Mar. 15 Occupy Wall Street: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “Occupiers are blaming the wrong people” by Margaret Wente. It’s a good article and I usually like reading her articles. Here it is:
Published Saturday, Nov. 05 2011, 2:00 AM EDT
Laurel O’Gorman is one of the faces of Occupy Toronto. She
believes the capitalist system has robbed her of her future. At 28, she’s
studying for a master’s degree in sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury.
She’s also the single mother of two children. “I’m here because I don’t know
what kind of job I could possibly find that would allow me to pay rent, take
care of these two children and pay back $600 each month in loans,” she said.
She’s typical in her bitter disappointment. Here’s Boston resident Sarvenaz Asasy, 33, who has a master’s degree in international human rights, along with $60,000 in student loans. She dreamed of doing work to help the poor get food and education. But now she can’t find a job in her field. She blames the government.
“They’re cutting all the grants, and they’re bailing out the banks. I don’t get it.”
Then there’s John, who’s pursuing a degree in environmental law. He wants to work at a non-profit. After he graduated from university, he struggled to find work. “I had to go a full year between college and law school without a job. I lived at home with my parents to make ends meet.” He thinks a law degree will help, but these days, I’m not so sure.
These people make up the Occupier generation. They aspire to join the virtueocracy – the class of people who expect to find self-fulfillment (and a comfortable living) in non-profit or government work, by saving the planet, rescuing the poor and regulating the rest of us. They are what the social critic Christopher Lasch called the “new class” of "therapeutic cops in the new bureaucracy."
The trouble is, this social model no longer works. As blogger Kenneth Anderson writes, “The machine by which universities train young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white-collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up.”
It’s not the greedy Wall Street bankers who destroyed these people’s hopes. It’s the virtueocracy itself. It’s the people who constructed a benefit-heavy entitlement system whose costs can no longer be sustained. It’s the politicians and union leaders who made reckless pension promises that are now bankrupting cities and states. It’s the socially progressive policy-makers in the U.S. who declared that everyone, even those with no visible means of support, should be able to own a home with no money down, courtesy of their government. In Canada, it’s the social progressives who assure us we can keep on consuming all the health care we want, even as the costs squeeze out other public goods.
The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is broken. But they’re wrong about what broke it. The richest 1 per cent are not exactly starving out the working poor. (In the U.S., half all income sent to Washington is redistributed to the elderly, sick and disabled, or to those who serve them, and nearly half the country lives in a household that’s getting some sort of government benefit.) The problem is, our system redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster than the demand.
The voices of Occupy Wall Street, argues Mr. Anderson and others, are the voices of the downwardly mobile who are acutely aware of their threatened social status and need someone to blame. These are people who weren’t interested in just any white-collar work. They wanted to do transformational, world-saving work – which would presumably be underwritten by taxing the rich. They now face the worst job market in a generation. But their predicament is at least in part of their own making. And none of the solutions they propose will address their problem.
Ms. O’Gorman, the graduate student in sociology, didn’t bring her kids to the Occupy demonstration in Toronto because she was worried about security. Still, she hoped they would absorb the message. “I’m trying to teach them equity and critical thinking from a young age,” she said. If she’d only applied a bit more critical thinking to herself, she might be able to pay the rent.
Mar. 28 My opinion: I have to agree with her on some
points. When I was in my early teens and
20s, I knew about what a practical major was like business. When I was kid, I wanted to be an author, but
I was unsure if I would ever be published.
When I was in jr. high school I wanted to get into acting and
singing. I was unsure if I was going to
make it.
I knew by graduating out of high school, there is more
chances of success. I remember talking
to my sister in 2006 when I was in Professional Writing in the beginning of the
school year. She did say: “Doesn’t mean
you go to more school, you are guaranteed to get a job.” She’s right.
Amy Chua: I cut out this Globe and Mail
article “Amy Chua’s dangerous ideas” by Margaret Wente on Feb. 8, 2014.
I only put some excerpts that stood out to me. There is a much longer article and the link
is at the bottom:
You remember Amy Chua – she’s the dragon lady who wrote a
book about her parenting style. It is probably not like yours. Her motto is:
All work, no play, no coddling, and hold the praise. A lot of people thought
her approach amounted to child abuse. Her new book, The Triple Package,
is making people even madder. (Actually, she wrote it with her husband, Jed
Rubenfeld, but she makes a better target.)
The authors believe their success is rooted in three traits:
a group superiority complex (“We are the chosen people”), individual insecurity
(“I can never be good enough”), and impulse control (“so I’ll have to work like
hell if I don’t want to be a complete failure”).
The authors argue that it’s this constellation of traits –
not socio-economic status, inherited privilege, or IQ – that matter most. For
those who have them, upward mobility is alive and well.
The authors’ thesis trashes conventional explanations about
why some people get ahead and some don’t. It suggests that the problem of
inequality is far more intractable than we’d like to think. It plays into
ethnic stereotypes. (All those stories you hear about Chinese mothers are
absolutely true.) It raises awkward questions about immigration policy. And it
leads to the gloomy conclusion that our culture today leaves a lot to be
desired. Here’s what our culture is telling us: Everyone is equal, feel good
about yourself, live in the moment. “Success today comes more often to groups
who resist today’s dominant culture,” they write.
More than half of all East Asian students (Chinese, Hong Kong
and Korean) come from families that make less than $50,000 a year. But they
blow the other kids away. Between 85 per cent and 89 per cent of them score at
levels 3 and 4 in Grade 6 math. The school board average is just 60 per cent.
Most South Asian students do well too, even though 70 per cent of them come
from homes with incomes of less than $50,000 a year.These findings are mirrored across Canada. Many of the disadvantages that are widely assumed to hold kids back – low family income, attending an “educationally challenged” school, learning English as a second language, having less-educated parents, or a non-white skin colour – simply don’t apply to large groups of immigrant kids. They do well anyway. What they have, the authors would argue, is extremely strong cultural capital. Their families demand more of them. They study harder than other kids do, and their parents don’t care about their self-esteem.
It doesn’t last forever. With success and achievement comes complacency, and by the third generation, the drive, the hunger to prove yourself and the ability to defer gratification start dribbling away. The children and grandchildren of today’s super-duper achievers will probably disappoint them.
There’s also a downside to all this striving, as Ms. Chua points out. A lot of driven kids are miserable. Some will eventually realize that what their parents wanted for them isn’t what they want at all, and that top marks and material success aren’t everything.
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