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The economy actually needs colleges and universities, for purely practical reasons. They’ve been keeping about 15–20 million young adults out of the job market.
by bradleyjg 4y ago
The economy actually needs colleges and universities, for purely practical reasons. They’ve been keeping about 15–20 million young adults out of the job market. They suppress unemployment.
If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained.
This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people.
We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.
- gran_colombia 4y agoIt's a joke.
- freetime2 4y agoI didn't read it as a joke. Young adults can be incredibly destructive if left to their own devices. > The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime. [1] https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/60294_Chapter_23.pdf https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/602...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thrown_22 4y agoElite overproduction produces civil wars. Universities are a way to keep people on the elite treadmill long enough to get past their 20s and stop thinking about revolution. The USSR largely collapsed because of that. Occupy wall-street was the moment it nearly happened in the US.