From the AP: ACT test scores drop to lowest in 30 years in pandemic slide
PHOENIX (AP) — Scores on the ACT college admissions test by this year’s high school graduates hit their lowest point in more than 30 years — the latest evidence of the enormity of learning disruption during the pandemic.
The class of 2022′s average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of 36, marking the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20. What’s more, an increasing number of high school students failed to meet any of the subject-area benchmarks set by the ACT — showing a decline in preparedness for college-level coursework.
The test scores, made public in a report Wednesday, show 42% of ACT-tested graduates in the class of 2022 met none of the subject benchmarks in English, reading, science and math, which are indicators of how well students are expected to perform in corresponding college courses.
Raw data: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=897
Headed down for the last 4 years although last year was clearly worse.
Having gotten Covid last week, I can understand the concern (I’m better but I had two days where I didn’t have the energy to do anything).Report
It’s a good thing we now know that the ACT is racist and only a test of test-taking skill.
Concerningly, the decline in average score is happening in parallel with a decline in the share of students taking the test. It’s also happening in every race except Asians, so it’s not just a matter of demographics shifting.
The NCES doesn’t seem to have as much history for the SAT, but here’s a table for 2017 to 2020. Test scores decreased only 9 points (less than 0.05 standard deviations), while percentage taking the test increased from 48% to 60%
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_226.40.asp
It looks like the SAT is taking some market share back from the ACT, though it’s not clear how much market will be left after the CRT/DEI cultists have their wicked, ignorant way with it.
Anyway, with the large shifts in market share, it’s hard to say for sure what’s going on here. Are we seeing a major decline in preparedness, or just some artifacts of selection bias?Report
That claim seems to come from the ACT reporting that certain groups aren’t as well prepared for college as other groups. So it’s reporting things we don’t want to hear. Things that get in the way of the social engineering we want to do.Report
I am a college prof.
We are seeing a wave of underprepared students/students lacking necessary background. But more: there are more students struggling emotionally than I’ve seen before. I also see students who just have no persistence left: if they don’t get a question in lab on the first try, they give up. they don’t keep trying. I don’t know if this is a sense of futility about the world, not having been challenged enough in 2 years of virtual high school, or what.
I admit I’m struggling too. There have been an increasing number of days I fantasize about handing in my resignation and just being free…..except I need an income, and I need the employer-provided health insurance. I can retire in seven years, and even that seems like an incredibly long time. I admit my level of wanting to persist at things when I fail the first time is at its lowest level I’ve ever noticed. We’re all worn out.
I realize my experience (and my colleagues’, they say the same things) is anecdotal, but…..higher ed is not doing well right now.Report
“There have been an increasing number of days I fantasize about handing in my resignation and just being free…..except I need an income, and I need the employer-provided health insurance” How much of this is that you’re “just getting old” and how much is not? Because this is exactly the same as I have felt since I hit my 50s.Report
I don’t know, but I will say the added work (we are underfunded, so faculty cover some tasks that admin would cover at other schools, and we usually teach overloads) has added up in the past five years.
But also, the pandemic and related stuff took an enormous bite out of my mental health and I’ve still not gotten it back. I’m slower and dumber now than I was before it. And I have a harder time regulating my emotions internally – I haven’t cried in front of a class or raged at a student outwardly, but I can feel at times like I would *like* to.Report
My family is struggling with some mental health issues, in each case they predate the pandemic, but there’s a good chance the pandemic made things worse.Report
Last Sunday was the gospel reading of the ten lepers. We spent 2 years like that as a society, isolating everyone and all shouting “potentially unclean”. It’d be hard to think up a more subtly-undermining psychological experiment. This is going to ripple for years.Report
well, I also lost my dad (to whom I was close) about six months before the pandemic started, and had a minor health scare (probably tied to stress over grief) in January 2020, so I wasn’t doing so hot going into the pandemic myself.Report
oh hey Henrietta is back! I got computers changed over and maybe I was using the ‘wrong” e-mail to comment on hereReport
WordPress and Gravatar are fussy that way.Report
I’m getting divorced. Thing is I don’t think it’s related to the pandemic by anything other than time.Report
I can attest from experience that being dissatisfied with your job and counting backwards to retirement feed off each other. Unless you’re counting down the last two weeks.Report
“We are seeing a wave of underprepared students/students lacking necessary background. But more: there are more students struggling emotionally than I’ve seen before. I also see students who just have no persistence left: if they don’t get a question in lab on the first try, they give up. they don’t keep trying. I don’t know if this is a sense of futility about the world, not having been challenged enough in 2 years of virtual high school, or what.”
I think this trend precedes the pandemic and is larger than most realize. Modern parenting — especially among the middle and upper-classes — has increasingly shifted towards parents trying to shelter their children from any adversity. I kid you not, my girlfriend — a Kindergarten teacher at a Bronx private school — received a lengthy email from a parent yesterday because his child only received one sticker on his sticker chart and they were essentially trying to negotiate their way into a second. For reals. That happened. And it’s not an anomaly. Even up through high school, parents are offering hand-over-hand support to their children with daily homework assignments, ensuring they’re correct but not actually allowing the child to develop basic independent work skills. It’s really widespread and happens in ways large and small, which I think is why you’re seeing what you’re seeing at the college level.Report
I’m about to harp on one of my pet theories but I believe the culture that causes this level of neurotic behavior with children and schooling is all a downstream result of our combination faux meritocracy and failure to modernize our creaking welfare state infrastructure. The reality is that our system leaves a very long way to fall, especially if you’re of the upwardly mobile, say, top 80-98% that has money but not necessarily real wealth or connections. You’ve made it, but you also know it’s precarious, and you’re an amoral market adjustment away from very different outcomes. This is obviously a great overstatement of the actual economic risks, and data shows class is way more resilient than we like to admit, but it’s the culture of the economy we’ve created. And if you think that any f-up or series of setbacks or just plain bad luck of life might end with your kid living hand to mouth in a dead end lower level service job on and off Medicaid then why not fight for the second sticker in Kindergarten? Why not be insufferable over a few GPA points? Everyone wants the best for their kids and when the stakes are so high why take chances?
Now obviously this leads to all kinds of insane behavior and there are a lot of really high strung people out there who need to just chill a little bit and seriously get some perspective. But it isn’t totally irrational and I think the larger scale damage it causes to our culture and to the development of children is real. Part of having a good meritocracy I think is softening the blows of the inevitable failures resulting in the system. That’s much more of a structural issue I think than a personal issue, or at least it’s a structure that exacerbates tendencies that might otherwise be better controlled.Report
Speaking as a parent, the solution is to make sure your kids have employable skills.
I’ve been fired more than once over the years. I was pseudo-fired about two years ago (told I needed to find a different role inside the company), thus the relocation.Report
Sure, but you know as well as I do ’employable skills’ is not some static thing. It’s a moving target and large scale changes in the economy outside of any one person’s control can make yesterday’s employable skill into today’s joke. Happens all the time and in a globalized economy it will happen more and more and faster and faster. Combine that with the fact that in a lot of big metro areas you now need a degree to pour coffee and answer telephones and this is what you get.Report
If “employable skills” is not static, the meta-set of “employable skils” is.
From the little things like “show up on time” and “don’t smell like marijuana” to the medium things like “be able to be left alone for an hour and get somewhere around 50 minutes’ worth of work done” to the *HUGE* things like “be able to train yourself”, those things apply pretty well from Subway to Systems Administration.
When it comes to the ACT, that doesn’t really communicate a whole lot about being able to show up on time, marijuana, or doing well even when not directly managed… but it is a somewhat decent indicator of “be able to train yourself”. To a “p greater than .05” standard, anyway.Report
Of course, and that’s what I meant by saying class is more resilient than we like to believe. There’s a such thing as cultural capital or just ability to adhere to certain norms and expectations. Literally showing up and not making an obvious ass of yourself can still go a long way. The mere fact that someone is taking the ACT is indicative of having a lot of those things, regardless of whether you got the 2nd sticker in Kindergarten or were just mostly on the honor roll instead of being valedictorian.Report
Bad parenting predates everything.
The good news is we’re probably getting better. GDP is going up, magic thinking is treading down, employment is solid, and focusing on kids’ success is a good thing.Report
And the mainstream media seem to be doing their best to talk us into a recession despite that.Report
When you say “into” a recession, are you taking into account that we’ve just had two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP?Report
yeah, there are even a lot of college majors that are less “employable” than 10 or 15 years ago.
Conversely: we’re having a hard time finding someone as a field-trained botanist, because for years universities said “there’s no money or jobs in organismal biology, become a cell biologist instead” so now I – nearing the end of my career- am having to pick up a course or two that the outgoing retiring guy used to teach, when we could not find a replacement on Search 1.
Search 2 is not looking good either 🙁
There’s GOTTA be a happy medium somewhere between “Follow your bliss” (meaning: some people wind up with training that’s hard to find a job in, or a job that pays a living wage) and “Learn to code” (do something you hate and eventually become part of an oversupply of some fields where others you can’t FIND a person with the training)Report
The vast majority of us sell our labor on a market, and markets inherently change over time. To me that reality is something our policies need to account for.
My personal experience with this is leaving a dull federal job to go to law school. Everyone said it was the smartest and most practical thing ever, and in 2007 when I started it probably was. By the time I graduated in 2010 there were still no jobs due to the financial crisis, my quality of life and economic security took a massive hit, and it took me years to navigate my way out of it. Thankfully through a lot of work, persistence, and, frankly, luck, it ended up working out for me but I know lots of people for whom that isn’t the case.
Being in healthcare tech I’ve come to learn there was a similar situation with pharmacists. For awhile there was a shortage, now there’s a glut, and you’ve got a bunch of credentialed people who spent the money on what I’m sure they were advised was a safe bet but are unable to get work in their field.
Now obviously, we all know intuitively some things are more practical than others but I tend to roll my eyes at this idea that anything is safe. The STEM shortage will pass, the music will stop, and there will be a bunch of people who didn’t get chairs. And that’s not necessarily wrong, there just needs to be a path for people in that kind of situation. We also have to be mindful that it probably isn’t realistic to expect everyone to be able to re-invent themselves multiple times through their career and that lots and lots of work can probably done cheaper by people in the developing world. I sometimes suspect that cultural habit is the only reason a lot of white collar work still exists in this country.
So to me the questions are really about how we’re going to modify our education system to account for this and how we’re going to update our social benefits structure so it’s less of a problem when it does. It’s a changing world and we need to adapt.Report
One major piece of this IMO is figuring out how to teach/encourage people to be more resilient and adaptive. We’re subtly setting expectations that it’s abnormal or unfair to face this sort of difficulty, but change and unpredictability are inherent parts of life.
I recall reading about a study that was done after the breakup of AT&T, when a large number of people lost their jobs. The researchers surveyed a number of these people and tracked them over time, and the trait they found was the most predictive of good outcomes wasn’t skills or intelligence or savings, it was people’s attitude about change. Those who expected things not to stay the same and who had a mindset of approaching life changes as opportunities rather than calamities did better emotionally and also with their subsequent career paths.
Of course, who knows if this study would replicate or stand up to scrutiny — but it makes intuitive sense.Report
I don’t disagree about teaching personal resilience but I think it’s a bit of a separate issue.
We should definitely want people up to be able to adapt but that’s something that needs to be front end invested in on the educational and economic policy side.Report
Well, i guess I’m a little skeptical about the ability of our system to adapt — especially the educational system. It’s already only tenuously connected to real-world needs, and the ask is vague — how can you simultaneously create the specialists you think you need and also teach them to be flexible in case things don’t work out 5 or 10 years down the road? We already have retraining programs and bootcamps and such, and they only get you so far.
One of the roles I play at my job is that of software designer, and it’s a frequent request/demand that we need to make our products flexible enough to handle whatever business or regulatory changes might come along. But (as I’m always quick to point out, usually in vain) the more flexible you make your application, the less good it is at any particular thing; and/or it becomes a nightmare to maintain all the different switches and flags and custom features that provide the flexibility. This seems like a rather similar ask in a different domain.Report
Nothing is perfect but I don’t think any of my ideas on how to improve things are particularly radical. A few basics are:
-Benefits need to become fully portable, participation mandatory, and not connected to employment.
-K-12 education needs to change from a one-sized fits all approach to a true, multi tiered tracking system.
-revamp of the student loan system and more offramps for bad debt.
-maybe add in embrace the YIMBY even though that is a slightly different subject.
The idea should be to try to get people out more prepared for work they are suited to and lower the cost on individuals of bad decisions or unforeseen economic changes so adaptation is easier. That’s not going to happen under 20th century models.Report
OK, these are more general improvements — I thought you were going for something more like “how do we educate (e.g.) lawyers in a way that makes it easier for them to switch to some other career down the road”.Report
Yea, I mean I would never present any of my thoughts on this as being specifically about lawyers even though my experience as a lawyer graduating at a certain moment has informed them. You might as well ask people to sympathize with a nest of vipers. But I do think we need to approach the problem in a less moralistic and more technocratic way.Report
Not this generation.
We’ve hit the point where it takes 6 software engineers to make a vacuum cleaner. With coding sucking up so many people, the other STEM fields are also undersupplied.
A lot of people CAN’T “learn to code”. They lack the mindset, the intelligence, or the temperament. That wouldn’t be a serious problem however society’s need for coders is going up, not down.
World wide there are currently bout 40 million technical jobs that are unfilled because of a lack of skilled talent. The US Labor Department thinks that will increase to 85 million by 2030.
https://codesubmit.io/blog/shortage-of-developers/Report
Not to overgeneralize, but I think that there are a lot of kinds of intelligence that overlap a lot.
Like, if someone cannot learn to code, I don’t know how great they’ll be at biochemistry.Report
Intelligence is an issue… but so is “wanting to deal with things and not people”, and “constantly thinking logically and solving logic problems all day every day”.
Most of the mechanical engineers I’ve met like to work with their hands and do physical things. “Learn to code” includes being willing to code for a living.Report
Maybe. But maybe not. Anyone who doesn’t work with their hands (keyboards don’t count) could be outsourced anytime policy changes to allow for it.Report
Boy howdy was this true back in 2004!
I’m not sure it’s true today.
Maybe the ‘rona still has some aces hidden up its sleeve but I’m not certain what lessons remain to be learned from WFH.
I think that it’s far more likely that we’ll see people moving to flyover and doing WFH than seeing companies tap into third-world countries.
There were too many unintended consequences from the last outsourcing megatrend.Report
I dunno. Since I went into the tech side of healthcare every company I’ve been at has had offshore dev, QA, and increasingly operational resources. Lots in India, Philippines, and Taiwan and a few in eastern Europe.
Maybe the appetite has changed due to the politics. But I think it’s naive to believe it couldn’t happen.Report
It is absolutely possible to get offshored at any time. Similarly the company itself can go under, or you can get painted into a office politics mess and get fired.
How big of a problem is this if it happens?
If you’re turning a screw on the line, then it’s a big problem. Your fall back is probably retail.
If you’re coding, then there are over a million unfilled software jobs in the US right now. You may need to move. You may need to change tools. However big picture you’ll probably be fine.Report
What *I* saw happen involved a couple of dynamics:
1. An *EXCEPTIONALLY* strong dollar. At its peak, you could get a Canadian dollar for 59 cents American. This was really useful for paying off Maribou’s (meager) student loans. Dollar was about this strong in Singapore, India, etc.
2. At the start of the 90’s, there was a *HUGE* scarcity premium dumped on people who could do HTML or, god help you, knew C++. I had friends who were making six figures! When the dollar was *THAT* strong!
3. There were a *LOT* of tasks that were overdone. Like, you didn’t *NEED* perfection or even close to perfection for a lot of tasks. “Good enough” had a threshold a *LOT* lower.
All of these things conspired to make Singapore exceptionally tempting. Use that strong dollar and pay 4 people for less than one person in the states.
Then we started dealing with stuff like people jumping from company to company for a raise. “WHAT? THEY CAN’T DO THAT!” and we started hearing rumors of really abusive contracts over there. I’m guessing the contracts weren’t that enforceable because we constantly dealt with the problem of “the old man” being a guy who was there for 4-5 months.
But that was fine because five nines is for jerks. Four nines should be enough nines for anybody.
After 4-5 years of this, I *FINALLY* got outsourced to Singapore for the last time right around the time that the jobs started sheepishly coming back when people started wondering if four and a half nines might be a good compromise.
Maybe there’s an untapped pool of really good (or really good enough) workers out there in the underdeveloped world. The dollar is strengthening up again…Report
When I talk to High School students about future careers, I tell them that the need for SW is going up, not down, and that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future.
If they have the mindset to code and could learn to enjoy it, then it’s a great field. If they don’t then life is too short to spend 30 years doing something you dislike.Report
Employable skills raises a bunch of questions though. There was a time when law school was considered a perpetually practical degree until it wasn’t. Now computer programming seems to be the new law school and will eventually produce a glut. Brass-ring consulting and I-banking is more about where you went to school than what you studied.
Engineering as an employable skill depends on the field of specialty to my understanding.Report
In the last two years I’ve re-tooled myself yet again. I was doing embedded, now I’m more of a build engineer guy.
Current job will last maybe about six more months. Then I’ll have to re-tool again.
Knowing how to learn, pick up new skills, and research problems is the skill that doesn’t get old.Report
These aren’t ordinary “employable skills”. You’re talking about 8 years of schooling, retire onto a yacht at 45, kind of skills. Like below, where you said there are only a few metropolitan areas where you can earn decent to great income. I think your scale is way off.
There never were a lot of jobs that let you buy a vacation home. Hunting cabin, maybe.Report
We’re wandering back towards “$200,000/year isn’t *THAT* much”.Report
I’m more interested in the ‘why is this happening’ question than the ‘are we talking about a very privileged cohort question.’ The answer to the second seems obvious and resounding for all of the reasons already discussed. The answer to the first not so much.
I mean, maybe the people whose kids go to the hoity toity school Kazzy’s girlfriend works at are all just bad, deranged people and that’s the end of the story. God knows I can usually pick out people like this from 50 yards at my son’s private school, and I am not one to ever discount personal agency. A-holes are going to be a-holes. However I really do think there’s more going on. Something is unglued.Report
Please understand: I am not on Team Good.
So “privilege” is a word that I interpret as potentially meaning “social/cultural capital” and, therefore, something that I think we should have a lot more of.
So when I think about the kids who are “very privileged”, I don’t know how the speaker is necessarily using the word. Is it appropriate to think “kids who get sorted into the Gold Reading Group” and not “kids whose parents bribed somebody who agreed to sort them undeservedly into the Gold Reading Group”?
You never know! “Privilege” gets used in both cases!Report
I’m interested in why it’s happening too. I’ve been pretty impressed by the comments here. I think it’s made people drop their political slogans and describe their lives. I had to push back against Saul’s parameters though because I don’t think they help.
And so far, we’re ignoring the fact that a single mistake in chem lab, the basketball court, or the bar scene can get posted and all your potential friends can laugh at you forever. That’s got to be doing psychological damage in a way we can’t measure.Report
According to the BLS, mean and median wages for lawyers are still a bit higher than for software developers. Not by enough to make an extra three years of school and law school tuition pay off, but it’s still a solid upper-middle-class job.Report
The problem isn’t law school, the problem is the unemployment rate for lawyers is a lot higher than for software.Report
Computer science majors actually have relatively high unemployment.
Keep in mind that the percentage of CS graduates not employed in a related field is likely considerably higher than that; this is just the people who are completely unemployed.
I suspect that the issue is that, due to a combination of cheating and lax standards, colleges are handing out too many CS degrees to people who can’t program their way out of a paper bag.
I wonder how employers in unrelated fields look at CS majors. Is it seen as a black mark if you have a CS degree and are applying for unrelated jobs that pay much less than software development?Report
That link is to recent grads and pretty much everyone on the list has very low levels of unemployment.
Probably the most useful column is “under-employment”, where CS (like the other engineers) has a rate of something like 20%.
For perspective, Nursing is 12% with an Unemployment rate of 1.8%. Nursing is crazy in demand and having a degree by definition means you can do the job.
Whatever is creating those numbers, it’s not a lack of jobs available.
That, that exactly.Report
When I think about it, in college I had a friend who majored in CS and who didn’t want to code for a living. He wanted to use the degree to… something (go into management?). I’ve forgotten his reasoning and he’s dead. Nice guy but made bad choices.
We have people who don’t want a job in their field and never did.Report
I see it from a different angle: this generation of parents (of which I’m a member), WE (collectively) lack a certain emotional resiliency. We are upset when we see our children struggle and we don’t know how to handle that upset. The frequency with which I hear parents start with, “I just can’t stand to see my child fail/so upset/struggle/etc…” with the operative word being the first one in that sentence: *I*. The parents aren’t actually doing what they think is best for their child… they may couch it as such… but ultimately they are acting in self-serving ways because they themselves are pretty fragile emotionally.
“Everyone wants the best for their kids and when the stakes are so high why take chances?”
As FillyJonk has pointed out, what these parents are doing is leaving their kids worse off for the future… not better. And even if you show this to people, most of them are not going to change their ways because ultimately they’re not doing it for their children but for themselves.Report
I agree that the end result is bad, hence why I said I think the damage is real. And I also agree that some people are just overly fragile and there’s an unfortunate tendency in some corners of the culture to indulge rather than require them to adjust, plus of course there are always people who are wildly over protective to the point of damaging their childrens’ development.
However I’m also saying that the experience of 2008 followed by over a decade of austerity politics plus a bunch of other aspects of a post industrial economy that have been simmering for 30 odd years are playing a big but largely ignored role in this and related cultural problems.Report
I don’t think our theories are mutually exclusive. They’re more likely informed by our respective vantage points. I’ve been watching parents day-in and day-out for almost two decades now. And I’m woefully ignorant on things like economic trends and the like. So I’m pretty sure there is a degree of both-and and the exact mix probably varies person to person.Report
I don’t know about this. We may not be in a post-scarcity economy yet, but we’re basically post-deprivation. Cars are more expensive and there was that whole toilet paper thing a few years back, but nearly everyone has the opportunity to provide the necessities through work, and those who don’t (in the developed world, at least) have their necessities covered for free.
Now, there are other things than necessities, and there may even be things that are more necessary. And a culture that has everything and is worried that it doesn’t can be as unstable as one that doesn’t have what it needs. But those are cultural problems unrelated to economics.Report
Maybe I’m using the incorrect terms and economics is the wrong way to talk about this. But I do think it matters that it is no longer possible to say ‘well even if junior isn’t college material he can always get an ok job down at the plant with good benefits and enough income for a middle class life.’ Even if people don’t necessarily think about their helicoptering and safetyism in those exact terms I think it is an operative assumption that in turn is a driver of that behavior. Simply speaking, from their perspective, there is no fall back plan.
Now if there actually still was an ok job down at the plant, I’d feel a whole lot better about totally chalking it up to a combination of neuroticism and first world problems. Which isn’t to say that isn’t also a contributing factor. But because there isn’t an ok job down at the plant, I don’t, and it further prevents me from totally dismissing the crazy parenting arms race as irrational. In a way it is rational, but just because it’s rational doesn’t mean it’s good.Report
My thing is, I’ve worked at the plant, and my knees are still shot. I’ve also worked behind a counter and at a desk, and I’ve been able to afford centuries-old manuscripts and every song ever recorded (because they’re all free). That’s the source of my resistance to your comment. I don’t know what class means anymore. (Cue Jaybird and his chart.)Report
I think perceptions of this are going to depend a lot on where people were in 2008 and the years immediately following. Which to reiterate, doesn’t mean that’s all that’s going on here, or even that their perceptions are completely accurate. They aren’t.
From a relative perspective all of us in the West are living lives of unimaginable luxury compared to the vast majority of people who have ever lived, and many who live today. I think that’s really important perspective we should always have in the back of our minds when it comes to virtually anything. But I also think there’s a glibness to that answer (which I’m not accusing you of) that also allows us to dodge tough questions about the results of our current social and economic structures, and whether we really are going where we want to be, and if everything might not all be totally upside.
Speaking of Jaybird I’m pretty sure this was part of the point of his pieces about visiting Qatar or the UAE that resulted in him walking back his libertarianism. I don’t want to mispeak on that and I can’t seem to locate the post. But suffice to say I’m not ready to turn it into a morality play about rich people without any clue about how good they have it. Hell I’m raising a kid in this environment and it suck at times, and I’d like to think we could do better. I’d hope the fact that none of us are starving under the terror of a militia in Somalia or even just that things were harder in this country 100 years ago doesn’t prevent us from considering the circumstances from which the culture in question arises.Report
(It’s here, for what it’s worth.)Report
Thank you. Hopefully I have not completely misconstrued your point. This conversation brought the post to mind.Report
All the essays smooshed together. The essay that talked about unimaginable wealth was this one.
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That. That exactly.
Most of those “tough questions” assume unworkable alternatives work, or assume inequality is a bad thing because it’s inequality, or assume infinite gov/political competence and resources.
There are things we could and should do better. The current system is also absurdly successful by any realistic measurement.Report
I don’t think all inequality is bad. I think some level of it is kind of inevitable. I just also think we could be doing better at managing the education to work pipeline and a lot of different cultural problems arise from our shortcomings in doing so.Report
Asserting that we live in luxury is a bit of a double edged sword isn’t it?
We live in luxury, so…Lets give free college to everyone!
Medieval kings would envy us so…lets give free health care for all!
We waste more food than we eat so…lets give food stamps out like Oprah on steroids!
A billionaire in 2022 could have 99.99% of his wealth taxed, and still be richer than any person who has ever lived!
To which the response is invariably- Oh, uh, well, we’re broke you see, and you gotta understand scarcity.Report
We’re not broke, but if the plan is to give everything everyone desires to everyone, then yes, you need to understand scarcity and resource limitations.
Are you willing to totally eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for these wonderful things you want?
If you are, then great, let’s talk. If you’re not, then trying to pretend we’re currently doing nothing seems a little disingenuous.Report
Let me say again that we’re basically post-deprivation but not post-scarcity.
We do give freer college and some measure of health care to everyone, and we’re making them unaffordable by doing so. That’s because we’re not post-scarcity. We do give out food stamps enough that no one should be hungry, and practically no one is, unless they’ve got a self-sabotaging mindset.Report
I heard a suggestion like this in the 1980’s against Bill Gates. My response then was to point out that sure it’s possible to do, but the next Billionaire won’t build his wealth in the USA.
So Bezos(es) would still exist, and still be rich, they’d just be off creating jobs and wealth in other countries. We weren’t done creating very successful companies in 1980 and we’re not done creating them now.
I fail to understand why making the USA poorer, less prosperous, and less wealthy is a good thing. There seems no upside to this idea.Report
$100k would last you about two years.Report
$100k?
A trillion dollars divided by 330 million people is 3,030 dollars each.
I have saved more than that from shopping at Amazon over the years. The math of this is insane.Report
I’m thinking about Chip’s billionaire who has 99.99% of his wealth taxed. He’s left with $100k. In some respects, his life over the next two years will be better than previous generations: better music, healthier food, very few lice. But after 2 years, he’s either got to invent another web browser (for which he’ll receive a small amount of money) or get on government assistance.Report
The idea that there are no good jobs available flies in the face of real median household income going up, not down.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Now that’s household, which might mean two incomes. If we ignore “factory” and go with “carpenter” or “plumber”, or “electrician”, then my impression is that’s still a viable option.
I don’t deny that the impression exists, but the math doesn’t support it.Report
Oh, and here’s another great chart.
150 years of employment all in pretty colors in a way that’s easy to show. Notice Manufacturing has shrunk since 1950 by more than half.
There’s an argument that manufacturing still exists, there’s another argument that it’s a lot harder for a white male with no education to get a great factory job just because he’s a white male. Walking through the Ford Factory I saw a lot of people color and females on the line.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-150-years-of-u-s-employment-history/Report
The difference is the precarity. Did you ever read The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren back before she became a woke joke?Report
The core problem is the human tendency to spend every dollar we have and even dollars we will have.
If you’re willing to live below your means then there’s not a lot that can go wrong, if you aren’t then you’re always one paycheck away from disaster.
Unfortunately that scales to two incomes, or even any income.Report
Yes. Due to exposure at an impressionable age to Great Plains grandparents who lived through the Depression, my wife and I have both been live below your means and get rid of debt as fast as reasonable people our entire lives. When I was finally on the wrong side of a corporate acquisition, we had a whole lot more options than some of my colleagues of a similar age who had been less conservative about it.Report
I also wonder if lower fertility rates are playing into this. When parents had three or four kids, they probably thought at least one kid would make it. When they have one or two kids, they have everything vested in that one kid.Report
There is no such thing as “post-scarcity”, or we’re already pretty close to there.
Everyone is never going to get the latest bleeding edge medical care. Insisting that “medical care should be free” is also insisting that there should be no bleeding edge medical care. A month’s supply of the medicine my kid badly needs cost me 80 cents. My own meds are even cheaper. They’re 30 year old technology.
The lack of Housing is self inflicted via the gov. We have the resources to supply cheap housing for everyone, we don’t let ourselves do so. Similarly the lack of insulin looks self inflicted.
Everyone has food. Everyone has access to the sum total of human knowledge. Everyone has rule of law. Everyone has clean water. Everyone has free education. Our poor have wildly more resources than the kings of old.
Everyone is never going to be able to date women at the top of whatever “hot” list. Fast forward to Star Trek level technology and everyone won’t have access to Dr Crusher.Report
American Onions rot in the soil, unharvested and unpicked.
Check out some supply chains, sometime.
We were at post-scarcity, with Just In Time.
Now? We are at war, and food is scarce.
England has starving schoolchildren eating stolen erasers at lunch.
Clean water? Find me a stream that you can drink out of and not get Giardia (I found one, in Puerto Rico — it was tested before I drank out of it). Hepatitis C in children strongly speaks of our lack of clean water, as well, given that it spreads via the fecal-oral route.
Our poor have wildly more resources? Fair enough.Report
Links?Report
My kid needs to be viewed as a success in order to reflect well on me.
That’s different from: My kid needs to be a success.
Noteworthy that this isn’t a binary thing. Doing your kid’s homework for them is horribly bad for them, getting them a tutor to learn what they should have already learned isn’t. Now the better (and cheaper) solution is to help them learn.Report
A lot of what I hear is couched in, “I want my kid to be happy!” And, yea, sure, we all want our kids to be happy. But when I think about that particular sentiment, I reframe it (for myself) as I want to position my kid to be able to pursue and find happiness.
If they grow up and think that happiness (or success) is guaranteed and that people around them will work to ensure they experience it… woe nelly is that a recipe for disaster.
My older son is a natural athlete. Most sports come easily to him and he has exceptional speed, coordination, agility, hand-eye coordination, and the like. This year he started tackle football. And while he has excelled at flag football, he is undersized, his speed is somewhat neutralized by the pads, and he is a year behind the kids who played last year. As such, he was second-string to start the season and feeling rather frustrated by it. It was his dream to play tackle and it wasn’t living up to expectations, which for him were that he’d just naturally excel and dominate like he was accustomed to. We had a lot of talks about putting in the work, showing up to practice, taking advantage of his opportunities, etc. “Nothing given, everything earned” as they say*. He stuck with it and eventually earned more playing time and is feeling a lot better about things. One coach (Coach H) was very helpful, really building up his confidence and helping him see the process. I approached Coach H before a game one day just to introduce myself and thank him for what he did. I mentioned that Mayo had been discouraged and that he had made a real difference. It was so interesting because his initial reaction was to interpret me as trying to argue for more PT for Mayo… something I’d *NEVER* do. But it must be something he hears often. So I clarified that I’ve been really happy with the process and I think it’s been good that he’s had to work for what he’s achieved and just that I appreciated him working so hard with him. It was like a breath of fresh air for him, as he is probably so used to just getting complained at that Mommy or Daddy’s Little All-Star isn’t immediately captain of the team. And I’m really glad that Mayo is having this experience because it will serve him so well down the road — in sports and in life — and a couple challenging weeks are a low cost to pay for such valuable life lessons.
But that’s increasingly an anomaly these days, it seems.
Yes, I want my kids to be happy. And successful. But I am not going to position myself to be the forever source of their happiness and success.
* With the obvious irony that his natural gifts are wholly “unearned” by him but whatever… they’re his.Report
I largely agree with you. My old take on upper-middle class parents and education was this:
A. “You are smart. You should major in something you love and are passionate about and things will work out.”
B. “Do you see this nice house? Do you know the nice vacation we just went on? These things are not cheap and your success is not guaranteed. You have to work hard, pick a practical major, etc.”
I think A is largely gone except amongst a few. We are seeing more of a world where there are only a few metros and few careers that can make decent to great income. Competition is fierce and so you have what you notice.Report
B is a train that once you are on is very difficult to get off.Report
When my son was pondering college, I gave him Path A, and told him to follow whatever his passion happened to be.
He of course told me it was philosophy and political science.
After a stiff shot of rye, I told him I supported his choice and would help him through college.
Surprisingly enough he found himself at loose ends after graduation, so I took him on as an intern to help me out
He discovered a love of computer modeling and design, and we both now work as partners for a large construction firm and he earns a comfortable middle class income.
And our boss? A guy who got a degree in…philosophy and political science.
The moral of the story?
Hell if I know. If forced at gunpoint, I would say that the world is changing so rapidly that there really isn’t any “go to college and study X and spend a lifetime doing X” anymore. Which is Path B, the “Just one word, Benjamin, …Plastics” school of thought.
My specialty, building virtual models of buildings, didn’t exist when I was in college. The skills we learned like how to draw by hand, are obsolete.
I doubt that any trade an 18 year old learns in 2022 will will be recognizable in 20 years time.
I’m coming to the opinion that Path A, generalized education in the liberal arts and humanities offers a better future.Report
I studied history in college, decided that going for a Phd was not my thing after meeting some TAs in their mid-thirties still working on their history PhD, and went to law school. I was unemployed for a year after graduating but got a job at immigration law firm and found that I had a talent for this. One moral is that you can decide that things work out eventually if you are patient and keep at things long enough. Another moral was that I got realistic early when I decided on going to law school rather than getting a PhD.Report
This debate even plays out during the high school years with what can be called the treats of education. During 9th grade, the band, chorus, and orchestra played in a musical festival in Toronto. We were impressive enough that the directors of all three were approached with an invitation about whether the band, chorus, and orchestra would like to play in a student musical festival in France. Parents in group A including our own jumped on this as tremendous opportunity because when your children are invited to play at musical festival in Paris, the answer is yes and how is this not an educational opportunity. Parents in Team B were very opposed as this was a disruption to the real education of academics and standardized tests, especially AP tests. Team B won.Report
My version of A was “Just get the degree. Stuff will follow. JUST GET THE PIECE OF PAPER!”
It was somewhat accurate for me, but my degree was from what used to be called a “commuter college” and was priced accordingly. It makes sense to get a degree in something that you love and are passionate about if it costs about $5k a year.
If the degree costs as much as a house? Well, you may wish to look into getting a degree in something that will pay you a paycheck that will allow you to make a mortgage payment every month for a while.Report
When I was 20(ish) I realized I was going to major in something that would pay very well (Chemical Engineering) but which I disliked doing.
So I took stock of my life, examined my hobbies, and changed my major to the hobby that would pay me the most (Computer Science).
When I’m talking to high school students that are looking for majors, I tell them that story.Report
“Gut course” is still socially acceptable, right? I know that we can’t make jokes about “Underwater Basketweaving” because it’s harmful to Indigenous People or something like that.
Getting a degree that communicates “I had to make it through several weed-out classes to get here” is one heck of a signal to employers. Someone who has a degree that communicates “I took mostly gut courses” is also signaling to employers.
Now, when there was a scarcity premium given to bachelor degree holders, that wasn’t so bad. On top of the scarcity premium, there was also a huge difference in what college cost in 1995 versus what it costs today.
So it makes sense to spend not-that-much-money to get a degree in something that you love and you’re passionate about when the degree also has a scarcity premium attached to it.
But the scarcity premium is evaporating which means that employers no longer say “oh, it’s a degree!” but “oh, it’s a degree in gut course stuff.”
And if that’s the signal you’re sending, you really, really shouldn’t be spending high five, low six figures to send it.Report
I think you meant: And if that’s NOT the signal you’re sending, you really, really shouldn’t be spending high five, low six figures to send it.
And I fully agree with that. IMHO a lot of degrees aren’t worth the money we spend to get them.
That probably explains why Affirmative Action in colleges hasn’t had the desired results.
If memory serves, for some (most?) of the engineering majors, it doesn’t matter where you get them in terms of future life income expectancy.
If you go to Harvard Law for you law degree, it’s a big difference than if you go to Bum Hick Law School. If you get a degree in Computer Engineering, then not so much.
AA encourages mismatching, which results in the student taking a light major at a very hard University, while they’d probably be better off taking a “gut” major at a weaker U.
Of course it’d also be really useful if “expected income by major” information were easily available.
(Interesting data starts on page 19)
https://cewgeorgetown.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Economic-Value-of-College-Majors-Full-Report-web-FINAL.pdf
That’s the best info I’ve found and it’s not very good. Once I found a study that actually listed all 600(ish) majors and the data was pretty grim and easier to read.Report
It’s important to distinguish between median earnings and value added. Value added is how much impact a major has on earnings controlling for student ability (as determined by, e.g., test scores and high school GPA).
I can’t find it now, but years ago I remember seeing a study that examined this question for a handful of majors at one or a few universities, and it found that, e.g., students majoring in English tended to be above average in terms of academic ability, but had average earnings, indicating low added value. Conversely, criminology students were below-average and had average earnings, indicating high added value. Engineering students had high academic ability and very high earnings, also indicating high added value.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this analysis has been done on a larger scale.Report
I hadn’t thought of it that way, very well done and imho, correct.Report
This doesn’t sound right to me.
First, the gap in welfare spending between the US and Europe is overstated. The US spends a smaller percentage of GDP on welfare spending than most Western European countries, but it’s also quite a bit wealthier, so in real per-capita terms it’s not so different, especially when you account for the fact that, due to not having a 20-25% VAT, US taxes are considerably more progressive than European taxes.
More importantly, parents who obsess over test scores are not the kind of people who are going to regard living on the dole as an acceptable outcome for their children no matter how well it’s funded. They’re obsessed because they want the best for their children, not the bare minimum. The outcome they’re trying to avoid is having their kids grow up to be average, not poor.
There do exist parents who, at a certain level of funding, will say, “Well, whatever. My kids can just go on welfare when they grow up.” But these are not the people you were talking about.Report
I said failure to modernize not failure to spend.
I also would like to think we can distinguish between wanting the best for your kids and pushing them to try hard to succeed versus the kind of crazed, unhealthy behavior Kazzy mentioned, which was what prompted the comment.Report
Sadly, what looks crazed and unhealthy to us is not only increasingly common but actually celebrated and praised as good parenting.
“You have to advocate for your child!”
Sure. But that doesn’t mean I’m calling their teach cuz they told me someone called them a butthead.Report
Speaking of coding:
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Sorta reminds me of this XKCD, thematically.Report
Standardized tests are so last year. If you want to send a signal, pick up a sword!
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I met a couple once whose teen-aged daughter’s goal in life was to make the US Olympic fencing team. She had the potential, and did eventually make the team… at the cost of a second mortgage to fund the coaching and international travel necessary to compete against a wide range of the best talent.
One of the oddities of US fencing is that we are much more competitive at the world level in the older veteran categories: age 60+, 70+, etc. I follow the USA Fencing feed on Facebook. The vet world championships happened fairly recently, and the US took a substantial number of medals.Report
It wasn’t just ACT scores –
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/01/1120510251/reading-math-test-scores-pandemicReport
Education and/or intelligence fell.
And the way to bet is it didn’t fall evenly. If you were expected to learn online and you didn’t have home internet access, then you had a problem. That’s a tiny minority but tiny minorities can move these sorts of numbers.Report
Indeed they can, and the response to lack of resources was uneven at best. Worth nothing however that the decline wasn’t confined to Blue states or red states, but appears to have been across the board.Report
Intelligence does not exist.Report