Will the huge oversupply of people with college degrees force you to take mind-enhancing drugs in order to compete?

In professional sports, one of the reasons for banning steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs is to prevent those drugs from becoming de facto necessities.  In other words, if a large percentage of the players you are competing against for roster spots on professional teams are taking performance enhancing drugs, then you, too, will be forced to take steroids in order to compete.  Honest, ethical people thus have a competitive disadvantage.

According to a report on Sunday's episode of 60 Minutes, college students and professionals in the workplace are now taking prescription drugs (often the ones prescribed for ADD) to enhance focus and mental awareness in the hopes of earning higher grades or being able to produce faster and better work product.  Many of these people do not have prescriptions and are purchasing these drugs in a second-hand manner, presumably illegally.  One of the interviewees mentioned that lawyers have used these drugs (big surprise):

Adams says other drugs are also being used as neuroenhancers. One he has tried is Provigil, first developed to treat the symptoms of the rare sleep disorder narcolepsy.

"People found that it was helpful as a stimulant for, you know, working in law offices and in academics and stuff like this. So I would say it's in the past five to ten years that it's become popular as a performance enhancer," Adams said.  (60 Minutes report: Boosting Brain Power.)

The state of our nation's economy, the Education Arms Race, and the tremendous amount of competition for knowledge-based and professional jobs is one of the primary motivators for this kind of drug abuse.  Otherwise honest, hard-working, presumably ethical people are being driven, perhaps subconsciously, to take prescription mind-enhancing drugs so that they can boost their performance and outdo the competition.  The pressure to use mind enhancing drugs is just one more symptom of Education Overproduction, the Education Arms Race, and our nation's hyper-competitive job market for knowledge-based, college-education-requiring white collar jobs.

Perhaps these neuroenhancers will prove beneficial to society by allowing people to improve their cognitive ability and focus.  I don't have a position on whether or not they are good or bad or beneficial, but until they are completely legal and available over-the-counter, people might still feel compelled to purchase them illegally in order to compete.

Democrats Introduce Bill to Make Private Student Loans Dischargeable in Bankruptcy!

Special thanks to"Lawsucks" at JD Underground for posting about this.  (It was posted earlier at the Education Matters blog, but I am not a regular reader of that blog, though perhaps I should be.)  If this bill passes, I think it would be profound, so I want to post about it here.

According to Dick Durbin's webpage, he and some other Democrats are working on a Bill that would make private student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, just like other loans.  Combined with the Federal government's new Income Based Repayment (IBR) program, graduates who are unsuccessful in securing employment sufficient to allow them to pay off their loans might be able to free themselves from their shackles.  If you are in the process of racking up mountains of private student loan debt, you might want to consider borrowing a little extra ahead of time so that you can afford to hire a bankruptcy attorney.

If this Bill were to actually become law it could revolutionize higher education by restoring a negative feedback loop to the higher education-student loan industrial complex.  Imagine what would happen if the banks no longer wanted to risk $100,000 on law students who needed to borrow $150,000 for their JDs knowing that a very large percentage of those students will never find work in the legal profession.  (If tuition is $35,000/year, which is now very common, and the cost of living is $15,000/year, then students may need to borrow $150,000+, ignoring undergraduate loans.)  If students can borrow up to $56,000 in federal loans, they would need about $100,000 in private loans.  (My numbers for the federal limit may be out of date.)

One consideration for law graduates might be whether declaring bankruptcy would make them "unethical" for the purposes of state bar's character and fitness examinations.  So, declaring bankruptcy on your private student loans might also eliminate the possibility of your ever being able to practice law in the future.  However, if you graduate from law school and cannot find a job in the field but do find yourself buried under mountains of private student loan debt, bankruptcy might become a serious consideration.  In fact, in this economy you might find yourself without any viable alternatives.

Note that there is one potential loophole.  Depending on the exact wording of the Bill that gets signed into law (if it gets passed at all), this may not apply to private lenders that are 'nonprofits" or that are associated with "nonprofits", in which case most private loans might not be dischargeable at all and thus it may not have any real effect.

Potential effects of this legislation might be that:

(1.) A negative feedback loop could be restored to the higher education-student loan industrial complex.  This could also put pressure on universities and especially the law schools to reign in the spiraling costs of higher education.

(2.) Students might no longer be able to obtain private loans without having cosigners who have a significant amount of assets (parents).  This might be one way the banks will try to circumvent bankruptcy.  This might make it impossible for students from poor families and for students whose parents are not foolhardy enough to put themselves on the hook from being able to obtain private student loans.

(3.) As a result, the number of students who are able to pursue expensive graduate and professional degrees that have dubious economic value could be reduced.  Banks might actually have to consider whether or not attending second, third, and fourth tier law schools (or all law schools in general) at a cost of $150,000 is a good investment.

(4.) Interest rates on private student loans could increase, which means that successful graduates will have higher loan payments in order to subsidize less fortunate graduates.

(5.) Some law, business, and other graduate schools might be forced to close their doors as a result of having too few students.  Of course, they will scream to high heaven before that happens and the federal government will probably step in to provide federal student loans so that everyone can pursue higher education.

I am not an expert on legal ethics, so I am left wondering:

If you declare bankruptcy, are you essentially repudiating your JD and eliminating any possibility of ever being able to practice law? Would declaring bankruptcy magically make you "unethical" and "unfit" to practice law as far as character and fitness examination committees are concerned? 

What would happen if you declared bankruptcy after you had obtained your law licenses and never reported it to the Bar? (Are you even required a personal bankruptcy to the Bar?)

Are there any states where a bankruptcy after having earned a JD would not preclude you from passing a character and fitness examination?

I did a Google search and found few articles about it in the newspapers.  Here are a few blog posts I found after doing a Google search:

House and Senate Introduce Bills to Make Student Loans Dischargeable in Bankruptcy (Student Lending Analytics Blog)

 

Big News--Senators Durbin and Cohen Introducing New Bill (Education Matters blog)

Methinks This is a Huge Sign of Progress (Education Matters blog)

Saturday Morning Law School Cartoon Compilation

I have finished compiling a list of satirical cartoons for the JD Underground and law school scambusting communities.  Please let me know if I've missed any.  Enjoy!
 
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/p/funny-law-school-scam-cartoons.html

Price Manipulation in the Precious Metals Markets?

The Economic Collapse blog has just posted an article reporting manipulation in the prices of silver and gold.  The article also hints at corruption in the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (where Brooksley Born,  who tried to sound the alarm about unregulated derivatives trading, used to work).  Here is a stunning quote from the article:

When people think they are buying "gold", they are actually just buying pieces of paper that say they own gold.

In fact, during the CFTC hearings, Jeffrey Christian of CPM Group confirmed that the LBMA banks actually have approximately a hundred times more gold deposits than actual gold bullion.

Uh oh.

So what happens if everyone decides that they want actual physical delivery of their gold?

It would be such a mess that it is painful even to think about it.

The truth is that right now most of the trading activities on the London exchange are just paper for paper.

But people get into gold because they want to be in a real commodity.

In fact, there are thousands of clients around the globe who think they own huge deposits of gold bullion, and are being charged large storage fees on that imaginary bullion, but what they really own are a bunch of pieces of paper.

This almost reminds me of the housing bubble crisis.  I have seen many ads peddling gold to the masses on television and wondered exactly who was making the money off of these sales.  I suspect that the people purchasing the gold are the ones being fleeced.  Of course, this is just one more example of our federal government's failure to properly regulate economic activity.

Do the Chinese think we are retarded?

According to Donald Trump, some of the Chinese businessmen he knows think we are completely insane for allowing them to have our industries and our jobs.  Perhaps this is what we need.  We need to have some powerful, influential wealthy people who still have a conscience and some scintilla of concern for the lower classes to help change our government's self-destructive economic policies.  The lower classes certainly don't have the ability to do it.  You can find the interview here:

http://www.economyincrisis.org/content/trump-sounds-alarm-china

Excellent article at Seeking Alpha

Sorry I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately; I've been preoccupied.  Anyway, I just read a great article at the blog Seeking Alpha titled Why the Credit Bubble Cannot be Reinflated.  Here is a profound quote that I'd like to share with everyone:

It's not the loss of factory jobs per se which has hollowed out the nation's manufacturing base--it's the loss of entire ecologies of production.

Most factories in advanced economies are filled with robots, not thousands of humans; that's the only way it makes financial sense in a global economy. But some company manufactures the robots, and someone has to maintain them and program them, and other firms supply parts, software, machine tools, etc. The end-product factory is merely the most visible part of a complex web of suppliers, toolmakers, and expertise.

So when production capacity leaves the country, it's not like certain trees got logged--it's like an entire ecology has been clearcut, leaving barren hardpan behind. It becomes very difficult to recreate that complex ecology and expertise.

This is consistent with one of the themes of this blog--that almost everything in our economy is interconnected.  In this case, the loss of low-level manufacturing jobs, the ones that our politicians and intellectuals thought we could do without--also results in a loss of other high-level jobs that are dependent on doing the low-level jobs.  Of course, that also results in a loss of jobs in other fields, such as lawyering (less economic activity means less work for lawyers).  Additionally, the loss of manufacturing jobs drives people into the colleges to retrain for (fewer) high-level jobs, and some of the people who lost those high-level manufacturing-related jobs will return to seek advanced degrees or to retrain for other fields, resulting in an oversupply of degree holders in various fields.

Labor Department claims a gain of 162,000 jobs. It looks like 88,000 were temp jobs for an actual loss of about 76,000 jobs.

It looks like the estimate based on the ADP report for March was wrong and that, according to the Labor Department (as reported at CNN Money), the U.S. packed on 162,000 new jobs in March.  Of course, relative to population growth, it's only a gain of 12,000 jobs, which is certainly much better than the large losses we have suffered recently.  However, 48,000 of those jobs were temporary Census Bureau jobs.  So, the real number is closer to 114,000 (or a loss of 38,000 relative to population growth).  Still, it does seem like good news.  I had previously predicted another month of losses and apparently I was wrong (for the first time in, oh, about two years).

Another blog, Seeking Alpha, is claiming that 40,000 other jobs were temp jobs and that 37,000 jobs were health care jobs.  I haven't come across a better source for this, but if so, that means that 88,000 of the jobs were illusory, reducing the number to 74,000 jobs for a loss of  about 76,000 jobs relative to population growth.  That blogger goes on to say:

Despite all the negative aspects to the employment report, including average hourly earnings falling 0.1%, the mainstream media trumpeted it as more evidence that 'happy days are here again' (the title of a song from the Great Depression). Coverage was filled with statements such as, "The increase is the latest sign that the economic recovery is sustainable and healing in the job market is beginning." Government hiring of census workers and more health care jobs (many of which are also government related) does not indicate a sustainable economic recovery. Instead, it indicates sustainable government spending to try to make a recovery look like it is taking place.

Is Having a Sense of Entitlement Necessarily Unfounded?

I have been contributing comments to a debate at the Wall Street Journal's blog, and I might turn some of  them into blog posts.  Here is the first one.

I disagree that it is wrong that “Many law students and new lawyers feel entitled to a high paying, high quality job because they went to law school.”  If you spent 7 years in college, busted your ass, paid a large opportunity cost, and accumulated $120,000+ worth of non-dischargeable student loan debt, shouldn’t you feel entitled to a reasonable return on your investment if you did a good job of training and preparing yourself to work as a lawyer?  I encourage disenchanted law school graduates who graduated with 3.0’s and above to feel angry, cheated, and entitled. It is perfectly understandable and proper to feel that way.

If you are a law student or an unemployed or underemployed lawyer, please stop flagellating yourself and feeling guilty for having been misled after you had been indoctrinated with propaganda selling the value of higher education since childhood. The state of our nation’s economy and our nation’s Education Arms Race are not your fault. You made an effort to train to earn a living by going to college and graduating from law school. Grow a backbone and a sense of righteous, moral outrage.  We are never going to be able to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy nor close excess law schools until we seize the moral high ground.

ADP data suggests loss of 23,000 jobs (more like 173,000 jobs) in March

One of the nation's largest payroll companies, ADP, has just reported data suggesting a loss of 23,000 jobs for the month of March.  Of course, since our nation needs about 150,000 new jobs every month to keep pace with population growth, it's really closer to a loss of 173,000 jobs.

Digging deeper into the stats, a loss of 51,000 jobs in good-producing industries was reported while 28,000 (presumably low-wage) service jobs were added.  So, our nation lost 51,000 jobs in industries that produce physical wealth and gained 28,000 jobs in low-wage industries, consistent with our transformation into a third world country.

Science Grad School Scambloggers?

Lawyers aren't the only people having trouble dealing with Education Overproduction. Even PhD. scientists (gasp!) of all people are having difficulty on the job market.  I have a Masters degree in one of the physical sciences, so I have been aware of this problem for over a decade, and last night I stumbled across the remains of a blog dedicated to science graduate school scambusting.  I haven't spent much time looking it over yet, but it's not hard to get the gist of it.  So, I thought I would post a link to it here:

Science Ph.D. Job Issues Blog

Also, check out this NPR Science Friday discussion about the problem:

Young Scientists Issues (1996)--At least listen to the ten minutes to hear a funny skit and a list of 5 things unemployed PhD.'s (and JD.'s) do not need to hear..

Granted, science PhD.'s don't have the kinds of student loan problems that lawyers and liberal arts PhD.'s suffer under, but they have still invested years of their lives to train for a glutted field and they may have undergraduate student loans that compounded interest while they were in graduate school.  Since it takes 5-7 years to earn a PhD., they have higher opportunity costs than law students.  That number increases if you add on time served in postdocs or include half of the years (2) spent majoring in science as undergraduates.  Normally, science graduate students do not pay any tuition and receive small stipends (think $15,000/year, often without any insurance).  The rationale behind the stipends is that they work as teaching assistants and research assistants, often for 65+ hours/week.  It really isn't a bad way to earn a PhD., and these degrees are not as useless as Art History or Philosophy PhD.'s, but these are bright people who might have been better served if they had gone into other fields where they could have found work with their Bachelors degrees (engineering, computer science, accounting, or business) or just headed Med.

After they finish their PhD.'s most end up working low-paid 2-3 year gypsy scientist positions called postdoctorates in the hopes of being able to eventually land an assistant professor position (good luck with that).  After two or three postdocs, most wash out of science, the best years of their lives having been wasted.

Science research at the universities is essentially structured as a pyramid scheme, with deans and professors needing a horde of graduate students to teach the undergraduates (laboratory TAs, review classes, etc.) and most importantly, to do the repetitive grunt work that is science research.  The institutions have no concern for whether or not our nation needs more PhD. scientists nor whether they will find real, solid middle class employment in their fields.  Also, since they cannot feed enough Americans to the machine, they import thousands of foreign graduate students who later compete for postdocs and academic and industry jobs with the Americans.  (The foreign grad students are good, hard-working, often very bright, rather likable people, and I have nothing against them personally, but this discussion and this blog is about what is in the economic interests of Americans, not whether or not people in other countries are good people or worthy of our jobs.) 

The end result is that we are producing a large oversupply of frustrated and disenchanted science PhD.'s.  But how will science research get done without the grad students?  Some people have proposed that we train fewer people and create permanent research positions for PhD.'s at $50-60,000/year.  They would probably be just as cost-effective if not more so than the graduate students because they are already trained and productive, just as postdocs are more efficient and productive than grad students.  

Before you conclude that science professors are necessarily in on this and that they are doing well, unlike law professors, they suffer from the risk of losing their research grants and their jobs, and tenure is being eroded.  (You might say that the "scientists career half-life is low.)  I don't think they are paid nearly as well as law professors either.  If you are an assistant professor you will have to work your ass off to make sure that your lab's research is productive and you will always be writing grant proposals, seeking extremely competitive grants.

Unsurprisingly, many of these unemployed, underemployed, angry, and disenchanted scientists have fled the science field to come to law school in the hopes of becoming well-to-do intellectual property lawyers.  So now we have an oversupply of people with a combination of advanced science degrees and law degrees!  That something like that is possible, that people who are so well-trained, well-educated, and skilled could have difficulty finding a job commensurate with their credentials is unfathomable to most Americans.

To an extent, I am also a science career scambuster, too.  Of course, I am interested in the problem of our nation's Education Arms Race in general as well as other economic and societal issues.

A Facelift for Fluster Cucked

After spending a number of hours messing around with a generic blog template and Blogger's new and improved WYSIWYG template editor, I am pleased to unveil a new look for my blog. I hope that it is more aesthetic and reader friendly.

It all started about a week ago when someone sent me an email alerting me to the fact that people could no longer post comments. So, I had to scrap my previous template, which I had designed using the Trix generator, and replaced it with one of Blogger's new templates. However, I thought it looked crappy.

So I found a generic blog template to mess around with and I learned some very basic CSS-HTML. (I further modified that template to make it even more customizable in the new Blogger template editor.) However, for some reason I still cannot get embedded commenting to work. Fortunately the popup window and separate window options work, so I'm going with the separate window option since some people might have popups disabled.

So, here it is. Please let me know what you think.

Why Won't (Can't) Unemployed Lawyers Find Jobs in Other Fields?

In response to a post at Law.com's Legal Blog Watch (responding to one of my posts), I explained why lawyers cannot easily strike out into other fields.

A poster named Rhymes with Right said:

"Am I to take it that these bloggers have no other marketable skills -- perhaps skills the acquired during their undergraduate careers? Why not go into that field -- or perhaps courageously strike off into other fields now?

Seems to me like they are just trying to cut down on the number of future competitors."

First off, the U.S. job market is atrocious in almost all fields right now, not just law. So even if you do have marketable skills in another field, it will not necessarily be easy to find work in it.

Secondly, after having spent three years in law school, employers will perceive that your skills in those other fields have atrophied (or gone stale) and that you must have forgotten everything you knew before.

Thirdly, even if employers in another field would regard you as being qualified, they will wonder why the hell you are not working as an attorney since the general public perceives that all lawyers are rich. They will assume that you are a loser since you could not find an attorney job.

Fourthly, a great many law school graduates really do not have any other tangible marketable skills. These would be the political science majors, the art history majors, the philosophy majors, etc. It might be tempting to argue that in that case, they should not be complaining. However, they have still been injured because they cannot find jobs as lawyers AND they have $100,000+ of non-dischargeable student loan debt, and they could have spent their three years obtaining a second bachelors degrees in more marketable fields.

Do not underestimate the difficulty of "courageously striking off into other fields" when you already have $100,000+ worth of debt over your head. Is it then a good investment to take on another $40-60,0000 worth of debt to retrain for another field? Retrain for what? What field would you roll the dice on? Even if someone were able to gain admission to nursing school and wanted to become a nurse, by the time he graduated that field would probably be glutted too (or filled with imported Filipino nurses on visas).

I know that finding a job in another field might seem like a piece of cake to someone who has never faced real adversity in the job market or who has never had to involuntarily change careers before or who has never had to confront a depression-era job market, but when you are staring at $100,000+ worth of student loan debt, it is a very daunting prospect that cannot be taken lightly. That further education and training would give you the opportunity to find a job in another field is not good enough; you would want a 95% probability of success.

Is my goal to cut down on the number of future competitors in the legal field? Yes, yes it is, as well as to prevent human suffering. Our society is suffering tremendously from economic waste in the form of unused education, not just in the legal field, but in almost all fields. (Our nation even has an oversupply of PhD scientists, which is a fact that is unfathomable to most laypeople.) This is very expensive and it hurts our nation's economy because money that people might otherwise spend on goods and services ends up being spent on student loans.

In the case of very expensive graduate and professional school, it is in our society's economic selfish interest to produce no more than a 5% or 10% oversupply of graduates. Note that consumers of legal services are not benefiting, price-wise, past a certain point from our nation's huge oversupply of lawyers--many of them are unable to earn a living offering legal services and thus are not part of the legal services market; it's already very saturated.

Frank's First Movie!

Dear Friends.  I am pleased to announce the creation of my first-ever animated political cartoon!  Please let me know what you think.

Is your job going to China?

According to a new paper hosted at the Economic Policy Institute's website, 2.4 million American jobs migrated to China between the years of 2001 and 2008.  So, that number does not include the hundreds of thousands if not millions of other jobs that must have been lost to China before 2001, nor does it include all of the jobs lost to other nations such as India and Mexico.  Presumably, other jobs were lost as secondary consequences of foreign outsourcing.

One of the themes of this blog is that our vast assortment of economic problems (resulting from awful economic policies) sometimes compound one another.  When American (manufacturing) jobs leave the United States (or when they are filled by foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas) through a process of global labor arbitrage, people in affected fields are motivated to retrain and reeducate, which means that those people will go to college to compete for jobs that require a college education even though the supply of college-education-requiring jobs will not magically increase to accommodate them.  (However, cries from politicians, media pundits, and disconnected ivory tower intellectuals that more and better higher education is the solution to our nation's economic problems continue to increase.)  Also, more high school graduates will feel compelled to go to college.  Then, unable to find jobs with their bachelors degrees, they will add graduate and professional degrees to their arsenals, engaging in an education arms race, resulting in an oversupply of people with advanced degrees and boatloads of student loan debt, increasing the number of poor souls who are members of the indentured educated class.

Are you ready to join the third world?

LMAO -- very funny video

I don't know who created this video, but I found a link to it on the Third Tier Reality blog (comment #4 of that post).  I laughed hysterically to the point where tears came out of my eyes, so I thought I'd share it with everyone.  Enjoy!

Jersey Shore law school graduate seeks job 

This thread at the JD Underground Forum might explain the reference to the "Valvoline Dean".

Here's another funny cartoon from the same author.

Harvard Law Graduates having difficulty finding private sector jobs?

An article in the ABA Journal reports that some Harvard Law students have been having difficulty finding jobs at (presumably large) law firms.  I suspect that those students will eventually find employment at small and medium-sized firms.  However, it makes me wonder how students at less prestigious law schools are doing.  This is yet just one more piece of evidence that we are training far, far too many lawyers and that we need to dramatically reduce the number of seats available at the law schools, preferably by closing many of them.

Indoctrination and Higher Education

Here are some (edited and improved) comments that I left on Angel the Lawyer's and Hardknocks's blog, But I Did Everything Right!. I think they are worth republishing as a blog post. Near the end of a post titled Second Chances, New Beginnings, Hardknocks asked:

What does it say about the state of our nation and the effectiveness of our educational system when a first generation college student with dual degrees from the best universities in America believes the only option left for her is to take out yet another private loan to get her PhD because she is unable to find a job – any job – even as a barista at the local Starbucks? What does it say when this blog gets thousands of hits each month with numerous young people telling us that they’ve given up, contemplated suicide, or have to lie on their resume because they have too much education to get a job? -- Hardknocks

It means that our society has a very serious problem with producing too many college graduates, not just in the legal field, but in almost all fields. We are also producing far too many MBAs and even PhD. scientists.

In fact, many people with science degrees, including many with PhD's and postdocs, fled the career graveyard of science for law school to become patent lawyers, resulting in a large oversupply of patent lawyers. That people could have two advanced degrees and have difficulty obtaining employment commensurate with their education is probably unfathomable to most laypeople, most of whom have drank the education Kool Aid and believe that higher education is a guarantor of vocational success.

The end result of our society's Education Arms Race is that our economy is suffering from a tremendous amount of economic waste and that as a result our society is poorer. Instead of spending human effort producing real wealth--goods and services--we are squandering it training people for non-existent job positions. Money spent on student loans is money that will not be spent on consumer goods and services. Of course, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans are also suffering from the excruciating pain and humiliation of having spent time and money on higher education only to find themselves unemployed and unemployable in their fields. If they do not find jobs in their fields shortly after graduation, they will probably lose the economic value of their degrees. The realization that you have really fucked up your life, permanently, and that you really are a loser can drive you to suicide.

How could all of this happen? It's happening because of the government's abject failure to regulate the numbers of people in college or to even acknowledge the existence of this issue. This is just another example of the government's failure to regulate a market that suffers from a lack of feedback loops and information asymmetry. Lenders don't need to worry about whether college education is a good investment because student loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and colleges don't need to worry about whether the market needs more college graduates because they have an interest in having as many students as they can and they are fed by student loans, which means that their financial self interest runs contrary to the best interests of students and society.

Demosthenes then said:

If only we "elite, ""super-intelligent," "over-educated," yet "under-experienced" asshats had asked these questions before it was too late maybe we could have stood a chance. -- Demosthenes

That professional school education may not have economic value never occurs to most naive 21 year-olds who are trying to decide what the hell they're going to do with their English and Poly Sci degrees other than sling lattes. On other forums, such as the ABA Journal, commentators will chime in with the retort, "They should have known better before going to law school, I have no sympathy for them."

I suspect that most people do not understand that students have been heavily indoctrinated with the dogma that education is the key to success. This message can be found almost everywhere in our society. Just crack open a newspaper or turn on the radio or the TV and it probably won't take long until someone says that more people need to go to college to "train for the jobs of tomorrow" or that "unemployed workers need to retrain to obtain new skills for 'in demand' fields." Our politicians, smug economists, and the media believe this dogma unquestioningly and they try to sell it to the public as though it were an opiate of the masses. "We have unemployment problems in this state, and we're going to do something! We're going to invest in better education!"

This notion that higher education is a guarantor of an economically secure life permeates our society and it bombards people from all directions. We have all been indoctrinated with it since elementary school.

Is it thus any wonder that so many 21 year-olds almost unquestioningly believe that obtaining an advanced degree, especially a professional degree, will give them a leg-up in the job market? Misleading employment statistics put out by greedy self-interested institutions of higher debt (such as law schools) only help to confirm in people's minds what they have been indoctrinated to believe since nursery school.

Don't be shy!  Please leave a comment!

POLL -- Will Obama Win Reelection?

Here's another one of Mark Fiore's cartoons which ties into my poll about Obama's reelection prospects:



I think the foundations of our nation's economy will continue to deteriorate, driven by the economic force of Global Labor Arbitrage, and that the percentage of working-aged Americans who are employed will continue to decrease. Even if there is job growth, it will still feel like job loss if the number of new jobs is not larger than the growth in the population of working-aged people. So, I don't think Obama will win reelection simply because people who would otherwise support him will either vote against him or will lose interest in taking the effort needed to come to the polls and vote for him.

Is Obama a wuss? I don't know, but from what I can tell he isn't much better than any other conventional politician on economic issues. He hasn't done anything other than to offer feel-good stimulus legislation while completely failing to attempt to address let alone acknowledge the real causes of our nation's economic malaise. (However, he's taken good care of Wall Street and irresponsible bankers.) Also, I can't say that I'm real impressed with his handling of health care.

What do you think? Am I the only person who voted for Obama and who rooted for him in the primaries now wondering how things might have been different if Hillary had been elected? I really not all that surprised by Obama's failure to address our nation's economic problems; I never expected too much out of him other than to be merely not as bad as the other candidates.

Don't be shy!  Please leave a comment! 

One of Mark Fiore's better animated political cartoons

Check out Mark Fiore's new animated political cartoon, Plummeting Death Reform, which mocks Congress's legislative paralysis.  At first I thought it was a reference to Congress's failure to address our nation's economic problems, but it's really about health care. Did anyone else think that was good metaphor?  I thought it did a nice job of capturing how the Democrats' concern for the Republicans will ultimately drive themselves into the ground (not that they need any more help).

Don't be shy!  Please leave a comment!  

Insanity in Education--Law School Tuition Skyrockets as Employment Propsects Dwindle

While browsing over my alma mater's webpage I looked at how much it wanted for law school tuition and thought to myself, "That's not much more than what I paid a couple years ago."  Then I realized that that rate was not per year, but per semester!

This is another instance of Insanity in Education.  While employment prospects for lawyers have decreased precipitously in the past two decades, the cost of becoming a lawyer has increased dramatically with tuition seeming to have skyrocketed by about 80% in the past ten years.

According to the law school rankings page at U.S. News & World Report, the sticker price to attend a top law school is now around $43,000/year.  If you add in $15,000 for living expenses, the total cost is about $58,000/year or about $174,000 round trip.  At least JDs from the top ten law schools have some employment value and many of the students will earn some money doing summer associateships.

What is even more sickening is that the prices have also increased at many no-name third tier toilet schools as well, some of which want as much as $40,000/year ($165,000 total cost) with many asking for $30,000/year ($135,000 total cost).

How their unemployed, underemployed, and mostly unemployable graduates are supposed to pay back those amounts in addition to whatever undergraduate student loan debt they have is beyond me.  In the meantime, naive students continue to bust down schools' doors hoping to gain admission to these institutions of higher debt.

Blogger Esq. Never has an amusing take on what the Federal government's new Income-Based Repayment plan portends for law school loans--the taxpayers will end up footing the bill.  I suspect that taxpayers would probably end up footing the bill anyway even without IBR because the Education Bubble will have to burst at some point.

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