Stuart Schneiderman cites a report that aggregate student loan debt has now surpassed $840 billion..and is still climbing. He suggests that these debts will have a major impact on the choice of marital partners, via a sort of reverse-dowry effect, as well as creating a long-term overhang on the housing market.
Academia
Malinvestment and the Higher-Ed Bubble
Workers with specialized skills like electricians, carpenters and welders are in critically short supply in many large economies, a shortfall that marks another obstacle to the global economic recovery, according to a research paper by Manpower Inc. The study mentions an Ohio shipbuilder that had to bring in experienced workers from Mexico and Croatia and a French metal-parts maker that hired Manpower to find welders in Poland.
The paper blames the shortage in part on the “social stigma” assigned to skilled blue-collar work, and cites a poll finding that only one in 10 American teenagers see themselves in a blue-collar job as adults. (The proportion was even lower in Japan.)
Begin with the end in mind
I’m a bit of Covey Fan, at least some great stuff from his first book. Beginning with the end in mind, and keeping it in mind, is central to strategic thinking on policy and politics.
With that out of the way, I’ll tell you that one of the “ends” I’m working toward is the transformation (as opposed to the reform) of America’s education system.
I can easily defend the statement that America’s education system can’t be reformed in its present context. Taking that one step further, i would argue that even if it could be reformed, we shouldn’t want to.
I write all this because I just posted a comment to one of my favorite blogs, Brothers Judd. The post on that blog touted an article describing Obama’s “break” with the Teacher’s Unions. This is an interesting development, and there is much more, and much less, than meets the eye.
The comment I posted is below.
This is my take, and I think I’ll be proven right. Obama & Co. know that the existing system is unsustainable, particularly for the urban schools. They are creatures of the Union, but know that Unionism is the problem. Hence their attempt to “fix” the system using half-measures like “turnaround models” and charters.
This is akin to “glasnost” and “perestroika.” Obama thinks he can loosen the leash, maintain control, and then re-unionize charters when results improve. This brings to mind 2 important things for true reformers to remember.
1. Reforms need to lead to the permanent removal of unionization from education, so we need to work toward the collapse of the union system (USSR), and not its “reform.”
2. All this talk of Obama truly understanding the problem should be ignored. Whatever his personal motivation to succeed, in his heart of hearts, he is an unreconstructed leftist who believes everything William Ayers believes about schooling.
He’s Gramsci to the core. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
Just remember, like Katrina, if every government school in the US fell to rubble tomorrow, we would see a flourishing of education that would surprise the most Pollyanna optimist. To that end, all half measures should be designed to destroy the current system, not to save it.
US Government Education Complex = USSR
Obama = Gorbachev
In my view, , the Union-dominated education system will appear strong, like the USSR, right up to the moment they collapse. Once they collapse, Unions must be driven from education.
The most important policy needed to bring that about is the rapid charterizaton of existing schools, combined with the majority of the education dollar following children to those schools.
If you don’t put a stake through their heart, salt and garlic the coffin, and scatter the ashes, they will come back and fix on your neck yet again.
Busting the Hiroshima Narrative
Richard Fernandez, AKA blogger Wretchard the Cat, has a post on Pajamas Media titled The Foundations of Our World on the modern politically correct myths surrounding Hiroshima — America was the original “nuclear sinner” and war criminal while Japan was “innocent victim” — that have become “The Narrative” that the Ruling classes promulgate through the Western education establishment and main stream media.
Just because this is “The Narrative” does not make it the objective truth. There is still a lot of historical information still being unearthed about that era. Information highly destructive of the politically correct narrative in the form of the unearthed history of the Japanese chemical warfare program.
The bottom line up front is that Hiroshima was a center of chemical weapons production for the Japanese and the weapons produced there were used in against Chinese, British and American troops in World War Two.
Hiroshima — The A-bomb plus 65 years
The best way I can think of to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is to review an article by historian Richard B. Frank that was published in the Weekly Standard in 2005. In it, Frank lays out the competing visions of history that have grown up after the event, and its most recent turns, that refresh our understanding of that day.
Why Truman Dropped the Bomb
Sixty years after Hiroshima, we now have the secret intercepts that influenced his decision.
by Richard B. Frank
08/08/2005, Volume 010, Issue 44.
The sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima seems to be shaping up as a subdued affair–though not for any lack of significance. A survey of news editors in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, first among the top one hundred stories of the twentieth century. And any thoughtful list of controversies in American history would place it near the top again. It was not always so. In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war. They further believed that those bombs had actually ended the war and saved countless lives. This set of beliefs is now sometimes labeled by academic historians the “traditionalist” view. One unkindly dubbed it the “patriotic orthodoxy.”
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But in the 1960s, what were previously modest and scattered challenges of the decision to use the bombs began to crystallize into a rival canon. The challengers were branded “revisionists,” but this is inapt. Any historian who gains possession of significant new evidence has a duty to revise his appreciation of the relevant events. These challengers are better termed critics.
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The critics share three fundamental premises. The first is that Japan’s situation in 1945 was catastrophically hopeless. The second is that Japan’s leaders recognized that fact and were seeking to surrender in the summer of 1945. The third is that thanks to decoded Japanese diplomatic messages, American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation. The critics divide over what prompted the decision to drop the bombs in spite of the impending surrender, with the most provocative arguments focusing on Washington’s desire to intimidate the Kremlin. Among an important stratum of American society–and still more perhaps abroad–the critics’ interpretation displaced the traditionalist view.
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These rival narratives clashed in a major battle over the exhibition of the Enola Gay, the airplane from which the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. That confrontation froze many people’s understanding of the competing views. Since then, however, a sheaf of new archival discoveries and publications has expanded our understanding of the events of August 1945. This new evidence requires serious revision of the terms of the debate. What is perhaps the most interesting feature of the new findings is that they make a case President Harry S. Truman deliberately chose not to make publicly in defense of his decision to use the bomb.
I hope the last line whets your curiosity enough to go to the link and finish reading the article.
It is well worth your time.