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That is indeed worrying. It is worrying that our society has no place for Journalism, Literature, History, ... We are building a society with an extreme focus

by gutnor 14y ago

That is indeed worrying. It is worrying that our society has no place for Journalism, Literature, History, ... We are building a society with an extreme focus on personal wealth. Since we are stuck on a single planet with limited resources, that type civilization will not end well.

smsm42 14y ago
Our society has plenty of place for Journalism, Literature, History. The question is if you want to study Medieval poetry, who's going to pay your bills? If you manage to have gainful employment while studying Medieval poetry, all power to you. If you come to me and say I have to pay your bills via taxes, while you enjoy reading poetry, then we have a problem here. The problem is not the focus on personal wealth. The problem is that some people think that if they like doing something, its the reason enough to force other people to pay for it, just because that people have personal wealth and thus by definition are soulless fatcats whose property has to be "redistributed" because it's not fair that their pursuits are profitable and poetry reading is not. This is the real problem we are having right now.
pjlegato 14y ago
There is a place for those things in our society, and indeed a much larger place in today's society than there has ever been in the past. Even 100 years ago, the study of any of those things was mostly limited to a very tiny elite who could afford entry to the very tiny number of universities. Now, we have numerous state universities that have created far, far more paying jobs available today for someone with a degree in liberal arts or humanities than has ever been the case in the past. The problem is rather that even with this historically high number of jobs available in history, literature, and so on, the universities are now producing people with degrees in those fields at a much higher rate than there are jobs available. Each faculty member added supports the creation of that many more new degrees in the field every year. Our society currently has a place for n historians (and that's a bigger n than ever before), but there are now also n^2 (or whatever) people with history degrees competing for those slots. There is a place for professionals in these fields, certainly; but there is not a place for every single person who thinks it'd be fun to be a professional historian. The number of people interested in doing that is just far larger than the number of people our society needs to do that. Not everyone can be an astronaut or a rock star, and being a professional in the liberal arts is not different.

by gutnor 14y ago

smsm42 14y ago

Our society has plenty of place for Journalism, Literature, History. The question is if you want to study Medieval poetry, who's going to pay your bills? If you manage to have gainful employment while studying Medieval poetry, all power to you. If you come to me and say I have to pay your bills via taxes, while you enjoy reading poetry, then we have a problem here. The problem is not the focus on personal wealth. The problem is that some people think that if they like doing something, its the reason enough to force other people to pay for it, just because that people have personal wealth and thus by definition are soulless fatcats whose property has to be "redistributed" because it's not fair that their pursuits are profitable and poetry reading is not. This is the real problem we are having right now.

pjlegato 14y ago

There is a place for those things in our society, and indeed a much larger place in today's society than there has ever been in the past. Even 100 years ago, the study of any of those things was mostly limited to a very tiny elite who could afford entry to the very tiny number of universities. Now, we have numerous state universities that have created far, far more paying jobs available today for someone with a degree in liberal arts or humanities than has ever been the case in the past. The problem is rather that even with this historically high number of jobs available in history, literature, and so on, the universities are now producing people with degrees in those fields at a much higher rate than there are jobs available. Each faculty member added supports the creation of that many more new degrees in the field every year. Our society currently has a place for n historians (and that's a bigger n than ever before), but there are now also n^2 (or whatever) people with history degrees competing for those slots. There is a place for professionals in these fields, certainly; but there is not a place for every single person who thinks it'd be fun to be a professional historian. The number of people interested in doing that is just far larger than the number of people our society needs to do that. Not everyone can be an astronaut or a rock star, and being a professional in the liberal arts is not different.