What Oxford taught me about posh people
unherd.com
unherd.com
After graduating from the Czech Technical University I realized that
1. I am much less special then I thought
2. There is much more hard working focused average people then the few talented superstars, both usually achieving the same
3. Surprisingly many of the exceptionally smart people in my social bubble, some of them graduated from the best universities in the world, "left the system" and focus on doing creative small thing's in their everyday life, instead of pursuing their parents dreams
4. Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair
5. I will do my best to teach my kinds to strive for understanding, a love for beauty and a complexity of the world, instead of focusing on grades and stuff
6. The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action. Not a representative sample though. Just ruining my illusion.
Not everyone can do this. You have to be really lucky to play games like that and still be fine.
The same goes for ‘going off to start my own food truck’. These options don’t exist for people that can only afford one solid go at this.
Just to clarify, Czech Technical University is free (for Czech citizens) - I also graduated there. I understand what you're saying, but I am somehow repulsed by the idea that such a system is considered a "privilege". It doesn't have to be a privilege. If you don't have good public universities in your country, you should consider getting involved in politics.
It’s a luxury to try one thing or another, no matter the cost (cash and time), and still land in an ideal situation as life progresses.
So is what the companies say about their board members and their C suite. I guess it could just be a reflection of facts but I fear this will lead to future startups hiring purely on this sort of credentialisms.
So these signals wouldn’t really help you make better bets, and they have bad side effects, which is why we need to bin them.
It's always going to be unfair. Attempts to fix it always result in some other unfairness.
The real thing that works is freedom, i.e. not having the law artificially holding you back. Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.
Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.
In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when facing GIs in WW2.
Of course, with free markets and prosperity, the Germans and Japanese have since caught up.
(In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.)
This even understates it. WW2 resulted in the US being the major world power due to everything you list and more. A true historical turning point.
The US nationalized many industries during WWII.
From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1]
"In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. Bondholders and stockholders were compensated, and railroads were returned to private ownership in 1920, after the war ended.
During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain."
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/worldbusiness/13...
Edit: this appears to be a definitive account of wartime nationalization.
Industrialists in Olive Drab https://www.amazon.com/Industrialists-Olive-Drab-Operations-...
"the individual most closely involved with this effort, recounts the unique story of Ohly and his compatriots who were charged with the mission of guaranteeing that private companies sustained the vital war production of weapons, munitions, and other materiel needed by America's fighting men and the Allies to achieve victory overseas"
Full PDF: https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-32-1/CMH_Pub_70-3...
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Rather, it was having access to 1) continent-wide natural resources and 2) no combat theatre domestically which would have disrupted manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, not to mention civilian life and morale.
Firstly, you say they nationalized many industries but the book talks about individual companies. Nationalizing an industry means nationalizing every company within that industry.
Secondly, this does not appear to have been motivated by the failure of capitalism but rather the opposite. It was done in response to union strikes. Unions are usually understood as being against capitalism and free markets; they want to replace individuals "voting with their wallet" by collectively taking control from management via committees of (frequently communist leaning or outright communist) representatives of the workers.
Thirdly, it says quite clearly that as late as 1943 the War Department had done so few of these seizures that it amounted to "barely a dozen". By the end of the war they had seized around 60. That's a drop in the ocean of the US economy, which is why it's not well known.
So this example doesn't really seem to argue against the notion that the US won because of free market capitalism. The only places where they had to step in and become authoritarian (very briefly) were places where capitalism was breaking down thanks to communist agitation.
The fact that the forcing is done with debt and threats of homelessness and not at gunpoint is just an implementation detail.
Muahahaha, good one!
The USSR and China also had this access, and it didn't seem to do the trick for them. The US supplied the USSR.
Airplanes, tanks, food, etc. were not nationalized.
Not to mention that both started way worse than the US at their respective times.
The USA didn't stick to ideological capitalism, and implemented many "socialist" policies: welfare systems, public works projects, labour protections, public infrastructure, etc. etc.
The USSR did stick to ideological communism as they defined it. Markets weren't utilized at all. Freedom of thought was suppressed. Political purges were executed.
In the USA, something similar was tried with the "red scare", but thankfully plurality won out, and some of those "abhorrent" socialist policies became mainstays in "great capitalist America" as part of the New Deal, which is what saved the USA from its domestic communist movement.
Over the last few decades though, the USA seems to have forgotten this. Forgotten that what saved the USA was not rigid adherence to some pre-existing quasi-religious ideological/spiritual polemic (which both capitalism and communism are), but the willingness to implement and incorporate a wide basket of ideas as they were appropriate.
When they did, they produced vast amounts of war material, and possibly would have beaten the Germans single-handedly given another year or two.
- Airports and airport security
- Postal service (USPS)
- Train operators (Amtrak)
- Insurance (FCIC, FEMA)
- Various municipal utilities and the TVA
- Various credit/financial/banking institutions
In the UK, we have privatised airports, mail, energy, telephony, water, train operators (though this is sort of changing), and don't have equivalents for many of the government owned finance organisations that the US has.
Additionally, many of the private industries in the US are far from free market. The UK's private healthcare industry is arguably more free market than the US's private healthcare industry, although has to compete with the NHS.
This isn't a criticism, just to remark that the US certainly isn't afraid of nationalisation and government owned services.
It's not a coincidence that the industries heavily distorted by the government in the US are the costliest - health care and education. Ironically, this interference was all aimed at reducing cost.
So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).
Your WWI remarks are not correct (any fresh joining recruits would compare well to starved demoralized decimated trench troops). Read some german WWI literature, they didn't care much US specifically joining the fight, it was just more enemies. If Australians would come, it would be the same.
I personally know several millionaires who arrived in America with a suitcase and a dream.
> class-based social system where divider is your wealth.
The usual definition of a class is legal privilege based on your parents. This does not exist in the US.
> So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).
People aren't desperately trampling 1000 miles and throwing their kids over the wall just to be poor. In America, they have freedom and a darn good chance to do well. Communist countries are different, they have to build walls to keep their citizens from escaping Utopia.
> Read some german WWI literature
I've read about WW1 from actual historians.
What do think the beaten down German soldiers would have thought encountering masses of American troops better equipped and far better fed than they ever were?
This is not true, historians collectively agree that Korea has seen the most spectacular rise.
Also, your comment was spectacularly off-topic and anachronistic. A country being a manufacturing powerhouse during WW2 doesn't mean that immigrants have a fair chance today. First they need to be able to enter, then they need to be able to succeed. That's the topic.
I'm not buying that.
S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more. Besides, SK's economy is free market, not communism.
> First they need to be able to enter,
100,000 per month are flooding over the border.
> then they need to be able to succeed.
Evidently they believe they can, or they wouldn't come.
As for around here in Seattle, there are immigrants everywhere. I jog through the park most days, and I hear languages from all over the world. They have their stereos blasting away, and large families with kids running around, and parked cars line the street. The smells coming from their cooking are delightful, I wish they'd offer me a bite :-)
Looks to me like they're doing very well. I have no idea how you can conclude that the American door to immigration is shut, or that they are doing badly.
You can't talk about countries with relative sizes and use absolute numbers. If you want to use this fallacy, I can tell you that the US is dwarfed by the whole of Asia.
Anyway, the original argument was that the USA isn't a country where everyone has a fair chance, but you absolutely want to turn it into anti-communist, pro-free-market propaganda.
Emphasis here is on the past tense.
There are several reasons to challenge this:
1. The USA had (and still has) unprecedented resources per population. Why is your claim not still the case?
2. Immigrants tend to be people with the means to immigrate. That's rarely people in relative poverty, unless you intended to mean slaves.
> "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
Whether those words are as appropriate today may be another matter, of course.
I understand this example to be of historical note because it was exceptional. Many people came over for the promise of farmland or gold or something that they could capitalise on.
"To ensure the verisimilitude of his story, Moberg did extensive historical research in both Sweden and the United States. He studied county records in Smaland and read many collections of letters that immigrants in America had sent to relatives in Sweden during the nineteenth Century. His studies also included trips to the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This research gave him a record of living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden and a feel for life aboard sailing vessels in the days when emigration had not yet become an industry backed by large steamship companies."
2. Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do. Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing. The money was to be made by cramming poor people in below decks. In colonial times, America was populated mostly by people escaping prosecution, indentured servants, sons who weren't first born and were not going to inherit anything, teens whose parents could not support them, etc. The Chinese and Japanese people came to escape poverty.
Furthermore, South America was and is rich in resources, but it remains poor. Nothing like the US happened there.
Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
> Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do.
"The median income of foreign-born households in 2016 was $53,200, compared to U.S. born resident’s median household income of $58,000."
That seems like middle class people to me.
Do we have different definitions of poor?
Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.
Besides, have you seen those pictures of immigrants going through Ellis Island clutching their battered suitcases? Do they look like rich people to you?
> That seems like middle class people to me.
Yup. Came poor and moved up to middle class.
BTW, I am properly amused by your theory that the US became a superpower via rich people immigrating and transferring their money to the US. That doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Where? Poor people get second-hand iPhones, or subscribe to plans that bill you in small installments over a few years. And even those who manage to save up and buy a new one - in a modern civilization, a smartphone is a basic necessity, right there after food and shelter.
Seems like just below middle income, which is typically deep in the working class and pretty far from the petit bourgeoisie, the balance-of-capital-and-labor-dependence middle class between thr working and capitalist classes.
My question was whether we have different definitions of poor - if you are distinguishing poor as everyone below middle class, and this is your definition of middle class, then you're simply claiming that everyone is poor.
Saying "poor people do X" now just boils down to "some people do X" [for example, the claim that poor people buy $1000 retail iPhones]. To me, that's not a very useful or interesting definition for this purpose.
Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli...
> A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for clandestine passage into the United States. Now they hand over up to $9,200 for the same journey, the Department of Homeland Security reported last year. Those figures have continued to rise, according to interviews at migrant shelters in Mexico.
> Some would-be migrants give up homes, cars, livestock and even farmland tilled by their families for generations and take on debt to pay the fees.
Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.
Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.
But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this.
Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture
They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off.
When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos.
Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos.
During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start.
Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.
China has arguably beaten (or is close to beating) that in very recent history.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-...
Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.
If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".
China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in with authoritarian leadership.
Let's not forget, however, that China is far from an "affluent" country. If your definition of affluent is focused on measurements like income and net worth of the population, China as a whole still falls well outside of affluent.
Yes, there's a sliver of population that is wealthy even by international standards, but the bulk of the population has income in the low $100's of dollars per month. That's what enables China to be the factory to the world. Is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but I think the CCP wants to keep it like it is.
No communist system can allow that. Instead, the companies are uniformly state-owned and the rewards added to the state coffers where they will be pillaged and shared by the politically connected.
Not really. The answer would be "communism with Chinese characteristics". The nuance is in the "Chinese characteristics" part. Whatever that means, but definitely not communism. China or CCP is communism in name only.
You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to where you came from, and sometimes that'll happen even if you do have those things. Holding on to an outdated view of what America is like is ... unhelpful.
How do you then explain the existence of sanctuary cities?
When the industrial revolution rolled through town Mexico couldn't take advantage of it. Back then the US used to welcome anyone from anywhere with ambition and an interesting idea.
The contemporary US might want to take note.
Note that you're talking in the past tense.
In practice at the aggregate population level, that is such an important distinction, and leads to the kind of pay-for-play judicial system the US increasingly practices, which weakens the US' internal signaling on important inefficiencies to root out. The more money tokens you put into the system, the more "fair" treatment you obtain, regardless of the negative externalities imposed. This is not new in history and around the world, but US rule of law has been declining for decades [1], and I believe it bodes ill for the US.
[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/us-falls-out-of-top-...
The meme about Soviet equality is pretty misleading. Their particular brand of autocracy increased inequality if anything, just expressed in different ways.
There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened.
You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.
For example, Swiss are very social people. Up until recently they did not even have a minimal wage defined in some of the cantons, yet even the worst jobs are usually extremely well payed. I.e. a python developer has just like 2x more than a garbage man. Anything a human touches is expensive.
In European countries, even some of the Eastern ones, there is usually a top-notch single payer health care system. That's social.
You can also have a high quality state funded education systems. A social aspect of politics does not require you to go all dictatorial suppressing basic rights. Please stop using it. It's ridiculous.
I think, across the board, people actually want mercy and grace. They’re not interested in fairness, they’re interested in help.
When they make mistakes, they want to be lifted up and forgiven. When they fall on hardship, even if their own making, they hope for help to recover.
It's typically the story of the prodigal son in the bible : it's unfair that the son that squandered away his inheritance gets back and is celebrated, while the son that was wise and helped his father does not get anything special.
Can I ask you a question without I swear any implicit judgement.
Do you gravitate towards conservative politicians?
Because I'm finding that this is the main distinction between Progressive and Conservative-minded people in today's western society. You can account for religion (there are religious leftists and atheist rightists). You can account for racism (there are plenty of racist liberals)
But I am developing a mental model (I'm sure it's not original, but I don't know enough about philosophy or sociology to determine who I should read with similar mindset) that the biggest difference is exactly the quote above.
Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.
Of course the implicit advantage of conservatism is if that enough people don't try, then it doesn't work, society does not become more fair, and conservatives get to point and say "see?"
And, on the flipside, you can spend a generation striving to achieve "real communism" like the USSR did claiming that true socialism is just around the corner, and never actually make any progress because the goal posts keep moving.
> Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.
And this is the key reason why I don't agree with you and why I will continue to fight for fairness and equality and equity improvements. I don't want to improve my own life at the expense of others. I think that is inherently selfish and defeatist. I'm a humanist, and I want my contributions go towards maximum optimizations across a multitude of humanity.
You try and you try to make society a fairer place to live in, but realise the system is so far gone that nothing you ever do will ever make a difference. So the morally correct and efficient thing to do is to expend those energies into helping you and yours, co-operate with those who extend mutually beneficial arrangements to you, and so on. Not only is it silly to try to create a fairer society, life has extensively proved that it is silly. Not that you disagree with the ideal, it's a great ideal, but it doesn't work in practice. Not that you wouldn't wish to follow it if you could (you would), but life has taught you that trying hurts you and yours.
Re: your mental model, I think there are a lot of studies and thinking that have gone into this, but I was immediately remidned of this old ted talk by Jonathan Haidt [0]. I am sure there are tons and tons more research on the topic.
[0] "The moral roots of liberals and conservatives" (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SOQduoLgRw)
Seems rather defeatist. Wouldn't you agree that different societies across the world vary in their levels of fairness? For that matter, how about different societies across time?
And I think that's OK. Personally I tend to look at things negatively and push onwards anyway, but I also understand when people say they don't want too much negativity in their lives. So I get it.
That's all!
That is not what freedom is about. Your comment implies that freedom is a zero-sum system. It most assuredly is not.
Under freedom, you (selfishly) prosper by creating value that other people want to give you money for. Stealing is zero-sum, this is not stealing.
(Wealth transfer programs are inherently zero-sum, and are unfair.)
And freedom is not a system, it's simply the situation of being able to do what you want without being punished. The freedom to steal is a freedom, just one people generally shouldn't have.
Neither claim has foundation.
> And freedom is not a system
Freedom has many meanings. I made it clear which meaning I refer to, and it isn't the one you're using.
I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount?
> Freedom has many meanings. I made it clear which meaning I refer to, and it isn't the one you're using.
And yours is very idiosyncratic. And mostly redundant with "market economy", except a market economy doesn't technically require people to be selfish.
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.
The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. Markets coordinate capital for the betterment of people at large.
Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company.
> The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China.
In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.
The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.
Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them.
The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...
Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist.
Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist.
Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.
By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently has a budget of $162 million per year. I'm sure there are plenty of hungry people who have much more need for that money, so by your argument maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them. It'd certainly provide them with a lot more funding than just the money from Bezos' clock...
I simply observed that it seems unreasonable to argue that a person saved from starvation by a marginal dollar doesn't feel more benefit from that marginal dollar than someone who wouldn't stoop to pick one off the street feels from marginal dollars that accrue to their bank accounts anyway. So some, but not all, redistribution can be positive sum.
Acknowledging the marginal utility of a [disposable] dollar to Bezos might be lower than that of someone earning less than subsistence seems both fairly obvious and not at all close to communism as the user I originally responded to suggests (Funnily enough, denying the validity of any sort of interpersonal utility comparison whatsoever actually does makes it impossible to make inefficiency arguments against communism or any other sort of government waste. Obviously millions of people behind the former Iron Curtain are wealthier today, but who's to say the Politburo members losing control over resources didn't suffer more?! I mean, that's silly, but so's arguing Bezos cares about loose change at least as much as the average poor person). Arguments against the idea that public might need education less than the wealthy needed to keep those dollars were pretty critical to there being a viable market and workforce for the Amazons of this world too.
If we actually want to discuss the efficiency and inefficiency of different forms of government and private [non]intervention it's much easier to do so without the unsupported and vaguely feudal assumption that no improvement on a status quo can be observed.
This is extraordinarily well-put. Thank you.
You're confusing freedom with capitalism. Understandable, since we need to spend 40+ hours a week to earn our "right" to shelter, survival and general health. In other words: the right to exist and participate. That doesn't make us free - it makes us beholden to an employer if on the payroll, the market if self employed and the greater economic system in both cases.
If we were truly free, we would only spend time doing things we thought were actually inherently valuable. For some of us, that would mean accumulating wealth. For a great many others, that would be the Star Trek kind of life about exploring, arts and discovery. Then again, that kind of freedom will perhaps be relegated to utopian dreams for a long time yet.
Oh phooey. I've been an employer and employee many times. At no time was I "beholden" to my employer, and at no time were my employees "beholden" to me. It was a simple transaction - trading labor for money. Either party could (and sometimes did) walk away at any time for any reason they pleased.
I've even been fired more than once. Didn't matter, I just got another job. No employee ever genuflected to me, either.
You're arguing in bad faith by making a caricature out of my argument. Please don't. I meant there is a clear dependency, like in software. Your app isn't free of dependencies if it imports other packages. It needs them to function. There's vendor lock-in.
> Either party could walk away
This might have been true for you, but doesn't generalise well. Yes, in theory people can walk away. In practice, they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage, survival, general life stability... etc.
It's not because you or I currently have a financial buffer and can survive stretches of unemployment that this is the case for the entire population. In case you missed it, a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).
Imagine you're a millennial with college debt in an area without a lot of jobs and analyse how free you really are to leave the one job you managed to get. How likely are you to get funding for a business? What's the tensile strength of your bootstraps?
You're entitled to look at it as a simple transaction, but the distribution of leverage for most people is distinctly asymmetrical, especially in anti-union countries like the US. So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-50...
In practice, they do, all the time, in every place I've ever worked, including min wage jobs.
> they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage
That's because of stupid government laws. Besides, if you leave you get COBRA for 18 months or something like that.
> survival,
Not in the US. Don't exaggerate.
> general life stability...
??
> a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).
That doesn't mean they're poor. It's easy to have a quarter million dollar salary and spend 110% of it.
> in an area without a lot of jobs
Hop on the Bus, Gus. Go where the jobs are. My extended family moved all over the US for better jobs. Heck, I wound up in Seattle to get a better job. Cost me a couple hundred clams worth of gas driving my bucket of bolts there from Kansas. Heck, somehow the penniless migrants manage to travel all over the US to get work.
> So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.
The courts are heavily biased in favor of the worker in legal disputes. And have you ever seen the press take the side of Amazon in any dispute with labor? Or any company?
It's about the same level as 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps'.
> ignorant of the world
I only speak of the US. Before the pandemic upended things, unemployment rates were very, very low in the US. That doesn't auger for employees being beholden to employers at all.
Which is fine, but stop projecting that onto the vast majority who absolutely cannot walk away from work 'whenever they feel like it' if they've any sort of family or responsibilities.
You're talking about the US and people not being beholden to employers - I'm sorry, but that is absolute nonsense for basically the entire working class.
If you tip too far over to either side, it's going to be a bad thing, and there is probably a much better way to find the sweet spot than to argue over what is "fair".
Having recently decided that I dislike leftist politics and that I align more with right-wing politics (in theory, if not in practice), the thing that switched in my mind is: why does it matter whether or not society is fair? I think that's the wrong question; I don't see any intrinsic value in fairness.
I think the right questions are: (1) how can we improve our average level of well-being, and (2) how can we reduce suffering?
So in my view, progressives incidentally get some important issues right including single-payer healthcare and environmental conservation. These policies tangibly improve our quality of life. But all the emphasis on equality, fairness, etc? Useless, in my view.
More generally, no two people are the same. It's not possible to make it fair even for two people, let alone billions.
I haven't seen any end to raising the bar. Where do you think it should end?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/gifted-programs-worse...
You can imagine what that looked like and who was walking around the gym with everyone else following slowly.
Whoever made that decision didn't go too far, they went into a completely wrong direction.
That's a decision that thousands of americans make every year they can't afford the healthcare they need to keep them healthy.
Those that can still work ridiculous hours damaging their health for far less than $1b - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/opinion/work-hours-us-hea...
What average?
MEAN:
Two systems of 100 people
System 1: 1 person with $10m and 99 people with nothing (mean=100k)
System 2: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k)
The latter is far far better despite on mean being worse.
MEDIAN:
Two systems of 100 people
System 1: 51 person with $1m and 49 people with nothing (median=$1m)
System 2: 100 people with $250k (median=250k)
The latter is better despite median being worse.
If you want to decide if a system is fair or not, think which system you'd like to live in if you rolled a D10 and ended up being born into the decile you landed in. Roll a 10 in america and it's great. Roll a 1 and you're collecting cans and hoping you don't get an ingrowing toenail.
In reality it's more like System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k) System 2: 98 people with $60k and 2 people with $10m (mean=259k)
And then people argue that System 2 is worse because the small increase for the most people is not worth the humiliation of some times seeing a person with 10m which is unfair.
The rich guys who have 10 houses or whatever, doesn't bother me at all, I simply don't care, and I'm sure that they are not much happier. Exactly the same way that I don't spend my time grudging over the fact that some guys are 100 times more handsome and charming and talented than me
That's not a good position to be in.
I'm far more interested in the quality of live of the 5th, 10th and 25th percentile than the 50th, 90th and 99th.
If you redistribute too much, you will lower your overall productivity and not have enough money and your average will go down. If you redistribute too little, you will have a revolution.
What I'm trying to say, is that everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist, so there's always a trade off to be made, and when people ask for less inequality, that will also mean less money overall, and also less for you if you are in the middle.
You'll have to back that claim up
> everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist
Well I don't care about the mean - not much use if Rockerfeller takes 90% of the income of a country and the rest have to deal with the 10% even if the mean is high. I care about how much money I have (specifcally what goods and services I can get with it), and how that is affected when various things happen (someone crashes their car into me, I get a cancer diagnosis, find that the CEO has been running the company into the ground and we're all laid off)
During the Great Compression, income inequality dropped dramatically, while the median increased. This was driven by policies like strong unions, the New Deal and Price Controls, and resulted in America's golden age, where the working and middle classes were far better off in 1960 than they were in 1930.
In reality this doesn't happen.
Is this the case? I would think most adults have realized that nature does not do fair, and it cannot be made fair.
I was under the impression that "progressivism" is more about raising the floor for quality of life, not about making things fair. So as to avoid the situations of favelas next to high rise condos with pools on their balconies.
- they tend to be young;
- political activists who have done nothing else;
- or drug addicts.
I can count on my fingers the number of serious progressives I’ve met who aren’t one of those things during my entire life in Seattle.
The “progressive” movement is why we have addicts encamped at a school — they’re so out of touch with reality, they view that as “compassion”.
Meanwhile, most adults realize police sweeps don’t solve homelessness, but they do prevent violent drug addicts leaving used needles all over the children’s playground.
I would not classify that as progressivism. Things like voting rights and ranked choice voting, progressive taxation, environmental protection, increasing educational opportunities for all, more nutritional options for food at schools, access to mental and all other healthcare, etc would fall under progressivism in my book. Of course, I'm not the arbiter of what is and is not deemed progressive, but generally I was under the impression that the goals were to keep the bottom quintiles moving forward, not letting drug addicts establish camps on or near school grounds.
e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318842505_Political...
You can be smart -or- hard-working and do fine anywhere. But you will always be bested by those who are smart -and- hard working.
> The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action.
Talk is easy but action is hard. There's a chance they never actually had to "put up or shut up" before in their life. And if that's true, there's going to be a strong aversion to actually taking action because that's when they might actually fail -- potentially for the first time in their life.
Don't be too firm in the belief that you yourself learned this in spite of your experience. Perhaps you learned it because of. We tend to appreciate and yearn for the things we don't have, the things we are too busy doing "work" to enjoy.
It does sound "better" to not worry about what -- now -- seems unimportant, but if your kids will grow up in capitalist society, it is critical that they have a focus on competing. Success is doled out in a pareto distribution. If you aren't already starting from the top, you have a very, very long uphill climb. Which will get worse. It's hard to enjoy the beauty of the world on an artist's salary.
#6 Getting fired isn't necessarily failure. These guys certainly have fallbacks. I'm sure they've learned from the firings. Maybe at their next role they will be superstars due to this experience?
In summary I think you are unfairly diminishing the value of an Oxford or other elite education. Partly or mostly because of the disillusionment. But it's not just about the academic/education part of the experience. Actually that's the least important part. Maybe when they were founded, it was quite important. Nowadays the internet gives us so much access to information that filtering it is more important than being spoon fed it. That doesn't mean elite universities aren't very important social signals and don't convey unfair advantages.
The academic part of life was good. The tutorial system is great, lectures were OK, practicals were good. The selection of courses was great. But doing CS, there were few opportunities to socialize with people in your degree - you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college. And that isn't great - perhaps it's good for people that are doing humanities and need to 'network', but for anyone doing anything interesting, you are not going to find too much in common with an undergrad studying English literature and more interested in drinking and pointless gossip/small talk.
And even many in the CS degree did not seem to have that 'hacker' mentality - that was mostly seen in international students.
What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically. The coursework and the exams were not super challenging, especially given that you chose so many of the courses, so you were mostly studying the actual things you wanted to study. Given that Oxford was supposed to have the very best students, passionate about their subjects, it was really odd how little so many cared.
Again, very strangely, few undergrad students from England seemed to go on to do Master's or PhDs, but many international students did. The graduate-level environment seemed much better, too.
When I went to a "top tier" uni in the 90s after watching the young ones and reading adrian mole I expected students to be going to rallies and being "intellectual". I spent more time reading about other subjects than my own and underperformed in my degree. Students were mostly over-privileged rich kids, doing exactly what you'd expect young people to do when they first got a chance of freedom.
I was lucky enough to get a full grant, which I wouldn't get now and overall I enjoyed the experience, which echoed far after I left the environment. It wasn't quite what I expected it would be though.
I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it would happen anywhere, but it is surprising to me that it is not strongly discouraged in society overall and at top academic institutions in particular.
I grew up in the UK, and agreed with every word. Especially the bit about social contact and drinking. When travelling in other cultures, I still find it insanely difficult to start a conversation with a stranger unless we're in some situation that I can think of as a pub (and even then it's not easy). The way that random Americans will spark up conversations anywhere is alarming, but I'm envious.
The drinking culture is weird. It's interesting seeing the German drinking culture here in Berlin as a contrast.
Most Asian students I met who had come over to Europe were pretty serious.
Anecdotally some friends from Wales who went on a study year to America were put into counselling and threatened with expulsion for their "drinking problems", they were pretty normal British students really, I think they ended up somewhere fairly conservative.
I suspect there is a big difference in Russia between top science universities and everywhere else. In my opinion, humanities education is of very poor quality in Russia so I could well imagine a party culture there. But the curriculum in top science programmes tends to be so intense and passing requirements strict enough that I doubt there is too much partying going on. However, a lot of the coursework I suspect is also still too outdated and often irrelevant.
There is also likely a big difference between students living at home and living in dorms. Who knows what happens in dorms, but the commuting students in my opinion don't tend to get too wild.
Finally, the social scene is just structured very differently. There are fewer elected subjects, and most of the social life happens during/between classes - the whole year just spends a lot of time with each other naturally and bonds over common struggles. There is a culture of trying to involve everyone in some sort of social life. You don't have to sign up for anything - it happens by default. Although I think international students would be treated differently and actually perhaps excluded. Instead of clubbing or going to bars, social drinking revolves more around drinking in someone's kitchen and engaging in pseudo-philosophical conversations.
Of course, my account is from a long time ago so things may be very different now.
You’d think so, but the whole culture has this problem. Western societies have replaced Christianity with the religion of hedonism and “self actualization.” It’s aspirational—most people don’t even live or want to live that way. But it would be taboo to condemn it or at least mark you as someone who wasn’t with the times.
Gaining a position in academia is something that takes a lot of time, so the disappointment is still with me.
I'm curious if you can be a professor after the old model, before structured academia, find those willing to learn and do research and continue your passion without the encumbrances (and benefits) of a Uni. That probably depends on your subject area.
- peer-review for journals and conferences
- a fellowship and guest lectures
- collaborating with my previous co-authors in my own time
- publishing educational content
and you're right, it is something I'm passionate about. The list above is my attempt to stay involved, but I'm not sure how that will work out long term. Hopefully I will find something sustainable.
On a more serious note, it comes back to what are top universities for? Excellent learning - you said that the tutorials, lectures and practicals were good to great, and I can assure you this is not true of all universities. But also: Building up a network. Gaining credentials. Learning those subtle cues that will allow you to mix with the elite.
For example, in fresher's week, 'default' organized activities were clubbing every night of the week. Sports achievements were celebrated with ceremonies, pub parties, chalk drawings on the walls of the college, publications in the magazines.
There is nothing wrong with any of those activities, as has been mentioned that is just what some loud teenagers getting a taste of freedom like to do. But you would expect a top academic institution encouraging other tendencies to even out the social 'hierarchy' a bit. The very fact that 'you might not have noticed the studious ones' who were 'hiding away in their rooms' is the problem when it is happening at the top academic institution in my view.
I don't know how you managed to miss this during your university career, but there are absolutely tons of clubs in every university. Sports, political, hobbies, music, etc. Nothing to do with drinking, apart from maybe a once or twice yearly optional social night.
There are 400 clubs registered at the OU student's union:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/life/clubs
Including compsoc, which would have been a way to meet your fellow CS grads:
And a competitive computer security club:
And they're just the ones I found by searching computer.
You could've packed your calender with different activities meeting new people every night and never have felt the need to drink a single drop.
After all, you are not interested in these things narrowly and specifically. You just would like to hang out with like-minded people that like to have fun in these sorts of ways.
In these societies, you mostly end up with some specific 'serious' activities (e.g. a talk, a lecture, a discussion, or something competitive). And social engagement then happens separately, usually at a social in a pub, also as a 'targeted' activity. It is a good way to get more serious about your interests, but does not seem like a natural way to make friends.
At my graduate institution, the undergraduate attitude was quite different; socializing was important, learning the minimal amount was efficient, and cheating was socially accepted (by peers, not necessarily the profs).
I was shocked at the difference in academic achievement this caused. The tests at the second institution were far easier, yet people were failing them. This was a difference between scoring 80% on nontrivial proofs, vs scoring 60% on one-step theorem applications. I don't think the incoming freshmen were vastly inferior. Rather, the culture at the first institution forced students to apply themselves through peer pressure, because that's what they perceived everyone else to be doing, and also what was valued. My advisor at the second institution seemed quite pessimistic about changing its culture, and viewed the first institution as a rare exception that would not be emulatable. He did agree on the extent of the difference.
From the prof perspective, this is all irrelevant because it's quite rare for a school to develop a good culture, so it's not the experienced reality for most profs. Asking to become faculty at a top institution where the undergraduates also all care about academics is like wishing for unicorns.
* Some selection bias here: I took grad classes, so these were the only math majors I had exposure to. Although, these were the only classes available because the school was small, so I'm not sure what an undergraduate could take if he didn't want to take grad classes.
Like other universities, things are also going to differ between subjects. But OxBridge has autonomous colleges which provide undergrad accommodation and arrange the individual tutorials/supervisions for undergrads. So there, college culture also matters. Some colleges certainly have a posher reputation than others, some have a reputation for being sportier, and so on. If you read a typical "OxBridge is really like this" articles without bearing that in mind you'll think the whole place is one thing.
> kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all.
I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :)
> you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college
There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it doesn't have to be that way, you can organise alternatives, and there's a whole intercollegiate infrastructure of extracurricular activities. There was a somewhat long-running university computer society when I was an undergrad, through which I found all the hackers, and some of us ended up starting a hosting service in my third year: https://www.srcf.net/ - that taught me far more of practical use than half the computing course.
May balls: yes, these are a bit odd and above my personal poshness threshold. I think they really do date from the era of Turing but not his subculture within that era, the big black tie social event belongs more to capital-S Society of debutantes and aristocrats.
> What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically.
The difficulty gap is real. Unlike all the education system people will have encountered previously, you can't coast unless you are very smart, and there will be extremely challenging material. It's .. deliberate is the wrong word, but there are certainly tutors who will up the difficulty level if their students are not struggling.
The mental health and motivational/pedagogical thinking is also stuck in the 19th century. Some of this does need to adapt to today's students.
> The more ambitious kids were more busy padding their CV to land a good job than doing what interests them.
This is far more what Oxford is "for" in British society because that's how you get ahead, unfortunately.
If it adapts to pedagogic techniques now known to be more effective, that’s a good thing. If it instead adapts to changes in the students themselves, I think that’s more likely to be bad than good, or is at a minimum not obviously good.
Obviously there have been changes in the students over the years, not least the fact that the universities now admit women and Catholics. There have also been far broader changes in society; it wouldn't be illegal for Turing to be gay in the present Cambridge.
Feynman drank, played bongo, womanised, slept with some of his friends' wives.
But that does not mean everyone who does that is a great Physicist. Neither all great Physicists do these.
Taking an outlier and using him for justification of something seems obtuse.
I love Feynman, and have a picture of him on my wall. But that does not mean I idealize or even like everything he did in his life.
Incidentally, I've not read much about his womanising - perhaps I'm not reading between the lines?
And although the bomb was used on the Japanese, it was meant primarily as a weapom against Hitler.
Feynman was an American Jew. Imagine yourself in the same situation. There's a dictator who hates all Jews and basically any race which is not Aryan enough for him. He wants to kill them all. A gigantic war machine which is fighting the rest of the world alone is also possibly building something similar.
You get the opportunity to work on something that undermines the devil, that will buy you and your country protection against it. Will you not work in it?
I was totally underwhelmed by the quality of the kids. I'd won a math contest with a couple of Polish kids in my team the summer before, and I thought my new classmates would be much the same: engaged, sharp. Instead I got a couple of fellows who seemed to be there for the drinking. It was quite deflating.
I did eventually round up a number of people with a better attitude, mostly from international circles. It's not like we were teetotal, just the balance of work and play seemed to fit an elite university better. Luckily I managed to forge a group of friends across colleges.
I also started to see there was no logic to who got in. It seemed to be purely a confidence game, especially for the arts subjects. I mean sure, they were probably better academically than your average person, but above some low bar it seems to be a lottery. I started meeting a lot of people who spoke confidently about things, but their confidence did not seem to be grounded in reality. There were so many of these people it gave away the game, I'm not sure I'd have noticed if I hadn't seen this concentration of BSers as a young man.
What was really missing was a love of learning. It's as if the kids had spent years gaming exams under high parental pressure, and now they were at uni as long they could get out with an OK grade they wanted to relax and explore the social world.
The tutorial system was wasted on some of my classmates. It's cringeworthy to be in a lesson with either 2 or 3 students, and one or two of the other kids hasn't done work. I also got proper sparring partners from outside my college, so I did ok eventually.
A) Incredibly smart and hard-working students that want to be around the leading experts in their fields. These kids end up as post docs / researchers, and get to work/stay close to those schools.
B) The ones that want to land elite jobs (gov / banking / finance / law / etc.) - for these, the social activities are quite more important.
Don't get me wrong, you need to be a top-tier student / pupil to get in, and the latter students are also such. But different priorities.
One thing I loved about my program (Baylor) is that they had a dedicated dorm building for engineering/CS students. I think it's because their program wasn't very prolific and they were trying to attract people (though I had no real complaints about it), but it created this awesome environment where the average person on your floor probably had a gaming desktop to show off, or would love to talk about a project idea you had, or might have an idea of how to recover the linux install you've just borked, or might be hosting a Minecraft LAN you could join. Not to mention the study-group opportunities, etc. It was a really great way to spend my first two years.
There may be differences due to the subject, level, or college. I did a one-year masters in STEM in a very international graduate Oxford college. But the vast majority of members of the college were hard working, insightful, friendly, and not at all posh. There was a very friendly and open social life, and I definitely don't consider there to have been a great facade presented. Perhaps I would have found different in an undergraduate degree in the arts, or a different college, but I didn't get that sense from the people I spoke to from other colleges and faculties. My best guess is the Oxford college the article writer ended up in was rather more grand and snobby than any of those I spent time at.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this certainly isn't the only experience, and I'm confident none of the friends I made there would relate to the article's assessment. I found it a fantastic place to meet insightful, honest, friendly people in addition to all of its merits for learning.
I went to Durham. I was - I am - a posh kid - albeit one who’s acutely and painfully aware of his advantage. The college I was in was stacked to the rafters with posh kids. Everything orbited the social life - the balls, the ents, who was where in the pecking order of committees and executives. I mean, the college was in a literal castle. If you were reading arts, it was easy enough to stay entirely within that world. Economics, politics, classics, history, philosophy, etc., were all filled with pashminas and brogues. I spent time in those lectures as I was running a miniature essay mill to boost my social standing, as that was just what you did.
I read physics - and the crowd couldn’t have been more different. The majority of science students were in the hill colleges, nearer the science campus, and came from state schools, rather than the mess of public school alumna you found in the Bailey colleges. I was a lone wool blazer in a lecture theatre full of t-shirts, rope-knit jumpers, pink hair and leather jackets.
For me, it was an illuminating experience, and it made me realise that I didn’t really fit in either tribe - although 20 years on, the few people I’m still in touch with are from my course, not my college.
The U.K. is a peculiar place when it comes to class. I realised over the years that how I said what I said, how I spoke, how I dressed, were all far more important to our business (because of course I started a business, with a posh friend from school) success than what we said, what we did. To other posh people, it says you’re one of the club, you can be trusted, nice school tie - to people from outside that world, it induces either a hat-clutching deferent reverence, or outright hostility.
I liked the people who were outright hostile, because by that point I absolutely hated the same thing that they did - even though I benefited from it.
Anyway. Experiences vary, and which college you’re in has a huge impact.
I can't find out the college he attended, but I agree that college choice really can impact who you meet and the general "vibe".
My experience at Cambridge (similar path to you, Alex) is also at odds with this article.
Yes, this is the best part of Oxford. My undergraduate education there consisted of:
1. Lectures to large groups of students
2. Some small classes
3. One-on-one or one-on-two "tutorials" with specialists in their subjects
#3 is the core of the Oxford system and is what makes it (and a small number of other UK universities who do this) special.
I went there from a bog-standard state school and it was an excellent education.
It took me a while to realise that the state educated people were often the more talented ones (they've not had anything handed to them on a plate), and our lack of poshness was actually something to be proud of - not something to feel inferior about!
I feel like in the last 5 years or so it has turned to posh is "uncool".
In the US, I feel like they had something similar. Obama was elected in 2008, but some people did have concerns of electing someone unestablished. To assuage these concerns, Obama promoted and kept safe the interests the elite at the time. Not detracting Obama here - that's the position he was in back in 2008 when some would have considered electing a black man to the Office as unthinkable.
Was Jimmy Carter posh? Harry Truman?
Heath, son of carpenter/builder, Scholarship to Oxford
Wilson, father was an industrial chemist, scholarship to go to school, bursary to go to university
Callaghan, father enlisted man in the Navy, then the coastgard, and died young leaving family relying on charity. Got a place at uni but couldn't afford to go
Thatcher, father was a grocer. Got to Oxford on a scholarship, studied Chemistry
Major, Parents were in theatre, then ran a garden shop, lived in a rented flat, left school at 16, did a banking correspondence course while failing to get a job as a bus conductor
Blair, Father was a university lecturer, went to boarding school at Fettes, took a gap year then did Law at Oxford
Blair brought in the posh = good, Champagne Socialists era. It's also what powered Labour - the alliance of the metropolitan left and the working class left (the latter having gone to the tories now)
Brown and May had normal backgrounds, but Blair, Cameron and Johnson are very different to Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Brown and May.
Just going on personal experience I feel like 'chavs' had social confidence around the early Blair, and tended to be dismissed late Blair/Brown. By the time Cameron was in office I fell like there was an idea that Eton, private school, investment banking, Mayfair = good, or at least this was stronger under Cameron than Blair. It's all flipped now.
Out of interest, what did you study at Oxford?
I studied Physics 2011-2014
My experience wasn't quite the same but I went to a college that had the highest proportion of state school students, and only heard about the most egregious posh people behaviour through rumour. The parker-bowles mob were notorious, for example, but I never came across them.
Wouldn't have thought many people would associate Trump's brash noveau-rich American stereotype act with the English Establishment, and Brexit actually made some Old Etonians popular in parts of the country that historically had very little time for them.
What does this mean? You don't get anything more Establishment than the teflon-coated career of Boris Johnson (MA Oxon, II.1)
Boris is Establishment, but went against the Establishment's beliefs by backing Brexit. I'd also argue that Cameron was more Establishment than Boris.
While everyone is smart and pleasant, there is the constant reinforcement that Oxbridge grads seek each other out throughout their lives to almost exclusively hang out with each other. I mean, as towns they're not exactly next door, but in London there is the joint Oxford and Cambridge club on Pall Mall so they can carry on as they were. They're often hopelessly insular in this regard and I have never quite understood it. Why your university would provide such a strong identity for yourself all your life, I don't get.
Although, the thought of my pompous college mates is not a memory I want to think about today though.
I went to a state school. I honestly thought my local community college did a much better job, but graduated anyways. I went to a professional school, and kinda thought the same--a whole lot of wasted time.
I will never forget our last party though. Everyone graduated with their degree. We were at this party, and the atmosphere was different. I couldn't figure it out until years later though.
My date that night was a stunning, innocent, affable, young lady. I recall guys at the party making a bee line to her. The ladies at the party gave me the look. A acquaintance came up to me, and said, "She's very young Danielll?". She was 20?
Anyway, everyone kinda of changed. They talked different. They talked like they did something wonderful by graduating. They were posing, instead of standing? The biggest poser had a job at Open Space. He thought he hit the lottery. That night he should have worn an ascot. Never talked to him again.
I remember thinking this is it? Well it's better than working full time. Hiding in school was something I adored, but knew I was no different than anyone else. In all reality, I felt guilty. The worse day in school was better than any day at my part time jobs. The four years were fun.
On the way home, Michelle said, "I've never felt so weird at a party." I had no idea what she was getting at other than being the worst party I have been to. She then said she felt like she didn't fit in.
I told her, "I don't fit in with those people. College was a joke for the most part." I couldn't believe the way people changed. I had a steady girlfriend who went to UCD. She was a different person upon graduating. Just so full of herself? I wasn't the greatest boyfriend either, by dating someone else, but I was young, and we both knew our relationship was baked years earlier.
End of story, but reminded of my young pompous classmates upon graduation.
Would I go to a alumni club after graduation--hell no, but colleges should provide them. I am a wacko, and despised networking, and schmoozing, but my classmates would be at the club. It would be a great selling point for colleges too?
(I had a premed/business education from a state school. I guess it's a lot different than going to an Ivy League school? I honestly remember eight classes maybe, that I felt were worth the time. My rambling post is about the obnoxious levels of self accomplishment so many young grads have.)
For them it'll be a chance to talk with people from different walks of life such as bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, business owners, or COs. Since so many have wide breadths of opportunity they'll be able to talk to people who have had novel experiences from themselves.
I mean the default experience seems to be a sheltered(maybe insular is a better word?[1]) one, but I can't say I'm not similar in my own social circle. I haven't purposefully gone out of my way to mingle with people in other groups outside of my normal social circle except at work/hobbies/sports and really only talk to those I already know at Friday drinks.
[1] Really I'm kind of looking for a word to express diverse sameness. Something you'd use to express "European countries are all the same except of course each is a unique culture". Maybe talking about untraveled Americans(US) except a word to contrast one who only lived in their rural town vs one who worked and lived from New Orleans, to Detroit, to New York, to Nebraska, to Hawaii and Alaska while not having left the US.
What you do notice though, is they absolutely know how to work their asses off. They're constantly organising things, writing stuff, offering to edit and help develop other people's work, coming up with new ideas and sharing them. They know how to dig deep into a topic and root out the interesting, fun and unexpected, and do something with it.
There are other people in the community who are much the same, it's a very collaborative community. It's not that they're the only people who stand out, but they're right up there.
I'm still taken aback by the disparity in leisure activities; it seems like a lot of people here escape to some international Instagrammable getaway for a weeklong academic break, whereas back home everyone would be fine just hunkering down or maybe visiting their parents for a weekend.
[1] "loudest" in the sense that they made sure that other students knew where they came from.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/education/harvard-busines...
I love my hometown, but it was a slog wading through all the people who ultimately wanted to keep me under their thumb. Many of them so close that I just couldn't see it until a lot of damage had been done. Everyone has feelings of jealousy, whether they are conscious of it or not, and the closer you are, the more likely it is you will be competing over resources, the conflicts of interest are just inherent.
They told me to work hard, but their idea of working hard was often just making the same damn mistake over and over again, as long as no one had to admit they were wrong, as long as authority was respected and hierarchy maintained. Whether your brow is high or low, I think you just have to learn to break free from those people, and learn to think for yourself, because they are everywhere, because it is an intrinsic consequence of social organization.
Maybe statistically they still turn out to not matter? Would be interesting to know.
they usually need to keep themselves in power / get reelected. Not necessarily a criterion of excellence.
Also reminds me of that school report of Boris Johnson - "Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. It is a question of priorities, which most of his colleagues have no difficulty in sorting out. Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else." Plus ça change.
https://twitter.com/lettersofnote/status/1094970662828101632...
For example: Tuition fees are in line with government-set rates and are no different for these institutions than other British universities (at least it was that way, back when I was there in 2005-2009). While the U.K. was part of the E.U. these low rates even applied to students coming to study there from elsewhere in the E.U. It is only "overseas" students who are asked to pay significantly more.
One thing that I found noteworthy when applying was also the fact that, for Cambridge, the admissions process had two phases: The first was academic acceptance. Those application forms made absolutely no mention of money. After a student has been academically accepted, there is a second phase in the application process that involves application to scholarships and ends with the applicant having to provide proof that they have the required funds to sustain themselves through the study period.
This was very different from what I remember about applying to universities in the U.S. which asked you to disclose your family's financial situation on the same application form that was also used to decide academic acceptance. That form, incidentally, also asked about things like family members who have attended the same university, etc. ...so there is much less transparency there to guarantee that a U.S. school wouldn't just use your socioeconomic standing directly as a criterion to decide admission.
There are, of course, impediments to social mobility into the class of Oxbridge-educated people, but it revolves more around academics than about money. For example, I found that the students disproportionately came from families where their parents were career academics. The relationship with those families having a lot of money was not something I particularly noticed.
The "poshness" of it all, particularly where undergraduate circles are concerned, also comes to a large extent from free choices that students themselves make to try to socially set themselves apart from their peers at other unversities. For example many willfully adopt "received pronunciation" to replace their natural dialects.
Of course there are people who don't enjoy horses. Or yachts. And not enjoying university should be seen as being no different.
If you look at them as an investment, I don't think they're a particularly good one.
And I think that this cycle of runaway inflation with regard to academic credentials as a prerequisite for jobs that don't actually require them is something that should be stopped.
I think there is a lot to be said for taking a degree which lends an element of structure not chosen by you. Sometimes you need to learn the stuff that doesn’t interest you to have a foundation to really understand the stuff that does, and you might find there are other things you had never been interested enough in to even consider which will turn out to be really interesting.
On top of that I think tuition in small groups is much better than I’ve seen any meetup group manage. I’ve organized it once at a previous employer to help get some our application developers to the point where they could work on the our core vm and database, and I think they found it helpful being able to ask questions and talk over where exercises had given them trouble.
Competent teachers with time for you and a body of advice (students, who have most definitely understood the material in the way it was offered if they are ahead of you) that isn't full of nonsense. There is something to be said for self-study when it comes to IT (I've learned significantly more on my own than at school), but it takes a lot of being able to recognise bullshit. That's not compatible with a lot of folks when they want to study.
1) The teacher is shit. 2) The curriculum is shit.
University, if you choose well, can remove these 2 risks.
My observation studying in Oxford was that there was a big dispatity in opportunity, but it derived more from inequities in the quality of schooling available than unfairness in the admissions process. I met a lot of state educated students, but most of them came from well-regarded schools on upper-middle class areas that got hundreds of students into Oxbridge univeristies each year.
Very few came from schools like mime that couldn't even work out which entrance exams I needn't to take for the course I was applying to.
I also found that students disproportionately cam from families who themselves had studied at Oxbridge.
"The relationship with those families having a lot of money was not something I particularly noticed."
When I was there, I noticed students disproportionately came from wealthy families, wealth in the millions rather than billions terms.
They claim to be "need blind", but they still ask. I'm not sure when they started that policy, but a quick search claims they are only one of 5 schools that claim to be "need blind".
They ask for the information at the same time as the application so that aid packages can be offered in a timely fashion. It can take months to process everything, and students need to know the cost far enough before the decision deadline to weigh their options.
The financial aid office operates entirely separately from the admissions office at MIT, and I'm sure this is the case at other schools that claim to be need blind. Need blind has a clear definition, and there are legal implications to being a need blind school (for domestic students) in the US. It isn't just some marketing thing.
To your point about indirect economic discrimination, I'll note MIT is very clearly the best Ivy+ at admitting low income students: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... That doesn't mean there isn't still a long way to go, but MIT is for sure not using need information in their admissions decisions, and if anything actively tries to not just take a ton of elite private school kids.
Actually, the next step probably will be to stop need blind admissions so that parental income can more explicitly be used to correct for disparity in opportunity.
UT Austin is a really good school from what I hear.
Or did, at least.
It's true that both of these policies are outliers on a per-state basis, but when you consider population, somewhat less so.
Texas is offering a way better deal and driving opportunity for a diverse group of students.
Low income families above the low income limit set by the government who cannot afford tuition + covering living expenses tend to be those who can’t really afford to attend those schools and this includes a lot of what would normally be considered middle class.
Yes you can take a loan but Cambridge and Oxford as notoriously expensive to live around, student accommodation aren’t cheap and the overall cost of living is quite high.
So you tend to skew towards either those who have money or families which planned for this from the get go, a few token poor people but quite a few of those that come from an “average” household.
The UK student loan is not perfect, but it does include a living stipend (which is family income based). Obviously it sucks to have to take a loan, but working is not a necessity (until after graduation). I’m not sure how reasonable the living stipend amounts are, but Cambridge is definitely reasonably affordable if you go out of the way for groceries etc. It’s a bit more expensive from a nightlife perspective, but again, college bars tend to have fairly cheap drinks.
If we take a £80,000 combined household income which won’t go that far in London especially if the family has more than one child and still paying for a mortgage or what is becoming more and more common these days rent. And while 80K is more than double the median household income this literally can be the salary of say two teachers or police officers with some seniority then you are only eligible for £4000.
For Cambridge last time I checked student accommodations cost £150-200 p/w at the minimum. That more or less your loan gone on housing alone.
The university itself requires the students to have £10,000 (well £9880) per year for living expenses this means that a family making £40K needs to add about £4K or 10% of their pre-tax income to their child’s education even with the stipend.
It’s possible sure but many families simply can’t afford that. And more importantly because students are required to show proof of funds the parents would have to prove that they have that money ready and quite possibly for the entire duration of the degree if their income is too low for the uni to consider them to be able to afford support.
I don't think this is all that wrong: If you are dependent on working to be able to cover your living expenses, it takes time away from your studies, which reduces the likelihood you'll pass, increases the likelihood of needing more time to get to a degree. Needing more time, means having to spend more time with low-paid jobs to sustain yourself until you get to the degree, and it all adds up to a risk that's difficult to manage for the student, and universities definitely don't want the drop-out rate that results from that.
You wouldn't start building a house when it's uncertain that you have enough money to be able to complete the project.
The way to manage the social ramifications is by keeping tution rates low and providing scholarships. Cost of living is not something you can control particularly well although, at Oxbridge, they at least do what they can on that front through university-owned housing etc. Also: Those are university towns that don't have cost of living and rents spiralling out of control as a side-effect of other industries that are there, like is the case in the Bay Area or Boston, which is a major metropolitan area even without the universities.
Sorry for the completely OT reply, but this triggered me because it is exactly how banks in Thailand do lending to build a house. Once all the details and total cost are known, the bank lends about half of the needed amount and then checks on your progress. If you didn't get about half the house built they don't fund the remainder.
I think this is for graduate students - the undergraduate student system is different.
There's no financial statement required for undergraduates because government loans are available to all UK students. This covers tuition and living costs (albeit scaled by parental income). No family needs to "cover tuition" for undergraduates.
People don't work during term time because they are very short (8 weeks) and intense. Plenty of people had work at home during the holidays.
I guess there are some people who have on paper wealthy parents who don't contribute as much as the government thinks they should, but in general lack of familial wealth is really not a barrier to undergraduate study at Oxbridge.
As far as I can tell this only applies to graduate students, and possibly those from overseas (and other weird edge cases like people studying for a second undergraduate degree). If you apply as an 18-year-old from a British high school, you automatically get a loan from the government for tuition fees, can choose to borrow more to cover some of your living expenses, and will be given money by the university or your college if you come from a low-income family. You never have to show proof of funds, because the university will make sure you can afford to go.
After couple of years, now I can see through the BS and the whole high self-esteem culture behind it. North America is a very unique culture where having a (often unrealistic) high opinion about oneself is seen as virtue. Immigrants like me, who are not familar with North American cultural schtick, can easily fall for the whole high self-esteem ruse.
All the people I know who interviewed for OxBridge were so god damn clever and smart I sometimes ( even til this day ) think whether they are human or not. They could learn a new subject far quicker than I do. And spend more time doing other mostly creative things. But nearly all of them ( at least those I knew ) quit their high paying job for something much simpler, Teaching, Fitness Training, Art or Traveling.
And In my opinion I dont think Cambridge is in anyway similar to Oxford about posh people. Although a lot of comments seems to think otherwise.
Oxford provides an amazing environment if you genuinely want to learn and improve and the university actually seems to care about you succeeding. The time I spent there remain a decade later some of the most enjoyable in my life.
At St Andrews I didn't find that to be true. At a far less prestigious university, it was true. My cohort largely agrees with that assessment, too.
There is a deeper issue for sure, which is related to the relevance of University education in many sectors. Medical, legal, humanities probably still belong there since there is a large breadth of knowledge as well as many years of precedence to learn.
For engineering, most people would probably be better off learning on the job, perhaps with day release to college. I found my Electrical Engineering degree far inferior to my college-level Engineering training and more suitable for those who plan to enter research rather than most of us who just wanted a good job.
> "But you’re thick like me", he said
For any readers who aren't familiar with British slang: the word "thick" means "stupid" in this context (as you have no-doubt worked out!).
Those people with academic parents/relatives will all come prepared. They will drink more than you at parties and still ace their exams without any problems.
Your best chance of success are ways of life that aren't easily prepared for, because it levels the field.
Right, it only confirmed that they met the minimum standards of the University and had graduated. It was never about "most intelligent", but merely met a minimum requirement of knowledge and intelligence.
And there are plenty of people who fail to meet that requirement, but despite what they say about "college level iq", most people can pass if they work at it.
After all that, the author still manages to go back to their "us vs them" thinking, too. They're still looking down on people who weren't raised like they were.
There is a shift from university for its own sake, back to skilled work in making things. A more rational motivation.
I was far too often, far too much like the arrogant snots the author encountered at university; I had been conditioned to be the smartest guy in the room. But I was passionate about computers and the engineering that had created them, and I worked hard. Not sure that the space I was taking up would have had more benefit to someone else.
This is a strange sentiment.
How many girls working in laundrettes, or men working at McDonalds, or lads working on the railways, or especially Romanian women who clean hotel rooms, can and do write quality fiction or non-fiction in their spare time and submit it to publishers? Sure, some authors have come from working-class background and had all sorts of menial jobs in their youth, which has made their books all the more interesting; but they also had something else. They had a rare sort of imagination, a love of the written word, an incredible drive to write, and a skill they had developed through continuous writing. At least the posh class is required to read and is instructed in writing as part of their education; so it's easier for the talented among them to discover their talents.
How many Einsteins spent their lives working in a coal mine because that's the only thing that their entire upbringing prepared them for?
In the UK Imperial is probably the closest to what you are looking for I guess.
Another option is VC type of funding. If you already have the chops to be convincing and work on relevant topic, places like Thiel Fellowship or YC might give you alternative approaches to learning.
As for Gates I do not know. In general, I would assume that the value of a university degree has only declined since then.
I find this topic fascinating and it makes me see discussions about underfunded education systems and universities from a different angle.
I ask because in the fields I'm familiar with many innovative approaches are actually university spin-offs.
Edit: The point of this beautiful article, "a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society" is a sad truth, but in my opinion the answer is openening the institution up, not abolishing it. Those people didn't learn middle class behaviour in universities, they were socialized with it since birth. Good, widely available public education is an effective means to level out this class-based inequality.
I imagine that technical universities, like ETHZ/EPFL, have a much larger annual impact
Then came the push in the 80s to 00s to get more working class kids into higher education, so they could have the same opportunities as upper class folk, thinking education leads to wealth. Instead we've just ended up with a bunch of working class kids graduating to become baristas.
Education doesn't lead to real wealth. University educated higher professionals still go back to their middle class home to open a carton of orange juice.
Having started a business recently, I've realised how much I didn't need anything I learned at uni to do this.
How much of this is just being stuck in old mindsets?
I went to an expensive private school with lots of rich people and just 1 student chose a program outside of business, engineering, or medicine and we were far from a science school. It was clearly understood that arts was a path to serving coffee. A school that arguably had more people win essay/book competitions than science fairs produced nobody in those areas.
In university, I met tons of people who thought that having a degree alone opened up a pile of job options. They were 20 years behind the mindset of my private school.
It is now that certain education leads to wealth and plenty of people are doing education which does not.
Alvin Kernan, who had a long career in academia, wrote in the early pages of his memoir In Plato's Cave of the influx of men like himself, attending college on the GI Bill in the late 1940s.
"I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism."