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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35161 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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It would solve some stuff.

They no longer pay enough to be worth their time- bigger ticket items got much more expensive (cars), and smaller-ticket items becoming much cheaper (entertainment and sex porn) at the same time.

The problem with that is that it's also good for society in general for them to work, and be properly rewarded for working with things they actually want; if you don't have that, the child-to-adult pipeline breaks down and... well, if you want to see the results of that, look out the window.

I suppose the car issue is a bit more complicated. I’m not so sure that cars are that much more expensive on average since back in the days, but either way the much more important aspect is that a combination of important social factors are disincentivizing teenage car use: car insurance rates becoming rather high for young men, the erosion of third places in social life, a general decline in community activity and the decline of malls in particular etc.

Back in my grocery store days, one of my co-workers was saving all his money for a used Camaro. He did eventually get the Camaro.

I thought that was stupid. Unlike him, I saved my money to help pay for college. I earned about $5/hour but the union took a lot, so I ended up with maybe $4/hour after taxes and union dues. I saved something like $3k in total.

Camaro guy had it right.

Also meritocratic competition for upper-middle class teens and young adults is far more intense than it was back in the day. Given that you don't need the money, working in a McJob when your competition are polishing their Ivy League applications with extracurriculars/building a list of public GitHub commits/using unpaid internships to network into cool jobs is loser behaviour.

If there was an expectation among elite colleges and suchlike that a well-rounded upper-middle class upbringing included paid work then this would be different, but I don't think it ever was. Paid holiday jobs were common for upper-middle class kids in my social circle back in the day because it was worth it - the amount you could earn in a McJob was a lot more than the amount of pocket money it was socially acceptable for an upper-middle class family to give a teenager. But the ones who spent their summers travelling weren't seeing as doing anything wrong, just as regrettably broke once they got to University.

This seems like a filter bubble effect- nobody I know thinks a teenager working a low wage job is a problem.

It's not that low wage jobs on a CV are a problem - even now an elite university or graduate employer would rather see "worked at McDonalds" than "sat at home playing Fortnite" - it's that paid work is a much smaller positive than more socially prestigious unpaid activities you could be doing instead. And one-marshmallow-eaters optimise for the future value of the CV, not for disposable income in the present.

Yeah, but if the admissions officers are in the filter bubble then the filter bubble effect becomes a real effect. The belief doesn't need to be "a teenager working a low wage job is a problem", it just has to be "a teenager who did these fancy things would make a better admit than a teenager who just didn't seem to have as many man-hours of accomplishments for some reason we don't understand".

But college admits aren’t nearly as hard as blue tribe elites think they are- good students nearly always get in to their state flagships, which are as good on a resume as any non-Harvard school.

It can’t be a real effect when the admissions officers have far less power than commonly believed.

their state flagships, which are as good on a resume as any non-Harvard school.

At first glance, Harvard appears to have about a 4% salary premium over the top California state schools or Georgia Tech, 15% over U. Virginia, 20-25% over U. Michigan or UT-Austin, and about 55% over my childhood state's "flagship".

Plus, even the flagship schools aren't exactly guarantees. UT-Austin just tightened its auto-acceptance rate (the way 85% of its in-state students get in) to the top 5%. If you were only in the top 6% of your high school, I'd say you're a good student, but you didn't make the cut this year; if you were in the top 10% of your high school, I'd still say you're a good student, but you never really stood a chance.

UT Austin takes enormous numbers of transfer students, though, so good students have the option to graduate from their even if they have to do community college for the first two years.

Plus, Harvard is in a league of its own and feeds into an unusually high salary market. In purchasing power/multiples of local salary in the nearby market the numbers are probably a lot more even. Except for the very small percentage of population which can get into a top Ivy, ‘worry less about college admissions’ is the correct move.

It seems that sometime, somewhere society arrived at the unstated consensus that high schoolers and college students who perform low-wage jobs part-time or on a seasonal basis are the sort of people who grow up to do the same sort of jobs full-time.

There are still places...

You ever visit a McDonald's in a rural area of the Midwest? All of a sudden there is a pretty blonde girl working the register, and everyone is competent and friendly.

It's like going back in time.

I wonder if there would be any way to get statistics on this.

When I went to college I moved out of a city where Burger King was staffed by teenagers managed by late-twenties workers, all of whom seemed to see this as a stepping stone to bigger things, and I moved to a much bigger city where Burger King workers were all twice my age and clearly not proud of or happy with where they were. I hoped the under-seared patties and limp lettuce were just due to heedlessness and heat lamps rather than spite and spit, but either way I found different places to eat.

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