This is the metadata that everyone is so worried about. It's not the actual conversation that's recorded, but the number called, call duration, and locations the cell phone was in for the duration of the call.
That's a lot. It means they can track you everywhere you make a phone call. If I go to my girlfriend's house and make a call there, it means they know who my girlfriend is.
It means that if I'm the (Democratic) governor of a state, and I call up an escort service, the (Republican) federal prosecutor will know about it, and he can decide whether to prosecute me or not, at his sole discretion. He can even agree not to prosecute me if I agree to step down from office, to be replaced by an ineffective successor.
That's what rich people know that the rest of us don't find out until it's too late.
You went to college and learned how to do useful and productive things. George W. Bush went to college, got drunk and smoked pot, coasted on his father's reputation as a U.S. Senator and big donor to his colleges, and made connections. GWB got farther with his connections than you or I did with our productive skills.
No, I'm not saying that they shouldn't go to college. I think that everybody should get as much education as they're capable of.
However, I don't think they should have to pay for college, any more than they pay for high school. Education is a public good. It's valuable for society to have better-educated people. It's so valuable that it's worth paying more taxes to pay for it. Europe is like that, and the US used to be like that. They certainly shouldn't have to go into debt for college.
If you're following that other Slashdot story, on STEM employment, I agree with the conclusion of that IEEE Spectrum article (although I think it applies to all college subjects, not just STEM):
A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone’s STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people’s employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students’ intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
I assume you read the IEEE Spectrum article, the first half of which was about the different definitions of STEM. It's quite common for a field to encompass many disciplines, and each discipline will use different schema (and different jargon), which are difficult to reconcile. I feel your pain.
It's not surprising to see gender studies as STEM. There are a lot of grants to study women in science, whether this is the result of personal choice or discrimination, and what we could (or should) do to increase the number of women in science. I don't have any firm conclusions. I'll go with the evidence.
But if somebody is studying, say, the early grade education of girls in science, and that study uses the same rigorous methods you use anywhere else in social science, then that would reasonably be classified as STEM.
I wonder why we don't have that many women in science.
1. How long does it take you to find a GOOD programmer? 2. How long would it take you to train one in the top third of those you interview to be a GOOD programmer?
If the answer to #1 is greater than the answer to #2, you're doing it wrong.
Which is one of the points that the IEEE Spectrum article made. American companies don't hire people for the long term, give them job security, education benefits, and in-house training, the way they used to do under the Eastman Kodak model (which was adopted by most Fortune 500 companies), until the 1970s.
Big surprise. If you downsize by firing your staff all the time, in a few years you'll turn around and won't be able to find the people you need to do the job.
Re:And thus the obvious is explained in detail...
on
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You can have two principled choices: You can say that (1) borders should be open, and any worker can apply for any job that he wants (2) a country has to defend its own borders, and we can't open it up to unfettered competition from overseas workers, products, pharmaceuticals, etc.
I tend to prefer open borders.
An Irish radiologist wrote about how the EU has anti-discrimination laws, and a French hospital couldn't discriminate against him in hiring him -- even though his French wasn't quite that good. He said that an x-ray has a lot of ambiguity, and when a radiologist gives a report, the report has to reflect that ambiguity. His French wasn't quite good enough to do that. He would give a report, he wouldn't have time to explain it properly, and then the meeting would be over. It took him 6 months for his French to improve enough to give a good radiology report. The hospital couldn't even discriminate against him because his French needed improvement.
If we want to bring in foreign workers, we should bring them in on a free-market, open-borders non-discriminatory basis. And I should be able to go to those same countries and work under the same terms.
But right now I'm tethered to the U.S., other workers can come in and compete with me, and I can't go to their countries to get the opportunities of their employment. (And free universities; I'd like to get that.)
Under the present system of bad compromises, I'd rather have fewer H1-Bs. If the corporations need STEM workers, let them pay taxes to improve the school system (from kindergarden to grad school) and grow their own STEM workers. Let them give good salaries, education benefits and in-house training, and job security.
There will always be winners and losers, not everyone gets a blue ribbon. The only question is how do you want the winner to be determined - free market competition or back room dealmaking?
There's a third choice -- democracy. People can make decisions based on open debate and the democratic process. They can say, "We have to provide every citizen with the best education that they're capable of, whether they can afford to pay for it or not."
In some countries, there are rich people who say, "I've done very well for myself, so I'm willing to give something back to society in taxes." Rather than have a few billionaires make decisions for us, all of us can decide among ourselves what's good for us.
In a free market, Bill Gates and Sergey Brinn own everything, and decide among themselves how to run the country.
Of course, you may believe that America is incapable of being run democratically like that.
Capitalism's not just about financial capital: it's about intellectual (you might have this) and social (many geeks don't have this, although the stereotype's changed).
True. But when you go through 4 years of college, and take 30 classes or so, and meet people socially outside of classes, you meet a lot of people, and you can see what they're good at. You keep in touch with them after you graduate. That's your network.
Need a marketing manager? How about your dope dealer?
Whereas it's practically accepted that just possessing an bachelors degree in Education means that someone is qualified to teach children what they need to know to advance in STEM fields.
I don't know who accepts that. Science magazine (which is read by a lot of science teachers) has articles on science education all the time. It's generally accepted that competent science teachers have to know (1) the science and (2) how to teach.
Conversely, you're not qualified to teach STEM just because you know STEM. People say, "I have a PhD in engineering, I can teach high school science." A lot of them can't.
For example, teachers have to know exactly what kids on each level are capable of understanding. I was surprised to find out that even kids up to middle school can't understand molecules, according to the science teachers who teach them. So you can go on for half an hour about molecules, the kids will try to follow you, but if you ask some non-rote questions, you'll see that they don't understand. Actually, that makes sense. The greatest scientists in the 18th century had a hard time understanding molecules. Can you give an experimental demonstration to prove that molecules exist?
Another difficult task that educators learn, which Science has discussed in several articles, is how to figure out what the kid's misconception is when he doesn't understand something, and how to get him to understand it. You can't just repeat yourself, you have to understand what the kid is thinking, and figure out how to get him to think it out himself.
The best part of that article was the conclusion, which I strongly agree with:
A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone’s STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people’s employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students’ intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
And this was a traditional view, during the time when this country supported education more than we do now (college was free or low cost with no loans, high school teachers had good jobs and respect).
That's a liberal arts education. Everybody should learn science and math, as much as they're capable of. Some people will be surprised to find out that they're good. Everybody should learn history, art, literature, philosophy, languages. When I went to school, even the engineering majors had to take freshman humanities and argue about Socrates, Dostoyevsky, beat poetry and whether there is a God.
If you read the biographies of Nobel laureate scientists, you'll see that some of them (like Eric Kandel) started out in literature and moved into science when they were driven there by curiosity.
Why should you be forced into an irrevocable career choice at 16? The rational strategy would be to learn as much as possible about as many diverse fields as you can, and move in to the one that matches your talents, the job market, and the opportunities that come to you by chance or social connections.
Jason DeParle has been writing about poverty in the U.S. for years and knows far more about it than you or I.
None of the 3 have professional jobs, so if the purpose of education is to improve your financial prospects, their huge investment was a waste. Melissa might or might not get a professional job when she graduates, but the employment market in the U.S. is the worst it's been since the 1929 depression. So your reason for optimism is that she might finally get a good job. Or she might not.
I don't think you can brush off $44,000 (or $61,000) of debt. That's an impossible burden for somebody who's making $8.50 an hour, and it's increasing with interest and fees. It's like being an indentured servant. In return for their efforts and expenses, they're financially worse off, not better off.
If high school advisers want to be honest, they have to tell bright working class kids that if you go to college, work hard, and spend a lot of money, it's more likely than not that you'll wind up in debt, you won't get a degree, and you won't get a professional job either.
It wasn't always like that. In 1970, you could graduate a state university with no debt, get married, and buy a house for a $50,000 mortgage (in today's money). Now you graduate college with that much in education debt, without the house. In 1970, almost everyone who graduated college could get a professional job, such as teaching. Now those jobs are gone.
If you look at the big picture, and the statistics, this is typical, not exceptional. Contrary to myth, there is very little social mobility in the U.S. Compared to other developed countries in the world, we're at the bottom, with the U.K. and Brazil. There's also more inequality in the U.S. People used to come to America for opportunity. Now working-class kids like this would have more opportunity if they could emigrate to a European country. You have to be making at least $100,000 a year before you're better off being an American.
We used to have the same situation in the U.S. City College of New York was free, and the state university systems were almost free. They gave stipends to cover living expenses, like the Europeans do. You had the children of tailors going to school with the children of bankers. The result was the greatest scientific and economic development the world has ever seen. Now the no-taxes-for-us-rich people have destroyed that system.
Relating it back to the original story, and to your point that this is a success -- the system is placing an impossible burden on working-class kids like this. They're supposed to figure out this enormously complicated system, which as it turns out was too complicated for them to figure out. Rich kids and their parents use financial advisers. Part of the problem, as the Science magazine article says, is that one burden of poverty is that it makes it difficult for people to make economic decisions like this. Professionals who work with poor people always observe that their daily life is more difficult. It's a burden just to cash a pay check. It's a burden to buy school supplies. It's a burden to buy groceries.
The American system is in trouble. We have to recognize that and change it, not try to excuse it. Let's do what worked well before.
In a just world, a person who didn't try would not get ahead.
This isn't a just world. George W. Bush was a drunk up to the age of 40 and he still got ahead. Lots of rich people don't try, and still get ahead. Their parents set them up, as GWB's parents did.
Conversely, a lot of poor people do try hard and don't get ahead. That's what that Jason DeParle story described.
I was talking about physicists working for Wall Street, as the parent suggested.
A lot of physicists were working on bullshit investment theories which finally brought down the market and (since the financial industry is so well connected politically) a government bailout using your tax money.
If you ever were thrown down into destitution, you'd have a hard time managing your affairs. Poor people can't just pay their bills, they have 5 bills that are overdue and they have to decide what to do next. That takes a lot of attention.
Well, I am not sure where there study group came from, but there is a tremendous amount of real-world examples to show that just giving money to people does NOT fix poverty. Don't believe me, take a good hard look at every big city in America for the last 40 years. The amount of money given to people in poor environments is staggering, and there is no real numbers to show that we have made a dent on poverty (by dent, I mean helped an appreciable percentage of people out of poverty).
The study comes from Science magazine. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract and if you click on the author affiliations you'll see that they came from Harvard, Princeton, U British Columbia, and U Warwick. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is not a left-wing think tank.
They provided good evidence to support their conclusion that when people are poor, they're under stress, and they're less able to make good decisions.
Other things being equal, giving money to people does fix poverty. The most successful poverty program in the country, in terms of bipartisan approval, was the Earned Income Tax Credit, and it did move a lot of people into significantly less poverty. So did the food stamp program.
Over a time scale of about 50 or 60 years, black people started out in the south in terrible poverty. The federal poverty program by Kennedy and Johnson gave them more income. We don't have the same poverty in the south now that we did in 1950. One dramatic chart is of the reading and math level of black students, which climbed dramatically from 1970 to the latest data, according to the NAEP. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
I know people who worked in Africa with families who were living on the subsistence level. One of the successful things they did was give them cash. They'd give the families $10 or $20 and the first thing they'd do was pay their debts. Next month, they'd buy necessities, like furniture. Next month, they'd start a little business, like selling things on the side of the road.
Most families do try to save. The real-world experience is that for a large number of them, a major unexpected expense will wipe out their savings. One of the most common is a medical expense.
Depends what you mean by "choice". Of course nobody will choose poor if given a magical choice between being rich and being poor. But give them a choice of getting a minimum wage paying job, working long hours, giving up booze, drugs and cigarettes, living responsibly and saving small amounts of money on the side while looking for a course at a community college to improve their skills, studying at night while working during the day, then getting a better paying job and working hard at it. While you are right about mental issues being a major cause of homelessness, there are other issues involved and those include choices that they have made daily throughout their life, such as choosing an easy short term option (getting high) or hard (waking up early and going to a shitty job day after day).
That's a right-wing fantasy used to justify the present state of inequality by claiming that people can get ahead if they really try hard. Psychologists call that the "just universe fallacy." Here's a reporter who actually went out and found the facts (my summary; click on the link for the full story). And the Science magazine report fits right in with this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall By JASON DePARLE Published: December 22, 2012 3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality.” "Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net."
Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. She’s working in her boyfriend’s furniture store for $8.50 an hour.
Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans.
Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist. Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon,
That's true. Another person who said the same thing is Diane Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education in the GHW Bush and the Clinton Administrtion.
Ravitch said that she started out believing in charter schools, high stakes testing and busting unions, but when she looked at the data, she saw that the main factor associated with academic success was family income.
She saw the data and admitted she was wrong. That's the sign of a scientist rather than an ideologue. Or salesman.
Please reread: all of them come from at least upper middle class like in, you know, "went to an exclusive private school" or "he was able to start his first business with a meagre million or two lent by his uncle Matthew that happened to be rich and with contacts".
Like Mike Bloomberg who went to Johns Hopkins.
Or Bill Gates whose father was a multimillionaire lawyer, whose clients were technology companies. Bill Gates is the classic example of the benefits of living in the right (expensive) neighborhood.
Bill Gates' father was a partner at the law firm of Preston, Gates and Ellis, and was already a multi-millionaire. This study codes Bill Gates as growing up with "some wealth."
Michael Bloomberg's father was a real estate agent. I don't know how wealthy his father was, but Michael Bloomberg went to Johns Hopkins, which isn't a cheap school. No 2-year community college for him.
In 1982, 60 percent of the people on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans came from wealthy families, compared with 32 percent in 2011.
That certainly goes against the conventional wisdom and it goes against my understanding from going back and forth between Paul Krugman and the Wall Street Journal. I don't have enough economics to read that paper and tell whether it's solid. Even they agree that income inequality is increasing in America.
Their argument is the "just universe fallacy," that you can get ahead if you're deserving. I just can't check their data.
College saving really should be a family affair. From the moment you are born, your parent or parents should be putting away something regularly. That something over the course of 18 years and coupled with one working themselves when they are of age should amount to a fair chunk of change.
Yes, and once that family has a major illness, or the main earner loses his job for six months or a year, or they lose their cheap housing and have to get more expensive accommodations, that fair chunk of change will be gone.
One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be.
Go back and read TFA. Those scientists found evidence for exactly the opposite. They said that poverty itself makes it difficult for people to manage money, because it puts people under stress.
I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.
Rich people that inherit their money often manage it poorly. There is an old saying: The first generation earns a fortune, the second generation sits on it, the third generations squanders it.
There is a lot of economic data on this. Once somebody gets into the upper classes, it's unusual for them to fall out. I think it was something like 5% of the people in the top quintile fall into the second quintile. It does happen, but it's rare. If your father set you up with a trust fund run by a competent lawyer, and you follow the lawyer's advice, you'll never have to work in your life unless you feel like it.
I believe in the complete legalization of firearms, prostitution, drugs, and gambling. These are clearly things that the right supports, right?
Libertarian wing. Ron Paul Republican.
As John Dean wrote, the Republican Party made a decision in its Southern Strategy to go after the religious right, because (1) they weren't too smart and (2) they would vote for whomever their preachers told them to. The thinking was, their preachers are manipulating these dummies, why shouldn't we? I don't know what happened, but John Dean was there.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the metadata that everyone is so worried about. It's not the actual conversation that's recorded, but the number called, call duration, and locations the cell phone was in for the duration of the call.
That's a lot. It means they can track you everywhere you make a phone call. If I go to my girlfriend's house and make a call there, it means they know who my girlfriend is.
It means that if I'm the (Democratic) governor of a state, and I call up an escort service, the (Republican) federal prosecutor will know about it, and he can decide whether to prosecute me or not, at his sole discretion. He can even agree not to prosecute me if I agree to step down from office, to be replaced by an ineffective successor.
You call yourself a nerd?
If you can't figure out a way to get past the NYT payroll, you're through. Turn in your propeller beanie. And your pocket protector.
No, you blew it.
That's what rich people know that the rest of us don't find out until it's too late.
You went to college and learned how to do useful and productive things. George W. Bush went to college, got drunk and smoked pot, coasted on his father's reputation as a U.S. Senator and big donor to his colleges, and made connections. GWB got farther with his connections than you or I did with our productive skills.
No, I'm not saying that they shouldn't go to college. I think that everybody should get as much education as they're capable of.
However, I don't think they should have to pay for college, any more than they pay for high school. Education is a public good. It's valuable for society to have better-educated people. It's so valuable that it's worth paying more taxes to pay for it. Europe is like that, and the US used to be like that. They certainly shouldn't have to go into debt for college.
If you're following that other Slashdot story, on STEM employment, I agree with the conclusion of that IEEE Spectrum article (although I think it applies to all college subjects, not just STEM):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone’s STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people’s employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students’ intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
I assume you read the IEEE Spectrum article, the first half of which was about the different definitions of STEM. It's quite common for a field to encompass many disciplines, and each discipline will use different schema (and different jargon), which are difficult to reconcile. I feel your pain.
It's not surprising to see gender studies as STEM. There are a lot of grants to study women in science, whether this is the result of personal choice or discrimination, and what we could (or should) do to increase the number of women in science. I don't have any firm conclusions. I'll go with the evidence.
But if somebody is studying, say, the early grade education of girls in science, and that study uses the same rigorous methods you use anywhere else in social science, then that would reasonably be classified as STEM.
I wonder why we don't have that many women in science.
Two questions:
1. How long does it take you to find a GOOD programmer?
2. How long would it take you to train one in the top third of those you interview to be a GOOD programmer?
If the answer to #1 is greater than the answer to #2, you're doing it wrong.
Which is one of the points that the IEEE Spectrum article made. American companies don't hire people for the long term, give them job security, education benefits, and in-house training, the way they used to do under the Eastman Kodak model (which was adopted by most Fortune 500 companies), until the 1970s.
Big surprise. If you downsize by firing your staff all the time, in a few years you'll turn around and won't be able to find the people you need to do the job.
You can have two principled choices: You can say that (1) borders should be open, and any worker can apply for any job that he wants (2) a country has to defend its own borders, and we can't open it up to unfettered competition from overseas workers, products, pharmaceuticals, etc.
I tend to prefer open borders.
An Irish radiologist wrote about how the EU has anti-discrimination laws, and a French hospital couldn't discriminate against him in hiring him -- even though his French wasn't quite that good. He said that an x-ray has a lot of ambiguity, and when a radiologist gives a report, the report has to reflect that ambiguity. His French wasn't quite good enough to do that. He would give a report, he wouldn't have time to explain it properly, and then the meeting would be over. It took him 6 months for his French to improve enough to give a good radiology report. The hospital couldn't even discriminate against him because his French needed improvement.
If we want to bring in foreign workers, we should bring them in on a free-market, open-borders non-discriminatory basis. And I should be able to go to those same countries and work under the same terms.
But right now I'm tethered to the U.S., other workers can come in and compete with me, and I can't go to their countries to get the opportunities of their employment. (And free universities; I'd like to get that.)
Under the present system of bad compromises, I'd rather have fewer H1-Bs. If the corporations need STEM workers, let them pay taxes to improve the school system (from kindergarden to grad school) and grow their own STEM workers. Let them give good salaries, education benefits and in-house training, and job security.
There will always be winners and losers, not everyone gets a blue ribbon. The only question is how do you want the winner to be determined - free market competition or back room dealmaking?
There's a third choice -- democracy. People can make decisions based on open debate and the democratic process. They can say, "We have to provide every citizen with the best education that they're capable of, whether they can afford to pay for it or not."
In some countries, there are rich people who say, "I've done very well for myself, so I'm willing to give something back to society in taxes." Rather than have a few billionaires make decisions for us, all of us can decide among ourselves what's good for us.
In a free market, Bill Gates and Sergey Brinn own everything, and decide among themselves how to run the country.
Of course, you may believe that America is incapable of being run democratically like that.
Over 50% of jobs are got through networking.
Capitalism's not just about financial capital: it's about intellectual (you might have this) and social (many geeks don't have this, although the stereotype's changed).
True. But when you go through 4 years of college, and take 30 classes or so, and meet people socially outside of classes, you meet a lot of people, and you can see what they're good at. You keep in touch with them after you graduate. That's your network.
Need a marketing manager? How about your dope dealer?
Whereas it's practically accepted that just possessing an bachelors degree in Education means that someone is qualified to teach children what they need to know to advance in STEM fields.
I don't know who accepts that. Science magazine (which is read by a lot of science teachers) has articles on science education all the time. It's generally accepted that competent science teachers have to know (1) the science and (2) how to teach.
Conversely, you're not qualified to teach STEM just because you know STEM. People say, "I have a PhD in engineering, I can teach high school science." A lot of them can't.
For example, teachers have to know exactly what kids on each level are capable of understanding. I was surprised to find out that even kids up to middle school can't understand molecules, according to the science teachers who teach them. So you can go on for half an hour about molecules, the kids will try to follow you, but if you ask some non-rote questions, you'll see that they don't understand. Actually, that makes sense. The greatest scientists in the 18th century had a hard time understanding molecules. Can you give an experimental demonstration to prove that molecules exist?
Another difficult task that educators learn, which Science has discussed in several articles, is how to figure out what the kid's misconception is when he doesn't understand something, and how to get him to understand it. You can't just repeat yourself, you have to understand what the kid is thinking, and figure out how to get him to think it out himself.
The best part of that article was the conclusion, which I strongly agree with:
A broader view, I and many others would argue, is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, there is indeed a shortage—a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage, you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, and learn them well, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job. Improving everyone’s STEM skills would clearly be good for the workforce and for people’s employment prospects, for public policy debates, and for everyday tasks like balancing checkbooks and calculating risks. And, of course, when science, math, and engineering are taught well, they engage students’ intellectual curiosity about the world and how it works.
Many children born today are likely to live to be 100 and to have not just one distinct career but two or three by the time they retire at 80. Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.
And this was a traditional view, during the time when this country supported education more than we do now (college was free or low cost with no loans, high school teachers had good jobs and respect).
That's a liberal arts education. Everybody should learn science and math, as much as they're capable of. Some people will be surprised to find out that they're good. Everybody should learn history, art, literature, philosophy, languages. When I went to school, even the engineering majors had to take freshman humanities and argue about Socrates, Dostoyevsky, beat poetry and whether there is a God.
If you read the biographies of Nobel laureate scientists, you'll see that some of them (like Eric Kandel) started out in literature and moved into science when they were driven there by curiosity.
Why should you be forced into an irrevocable career choice at 16? The rational strategy would be to learn as much as possible about as many diverse fields as you can, and move in to the one that matches your talents, the job market, and the opportunities that come to you by chance or social connections.
Jason DeParle has been writing about poverty in the U.S. for years and knows far more about it than you or I.
None of the 3 have professional jobs, so if the purpose of education is to improve your financial prospects, their huge investment was a waste. Melissa might or might not get a professional job when she graduates, but the employment market in the U.S. is the worst it's been since the 1929 depression. So your reason for optimism is that she might finally get a good job. Or she might not.
I don't think you can brush off $44,000 (or $61,000) of debt. That's an impossible burden for somebody who's making $8.50 an hour, and it's increasing with interest and fees. It's like being an indentured servant. In return for their efforts and expenses, they're financially worse off, not better off.
If high school advisers want to be honest, they have to tell bright working class kids that if you go to college, work hard, and spend a lot of money, it's more likely than not that you'll wind up in debt, you won't get a degree, and you won't get a professional job either.
It wasn't always like that. In 1970, you could graduate a state university with no debt, get married, and buy a house for a $50,000 mortgage (in today's money). Now you graduate college with that much in education debt, without the house. In 1970, almost everyone who graduated college could get a professional job, such as teaching. Now those jobs are gone.
If you look at the big picture, and the statistics, this is typical, not exceptional. Contrary to myth, there is very little social mobility in the U.S. Compared to other developed countries in the world, we're at the bottom, with the U.K. and Brazil. There's also more inequality in the U.S. People used to come to America for opportunity. Now working-class kids like this would have more opportunity if they could emigrate to a European country. You have to be making at least $100,000 a year before you're better off being an American.
In most European countries, college tuition is free, or almost free. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/world/europe/Germany-Backtracks-on-Tuition.html Germany Backtracks on Tuition, By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE, New York Times, August 25, 2013
We used to have the same situation in the U.S. City College of New York was free, and the state university systems were almost free. They gave stipends to cover living expenses, like the Europeans do. You had the children of tailors going to school with the children of bankers. The result was the greatest scientific and economic development the world has ever seen. Now the no-taxes-for-us-rich people have destroyed that system.
Relating it back to the original story, and to your point that this is a success -- the system is placing an impossible burden on working-class kids like this. They're supposed to figure out this enormously complicated system, which as it turns out was too complicated for them to figure out. Rich kids and their parents use financial advisers. Part of the problem, as the Science magazine article says, is that one burden of poverty is that it makes it difficult for people to make economic decisions like this. Professionals who work with poor people always observe that their daily life is more difficult. It's a burden just to cash a pay check. It's a burden to buy school supplies. It's a burden to buy groceries.
The American system is in trouble. We have to recognize that and change it, not try to excuse it. Let's do what worked well before.
In a just world, a person who didn't try would not get ahead.
This isn't a just world. George W. Bush was a drunk up to the age of 40 and he still got ahead. Lots of rich people don't try, and still get ahead. Their parents set them up, as GWB's parents did.
Conversely, a lot of poor people do try hard and don't get ahead. That's what that Jason DeParle story described.
I was talking about physicists working for Wall Street, as the parent suggested.
A lot of physicists were working on bullshit investment theories which finally brought down the market and (since the financial industry is so well connected politically) a government bailout using your tax money.
That is exactly the opposite of what the scientific research, in TFA, found. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract
If you ever were thrown down into destitution, you'd have a hard time managing your affairs. Poor people can't just pay their bills, they have 5 bills that are overdue and they have to decide what to do next. That takes a lot of attention.
Well, I am not sure where there study group came from, but there is a tremendous amount of real-world examples to show that just giving money to people does NOT fix poverty. Don't believe me, take a good hard look at every big city in America for the last 40 years. The amount of money given to people in poor environments is staggering, and there is no real numbers to show that we have made a dent on poverty (by dent, I mean helped an appreciable percentage of people out of poverty).
The study comes from Science magazine. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract and if you click on the author affiliations you'll see that they came from Harvard, Princeton, U British Columbia, and U Warwick. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is not a left-wing think tank.
They provided good evidence to support their conclusion that when people are poor, they're under stress, and they're less able to make good decisions.
Other things being equal, giving money to people does fix poverty. The most successful poverty program in the country, in terms of bipartisan approval, was the Earned Income Tax Credit, and it did move a lot of people into significantly less poverty. So did the food stamp program.
Over a time scale of about 50 or 60 years, black people started out in the south in terrible poverty. The federal poverty program by Kennedy and Johnson gave them more income. We don't have the same poverty in the south now that we did in 1950. One dramatic chart is of the reading and math level of black students, which climbed dramatically from 1970 to the latest data, according to the NAEP. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
I know people who worked in Africa with families who were living on the subsistence level. One of the successful things they did was give them cash. They'd give the families $10 or $20 and the first thing they'd do was pay their debts. Next month, they'd buy necessities, like furniture. Next month, they'd start a little business, like selling things on the side of the road.
Most families do try to save. The real-world experience is that for a large number of them, a major unexpected expense will wipe out their savings. One of the most common is a medical expense.
That's what Elizabeth Warren studied.
Depends what you mean by "choice". Of course nobody will choose poor if given a magical choice between being rich and being poor. But give them a choice of getting a minimum wage paying job, working long hours, giving up booze, drugs and cigarettes, living responsibly and saving small amounts of money on the side while looking for a course at a community college to improve their skills, studying at night while working during the day, then getting a better paying job and working hard at it. While you are right about mental issues being a major cause of homelessness, there are other issues involved and those include choices that they have made daily throughout their life, such as choosing an easy short term option (getting high) or hard (waking up early and going to a shitty job day after day).
That's a right-wing fantasy used to justify the present state of inequality by claiming that people can get ahead if they really try hard. Psychologists call that the "just universe fallacy." Here's a reporter who actually went out and found the facts (my summary; click on the link for the full story). And the Science magazine report fits right in with this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html
For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
By JASON DePARLE
Published: December 22, 2012
3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality.”
"Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net."
Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. She’s working in her boyfriend’s furniture store for $8.50 an hour.
Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans.
Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist.
Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon,
That's true. Another person who said the same thing is Diane Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education in the GHW Bush and the Clinton Administrtion.
Ravitch said that she started out believing in charter schools, high stakes testing and busting unions, but when she looked at the data, she saw that the main factor associated with academic success was family income.
She saw the data and admitted she was wrong. That's the sign of a scientist rather than an ideologue. Or salesman.
Please reread: all of them come from at least upper middle class like in, you know, "went to an exclusive private school" or "he was able to start his first business with a meagre million or two lent by his uncle Matthew that happened to be rich and with contacts".
Like Mike Bloomberg who went to Johns Hopkins.
Or Bill Gates whose father was a multimillionaire lawyer, whose clients were technology companies. Bill Gates is the classic example of the benefits of living in the right (expensive) neighborhood.
Bill Gates' father was a partner at the law firm of Preston, Gates and Ellis, and was already a multi-millionaire. This study codes Bill Gates as growing up with "some wealth."
Michael Bloomberg's father was a real estate agent. I don't know how wealthy his father was, but Michael Bloomberg went to Johns Hopkins, which isn't a cheap school. No 2-year community college for him.
In 1982, 60 percent of the people on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans came from wealthy families, compared with 32 percent in 2011.
That certainly goes against the conventional wisdom and it goes against my understanding from going back and forth between Paul Krugman and the Wall Street Journal. I don't have enough economics to read that paper and tell whether it's solid. Even they agree that income inequality is increasing in America.
Their argument is the "just universe fallacy," that you can get ahead if you're deserving. I just can't check their data.
College saving really should be a family affair. From the moment you are born, your parent or parents should be putting away something regularly. That something over the course of 18 years and coupled with one working themselves when they are of age should amount to a fair chunk of change.
Yes, and once that family has a major illness, or the main earner loses his job for six months or a year, or they lose their cheap housing and have to get more expensive accommodations, that fair chunk of change will be gone.
One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be.
Go back and read TFA. Those scientists found evidence for exactly the opposite. They said that poverty itself makes it difficult for people to manage money, because it puts people under stress.
I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.
Rich people that inherit their money often manage it poorly. There is an old saying: The first generation earns a fortune, the second generation sits on it, the third generations squanders it.
There is a lot of economic data on this. Once somebody gets into the upper classes, it's unusual for them to fall out. I think it was something like 5% of the people in the top quintile fall into the second quintile. It does happen, but it's rare. If your father set you up with a trust fund run by a competent lawyer, and you follow the lawyer's advice, you'll never have to work in your life unless you feel like it.
I believe in the complete legalization of firearms, prostitution, drugs, and gambling. These are clearly things that the right supports, right?
Libertarian wing. Ron Paul Republican.
As John Dean wrote, the Republican Party made a decision in its Southern Strategy to go after the religious right, because (1) they weren't too smart and (2) they would vote for whomever their preachers told them to. The thinking was, their preachers are manipulating these dummies, why shouldn't we? I don't know what happened, but John Dean was there.