Unemployment levels beyond compare. Why no discussion on this?

Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini has a tweet that puts it quite well:

US economy now close to stall speed. From anemic recovery to tipping point to stall speed and growth recession. Is a double dip next?

Yet another reason I am simply relieved, even more than happy, that I have a job. A job that is secure. With indefinite tenure.

But, often across from me is the reality--students who are going to find it extremely difficult to find any job at all.

Yesterday, it was another lesson on the painful reality of unemployment.

I was merrily walking along the bikepath by the river, enjoying the fantastic spring day here.  Low 70s and nothing bu the sun.

And then all of a sudden I see a woman sprawled out on the grass by the path, with her cycle down, and a guy helping her out.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked them.  She asked me to hand her the water bottle that was on her bike.

The guy was wiping the blood of her knee and shin.  Without lifting his head, he asked me "what is the shortest way from here to the main road for her friend to pick her up in a car?"  I had no idea.  I mean, I knew that there was one route, but that was at least half a mile to the road.

I offered to wait with her if he wanted to bike up to the nearby homes to figure things out.  He thought that might work.

While he was gone, I asked her how she was.  She was in a great deal of pain--couldn't move her left leg.  An older woman on her bike stopped by.  She took out her first aid kit--yes, she had one in a carrier in her bike--and before beginning to wipe the blood asked her "are there any pathogens in your blood I should be worried about?"

What an important question to ask in a very respectful way, I thought to myself.

Meanwhile, a couple more people stopped by.  All of us at some point asked the same question: should we call the emergency folks?

This is where the reality of unemployment kicks in.  She didn't want to call for the ambulance because "I have no insurance and am unemployed.  I can't afford to pay for it."

It is awfully shocking to come head-to-head with that kind of a reality.  A reality that exists only as a theoretical and intellectual possibility for me, but is everyday life for many.

She lucked out in a way--a fire engine and emergency crew happened to be on the bike path for some other reason, and they gave her emergency care that she needed.  And bundled up her leg.  They advised her to head to ER, but she preferred to go home with her friend.  The fire chief drove to get the get friend's vehicle over to the bike path and load her into the car.

A half-hour had gone by as I resumed my walk.  All the sight of blood and sound of pain had made me queasy. I was afraid I was going to either throw up or pass out.  Am glad I know my own limits and tolerances when it comes to such situations.  I couldn't wait to get home and drink a whole lot of water and settle my stomach and my mind.

Thus, after a good night sleep, here I am blogging about unemployment.  I can't but help wonder and worry that there is very little public discussion about the high levels of unemployment.  And, an unemployment where the jobless are being so for weeks on.

We are in historic territory when it comes to such long-term unemployment:

The average unemployed person in America has been looking for work for 39.7 weeks, or more than nine months. That is the longest average unemployment spell since the Labor Department started keeping track in 1948

Robert Reich writes:

The overall jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Together with plummeting housing prices, falling wages for non-supervisory workers, a paltry 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter, and a precipitous drop in consumer confidence, the picture should be clear to anyone able to see clearly.
The recovery has stalled.
We’re not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.
The question is whether all this will wake up Washington, and stop the monumental distraction of the games being played over the debt ceiling and long-term budget deficit. The Republican lie that the nation’s long-term budget deficit is responsible for high unemployment would be laughable if it weren’t so tragically irrelevant to the current situation.

Image of the day: Cricket in Rome. Yes, Italy!

Yes, cricket with all the pads and helmets. But, in Rome!  The NY Times has a neat story on this:

In these edgier patches of the city, whose schemers and dreamers were immortalized in the early 1960s by the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, a new Rome is taking shape. It is filled with Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Indians and other immigrants who are quietly transforming the texture of one of Europe’s most homogeneous cities, blending their own traditions with a Roman accent.

Must be quite surreal to watch this live ...

As the sun began to set, one Green Bangla player called out from the bench to anyone who would listen. “Hey, look at me! I scored 50 points!” His accent, in flawless Italian, was as Roman as any Roman’s.

 It is one crazy world in which we live.  South Asians in Italy playing cricket.  And I, from India, drooling for pasta here in America.  I love this craziness :)

I suppose now the stereotypical "spicy meataballes" can mean a completely different kind of spice, eh!

Drool. Cook. Eat. Aaaah!

The little more than an hour of a drive from work to home means that often my mind wanders about, and an evening ago it was about food. As I went through various options, I settled on a pasta dish for dinner.

But, what kind?

This is spring time, after all, and I wanted to use a couple of fresh ingredients.  So, I stopped at my favorite grocery store close to home, picked up some fresh tomatoes and spinach.  Yes, I knew that I had all the other ingredients at home.

Couldn't even wait to get into home-clothes--went straight into the kitchen, and started with the garlic.

Then diced up the tomatoes.  Got a pot of water going to boil the penne pasta.  And over another flame olive oil to get the garlic to release its flavor.  Threw the pasta into the boiling water, and tossed in chili flakes into the oil where the garlic had transformed into tempting golden colors.  And then all the spinach went in, along with a couple of tablespoons of capers and quite a few kalamata olives.  A few minutes later, the diced tomatoes and salt.

And then it was all a matter of tossing in the pasta from the boiling water into this colorful mix.  A minute after mixing it all, the flames were all off and I went away from the delightful aromas to finally change into comfy home clothes.

Came back and served myself the pasta, and grated some parmesan on it.  And, after I was done, I brewed a cup of decaf coffee.

I was ready to tackle the problems of the world.

Yemen ... I know ye from my posts

With all the news updates about the protests and proto-civil-war in Yemen, here are a few of my own posts about Yemen over the past few months:

About President "Uncle Ali" ... a Yemeni version of Musharraf
How even students in my class got all worked up about the status of women in Yemen--and this was in a class way back in March 2010!
Back in July 2010, the NY Times Magazine had a lengthy piece titled, "Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?" ... to which my response then was, as is now, "The answer is a no-brainer!"

There is something seriously wrong when a bloke like me is able to follow events in a far away country and blog about them, only to realize that our government lags way behind in its policies.  If that is my case, imagine then the frustrations of phenomenally informed and qualified commentators like Juan Cole!

BTW, recall these Jon Stewart classics on Yemen?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen - Sad Libs
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Shabana Azmi on NPR ... what a pleasant surprise!

A couple of mornings ago, I was driving to work and listening to NPR when it was a segment on Shabana Azmi.  Yes, that same Azmi from Indian movies.  It was cool. 

Today, I was thinking about that as I was driving back home, and I realized that I couldn't recall any particular song from her movies.  I mean, Azmi was not one who was that stereotypical song/dance Bollywood actor.  There was a lot of arty and intellectual aspect in her acting and the characters she played--even in the commercial films. 

My earliest memory of Azmi is from a wonderfully classic Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players.)  I simply loved that movie, which I recall watching at home on television.  We had only one channel--Dhoordharshan--which would telecast the art movies that rarely ever screened in movie halls because these were not the formulaic ones.  I had my fill watching quite a few non-Bollywood movies that way, and enjoyed them all.  But, I digress ...

Much later in life, here in the US, I did watch the controversial Fire.  While the actors, with Azmi in the lead role, did a great job, I didn't care much for the movie because it raced to the sexual angle and played it up more than the love itself.  It would have been an awesome movie if only Deepa Mehta had taken the time to tell the story of love between the two women in those very oppressive contexts.

Anyway, thanks to YouTube, I am able to enjoy this song here--though, as one who watched very few movies when I was a kid and teenager, I admit that I have always liked this song even though I have no clue about the movie itself.

Graduate School: It is not unemployment if you pay tuition

A student "D" sends me an email with a link to the video embedded here, and adds "I saw this clip about Grad school and thought of you...real short, only a couple minutes, well worth your time"

And I thought no student ever listens to me, or reads what I write :) 

Seriously though, my thanks to "D," who has on more than one occasion engaged me in discussions ...

Tuition increase in Oregon ... and the money kept rolling in ...

With the slowdown in the economy, and the free falling home prices, the talk of a double-dip recession is getting louder and louder.  Against such a background comes this news report:

Oregon's seven universities have proposed an average 7.5 percent tuition increase for full-time, resident undergraduate students next year, pushing the average annual cost of tuition and fees to $7,634. ...
The proposed increases, which the State Board of Higher Education is expected to approve Friday, range from 5.1 percent at Western Oregon University to 9 percent at PSU, the University of Oregon and the Oregon Institute of Technology. Proposed increases are 8.1 percent at Oregon State University and 6.8 percent at Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon universities.

I suppose we need all that extra money for rock-climbing walls, re-branding, ... who cares if the promise of college education as the ticket to economic prosperity is a mere selling strategy, right?

In my op-ed piece, I wrote that:

At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries are colleges and universities that are, naturally, recording enrollment increases -- even in my classes in the summer. This enrollment growth then triggers the need for additional facilities, which necessitates a demand for more money from students and taxpayers.

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever. As economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families and taxpayers, begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

But, if the rates are going up 7.5%, .... oh wait, didn't I voice the same worries quite a few months ago?

College was supposed to be hard. "was" is the operative word :(

If ever it is the case that a crisis is too good an opportunity to waste, well, now is the time to seriously rethink higher education here in the US.  And, what we do here will spread to the rest of the world too.  Not a single day passes without reading yet another piece that makes me wonder for how much longer this craziness in higher education can go on ...

Consider the following chart from Economix:

The chart easily tells the story, which is:

a higher share of college graduates under age 25 were employed in 2000 than in 2010 — 81 percent versus 74.4 percent. And a higher share of this demographic was employed in jobs that required college degrees a decade ago than last year — 59.7 percent versus 45.8 percent.

A phenomenally wasteful underemployment.  A kind of underemployment that is bound to have terrible implications for the rest of the graduates' lives.

But then one might contend that this is lowering education to nothing but utilitarian calculations.  But, hello, most students are in college only for those reasons.  If they could get going on a $30,000 job without the requirement of a college degree, I bet that the enrollment at my college will be down to a fifth or less.

As Loius Menand points out in his wonderful book-review essay in the New Yorker, it was not always like this:

A lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to both theories. The system is designed to be both meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional schools and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the importance of college for everyone. We want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive. ...
It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything?

Yes, are most students learning anything, more so given the expensive nature of the investment?

when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.
If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.
These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.

College is no longer supposed to be hard.  It is now an easy ponzi scheme.

From curmudgeon to cowboys and commencement

The best lines I read today are from this rather polemic op-ed by the curmudgeonly Harvey Mansfield:

A graduate student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.

With all his writing on manliness and gripes about a feminized culture, Mansfield does come across at times, if not all the time, as an academic cowboy of sorts.  Atul Gawande uses the same cowboy metaphor, but in a completely different way in his commencement address to the graduating class of Harvard's medical students.  Even if I were not the Gawande fan that I am, well, it is a kind of commencement address that makes a lot of sense.  Speaking about the changes in the medical profession over the last couple of generations, and the spiraling cost of healthcare, Gawande notes that "We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need."

The metaphor is easy to grasp--we have seen how fast and efficient the pit crew people work, and work as a team.  We imagine the cowboy to be a lonely horseback rider herding cattle.  And then Gawande concludes with this:

Recently, you might be interested to know, I met an actual cowboy. He described to me how cowboys do their job today, herding thousands of cattle. They have tightly organized teams, with everyone assigned specific positions and communicating with each other constantly. They have protocols and checklists for bad weather, emergencies, the inoculations they must dispense. Even the cowboys, it turns out, function like pit crews now. It may be time for us to join them.

To some extent, the old-fashioned academe too used to function like pit crews more than as cowboys.  But, the rapid and over-specialization of academics even at teaching universities like mine has transformed faculty into pedantic cowboys, I suppose.

Oh for a brief moment in the sun ...

For a brief few hours it was a gorgeous spring day here.

Sun, blue sky, puffy white and grey clouds, with an occasional rain drop.  All we need is a couple of hours that way, and I am willing to overlook how nature is otherwise screwing us up with a February weather during these last few days in May.

It is evening, and the rains are back.  The raindrops falling on the roof and on the leaves are loud enough, and yet somehow comforting enough.  I suppose the comfort comes from the familiarity after all these years in Oregon.  Like a wonderful friend having annoying habits!

The sunny warmth and the blue sky already seems like a distant memory.  Good thing I took a bunch of photographs to remind myself that it was not in my imagination!

The river was gorgeous.  People were out and about--I think we all knew that good things, unfortunately, come to an end, and we wanted to enjoy the moment while it lasted.  As I hurried along the path, I overheard two women complaining about their mothers.  In a large group, which seemed like two families all on bikes, one father yelled out to the other father that it was getting all numb down there.  Two older women were seated on a bench, in the sun, and conversing.  A kid asked his mother why there was no trash can right there for him to throw the candy wrappers, and his mother directed him to carry that for a while.  A dog wagged its tail wildly and was so excited to see me that I stopped to pet that pooch.  Which is why I care not that it is raining again.

Are you middle class? You think you are poor? Check this out

If ever you are like me, then, well, I feel sorry for you.   Haha!

Ok, kidding aside, if ever you have doubts on your own economic standing here in the US of A, and want to figure out where exactly you fall along the income spectrum, well, take a look at this table which will tell you which income percentile you belong to.

What is, however, more interesting is the following chart (in fact, it is this chart that led me to the income percentile table too)

 

"Oh my freaking lord" is probably what you are thinking.
Being rich or poor in material terms is all relative.  Check this map of the world:

A generational change: The new ethos of the young and the restless

I totally get it that my students are different from me, perhaps even more than how my generation and I were different from our predecessors.  Which is why I don't care much when students have their smartphones always visible to them on their desks in the classrooms.  Or when students have their laptops open ... as long as they are able to respond to the questions I have for them, and jump in with relevant and interesting comments.  After all, I experienced this even with my daughter, who was a big time multi-tasker even a decade ago, which seems like a century ago.

Which is why the following from a NY Times report on the  Millennials (Gen Y) does not surprise me at all:

Perhaps most important, many of the behaviors that older generations interpret as laziness may actually enhance young people’s productivity, say researchers who study Generation Y.

Members of Gen Y, for example, are significantly more likely than Gen X’ers and boomers to say they are more productive working in teams than on their own, according to Don Tapscott, author of “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World,” a book based on interviews with 11,000 millennials.

To older workers, wanting help looks like laziness; to younger workers, the gains that come from teamwork have been learned from the collaborative nature of their childhood activities, which included social networks, crowd-sourcing and even video games like World of Warcraft that “emphasize cooperative rather than individual competition,” Mr. Tapscott says.

Employers also complain about millennials checking Facebook and Twitter on the job, or working with their ear buds in.

Older workers have a strong sense of separate spheres for work and play: the cubicle is for work, and home is for fun. But to millennials, the boundaries between work and play are fuzzier, said Michael D. Hais, co-author of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics.”

There is a big time blurring between work and fun that is even more than how it is in my life.  To recall the words of a really, really old dude, "the times they are a-changing." Again. And again.