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Articles like this remind me of "old economy steve". Please, Professor with tenure and a pension, tell us how children facing an increasingly winner-take-all w
by carsongross 11y ago
Articles like this remind me of "old economy steve".
Please, Professor with tenure and a pension, tell us how children facing an increasingly winner-take-all world in which failure actually is catastrophic are too afraid to take risks.
- rwallace 11y agoThat's an argument for why it's reasonable to be wary of taking financial risks. It's not an argument for why it's reasonable to call the police and a psychotherapist because you saw a mouse in your apartment.
- pippy 11y agoYou'll always find people like that in University. The interesting thing is the younger generation treating education like a commodity. And given tuition costs, they have a right to. This will inevitably cause tension between the academics and the students. The most damaging cause it will have is on society long term, as higher learning traditionally has been used for demonstrating the capability of an individual. Instead we're seeing the capability for obtaining ~$30k debt.
- thebooktocome 11y ago> You'll always find people like that in University. The point of the article was that we are finding more people like that, on average, than we were in the past.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoPeople's feelings aren't necessarily reasonable. If you grow up almost exclusively in an environment where failure can snowball fairly easily, which school is, and everyone tells you it's really important not to fail in that context, whether or not that's true, then that will be likely to be a large part of the pattern of emotion you have when confronting failures outside that context.
- CWuestefeld 11y agoan increasingly winner-take-all world in which failure actually is catastrophic I find this surprising. In what way is, in today's world, failure any more catastrophic than at any time in the past? Are there very many examples of people who have never failed at anything? For the rest of the population who has experienced failures, am I to understand that we're now doomed?
- Retra 11y agoStudent wages are lower, student debt is higher.
- rndn 11y agoI think a similar development can also be seen in countries without any tuition fees, but my sample size could be too small to say that with certainty.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoBut that's not winner-take-all, that's just a situation where investment must carefully be coordinated against projected future returns. I am also waiting for an explanation of this winner-take-all idea. A couple/few posters have mentioned it. Sounds quite depressing.
- carsongross 11y agohttp://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2014/01/20140102_wealth10.jpg http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303... Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the highest brackets. The delta between someone in the top 5% and the top 1% has increased markedly. Competition for that 1% slot has increased dramatically. Tenure-track positions now have thousands of applicants. In tech, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. made tens of thousands of millionaires. Google made, say, thousands. Facebook made, say, hundreds. Instagram made ten. (I exaggerate for comic effect.) I don't entirely disagree with the authors general point: kids are extremely shielded today, but I don't think he is properly sympathetic to the context in which kids (and parents) find themselves in. To the point of a comical lack of self-awareness. (In fairness this is an article in psychologytoday.)