Aging in Buffalo: A Personal Invective

I turned twenty-seven on Friday.  I know that most everyone has the experience of reaching an age at which birthdays cease to be causes for celebration, but I don’t think so many people find them to be the cruel reminder of lost time that they have been for me roughly since I became a full-fledged adult.  That is, if I could ever be called that in the first place.  I’m sure that by some people’s standards, I never grew up.  I’m inclined to agree; I’m just not inclined to blame myself.  That’s why birthdays are so awful.  They remind me of the speed with which time is marching on even as I remain stuck firmly in my place.

It’s interesting to be a resounding failure starting in your very early twenties, and an educated, ambitious one, who simply never had the chance to even screw up an opportunity.  It’s interesting to see the evidence of that failure every time you look out your front door on a hateful city that you never thought you’d have to return to, but then were never able to leave.  The Buffalo that I see every day is a place where no one seems capable of living with purpose, achieving social mobility, or bettering their personal character.

It’s actually terrifying to be aging here, because everywhere I look I see reminders of all the different people I don’t want to become.  Yet in absence of evidence of any alternatives, it seems increasingly likely that I will become just like some of them if this environment continues to hold me so close to its rust-pockmarked bosom.

I used to have more fire in me.  Twenty-seven shouldn’t be associated with this kind of tiredness.  Often, I feel numb enough to tolerate the intolerable.  Honestly, there was a time not long, and yet too long ago when I came close to vowing to kill myself if I wasn’t out of this town by a certain date.  The trouble now is that I can’t for the life of me remember when that date would have been.  Was it the start of this summer?  Next January?  The previous January?  My twenty-seventh birthday?  I can’t remember.  It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.  I am exceptionally well-distracted with the ceaseless struggle to find each day’s work and survive the week, and I am exceptionally well-deluded into thinking that therein, somewhere, lies a future change of life.

But then when I venture out of my home office, I see the change of life that comes over time, in absence of a transformative moment, a firm knock of opportunity, a breaking point.  Who shall I become, among these?  Perhaps by the time I’m in my mid-forties, my home business will be truly legitimate, and I can be like the shop owner around the corner, working irregular, overly demanding hours for a success so modest that in the fullness of middle age he is still living without health insurance.

Or maybe I need not look so far into the future, and instead I can aspire to be like my close peer and lifelong resident of the Blackrock neighborhood, who is consistently and profoundly more successful than I, which means at present that he’s been tasked with managing and fundamentally reorganizing a nearby gas station for eight dollars an hour.  Perhaps I can aspire to that without waiting to decay with age, though I doubt it.  Given my past history, it seems that even to be willfully exploited is too much for me to ask of prospective employers.

If, however, I could by some chance succeed in letting myself be exploited, then I can look forward to being like my brother, seven years my senior, slaving at management of a kitchen in exchange for a salary far short of the absolute minimum threshold for middle class, and too beat-down and molded into complacency to seriously seek a better way of life, while middle age looms.  Then, if I succeed in emulating that image, I can look forward to also becoming like my parents, both lonely people whose lives have apparently lacked any efforts at positive change for years on end.

I have to get away from these people, and I’m losing the capability to even imagine how that would happen, which is in turn inching me closer to the terrible outcome I want to flee from.  But it’s not family that I most fear becoming.  It’s all the little bearers of shattered lives or simple minds that shuffle about me day after day.  The few who possess the means for a decent life still seem either desperately adrift or else aloof and arrogant behind the bitterly ideological walls they’ve had to build for themselves to keep the tragic reality of this rust belt hellscape out of their emptily contented little lives.

The rest are a tragedy unto themselves.  Yesterday, I heard shouting outside my home and went out to make sure nobody was being hurt.  At the end of my street, a young woman was ranting and throwing things at who I presume to be her boyfriend.  I walked in that direction to make sure everything was all right, my phone in hand, ready to call the police.  For all I could tell, the woman was just throwing a tantrum, and the man was not returning the physicality, so I didn’t really know at what point to intervene.  In my uncertainty, I just ended up sitting nearby, next to a man who shook his head at the fighting couple and started talking to me as soon as I arrived.

If I spend time outside, I can generally count on finding half a dozen people in the course of an afternoon whose social status is wildly indeterminate.  I still remember my first encounter with the deplorable Eric Starchild, who wanders the streets of Buffalo selling single plastic beads on black strings for exorbitant prices.  When first he spoke to me, I thought for sure he was homeless and that that was his way of getting by and making the most of the hand he had been dealt.  Years later, I found out that he comes from an upper-middle class background, and after putting up with his attempts to advise me on how I could easily fix my life and have a career, I now have to restrain myself from punching him in the back of the head every time I see him walking somewhere ahead of me.

The fellow I encountered yesterday was of a similar sort.  He specifically described himself as coming from a wealthy family, but also as not being rich anymore.  That still left some doubt in my mind, as he sat there with his grocery cart and half-empty forty ounce bottle of beer, as to whether he was homeless, poor like me, or just another pretender who has still holds the financial means to do something with his life, but chooses not to.

I had a pleasant enough conversation with the fellow, though I could tell from the start that he was just slightly crazy.  It took about thirty seconds of conversation for him to reference mechanisms of government control, and another minute to get to his pronouncements about chemtrails.  He was perfectly coherent by and large, even relatable, but he’d filled the gaps in his worldview with self-assured paranoia.  He quite reminded me of a fellow I met on a Greyhound bus once, who talked to me with great clarity about many things, but occasionally told stories about how the FBI had been sending agents to monitor him in the guise of such people as his ex-wife’s new boyfriend.  I quite like talking to these people.  It’s intriguing to see how a person creates a consistent mythology to explain the tragedies of their lives, and how in the best of cases, this can seemingly avoid seriously impairing the person’s perception of reality in other areas.

I am especially interested to talk to these people now, because a spent a solid couple of years cresting toward the edge of insanity, and communicating with people who have inched past the barrier is the only thing that suggests the possibility that I am not irreversibly headed towards the hideous outcomes that have been realized in so many of the people that surround me.  On the other hand, most of the people I’ve spoken to who have embraced such paranoia have been roughly twice my age.  How many times did they near the edge and draw back while they were still young?  How much longer do my inexplicable and inexpressibly crushing failures have to persist before I manufacture conspiracy theories to make sense of them?

I may have already been suffering under the weight of those failures for six years, but conceivably there could be decades still to come.  Nothing, after all, exists to give me confidence that it will ever change, unless I can count the fact that I’m feeling pretty stable in my advanced age.  But as it happens, it was actually the instability that served to make me feel like I had it in me to fight an intolerable situation, to literally run away from this town with thirty dollars tucked into my shoe if the future here began to look bleak enough.

I fear the sort of person I will become if I remain as invisible as I am for much longer.  I fear it all the more because I no longer have the same confidence in my resistance, yet I still see every bit as much to resist, everywhere I look.  In five horrendous years in Buffalo, I don’t think I’ve met a single person I genuinely respect.  Those older than I are chilling images of the things that this town does to a person.  They are vessels for the display of various unique admixtures of hopelessness, paranoia, ignorance, unjustified arrogance, complacency, prejudice, and greed.

To date, the only person I have seen with any regularity whom I can say does not make me intensely sad is, oddly enough, a toothless old woman who sits smoking near the bus stop by the old Showplace Theater.  She has been as vividly damaged by her own life as all the rest of them, but somehow she is wonderfully pleasant to everyone who passes by, and it is a pleasance unpolluted by the relentless ego that motivates so many other local people to reach out to one another.

This woman, alone among all the others, seems to have found a way to inhabit this place with a character of quiet dignity, and I applaud her for it.  But still it is not good enough for me.  If, God forbid, I reside here when I am near to her age, I would never want my own dignity to be quiet.  I want it to rage against the systematic theft of lives.  I pray that this silence in me now is just a passing phase, and that age is not taking the fire from my blood.

Causes Can Have More Than One Effect

Before the night is over here, I want to make an additional comment on the same Morning Edition segment that I posted about earlier.  Thinking back on it, I realize that while my incredulousness about the use of Death of a Salesman to illustrate the concept of the American dream was well worth emphasizing, I missed the opportunity to remark on another, possibly more significant aspect of the story.

The subject of the story and its authors all make terrible assumptions about the American dream, but they make equally terrible and even more common assumptions about education as the pathway to it.  They pretend at compassionate liberalism but are seemingly guilty of very subtle acts of blaming the victim.  After outlining Juan Carlos Reyes’ triumphal narrative, they emphasize the fact that he is aware of the fact that the vast majority of people from his neighborhood didn’t make it out, and that he wonders why.

The story goes on to quote Jim Cullen, the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, as saying “A college degree has become, in effect, the lottery ticket of American life.”  I very much agree with that remark as it appears on the surface, but apparently in context it was meant to refer not to the value of the degree itself but the likelihood of obtaining one in the first place if you come from a challenging background.  Everyone involved in presenting his story looks at Reyes and makes the same mistake of confusing correlation and causality that I see at every turn in topics of education and employment.

As it’s presented by NPR, it was the act of getting a college degree that turned Reyes’ life around; nothing else.  Yet the actual story that’s presented of him, if one pays attention to it, focuses on the interventions of a committed high school teacher who pushed Reyes to pursue and achieve more, and who took an active interest in Reyes’ future.

It may be presumptuous, but I feel confident in assuming that she wasn’t the only presence in his life that offered encouragement, advice, and more importantly, support and assistance.  It seems to me that it’s an exceptional mistake to say that this man was destined for nothing until he got a college degree, at which point his future opened up wide for him.  It seems like a mistake in light of the fact that Morning Edition and Reyes himself wonder aloud about what it could be that differentiates him from other people who came from his beginnings but didn’t dream big, didn’t go to Baruch College, didn’t become a senior manager in the Office of the President at Columbia Teacher’s College.

It’s as though the program comes right to the brink of asking the right question but then falls back on the assumption that there must be something wrong with all the Hispanic kids who didn’t make it, even if it isn’t their own fault.  Morning Edition entertains the notion that there’s some specific set of tools that lead a disadvantaged youth to college, but it oddly fails to consider whether those tools are important beyond simply compelling a student into higher education.

If there are certain circumstances that contribute to a person like Reyes going to college, isn’t it just possible that those circumstances, and not merely the presence of a college degree, contribute to such a person’s success?  Maybe for some impoverished youths, the lack of a social support structure and connections within the middle class does more to limit their prospects than the lack of an education.  Conversely, maybe a person who pursued higher education but lacked any external influences that ranged beyond their impoverished background wouldn’t get as far as Reyes, who had at least one experienced and well-connected teacher actively supporting his trajectory in life.

Morning Edition further quotes Jim Cullen as saying that some would look at Reyes’ story as proof that the system works while others would see the fact that he is only an exception as proof that there is something seriously wrong with that system.  For my part, I would take it as further evidence that we are aggressively focused on entirely the wrong system in trying to explain the source of economic opportunity.  Yet the possibility that status and social influence might have something to do with economic outcomes seems as obvious to me as the fact that Death of a Salesman is not a happy story.

Death of an Academic

Today, Morning Edition featured, as part of their series on the American dream, a story about a man named Juan Carlos Reyes, went to college in order to work his way out of poverty in the South Bronx.  They said that Reyes was introduced to the notion of the American dream via Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  Reyes describes the idea as that "with hard work and dedication you'll get a nice house, a nice car, and enough money for your kids to go to school."  Afterwards, the program transitioned to its next segment by pointing out that Miller's play was one of many examples of the American dream being a theme of literature.

I find it amusing that no one involved in the segment seemed to recognize the irony of using that particular piece of literature as an illustration of the topic of the series.  Yes, the protagonist, Willy Loman, was a successful person, but his success came at the expense of his happiness and peace of mind.  Is that fact irrelevant to our understanding of the American dream?  Miller conveyed the impression that Willy Loman pursued the surest path to more money and possessions despite the fact that there was another livelihood that would have suited him better and perhaps led to a happier marriage and a better upbringing for his children, even if in a smaller home.

For a long time, I have had the sense that people would understand Miller's play better if it was updated for a modern audience.  I've considered the idea of writing a version called Death of an Academic.  In the social circumstances in which Miller was writing, a man was generally expected to pursue the molded image of the American dream by committing himself early and completely to sales.  Today the assumption is that the more you devote yourself to formal education, the more money you'll acquire, and thus the closer you'll be to the American dream.  Young men and women are expected to follow that path regardless of resources, personal interest, or aptitude.

The Reyes story presents him as having been saved from the unacceptable fate of following his initial ambition to become a doorman.  Before being steered toward higher education, he reasoned that people in that position made sixteen dollars per hour and that that would suit him fine.  He may be better off and happier now than he would have been if he'd acceded to lesser ambitions, but that's not the main idea that I get from the way the story is presented.  Instead, the message seems to be that sixteen dollars per hour is simply not enough.

I graduated with honors from NYU.  In the years between doing so and becoming a full-time freelancer, I never had a job that paid more than nine dollars an hour.  It was a meager existence, but still I was able to support myself - or at least I would have been were it not for the crushing debt I incurred in going to school.  How much more resentful I would be of that fact had I gone to college merely as a means to an end, and not because I was genuinely, passionately interested in my education.

With each generation, we slightly change the shape of the American dream.  But we don't change the notion that one size fits all, that that dream looks the same and feels the same for every type of person.  In fact, some people are better off becoming carpenters than traveling salesmen; some people are better off becoming doormen than graduate teaching assistants.

The Culture of Obesity

David Sirota had a piece in Salon yesterday addressing the obviously demanding issue that is the obesity crisis.  The article consists of five recommendations for how to begin practically addressing the problem.  The appeal of them is intuitive enough, though I would put much more emphasis on Sirota’s number two recommendation, restructuring subsidies, than on his number one, taxing junk food.

I believe that consumers do tend to act in a rational manner, so far as their understanding of the facts allows.  It seems to me that a principle cause of obesity is the malnutrition of the poor, helped along by the fact that high fructose corn syrup and general junk food are less expensive per calorie than healthful food.  Taxing junk food without first dramatically altering the grocery market wouldn’t fix the element of the problem that’s caused by poverty.  Making all food more expensive won’t make people any more likely to acquire adequate nutrition from the food that was expensive before the fact.

There is perhaps a breaking point to be had here, in the same sense that there is with any instance of blaming the victim.  It is unfortunately tempting to assume that obesity and similar ill health is purely the result of poor choices, without regard for the possibility that some people’s actual range of choices is constrained.  For my own part, I often find myself thinking that I know exactly what I need to do in order to be healthier; and more than that, I know that I would roundly prefer the healthier dietary and lifestyle options that are theoretically available to me.  And yet I know that I simply cannot make many of those choices, because they are out of my price range.

This is not to say that education (Sirota’s fifth point) isn’t essential to reversing negative trends in food consumption, but by emphasizing ideas that effectively punish people for their constrained choices, we practically absolve ourselves of the responsibility to make other people’s most healthy choice into the choice that is also most rational.

The trouble is that things like extending the boundaries of rational choice are tediously difficult solutions that must rely on collective social action and firm government initiatives.  This goes for a solution grounded in education, and it goes double for ending junk food subsidies.  It’s also the essence of the third item in the Salon article, banning junk food in schools.  Again, though, I would adjust the language to “replacing” junk food.  It’s more accurate, considering that what we’re talking about is junk food that schools had been supplying in the first place, and it’s also just better PR.  The word “ban” might convey the idea that this issue really is about limiting people’s choices, rather than changing the rational calculations that go into making them.

In any event, all of these potentially effective anti-obesity measures can only be gradually and incrementally implemented.  None of them come with associated breaking points.  The last of Sirota’s recommendations, though, is a matter of impelling a breaking point for a relatively small number of people.  It’s also maybe a solution that wouldn’t spring to many people’s minds, being as it is hidden in plain sight.  But concordantly, it’ll be in plain sight so it might generate more rapid results.

The recommendation is “stop glorifying unhealthy eating habits,” and Sirota’s example of such glorification is the photo-ops that appear throughout presidential campaigns of candidates consuming corn dogs and cheesesteaks.  For some reason, this is seen as an essential way of connecting with voters, either because such terrible food is considered uniquely American or because it helps to make the politician seem like what everyone assumes Americans stupidly want their leader to be: a regular guy.  I hope there will never been a better example of this trend than at the last Iowa straw poll when the treat to be photographed consuming was a deep-fried stick of butter.

But the glorification of unhealthy eating habits extends far beyond that.  For instance, I have always been both perplexed and disgusted by the fact that an activity known as competitive eating exists.  And until it ceases to exist, it remains indicative of a culture that has strongly duplicitous attitudes towards healthy living and the causes of obesity.  And competitive eating truly must cease to exist, along with every other impulse to present food consumption as a source of amusement or personal image, as opposed to what it is and should be: a source of nutrition.

All the more complex initiatives to address the obesity crisis must precipitate from a change of culture, which clarifies valuation of healthy lifestyles.  Until that is achieved, efforts to change policy and improve education are doomed to a degree of frustration.  They will not be accepted by a population that is still pulled in two directions.  They will not be backed up by uniform political will.  Every collective change starts at the level of the individual, and yet the individual’s attitudes often have their foundation in media.

That’s why this is a matter of reaching a breaking point.  The most crucial first steps must be taken by those few people who are in a position to say, no, we won’t broadcast the hot dog eating contest this year, or no, we won’t run the picture of Mitt Romney jamming a chicken fried steak into his face on the front page, or no, we won’t make the fat guy the comic foil in this sitcom.  People in charge of decisions like this are disproportionately capable of changing culture, but I fear they often don’t realize it.

I am always hopeful that something will both jog their awareness and prompt them to take the corresponding responsibility seriously.  And I hope it takes something less than their ceasing to profit off of American obesity, because if I’m right that other initiatives won’t reverse the crisis without a cultural change, then that may never happen.

Shocking Common Financial Realities

Bill Cimbrelo directed me to a CNN Money story titled “Retirement Shocker: 60% of Workers Have Less Than $25,000 Saved.”  To my mind, the main question that this raises is for whom is this a “shocker”?  If the cited fact applies to more than half of the people concerned, isn’t it safe to assume that the majority of people should be unsurprised by the information?  The only reason that I see why a person would be surprised by statistics that affirm the day-to-day reality of his life is if he thinks his own experience is somehow anomalous, somehow out of keeping with the daily experience of other people like him.  Unfortunately, this is almost certainly the situation with most lower-middle class and poor individuals.

So here’s a breaking point that I’m looking forward to, and it’s one that’s on my mind often, and that I’ve brought up earlier and elsewhere.  The news media and society in general needs to stop presenting affluence as the default state of life in America.  It’s not correct, and more than that it can be damaging to policy and social discourse.  Our collective understanding of income disparity is distressingly skewed by a distinctly hopeful presentation of American life in most media, whether fiction or non-fiction.  As with all things, failure to accurately recognize the problem makes failure to craft solutions almost certain.

 People should never be shocked by information that’s right under their noses all the time.  If they are, then it’s pretty clear that something had been wildly misrepresented in the past.  You might object that it’s not as though people walk around with their total retirement savings tattooed on their heads.  Why should we have any idea what sort of figures apply to the majority.  You shouldn’t, of course.  And if you’re not a meteorologist you shouldn’t know exactly how much rain your area has gotten this month.  But when somebody tells you that figure would you be shocked?  If so, surely you’re either terrible at estimating rainfall or you haven’t been looking outside very much.  And if you weren’t paying attention, in order to be shocked you have to have made some groundless assumption about what the amount might be, which will then be contradicted by the facts.

There’s a lot of information that casual observers can’t be expected to know about people, about the economy, about the world.  But learning something new is not the same as learning something shocking.  Yet I don’t dispute that the headline for the given story was accurate and that a great many people were shocked by the revelation.  They wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t concluded on the basis of nothing whatsoever that the majority of Americans are well prepared for a comfortable retirement.  I put forth that this sort of thing reveals the entire perception of income demographics in America to be pure fantasy.

Such a fantasy promotes a victim-blaming mentality.  And it promotes that not just among the beneficiaries of income inequality but among the victims of it, too, as they may tend to be surprised by information that shows their experience to be firmly in the majority.  And yet even the recognition of that information is not in itself enough to move commentators towards the idea that financial difficulty is an endemic problem and not a personal one.  The language applied to stories about the plight of the masses still suggests that the simple fact of their being a part of the masses is in some measure attributable to their own negligence, sloth, or ignorance.

The CNN article takes pains to spin the subject in a certain direction that is at once optimistic about general patterns and unfair to individuals.  It points out, “While workers' lack of saving and confidence in their ability to retire comfortably is troubling, [Employee Benefit Research Institute director Jack] VanDerhei said it's good that people are becoming more realistic about their financial situations.”  Sure, maybe, but there’s an enormously significant dimension of this story that stretches beyond the personal responsibilities of the people who are negatively affected.  At the same time that those people exhibit realism about that, how about analysts, media, and society as a whole become more realistic about the financial situations of people other than themselves?

Simplistic Thinking from Educated People: Arne Duncan

Every time a representative of the government goes on the television or radio to talk about higher education, my blood boils a little at my recognition of the simple-mindedness that governs policy in that area. On last night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s guest was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. At the very end of the portion of the interview that went to air (the entire thing is available in three parts on the web), Duncan made the most indefensibly black-and-white assessment of the outcomes of education that I have yet encountered.

First, though, he pointed out that the United States is now ranked 16^th in number of college graduates, whereas a generation ago it was in first place. He further explained that our rate of graduation hasn’t fallen, but has leveled off, allowing fifteen other countries to surpass us. Now, after a good deal of research, I’ve found that different reports come to different conclusions on the exact ranking, and they base those rankings on different criteria applied to different countries, so I can’t pin down exactly which countries beat out the US on this subject, or even whether Duncan is quite correct with his statistics. But it’s certainly the case that we’re far from the top, and some countries can be pretty conclusively identified as exceeding us in provision of tertiary education.

Duncan’s point is apparently that our achievement of benchmark standards for secondary education is insufficient to prepare students for college and university. I’ll eagerly agree that that’s true, but it is unhelpfully presumptuous to assume that that’s the only important factor contributing to low levels of higher education attainment. What of the steadily climbing costs of college tuition and the dearth of public funds to compensate for the out-of-pocket expense for students and parents? Might that not hold back some perfectly capable students from actually obtaining the education that they’re intellectually, but not financially, suited for?

Among countries in the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development, the United States is 29^th out of 34 in terms of how much funding for educational institutions comes from public funds. Not only is this situation accepted by US society, it is lauded by some elements thereof. Private institutional dominance of tertiary education, and indeed of all segments of society, increases competition and improves outcomes, they say. But with the US ranking somewhere around 16^th in educational attainment, it’s clearly not working that way. In fact, among the nations that are fairly reliably ranked well ahead of the US on this point, many are classed as those nations that conservative Americans tend to envision as socialist hellscapes.

Several Northern European countries are variously placed in lead positions on the list, including Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. What’s more, an Economic Policy Institute study of the affordability and accessibility of higher education in various countries concludes that “Finland and the Netherlands should be models for the international community” when it comes to both of these factors.

The correlation between cost and completion rates is not overwhelming, but it is sufficient that it needs to be explored as a factor, rather than being discounted among the ongoing repetition of the claim that if kids are smarter, they’ll always do better. There are other factors, and to deny that is to accept such unforgivably single-minded approaches to solving our problems as will only worsen some aspects of the situation. It’s not just that we’re failing at educating our children, though certainly we are doing that. It’s also that we’re failing to provide our children with suitable opportunities, access, and incentives.

Duncan seems to be under the mistaken impression that the problem underlying our trend of slipping behind the rest of the post-industrial world is just that students are failing at an alarming rate. But it’s not just dropouts that account for the low completion rate; the US ranks behind most of the OECD countries in terms of actual enrollment in higher education. And that fact is specifically ascribed in part to rising costs. That should be fairly obvious, especially to a Harvard-trained economist like Arne Duncan. As opportunity costs rise, the rational motivation for people to invest in something goes down.

The response to this would probably – nay, certainly – be that the opportunity costs of not attending college are unquantifiably higher than the material costs of attending. To that I would offer the simple challenge: prove it. The claim is repeated in the media constantly, always asserted, always assumed, but never adequately proven. And it would be one thing if the assertion was just that, on average, people with higher education backgrounds tend to do better than those without them. But that’s not what representatives of the administration say. Instead, they spread the hideously uncritical idea that if you get a college degree you are guaranteed success, and if you don’t get one you are guaranteed failure.

Do you think I’m mischaracterizing their claims? Arne Duncan said it on the Daily Show: “We have a million young people dropping out of school every year. A million. There are no jobs. None. They are guaranteed poverty and social failure.”

Guaranteed, he says. That there are any guarantees in life is an odious and socially detrimental lie. Virtually nobody would argue that people aren’t better off overall if they’re educated. For my part, I think that education is the most important thing that a person can pursue in life, though I am careful to emphasize that there are different ways of pursuing education, some far less expensive than others, and that education can serve a variety of ends, from vocational training to living a richer, fuller life of poverty. But the universal economic benefit of higher education is a baseless assertion so long as there are other explanations for a portion of the correlation between education and earnings, and other alternatives as to how hiring and job training might take place.

Now, Arne Duncan wasn’t very specific when he said “a million students dropping out.” If he was referring to students who drop out of high school, sure, they have their work seriously cut out for them if they want to be materially or socially successful. However, I’d still consider it irresponsibly closed-minded to say that both poverty and social failure are absolute guarantees for every child who has dropped out of high school in recent years.

Even working at a fast food restaurant can eventually allow a person to make a living wage, as long as he or she doesn’t rush to have children or otherwise climb into a hole that can’t be escaped through years of earnest work and eagerly sought promotions. What’s more, I’ve known people who’ve dropped out of high school and then obtained GEDs earlier than when they would have theoretically graduated. Hell, my ex-girlfriend never finished high school, and she leapt easily from job to job, quitting without notice and being hired for positions with higher pay, more responsibilities, and better titles, all at a time when I, with my fancy NYU degree, couldn’t so much as secure an interview for anything more than an eight dollar per hour retail job. Some people are just lucky; some just aren’t.

Regardless, I don’t think Duncan was referring to high school dropouts. The only statistics that I could find on short notice were from the 2004-05 school year, at which time 540,382 students dropped out of school between grades nine and twelve. Unless that number has doubled in seven years, I think Duncan was referring to any student who has dropped out at any level, primary, secondary, or tertiary. If so, some of the Americans who have been guaranteed poverty and social failure according to Arne Duncan include billionaires Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Ralph Lauren, Dean Kamen, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as a pretty extensive list of other highly successful individuals in a variety of fields.

This repetition of a shockingly simplistic set of talking points about higher education has got to stop. Is learning good? Chirst, yes! That part is perfectly simple. But it’s not a purely economic good, and to whatever extent it does improve your income potential, that’s not the only factor. There is something to be said for the influence of social connections, environment, work ethic, opportunity, investment capital, employer bias, and plain old luck. Amidst all of that, what I want to see happen is that kids start going to school not because they want to make money, but because they want to learn. Is it really too much to ask that we encourage education on those grounds, rather than trying to deceive every young person into pursuing something that he’s not interested in and at which he’s no good?