Some greatest hits of the 10-year lookback pieces on the crisis. [feedly]

Some greatest hits of the 10-year lookback pieces on the crisis.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/some-greatest-hits-of-the-10-year-lookback-pieces-on-the-crisis/

I've read probably 100 of those "lessons learned (or not)" pieces about the crisis on the 10-year anniversary of Lehman's collapse.

Here are some that stood out to me, though one inevitably leaves out some worthy of your attention, so feel free to add others. (My own piece is out today on WaPo.)

–I found this Steve Pearlstein piece interesting on a couple of levels. It's a solid take of the shampoo economy dynamics (bubble, bust, repeat) that I've long bemoaned, citing the insights of Minsky's analysis (by putting financial cycles and regulatory amnesia at the heart of his model, Minsky explains a reality that conventional economics, which assigns finance a benign, intermediary role, assumes away).

But on a deeper level, as someone who's read Pearlstein's work over the years–he's long been a celebrated business writer for the WaPo–his identification of the flaws in capitalism take on greater weight as they come from a writer who did not start out looking for such flaws.

–As I note in my WaPo piece, for all the ink spilled on these 10-year anniversary pieces, there's one critical question that hardly gets asked at all: how did we miss it? Dean Baker, one of the few who didn't miss the housing bubble, points out that this shouldn't have been so hard to see.

"The [housing] bubble and the risks it posed should have been evident to any careful observer. We saw an unprecedented run-up in house prices with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of the housing market…The fact that prices were being driven in part by questionable loans was not a secret. The fact that lenders were issuing loans to people who had not previously been eligible was widely touted by the financial industry. The fact that many of these loans involved little or no down payment was also widely known."

–Dean's piece gets into the response to the crisis from the perspective of the negative impact on consumer spending from the loss of trillions in housing wealth, along with tanking home building/residential investment. Others, as in a recent piece by Ben Bernanke, argue that panicked credit markets were a more important driver of the loss of output and jobs in the downturn. Krugman agrees with Dean, emphasizing that output and jobs remained weak well after credit conditions thawed.

Surely both–the credit freeze and the negative demand shock–mattered. Banks and non-bank lenders were engaged in a carry trade of borrowing low in short-term money markets and lending long in asset markets, especially housing. The bank run that ensued when the loans soured and the short-term credit evaporated practically overnight was, of course, as Bernanke argues, an important driver of the output losses that followed. But absent bolder Keynesian interventions, reflating credit alone would have, and in fact, did, amount to pushing on a string (though see Furman below for a somewhat upbeat take of the U.S. fiscal case).

–This engenders bailout questions and arguments that have been going on since TARP was born. John Cassidy takes us through the issues in a review of Adam Tooze's new book Crashed, which looks like a very deep dive into the global finance aspects of the crash.

–Neil Irwin provides a painful reminder of how horribly unpopular the bailouts were. He argues that they accomplished their goals of reflating credit markets, but at tremendous political cost, a cost I'm reminded of with every presidential tweet.

–Based on this moral hazard problem, Robert Samuelson asks: "How do you protect the system without seeming to reward the guilty?" This seems very straightforward to me: regulate the heck out of the financial markets. The extent of regulation should be proportional to the risk posed to the rest of the economy. And the time to worry about moral hazard is not in the crunch. It's precisely now, when markets are ebullient and policy makers are reading urging regulators to go night-night at the switch.

–Jason Furman reminds us that the fiscal policy response to the downturn was a lot more robust than the Recovery Act. In fact, if you sum up all the countercyclical fiscal programs over the period of the Great Recession, the price tag is twice that of the Recovery Act ($1.5 trillion according to his Table 1). While Furman gives a relatively favorable review of the fiscal actions taken back then (with solid evidence), he doesn't look at the Obama administration's housing relief policies, which were arguably woeful under-performers.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Bernstein: A couple of economists respectfully disagree on the politics of policy in the age of Trump and the new socialists [feedly]

A couple of economists respectfully disagree on the politics of policy in the age of Trump and the new socialists
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/a-couple-of-economists-respectfully-disagree-on-politics-policy-in-the-age-of-trump-and-the-new-socialists/

Belle Sawhill is an economist I greatly admire, so I carefully read her Twitter-thread critique of a piece I recently posted in the WaPo.



My piece makes the case that technocratic policy wonks, like Belle and me, should not be overly critical of ambitious, even unrealistic, policy proposals by the new socialists. True, they often eschew the path dependency by which many of us are constrained. But they signal to key constituencies that, relative to establishment or centrist Democrats, they're going to bring a new, aggressive fight to the powerful, well-endowed forces that have long been aligned against the progressive agenda.

I argue that:

"What Trump should have taught us by now is that if people believe you've got their backs, you can do things never imagined by the status quo. In this regard, the new socialists are saying to the majority that has long been left behind, "We've really got your back." Moreover, their analysis of market power is far more convincing than Trump's promotion of fear and divisiveness.

Yes, the socialists are eschewing path dependency, and not all their plans pass technocratic muster. But, for now, that's beside the point.

What is that point? To enlist poor, middle-class and diverse America in the struggle to take back their country and their democracy from the oligarchs who are actively undermining it."

Belle argues that I'm advocating "politics first, policy later," and that this strategy invokes significant risks. These include a) alienating a public that is more moderate than activists, b) exposing D's "to barrage of criticisms from right, painting them as socialists who will raise taxes, take away freedoms, and scare away swing voters, including Rs unhappy with Trump," and c) deepening distrust of government by promising big and delivering little, if anything.

Instead, she recommends: "A simple values-based agenda that provides good jobs, honors personal responsibility, diversity, community-based efforts, and demands integrity from public servants." That sounds good, but we'll all have to read her new book (looking forward to it!) to understand what she's suggesting. Surely a "values-based agenda" means different things to different people.

In fact, such differences make me skeptical of Belle's claim that the public is more moderate than activists. That may be true in Conor Lamb's district, but it's demonstrably not so in Ocasio-Cortez's or Jahana Hayes' or Ayanna Pressley's or Andrew Gillum's or Stacey Abrams'.

I suspect Belle is thinking about general elections, not primaries, where activists tend to be more prominent. Still, it's hard for me not to see what the Times calls a "surge of progressive energy on the left among nonwhite voters and white millennials" as a critical movement pushing our politics in a less moderate direction. Individual elements of the socialist agenda poll well among the general public, sometimes even with Trump voters. President Obama just endorsed Medicare for All and debt-free college, planks of the new socialist agenda. In fact, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a slight majority of Republican voters support Medicare For All. These poll results suggest to me that young people are increasingly uninspired by status-quo, establishment, middle-way arguments.

Next, there's no question that right-wing opponents will make all the accusations Belle notes under "b" above. But they already make all these accusations – President Obama was routinely called a socialist for pushing an agenda with which I suspect Belle is very comfortable.

So what? I'm not going to let their cat calls dictate my policy agenda. I'm sure that universal coverage, higher minimum wages, employment supports, access to quality education from pre-school on up, promote freedom. And it's my—I'd argue "our"—job as policy wonks to make the case.

If that means more tax revenue, which it does, then we must be honest about that too. The fact that one party will only cut taxes and the other will only raise them on a narrow sliver of the richest voters is simply unsustainable and inconsistent with meeting the challenges of climate change, aging demographics, infrastructure, health care, poverty, affordable, quality pre-school through college, and more.

Finally, I can envision an endgame that raises, not lowers, trust in government. If the Ds were to take back the Congress and the White House, the lions would have to sit down with the Lambs. That is, Democratic moderates would have to work with the progressive insurgents to hammer out a compromise policy agenda in the areas above. I doubt they'd end up with single payer and free college, but I'm optimistic that they'd get part of the way there.

That might well disappoint some activists, but it would have a potentially much larger, positive effect in tapping the growing recognition that we need a functional, responsive, representative government that can help to solve real problems. -- via my feedly newsfeed

IMF Ten Years After Lehman—Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead [feedly]

Ten Years After Lehman—Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead

https://blogs.imf.org/2018/09/05/ten-years-after-lehman-lessons-learned-and-challenges-ahead/

By Christine Lagarde

September 5, 2018

عربي, Baˈhasa indoneˈsia, Español, 中文, Français, 日本語, Português, Русский

A trader on the New York Stock Exchange the day US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy: the global crisis that followed is a defining moment of our time (Photo: Nancy-Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

The global financial crisis remains one of the defining events of our time. It will forever mark the generation that lived through it. The fallout from the crisis—the heavy economic costs borne by ordinary people combined with the anger at seeing banks bailed out and bankers enjoying impunity, at a time when real wages continued to stagnate—is among the key factors in explaining the backlash against globalization, particularly in advanced economies, and the erosion of trust in government and other institutions.

In this sense, the crisis cast a long shadow, which shows no sign of going away any time soon. Yet the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers—what I once referred to as a "holy cow" moment—gives us an opportunity to evaluate the response to the crisis over the past decade.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers provoked a broader run on the financial system, leading to systemic crisis. All told, twenty-four countries fell victim to banking crises, and economic activity has still not returned to trend in most of them. One study suggests that the average American will lose $70,000 in lifetime income because of the crisis. Governments continue to feel the pinch too. Public debt in advanced economies rose by more than 30 percentage points of GDP—partly due to economic weakness, partly due to efforts to stimulate the economy, and partly due to bailing out failing banks.

We are now facing new, post-crisis, fault lines.

Looking back today, the pressure points seem obvious. But they were less obvious at the time. Most economists failed to predict what was coming. It is a sobering lesson in groupthink.

What were these pressure points? At the core was financial innovation that vastly outpaced regulation and supervision. Financial institutions—particularly in the United States and Europe—went on a frenzy of reckless risk-taking. This included relying less on traditional deposits and more on short-term funding, dramatically lowering lending standards, pushing loans off balance sheets through murky securitizations, and more generally, shifting activity to the hidden corners of the financial sector that were subject to less regulatory oversight. For example, the market share of subprime mortgages in the United States reached 40 percent of overall mortgage-backed securities by 2006—up from almost nothing in the early 1990s.

In turn, the increased globalization of banking and financial services caused the crisis to cascade rapidly and dangerously. European banks were major buyers of American mortgage-backed securities. At the same time, the introduction of the euro led to large capital flows to the periphery as borrowing costs fell. These flows were financed by banks in the core—another channel of financial contagion. Globalization also contributed to the problem through regulatory arbitrage—financial institutions were able to demand lighter oversight based on their ability to decamp to more favorable jurisdictions.

If the policy response to these pre-crisis risks was inadequate, I would say that the immediate policy response to the crisis was impressive. The governments of the major economies represented by the G20 coordinated policies on a global scale. Countries with banking problems limited the drag of flailing financial sectors on the real economy—through measures such as capital support, debt guarantees, and asset purchases. Central banks slashed policy rates and later sailed deep into unknown seas with unconventional monetary policy. Governments propped up demand with large fiscal stimuluses.

The IMF played its part too. We mobilized member countries to expand our financial resources dramatically—and as a result, were able to commit nearly $500 billion to countries hit by crisis. We also pumped an unprecedented $250 billion of global liquidity into the system. We modernized our lending frameworks, to allow a faster and more flexible response to country needs—including by moving to zero interest rates on loans to low-income countries. And we engaged in a serious rethink of macroeconomics, to get a better handle on what we all had missed, including the complex linkages between the financial sector and the real economy.

Together, these policies—in the context of collective international action—largely worked in the sense that a worst-case scenario was averted. This was not a sure thing—in the immediate aftermath of Lehman, we were really staring into the abyss. Holy cow, indeed…

Policy also addressed the mistakes that led to the crisis. Banks have much healthier capital and liquidity positions. Off-balance sheet entities have been curtailed and brought under the regulatory umbrella. Big banks face tighter regulation, and leverage is lower. Subprime mortgage origination is largely gone. A big chunk of over-the-counter derivatives has been shifted to central clearing.

This is all good, but still not good enough. Too many banks, especially in Europe, remain weak. Bank capital should probably go up further. "Too-big-to-fail" remains a problem as banks grow in size and complexity. There has still not been enough progress on how to resolve failing banks, especially across borders. A lot of the murkier activities are moving toward the shadow banking sector. On top of this, continued financial innovation—including from high frequency trading and fintech—adds to financial stability challenges. In addition, and perhaps most worryingly of all, policymakers are facing substantial pressure from industry to roll back post-crisis regulations.

There is one other important area that has not changed much—the area of culture, values, and ethics. As I have noted before , the financial sector still puts profit now over long-range prudence, short-termism over sustainability. Just think of the many financial scandals since Lehman. Ethics is not only important for its own sake, but because ethical lapses have clear economic consequences. Good regulation and supervision can do a lot, but they cannot do everything. They must be complemented by reform within financial institutions.

In this context, a key ingredient of reform would be more female leadership in finance. I say this for two reasons. First, greater diversity always sharpens thinking, reducing the potential for groupthink. Second, this diversity also leads to more prudence, with less of the reckless decision-making that provoked the crisis. Our own research bears this out—a higher share of women on the boards of banks and financial supervision agencies is associated with greater stability. As I have said many times, if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.

So where do we stand on the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman? The bottom line is this: We have come a long way, but not far enough. The system is safer, but not safe enough. Growth has rebounded but is not shared enough.

Complicating matters, the political economy landscape has shifted, with a fading commitment to international cooperation—ironically, the very kind of cooperation that prevented the crisis from becoming another Great Depression. Think of the role played by the G20, the FSB, the IMF, and others who worked so well together over the past decade. Indeed, the importance of international cooperation in meeting 21^st century challenges is one of the enduring lessons of the crisis.

We are now facing new, post-crisis, fault lines—from the potential rollback of financial regulation, to the fallout from excessive inequality, to protectionism and inward-looking policies, to rising global imbalances. How we respond to these challenges will determine whether we have fully internalized the lessons from Lehman. In this sense, the true legacy of the crisis cannot be adequately assessed after ten years—because it is still being written.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

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The financial crisis and the foundations for macroeconomics [feedly]

The financial crisis and the foundations for macroeconomics
http://larrysummers.com/2018/09/13/the-financial-crisis-and-the-foundations-for-macroeconomics/

A, if not the, preoccupation of macroeconomists for the last generation has been providing macroeconomics with a microeconomic foundation. At one level this totally makes sense. How can one be against establishing foundations? And it makes sense to think that macroeconomic theories of fluctuations in investment, for example, should be rooted in theories of how individual businesses makes investment decisions.

Yet it has to be acknowledged that the principle of building macroeconomics on microeconomic foundations, as applied by economists, contributed next to nothing to predicting, explaining or resolving the Great Recession. The insights into the financial meltdown that policymakers found most valuable came from scholars, such as Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, who thought in terms of broad aggregates and made no effort to establish micro foundations. The market participants, such as Ray Dalio, who were most prescient with respect to the crisis ignored microeconomics as they theorized in terms of debt and credit aggregates.

What went wrong, and what is to be learned? In my view, the core supposition of much of macroeconomics, which is that it is best to operate with as fundamental a foundation as possible, is not supported by the history of science. Psychologists understand much of human behavior without thinking about neurons. Geologists product earthquakes without going back to the first principles of physics. Structural engineers use rules of thumb gained from experience for understanding the properties of materials used in construction.

So, too, macroeconomics need not be, and probably should not be, built on foundations that center on optimizing decisions by households and firms. For such an approach to be tractable too much needs to be abstracted from. In addition, recent research in behavioral economics suggests that optimization of the kind envisioned by economists is a poor model for understanding actual spending decisions.

But some kind of foundation is still required for macroeconomics. That is why I'm very excited by my friend Andrei Shleifer's new book with Nicola Gennaioli, "A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility." The book puts expectations at the center of thinking about economic fluctuations and financial crises — but these expectations are not rational. In fact, as all the evidence suggests, they are subject to systematic errors of extrapolation. The book suggests that these errors in expectations are best understood as arising out of cognitive biases to which humans are prone.

It starts with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, showing how their ideas can be used to build tractable models of expectations in the economy. The approach helps to reevaluate the housing bubble before the financial crisis but also explains why investors and policymakers were so slow to catch on to the vulnerabilities of markets as the bubble began to deflate. It provides a persuasive account of the 2008 crisis and suggests the kind of perspectives that could have prevented or at least mitigated its consequences. And it points the way toward reducing future crisis risks.

To be sure there is much more work to do. The arguments that Gennaioli and Shleifer make need to be debated in the profession. And, yes, it is easier to explain the past than to predict the future. But theories of economic fluctuation and crisis based on the tendency of human beings to become too greedy and then too fearful seem much more fruitful than theories based on accurate optimization.

Something is wrong with the economics profession if events like those of 2008 do not change its thinking. Those wanting to be in the vanguard of the new thinking should be reading "A Crisis of Beliefs."

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Did Trump just kill the US auto industry? [feedly]

Did Trump just kill the US auto industry?
http://www.atimes.com/article/did-trump-just-kill-the-us-auto-industry/

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Economic historians will cite July 9, 2018 as the date on which the US lost the trade war with China – before the war began.

That was when Germany's top manufacturing companies – Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, BASF and Siemens – announced tens of billions of dollars of new investments in China as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang posed for a photo op with German Chancellor Merkel in Berlin.

BMW will expand its joint venture with Brilliance Auto to produce 519,000 vehicles a year. It also set up a joint venture to produce an electric version of the Mini together with Great Wall Auto. And it agreed to buy US$4.7 billion worth of batteries from Chinese producer CATL, which just announced a new plant in southern Germany. Volkswagen earlier this year announced that it would invest US$18 billion in China by 2022 and construct six plants to build electric vehicles. BMW will move some of its SUV production out of its South Carolina plant in response to auto tariffs.

Since then the prices of US automakers have tanked, and German auto stocks have rallied. The future of the auto industry lies in electric vehicles, for which China will be the world's largest market by far. China also has the world's most advanced battery technology as well as the most robust supply chain for battery production.

China's response to American tariffs has been to offer German and Japanese industrial companies a privileged position in joint ventures with Chinese manufacturers. China also is reportedly planning to reduce import tariffs for America's competitors. Toyota and Honda also announced plans to expand Chinese production in July.

The US administration often cites the relative performance of equity prices as a gauge of its success in the present trade confrontation with China. At the sector level, though, equity prices tell a different story.

President Trump apparently believes that tariffs will bring auto production back to the United States, as he suggested on Twitter in early September:

Ford's North American production manager Mike Levine tweeted in reply, "It would not be profitable to build the Focus Active in the U.S. given an expected annual sales volume of fewer than 50,000 units and its competitive segment."

The fate of the Ford Focus, though, is the least of the problems of the American auto industry. China has prepared a supply chain for electric vehicles in depth, and it is extremely difficult for automakers who are not entrenched in the Chinese market to compete.

China also holds the keys to the future of self-driving cars. Rather than attempt to design autonomous vehicles to negotiate the poor infrastructure of American cities, China is designing cities around the concept of autonomous vehicles, with roads fenced off from pedestrians and 5th-generation mobile broadband.

China is not only the largest auto market in the world, and likely to grow as a percentage of the world auto market, but it is the center of auto industry innovation.

Wall Street analysts are busy calculating the prospective advantages to European and Japanese exporters. As I wrote in August (Europe, Japan, China and Russia line up against the US), America's trade war on China portends a global shift in trading relationships away from the US.

Alicia Garcia Herrero, an economist at the French bank Natixis, summarized the potential shift on September 14:

"For the first batch of import tariffs ($50 billion from each side), the key beneficiaries in Europe from substituting Chinese exports into the US would be general purpose machinery. As for China's market, European car manufacturers, followed by aircraft and aerospace, would be the key winners from potentially replacing the US exporters…For the second batch of import tariffs (on $200 billion from US side and $60 billion from China's side), Europe's potential gains in the US are extended to many more sectors, including office, accounting & computing machinery as well as furniture […] European gains in China will also be more widespread, covering sectors such as medical & precision products, basic chemicals and general purpose machinery."

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Middle-Class Influence vs. Working-Class Character [feedly]

Middle-Class Influence vs. Working-Class Character
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/middle-class-influence-vs-working-class-character/

"Jesse" is one of a cohort of 80 students sociologist Jessica Calarco observed from the 3^rdthrough the 5^th grades and then revisited in middle school for her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.  Calarco also interviewed the students' parents. Her research reveals that middle-class children practice "strategies of influence" in school because their parents prioritize academic success, while working-class kids generally follow "strategies of deference" because their parents care more about developing long-term character.

In middle school Jesse lost a homework packet and simply accepted a "0" grade when the assignment was due.  Several weeks later his mother found the packet and made Jesse complete it.  When Jesse turned it in, his teacher "firmly, and a bit incredulously" returned the packet ungraded, saying: "It's a little too late for that now.  I mean, that [assignment] was like a month ago."  Here's how Calarco describes Jesse's reaction:

"Jesse does not look up.  He nods slowly, but he keeps his shoulders hunched forward and his head low.  As Ms. Cartwright heads back to her desk, Jesse glances up at me, his face and shoulders heavy with resignation.  He murmurs quietly, almost sadly: 'It wasn't to get a better grade.  It was to make me a better person.'"

Jesse later explained to Calarco that his mother had told him to complete the late assignment not to improve his grade but because it was the right thing to do – "to work hard and take responsibility for his actions."

Jesse is from a working-class family, and Calarco recounts in heart-breaking detail how the working-class kids she observed are disadvantaged in grade school by their inability and unwillingness to push teachers to give them more time on a test, help them with answers, and allow them to turn in homework late. Middle-class kids, on the other hand, often treat teachers' instructions as but opening statements in a game of negotiating that these kids become amazingly good at as early as the 4^th grade.

According to Calarco, middle-class kids are taught to question and negotiate with the authority of their teachers, who are there to serve and help them. They learn that children should ask for help and seek  special accommodations when they need them.  Working-class kids, conversely, are taught to defer to teachers, to do what they're told, and not to burden teachers with unnecessary questions but to work out their problems on their own.

Calarco argues that it is not only teachers' own middle-class predispositions that disadvantage working-class students (a "hidden curriculum" noted by other scholars like Annette Lareau), but middle-class kids' own crafty agency, and their knowledge that they can count on their parents to intervene if necessary, that makes it nearly impossible for teachers to give the same time and attention to working- as to middle-class kids.  In Calarco's observation, teachers are often frustrated with the demands middle-class kids make on them and appreciative of the working-class kids' deference and respect.  But the middle-class students are so confident, persistent, and often humorously, good-heartedly creative in seeking attention that as a practical matter, teachers have to give them more time just to get through their day.  This dynamic is further aided by working-class kids' commitment to not being a bother to teachers and to working out things on their own, and many of them see what the middle-class kids are doing as undignified begging at best or even cheating, which they disdain ever doing.   At a Working-Class Studies conference where she presented some of this research, I asked Calarco whether the working-class kids' disdain for middle-class negotiating might be based in a commitment to personal integrity.  She said, "Oh, for sure, though nobody used those words, of course."

As for remedies, Calarco argues against both teaching working-class kids to negotiate better or urging middle-class parents to restrain from teaching their children strategies of influence.  Rather, she advocates for teachers and schools to enforce sharper boundaries against negotiating the special deals middle-class kids are so good at bargaining for and to stick to those boundaries when parents complain and threaten to go to the school board.

I found her arguments for that approach sensible and cogent, but as with many remedies for addressing our growing inequalities, it puts too much responsibility on only one of our institutions and on teachers, whom Calarco so vividly shows want to treat all their students equally and often work ingeniously if unsuccessfully to do so.  I wish Calarco had pulled back a bit to a larger frame that built on one of her most insightful paragraphs:

"All the parents . . . regardless of class or mobility, wanted to support their children's academic success.  At the same time, parents worried that too much support could undermine their children's development of good character (i.e., respect, responsibility, and work ethic).  Middle-class and working-class parents alike struggled with how to balance those seemingly competing priorities.  Ultimately, middle-class parents prioritized good grades, and working-class parents prioritized good character.  Both groups, however, made those choices with reservations."

She doesn't spell out the reservations, maybe because they're pretty obvious.  As Jesse's story suggests, he just wanted to be "a better person," not to be too much of a bother, and for sure not a beggar or a cheater.  He could do with some negotiating skills, and with some more willingness to speak up for himself so he can be treated more fairly.  But no matter what he does, he'll never catch up to the increasingly manipulative influencing skills the middle-class kids are developing – partly, and importantly, because neither he nor his parents want him to.  By prioritizing good character, however, he is gradually undermining his academic competitiveness and eventually his competitiveness in a bifurcated labor market that increasingly has only low-wage and high-wage jobs that track education levels.  His parents may sense that, and thus their reservations.  Middle-class parents' reservations are likely based on the same perception – that if their kids have to sacrifice a little character and integrity to achieve academic success, it will be worth it in the long run because it will improve their chances of getting one of those increasingly rare jobs with good wages and conditions.  But is this really what middle-class parents want: Finagling, transactional grade-hounds constantly seeking competitive advantage so they can find a career, not just a job, a career that may value those same finagling, manipulative transactional skills they're honing in school?

I doubt that is what any parent wants, but those are the pressures being put on us by the increasing distance between good jobs and bad jobs based on educational attainment.  Parents should not have to prioritize between good grades and good character.  We need to attack our growing inequalities with higher wages and better conditions for all the bad jobs that do much of the work we all depend upon.  In the long run, even most winners can't really win in a winner-take-all society.

Negotiating Opportunities is full of carefully observed interactions among kids, parents, and teachers nearly all of whom are trying to do their best most of the time. But they're doing it within a socioeconomic structure where trying to build character and maintain personal integrity can increase your chances of having low wages and lousy working conditions, while in order to gain decent working and living environments and some discretionary income, you may have to trim your concern for character and integrity and to get really good at treating human relationships as simply transactional.

Jack Metzgar

 -- via my feedly newsfeed