4 ms·

The recession wiped out real estate, wall street and Detroit, but one can still have a nice, well-compensated life being a lawyer, cop, politician, public schoo

by rphlx 16y ago

The recession wiped out real estate, wall street and Detroit, but one can still have a nice, well-compensated life being a lawyer, cop, politician, public school teacher, and almost any type of government employee. Why bother with all that Calculus?

hga 16y ago
You have a good point; my forward looking quibbles are: The young lawyer supply is now grossly out of whack with the demand (there are too many for the slots available ... and this field is now starting off shoring...). Skim the Instapundit's blog (he's a U of Tenn. law professor) for lots of indicators on this, the latest being smaller law firms offering unpaid internships. As he or someone said, if you have to fight to get an unpaid internship.... The number of politicians is relatively fixed. Maybe not in California, where there are a zillion boards in which to place term limited legislators, but that latter game along with all the other ones in is coming to an end. And the same WT cops, public school teachers and "almost any type of government employee" in most states and the Federal government. Right now they're for the most part in tall cotton, but we can see how this game is likely to end rather harshly rather soon. A situation where they're getting on average a whole lot more compensation than taxpayers is not politically stable in the long term when the latter are getting hammered by the Great Recession. Some states like California are not recognizing their financial limits in that they're merrily adding civil servants on their way to de facto bankruptcy (being sovereign there's no legal framework for a state to go bankrupt). In my home state of Missouri our new Democratic governor has laid off more than 2,000 state workers along with many other moves (e.g. a freeze in starting new projects for the DoT) to keep our budget more than vaguely in sync with reality. Soft landings have been arranged in state higher education, etc. The bottom line is that in this Purple state few in government are spending like there's no tomorrow (the only one I know of is my county sheriff who has his own tax source ... and I'm getting the impression he's not winning any points while the rest of us are tightening our belts). (Well, my home town of Joplin is not feeling much pain yet, we've gained the most jobs (absolute (!)) of any metro area in the state (and ours is not big in population) and our tax revenue decreases are quite manageable as of yet. Then again we didn't go wild in any way during the last two bubbles.) So, how many students will bother with the calculus if they think they can find a cushy government job instead? I don't know, but we're not e.g. France where the culture strongly encourages getting one of the latter instead of working in business. Despite decades and decades of vicious anti-business propaganda, the business of America is still business.

by rphlx 16y ago

hga 16y ago

You have a good point; my forward looking quibbles are: The young lawyer supply is now grossly out of whack with the demand (there are too many for the slots available ... and this field is now starting off shoring...). Skim the Instapundit's blog (he's a U of Tenn. law professor) for lots of indicators on this, the latest being smaller law firms offering unpaid internships. As he or someone said, if you have to fight to get an unpaid internship.... The number of politicians is relatively fixed. Maybe not in California, where there are a zillion boards in which to place term limited legislators, but that latter game along with all the other ones in is coming to an end. And the same WT cops, public school teachers and "almost any type of government employee" in most states and the Federal government. Right now they're for the most part in tall cotton, but we can see how this game is likely to end rather harshly rather soon. A situation where they're getting on average a whole lot more compensation than taxpayers is not politically stable in the long term when the latter are getting hammered by the Great Recession. Some states like California are not recognizing their financial limits in that they're merrily adding civil servants on their way to de facto bankruptcy (being sovereign there's no legal framework for a state to go bankrupt). In my home state of Missouri our new Democratic governor has laid off more than 2,000 state workers along with many other moves (e.g. a freeze in starting new projects for the DoT) to keep our budget more than vaguely in sync with reality. Soft landings have been arranged in state higher education, etc. The bottom line is that in this Purple state few in government are spending like there's no tomorrow (the only one I know of is my county sheriff who has his own tax source ... and I'm getting the impression he's not winning any points while the rest of us are tightening our belts). (Well, my home town of Joplin is not feeling much pain yet, we've gained the most jobs (absolute (!)) of any metro area in the state (and ours is not big in population) and our tax revenue decreases are quite manageable as of yet. Then again we didn't go wild in any way during the last two bubbles.) So, how many students will bother with the calculus if they think they can find a cushy government job instead? I don't know, but we're not e.g. France where the culture strongly encourages getting one of the latter instead of working in business. Despite decades and decades of vicious anti-business propaganda, the business of America is still business.