alright, I’m all for that, just let me know what your sense for irrational or complex numbers is, please! Then the Euler’s identity falls into place like Tetris blocs.
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want to add some more to taxes and education topic – if whoever cannot afford – should leave principle would work – all the professors at Stanford and teachers together with young and passionate entrepreneurs (who are not in billion and up club, exaggerating the point) would be in this category soon in high-cost-of-living areas…. so middle class will disappear and this whole gap will continue growing… until something really bad will happen… like another revolution:)
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Totally agree with you. The government is not a good shepherd and it’s not the people we want to take charge of the redistribution of wealth.
In my country, where we have an awful populist government, close to Chavez in Venezuela, this is a sensible issue for us, educated citizens who live not from State subsides but out of hard work and pay lots of taxes to sustain a pool of parasites.
It’s very funny to verify every time that in the majority of cases, "the poor" chose to stay that way and live from subsides and social security (and from squatting public terrains, like right now is happening:
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/BreakingNews/View/53797
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/BreakingNews/View/53797
At least down here, that’s the norm. For when you give them the tools and possibilities for work and access to a more "civilized" life, very few take it.
So, it’s not just you and me and the politics and innovation to help narrowing "the gap"… it’s also about *them* wanting to help narrow it.
Sorry, it’s a very touching issue for me right now with what is happening down here…
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Watching all the other videos/parts of the conference… so interesting what each of you adds to the exchange. Duncan and Kevin -both never heard of before- and you, a great juncture. Wanted to say that.
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thanks!
I just finished Sam Harris’ new book, The Moral Landscape and he offers some thoughts on another polarizer:
“While most developed societies have grown predominantly secular, with the curious exception of the United States, orthodox religion is in florid bloom throughout the developing world.
religiosity is strongly coupled to perceptions of societal insecurity.
In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality. The poor tend to be more religious than the rich, both within and between nations.
And on almost every measure of societal health, the least religious countries are better off than the most religious.” (p.146)
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I understand the point, and I agree on the equation that people tend to look for shelter in religion in a socially threatening and insecure environment. This especially applies to the US, as per what is visible from abroad, from here at least.
It’s very simple: when the world around you changes everyday, and especially not for good, people are prone to turn on their "faith instincts" in order to keep some sort of mental sanity amidst chaos. It’s like trying to find peace, believing that there’s a vortex of this spinning wheel, where all the movement originates, and in which, there’s no movement at all. Believing in fate and an superior power, is, I think, a survival trait. It’s a mental equalizer.
And taken as such, I deeply respect whoever finds solace in that (and don’t do drugs or get violent towards others to decompress their anxiety).
However, at a country scale, in not all cases it applies. In my country -Argentina for those who don’t know-, for example, where social insecurity and a threatening and unstable environment, in the context of a constant lack of institutional security, poor application of law and lack of long term economic and State politics, is a constant since we have a memory. People are not more religious here because of that. People didn’t go more to church after the 2001 crisis, when they woke up, and all of a sudden our currency worthed 4 times less that it worthed 24hs before. We really don’t tend to find a refuge in religion. Now, thinking, perhaps that’s why we as a society are so inclined to therapy (we are a case study, worldly, one of the countries in which there are more therapists per capita).
I imagine having a conversation with someone here, the usual about our economic and political (therefore social) problems… blaming it on religion or even making a correlation between those things. They would probably laugh, or don’t get it. Because it really doesn’t work that way here.
Now, if I told somebody that a person from the United States, thinks this way, they would probably understand and agree. Because we see how problematic has become for you down there all this issue, and how touchy you are in general about it. And of course how religion is a State politics and a severe problem, in countries like in the middle East
Here we blame our societal illnesses on other things which are, basically two: Culture -education is public and secular- and Politics -intended to keep people poor and stupid-. That’s enough in our reflexions to justify why we are how we are. Why we are a fail of a country and a society. And religion doesn’t seem to be our OTC painkiller of choice.
I think India is another interesting case study to see how it applies -or not- what this author says.
What do you think?
Hope it helps my contribution.
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Very interesting V.
Monopoly on Christianity and afterlife insurance, says a lot about the insecurities I think of when I consider why people turn towards religion. "monopoly" and "insurance"… those two words give little room to "random" "diversity" "chaos"… which are the source of most of the mental insecurity in us.
It’s always easier to put the blame outside (fate). And to instruct people about an afterlife divine judgement in which you will really pay for your sins if you didn’t pay down here on Earth.
Actually, I’d love to believe in that. It’s very easy. But as soon as you have three or more neurons working alright, you really start to question that statement.
American society looks sometimes just like too indoctrinated on official and mass media statements. This can probably apply to religion as well, when it applies. It’s not difficult for me to see why is the land of massive entertainments and fast food and all this "I don’t want to think too much", H.D.A.D. culture. This is what I fear most when I see where my own society is headed.
It’s plain simple to me, let’s see this irrevocable example: Morbid obesity is epidemic in the US. People are not just overweight, they are too fat they don’t fit in normal chairs. How could that ever happened were people really woken up and with their eyes opened, connected with their reality?
I tell you, I’ve been obese when I was young, for several problems of emotional and abusive nature. As soon as I could begin to disentangle from that, at age 15, I took charge of my body. There’s a psychology prone to the negation of reality and magical thinking and lack of self reflection and overall numbness, which is necessary to keep someone morbidly fat for long, and to even take them there on the first place. And there’s a biochemical brain disbalance at the base of it, as a contributing factor.
People in my country are rather slim everywhere you go. Same happens in Europe. People care a lot about their bodies and health. And effort takes the stand (being fit) over numbing pleasure (overeating).
If you allow me then, perhaps this same psychology necessary for one thing is the one that is necessary for the other: the monopoly of religion. We can maybe write a book: Fast food and religion.
Poor people tend to be more overweight than rich people. We use to blame it on cheap diets. I know it’s not true: eating healthy is not more expensive. Because you let less, to begin with. Now, this author as many others correlates poverty with religion. Is there some connection we are missing? Is there a common denominator?
Of course, I am making a generalization. We can never talk about a country and a society without making generalizations.
And, V, indeed, I DO know SJ is on a campaign…
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Hi Steve,
This is what I wrote you in the email:The question for me is how far can you really "educate up" the great mass of average (100 – IQ?) people in order for them to be able to earn enough money to participate in this new world?
Henry Ford’s paying his grade school educated, manual workers enough for them to be able to buy the cars they built seems to me the foundational source of American social stability (many people seem to have forgotten that at one time the American labor movement was perhaps the bloodiest in the world). My fear is if the fussvolk are excluded from this new economy, they may burn it down or drown it in blood. At best, if this trend of growing social exclusion continues on the line of Kurswell’s curve we could end up with a world that might resemble some sort of Silicon Valley surrounded by favelas.
Without sounding like too much of a crank, I should say that I am a great believer in "average" that if you if you take good care of the average people, the path of the intellectually privileged will take care of itself. Geniuses, in my opinion, are what I think geneticists call "sports", that come out of the average and return to the average (we don’t hear very much from the Mozart family lately, do we?). Here in Spain, I know the García Lorca family, very charming, intelligent ma non troppo, dripping with class… but not a genius like Federico in the whole bunch. Paloma Picasso sells perfume.
A closer example of how the general social environment affects thing… Steve Jobs… Now, obviously he had fantastic genes, but think, he was raised by a very humble, poorly educated family in period where it was much easier for people with little education to have well paying jobs and stable, two parent families. Steve found himself living in a very rich, progressive state, with a very good public education system, and his genius flowered. I wouldn’t be surprised that, even with all his brains and energy, if he had been adopted in those days by a similar family in Alabama, he might have ended up owning a small chain of filling stations… and in today’s working class environment? I don’t like to think of what is going to waste out there.
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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/48331433@N05] "we could end up with a world that might resemble some sort of Silicon Valley surrounded by favelas."
Well, that is much what most of the BRIC countries look like… China, Brasil, India… and it is foreseen that *they*, these economies, are the future. So, I am sorry to say, but the future we are building looks pretty much like you fear: Silicon Valley surrounded by favelas.
Bright a future, eh?
Good questions you make, looking forward to Steve’s replies.
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What I am convinced of, by the history of the past century and massacre we had witnessed in communist countries, is that the answer is not a protective/collectivist economy. The answer should come from within capitalism. However is good to take note that those countries which belong to the BRIC are actually communist or ex-communist, or ultra protectionist (Brazil)… So, I would not be surprised that yet again we would try to find the answer in a driven / centralized and collectivist economy.
I think that the answer must come, in great measure from a new monetary system. The Monetary theory and the monetary policy is obscenely flawed, and that is one of the biggest ailments of our time. And the current crises are coming to expose this flaw. The problem of inequality is not in capitalism itself, in the basis of liberalism, but is in the monetary/financial system, which is in fact very totalitarian, centralized (central banks) and in hands of a few, greedy hands.
When we solve the problem of an economic system that to create currency incurs in debt by definition (central banks) and that make unreal profit out of nothing (wall street), and to preserve this huge pink elephant going, puts all its weight over the shoulders of all the workers (who create the real value) in the form of inflation, taxes and restrictions of all sorts… until we cannot change this equation, there’s no future but Silicon Valley surrounded by favelas.
Perhaps we wont reach that point because a massive civil raise and war will happen before. But in any case, whether we reach that future or we get a war in our way to it, there’s going to be a lot of bloodshed and pain, and no-one will win. The ones on top have to understand that this is a system, you cannot have as a long term policy to enrich a few at the expense of impoverishing the many, unless you are planning to have the system collapse sooner or later.
Monetary policy – Financial system. Those are the two main areas to correct, I think.
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Education and over-population are also important areas that need attention, of course, like many others. But without those two I mentioned before corrected, there’s no real solution in the way, IMO.
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Of one thing I have no doubt: The one who discovers the way that "average" people of average intelligence and educational attainment can generate enough value to be able to consume all the wonderful things that coming innovation is going to create on the Kurswell curve will be a cross between Steve Jobs and Mahatma Gandhi. Certainly there is an opportunity here for anyone who aspires to greatness and enduring fame.
What really might be happening here? Here is a quote that is even getting play in the Financial Times:
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. Karl Marx – Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
It’s funny how people like Nouriel Roubini and Raghuram Rajan are dusting off Marx after all these years. It’s a little like what Mark Twain said, "When I was thirteen I thought my father was an idiot, when I was twenty three I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in ten years."
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What I fear is that we may be creating a situation where the great mass of humanity would actually prefer something like the Democratic Republic of Germany (Stasi included) with its good, free education (Angela Merkel is an alumnus), guaranteed jobs and health care etc, to the brave, new world we are building at the present.
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Marx is out of the question here. His vision is to me, completely outdated. He could not address the ongoing stealth from the financial – monetary system, which ensure that we never get a real solution to the problem you spot.
(Opportunities for fame and growth for a few who are at the right time with the right idea in the right place, and have an entrepreneur spirit, have always existed and always exist in ALL contexts, now, yesterday and tomorrow, but that will never be something you can rely on for solving the problem of the majority of the population)
I don’t personally think the world we are building at the present is brave, neither new. I think it’s more of an involution to a well known slavery-like society where very few feudal lords get rich by systems that ongoingly impoverish the poor. And those systems are not due to capitalism and the concept of class struggle and surplus value, but in the foundation of our monetary / financial system. As I see it, of course.
Btw, I don’t see anything wrong in people wanting to have a guaranteed access to education and health. I think that accomplishing that in a major scale globally would be a sign of evolution, not the opposite.
Otherwise, your comment, unless I am understanding it wrong, is only focusing in people as consumers, and your only interest is how to "feed them" with the enough education to create value enough to consume in order to feed a macro economy, regardless of everything else. That and the social engineering thoughts of the communist with their treatment of population as mere figures and their massive killings for the sake of the country’s economy, seems not too far apart. Would love some more clarification, thanks!
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Actually people who know a lot about it tell me that Marx did predict that the financial sector would finally outweigh the productive sector. Don’t confuse Lenin with Marx.
Quite naturally many people think that as the Soviet Union collapsed in ruin that Marx was to blame for it and therefore that his analysis is valueless. They forget that Marx didn’t create the Soviet Union, Lenin did, using Marx as an intellectual tool. Where Marx said, " have matured in the womb of the old society itself", Lenin believed that the "new social order" could be delivered by Caesarian section. He was wrong and instead of the the moneyless, classless society that Marx vaguely predicted would succeed our system, Lenin gave birth to a sort of state capitalism, whose definition might have been the old soviet joke, "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
Having said that, it is doubtful if the czarist regime could have ever industrialized Russia, defeated Nazi Germany and put the first man in space as Lenin’s creation did. The irony of course being that the USSR’s collapse made a perfect example of what Marx had said, " new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." Lenin’s C-section revolution couldn’t adapt to the post-industrial, information society trend. They were the ones that were "old".
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Here we get into the question of artificial intelligence. Right now there are computers that can defeat the best chess grand masters…. If we apply Moore’s law or the Kurzweil curve, imagine what that could mean in 20 or 30 years… with a PhD in mathematics you might get a job parking cars.
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I just blogged off what we have been talking about:
seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-do-they-quote-m…
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