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

yeah but the causation doesn't have to go one way or the other, it's uh simultaneously determined. education is both a symptom and a cause of prosperity. extreme naivete (education always creates prosperity) or cynicism (prosperity only results from hegemonic power and education is a frilled bow on top to make us feel good) both wrong

the return to education increased a lot since the 70's so in some (possibly perverse) sense it makes sense for costs to have increased. but kids born into generations with shit labor markets get the sticky high cost without the sick job. some people say student loans should be tied to the unemployment rate the year you graduate. (i mean like everyone else here i'm a hippie who things school should be free and unlike half the ppl who post here live somewhere where it almost is due to low costs & a generous loans bursary system but to consider something plausibly palatable in US) if student debt was more equity like before the recession we would have seen a lot less of these articles

"our kids aren't getting the white collar jobs we hoped for them!" is both a quid ag and a general concern because the effect cascades in a predictable way: when those kids fail to get the jobs they hoped for they push less educated people further down into less well paying jobs.

ok got xp'd, think we agree

iatee had a good run with these threads

RIP, so sad he got run over by a self-driving car

What about the federal debt part of the equation -- I know it's generally considered an overblown fear on the left, but how much of that is a byproduct of being the most powerful nation in the world, and what happens if/when we stop being the most powerful nation in the world?

what do u mean

I mean rising federal debt discussed in the article as among the headwinds facing gen y

oh, well the demographic shift will happen to a lot of other countries that aren't or weren't the most powerful nation in the world, and some of those countries have a lot of debt too. but the solution to that problem is not "not having any debt" but "letting immigrants into the country so the demographics aren't completely fucked"

ow much of that is a byproduct of being the most powerful nation in the world, and what happens if/when we stop being the most powerful nation in the world?

xposts is federal debt necessarily correlated with the power of a nation? this is a map showing central government debt as a percentage of GDP:

http://i.imgur.com/jTIlTjf.png

http://i.imgur.com/qGeh74K.png

So...kinda? Easier to go in debt bc you/debt owners both confident that you'll generate economic growth to pay it off

oh, actually those maps might be misleading, sorry. if a country is white on the map, it doesn't mean that they have extremely low central government debt, it means there aren't data for the country at all:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.DOD.TOTL.GD.ZS/countries/1W?display=default

Pfft well shit idk

debt/gdp is cyclical. varies alot within countries over time as well as across countries, and doesn't have anything to do with "power" or gdp. also, the fact that some countries have more debt & some less is necessary (world debt = 0) and good: if one country has a recession and another doesn't, the first country can borrow money from the second. i don't know how this is related to tuition and i'm still not sure what hurting's point was

in the scarequote good old days, the hegemony (the top single-digit % or w/e) funded the tertiary education system via tax transfer because it was a key part of maintaining hegemony. boomers appear, the universities were opened up. asia industrialized, detroit fell, you know the story. the only people who could make a decent living were college educated professionals; the policy response was "let's turn everyone into a college educated professional!" what was made possible is now mandatory. a degree is now worth what a high school diploma use to be. the hegemony has responded: why are we paying for all this shit? and so they stopped.

how i break it down to an extent.

the only people who could make a decent living were college educated professionals; the policy response was "let's turn everyone into a college educated professional!" what was made possible is now mandatory.

politicians don't choose how many people go to college and it isn't mandatory for anyone to go, though. it wasnt a policy decision for more people to go to college its more like, hey you can make more money if you go to college... so people went to college. also there isn't a small group of organized people called the hegemony that used to pay for college for everyone and then decided not to...

mb there is a way to work power and hegemony into an explanation of returns to education but its not an explicit conspiracy theory IMO

when college was cheap and being college educated meant comfy middle class job for life, it was easier to justify transferring the cost to individuals. that decision wasn't made by some hegemonic conspiracy, it was made indirectly by the lack of resistance every time this state or that state cut funding and raised tuition.

it wasnt a policy decision for more people to go to college

it wasnt?

also

the hegemony has responded: why are we paying for all this shit?

seems more like something that's *going* to happen than something that did happen. if sending all those poor kids to college stops being the publicly accepted magical wand solution to all kinds of policy problems, then things are gonna get worse for the institutions involved.

I think that shit is gonna hit American universities in the not so distant future and that's one reason I've left the USA

certainly all kinds of questionable shit being paid for by someone or other when really we should be transferring cash directly from extractive oligarchs to the bank accounts of everyone else, it'd be extremely low-cost to run

maybe once it all collapses and they fire all the incompetent boobs who haven't been educating anyone i'll finally be able to get a job

Ok xps sorry I wasn't explaining myself clearly at all. First of all, it has nothing to do with tuition, it just has to do with the article posted about the problems facing millennials in the future, one of which is (allegedly) growing federal debt. And I was saying that I feel like the left take is often to shrug off the idea of growing federal debt being any threat to our future (hope I am not strawmanning here, do not mean to), and I am wondering what take on that people ITT have.

Sovereign debt is not like household debt, the U.S. national debt could grow indefinitely without an actual problem happening; if the dollar were to somehow inflate dramatically relative to the RMB then maybe there would be a problem? That's my assumption.

So yes I totally ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that off, who cares how much debt we have, it's how we get dollars to exist without printing them, it's less inflationary right? In theory?

Sovereign debt is not like household debt but that doesn't automatically mean it can grow indefinitely without a problem. Nations have actually run into problems before when their sovereign debt got too large. Hence one of the questions I was asking: does the assumption that it will never become a problem for us implicitly rest on the assumption of us remaining the most powerful country in the world? I mean Greece, which is not so powerful, is at the mercy of its creditors.

in diplomatic fashion i agree with elements of what both of you are saying. you can't continue accumulating massive loads of debt in perpetuity without running into problems at some point. but people like krugman will repeatedly argue that the amount of debt the U.S. current has and is projected to have in the near future isn't a fatal problem that can't be solved. there's precedent for nations taking on more debt (as % of GDP) as the U.S. and coming out fine by making policy adjustments. he was trying to persuade people of this back during the loudest days of calls for austerity, arguing instead for more stimulus/federal spending. but i guess all of that depends on how much you trust krugman and his econofriendz.

but out of the list of things that will possibly happen in the future that will be terrible for me, the ramifications of federal debt is low on the list

I think I basically agree with the Krugman-n-friendz take that you don't do austerity in a recession, and that ideally you spend the money on things like infrastructure projects that provide jobs to the working/middle class (who will spend money) and benefit the larger economy (e.g. by providing better transportation for workers and goods).

I am sort of wondering "at some point in the distant future is the federal debt going to fuck with my life at all?" though

Greece's debt was also denominated in a non-sovereign currency, which seems like a confounding factor. Really, the raw size of the debt or the debt:gdp ratio wouldn't concern me as much as, like, the RMB suddenly getting way more expensive. Or some other kind of disaster. Our debt's cheap.

yes definitely the euro made things much more immediately terrible for greece (since it had no option of inflating its way out of the debt).

https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/social-sciences-and-humanities-faculties-close-japan-after-ministerial-decree

Japan radically scaling back social sciences in favour of 'useful' qualifications.

Idiotic decree - but I would've thought economics and law would be useful! Seems the decline in the population is as big a factor.

http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ihe/article/view/8550/7683

As for economics, well, perhaps Abe doesn't want too many people familiar with that quote Keynes attributed to Lenin: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”

http://nytimes.com/2015/09/14/upshot/gaps-in-alumni-earnings-stand-out-in-release-of-college-data.html

a strong contender for the worst thing i've read all week

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/8/9261531/professor-quitting-job

Critiques of my teaching and debate team coaching, often made through backchannels and delivered to me secondhand or not at all, centered on my easygoing personal style (He doesn't use the title "doctor!" He teaches in T-shirts!), my effusive student evaluations (If he's pleasing them, he must be doing something wrong!), and my relatively calm demeanor (If a young academic doesn't seem stressed beyond capacity, he's not working hard enough!).

yes these were definitely the critiques made

hmm looking at his previous work, I am sure you could top that pretty easily xp

"Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Clickbait" in The Good Men Project Magazine, February 2014

"Masculinity and Competitiveness: Why I Quit Playing Video Games" in The Good Men Project Magazine, February 2014

"Rick Rude: The Loneliness of the Above Average Man" in The Good Men Project Magazine, December 2013

"So What if Barack Obama is Gay?*" in The Good Men Project Magazine, November 2013

what's your biggest weakness?

that's a difficult question, but i suppose that if i had to, i'd say that i can sometimes care TOO much about this company.

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/study-total-depravity

But Veblen did not call Veblen goods “me goods”

heheheh

Mission creep is driven by student demand (the terrible reality that America has no use for non-degreed workers any more)

This isn't necessarily true. Iirc, college enrolment has declined for three consecutive years and isn't predicted to grow again until 2017 at the earliest. The next ten years of growth are predicted to be relatively modest. When the economy is reasonably robust, a lot of people go straight into employment. The big growth years tend to coincide with recessions. For-profit colleges have been the worst hit due to a (necessary) increase in regulatory scrutiny and questions over vfm.

The economic analysis in that article sounds pretty questionable in places.

Also, the word "loan" is conspicuously absent from the article although it's probably the main driver of college cost. Veblen good or no, a 120k "discount" price would appeal to far fewer status chasers if there weren't a virtually bottomless well of credit available with few of the limitations affecting other forms of credit.

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

The biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy. It is compound interest.

In the coming decades, the returns on 401(k) plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a 25-year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did. Oh, and she’ll have to do it on lower wages.

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

I don't understand this. I've recently begun working at a Portuguese callcenter. This is not the best job in the world, it's probably pretty low in the hierarchy of jobs in Europe, wage is lower than any job in Denmark, but it's steady, and I'd never think to spend half my income on rent. This guy has enough experience and network to get a "highline" article on huffpost but he's unable to land a steady job?

Dunno, maybe things are just terrible in the US.

The rent situation here depends very much on where you live. Even the outskirts of popular cities can be expensive.

I'd never think to spend half my income on rent.

congratulations?

Average take-home pay in the UK is something like £1700. Average rent is something like £850-£900. In London that is £2200 and £1600 respectively.

Obvs that includes rent on multi-occupier properties as well but I’d be surprised if anyone other than the fairly wealthy renting in the south of England is living on their own and spending much less than half their income on accommodation.

Twenty years ago I was living on $18K a year but my rent (apartment with a couple of roommates, suburb of a popular city) was just under $300 a month, so $800 a month for the whole place. Just looked on Zillow and apartments of similar size in my old neighborhood are now renting for $2500 and up. So yeah, people who live there are spending half their income on rent unless they've got a lot of income for a young person.