"the U.S. has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place.
The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism."He's at least partially correct. Since we are unlikely to stop buying foreign oil and cheap Chinese manufactures, we need to export something back. If it's natural resources, we act like a colony, and our current strategy of producing and exporting treasury bonds is unsustainable. We must continue to have sharp minds producing valuable technical manufactures for export to remain a strong and prosperous society.
Thomas Friedman writes a column with similar thoughts. He largely cites a column by Robert Samuelson, which bemoans that students aren't motivated to do the hard work.
"Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a "good" college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure."to which Friedman adds
"We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism."A good friend who teaches high-school says the same thing - the bailouts have been bad for student motivation.
I remember a recent TV ad for an on-line high school. Some of the supposed benefits were that you got to take courses at your own pace and take tests at your own time. For some students, this is a benefit. But, the real lessons of high school are not that the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides, nor that Jane Austen wrote a bunch of good books. The real lessons are the world does not exist for the benefit of the students, and sometimes you have to take tests on somebody else's schedule.
2 comments:
Hi Morgan,
It probably isn't a good idea to focus to focus on the sometimes strange priorities of the schools.
In a capitalist economy, production tends to go to low cost producers. The US, which tends to believe that having large amounts of cheap goods is a good thing, and also that capitalism is generally wonderful, more or less decided to go with the flow. The Japanese and the Germans elites, very aware of having lost WWII, decided to resist by automating assembly lines, training and employing a lot of engineers, etc. We're now seeing the results of these decisions.
Given this environment, individuals in the US have tried to adapt by getting MBA's and law degrees, After all, people with these degrees are morelikely to rise in the American economy, and less likely to be replaced by an Indian or Chinese engineer.
So it is at least as likely that students who go into law or management are responding to the incentives the economy offers them, as that that they are simply undisciplined.
Ray,
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the comment. I guess what I'd argue is that MBAs and Lawyers (and especially stock-brokers and bankers) should make less money. Not sure how to do this in a free economy.
The comment about Japan and Germany is interesting. As you know, I go to a lot of high-performance driving events, and we often joke that maybe Germany and Japan really won WW2 based upon the cars that show up.
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