EduBubble

Rachel Donadio at the NY Times spells it out in her lead: the unemployed daughter has a fancy degree while her 60-year-old father with a 5th grade education has been relaxing since the age of 42 with a fat pension. The sins of the father are visited upon the offspring. There’s a reason why they don’t teach Exodus in the modern university any more. The kids might figure out the scheme and riot.

We have a terrible problem in the US and it’s easier to diagnose by talking about some distant foreign land. It would be difficult for the NY Times to take on the demographic imbalance in America so directly because, well, some of the retired readership might start to feel a bit guilty about taking all of the jobs and all of the money. The NY Times certainly couldn’t reprint talk of a revolution so easily if the talk was about a revolution in the US.

But in Italy, well, that’s a different story. We can speak honestly about how the unionization and all of the protection given to the old is denying opportunity to the young. We may not be able to be so direct when the folks in the US play those games, as they’re doing right now in NY where the unions would rather stiff the new state workers with a puny pension in order to fund the fat pensions of the old.

This is a brutal battle between the geezers and the twerps and the geezers are winning. They hold the levers of power and control the police. The strength and the resilience of the youth is nothing compared to the guile of the La-Z-Boy set.

The student debt is just one big part of the battle. When the states need to choose between more medical tests for the old or college for the young, they slash the university budgets and keep writing the checks to the doctors. And what do the tenured radicals in the university do? They could cut the costs and start teaching again, but they don’t. They want to preserve their own sinecure and the youth be damned. They jack up the tuition and enslave the youth. What a brutal way to avenge the loss of beauty that comes with age.