Chris Roquemore once thought of himself as working class. But it's hard to keep thinking that, he said, when you're not working.
The 28-year-old father said he sparred with his supervisors at a retail chain about taking time off after his mother died — and ended up unemployed. Since then, Roquemore has worked odd jobs and started studying nursing at Long Beach City College, trying to get "a career, not a job." All those changes, in turn, changed the way he thought of himself.
Roquemore is among the small but surging share of Americans who identify themselves as "lower class." Last year, a record 8.4% of Americans put themselves in that category — more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey, a project of the independent research organization Norc at the University of Chicago.
The rising numbers surprised some researchers and activists even in light of the bruising economy. Read more >>
New German research finds a darkened room encourages freedom of thought and inspires innovation. There are certain times when you want the lights turned way down low. One such time, according to recent research, is when you need to think creatively.
“Darkness increases freedom from constraints, which in turn promotes creativity,” report Anna Steidle of the University of Stuttgard and Lioba Werth of the University of Hohenheim. A dimly lit environment, they explain in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” all of which encourage innovative thinking.
Steidle and Werth describe six experiments which provide evidence for their thesis. The key one featured 114 German undergraduates, who were seated in groups of two or three in a small room designed to simulate an office.
The room was lit by a fixture hanging from the ceiling directly above the desk. The amount of illumination varied, with some groups receiving only 150 lux (dim light), others 500 lux (the recommended lighting level for an office), and still others 1,500 lux (bright light).
After acclimating themselves for approximately 15 minutes, participants went to work on what the researchers describe as “four creative insight problems typically used in creativity research. These tasks require that individuals change their perceptions of a given problem in order to find the optimal solution.” Read more >>
We have been very active in our discussions of the impact of the pending rise in food prices around the world (from central bank largesse to weather-related chaos).
As Goldman notes, food inflation has been one of the most significant sources of headline inflation variation in emerging markets (EM) over the past few years. Since June, international prices for agricultural commodities have risen almost 30%, increasing the risk of fresh, food-related increases to EM headline inflation.
We, like Goldman, expect EM headline inflation to start to reflect the relevant pressures more broadly in the October prints at the latest. While the effects, for now, are expected to be less extreme than the 2010-2011 episode, the timing as the US enters its fiscal-cliff-prone malaise, could mean a further round of easing will reignite this critical inflationary concern. Read more >>
The latest CFO survey from Duke University and CFO magazine finds little positive feeling as executives look ahead to the last quarter of the year. Even cuts in interest rates would likely have little effect, CFOs say. The "Optimism Index" Of U.S. CFOs fell to 52 from 56 in the summer quarter, based on a scale of 0-100. In the spring, the index was 59.
Twice the percentage of CFOs (44 percent) have "become more pessimistic" than are more optimistic, the survey found. That's not good news, warned one of the executives overseeing the survey. As a result, little improvement is expected on the jobs front.
CFOs expect to increase hiring by 1.5 percent and capital spending by 3.7 percent while earnings are forecast to grow by 6 percent. All those percentages fell from the previous quarter. “The drop in optimism is worrisome for the U.S. because historically it foretells slower economic activity over the next year,” said Kate O’Sullivan, editorial director at CFO Magazine. “Optimism is also falling in Asia and Europe.” Read more >>
Students don't seem to want to buy e-textbooks. So some schools are simply forcing them. While several colleges across the country are pushing electronic textbooks, touting them as more efficient and less cumbersome than regular textbooks, students are reluctant.
E-textbooks still account for only 9% of textbook purchases, says Student Monitor, which researches college student behavior. "How excited can you expect to get about an e-textbook?" Student Monitor President Eric Weil says. "It's not a fashion statement, it's not a status symbol; it has to overcome the advantages that students see (in) a printed textbook."
Typically, students don't save much when opting to buy an e-textbook. For example, an organic chemistry e-textbook costs about $100, while the print version of the same book costs just $15 more. For University of Wisconsin senior Leslie Epstein, having to buy an e-textbook only added to her expenses. She still found herself printing a copy of her textbooks in the two classes that required an electronic version, and said despite the lower price tag of an e-textbook, she'd buy the print version of the text "every time." Read more >>
A new poll says that confidence in U.S. public schools has dropped to the lowest level in nearly four decades. Twenty-nine
percent of those questioned in a Gallup poll said they had a "great
deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in public schools. Forty percent
had some confidence while 30 percent expressed little or none.
When Gallup first measured confidence in public schools in
1973, 58 percent reported having a strong belief in the country's
educational system. Since then, that number has steadily tracked
downward. Read more >>
The American job market is no place for students as the number of employed high schoolers has hit its lowest level in more than 20 years, according to new figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.
In 1990, 32 percent of high school students held jobs, versus just 16 percent now. Blame their elders.
Sectors that traditionally have offered teens their first paying gig — fast-food chains, movie theaters, malls and big-box retailers — have now become the last resorts for out-of-work college graduates or older Americans forced back into the labor force out of sheer financial necessity.
The resulting squeeze has left students on the outside looking in.
The crunch is also hitting college students. In 2000, 52 percent of full-time college students worked. That number has now fallen to 40 percent, the National Center for Education Statistics reports. More>>
Graduating college students face a mixed job market at best this
year, and most will leave school without an offer in hand, despite an
uptick in hiring by on-campus recruiters.
A survey of
employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed
those that recruit on campuses plan to boost hiring of new grads by
10.2% from last year. However, on-campus recruiting is only a small
slice of the pie—the bulk of graduates find jobs on their own.
In a study to be released Thursday,
the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers
University found that recent graduates are taking awhile to find work.
Only 49% of graduates from the classes of 2009 to 2011 had found a
full-time job within a year of finishing school, compared with 73% for
students who graduated in the three years prior. More...
At 5:50 of the video, Sir Robinson states: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original, and by the time [children] get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened to be wrong, and we run our companies this way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist for SmartKnowledgeU™ via ZeroHedge There is an inextricable link between our academic system and the failure of citizens worldwide to understand the dire negative financial consequences of the coming second phase of the global monetary crisis. To help you understand the huge gap of knowledge that is missing from all business curricula today that is necessary to foresee the coming consequences of the second phase of this crisis, I have posted a brilliant speech below by educator Sir Ken Robinson that illuminates all of the deliberate flaws of our current academic system today imposed upon us by the very financial oligarchs that founded our academic system. These flaws in the system immensely contribute to the ignorance of the masses regarding the severity of the crisis that exists today. The below video is a must watch and there is a reason why it currently has more than one million views.
Sir Robinson goes on to explain that the roots of the vast problems in our educational system are relatively new. The standardization of the hierarchy of academic curricula to value mathematics and languages at the top, then followed by the humanities, and then the arts, something that has only happened within the past century, Mr. Robinson claims, is why we have an academic system today that churns out millions of students that have lost their capacity to create. Mr. Robinson argues that there is not a single country in the world that makes dance classes mandatory though he believes dance is just as important to a child’s development as mathematics. Creative arts stimulate the brain in ways linear sciences cannot. And the stimulation of creative right-brain dominant functions that can happen through the arts, Mr. Robinson argues, is absolutely critical to a rich, fulfilling life.
I would argue further that stimulating creative right-brain dominant functions are also paramount to breakthroughs in analytical left-brain dominant tasks. For example, I’ve often had some of my most important breakthroughs in developing the investment strategies I’ve successfully employed to outperform the S&P 500 by nearly 30% to 40% for 3 years in a row while absorbed in a totally non-related task – sometimes while watching a thought-provoking film, and other times, when training in a close-quarter defense technique under the tutelage of my martial arts master. Seven years ago, when I was still employed by a Wall Street firm, I discovered that many of the firm's prospects desired the old-school 50-60 something-year-old person that had been in the investment business their entire life to manage their money. Only when I left the corporate investment arena and founded my own niche wealth consultancy company, SmartKnowledgeU, LLC, did I realize the enormous limitations and low utility of the investment concepts employed by large commercial investment firms. When confined and surrounded by hundreds of employees that held similar investment beliefs, I could not see the motivation behind investment concepts like diversification and ten-year buy-and-hold strategies. However, once I left an environment in which I was bombarded with daily investment propaganda, I immediately recognized how nearly all strategies at large commercial investment firms are squarely centered around gathering assets FROM clients rather than earning profits FOR clients.
Institutional academics operate in the same manner to serve the same dark lords – the global financial oligarchs. As Sir Robinson explains in the above video, today, students with independent, active, and creative minds that refuse to conform to the traditional confines of academics are often misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and subdued with medication rather than celebrated for their creativity. In the past, before the diagnosis of ADD existed, these students were able to fulfill their creative potential. Today, this would not occur under our current system. If we explore the historical roots of academia even further, and there are voluminous works that do so, we will discover that the standardization of the academic hierarchy was facilitated by the financial oligarchy at the very same time as the industrial revolution with only one purpose in mind – to provide a literate, debt-burdened, and obedient labor force for the new moneyed elites of the industrial age.
In the United States, two of the richest families in America, the Rockefeller and Carnegie families, donated vast sums of money to help establish numerous US universities, while millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke and Leland Stanford all founded universities in their own names. The majority of these families did not do so with philanthropic values in their heart, but with the aim of controlling the goals of modern day academia to serve their purposes. Consequently, the financial oligarchy standardized the hierarchy of academia courses with the intent on providing themselves with an endless supply of indebted, literate, obedient factory workers.
Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, wrote, “the development of a factory-like system in the 19th century classroom was not accidental,” a reference to the financial elite’s goal to discourage dissent through academia and to mold students into literate but very obedient workers that would provide the backbone for the ongoing Industrial Revolution. In 12 years of primary and secondary school, four years of university, and three years of graduate school, I can recall only two teachers out of more than a hundred I encountered during that time span (when counting teaching assistants, lab instructors, etc.) that encouraged dissent in the classroom. In fact, because most of my teachers “hammered down the nail that stuck out,” I can easily recall those two professor’s names, because to this day, they still stand out from the rest – Professors Renee Fox and Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte.
Given the inflation in academic degrees that is being reported worldwide today where master degrees are now required for jobs that five years ago only required bachelor’s degrees, people are misinterpreting this degree-inflation in the employment arena as an indication of a need to pursue a higher degree. Unfortunately, this is a choice that, I believe in the long run, will hurt people much more than it will help them. A greater amount of the wrong kind of knowledge will not adequately prepare anyone to survive the second phase of this monetary crisis. And traditional forums of education only teach the “wrong kind of knowledge” when it comes to understanding today’s global monetary crisis. This is precisely why in five years, we will have a proliferation of PhDs and MBAs unable to secure employment and simultaneously burdened with the double handicaps of massive student loan debt and an inadequate knowledge of how to survive the global monetary crisis.
Though the below story was reported in mid-2009, I believe that millions of students will unfortunately suffer the same fate as Trina Thompson over the next several years because they are pursuing the wrong type of knowledge in their academic pursuits:
In New York City, a Monroe College grad wants the $70,000 she spent on tuition because she hasn’t found gainful employment since earning her bachelor’s degree in April, according to a suit filed in Bronx Supreme Court on July 24. The 27-year-old alleges the business-oriented Bronx school hasn’t lived up to its end of the bargain, and has not done enough to find her a job. The information-technology student blames Monroe’s Office of Career Advancement for not providing her with the leads and career advice it promised. “They have not tried hard enough to help me,” the frustrated Bronx resident wrote about the school in her lawsuit. “She’s angry,” said Thompson’s mother, Carol. “She’s very angry at her situation. She put all her faith in them, and so did I. They’re not making an effort. “She’s finally finished [with school], and I’m so proud of her. She just wants a job.” The mother and daughter live together, but are struggling to get by. Carol, a substitute teacher, has been the only breadwinner. “This is not the way we want to live our life,” the mom said. “This is not what we planned.” As if being unemployed weren’t enough, Trina’s student loans are coming due, saddling the family with more debt, the mom said.
The type of knowledge one pursues will be intimately linked to one’s ability to not only survive, but also to prosper during the second phase of this global monetary crisis. If educator Sir Ken Robinson is right, and traditional institutions of education are killing creativity and intelligence because they offer incomplete or the wrong kind of knowledge, then it becomes incumbent upon everyone to seek the right type of knowledge to survive the second phase of this economic crisis. Among the right types of knowledge are the following subjects: Austrian business cycle theories, how the fractional reserve banking system operates, the relationship between increasing government taxation (income taxes, global warming carbon taxes, etc.) and the creation of money as debt, and the importance of gold and silver to sound monetary policies. Ultimately, seeking and understanding the right type of knowledge that allows one to understand the root causes of this current monetary crisis will be a million times more beneficial to your financial health in the future than a PhD in economics from Harvard ever could be.
Marc Faber predicts with certainty that the United States will go through high inflation and a lower standard of living. Expect wars and currency re-evaluation.
Make no mistake -- The Associated Press and the Rubert Murdochs of the world know the current news system is doomed. That's why they want to charge for their content -- their role is to protect power and the interests of the financial elite. The AP and Murdochs of the world want to maintain their superior priest-like positions as Godly news oligarchs. They want to stifle the new paradigm of citizen journalism that's gaining critical mass -- a paradigm where news is distributed horizontally.
Murdoch and his ilk are in imminent danger of extinction and they know it. They aren't simply going to lay down and die. They'll use every last dollar from their millions to destroy bloggers and the growing monumental shift in information gathering bloggers represent. Media moguls are aware that to some extent they have bloggers over a barrel. It costs money to finance news gathering teams across the globe. And there's only a handful of wire services that dominate the entire news landscape, a landscape all of us are imprisoned and beholden to for what the media monopoly decides is news.
Murdoch losses of $136 million this year and $57 million a year earlier, have nothing to do with free content. "Quality journalism is not cheap," said Murdoch, "and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting."
The only quality journalism and good reporting Murdoch has achieved is how well he's managed to cannibalize the truth. Murdoch's media group spews out a shameless stream of lies, deception, and propaganda. Murdoch's only interest is in preserving his media mogul status and proto-fascist, top-down structure of information distribution; the same can be said for rags like the Huffington Post that serve as a mouth piece for Obama.
Murdoch's pathetic pledge to charge for content will fail, pure and simple. He will not create a mass parade of would-be content followers. On the contrary, his pay-for-content scheme will only hasten the destruction of his entire media mega-structure. Murdoch may generate revenue from those of like minds willing to pay for his hysterical evangelistic version of news, but it will all backfire.
His greedlust will foster the healthy media competition he clearly opposes. Murdoch may succeed in attracting a small, loyal band of paying Jim Jones-like followers who will worship him as a journalistic hero, but the real heroes are bloggers forced to wade through the manure he and others call news. As it stands now, bloggers must arduously sift through information from wire agencies -- and the subsequent spin by retail outlets -- for little nuggets of truth: it's like panning for a few small specks of gold in a murky river of lies.
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