Posts by BenWilson
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I don't know how much time you've spent in minimum-wage workplaces but "secure" isn't the word I'd use to describe it. "Just scraping by" is usually a better phrase.
Not a lot. Probably less than a couple of thousand hours, all up. I'd go along with describing it as "just scraping by" if I hadn't personally experienced going from being a student to that and back again, every year. I know which one was "scraping by", and it sure wasn't the one with the regular paycheck. The holidays actually felt like holidays, despite the fact I was working full time.
But I respectfully suggest that "oh, I'd have been so much happier not doing a degree and earning lots of money and living the simple life of the working poor" is a mindset that's a lot easier to have when you don't have to be one of the working poor.
True. The flipside is that the same goes for the working rich. "Oh I'd have been so much happier just having a fun time at varsity and then drifting into a high paying job" is a lot easier to imagine than actually do.
And I'll say again: people like your friend earning millions are, by and large, massive statistical anomalies. Very few people get no post-school qualifications and make millions of dollars. It's just not a useful anecdote for planning your life, unless you are particularly intelligent and/or driven.
Very few make millions, period. So the same statement goes for any anecdotes about undergoing tertiary training to make your fortune. Hence my going through the exercise of working through the actual numbers in NBH's EOTE. I'd be a whole lot more convinced by longer term studies. It's pretty complicated stuff, really, when you also consider how hard students actually have to work. As they are careful to say in the summary (my emphasis):
Care is needed in interpreting the following differences in earnings, and in particular, the extent to which these differences can be attributed to education....Even when limited to young leavers, there are likely to be differences in the innate ability of some groups being compared. While some education characteristics are likely to capture this, it may be that these differences in ability (or other unmeasured characteristics) are contributing to the resulting earnings differences, rather than the educational differences being compared.
It's better than nothing, of course, a damned sight so. But I'm not finding the economics compelling if the report is to be trusted.
Repeat: I'm not all about the economics. But I do want to know about them.
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Cracker: Spotted, in reply to Rich Lock,
But ideally it doesn't have to be that way. Why sneer at Macca's because you like fine gourmet dining? Or Lady Gaga because you're into The Pixies? Surely that which you don't like is simply an irrelevance? No-one forces me to eat, or listen to, either of them.
I guess there's a lot of arguments that you do get put under some pressure to eat and listen to them. Popular stations will play Gaga a lot. Maccas is everywhere, and sometimes the only choice left. And proselytizing aesthetic choices is probably motivated in part by a desire to do the person some "good", by pressuring them to make the "right" choices. In the case of Maccas, that good might even be to their health as much as their artistic appreciation (although probably at the cost of their pocket).
Indeed your ethic (which is much the same as mine) regarding polite disregard for choices I'm not into, is also an aesthetic choice. I can't escape having made aesthetic choices constantly in my life. But there's a class of discussions I really don't get any pleasure from at all regarding those kinds of choices. I'll usually become flippant, opting for joking around if such a discussion starts, unless pressed, in which case I'll become angry or evasive. That's all irrational at a deep level.
It's on par with the kind of work-avoidance I'm engaging in now - I should be doing graphic design for my app, but I just can't stand the process. I actually don't like software in which form has taken a lot of precedence over function, which will reflect in the final cost, and find it incredibly difficult to put myself in the mindset of people who do. But all advice is that it does pay dividends. FFS. I should outsource it.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Education may not be the golden ticket to riches but it helps you understand the needs of others
Not sure about that. It helps you perhaps find out what those needs are in a more systematic way if you care to, but I don't think it engenders empathy - that's found in all walks of life, and also absent in them. Education can train you to be a wanker, if you let it.
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Cracker: Spotted, in reply to Rich Lock,
But other peoples value judgements on those things we don't have in common are not welcome.
I'm often interested to hear, more because it tells me about the person than about the art. But yes, people saying things you like are crap wears thin fast. It seems more likely, the more refined the tastes of the person.
This discussion may be veering dangerously towards the same subject matter as The Great PAS Art War of 2010.
Ugh. I'm out now.
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Cracker: Spotted, in reply to DCBCauchi,
An art work is an object, whether real or virtual, whose constituent elements have been intentionally arranged for a non-functional purpose and that is presented in such a way that it refers to other art works.
Discuss.
That's a self-referential definition. Unless you point to the other art works, I can't use it to identify any art works.
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how many are there that end up stuck in crappy minimum or close-to-minimum wage jobs all their life?
I don't know. They exist, for sure, although "stuck" is a loaded term to describe people who don't even try to get better work, not even within their workplace. "Secure" might be what they were actually after.
But if you want to do something specialised or the really well-paying jobs, a degree can pan out.
It can. Or, like my previous business partner, you can make millions without any qualifications beyond school cert (whatever that is now. Level 1 NCEA?). Get a job doing something, learn to program in your spare time, sell the software...away you go.
For everyone who drops out and does well there are a lot more who don't, because succeeding under those circumstances takes innate skills that not everyone has or develops on their own.
The stats NBH gave don't really back that up. There's a difference, but it's not a many-fold. Completing a bachelor's degree starts you at 32% more than not completing it (table 1). It also sets you back up to three years, and costs money. That's the biggest difference, the other kinds of qualifications all counted for less.
The post-study earnings table (table 2) is also interesting, in that it says after 3 years someone with a bachelors degree is about 27% ahead on income over someone with only level 1-3 certificates. At that rate, it's going to take somewhere on the order of 9 years to break even to cover the lost 3 years. Possibly more, if you include the cost of the study, and progressive income taxes. Certainly more, if you then act like you're as wealthy as your income suggests, which most people do.
As a purely economic choice, study seems rather risky, and also likely to involve a lot harder work. It also comes with 3 years that are still a financially dependent on your parents, if they are of average wealth. 3 more years of living at their home under their rules, etc. That's not an insignificant cost to a young person wanting to become independent, and it's a very high cost for people who don't like their parents.
I'm not trying to talk study down. Just trying to get to the bottom of the current economics of it. It might help people from older generations grasp why getting into university doesn't mean a life of peaches the way it used to.
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Cracker: Spotted, in reply to Steve Barnes,
And a fine night was had by all, did we ever decide what Art was?
Hell, I never even tried to answer that kind of question as a philosophy student. I can't see it going anywhere useful, other than perhaps to signal what you're into, so that like-minded people are attracted. I always feel isolated in those kind of discussions, expecting at any moment that people will work out I like the wrong kind of music or TV shows, have the wrong taste in books, etc.
Lindsay would claim he could prove objectively that certain music, or art, or literature, was better than others, and that the other stuff was 'evil', but often it was just repeating what Ayn Rand had said. Ayn Rand, because she's such an awesome literary talent.
Yeah, or that shit happens.
Totally. As a 13 year old Alex P Keaton was my hero.
Thomas Edison was mine. Not just because he invented so many useful things, but also because he made it pay for him. I never even knew he was quite such a crazy crackpot until recently.
I am not actually like him, though. Much, much more middle class and risk averse.
When the crash came in 87 I mourned the fact I would never be a yuppie. Personally I think it was the fact that I was a bit of a geek at school, and so knowing I'd never be an All Black, getting rich was the only way I could stick it to all those f**kers who were making my life a misery at the time.
I was a nerd, rather than a geek. My school was full of rich kids, and physical bullying virtually unknown. The crash didn't really raise a ripple, other than bankrupting the stadium we were building (financed by Chase). There was no rugby team at all because the hippies who ran the place were bitter on the Tour. There's never been anyone to stick it to. I can't explain an ACT flirtation other than as I have, that it was a reaction to parental authority. Pretty short lived, in my case, maybe 2 years.
Such a great intro to the perfect libertarian society, chasing some rich c**t for my minimum wage.
I had a similar unpleasant brush with an ACToid, who nearly bankrupted me on a property deal when I was 22. The worst part was his tireless niggling, and his bitterness that he'd only made $100,000 out of me losing about $50,000. My lawyer, who was also an ACToid, lost some of his taste for it, during his dealings with the fellow. I think he started to realize even then that being a ruthless old arsehole isn't really that great a model for society.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to NBH,
I was actually not even going there. The question of actual financial payoff is at least a subquestion that could potentially be answered with numbers alone. But it's still a hard question, lots of data to consider. I guess if you can show that people are generally better off after, say, 6 years from commencing tertiary study, then you've got an answer of sorts. And that 3 years of financial backpedalling when the straight-to-work-er is going forward do actually make me seriously question that, even with the EOTE you gave. One has to earn more than twice as much to catch up on 3 years losses in only 3 years. Make it the 7-8 years of a doctorate and we're talking having to do the same for 7-8 years. The only people I know who make that much bank out of such long education are doctors.
I personally emerged from tertiary education after 5 years, about $30,000 in the hole, and was only able to walk into an average wage job. It took a further 4 years to double that. Another 4 and it doubled again, but by then I'm no longer inclined to think that university had anything to do with it, and it was more a function of my ambition, drive, and more importantly, contacts. I wasn't doing anything I learned at university. I had work constantly on my mind, was effectively doing nearly constant work and had only two actual holidays in 10 years, because holidays cost me a huge amount of lost earnings as a contractor. When personal reasons caused me to lose the motivation to do this level of work, I also lost that contract. Now I'm just another contractor whose skills have dated, any motivated 22 year old kid is as productive with new technologies.
In the same time a fairly lazy friend of mine dropped out about a month into first year, did some pretty basic minimum wage work until he found a niche, learned a trade (pest control) and has steadily built up a tidy pile of money, and is in well-paid secure work. There's always pests to kill, and you do it pretty much the same way forever, the techniques change only gradually. It's certainly not like he's had to learn 8 new programming languages on 10 different operating systems, with 4 major paradigm changes like I have. He does his work, goes home and relaxes, takes good holidays, and does what he likes with his weekends.
Does make me wonder about the economics of tertiary education, I must say. In hindsight it strikes me as doing things the hard way.
Not that I'm grudging my choices. I do value things other than the financial aspects. I was interested in the things I studied, and didn't really bother much with the rest (hence the extra year my degree + diploma took). But if kids are a bit iffy about it, I'm not really inclined without hard facts to tell them they should study, because the way things currently are, with student loans, no allowances calculated off parental income, and the fact that degrees are heading towards being commonplace, and my own personal experiences, if they want to just do low wage work and probably find a niche, who am I to say that's not thinking ahead?
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OK, there are answers in there, but I'd have to devote some time to them to be able to work out if the financials of tertiary stack up. It's still incomplete, the earnings growth is only tracked for 3 years post study, and all classes of people of that age have earnings growth that is well above the median, whether they got degrees, or left school after failing to complete level 1. I guess you tend to have the fastest growth when you start at the bottom.
Also, there is of course a big danger in the comparisons, that people choosing study are possibly self selected as the most likely to have high wage growth no matter what they did. Not sure how to eliminate that from the equation.
Interesting point in there, that people who didn't complete their doctorates seem to have done better for it. Most curious. I wonder if they didn't complete because they were grabbed, skewing the figures.
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Hard News: On Science, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
We should actually be aiming for 100% renewable by 2020 and to go well beyond that in replacing transport and static fossil fuel usage by renewables after that date.
Yes, both Labour and Nats are disingenuous to only refer to electrical energy. Oil consumption for transport is fossil fuel based, and it doesn't need to be. There are lots of ways we could produce biofuels, and many transport initiatives to replace petrol with electricity, the most obvious being increased rail usage, and higher density urban areas. Rising oil prices could give NZ a very competitive advantage.
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