sridhar_vembu

I have to call bullshit on this one. Most of us here, supposedly "conscientious" people, can trace our being here (in the existential sense of "being") to some ancestor with "low consciousness".

Birthrates are falling rapidly around the world, yes, including in places you may think are populated with "low conscious" people. The reason is very prosaic: urbanization. As people get crammed into smaller areas, they naturally start to reproduce less.

It goes back to the fundamental human urge to take care of our offspring: an overcrowded city is also a highly competitive city (Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York etc illustrate this best) so people who live in that environment that don't want to bring more offspring into the world.

Even in a country like India, the population growth is almost all rural. The birth rate of city-natives in big cities has dropped well below replacement level, and cities are gaining population because of immigration and within one generation those rural-turned-city-dwellers have low birth rate.

Please send me mail svembu at google's email.

Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job. --

I think the vast majority of us (I include myself) would be better off focusing on learning and finding meaning through work. I have learned to appreciate the finer things of life (literature, philosophy, art, music) outside the context of formal education, as I gained life experience and learned to reflect on that experience. I don't believe I could ever have appreciated philosophy as a 19 year old. I just did not have the life experiences to appreciate the questions it tries to ask. No professor can supply those experiences, and the best the system can do is to simulate it.

So the traditional University, seeking truth, would continue to exist, but people would go there when their life experience propels them towards it.

In crass business terms, we unbundle training in specific skills, the important task of earning a paycheck, from the abstract pursuit of truth. In that sense, the University becomes closer to how a religious institution operates today. Commercial job skills get to be imparted by commercially driven entities, with employers playing a prominent role.

This could dramatically alter the economics of providing those skills, as we have found out from Zoho University. We not only don't charge students, we actually pay them from day one, and yet, over a 3 or 4 year period, their dramatic gain in productivity effectively pays for the investment in skill building. Yes, this is not the "abstract pursuit of truth" but that needs to be unbundled.

In a chapter titled “What College Could Be Like,” Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors. --

This is what we do in what we call "Zoho University" within our company. We hire students out of high school, and they go through a program that has a mix of classroom instruction focused on extensive programming exercises with a heavy dose of interaction with people building products. Basically education combined with context - why should I learn this? Why is this relevant?

This comes from my own personal experience doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton. I would rate my PhD as idle mathematical game playing. That would have been OK as a hobby, I just wish I had not gifted 4 years of life to its pursuit. And I definitely take issue with the fact that this was tax-payer-funded pursuit - in fact, tax-payer-funding has something to do with how abstract and detached from reality these things get. So I ended up repudiating the whole thing. Zoho University is my atonement.

I passionately believe that the vast majority of students (myself included) would get far more value from this type of a "contextual education" program.

Standard of living is going up, but quality of life is definitely declining in major cities. There is a lot more money (even after adjusting for inflation) so the purchasing power has increased tremendously. There is a much richer variety of goods and services people have access to, housing is a lot nicer, people can afford vacations and so on. All that is on the positive side. On the negative side, people spend longer and longer time commuting in worse and worse traffic, suffer more water & electricity shortages. The general stress level of urban life has gone way up. Overcrowding would explain all of the negatives, and I have outlined why the overcrowding occurs. It is not just "too many people", because even the most densely populated regions of India have plenty of space when you leave major cities and India's population density is at the same general level as Western Europe. It is the inadequate infrastructure that causes massive overcrowding.

I agree with your overall point though - I am an optimist.

This is a great post - "moral suffering" exactly captures the feeling I have as an educated and affluent Indian. Yet, I keep going back, keep doing more in India.

I have thought about this quite a bit, and here is an interlocking set of problems that cause this "moral suffering". The phrase "private wealth and public squalor" captures the present situation in urban India very well. A city like Chennai or Bangalore is not that poor anymore on a per-capita basis, but they looks much poorer. The contrasts are just shocking. You can find apartment complexes where flats cost $150-200K and up (yes that is in USD) , sitting on potholed roads, surrounded by trash. Here is an explanation of how the system doesn't work in India:

* Taxation system is irrational - the $200K apartment would pay next to nothing in property taxes, probably as little as $100 a year (legally). Local governments require state or central assistance to run themselves. Consequence: there is no way for a local government to plan ahead, it has to rely on entities at a much higher level. Even the state government doesn't have much of a tax base, so it relies on grants from the center. This is a completely broken over-centralized public finance system, but there is absolutely no political will to tackle it.

* Relentless concentration of economic activity in major cities, because smaller cities and towns are even more starved of resources (on a per capita basis) and lack any local tax base at all, so both investment and people migrate to large cities like Chennai or Bangalore. This self-reinforcing dynamic has resulted in ridiculously overpopulated big cities. At Zoho, 70-80% of our employees come from smaller towns who have migrated to Chennai, so we are part of the problem of this over-concentration of economic activity.

* Increasing private wealth and non-existent urban infrastructure combine to produce some of the most extreme valuations in real estate in the world. Right next to Zoho office in formerly suburban Chennai, land goes for $10 million an acre (there are no acre-sized parcels, of course) simply because as a close-in suburb, this has a nominally functioning infrastructure, which far out places would lack.

Note that I don't mention a world about corruption because that exists in so many other countries without producing the same urban squalor and "moral suffering" that India produces.

The solution I have come up with, something we intend to adopt in Zoho, is to abandon major cities, and move to much, much smaller towns. At the level of about 50-100K population, there are many towns that offer a decent quality of life, particularly when you bring in the kind of jobs and economic activity a company like Zoho can bring. This is the plan we are working on.

Now I will mention some good news, because some posters here are so pessimistic. In my life time, I have seen massive improvements, massive reduction in human suffering in South India. I routinely saw sights as a kid that I don't see anymore: train stations full of emaciated, sick people begging, severe malnourishment everywhere, higher education serving 1-2% of the population (now in the Southern states, it is closer to 20-30%), and a general mood that life would never get better. Today a lot of smart young talent coming on stream that is a capitalist's dream in India. Yes, you have to invest in training and skill building, but if you do, the rewards are immense. The monetary rewards are very good, but the psychic rewards are immeasurable.