Comment by chongli
10 months ago
It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three.
But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners.
We are a society of ladder-pullers.
I don't disagree, but often we complain about people pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"
We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals, and exhorting people to do so saps energy and distracts. The system interprets integrity as damage and routes around it.
That's wildly inaccurate. Your logic necessitates that "the system" is not composed of individuals.
The problem itself was created through individual actions...
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This attitude willingly donates what agency you have to the people and things trying to take it from you.
Lead by example. Mimicry is real, we all do it whether or not we are aware. Every node in the graph influences others. If you must exhort, it works better if you follow your own advice.
Of course, be discerning as you do this, and don't expend your energy or goodwill where it will be wasted. Be like Gandalf.
Any dogmatic system is fault-tolerant, in that it will "route around" some amount of internal dissent, but this does not make it impregnable.
The ruts in our minds steer us just as much as those in the ground. But earth turns and so can we.
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This is a problem with liberal thinking. Its brains over do the right thing.
>The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market.
I'm not even sure if people are aware of inflation/housing as a completely solvable issue by the govt. I guess it's because people most people are clueless on how it is to be solved.
>We are a society of ladder-pullers.
It's by design, to serve the rulers. It's an assembly line of slaves who are given some freedoms and are put through various stages of school, university, work and retirement. When most people retire they are left with little to nothing.