generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

oh wait they're already doing that

wasn't even implying 'the permanently unemployed are gonna go on crime sprees' - one of the interesting things about the great recession is that crime hasn't shifted much overall. I more meant 'more people having friends and family who have been unemployed for 3 years, not out of choice, more people interacting w/ office workers thrown into poverty, etc.'

people getting what they don't deserve, haven't earned

yeah ppl can only have money they didnt deserve or earn if the 'market decides' to give it 2 them, not communists govts

yeah I mean *I'm* persuadable on this but I kinda goes against our national image of ourselves as a place where hard work + gumption makes you the person you are. I guess the consumer revolution already upended that, though. So I dunno.

would rather see a renewed WPA though

xp but that's money they deserve, axiomatically (I mean, to those who have that pt of view)

sort of? i mean the idea that the market for say, corporate executive salaries is truly efficient is p lol but w/e

sarcasm was more just bcuz youre right, even the most parasitic of rentier capitalists will go 2 the way arguing that they produce some kind of social value (lol making markets more efficient) just because the idea of true 'leisure' class also seems deeply unamerican

realistically i think a simplified, more progressive and better enforced tax regime is the 'fairest' way of readjusting things otoh wheres max, i think he has a workable idea for sending ppl to go work on farms or s.thing

renewed WPA could still be great in the short-term, but in the long-term you'd rather people were working just for the sake of working? you'd rather a man digs a ditch than a machine?

one of the related issues is that rich people are working longer hours than ever.

if we want people to work just because being a 'worker' is good for your moral character or whatever, we can have a system of shared part-time labor. we simply may not need 95% of working americans to provide 40h week of labor, and having 10 people work 20h is probably better for society than 5 unemployed people and 5 people at 40h. it's never that simple, though, and I think it would be harder to organize from above than just increasing welfare, which is actually fairly straightforward. (unemployment insurance without an end date.)

but I kinda goes against our national image of ourselves as a place where hard work + gumption makes you the person you are.

hah this hasn't been true for a long time, but yeah it's built into our national self-image

keynes thought by 2030 we'd be working 15h weeks and mostly just trying to figure out what we'd do with our free time

(he did not envision ilx polls)

I'm not sure what I think re paying people to not work but I think I'm committed to the "dignity of labor" both as in "don't make work so shitty that it offends against human dignity" (that's an injunction to the ruling class) & as in "work is a basic human good, it gives meaning & purpose & direction to human life" but re the latter I have a pretty broad understanding of work e.g. building ridic Minecraft worlds might count, so I dunno.

virtual WPA hmm

I think 'paying people not to work' is not the right phrasing - 'paying people subsistence wages when the demand for more labor simply doesn't exist'. this isn't some crazy futurist idea either, already happens in countries w/ considerably less wealth than america.

yeah I think the right phrase might be "guaranteed minimum income", there might be some econ/poli sci term of art that gets used I dunno.

'In Praise of Idleness', Bertrand Russell takes on the supposed nobility of work

though as someone said upthread unlimited unemployment insurance is a lot easier to implement than some sort of universal free money program

15hr working week, another 15hrs spent studying to keep colleges open

Money quote:

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

ok so I'm obvs just posting the good-sounding rhetorical bits here but still

yeah I know the Russell essay, but I don't trust him on this: he only knew idleness when depressed, & he was an aristocrat.

he was an aristocrat and therefore…his opinion is invalid or…?

well there's also something to say about idleness in the white collar 40h week

see: ilx.com

xp do you mean since he personally never put in 12-hour days at the sadness cannery in Manchester or something he couldn't know how rewarding that really was?

iatee ilx.com isn't loading for me ???

haha ilxor.com

I like how we have this overarching narrative about the american love of labor but at the same time we also believe that a significant % of americans are looking for an excuse to live the rest of their lives under the poverty line as welfare dependents

yup. then again i believe that the 'overarching narrative' is most often associated with one particular ethnicity of americans, while the 'significant %' are associated with other ethnicities. damn cynicism..

pearsockic

that there's really only two posters on ilx, velko and a sockmaster supreme

― harshbuzz to my chilt-on (zvookster), Wednesday, March 24, 2010 2:12 PM

zvookster would know about that : )

pearsonic isn't a sock

you guys all laughed at my farm camp idea and now youve all come back around

marx thought that once we overcame capitalism wed all go hunting a lot

dude was really into hunting, go figure

i'm not laughing at the idea - i actually think that a civilian corp (a year of military or non-military service, optionally) as prerequisite for no-strings-attached two years of college funding is a semi-brilliant idea.

nah silby re. Russell all I was saying was that as an aristocrat he knew a different kind of idleness from the laborer: it wasn't simply a way to rest his feet & turn his mind off, as laborers do, but rather a way to let his mind free.

even poor people have the internet now

facebook: the great equalizer

farmville: the great unequalizer

haha touche

allow me to raise the discourse: shit sux.

I'm liking this Bertrand Russell essay, though

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-the-jobless-the-mad-as-hell-millennial-generation/244552/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-unemployment-what-its-like-to-be-jobless-in-your-20s/244448/

just user emails nothing super enlightening

but I like the boomers/gen x/gen y narrative, we haven't talked much about that

I can linkspam my own thread right

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/09/05/rick-perrys-plan-10000-for-a-ba/perrys-college-plan-its-just-a-start

mostly just college profs defending the status quo

$10,000 for a bachelor's degree? Let's start by firing all the administration!

otm

haha I mean but you should see the admin levels in your av research uni, & most of it is aimed at nothing more than making more money---it's like the platonic ideal of Weber

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/Part_12.html

http://universityprobe.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Untitled-1024x700.jpg
http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-growth-at-uc/

this crazy old physics prof has written a lot of good stuff over the years w/r/t the UC system financing and costs:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/

esp: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/UndergradCost.html

admin cash is pretty sweet too