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Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 13:34:16 -0300

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote:
>
>
>  
>
>>Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League
>>dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start
>>with.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's
>composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to
>get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say
>"Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could...
>  
>
Sure - discussion in Forbes - rigorous research, that. Especially when 
the data in their own list
contradicts them. I continue to look at the list and all the "inherited, 
growed" entries. I guess if
I read it enough times my vision will clear.

>[Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school,
>like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught
>you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of
>*those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get
>around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing
>transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's
>government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of
>innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this
>summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out
>there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.]
>
>
>The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a
>"terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the
>best school possible.
>
>Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard,
>for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it,
>ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the
>years for proof.
>  
>
I, at on point, looked into Stanford Business School. After learning 
that tuition was > 20K,
no financial aid was available, and part-time work was disallowed, this 
smart person decided
that I was not willing to spend the $150 application fee 
(non-refundable). During attendance at
my local business school, I was told repeatedly I should have gone for 
it - to quote a prof, (Northwestern MBA), it
has nothing to do with the education you receive - in general European 
(and Canadian) business
schools are better and more innovative - its the connections. He used 
the words "American nobility."

>Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after
>World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course,
>Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who
>goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually
>afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who
>couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the
>last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades,
>and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in.
>  
>
"invented" being the right word. Dubya went to Yale and HBS. I guess 
"practically" gets you
around that problem.

>
>The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal"
>degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or
>learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss
>basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after
>death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people
>who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is*
>smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow.
>
>BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this
>rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to
>beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You
>were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to
>Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful,
>much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on
>this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with
>educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The
>facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*.
>There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and
>economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including
>ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case,
>intelligence and effort.
>
>[I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of
>competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you,
>apparently.]
>
>  
>
Its interesting but in this part of the World (Nova Scotia) a recent 
study found that college graduates
earn less than graduates of 2 year community colleges (trade schools). 
They did decline to mention
that the demand for some trades  is so great that some of
them are demanding university degrees to get in. Just for the record - 
the average salary for
a university graduate (including advanced degree holders) here is C$ 
21,000  -- < $14,000 US. No wonder
half of San Francisco has set up here - we have a whole whack of call 
centers that
have arrived here in the last couple of years - I think they hire some 
entry level IT people for around $10 ($6 US) an
hour, which of course, fits perfectly for me - my entry level job, in 
1986, paid $11.00 an hour. The fundamental difference
is that most of the jobs that require a trade are *unionized*.In other 
words, in this part of the world, for the vast majority of people, 
 union dues are a better investment than tuition. The counter-argument 
to this is that many college graduates
 leave for better work elsewhere, but the counter-counter argument is 
that we are the thin edge
(one of several really - prison labor in the US would be another) of 
third-world wages and work practices coming
 to North America.

I worked at a company that had a 14-year wage freeze. The fact that they 
could maintain that (and prosper) just says
 volumes about the economy in this part of the world. I met many people 
there, like me, who felt that was fine, I can vote
with my feet. They didn't quite realize that just about every large 
employer in the area has similar, or worse, policies. Anyway
eventually they started a union drive. During the vote, retired 
employees were brought in by the employer (rumours were
that they were paid the going rate for a vote around here - a bottle of 
rum) and somehow allowed to vote . The union filed
 a grievance - which was denied - by a Minister of Labour, who, hey, 
guess what - used to be a VP at the company.
That's free labor markets at work. The business continues to prosper - 
as I was told when I was there -  it is a cash cow as long
as the JOA (Joint Operating Agreement) with the competing paper is in 
place.

And if you think that any of those wonderful American companies, out of 
some free-enterprise belief in competing for the best talent,
are going to do anything about that, sorry, most of them received 
generous subsidies, in return, I'm sure, for an understanding about
the labor markets here.

>
>BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country,
>*including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes,
>all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and
>there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition,
>most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have
>*much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically
>all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and
>not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not.
>
>That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The
>People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better
>stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept
>apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd
>know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase
>in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about
>extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who
>doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some
>politician as Santa Claus come election time...
>  
>
Much as I like to accept what you say - I do believe in free markets , I 
have difficulty finding any - except of course for
labor markets, which governments go to great lengths to protect (well 
unless the supply is tight)
It was a great run with the technology industry - producing most of the 
self-made billionaires on
the list, but now we've got a government-sponsored monopoly, and the 
concept of "more stuff, cheaper"
which it has always promised - seems to be disappearing. A particularly 
galling example is
high-speed internet access. An article I read a couple of years ago that 
it is an area where the pricing
approaches of the IT industry (cheaper, better or you die) and the 
telecom industry (maintain your
monopoly through regulation, and get guaranteed price increases through 
the same regulators) meet.
Sadly to say, the telecom industry seems to have won. The whole 
entertainment industry/RIAA/Palladium thing
seems to be another instance where actually giving value to the customer 
seems less important than using
regulation to reduce competition and substitute products in order to 
produce profits for the favored few.

>
>In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not
>theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and
>redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just
>that: horseshit, happy or otherwise.
>
>To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx
>wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense.
>  
>
I usually agree - but when there's a Republican in office -  I feel like 
they're the biggest believers in
the Manifesto, in reverse. Create a reserve pool of labor, reduce the 
rights of that "proletariat" you've
just created with bogus "law and order" policies , concentrate capital 
in the hands of a few (ideally people
who can get you reelected) and the economy will take care of itself. Oh, 
and lie - use
the word "compassionate" a lot. I guess I tend to believe that a certain 
amount of poverty reduction actually
helps a modern capitalist state - the basic economic tenet of the 
Republic party seems to be the more homeless under
 each overpass, the more efficient the rest of us will be.

And the facts are, for most people in the Western world  are declining 
standards of living, declining benefits, disappearing social safety net,
greater working hours,  essentially since the entrance of women into the 
work force (not blaming women in any way, they have a right
 to work but its now 2 wage-earners in each family and still declining 
standards of living) is the reality.

Again to quote that wonderfully liberal document I keep coming back to - 
the CIA world factbook - on the US economy:

"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to 
the top 20% of households"

Owen










