This is the third article expressing an algorithm for aspects important to life. The first two algorithms were for well-being and exercise. Both of these had narrow focuses and did not claim to work out all the details, but pointed to the most important dimensions of each for individual flourishing. Unfortunately, everything described in detail in those articles is given very little attention within our schools and many people simply do not leave high school having learned the most important knowledge to understand individual and collective well-being. This is unfortunate. Schools are simply not teaching and measuring much of value anymore. Much of the structure is still based on nineteenth century ideas when nations could train future employees in easily predictable skills that they could turn around and use for 40 years at the same employer and then retire or die young. The future of work looks entirely different. Most students sitting in our classrooms today have no way of predicting what content and skills they will need in the future. Any attempt to do so is simply asinine and is ignorant of what is taking place in the realms of machine learning, automation, robotics, globalization, and mass communication technologies. Studying traditional subjects with pre-written curricula in order to go to a university, where “the typical 2016 college graduate has $37,172 in student loan debt, up six percent from last year”, so one can go on to earn a median income below what it was in the 1970’s doesn’t make sense. It makes even less sense to enter the workforce after years of mind numbing effort with that much debt for the sake of a fancy credential when large companies that hire the best talent, like Google and Ernst and Young, have “moved away from a focus on GPAs and brand name schools”. All of this calls for a different kind of emphasis in schools. An emphasis on what will matter most in the twenty-first century: the ability to autonomously and creatively problem solve while engaging in global citizenship. To that end, the article that follows will discuss some of dimensions necessary to realize those aims. The Algorithm Edu21 = f(QoL, S) Education for the twenty first century should be a function of teaching students how to develop higher levels of quality of life and sustainability. Origins Disclaimer: This section is rather technical and not entirely necessary for those who just want to skip to the next one and see results of the algorithm in action. Edu21 was generated while trying to contrast Tyler Cowen’s formula for a good society, basic rights and wealth plus, with Nic Marks’ formula for the Happy Planet Index, which “Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist and one of the founding fathers of ecological economics” described as “the ultimate efficiency ratio – the final valuable output divided by the original scarce input.” That is, the HPI can be thought of as the degree to which happy and long lives are achieved per unit of ecological resource consumption (Kindle Locations 325-330): Marks elaborates on what goes into the two main components by explaining that Happy Life Years is made up of life satisfaction and life expectancy data and: can be seen as happiness-adjusted life expectancy. The measurement has a powerful logic to it. It recognizes that a satisfying life is not ideal if it is short; and that a long life is not ideal if it is miserable. (Kindle Locations 273-275) He then explains that, “In our opinion, the current best available approach is the ecological footprint, developed by ecologists Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees”: Our ecological footprint is a measure of the amount of land required to provide for all of our resource requirements, including the amount of vegetated land required to absorb our CO2 emissions. This figure is expressed in units of “global hectares” (gHa). The advantage of this approach is that it is also possible to estimate the total amount of productive hectares available on the whole planet. Dividing this by the world’s total population, everyone’s global fair share of ecological resource use can be estimated. Using the latest footprint methodology – and it should be noted that this is a developing methodology – this estimate is 2.1 gHa per person. (Kindle Locations 276-282) While these two formula are good places to start a discussion on what’s important, they don’t quite capture everything we would hope for our children. This is made painfully clear by Martin Seligman in Flourish when he writes: in one or two words, what do you most want for your children? It’s obvious that many of those hopes aren’t captured by Cowen’s basic rights (defined as negative liberties such as having the right not to be murdered, tortured, or abused) and wealth plus (defined as typical GDP that accounts for leisure time, in-home work, and environmental impact) or Marks’ measurements of life satisfaction (taken from Gallup’s World Poll on a 1-10 scale) and life expectancy. Edu21, in contrast, would account for the traits listed by Seligman, as well as those by Cowen and Marks, because QoL as used here is defined as such: Quality of life is a function of subjective well-being and objective well-being, where subjective well-being is defined as a function of hedonic pleasure, life-satisfaction, and connection to others, which the link above describes in detail. Subjective well-being is then responsible for covering our most important hopes for our children, while objective well-being takes care of the other issues related to rights, wealth, and health as defined below: OWB = f(H, W, E, S) Objective well-being is a function of health, wealth, education, and security. When using this more robust aim for students than what Marks calls “happy life years” above, we have much more to work with in the domain of education for the twenty first century, especially when paired with the all important dimension of sustainability as measured by the ecological footprint that Marks uses and which Cowen would at least appreciate as a good approximation, even if he were to prefer some other measure of environmental impact for his wealth plus metric. An Edu21 School With all that technical background out of the way, it’s definitely time to describe what an Edu21 school might look like. The algorithm can point the way. Rather than typical subject blocks and standardization of school content, concepts, skills, and assessments, an Edu21 school would focus on the major aspects of developing quality of life and increasing sustainability, aka sustainable development. As Michael Horn, the co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, points out in an Atlantic article: content knowledge will continue to matter, but students will learn content in different ways—from online modules to in-person sessions. A core set of standards will be critical for all students to master—or, in some cases, gain exposure to—in English, mathematics, history, and science. These standards should be fewer, such that as students master them, they can go deep in areas they enjoy to find their passions and develop expertise. For example, every student may not need to master Algebra. Exposure to music and arts, as well as such things as financial literacy, economics, engineering, and computer science will also be critical to build a foundation for students with an eye toward helping them have a broad enough base such that they can find and develop passions and be engaged citizens. Finally, physical education will continue to have a role in schools, but the purpose will be to help students lead healthy lives--not necessarily to develop athletes—and to bolster learning, as evidence shows that exercising before learning can greatly improve productivity. The day may still wind up being divided into different blocks or “periods” for various emphases throughout, but it wouldn’t need to be done by traditional subjects. Much time would be devoted to learning how to increase subjective well-being for individuals, as it forms the heart of what we care most about, while also being “the key to unlocking the creativity and innovation we need to create a better future,” as Marks points out (Kindle Locations 452-455). This is similar to the function that many language, social studies, and arts classes provide now, but without the explicit mandate to focus on well-being. The International Baccalaureate has a mission that implies much of this with its desire “to create a better and more peaceful world”. In learning how to increase subjective well-being and alleviate suffering for both themselves and others, students would of course have to learn about the factors of objective well-being and how they contribute to various states of consciousness for both themselves and others. This is a similar role played by many science, math, PE, and social studies courses, but often without the connection to why these subjects are important as foundations for well-being. And finally, when they are able to understand clearly how to improve quality of life for all and the importance of that endeavor, it will be obvious that Marks is right when he states, “It makes no sense if a nation’s current well-being comes at the expense of its future well-being,” (Kindle Locations 233-239) and that, “sustainability can be thought of as creating future happiness – human happiness that lasts over time” (Kindle Locations 446-448). This understanding is, again, fairly similar to what students might learn in a social studies, science, or math class without necessarily seeing how it fits into a broader picture. What It Might All Look Like This could quite easily create a new looking school day. One that worked on problems, projects, challenges, curiosities, and designing products. Teachers could pose questions and guide students to think about the important questions in life regarding quality of life and then have them investigate autonomously, either individually or cooperatively. This would not require a pre-written curriculum or that every student learn the same thing. Only that they learn how to learn, that they focus on real, current issues, and that they always be thinking of others and how they can creatively solve problems for themselves and those that are suffering in some way. In not following a pre-written curriculum, but instead deliberating, cooperating, and building consensus on what is important, students will also be better prepared to act as democratic citizens rather than passive recipients and receptacles of the school’s information. Students that are passionate about the arts could spend most of their day working on projects and products, possibly as designers for other students who are more interested in making videos or websites that advocate for community initiatives. The two students could then pair up with a third that is even more interested in coding and wants to design a website to support the project, while a fourth might be more numbers oriented and design and carry out a research project to gather data on the issue. The point is that all these students would be learning unique skills they are passionate about in a “just in time” manner, while simultaneously developing the ability to work both independently and cooperatively. They would all learn from each other, while also not sacrificing their individuality and still be working to have a positive impact on their own worlds and the world at large. In closing The Happiness Manifesto, Marks writes: We urgently need a positive vision of our future. We need to stimulate people not to run away but instead to engage, to have compassion, to be open, to be flexible, to be creative and innovative. We need to find a better way, and we won’t get there by just doing the same as before. These actions should be seen as an invitation, an invitation to try things differently: in our families, in our communities, in our businesses and in our governments. All of the above is true. However, that positive vision for our future starts with education. It starts by rethinking what we’ve done before and realizing that what got us here won’t get us to where we need and want to go. The world is changing quickly and education isn’t adapting. It needs to adapt now and Edu21 is one path forward. A path to “purpose, freedom, and creativity”.
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I turned 29 today. I’ve essentially accomplished every personal goal I set for my life already. I’m lucky in that respect. Success and luck really do go hand in hand. I have a bucket list of things to do and places to visit before I die. I made it a few years back. There are 99 things and places on the list. I’ve finished 12 of them. The rest don’t matter. Well, maybe the doctorate. We’ll see. I also literally can’t think of anything I want. I own everything that I desire. A Ducati would be cool, but I’ve owned bikes in the past and they can be a pain in the ass. They’re fun for a few hours, but books and exercise are more fun after the adrenaline wears off. I even wrote down my perfect day at the time I made the bucket list a few years ago. I spend almost every weekend living what I described as my perfect day back then. Weekdays aren’t terribly far off either. What does one do when they find themselves in this situation of self-actualization, where their desires and goals are satisfied? Try one’s hardest to actualize others. In the long-run, this means constantly focusing on education and learning. Creating, innovating, and inventing new things so that the whole world is wealthier and has more options as a result. If this wealth creation is paired with respect for all sentient life by creating various universal rights and inclusive institutions, we have a winning formula for the “good life”: rights plus wealth. This means education for democratic citizenship and entrepreneurship so that students have the ability to turn innovative ideas into products of value that solve problems and challenges for others. It means teaching them about sustainable development, the practice of scientifically and morally based problem solving. These skills lets them “do good better”. However, most people can’t wait for the long-run to happen. They need rights and wealth now, not tomorrow. It is a tragedy that millions die every year because they are poor. We can save these these lives. Organizations like Give Well, Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, 80,000 Hours, The Centre for Effective Altruism, and The Copenhagen Consensus are all doing fantastic work to figure out exactly where the most marginal benefit per dollar spent on humanitarian and philanthropic efforts is coming from. For example, Give Well estimates that “you can save a person’s life for approximately $3,500.” This is the “person” whom Megan and I will be giving the $3,500 from this post’s title to. It is a statistical person. And we aren’t even giving the whole amount tonight. Both of our parents donated to Give Well organizations for our birthdays this year. They also gave for Christmas at our request. We currently give $100 each month to Give Well and let them allocate it as they see best fit. From the amounts we’ve given or had donated on our behalf over this past year, we only need to donate an additional $1,800 to save that life. With all the wonderful birthday wishes written to me today just because I was born, I feel it’s very important to live a life that is deserving of that celebration. At this moment, I can’t think of a better way to deserve those wishes than by trying to prevent others from dying prematurely and having their loved ones celebrate their birthdays without them. Admittedly, it’s much harder to get worked up emotionally about donating to causes based on statistics. It doesn’t have the same emotional drive as watching a firefighter save a person by pulling them from a burning house. This is why Bertrand Russell, in The Aims of Education, stated: The next stage in the development of a desirable form of sensitiveness is sympathy. There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child will cry because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose, affords the basis for the further developments. The two enlargements that are needed are: first, to feel sympathy even when the sufferer is not an object of special affection; secondly, to feel it when the suffering is merely known to be occurring, not sensibly present. The second of these enlargements depends largely upon intelligence. It may only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is portrayed vividly and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other hand, go so far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important. Almost everybody is deeply affected when someone he loves suffers from cancer. Most people are moved when they see the sufferings of unknown patients in hospitals. Yet when they read that the death-rate from cancer is such-and-such, they are as a rule only moved to momentary personal fear lest they or someone dear to them should acquire the disease. The same is true of war: people think it dreadful when their son or brother is mutilated, but they do not think it a million times as dreadful that a million people should be mutilated. A man who is full of kindliness in all personal dealings may derive his income from incitement to war or from the torture of children in ‘backward’ countries. All these familiar phenomena are due to the fact that sympathy is not stirred, in most people, by a merely abstract stimulus. A large proportion of the evils in the modern world would cease if this could be remedied. Science has greatly increased our power of affecting the lives of distant people, without increasing our sympathy for them. Suppose you are a shareholder in a company which manufactures cotton in Shanghai. You may be a busy man, who has merely followed financial advice in making the investment; neither Shanghai nor cotton interest you, but only your dividends. Yet you become part of the force leading to massacres of innocent people, and your dividends would disappear if little children were not forced into unnatural and dangerous toil. You do not mind, because you have never seen the children, and an abstract stimulus cannot move you. That is the fundamental reason why large-scale industrialism is so cruel, and why oppression of subject races is tolerated. An education producing sensitiveness to abstract stimuli would make such things impossible. (p. 401-402) I’ll keep waiting and working on education to “make such things impossible”. In the meanwhile, I will also continue to advocate and give for those who weren’t born with the extreme luck that I was. I hope to replicate and expand this giving each year for the rest of my life. I hope this encourages a few others to do so as well.
Living in a modern nation-state requires a complex interplay of state centralization, rule of law, and political accountability. The latter two components are necessary constraints on the former and are often carried out by developing institutions that can be labeled either inclusive or extractive. Inclusive institutions tend to create prosperity, while extractive ones tend to ultimately lead to ever increasing concentrations of wealth among an elite who eventually find themselves having to answer to the majority, either in non-violent or violent events, or by simply draining the state of its prosperity over time. State centralization is important for creating a monopoly on force and violence, which can be used through the rule of law to create inclusive institutions that allow citizens to interact freely in the knowledge that their innovations won’t be stolen or extracted by force by those who have the most might. Extractive institutions are those that essentially embrace the idea that “might makes right” and as result often completely stifle innovation and the creation, propagation, and dissemination of new ideas, which might challenge the extractive process that so enriches the empowered elite. One form of power that is extractive in nature is that of the medieval form of political and military structure known as feudalism. It is defined below: Feudalism: The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection. The idea that “peasants are obliged to live on their lord’s land and give homage” is largely what exists in today’s America. This might seem dramatic or hyperbolic, but let’s examine it more closely. There are three major ways in which one might see this as true today: labor mobility, income tax, and debt. Labor Mobility Free movement of labor (people as workers) is an essential liberty among free people. In its most extreme negation, you have slavery, where people are viewed as property, and just above that you have feudalism, in which peasants are tied to the land they work in order to pay their lord homage. But are people tied to the land in today’s America in the same manner that they were during feudal Europe? In one major way, yes. People do not have the freedom to move between nations as they please. Some do not even have the freedom to move between states due to restrictions. Of course, these areas of land are much larger than previously, but the fact remains that a person in America cannot simply buy a ticket and fly to North Korea or vice versa, even if they can afford the cost, because of visa and immigration restrictions created by the state powers of those nations. Even movement from America to prosperous nations such as Singapore or South Korea that America is on good terms with, requires huge amounts of work, red tape, and worker restrictions with all sorts of stipulations on what work can and cannot be done with caveats for deportation at all turns. This is hugely important when capital is given freedom to move between nations. When capital can move, but people cannot, “a race to the bottom” begins. Corporations are able to move their capital to whatever nation will supply the cheapest labor. In recent history, American companies moved their capital to China so as to capitalize on the lower wages workers were willing to earn compared to their American labor counterparts. As China’s labor becomes more expensive and wages rise, we see capital already moving to other nations in and around Southeast Asia, primarily Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, and parts of India. This primarily happens as the incomes of these nations, such as China, rise over time due to increases in real GDP and workers begin to demand higher wages. Rather than acquiesce to demands from labor over wage increases, capital can simply move to a new location. Once Southeast Asia becomes too expensive, we are likely to see a larger movement into Africa and parts of South America. Of course, we can say that this would eventually lead to some sort of global equilibrium where wages rise among the nations that capital temporarily stops over in. This would happen in the long-run and as Keynes famously said, “In the long run we are all dead.” Luckily we don’t have to wait for the long-run equilibrium on world wide wage increases. If people were given the freedom to move their labor to nations that had higher wages, they would surely seize it. This is because people as laborers understand that their geographic location accounts for most of their income (60 percent of variability in global incomes). In fact, we see this even though it is technically not legal in places where poor nations border richer ones. Mexico and America, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, India and the UAE, and the Philippines and Singapore. All of these nations have huge migrations of people trying to escape being tied to their own lands that suffer from poorer working conditions and poverty. This begs the question on migration from America for a better a life. America is quite rich already, but many Americans would still be better off trading their labor in other nations if given the opportunity. Allowing this to happen more freely would also create “a race to the top” as nations and corporations would be forced to pay labor more in order to attract the best workers available today, rather than tomorrow in some distant global wage equilibrium described above in the “race to the bottom” scenario that currently operates. Not only would this freer movement of labor benefit Americans, but it would also benefit the entire world. Many economists agree this would increase world GDP somewhere between two and three times what it currently is. Some have even stated that it would be “the world’s best anti-poverty program,” exceeding even the current benefits seen from free trade, which is really just free movement of capital. Income Tax A lack of labor mobility keeps people tied to the land in which they are born, creates a “race to the bottom” in wages, and prevents world GDP from increasing as quickly as it could otherwise and therefore hurting efforts to alleviate world poverty. However, one might argue that within a given nation, there isn’t much feudalism happening. That free labor movement is just a larger global issue that needs to be resolved. That isn’t entirely true. Both income tax and the next section, debt, are ways in which America in particular, but any country with large financial and corporate interests in general, keep the general public in states of servitude. This relates closely to the definitional aspect of feudalism above that refers to “a social system in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service”. In this case, we have financial sector billionaires acting as the Crown by granting “lands” to politicians in the form of campaign fundraising in exchange for government legislation that grants them use of “military services” in the form of militarized police forces who are able to assert laws drafted by lobbyists to extract income tax and debts from the majority of Americans as dictated by the IRS. Of course, society does in fact have good reason to levy taxes. We need roads, bridges, dams, schools, police, and firefighters. Taxes pay for all of these public goods and we have to raise them from somewhere. This section is in no way an argument against taxes or their societal benefit. One way to raise taxes is corporate taxes. Another is capital gains taxes. And of course, the main option we rely on today is the income tax. The income tax needs to be quite high today in America because of the fact that other taxes, such as the corporate and capital gains taxes, are kept so low. This is the result of massive lobbying interests writing legislation that benefits the financial sector of America and other countries that follow our precedents. This legislation is then enforced by the tax system through the threat of police force if one fails to comply. Anyone refusing to pay income taxes will quickly get a knock on their door. So rather than extremely wealthy businesses and individuals who make the majority of their money in assets that are taxed under corporate and capital gains tax codes paying for a large share of taxes, the larger majority of working and middle class individuals are forced to pay higher taxes from income. This means they keep less of the wages they earn and therefore must work a larger number of hours to afford their consumption practices (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, etc.). This is basically a modern day “homage” that is described in the definition of feudalism at the start. If one wants to live on the lord’s land, one must pay the homage, which of course they are obliged to live on because they don’t have freedom to move across borders. Debt Finally, we come to debt. This works in tandem with income taxes in many ways. It forces people to work longer and harder in order to service the ever growing proportion of debt that makes up average American incomes. David Graeber, in The Democracy Project, asks: How much of a proportion of the average American family’s income ends up funneled off to the financial services industry? Figures are simply not available. (This in itself tells you something, since figures are available on just about everything else.) Still, one can get a sense. The Federal Reserve’s “financial obligations ratio” reports that the average American household shelled out roughly 18 percent of its income on servicing loans and similar obligations over the course of the last decade— it’s an inadequate figure in many ways (it includes principal payments and real estate taxes, but excludes penalties and fees) but it gives something like a ballpark sense. (Kindle Locations 1220-1225). Coupled with state and federal income taxes, sales taxes, and the excluded penalties and fees Graeber mentions for financing the debt, it is easy to see that the majority of Americans could be paying as much or more than fifty percent of their income to service debt and pay taxes for the “privilege” of living and working on American soil, which they have relatively few options to leave. Many might argue that modern Americans do not have to take on debt, but that seems to be a rather un-American statement to make. Here are the figures on American debt composition (also from Graeber): TOTAL DEBT BALANCE AND ITS COMPOSITION Americans are constantly sold the idea of home ownership. It is part of the American dream. It also has very large tax incentives, meaning banks highly encourage it, although some economists are beginning to question the validity of this system of incentives and the adverse effects it can have as demonstrated in the Great Recession of 2009. That “American dream”, turns out to be largely a dream for the financial sector, which is then able to extract interest, fees, penalties, and the like for helping you achieve it and pointing out that you’re wasting money by renting because of the tax code they have written, a problem that largely doesn’t exist in Germany where people get by just fine by renting. Auto loans are nearly a necessity if people wish to get back and forth to work in large sprawling suburban metropolises, another problem that doesn’t exist in many countries that make better use of public transportation like Korea and Singapore. Try getting to work in California without a car. Next to housing, cars are typically the largest purchases Americans make and that typically requires financing with the attendant extractive fees and penalties. Then we come to student debt. Another financial sector dream. Higher education is no longer about the development of our collective humanity or the exploration of the world and what makes life meaningful. Instead, it is the route that must be taken to enter professional work. In order to work in a field that gives one even the slightest chance to break out of the state of serfdom described so far, one must engage in a professional career. This leaves the average American exiting university with over $30,000 in student debt, that cannot be unsaddled even by bankruptcy, at the start of their working life where the median income in America is currently just over $30,000. This student debt is the ultimate manner in which the financial nobility are able to keep serfs tied to them. One must pay the student loan fees in order to work because of the degree, licensing, and credential requirements of professional fields or risk very serious likelihood of arrest or police threat of violence as they dispossess you of your house, car, and future pay for defaulting. There is simply little pragmatic alternative for most people in the United States other than getting a student loan, home loan, and car loan in order to work in a profession, live without throwing money away on rent, and commute back and forth in most major cities so that one can turn around and pay those loans and taxes before keeping the little left over for food, clothing, and a bit of leisure and entertainment. A Path Forward Americans work the longest hours of any comparable developed nation. The reason should appear obvious by now. We live in a system where the financial sector can lobby government officials for the rules that most benefit them and give them the greatest opportunity to extract income and wealth from the working and middle classes, not unlike southern elites managed to successfully vote for the secession. They are able to do this in a few major ways: gaining rights to move their own capital around the world freely, while not allowing labor to do so; keeping corporate and capital gains taxes low, thereby shifting the burden of taxation to income taxes; and ensuring a society that requires the majority to take on debt in the form of home ownership, car ownership, and student loans to meet the requirements of professionalization. None of these rules that harm the majority of US citizens must exist. They largely exist because of the insecurity that breeds within the system itself. If a person is financially insecure and always worried about the harsh consequences from missing even one debt payment or an inability to pay taxes, they are much more likely to act in conservative manners that attempt to create a sense of stability in their life. Psychology is showing again and again that a feeling of stress caused by scarcity turns people inwards, lessens their thinking capacity, and generally makes them more self-interested. This can help explain why so many working class people vote directly against their own long-run economic interests. They are much more concerned with the predictability of tomorrow by voting for a conservative than the unpredictability of voting for social change that could harm them in the short-run as various social programs and policies are fleshed out. How does a society overcome this? Unfortunately, there is no simple or quick answer. Francis Fukuyama summarizes this well: The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems— past and present— are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain one in perpetuity. (pp. 428-430) What’s worth adding to his thoughts is that the higher level of education he mentions ought to be made free of the oppressive student loans currently being issued in order to avoid serfdom where people become tied to working any job they can find in order to pay the banks back.
While this is by no means a radical or even new proposal, the reasoning should be clear enough. Higher education levels create citizens that can think, act, and work more productively. In thinking more clearly, they are able to find jobs that pay better, ultimately allowing them to overcome their debt, have more discretionary income post-taxes, feel less financially insecure and thereby be able to vote in ways congruent to their own interests. Clearly, this is a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. What comes first, the voting for better education or the better education needed for the voting? It’s a bit of a “catch 22”. Hopefully, understanding how America closely resembles a feudal state can help in the education process needed to keep government accountable when voting so that legislation is created that benefits the majority and the corrosive institutions that currently exist can slowly be dismantled. |
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