Is College Necessary?

Last week, when discussing Emotional Labor, a question was brought up about choosing someone to do a job, when 'like 5 people have the exact same qualifications'. Because of this, I started thinking about what exactly is a 'qualification'. What standards are applied? Are they really the most useful ones to measure a person's capability? What might be a better way to determine if someone is good for a job?

Also, how do you show people you're capable of a job, before they know who you are, and in spite of biases they may have about you based on what you look like or your reported personal history?

When people seem to have the same qualifications, how do you choose which is the right person? What becomes the determining factor?



Is a college degree the best indicator of someone's ability to perform a job?
If you're an employer, there are lots of signals about a young person's suitability for the job you're offering. If you're looking for someone who can write, do they have a blog, or are they a prolific Wikipedia editor? For programmers, what are their TopCoder or GitHub scores? For salespeople, what have they sold before? If you want general hustle, do they have a track record of entrepreneurship, or at least holding a series of jobs?
You've noticed by now that 'a college degree' is not in this list of signals. That's because I think it's a pretty lousy one, and getting worse all the time. In fact, I think one of the most productive things an employer could do, both for themselves and for society at large, is to stop placing so much emphasis on standard undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Emotional Labor

Last fall we discussed in 'Professional or Human Being?' the ethics of being required to use your emotions and personhood to perform a job. This time through an article talking about various kinds of work involving caring for people, I've found there's a concept called Emotional Labor. I'd like to explore this idea a little bit.


When you perform your job are you actually 'performing' at your job?
To what extent are we performing a role when we go to work? Does it change over time? How much of your 'real' you is put into your work?
In the ideal, how much separation should there be between you and your job. Should your work be a part of you or something separate from you?

Are emotions a part of work? Are they supposed to be?
Are you emotionally invested in your job? Always, or just some parts?
Do emotions detract from doing a job well? When is this true?
Do they enhance the ability to do a job well? When is this true?

Should our emotions be the commodity? Should our emotions be part of the skillset we're offering to a job? Should our emotions be part of the job, be for sale?

The Tide Economy

Let's look at a different kind of alternative economy. There's a lot to talk about: poverty, marketing, branding. Here are the main points of the article. (As always click the heading to go to the actual article, in this case, from New York Magazine.)

Suds for Drugs
The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team.
What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. “We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,” Thompson says. “I guess they were bragging.” It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.

Getting Old

First, here are some related facts and statements to start our brains on the topic.

“Later life seems to be a season in search of its purposes. Aging is an art. It’s not a scientific problem to be solved,” Dr. Thomas Cole, 58, told the crowd. “Being old is filled with unexpected possibilities for creativity,”
Esther Liwazer, 72, stood up and said, “Look! This is very important. What he’s saying is that society needs an attitude adjustment.”
Karen Jackson, 58, a dietician from Detroit, called Cole’s message “absolutely remarkable.” She said, “Our society is in the middle of a revolution because of aging and the overarching idea is that we need to be positive about this.”

Three British ideas for caring for elders:
A kind of timebanking scheme. Care4Care invites volunteers to help care for older people. The cost of care consumes many elderly peoples' life savings
For every hour's care they put in, the volunteers build up an hour's worth of care credit that they can keep in a timebank. They can then use it for their own care later in life.
Rent-free living for carers. People who do the caring live rent-free with the elderly person, and perfomr 10 or so hours of service a month for them. Companionship, constant care, mutually beneficial. Definitely a plan that also needs supervision.

Implementing an Interest-free economy: Currency reform

Money, unlike all other goods and services, can be kept without costs. If one person has a bag of apples and another person has the money to buy those apples, the person with the apples is obliged to sell them whithin a relatively short time period to avoid the loss of his assets. Money owners, however, can wait until the price is right for them, their money does not necessarily create 'holding costs'.

If we could create a monetary system which put money on an equal footing with all other goods and services (charging, on averate, a 5% annual maintenance cost, which is exactly what has been paid in the form of interest for money thorught history) then we could have an economy free of the ups and downs of monetary speculation. Money should be made to 'rust', that is, be subjected to a 'use fee'.

Instead of paying interest to those who have more money than they need and in order to keep money IN circulation, people should pay a small fee if they keep the money OUT of circulation.
--Excerpted from Margrit Kennedy, Interest and Inflation Free Money p. 13

Okay, so how should we best go about doing this? Here are some ideas, I want to talk about the feasibility, obstacles, whether or not you think they're a good idea.


Idea 1: Charge people to store their money. (Margrit Kennedy p.27)
For several years in Switzerland, investors ... had to pay interest in order to leave their money in a bank account.

How economic inequality harms societies

There's a lot of information to process in this video, so I'd like to try the 'on-the-spot critical thinking' experiment again. We'll watch the video together, and the minute anyone has a question, a comment or wants to know more, we stop the video and discuss.



And then, if there's time left over, I'd like to get into a quote from the end of an interview TED did with him:

We’re becoming increasingly aware from occasional wealthy people who get in touch with us that even a proportion of the rich feel some sense of disquiet with levels of inequality — and I don’t just mean Warren Buffet. For instance, an ex-banker e-mailed me saying he’d bought a hundred copies of our book for his friends and colleagues. He recently hosted a dinner for us and some of them. He regards it as immoral not to pay tax. We’ve come across a number of business people who feel that way strongly. One of them suggested that there should be a tick box on tax forms, which you tick if you’re willing for the amount of tax you pay to be made public. Some people would be able to take pride that they’ve contributed, say, fifty thousand dollars to the well-being of society. But the implication for those who did not tick it might be that they felt ashamed and had something to hide.

JAK Interest-free Banking in Sweden

Part 1 - Ethics

This part introduces the JAK bank in a very simple way, and then mostly makes an argument (which we already understand) about why our virtual (exponential, interest-based, debt-based) economy is unethical and ultimately unsustainable.

"Money is produced as a loan, mostly. In the OCD countries, only 3% of the money is produced as coins and notes. The rest of it is debt. And debt has to be repaid with interest. To avoid getting inflation, everything you use money for also has to grow at the same pace as you increase the money. And money has to be increased, because you need to repay the earlier years' debt with interest.

What are the problems linked with and interest based-economy?
The main problem is that it forces people to borrow more money each year in order to pay the interest on the loans they already have. If you dn't do that you have to cut your other expenses in order to pay thie interest, and this means you have to choose between exponential debt growth or a rapid increasing unemployment.

Now in September (2007) the ECB is going to raise again the interest rate on moeny, they say to counteract inflation. But this is quite wrong. I've done some statistical researches that analyze Swedish society over a perioud of 20 years. It very clearly shows that about 4 months after you have raised the interest, you get an increase in invlation, a price increas. And then between 8 and 9 months after a raise of interest, you get an increase in unemployement. And this will ahve an impact on the prices downward, but this downward is not so big as the initial rise of the prices. if you rise the interest by 1%, you will get an increase in inflation about 0.5%."

Part 2 Techniques

0:45 Begins the explanation of the bank. I would like to discuss this, why it works out equivalent to a 2.5% interest rate on the loan.
2:06 Post-saving, or after-saving: The member pays back the loan, and then is allowed to withdraw the resulting savings. It seems that in a way, she gets the money twice.
3:11 Savings are not the same as savings points.

Since there is no interest given to members, won't a member who only saves and doesn't borrow lose money?
Answer at 4:22. The point is supporting the community. When the community is wealthy and stable, everyone benefits. So saving your money in this way is not about individual profit, it's about profiting the whole group, and making the community viable. The JAK bank is mostly staffed by volunteers.

"Loaning as a mutual service among people, that is the financial heresy of JAK bank."

The Basis of Trust

Last week's conversation, Ants, Control and Hierarchy, ended with a short discussion about trust:

-Trust? Why is it hard for people to trust each other?
-Evolution!
-Is it natural? Is a genetic thing? Is it about education? Is it culture and subroutines?

Since people wanted to explore this further, today's question is:

What is the basis of trust between human beings?

Here are some answers gleaned from the internet, let's see where this takes us! Click on the headlines to find the article from which the quote or synopsis was taken.


A Definition of Trust

Rousseau and her colleagues offer the following definition: "Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another."[1] Similarly, Lewicki and his colleagues describe trust as "an individual's belief in, and willingness to act on the basis of, the words, actions, and decisions of another."[2]

討論逐字稿 Ants, Control and Hierarchy

This is the transcript from our Ants, Control and Hierarchy discussion.

Discussion
So can someone summarise our article today?
It talks about ants and human beings.
...aaaaand?
Okay, the story is about an experiment about how ants' networks work, and compare it to human beings' society.
The first part, the short story is, if Argentinian ants eat the same things as other ants, they think they're friends.
I think what they eat matters so much because they communicate by touch and smell. So maybe for some human beings, they focus on how people dress, in that case what you wear and how you carry yourself is more important than what you eat.

Ants, Control, and Hierarchy

Last week we we spoke about control, and people wanted to continue this discussion. Since some of what we touched on was control within society or a social group, I thought we might look at this article in the Boston Review on ants. Ants are often held up as an example of good social organization, they're thought to be hard workers, and often what we perceive as the organization of ant colonies is used for exploring ideas about human societies, so it might be fun to look at organization and control through this lens.
Here's the transcript from the discussion.


Whether ants fight is determined by whether they share food.

In the early 1990s a group of scientists at the University of California, San Diego introduced the notion that Argentine ants form a super-colony, one enormous colony stretching throughout California. … The force of the idea of the super-colony came from the observation that Argentine ants from different nests rarely fight with each other. The super-colony evoked an image of huge numbers of small brown ants pouring into California from Latin America. The fact that the ants didn’t fight with each other suggested that somehow they were all linked together, and that united they could defeat all the native ants in their path.

But the lack of fighting among Argentine ants does not reveal a collective purpose. Like all ants, the experience of an Argentine ant is largely olfactory and tactile; most of the 11,000 species of ants have very poor vision. An ant is coated with a layer of grease (cuticular hydrocarbons) that carry its colony’s odor, and ants of some species react aggressively to the odor of a different colony. Argentine ants, like some other ant species, are not very sensitive to small differences in odor.

However, scientists recently have discovered that, with sufficient differences, Argentine ants will fight after all. In a laboratory working to develop pesticides, a technician fed some Argentine ants a German cockroach. The result was both unintended and exciting: the cockroach’s odor was incorporated into the ants that ate it, and they were attacked by other Argentine ants that had not eaten the cockroach. When it comes to fighting among Argentine ants, what matters may be whether they have been sharing the remains of Big Macs, not their genetic origins.

Kara

Let's discuss this video:

Jealousy, Envy, Harmony

What is jealousy?
What is envy?

These two words are so similar in Chinese and English, even though they don't translate exactly directly in terms of how strong an emotion they convey. What's the relationship between these two emotions?

What does jealousy feel like?
What does envy feel like?
Are they similar or different feelings?

Do you ever feel that if others are doing well, you are less likely to have the same happen to you?
Could fear of envy bring about social harmony? (See story and examples below)
Was that how things worked in any experiences you've had?

Jealousy/Envy and Harmony
Is jealousy or envy based on a fear of not being good enough, to work for or keep something valuable? Is jealousy or envy based on a fear of losing something valuable?
Do these fears have a common root?
Are these fears going to influence group harmony?

Group Harmony and Sense of Self
Is it more important to take care of yourself before others, or others before yourself?
Does taking care of others first, or taking care of yourself first, have any relationship to your sense of your own value?
Does your sense of your own value influence your ability to work well in a group?
Our society values selflessness, and our society also values harmony. Are these two attitudes compatible?

"This sort of serves a useful group function," says van de Ven. We all think better off people should share with others, "but that's not something we are inclined to do when we are better off."

Do you agree or disagree?
What kind of attitude does this quote seem to be talking about?