The Razor

I usually don’t review books, let alone children’s books, but every once in awhile something comes a long that deserves my admiration.

Cannon the Brown Bear: An Illustrated Children’s Fable is a very simply story about a bear who begins free and happy and who provides for himself. But then he starts to receive food handouts and even his den is dug out for him, and he begins to find himself unhealthy and bored and unhappy. So one day he takes back his independence and begins to rely on his own resourcefulness to provide for himself, and his life is much fuller because of this.

I enjoyed the book very much. Some may find this message to be political which is a shame. Maybe it’s because I’m old but I didn’t find the message very “political” at all. Is it right wing to teach children the value of reaping what you sow? Is it Republican for children to read fables that could have been read 2,500 years ago by a Greek like Aesop? Since when is learning to provide for yourself a political act?

And I particularly enjoyed the fact that the illustrations were done by a child. As a fan of the classic illustrators like the Wyeths, I appreciate the artistry of the medium, and seeing it done with a child’s hand adds authenticity to the work.

If you are looking for a book for those in the 3-7 range, consider this one. It’s Kyle’s first work, and honestly, it’s one of the better first books I’ve read as of late. Kudos to Michaela for a job well done illustrating the work.

Measles cases have soared in the UK, making it second in Europe behind only Romania in the number of cases. Last year the UK had 2,000 cases and so far this year it has had 1,200, putting it on track for another record breaking year. Of those sickened, about 20 have been hospitalized with serious complications including pneumonia and meningitis. In 1998 a paper published by Andrew Wakefield and others suggested there was a link between the measles vaccine and autism. As a result, measles vaccination levels plummeted in the UK, from 90% of children down to 54%. The measles epidemic now hitting the UK is a direct consequence of this failure.

I had a child when the scare hit, and I sympathize to a degree with the parents who thought they were doing right by their children by avoiding the vaccine. The parental instinct is to protect your child, and exposing him or her to dangerous agents intentionally, trusting faceless authorities to have done their due diligence and provide a safe vaccine isn’t easy, especially while no vaccine has zero side effects and every instance of those who did experience them gets press while nothing is written about those vaccinated and exposed to measles who were protected from the disease. Wakefield’s paper and the press he received from it fed into a natural suspicion people have for authority. Skipping the vaccine seemed sensible, especially since doing so had no immediate effect as herd immunity offered some protection for the unvaccinated.

Around my hometown of St. Louis there are several high schools and colleges run by Christian Scientists, a religious sect that believes in the power of prayer instead of the science of Medicine. While this may seem quaint or irrational to those of us in the 21st century,  at the time Mary Baker Eddy founded the group in the late 19th century Germ Theory had yet to become orthodoxy in Medicine and it wasn’t until the 1920’s that going to a doctor offered any benefit as opposed to staying at home. In fact hospitals at the time were good places to get sicker. Students at these schools are not vaccinated, and measles outbreaks are common and deaths from the disease are not unknown. Either God had an ax to grind with the Christian Scientists or measles vaccination was a pretty good idea. Perhaps the Brits would have benefited from the presence of this sect on their territory to see what happens when children aren’t vaccinated, but it’s doubtful. The specter of Autism is pretty powerful, especially when authorities have been wrong so often in the past.

But in this case they weren’t wrong; Dr. Wakefield was, and kids are paying the price for his mistake and their parents’ bad decisions.

Last night the wife and I were outside on the deck, listening to the spring peepers while allowing her to decompress from her stressful day as a rural family physician. That often includes brief deprogramming sessions after she listens to NPR on the way home from the practice. During the drive she heard a story about the shooting death of a young black girl in Chicago who had performed at the President’s inauguration. I am lucky to be married to one of the smartest people I’ve ever met who doesn’t realize it, so she already knew that the gang violence behind the murder of Hadiya Pendleton had nothing to do with lawfully owned guns or “gun culture”.

She recognized as an intelligent person and doctor in one of the poorest parts of the country that gun culture isn’t the root of the violence, something else – something that when said leads to knee-jerk charges of racism even though the vast majority of poor patients my wife attends to are white. Douglas Ernst, writing in the comments section at the Colossus of Rhodey, says it best: “I’ve said for quite some time that we don’t have a “gun culture” ... we have a “having kids out-of-wedlock” culture.”

The Wife also happens to have a degree in anthropology. She couldn’t think of any culture that has been studied that allows boys to grow up without fathers or father figures. She believes, and I agree, that raising a boy without the guidance and discipline of an older man in his life is like letting a wild animal loose on the streets. Like stray dogs, these children eventually form into packs and establish a hierarchy of their own, but one parasitic on society instead of contributing to it. The gang takes the place of the father, the grandfather and the uncles.

I come from a broken home myself, but one that was broken by a massive heart attack on the job site. For years I drifted and experimented with things I probably shouldn’t have – and wouldn’t have had my father been around. But I was lucky: I was white and geeky and attending Catholic schools where the only gangs were of the nun or Jesuit variety. Had I been another color and in another place I could easily have ended up differently. Still, growing up without a father made me swear that I would never subject my child to divorce. I even cut out tobacco and later alcohol because I wanted to stay around to provide guidance to my son that I had lacked from the age of 11 onward.

If we want to stop gang violence or the violence of young men that gun down innocents for no reason, then we need to face the reality that there are limits to single parenthood and consequences that are borne by everyone. We have created, and even celebrated the single mom in media even though a child born to a single mother is more likely than any other to be born into poverty. I realize there are good, solid reasons for divorce, but we need to recognize and admit that we are raising a generation of “wild boys” without morals or conscience and then setting them loose into society where they end up in prison, unemployable and marginalized by society before entering an early grave.

A generation ago the fictional character Murphy Brown became pregnant and was lionized by the liberal media elite as a brave example for American women to follow, even though unlike the fictional character most women had a fraction of Brown’s earning power. The family values crowd was pilloried mercilessly for their criticism of the character. Now we have entire cities where the majority of boys are being raised by their mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Maybe, just maybe, the family values crowd was right after all.

Where the family values crowd is wrong, though, is on abortion. After all, single mothers who carry their children to term are lauded by the family values crowd. One would think that society would benefit if these mothers had opted for abortion instead; it’s hard to argue that the world would be a better place had the thugs who gunned down Hadiya Pendleton ended up in a medical waste incinerator. The family values believers would retort that fighting abortion is simply the first step on a path that ends up in marriage and a stable family, but such an argument is hard for me, one of their sympathizers, to understand and find possible in modern society. I simply think we’ve gone too far away from the traditional family to return to it.

Is there anything that could replace it?

There are cultures where the saying “it takes a village to raise a child,” is more than an empty slogan. Some traditional cultures in the Amazon and in Africa live communally and boys are raised by all the men in the village not just their fathers. Similarly in Scandinavia I’ve learned of unrelated people who live in separate apartments but share common spaces such as kitchens and living areas. In such an environment it could be possible for boys to be raised by completely unrelated men. What’s important is not bloodline but that a man serve as a role model for a boy while helping to set expectations and responsibilities for him in the general community to give him a place within it and to create within him a sense of belonging. Such a sense is only found in criminal subcultures today in the US, Russia and other nations suffering from “having kids out-of-wedlock culture,” so it’s worth considering any situation that could make boys into productive men in society.

But first we must recognize our society’s failure, that by encouraging women to have children out of wedlock and brainwashing them into believing them they can raise boys just as well as girls, we have created an entire caste of maladjusted young men who are violent, narcissistic and parasitic. This has nothing to do with race, but it has everything to do with half-baked psychological theories, ill-conceived but often well-intentioned government policies, topped off by a post-feminist culture that views men as a disease that needs to be drugged with Ritalin, predators that must be jailed or helpless oafs to be brainwashed until they are infantilized.

Free to good home: 16 year old boy. Requires high speed Internet, unlimited video games, designer clothes, food made to his exact specifications on demand, latest generation of iPod, no fixed bedtime, no chores around the house,  unlimited canned soda. Demands respect without providing any in return, drivers license without practicing driving because he knows everything at his age including how to drive. Unfortunately this knowledge does not translate to his grades which include a “D” in Spanish. Madre de Dios... Also unable to follow commands such as “Do your homework,” “Clean your room,” or “Hurry up, you’ll be late for school.” Excels at making his mother cry. Housebroken.

At the ripe old age of forty-something I’ve discovered motorcycles. A few months back I bought the kid a 125cc four stroke Yamaha dirt bike to have fun with over the summer. He ended up riding it for a few hours before he resumed his routine of skyping and playing multiplayer Minecraft. Now I’m the one riding the thing all the time.

I’m also a lifelong NFL fan, and I miss the old days of smashmouth football when big men used to collide into bigger men carrying an odd-shaped ball and yellow penalty flags were rare. Today I’ve become so accustomed to penalty flags that when I watch a baseball game and someone crosses home plate I wait to see if there’s a flag on the play. Seriously. I was also bored stiff half the time I watch baseball, hoping the basemen charge the mound and sack the pitcher. Yes the months are indeed long between Super Bowl and the pre-season.

I’ll admit I don’t wear any helmet while riding the dirt bike on my property. I recognize it’s extremely dangerous and because of that I have yet to put the bike down or fall. I’ve had a scare or two as recently as last night when I took a turn too sharp and braked too quickly, nearly catapulting myself over the handlebars. My son, on the other hand, has wrecked a few times but does so wearing gloves and an expensive motocross helmet. I realize it’s silly to generalize using such a small sample size as two, but I’ve talked to my son and watched him on the bike and it’s clear to me that he pushes the bike too far and takes a lot more risks wearing the protective gear than I do without it. Is it possible the same thing occurs in other sports like football?

In the Seattle-Chicago game on Dec 2, Seattle’s Sidney Rice took two shots in the head (video), one by Bears’ defender Major Wright and another when his head banged the ground as he scored. Now imagine the same play with both players wearing little or no protective gear. Would Wright have tackled Rice in the same way? I doubt it. Earlier in the game Chicago’s Earl Bennett got hit by two Seahawks and cartwheeled into the end zone. He walks away without apparent injury, but  given what we are learning about concussions in the NFL the damage does not come from a single hit but results from repetitive hits each of which may seem completely harmless at the time.

American football is a multi-billion dollar industry. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people rely on it for their income. But the more I watch it the more I wonder how long it will be around. The murder suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jevon Belcher is no surprise for NFL sports fans who have become numb at the high price paid by players of the game. According to the New York Post, Belcher struggled with pain, prescription drug abuse, and alcoholism caused by his playing the game, and he eventually snapped. Bob Costas used his position on the air and blamed the 2nd Amendment instead of the nature of the sport that pays his multi-million dollar salary, nor the fact domestic violence resulting in death doesn’t always involve guns. Belcher was 6’2” 228lbs. He probably was twice the size of his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and could have killed her with his bare hands had he wanted to. Bob Costas has a lot of nerve airing his liberal opinion about guns all the while collecting paychecks from the blood sport.

Courtesy: Instapundit

Is the problem prevalence guns or the nature of the sport? American football is unique in sports due to the amount of physical contact between players. Baseball players rarely run into each other, rushing home plate being the exception and the concussion danger of this play is now increasing calls to ban it. Hockey has a lot of physical contact as well and Canadian neurosurgeons are calling for a ban on body checking to protect against concussions. I simply do not see how we are going to be able to make football safer for players without making it a non-contact sport.

In the meantime people excuse the danger by saying players know the risks and are paid handsomely to take them. That’s little comfort to Belcher’s mother who watched her son kill himself or to the parents of Kasandra Perkins. The NFL will add penalties and increase pads, and the players will do what my son does when he’s on the dirt bike, push themselves even further to the point where injury is inevitable. I would like to see teams at least try to play the sport without all the protective gear to see whether linebackers and tackles dialed it back a bit before sending somebody into next Tuesday, but I’m not hopeful that would end the danger either.

So we will see men kill themselves off the field quickly like Belcher or on the field slowly all for our amusement. I enjoy the sport but my conscience is stirring and I won’t be surprised if my lifelong love the game turns into a remainder of life regret for the carnage I’ve witnessed on countless Sunday afternoons.

To put it crassly, nothing motivates a man better than getting laid, especially when that man is in his late teens through late thirties. Men will do anything, risk anything, pay anything for a piece of tail – just ask Gen. David Petraeus, former Congressman Anthony Wiener and President Bill Clinton. I have followed women across continents, done deeply embarrassing and stupid things, and even built a career and sobered up because of a woman. Women are great motivators, or at least they were. Now I’m not so sure.

I look at the women in Generation Cupcake, the latest generation to follow the selfish Baby Boomers, the cynical and sarcastic Gen-Xers and the Millennials (what are they known for other than coming of age after Y2K?) and I feel sorry for straight young men today. No wonder they aren’t having sex as some studies have found if women like Sandra Fluke and Senator-elect/Squaw Elizabeth “Whines with Fist” Warren represent the state of feminism these days.

I’ll admit I’m old fashioned. I expect women to work and make at least as much as I do if not more. They don’t have to handle the housework, cooking or child rearing I’ll handle that – as well as spider-removal duty, fixing anything that breaks around the house and maintaining the cars. I realize that while men are smart enough to cook women are obviously not mechanically inclined as proven by number of great chefs and dearth of female mechanics and pest control workers. But a woman can whip up a Gantt Chart just as good as any man, and lawyering and doctoring? Well I’m married to a doctor – a good one I might add – and have hired female attorneys who were just as much sharks as mob defense attorneys.

But I am a feminist of sorts. I was born in a household full of women; there was so much estrogen in the air I’m still amazed I made it out of the house straight. To me feminism means independence and self-reliance two attributes that were missing from the traditional view of women. Yet while these attributes are key to adulthood but have evidently been lost by today’s women. Instead of independence they have become dependent on their parents and the government for support. Likewise self-reliance is lost and they are forced to doing what any kid does when he wants something that he can’t get himself: he whines.

Sandra Fluke whined for someone to buy her the Pill; Warren whined for a senate seat. Both got what they wanted and are content for now, but both lack the ability to set a goal and reach it independently. They will want something else and they will whine and stamp their feet until someone provides it to them.

Is this what the suffragettes fought for? Is this what the thousands of women who worked in munitions plants supporting their sons and husbands fighting in World War 2 suffered for? Is this what women want, to be coddled by proxy-parents like rich men or the government?

That isn’t freedom, it’s living in a cage albeit a gilded one where your parents buy your wine and your government pays for your pills. It’s like the most selfish generation of people unleashed on this country, the Baby Boomers, have spawned a generation even worse than them. Luckily I’ve raised a son who got so turned by women that he’s found other pursuits that aren’t “psycho” or “selfish” the way he puts it. The neuroticism and selfishness displayed by girls his age is good news for a parent who isn’t keen on seeing his son sexually active at a young age, but I can’t help but wish that women his age were a little more free and “normal.” Women can be inspiring creatures when they are mature and sane, but the women of Generation Cupcake clearly are neither.

The Kid and I are driving back from a trip to the mall and other various errands in the City. I’m driving into the darkness of the setting sun on a North Carolina road with Pandora streaming alternative hits from the ‘80s on the stereo. We talk about bad drivers since he will soon cross another line separating him from childhood, and he makes a joke that makes me laugh. He is becoming a man, independent from his parents, and will sooner than I want will be on his own, chasing his dreams, and driving roads I will never see. I glance at the clock, 7:23 pm, and for a moment I wish we are driving into the night together talking and laughing forever. As all moments must it passes into memory, but if I could stretch out a moment from an instant into an eternity, it would be this one.

Much talk is being made about the Republican War on Women. But there is a war on that people sense but don’t really talk much about. It’s a war with real casualties and suffering. It will devastate lives of the innocent and guilty without differentiating between the two. It is the war on children being waged by the Left that dominates the Democratic party.

The war starts before birth with the elevation of abortion to sacramenthood including gruesome battles such as the legalization of partial birth abortion and the killing of infants who survive (both laws supported by the High Priest in Chief, Barack Obama.) These battles are supported by Malthusian fears manifested in the religion of environmentalism that views bearing children as sinful, except for the high priests such as Al Gore and “Population Bomb” author Paul Ehrlich who are free to procreate as they see fit. In light of this view the Left has supported one-child policies and forced sterilization that has led to sex-selective abortion and infanticide of females in India and China. It’s ironic that the enlightened feminists of the Left who continue to support these policies do so to the benefit of the patriarchy and detriment of women in these countries, leading to the births of 120 boys for every 100 girls in China. The New York Times attributes the “imbalance almost entirely to couples’ decisions to abort female fetuses,” yet China’s One Child Policy continues to be lauded by scions of the Left such as Tom Friedman. Yes, for connoisseurs of Irony the Left provides an endless buffet.

The war wages after birth, as the interests of children are ignored by the Left’s disparagement of traditional marriage even though children fare better with two parents in a stable relationship rather than in single parent or divorced parent households. Since the 1960’s the Left’s clarion call has been freedom without attendant responsibility, and that has resulted in broken homes or in many cases, no homes. Children in single parent homes are poorer than those in mixed parent (divorced) homes who are then trumped by children living with their birth parents together under one roof. The traditional family has always been uncool to the American Left, and as a result children have suffered.

The Left’s stranglehold on education has damaged children for life. Public schools are geared more towards providing teachers and administrators work than they are towards teaching children. Teacher’s unions have fought reform efforts such as vouchers and charter schools every step of the way. Curricula across the country have been dumbed down in an effort to indoctrinate the next generation with Leftist ideology. Since every culture is equal, precious time is frittered away discussing the contributions of minorities while downplaying the role of “dead white men” in American history. The rigor of mathematics is ignored because boys do better at the subject than girls so neither is taught. Boys are taught the same way as girls even though boys need more physical activity and learn better while active than girls, who do well seated and in a calm environment. Leftist dogma refuses to recognize sex differences so instead boys are sent home with notes insisting that they be medicated to make them as placid as girls, with the added benefit that they thus become easier to control.

Children in-debt themselves to attend colleges and universities filled with non-teaching administrators and staff in environments that would make Stalin proud. Hate speech codes limit free expression thereby ill-preparing children for the day when they enter the world and are forced to deal with people who do not think like them and perhaps even hold opposite opinions. Codes of conduct control interaction between the sexes, protecting young women from the responsibility of their actions while burdening young men with the knowledge that a man can be accused of any crime on campus without the constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair trial. Courses are geared towards the interest of faculty or the short-term attention spans of students instead of providing the skills necessary for successful careers and intellectual achievement after college.

It’s not the matter of teaching college kids how to program in C#, it’s teaching them how to evaluate and argue a position, something the Greeks do well but being dead white men are politically incorrect to teach. So kids exit college knowing how to spout slogans without how to evaluate the ideas behind them or to argue their points because they lack the intellectual tools to dissect an idea or persuade. The result is an entire generation that believes winning a debate is forcing your opponent into not responding to your sound-bites, and as a result talk past each other incapable of understanding others as well as their own opinions.

Finally, the war on Children reaches its Waterloo with the mountain of debt. $1 trillion of student loan debt. $16 trillion in federal debt. $1.2 Trillion in state debt. $355 Billion in underfunded private pension debt. $673 Billion in underfunded federal pension debt. $2.2 trillion in underfunded public state and municipal pension debt.

Add up the numbers and assume that the US population size and age ratio don’t change (the former won’t, the latter will, requiring even more young people to send checks to doddering old farts who yell at them to get off their lawns) and I get $21.5 trillion to be paid for by 120 million workers. That’s roughly $180,000 waiting for each child to enter the workforce. Estimates for average lifetime earnings are around $1.6 million, so that $180k represents  11%, so we can expect that American children are going to have roughly a 10% lower standard of living thanks to these debts than their parents or grandparents.

This is real money that won’t disappear. It must be paid either through the current generation living within its means, working longer, accepting higher taxes, benefits cuts, reduced services and ultimately a lower standard of living. Somebody is going to be eating cat food, and maybe even a few cats, but $21.5 trillion will be paid by someone. It won’t be inflated away. The government can’t borrow that much to pay off that debt. Instead children, even those lucky enough to escape the “choice” of abortion, are expected to be enslaved to bear this burden. Vice President talks about Republican’s wanting to put black people in chains, ignoring his own personal responsibility as a congressman and senator for nearly 40 years during which time he helped drive the country into debt and its future children into economic slavery.

Well how about the rich? Isn’t it time they paid their “fair share?” In this case, fair share means everybody’s debt not just theirs, but let’s assume that we hold guns to their heads and give them a good mugging just like the Soviets did in the early 1920’s. We could use the most recent issue of Forbes’ Top 400 richest Americans as our economic hit list and confiscate the wealth of everyone on it, from Bill Gates (net worth: $59 billion), through Warren Buffet ($39 billion), who can finally lose his guilt for paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, George Judenrat Soros ($22 billion) who can perhaps finally atone for his war crimes, all the way down to Peter Lewes ($1.05 billion), the progressive chairman of Progressive insurance. Wiping all 400 out, leaving them with nothing except the promises of the Socialist State, medicare and social security, will net us a whopping $1.5 trillion – leaving us $20 trillion short. We would need 14 Bill Gates’s, Warren Buffets, Peter Lewes’s and 14 times the rest of the 400 list to pay for it all. Instead the Democrats intend our children and grandchildren to pay for it.

And that’s not even covering  Social Security. Remember that lockbox talked about 12 years ago? Well we never went to the store and bought one so Congress raided it. At a time when we should have been socking away surpluses to pay for the retirement of Baby Boomers, we blew the money on what? Blow and hookers? Beats me, but the money’s not there. Disability will be underfunded starting in 2016. Social Security itself won’t last for more than a decade beyond that and requires an investment of $200-300 billion per year to remain solvent – and relevant – for when today’s children need it.

Someday America’s children will grow up and understand what the Democrats have done to them, but by that time the only memory of Joe Biden will be a street named after him in Scranton and Obama will replace Jimmy Carter as the doddering old fool of the Left who the Democrats cart out at conventions to remind America how psychotic the party leadership has become after purging sane members like Dick Gephardt and Zoell Miller. I hope he lives long enough to see America’s children realize they have been the other side in a decades long civil war, and they fight back.

I was walking with the Kid beside me, and I glanced at how tall he has become. He is in the bloom of manhood, and although he is still a tad shorter than me and lacks my upper body strength, the day will come very soon when he will best me in both height and physical power. The thought led to an unusual feeling, one that I had never felt before.

I felt less alone and even protected somewhat, as if someone I trusted “had my back.”

It was a remarkable feeling and one that I’m still carrying tonight.

Half a trillion spent on poverty, yet people are still poor according to this study.

When the War on Poverty was declared in 1966, my family was still classified as poor. Both my parents worked and raised six children, sending all to private schools. Thanks to their efforts today it is solidly middle class with several members reaching its upper part of the category.

My family did it without receiving government money. How?

1. Our parents sent us to college or helped us into solid vocations. Not all of my siblings are university educated, but they all had solid careers in professions such as nursing, teaching and the trades.
2. Our parents encouraged us find the right partner and to stay married – the single most effective way to stay out of poverty. Our parents taught us to value ourselves and to find partners who did the same. Of six children all have married partners with strong work ethics and ambition. Only 1 has divorced and it took nearly 20 years to overcome the financial impact of that divorce (she eventually married a fine man I’m honored to call my brother-in-law.)
3. Our parents instilled in us a sense of pride based on our work. It didn’t matter what that work was, as long as we stayed working and continued bettering ourselves by adding new skills and training. Even today one of the first questions asked is how are jobs are going. It may seem old fashioned, but to a family that skipped meals as late as the mid 1950’s – America’s Happy Days – one’s job is the best indicator of family health.
4. We were taught to forgo immediate gratification for longer-term benefits. This has driven many of our spouses to distraction numerous times, but the end result is that we are savers not spenders. All are thrifty to a fault, as one would expect from the children of those who came of age during the Great Depression.
5. We were raised with the philosophy that emphasized self-sufficiency. If we couldn’t do something, we often ended up learning to do it ourselves because there was nothing worse than having to rely upon someone else. Reliance easily became dependence which in turn became subservience, and both the Irish and the Bohemian sides of my family left servitude behind with the Old Country.

Another Bloomberg article on the education bubble. This one by Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an economics professor at Ohio University. Vedder points out an incongruity about the economy and educational situation in the United States that has bothered me for years.

U.S. employers complain that they can’t find enough skilled employees. Then how do we explain why almost 54 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed, even in scientific and technical fields, according to a study conducted for the Associated Press by Northeastern University researchers?

The cause is more fundamental than the cycles of the economy: The country is turning out far more college graduates than jobs exist in the areas traditionally reserved for them: the managerial, technical and professional occupations.

This is partly due to firms outsourcing their training to other firms, and to the educational institutions themselves who are apparently too busy offering classes on the History of Surfing, Happiness, and the HBO series The Wire. Companies used to hire competent people and then train them. Today they expect them to come to the job not only trained, but able to integrate into an existing project with minimal learning curve.

As an intellectual, college educated adult and the parent of a teen, I’m concerned about the split between the job market and the educational system. Like every parent I want to provide the best start to my kid as possible. But when I look at the academic world, its cost in terms of time as well as money, I’m wondering if the path that I followed still makes sense. Vedder estimates that students spend 30 weeks a year in school and less than 30 hours a week on academics. In the best quote I’ve seen on the expense of higher education he echoes Churchill when he concludes “never have so many dollars gone to teach so many students for so little vocational gain.” With the average cost of a year of public college at $22,000 and of a private one at $43,000 a quick bit of (high school) math nets the per-hour cost of the education using Vedder’s hours spent at $24.50/hour (public) and $47.77/hour (private).

Is there a better way? For many parents and potential students there must be, but if so what?

At those rates one could realistically hire a full-time private tutor – and good ones at $48/hour. But if you do would you demand him or her teach your child about Happiness or watch HBO? If not, why would you as a parent allow your child to waste his time on such fluff – especially when he is bearing more of that cost by becoming indebted?

Indebtedness is one of the worst possible burdens one can put on one’s child. It limits options at a time when a young person should be exploring them. A trip to Europe to visit friends becomes impossible when time off means missing student loan payments. It’s much more difficult to pursue a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity while an existing job makes the student loan payments. Parents might argue that college offers other experiences that aren’t quantified by the degree such as personal growth and enrichment, but they fail to appreciate that this is a tradeoff between the limited opportunities of college life with the broader and more lasting opportunities in the broader world. Some have commented that it is their duty to provide the best of both worlds to their children by paying for their educations, thereby freeing their children of the consequences of indebtedness. As a parent who believes in the importance of personal sacrifice for the sake of children, it is difficult for me to argue against that point except to state that the skyrocketing cost of education has pushed the cost of education beyond the means of all but a minority of parents, and that for most of that minority the dollars spent on education will have to come from somewhere such as retirement savings. This means that such parents are actually shifting the burdens from their children’s college age to their middle age when they will be relied upon to care for them in their retirement.

Is the tradeoff worth it?

Attending college can offer worthwhile experiences to the developing young adult, but the indebtedness and time spent pursuing a degree have reached a point where other opportunities and experiences have to be sacrificed. For some the sacrifice may be worth it, but parents and college hopefuls have to weigh the lost opportunities in their decisions.

Cross-posted at the Moderate Voice.

Father’s Day essays tend to be nostalgic, exploring the writer’s feelings towards his or her father, are often hackneyed and tend towards the maudlin. I haven’t thought about Father’s Day much to be honest, because when I was dwelling on my relationship with my father I hadn’t yet become one. Before my child I searched for my father like many men do whose father disappeared from their lives (my father dropped dead at his job when I was a boy) or never entered them in the first place. When I became a father I realized that no matter what my personal feelings were towards my father, it didn’t matter. It was time for me to set all that aside and focus on being a father to my child.

I want to begin by making a distinction between “father” and what I think can be best characterized as “sperm donor.” Fathers don’t have to share DNA with their children, in fact some of the best fathers have been step-fathers, fathers of adopted children, and even family friends or male relatives. I’m not even sure they must be men; it is possible for the right type of woman to play a fatherly role just as it is possible for a man to be motherly (to limit the abuse of pronouns, assume that fathers must be men in this essay.) These are men who gave their time to raise a child, worked hard to support them, and were there for them emotionally throughout their childhoods. These are men who never broke their promises, nor made a child feel anything but the most important person in that man’s life and always put the child’s interest and that of the family above his own.

Contrast that with “sperm donors” like this fine specimen who has more than 20 kids with at least 15 women. For all intents and purposes this guy could have jerked off in a cup and for that he doesn’t deserve the honorific of “father.” Yes, father is an honorific, or at least it should be, and just because a man lives with his children doesn’t mean he deserves it.

In my time I’ve known men who aren’t there for their children even when they share living space with them. Often these men are still children themselves, caught up in their own narcissistic thoughts and pleasures. They may resent their children for getting in the way of their selfish pursuits, whether it’s a drink with the guys or a date with a hot girl from the office. I’ve known men who curse their own fathers for misdeeds in their childhood, focusing all their hatred on a fading image stuck in the past growing more distant with each passing day, while they ignored their relationships with their own children, completely oblivious to the mistakes they commit today while struggling to keep each detail of the decades-old transgression alive in their mind.

Unlike sperm donors a father thinks about his family first and himself second. There are no caveats to this, no qualifiers about “personal happiness” or terms involving the word “self” in them at all. Being a father means submission to a greater good: your family. Everything that you do is for the family, everything that matters in your life comes from the family. Your identity is through your family, and without your family you are nothing. Secondly, becoming a father requires a personal choice. I still remember the torment I went through when I was forced to choose between remaining a selfish human being and becoming a father. It was a painful choice, so painful that for me it became a kind of death. On that day long ago the person I was died, and the man I became, the “father” was born. Like any true rebirth it was confusing, frightening but exciting. I felt the world around me expand, leaving behind the selfish shell that I had been since birth and feeling and experiencing the world in new ways. I gained new sensitivity to the suffering of others, a thin skin that bleeds all too easily along with the maturity to handle the pain. I gained the strength to do what was necessary to bear the burdens that my new identity imposed on me, plus an awareness of my surroundings that later became the foundation for what I laughingly called “daddy radar” – the unconscious tracking of one’s children at all times. On that day I became a man, for what greater honor for a man is there than to become a father?

Fathers are instinctively self-reliant. Television might characterize us as childish buffoons in commercials incapable of feeding our children without our wise wives, but fathers today not only know how to feed their children, they think ahead so that their children will not go hungry through the coming week. That means not only working to create the cash to buy the food, it now means knowing how to buy that food and prepare it. While some fathers may still have the luxury of a woman to prepare daily meals, a father’s instinct means that he learns to do it himself so that his children are fed at the proper time. Today’s father not only knows his way around the kitchen, he knows his way around the house, the car, the office and everywhere in between. He is a jack-of-all-trades because that is what his family needs, and if he doesn’t know how to do something, then he knows someone who does.

A father has intuition that would excite a KGB agent. A father knows his children so well because he has been paying attention to them since well before their births. He knows what a child thinks because he has been with him or her for years, paying attention to their comments, answering their questions and consoling their tears. He has seen their struggles, their triumphs and their failures. He has seen good report cards and bad, suffered through last-minute homework, and followed the soap opera that teenagers call “life.” By tying this experience with his own as a child, he makes it impossible for his children to lie to him. When something doesn’t feel right to him, he doesn’t ignore the problem. He challenges his child, determined to discover what is going wrong in his or her life. Even though he may be exhausted or perhaps even afraid of what he will find, he will doggedly pursue the root of his child’s problem, finding a solution and implementing it no matter the cost.

A sperm donor knows little of none of this, and tragically may be incapable of even recognizing his ignorance. A father may even pity men like these who are incapable of understanding the sublime joy of being the last to fall asleep in his house, his children asleep in their rooms, his wife next to him in bed, his universe ordered and secure. But then he remembers that they have chosen their paths in life and ultimately their fates.

A father understands that it is up to him to live his life as a pillar of steel sandwiched in concrete to support his family. He suspects that his own personal growth paradoxically came through his submission to fatherhood, but he doesn’t dwell on that fact much. Like most fathers, he doesn’t dwell much on his own well-being, not when there is the well-being of the members of his family to consider. Finally, he knows that to truly honor his own father he must become a father that inspires his own children to one day write trite essays and stories on Father’s Day.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens provides free advice to the Class of 2012:

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn’t to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It’s not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It’s that they can’t connect the dots when they don’t know where the dots are in the first place.

Sometimes the best advice is that which you don’t want to hear. If that’s the case then the Class of 2012 – and future classes and their parents, should read the entire thing here.

I have a BA degree in Political Science and in the decades since I got the degree it came in useful once: it allowed me to teach English in Japan, a university degree being the sole requirement at the time. Since then I’ve not used it during my career and I likely never will. I have no regrets getting the degree however, because I got it from a state school and graduated with debt I repaid in four years teaching, making $2,000 a month. After returning to the USA with the Kid and the Wife I began a career in IT starting at the bottom by working at a help desk. Over the years I built the career into something that I enjoy and has proven lucrative. The Wife and I also made an investment in her education, graduating medical school 8 years after taking the first steps to do so, albeit saddled with enough education debt to choke an accountant. Together we live comfortably although not extravagantly, and looking back I appreciate that our current circumstances are the outcome of a series of clear-headed decisions and sacrifices we made long ago leavened by a dash of luck.

Now the Kid is approaching college age, and it will soon be time for him to confront some of the same decisions we faced. One of those decisions will be whether to go to college, and for years I have been studying the education landscape with a critical eye in preparation for this day. During that time I have read voraciously and talked to newly minted college graduates and grad students. What follows is based on my experience

If you are a high school student, don’t go to college just because your parents think it’s the next stage in life or its what everyone else is doing. Your parents likely didn’t finish school with sums of debt that they likely couldn’t have supported upon starting their careers, and they are using their experience as a guide. Unfortunately the world has changed tremendously since they got their degrees in the 80’s or 90’s, and their experience can seriously screw up your life. As for going because it’s what everyone else is doing, do yourself a favor and look up “tulip mania” and educate yourself on economic bubbles. These bubbles all burst, eventually hurting those who follow the economic advice of the herd. There are whole industries dedicated to keeping those bubbles going and for encouraging the stampede of young people into education, just as there were Indians who used to stampede herds of buffalo off cliffs.

The simple problem with college today is that it is too expensive. Costs have been rising above inflation for decades, inflated by the cheap money made available for borrowing through student loan programs. Student loans seem innocuous, even beneficial. After all it often makes sense to borrow to buy something that will improve your salary and marketability in the future.

Take it from someone who has to write a large four figure check every month to pay off student loans: Student loans are an insidious form of credit. Most students and their parents wouldn’t dream of piling up tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt yet when they think about student loans they lose their senses. All critical thought evaporates.

What is wrong with student loan debt? Several things, but the most important is that you cannot discharge it through bankruptcy. Go on a bender with your Visa card and you can declare bankruptcy and have the debt erased with only a damaged credit rating to show for it, and even that can be repaired after a few years of sensible living. But student loans are for life. They can never be discharged, and all the so-called forbearance programs like Income-Based Repayment do is spread out the debt over a longer period of by piling on the payments you are missing onto the end of the loan. Add in compound interest and that $1,000 payment you are avoiding today will likely cost you $3,000 by the time you pay it off.

Which brings up the subject of compound interest. Even though I had two mortgages under my belt I was still shocked by this simple accounting concept when it came to handling the Wife’s student loans. It bit me in the butt even though I should have known better. Here’s how.

Imagine that you expect to finish undergrad with $50,000 in debt. $50k sounds manageable, right? Now let’s say that your lender is spreading those payments over 15 years at 6.8% interest. You will end up paying back nearly $80,000. So that $50k you graduated with isn’t really $50k. It’s $80k, 60% more than you thought. During that 15 years of repayment you are going to have numerous debts such as car payments and perhaps a mortgage. You will also have to pay for everything that your parents have paid for. Sewer bills, water bills, personal property taxes, health insurance premiums, dental bills – the costs of living that as a child you’ve never had to consider let alone pay. This is why a general rule of thumb is that your student loan payment should be less than 10% of your income. Add in the other rules of thumb that a mortgage should never take more than 25%, a car payment 10%, and the salary that isn’t allocated to a bill quickly disappears. So to support that $50k debt you are going to have to make $70k a year. See for yourself.

There is just one starting salary out of undergrad that will net you $70k a year: petroleum engineer ($97,900). And that’s today. By the time you graduate that starting salary will likely be much less because other students will have gravitated towards that major, boosting the supply of graduates for a limited supply of jobs, driving down starting salaries. Maybe something else will fill the void, but since you don’t know what it is it is impossible to select that major years in advance.

Maybe you can console yourself that there are plenty of mid-career jobs that pay well over $70k in the Payscale survey. The problem is compound interest. Mid-career is calculated at 15 years, so to get to a point where you can afford the payments, you will need to forbear early in repayment which will tack those payments on to the end of the loan, boosting the total amount you have to repay and saddling you with payments beyond the initial 15 years. That $50k becomes $100k or more.

Everyone says debt is bad but no one really says why. Debt limits your choices. I think this is the most important reason for young people to avoid it completely or at least realistically understand it before taking on substantial chunks of it.

Say that you decide after graduation that you want to take six months off and travel around Europe. Traveling is one of the best things a young person can do. It exposes him or her to new cultures and different ways of living that cannot be learned in the classroom or in a book. The experiences gained from seeing the world are priceless and often life changing. One not only learns about others, traveling teaches one about oneself. For this reason it has been a critical component of liberal arts educations for centuries, but one that has been forgotten except through expensive exchange programs that limit and control new experiences, neutering the benefits of travel while expanding the costs. But you can’t don a backpack and buy a ticket to Istanbul to visit your Turkish friend when you have student loans coming due.

Say you have a great idea and want to start your own business. Starting a business is hard enough when you have little credit history, but go to a bank for a small business loan to get your idea off the ground when you have student loans coming due and you’re just wasting your time. Not only will you not get the loan your business needs, you will have to choose IBR and add to your debt while you work to get your business going, or you’ll have to skip it altogether and choose the first job that provides you with a decent chance of paying the loans back. I have seen first hand student loan debt push medical students into more lucrative specialties just because they pay better instead of those like family medicine and pediatrics that pay much less but require the same debt load.

The statistics I’ve seen suggest that people will change careers several times over their working lives. I’m 15 years into my second, and even within my current career I’ve changed focus and types of jobs many times. I would have been unable to do that if I had been saddled with student loans, forcing me to follow the money instead of my interests. The economy that is evolving requires people to act quickly and nimbly to stay employed and develop new skills, and doing this is much more difficult with student loans holding you back.

Like many liberal arts majors I considered going to law school. If there is one field that I would discourage my son from entering, it is law because it is the worst investment one can make, and the statistics bear that out. As this post by Walter Russel Mead states, unless you get into the top handful of law schools you are wasting your money on a degree that will pay much less than professions that don’t require expensive graduate education. Lawyers have a median salary of $50k, and to get that $50k/year they incur $125k in debt. According to Payscale, one could major in physics, avoid the $125k in graduate debt and start out making $50k a year, with the prospect of doubling that by mid-career.

So what am I telling my own son? I am telling him to not go to college until he has a goal in mind and college makes economic sense to help him to achieve that goal. I am telling him that after he finishes high school he should expect to travel and to work so that he learns about the world and himself. He has shown interest in the military but I have tied that to college, insisting that he only enter the military as an officer. He can attend junior college and get exposure to new fields there for a fraction of the cost of four year schools. As for the social benefits of college, there are alternatives that don’t cost $45/hour. He can pay someone to be his friend and hang out with him for much less, and besides, college friendships are overblown. I have a small stable of friends, and all were met on the job, in high school, or in non-college related activities during my college years.

There are benefits to college, but these benefits have become too costly. There is simply no reason that a 22 year old should saddle him or herself with debt that limits choices until middle age. That’s not what college was supposed to do, but it is what it has become.

The clouds had grudgingly parted and allowed some sun to shine through the cold that had wrapped the countryside in a thick blanket of Winter gloom. Taking advantage of the respite I started cleaning out the basement, pulling out suitcases thick with dust and cat hair to air out and organize the plastic storage boxes.

I opened one full of Legos. In it a house was half-built laying on top of a jumble of bricks. Several years ago my son had worked on it for minutes, perhaps several hours and then stopped. It got put away and left undisturbed in the box. He is 15 now, learning how to drive, in love with a girl who lives on the Outer Banks and comes nearby to visit her grandparents. He has no interest in Legos and probably won’t for a decade, perhaps longer.

One day he will open the box and find the house waiting for him, exactly as he had left it when he was 11 or 12. He will see it through new eyes, and the years will fall away like so many leaves of seasons past as he lifts the house from the box and sets to work on it with a companion whose identity is a mere glimmer in my imagination.

But until then the box of Legos is secure in our basement, waiting for his return.