Here's a bouquet of resentments, all brought together in a new meme: high-priced education, bloated bureaucracies, fat public employee benefits. They come together this weekend in, e.g., The Economist's piece on how American higher education might go the way of the American auto industry. And here's an NYT book review on (gasp!) the end of tenure. And most dramatic of all, the Wall Street Journal zeroes in with malicious glee on what seems to all appearances to be a vastly overbuilt new "education center" in Los Angeles, [Update: And add Michael Barone on bubble-bursting. Alternate account: It's the capitalists.].
I won't claim any particular insight into what the Future May Hold, but this is one of those moments when I'm just as glad I'm at the end of my career, not the beginning. I've spent half my life enjoying the privilege of having the police to collect my salary.. I'm not at all ashamed of what I did for a living; on the whole I'm rather proud of it. But it is beginning to look like I rode the crest of the wave.
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2 comments:
*All* of us (of a certain generation + or minus a dozen years) rode the crest.
We lucked out on the selflessness of our parents' generation and the prosperity that they fought for, brought and earned for America. We let it slip away in an orgy of...well, I don't know of what. But this is for sure: We screwed our own children and grandchildren — not by running up a national debt, but by allowing it to be run up on the wrong things, meanwhile cutting slicing and dicing the good things into oblivion.
And now.im our dotage, instead of screaming bloody murder the way we did when we were younger, we let it go by without sticking it to the republicans in democrats clothing (see: Barak Obama), tea party lunatics, authentic Republican troublemakers, media nutcakes and media loafers.
Shame on our generation. Shame on us. Shame on me.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crank
i've got three grandkids now in the professional world -- one writing on politics and local gov, one a computer engineer in health work, onewith a doctorate in a science working more with computers and math than in physics. two have wifes -- one starting out at a major newspaper, one qwith a masters working on a doctorate. they're not as worried about the years ahead as we old guys are.
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