25 years old and deep in debt

[Malthus]

The moment Ide and company convince everyone to go into STEM and avoid law, is the moment when there will be, three or four years down the road, a critical shortage of law students ...

What we have right now is a critical shortage in Canada with people with STEM degrees.  We graduate way too many law students.  If Ide et al convince people not to go to law school then the numbers might reduce down to where people might actually get articles and then employment after law school.

Btw, who knows they are really going to love doing law before they go to law school?

The same way anyone "knows" they are going to love any occupation - that is, they don't.

Thats the point.  Why would you ever let your kid go to law school because he "really loves it" since there is no way for him to do so rationally.  There may be some other good reason for him to do it but that isnt it.

You appear to be addressing an argument no-one is making ... 

[alfred russel]

The same way anyone "knows" they are going to love any occupation - that is, they don't.

The difference isn't between those with miraculous foreknowledge and those without, it is the difference between those who genuinely want to do the activity, and those who merely drift into it. The former may well be awfully dissapointed with it; but that unhappy outcome is a lot less likely than for the latter.

In accounting, if you ask someone how they decided to be an accountant and they say it is what they always dreamed of doing, they are either lying or a freak, and probably both. Possible exception is someone whose parents were accountants.

Everyone has some story like, "I just wanted to get a job." Often followed by (if they are honest), "I needed to find something after washing out of some other college program that people think is interesting."

[Savonarola]

I really doubt it.  TV is full of shows about rich and glamorous lawyers having exciting court cases where their plucky creativity wins the day over professional skill.  Very few shows are about rich and glamorous Engineers.  Maybe Sav could write one though.

No, sorry, fiction has to have some degree of verisimilitude.   



One of the ideas on my (all to long and growing) idea list was to take the evil and good twins from "The Amazing Adventures of Captain Canada " and writing about their daily lives.  (The evil twin was an engineer.)  Something like Keeping up with the Kardashians, but with lasers and giant robots.  Unfortunately that would mean watching "Keeping up with the Kardashians" and I'm not sure I'm willing to make that sort of sacrifice.

[Ideologue]

More and more, I realize that Things To Come is a plan for life.

[crazy canuck]

Thats the point.  Why would you ever let your kid go to law school because he "really loves it" since there is no way for him to do so rationally.  There may be some other good reason for him to do it but that isnt it.

You appear to be addressing an argument no-one is making ... 

If they have a real love for doing it, I would encourage them to do it

[crazy canuck]

The American dream moved North to Canada according to this opinion piece in the NY Times

It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "the American dream."

The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn't fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else.

Adams was right at the time, and for decades. When my father, an eastern European refugee, reached France after World War II, he was determined to continue to the United States because it was less class bound, more meritocratic and offered more opportunity.

Yet today the American dream has derailed, partly because of growing inequality. Or maybe the American dream has just swapped citizenship, for now it is more likely to be found in Canada or Europe — and a central issue in this year's political campaigns should be how to repatriate it.

A report last month in The Times by David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy noted that the American middle class is no longer the richest in the world, with Canada apparently pulling ahead in median after-tax income. Other countries in Europe are poised to overtake us as well.

In fact, the discrepancy is arguably even greater. Canadians receive essentially free health care, while Americans pay for part of their health care costs with after-tax dollars. Meanwhile, the American worker toils, on average, 4.6 percent more hours than a Canadian worker, 21 percent more hours than a French worker and an astonishing 28 percent more hours than a German worker, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Canadians and Europeans also live longer, on average, than Americans do. Their children are less likely to die than ours. American women are twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth as Canadian women. And, while our universities are still the best in the world, children in other industrialized countries, on average, get a better education than ours. Most sobering of all: A recent O.E.C.D. report found that for people aged 16 to 24, Americans ranked last among rich countries in numeracy and technological proficiency.

Economic mobility is tricky to measure, but several studies show that a child born in the bottom 20 percent economically is less likely to rise to the top in America than in Europe. A Danish child is twice as likely to rise as an American child.

When our futures are determined to a significant extent at birth, we've reverted to the feudalism that our ancestors fled. "Equality of opportunity — the 'American dream' — has always been a cherished American ideal," Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University, noted in a recent speech. "But data now show that this is a myth: America has become the advanced country not only with the highest level of inequality, but one of those with the least equality of opportunity."

Consider that the American economy has, over all, grown more quickly than France's. But so much of the growth has gone to the top 1 percent that the bottom 99 percent of French people have done better than the bottom 99 percent of Americans.
Three data points:
• The top 1 percent in America now own assets worth more than those held by the entire bottom 90 percent.
• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.
• The top six hedge fund managers and traders averaged more than $2 billion each in earnings last year, partly because of the egregious "carried interest" tax break. President Obama has been unable to get financing for universal prekindergarten; this year's proposed federal budget for pre-K for all, so important to our nation's future, would be a bit more than a single month's earnings for those six tycoons.

Inequality has become a hot topic, propelling Bill de Blasio to become mayor of New York City, turning Senator Elizabeth Warren into a star, and elevating the economist Thomas Piketty into such a demigod that my teenage daughter asked me the other day for his 696-page tome. All this growing awareness is a hopeful sign, because there are policy steps that we could take that would create opportunity and dampen inequality.

We could stop subsidizing private jets and too-big-to-fail banks, and direct those funds to early education programs that help break the cycle of poverty. We can invest less in prisons and more in schools.

We can impose a financial transactions tax and use the proceeds to broaden jobs programs like the earned-income tax credit and career academies. And, as Alan S. Blinder of Princeton University has outlined, we can give companies tax credits for creating new jobs.

It's time to bring the American dream home from exile.

[Valmy]

The American dream moved North to Canada according to this opinion piece in the NY Times

• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.

Ok that is hilarious.  Sad, but hilarious.

[Malthus]

Thats the point.  Why would you ever let your kid go to law school because he "really loves it" since there is no way for him to do so rationally.  There may be some other good reason for him to do it but that isnt it.

You appear to be addressing an argument no-one is making ... 

If they have a real love for doing it, I would encourage them to do it

As I later clarified, having a love for the practice did not mean you knew how to do it - it only meant you really wanted to do it.

As in, "I would love to become an astronaut - it has always been my dream". Well, how many kids saying that actually know what it is like to be an astronaut? I'm guessing "none".

It may be totally irrational for a kid to "love" the idea of being an astronaut because naturally, he or she knows nothing about it, but it would be absurd to say that this cannot be a motivation for kids to grow up and do just that - and my guess is that, just like the law, those kids who had that dream would do better with the actual tedium and stress involved in being an astronaut that those who just got into it becase they though the space program was a good career move. 

[Ideologue]

The American dream moved North to Canada according to this opinion piece in the NY Times

• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.

Ok that is hilarious.  Sad, but hilarious.

The upside is that to nationalize almost half the wealth in the U.S., you only have to take it away from six people.  And if they struggle, six dead class enemies isn't really the tragedy of the kulaks, is it?

[alfred russel]

The American dream moved North to Canada according to this opinion piece in the NY Times

• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.

Ok that is hilarious.  Sad, but hilarious.

Yeah, but I'm probably worth more than the bottom 25% or so of American households put together. Lots of households have negative net worth, which really skews the stats.

[alfred russel]

The upside is that to nationalize almost half the wealth in the U.S., you only have to take it away from six people. 

That isn't right. 

[Ideologue]

Fair enough.  I still think we should still nationalize them.

[garbon]

The American dream moved North to Canada according to this opinion piece in the NY Times

• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.

Ok that is hilarious.  Sad, but hilarious.

The upside is that to nationalize almost half the wealth in the U.S., you only have to take it away from six people.  And if they struggle, six dead class enemies isn't really the tragedy of the kulaks, is it?

I don't see why it would stop there.

[Eddie Teach]

The upside is that to nationalize almost half the wealth in the U.S., you only have to take it away from six people. 

No. What that misleading statistic really says is that almost half the people in the US have no wealth to speak of.

[Ideologue]

Well, does that actually change the math?

If there 300 million and six people in the U.S., and six Waltons own half the wealth, does it matter whether the other half is owned by 300 million equally or by 200 million in equal shares with the other 100 million owning nothing?  The Waltons still control half the wealth.