[p2p-research] Job Losses and Productivity

[Ryan Lanham]

Hi Michel:
I'm not sure what "education" is.  I doubt it leads to happiness.  I doubt
it leads to wealth.  I doubt it leads to good citizens.  It correlates best
with wealth.  But most of it is wasted and silly.  The entire university
system of the West is now more wasteful in my view than it is productive.
It is more broken than the states that support it.

Regardless, it is rapidly becoming software.  There is simply no arguing
that Rosetta Stone teaches students languages better than classes.  If that
is true, how long is it before we have Rosetta Algebra, etc.  And at that
point, what do we need with the little red brick buildings and the pleasant
27 year old young ladies who hold hands and wipe noses?  Morever, what do we
need with the professors whose "research" helps no one live longer, better
or wiser?  People who believe they are owed the right to think what they
want and write what they want on the public's dime.  Why?  For whom?  It has
become silly.  It is a matter of time, whether you or I like it or not.  It
is dying and will die in the next 30-50 years totally.  I have talked with
enough leaders from the field to know this is true.  They know it.  Now we
must prepare for it.  For profit universities in the US are crushing the
state schools in terms of enrollment and use of technology.  Soon it will
reach a tipping point.  Europe will follow.  Contemplating the Frankfurt
School is a luxury for the rich...not a national necessity.  What nations
like India and China need is people who read Make Magazine and who build low
cost or free software and bicycles from open source machines.  You don't get
that by training philosophers and poets.

As to debt, inflation doesn't restart the clock.  It destroys the clock.
Once it is destroyed, there will be poverty and misery (for the poor) unlike
anything yet known.  It is very likely the poor will simply be slaughtered.
They cannot defend themselves (we will sadly soon see this in Thailand) and
they cannot appeal to world outrage (there isn't any.)   Whatever
neo-liberalism is, I hope it is orderly financial markets, jobs, and free
trade of innovative goods and services.  That is what we need.  The old left
is dead.  Long live the new left...libertarian, anti-state, co-op intensive,
civil society supporting, and willing to earn and trade with a moral sense.


On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> ryan, education is emphatically Not a product meant for the markets to
> consume, it is a education for citizenship and human happiness, that as a
> sideproduct, should create people who can contribute to the wellbeing of
> society through their work and activities ... and for this of course, they
> need skills as well as education ..
>
> here is an article I hope you will read, on sovereign credit, and why, it
> is not over, and why the people of Europe and elsewhere should not acquiesce
> in the neoliberal holdup and destruction of social structures of support and
> solidarity,
>
> Michel
>
>
> via http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/hyperinflation.php
>
>
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