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Saturday, October 30, 2021

America’s Next Aristocracy — Mathis Bitton

Interesting article that comes to similar conclusions as Ravi Batra's The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos and Neil Howe and William Strauss's The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny. They all address America's increasingly dysfunctional system based on different theories and analysis. 

It seems to me that these are all factors the need to be considered in approaching the system, and there are also many more factors, since this is a complex adaptive system embedded in a larger complex adaptive system constituted by the world system. Clearly, America handles its own system will have far-reaching influence on the world system in an era of American empire. 

Palladium
America’s Next Aristocracy
Mathis Bitton is a student of political theory at Yale University
https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/29/americas-next-aristocracy/

2 comments:

  1. As regards education, this interesting post from MRU.

    Is the college wealth premium *zero*? by Tyler Cowen

    Now this one is a stunner:

    The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college gra duate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. Using variables available for the first time in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education.

    That paper is by William R. Emmons, Ana H. Kent and Lowell R. Ricketts, and comes from the St. Louis Fed, not from some bunch of (college-educated) cranks.


    As an aside, a study done found that an investment in financial capital in the form of an index fund in the 1980s would have produced an 8% return. The same investment in human capital would have produced a 7% return. The latter has been falling ever since.

    Of course there are returns to education that are more than monetary, but then again, you could have picked up that education for the cost of a library card in the past, and now the internet instead.

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