Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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ZIRP and Youth Unemployment

WorldNetDaily gives us a breakdown of American unemployment by age group with some trustworthy sources to add commentary.

What’s happening is a bit complicated.

  • ZIRP means older workers can’t earn interest on savings, so they must remain in the workforce longer than they might otherwise
  • These older, more experienced workers out-compete younger workers for management positions — more of the youth find themselves stalled in place
  • Younger people take advantage of low interest rates and minimal credit checks to remain in school as long as possible to add to their certifications, but staying out of the labor force

There is no real easy way out of this situation given that governments around the world have committed themselves to a destructive monetary policy. Old workers, in more ordinary times, would be essentially lending banks the money that they would then, in turn, lend out to younger people to finance their living expenses and business projects. What instead happens is that old workers remain in their incumbency, because it’s less attractive for them to lend money to the banks (save and live off the interest) than it is for them to remain in the workforce drawing a salary and out-competing younger workers.

There’s also the issue of most academic education being completely disconnected from the needs of industry:

But beyond the issues of a sluggish economy, a 2014 study by Bentley University illustrates an enormous gap between what employers want and what Millennials give on the job. Companies report a lack of work ethic, lack of hard skills, and lack of preparedness as some of the reasons behind the high employment rate for young people. “Among the perceptions from the survey were that recent college graduates are harder to retain, lack a strong work ethic and aren’t as willing to pay their dues as previous generations were.”

Younger workers in turn are additionally squeezed by immigration, which tends to consist of younger people also going after less skilled positions. In Japan, where there is no open immigration, there are nonetheless similar issues with youth unemployment (by conventional metrics) outpacing that of the older people, and younger people having trouble attaining all the typical stages of life development which would be ordinarily expected.

Many of these issues are broadly understood — even across the political spectrum in some cases — but democratic states tend to struggle to reform themselves, instead hoping to muddle through without challenging fundamental assumptions. Under popular democracy, it’s necessary to establish a broad and enthusiastic consensus on major policy changes in most situations. This process is necessarily expensive and sometimes impossible, particularly on complex issues which involve significant trade-offs for large and influential portions of society. This is why democracies tend to lurch from crisis to crisis — because only the crisis can provide the impetus for the creation of a new consensus.

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A Roadmap for Cheap Private Education

Michael Strong, a serial founder of charter schools, has written a concise blueprint to educate a child for less than $3,000 per year. It’s worth your time. I found it through Isegoria’s posts on the essay.

I managed to hit all three of his performance metrics in a conventional private school that cost much more than that, and I’m confident that his method is many multiples better than anything I’ve seen a contemporary private school teach.

The other key that parents should keep in mind is that plenty of private schools have a student body that’s morally dissolute — and we should expect that dissolution to be much worse in the next generation. The high cost is also a major factor.

A year at a top high school for most middle class families who won’t qualify for financial aid often exceeds $40,000 per year. That’s more than enough to seed a business or just to maintain the family assets. It also means that your kid will be associated with a lot of high-achieving dope smokers, sluts, and irredeemable nerds whose parents can afford tuition.

What’s key is in teaching superior skills in reading, writing, arithmetic, and some sort of practical art with real world value. The cost comes from hiring expert tutorial help, which should be within the range of anyone earning a lower middle class household income or better:

Twenty-five dollars an hour buys an excellent tutor (or academic coach) in most parts of the country.  Many graduate students or retired people would be glad to teach a well-behaved, motivated young person for $25 per hour.  Two days of mathematics coaching would thus be $50 per week; another two days of humanities (reading, writing, and conversation) coaching would be another $50 per week.  At one hundred dollars per week one can buy thirty weeks per year of personalized academic coaching for $3,000.

Whether it requires more or less than this to educate your child depends on his or her motivation, your own skill set and time, and your local talent pool.  Your child might need more hours of contact time per week, you may be able to supplement tutors so that your child needs less contact time, you may find great people willing to tutor for less, etc.  In an alternative model, the parents may provide 100% of the instruction until secondary school, at which point you could budget more than $6,000 per year for custom secondary instruction.

By means of creating joint lessons with other home-schoolers with children interested in similar subjects, you could hire tutors for small “classes” of students and share the costs.  Thus if there were four students engaged in a given set of lessons/tutoring sessions your $3,000 would stretch to four times as many contact hours.  Indeed, in some cases these informal tutoring arrangements can result in the creation of a “private school.”  The point is not whether or not it is a school – it is whether or not your child is getting first-class, personal attention from a talented and caring educator who knows and loves their academic subject.

The more fundamental point is that by means of focusing on truly essential core behavioral characteristics, such as responsibility, motivation, politeness, etc., and on very high-level core academic skills, including serious reading, writing, and mathematics advancement, it is possible to provide a superb education for your child at home for very little cost.

To the extent that we still have the liberty to provide this sort of education to our children, we ought to use it as much as we can.

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Book Review – The True History of the American Revolution

 

This is a popular book in our little corner of the web, and I took some time earlier this summer to get through it. Foseti wrote about it back in 2008.

You can pick it up for less than a buck in eBook at Amazon or for free from Archive.org.

What’s remarkable about it is that it will probably contradict a fair amount of what you already think that you know about the American revolution, while also bringing to your attention some of the context of English politics during the revolution which you probably would be unaware of unless you happen to be a specialist in this period. In particular, the exact counts of relative force levels between the colonists and the British surprised me. Fisher strongly alludes to the conclusion that the Americans couldn’t have won the war had General Howe actually prosecuted it to the fullest.

Fisher also provides some of the opposing perspective relative to the typical American tale about unfair taxation and duties providing the impetus for the revolution. What was a more significant factor was that the colonists had been flouting British regulation of trade for decades already. What the colonists revolted against was the actual enforcement of those laws. The colonists were eager to have the military protection from the British empire, but far less eager to comply with their obligations to finance it. This coincided with an explosion in popularity of classical liberal thought, most importantly influenced by the popularization of Locke.

American histories tend not to emphasize this. If you knew some details about all the British lollygagging in New York for much of the war, you might have gotten the sense that something was screwy, but seeing the relative force numbers in plain language makes it obvious that the American colonials were, more or less, allowed to win. Another major area of coverage is the social-justice-warrior behavior of the American patriot party. Essentially, the patriots were able to mobilize a highly ideological minority to suppress loyalist opinion and keep moderates on the sidelines:

But the mobs went on with their work in spite of [John] Adams’ protest. All through the Revolution the loyalists were roughly handled, banished, and their property confiscated. Even those who were neutral and living quietly were often ordered out of the country by county committees, because it was found that a prominent family which remained neutral deterred by their silent influence many who otherwise would have joined the rebel cause. Few loyalists dared write about politics in private letters, because all such letters were opened by the patriots. In many of them which have been preserved we find the statement that the writers would like to speak of public affairs but dare not. A mere chance of most innocent expression might bring on severe punishment or mob violence.

These mob techniques are not so different from today’s technologically-enabled mobs, except perhaps the old kind were more eager to use tar and feathers.

This is not, then, a new factor in American life, but instead is a founding tendency which we see periodically re-emerging throughout our history. It also meant the ruination of countless loyalists, who either lived on in poverty or otherwise had to flee back to the home country:

The disastrous effects of the rise of the lower orders of the people into power appeared everywhere, leaving its varied and peculiar characteristics in each community, but New England suffered least of all. In Virginia its work was destructive and complete, for all that made Virginia great, and produced her remarkable men, was her aristocracy of tobacco planters. This aristocracy forced on the Revolution with heroic enthusiasm against the will of the lower classes, little dreaming that they were forcing it on to their own destruction. But in 1780 the result was already so obvious that Chastellux, the French traveler, saw it with the utmost clearness, and in his book he prophesies Virginia’s gradual sinking into the insignificance which we have seen in our time.

When the British began to prosecute the war in earnest after the replacement of Howe in 1778 by General Clinton, it was essentially too late to prevent the entry of the French into the war and the eventual conclusion.

It’s short book, clearly-written, and well worth your time if you’re interested in learning a more balanced view of the American founding.

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