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I will bite. What’s the difference between formation versus filtering? It has to be more than vibes. I know when I went to school I worked my ass off, but maybe I wanted it more. I took 20 credit hour semesters in Engineering (plus wanted to dabble in economics). It was work. I know there are easy paths through elite schools but those have to close to as hard as a top MBA school which academically are on the easier side. I also did drink, went to football games, had religious education in school. I feel like that is formation.
Have things changed since I got out of school. Every school I have ever attended had some kind of spirit to this that you will now become this kind of “person”. Even flagship state schools have a concept of “Michigan Man”.
I do think America had a concept of institutions “molding” people. Maybe the are credentials today, but the credential has/had value because it meant if a company was hiring you; you had certain traits.
I guess this is a recent thing where something is just a credential and acceleration 2016-2024. And likely has a parallel with America giving up on assimilation and going with diversity is our strength. America itself is no longer expected to change someone.
One of the major flaws in either the American university system or our mass culture is the push for everyone to get into higher education. It’s producing ‘far’ too many competitive, elite aspirants that aren’t good for society. When you see warning signs like this, it should start ringing alarm bells in the minds of policymakers.
The absolutely insane salaries offered are what's doing the pushing. You can have a very nice life in America on $60k/yr- for multiple people. Let alone multiple times that. There's no need for the education system to push vast numbers of smart kids to try to go to the most selective college they can get when they know that's the siren song of six figure salaries.
I’ve tried making that point to people before but it always falls on deaf ears. They don’t understand the relative strength of your purchasing power varies widely depending on where you go. But I’ve learned when it comes to finance/economics/math, Americans are horrible and can’t manage money.
That was especially evident if it wasn’t already, when you saw stimulus checks during the pandemic and the way people were spending. Holy shit. People don’t know when the Fed starts printing in anticipation of a deflationary environment, it isn’t printing ‘money’, it’s printing ‘debt’. And credit analysts were trying to point this out to public policymakers, that the inflation is going to come due in the years afterward. But to the average consumer, what do you mean, $1 is $1. Yes. 1 is equal to 1. It’s the ‘value’ of said $1. People who were acting smart with the excess cash would’ve invested in stocks, because when the value of cash is decreasing and the economy is making a downturn, businesses have to figure out how to keep their heads above water by selling their products at a markup; so as knives are falling on the ground (cash), dinner is still being put on the table (equities).
People think concepts like volatility and risk are the same thing and they’re not. That’s finance 101 (“cash is trash”). Cash has no volatility but it’s risky as fuck to hold. But people just stare at you dumbfounded and in 2026 complain and say, “man why is everything so expensive today?” And sometimes I just want to look them in the eye and go “are you stupid?” You’re paying for those stimulus checks several times over and will continue to do, along with the exogenous shocks of the war right now. There are ‘zero’ free rides in life, and the sooner people come to terms with that and learn to be responsible, their lives will begin to improve.
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