From 1965 to 2013, according to a new Pew report called “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College,” the typical high school graduate’s earnings fell more than 10 percent, after inflation.
“That is one of the great economic stories of our era, which you could define as income inequality,” said Paul Taylor, an author of the report. “The leading suspects are the digital economy and the globalization of labor markets. Both of them place a higher premium on the knowledge-based part of the work force and have the effect of drying up the opportunities for good middle-class jobs, particularly for those that don’t have an education.”
Even middle-class jobs that are still available increasingly require a college degree, either because they require more skill than they used to or because employers have become pickier.
Laurence Steinberg believes fixing high school is the best way to produce more college graduates:
The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world. Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion.
More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn’t the issue. It’s getting them to graduate.
If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. … If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree—traits like determination, self-control, and grit. This means classes that really challenge students to work hard—something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren’t nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.
I am 27. My age is important because it tells you that pretty much everyone I know is on Facebook. All my friends, all my family (grandparents included). Every single person. I recently threw a party and realized that I had to send out annoyingly informal Facebook invitations because, other than by phone, I have no idea how to contact my friends. I’m sure they all have email addresses, but why would I know what they are? I haven’t emailed one of my friends in years. Email is for conversing with old people and writing to The Dish.
When my fiancé proposed, we were in Asia. We called parents to let them know and then changed our relationship status on Facebook. That was all we did. That is how all of our friends found out. That is how my uncles and aunts found out. I have one friend who quit Facebook and she was literally the last to find out several months later. I don’t want to be that out of the loop. A friend had a baby yesterday. Facebook let me know. It’s the society pages of our times. Quitting Facebook literally means quitting my friends’ lives. I just can’t do that and still have friends. I know all the research into how Facebook affects mood and outlook, but I would rather be a little unsatisfied with my life than have no idea what is happening in my friends’.
A few other readers are much less satisfied with the site:
I’ve been on Facebook for just over five years now and for most of that time I have dithered between staying on Facebook or closing my account. Why? I find myself more depressed since I got onto Facebook.
I attribute much of my depression to what I see on Facebook alone and I can’t help but use Facebook as a measure of my own life. Specifically, I hate seeing people I grew up with and worked with having seemingly better lives than me, according to what they post. I also get depressed by some of the same people I grew up with and worked with who are experiencing hard times and turn Facebook into their online pity party. Then there’s the high school friends who post something rather mundane who get many likes from many of my classmates while I get maybe two or three, which just demonstrates how you high school popularity (or lack of it) follows you for life. Another similar depressing fact: most of the handful of people who have defriended me were people I grew up with or went to high school. High school was 30 years ago!!
Another big reason for wanting to leave Facebook comes down to many of my Facebook friends who don’t exercise good editorial control: either don’t know when to keep their “Facebook mouths” shut, or don’t open their Facebook mouths at all.
I’m a news junkie and I find the Facebook newsfeed to be a good and valuable source of world, national, local, sports, art. political and other news, to the point that it has replaced the print newspaper. It is also a good source of news from friends, but only when they have something interesting to say and sadly, that occurs occasionally. More often, I get posts about my Facebook friends unsolicited political, religious and social views, constant memes on all those subjects, banal posts about the mundane things in their lives that interest only them. For those who don’t say anything at all, I wonder if something bad is going on in their lives and they stay off Facebook to avoid discussing it or to avoid lying about their circumstances by positing pictures of themselves as shiny, happy people.
I also find that you gotta close your account completely. I’ve tried deactivating for a couple weeks last year and that did not work.
Another called it quits:
I grew up with a mother who was a real life version of Hyacinth Bucket (“it’s pronounced Bouquet!”) from the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. Her life and the lives of her family were held up to relentless competitive comparison with the lives of neighbors, acquaintances and anyone else who came across her radar, always with the intent of reassuring herself that she was better than they were.
After some years of therapy connected, ostensibly, with other issues, I realized that the reason Facebook was so compulsive to me was because it allowed me to practice this delightful inherited behaviour all day long. It plays into some very unpleasant human social characteristics, foremost the temptation to evaluate one’s own worth based on a comparison with others: what they have, what they do, where they holiday, etc. It is a profoundly unspiritual experience.
I have no doubt that Facebook users are statistically less happy than non-users. I found that to use it for any length of time with any regularity was to risk being sucked into a very unpleasant world of comparison. And as anyone who’s attended AA will tell you, “Compare and despair!” It had to go. For the likes of me, it’s poison.
With this whole terrible idea of using the debt ceiling as a policymaking opportunity behind us, can we just get rid of the darn thing? It serves no useful purpose beyond partisan needling. But it obviously doesn’t systematically advantage either Democrats or Republicans. In the long run, the needling all just evens out. What you’re left with is a negative-sum impact on the real world. So let’s scrap it.
Eric Posner points out that Congress is already on it:
Recently, several members of Congress, including Representative Mike Honda and Senators Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, and Mazie Hirono, introduced legislation to do just that. The bills provide that when the national debt comes within $100 billion of the ceiling, the president may send a notification to Congress to that effect. Congress then would have a limited period of time during which it may issue a joint resolution that forbids borrowing above the debt ceiling. If Congress fails to pass such a resolution, or does but it is vetoed, Treasury may borrow beyond the debt ceiling. The bills make sense, and Congress should act on them as soon as possible.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the debate about homosexuality in Putin’s neo-fascist Russia is what we can actually do about it. Protests are fine; international condemnation is important; helping gay groups in Russia matters. But at some point, this is not our country, and there are limits to intervention, if we are not going to engage in the simplistic idea that all societies across the globe must now have the same prevailing attotudes toward gayness that have only recently emerged in the West. In our latest podcast, I asked Masha Gessen what her ideas are for giving Russian gays some practical support and help. Her answer surprised me – but it shouldn’t have: granting Russian gays the group refugee status that we once accorded to Soviet Jews:
If you’re a subscriber, you can listen to the whole podcast here. If you’re not because you’re still procrastinating on renewing, get it over with and subscribe here!
First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden each issued personally signed tweets praising Sam. So did several Democratic senators, including Clare McCaskill of Missouri. But do you know who hasn’t made a statement? Missouri’s other senator, the Republican—Roy Blunt. And there’s been a similarly odd split in the media. Pretty much every left-of-center publication has weighed in—Mother Jones, the Nation, and the American Prospect all had something to say. There appears to be nothing at National Review or the Weekly Standard. The Fox News seems similarly bereft of commentary.
In fact, the only conservative punditry on Sam I’ve seen was an odd, if predictably unpleasant, rant from Rush Limbaugh.
“Sam, who cares about your sexual preference?”, asks a conservative blogger. We actually do care about the sexual preferences of pro-athletes (or about-to-go-pro athletes)—their orientations, their escapades, their taste in Kardashians—but since everyone is presumed to be straight until they say otherwise (a not unreasonable assumption, as most people are straight), only gay or bi athletes are in the position of having to announce their sexual orientations. No one objects when the straight-by-default assumption essentially (and loudly and accurately) announces a heterosexual athlete’s sexual orientation—but let a gay person announce his sexual orientation and watch the rightwingers have aneurysms.
Nevada state officials have decided they can no longer defend the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Lyle Denniston explains what comes next:
The Nevada ban will get a continuing defense in the Ninth Circuit by the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, the sponsors of the ballot measure against same-sex marriage. Under a provision of federal rules for appeals, a case can continue to a decision even if the state involved drops out as a defender, leaving only a private party to support the state measure.
Meanwhile, another federal appeals court, the Tenth Circuit, based in Denver, has scheduled two hearings in April on the marriage controversy — on April 10, a hearing on the constitutionality of Utah’s same-sex marriage ban, and on April 17, a hearing on the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s similar ban. In both of those cases, federal district court judges struck down the bans.
It is unclear at this point which of these cases, or some other case from another federal appeals court, would be the first to reach the Supreme Court. But it now appears close to predictable that the Justices will be confronted with the underlying constitutional issue sometime later this year, in time for consideration at the next Term opening in October — if the Justices are ready then to take on the question.
Germany’s Carina Vogt won the gold metal in women’s ski jumping yesterday, making her the first person in Olympic history to do so; until this year, only men could compete in the sport. Amanda Ruggeri looks back on the absurdity of the 90-year snub, which was partly based on the protection of women’s reproductive organs:
Let’s point out what should be pretty obvious already: Ski jumping is hard on women’s bodies. That’s because it’s hard on everyone’s bodies – on knees and knee ligaments, in particular, not on reproductive organs. The IOC’s Medical Commission itself stated the equivalent of “no duh” in a special report in 2002, writing that, in sports in general, “The female reproductive organs are better protected from serious athletic injury than the male organs. Serious sports injuries to the uterus or ovaries are extremely rare.” Lindsey Van, one of the three women jumping for the U.S. this year and the winner in 2009 of the first Nordic World Ski Championships to include women, put the matter more colorfully to NBC last year: “It just makes me nauseous. Like, I kind of want to vomit. Like, really? Like, I’m sorry, but my baby-making organs are on the inside. Men have an organ on the outside. So if it’s not safe for me jumping down, then my uterus is going to fall out, what about the organ on the outside of the body?”
Maybe it’s because we have all become inured to “snark” that we’ve come to look down on brutal book reviews. And some are indeed irritating. There are few hatchet-jobs in TNR’s back-of-the-book that aren’t motivated by personal malice, bitter jealousy, or preening self-righteousness. But the classic hatchet-job – written by an arch, disinterested, yet vicious critic – is still a mercy. James Wood can still do this stateside, but it does seem a very English vocation. And as journalism slowly surrenders to public relations, and as criticism cedes to reader reviews, I’m glad that in Blighty, the Omnivore maintains its “Hatchet Job Of The Year” prize:
Camilla Long took the prize last year, for her write-up of Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath, in which she dismissed Cusk as “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish”, and who “describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail”. Adam Mars-Jones won the inaugural Hatchet for his review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, in the Observer. “The book’s pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art,” wrote Mars-Jones.
But this year’s winner is an almost perfect match between reviewer and subject. It’s the brilliant A.A. Gill of the Sunday Times (where I write a weekly column on America) and Morrissey, whose pendulous autobiography was just published with a bulls-eye already attached – it was part of the Penguin Classics collection, up there with Aristotle and Jane Austen. Well, take it away, AA:
Morrissey’s most pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing is having this autobiography published by Penguin Classics. Not Modern Classics, you understand, where the authors can still do book signings, but the classic Classics, where they’re dead and some of them only have one name. Molière, Machiavelli, Morrissey. He has made up for being alive by having a photograph of himself pretending to be dead on the cover.
And the denouement:
There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn’t be written. Some to protect the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In Morrissey’s case, he has managed both. This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn’t diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.
With some cupcake icing added for effect by your humble reviewer.
The Dish 