The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
— Michelangelo Buonarotti
Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
— J.K.Rowling
The University is like our congress-dysfunctional and designed for the ones who run it not the students. No changes in 40 years.
(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.
— Margaret Wente
I still don’t see how Europe and even the US and the rest of the OECD are going to be able to meet all their financial obligations to a middle class that cannot in the long run compete with a much larger non OECD middle class in a world of free trade. The reason the OECD middle class cannot compete is simple. Both the OECD and the Non OECD middle classes now have the same level of education, access to global communications, global production systems and global trading platforms. Yet in the OECD we pay our middle class five times what the rest of the world middle class is paid. That situation cannot persist. In the short run it has been masked by OECD governments running big deficits to maintain wage differnetials and entitlements and the top 1% have been able to leverage the outsourcing arbitrage, benefit from automation and post 1980 fiscal policies. They have also engaged in global financial manipulation. In the long run we have a generation of income and wealth realignment to experience between the two middle classes and it will be painful and a negotiation with the top 1% worldwide to cushion the consequences. That is really the underlying problem behind these surface phenomena.
— Geoffrey Henry
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living
— Buckminster Fuller
”Ms. ___, you are just so cozy for me that I can’t *stand* it!” -3 y.o. girl. I almost died of a cute attack.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, toknow it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
— Henry David Thoreau
As someone who currently makes a living providing that liberal arts education that (I fully acknowledge) now seems to be failing huge numbers of people, I agree 100% with the rest of the above quote. One thing that really bothers me about this whole global economic crisis I keep harping on is the way it was deliberately created by people in power and is now being used as a justification to erode the value of the liberal arts education — two things that will devastate the existence of the middle class and the prevalence of critical thinking abilities for years to come. A liberal arts education is not the only social mechanism that creates a critical-thinking, informed middle class — but it has historically been one of the most important. When the value of a degree in something like theater, which doesn’t always give immediate earning power but does give a valuable perspective on the world, is eroded too fundamentally … ie, when a degree in theater becomes a ticket out of the middle class, rather than a way to stay in it or possibly join it, and when the function of the higher education system to continue to create/maintain the existence of critical thinking skills in the general population (instead of much more narrowly defined “job skills”), democracy itself is in serious danger. The erosion of the middle class is a serious political problem, as is the undermining of the higher education system, and both of these things provide the context for a lot of the anecdotal observations of this thread.
but don’t worry - I have a very New York-like quadruple-bolt-lock system protecting my pink fortress
— Leigh
