New American Dream
From Good:
In a time of continued economic uncertainty, Americans’ priorities are shifting, according to MetLife’s fifth annual survey of American ideals. They are less concerned with professional success and the trappings of material wealth, instead aspiring to a greater sense of personal fulfillment.
Full graphic here.
There is no hard and fast solution offered in this piece by Ben Goldhirsh, the CEO of GOOD Magazine, to the political and economic problems America is facing. However, there is an important perspective, one that definitely needs to gain more recognition. So why not. Let’s be OUR best. -NS
by: Ben Goldhirsh
CEO, GOOD
We’re entering the fast waters of globalization. Current trajectory says China will soon overtake America as the world’s largest economy. India, Brazil, Indonesia, and others are enjoying faster growth rates than we are. It’s logical, given that earlier-stage economies have room for easier growth than more mature environments like the United States. That’s a good thing. It doesn’t have to threaten Americans’ actual quality of life.
Yes, there will be currency issues when the Yuan competes with the dollar in the international monetary market, and yes, competition for jobs will intensify in the ever-flattening world, and yes, more people with appetites will pull even harder on the fixed set of natural resources we all covet. But these matters will not capsize us.
The greater threat is the country’s collective emotional and intellectual response to the evolution that is afoot. The exceptionalism that took us roaring past England at the beginning of the 20th century is a great thing, but it threatens to confuse the way we handle what happens next. And sadly, looking at the political fray shaping up as we enter an election year, I fear that being terrified of not being the best, has us acting at our worst.
Check out this GOOD infographic of what diseases have had the most impact on the human race over the years. The results may shock you. -NS
Urban bike sharing is a recent trend in hip cities, and Barcelona is at the forefront of the hip. According to a recent report that GOOD is featuring on their site, Barcelona’s bike sharing program is actually life-saving – 12 deaths a year are prevented because of it. Sharing saves lives. Write that down. – AN-H
via GOOD
Urban bike sharing programs improve city dwellers’ lives by offering a convenient way to get around, exercise, and reduce pollution. But could cycling instead of driving could actually save lives? So says science. According to a study published earlier this summer by the British Medical Journal, a successful and widely used bike sharing program in Barcelona prevents 12 deaths a year.
Barcelona started its bike sharing program, Bicing, in 2007. Two years later, more than 180,000 citizens had enrolled: a full 11 percent of the city population. Since many of the people who participated in the program were likely new bikers transitioning from driving, the BMJstudy examined the net impacts on public health resulting from a significant citywide shift to biking from driving. The researchers measured the health outcomes and mortality risk associated with changes in residents’ amount of physical activity, chance of accidental injury, and exposure to air pollution.
This is awesome. GOOD and Hyundai created an interactive transparency that visualizes the number of hours people volunteer for the cause they choose.
Click on the picture to the left and pledge a few hours to the cause of your choice and then go do. Who knows, maybe Hyundai will give you a brand new car for doing some good. – Jordan
Since we’re in the business of encouraging young people to take a semester off or a gap year to pursue something experiential, meaningful, and challenging… I thought posting this would spark some good conversation. Education is a privilege and intensely important. But is a ‘degree’ the same thing as ‘education.’ To quote my man Ralph Waldo:
“Our culture has truckled to the times–to the senses. It is not manworthy. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us brave or free. We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can.. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and: comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great-hearted men. The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus would education conspired with the Divine Providence. A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, this word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own.” – R.W.Emerson.
So, read this interesting article from GOOD Magazine, and discuss in the comments as you wish. – Jedidiah
A couple of months ago, I wrote an essay titled “College, Inc.,” which shed a light on the inevitable student loan crisis, and the collective action we can do to prevent it from happening. As a follow-up, I’ll share with you my view about why higher education is overrated.
Ben Casnocha recently wrote an article about what 17 million Americans got from a college degree. Not surprisingly, millions of Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less than the skills level associated with a bachelor’s degree:
For hundreds of thousands of Americans, spending four years and untold amounts of money (and debt?) gets you a job as a waiter, parking lot attendant, or janitor. Yet everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Gates keep pushing a college education as the way to secure one’s economic future. That is a view that should be heavily qualified.
Richard Vedder from The Chronicle of Higher Education digs a little deeper and debunks the myth that a college education will result in higher paying returns: “In other words, the stats have always been skewed for certain subgroups—particularly relatively disadvantaged groups with low education outcomes—are higher than the average marginal returns to education in the population as a whole.”
This is the fundamental problem with documentaries like Waiting for Superman and organizations like Teach for America. They are focused on a small subgroup of the entire education system. And here’s the reality: not everyone will attend Harvard. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about 18 million students enrolled in college in 2007. Harvard only enrolls 20,000 students per year and the rest of the top notch schools can only fit a specified number of students. So, where do the majority of students receive their higher education? Most attend either community colleges or non-prestigious four-year colleges. It makes one consider: What’s the value of a degree from college? A job as a waiter?
The Project on Student Debt makes a compelling case: “College seniors who graduated in 2009 carried an average of $24,000 in student loan debt. Meanwhile, unemployment for recent college graduates climbed from 5.8% in 2008 to 8.7% in 2009—the highest annual rate on record for college graduates aged 20 to 24.”
Some innovative leaders like Peter Thiel (you’ll know him from The Social Network) are taking matters into their own hands. Peter Thiel is paying students to quit college with something called the Thiel Felloswhip, which pays would-be entrepreneurs under-20 $100,000 to drop out of school.
Peter Thiel’s idea is a great one but I think there’s an even easier, scalable solution. We need to go back to the true goal of education: learning new skills. The grievously undervalued human capital issue here isn’t quality education in school but quality of skills in markets. This is the basic premise behind the edupunk movement: learning new skills that result from a DIY attitude. And the idea behind our start-up, Skillshare, which is a platform to learn anything from anyone.
Instead of looking at where students got their degree, we need to start looking at their real-world experience and the skills they’ve developed. Why hire a student with a degree in “marketing” when their real education is about to start? Like Sir Ken Robinson says: “We have to think differently about human capacity.” It starts by debunking the myth that higher education is an indicator of success, and focus on what matters most: doing shit.
Michael Karnjanaprakorn is the co-founder of Skillshare, which is a platform to learn anything, from anyone. He is based in New York City.
It’s a pretty simple concept, if you understand yourself and have found meaning in your life, you come off as more attractive and appealing. At least that is what the new study from the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science shows us.
People seek interpersonal connections with those who have found meaning in life. So if you are searching for meaning in your own life, whether you know it or it is subconscious, odds are you will be attracted to those who have already found it.
Testing showed that having meaning in your life had higher levels of social magnetism than happiness, religiosity, and extraversion.
The point to be taken from this study is this: If you’re breaking a sweat attending law school or working at that financial management firm for the purpose of making money and thinking it will bring you the interpersonal social status you desire, you may want to reevaluate those thoughts, because chances are you have overlooked the social power of having a deeper purpose.
Of course, the hard part is actually finding that meaning in your life if you haven’t already. But don’t stop, it will come, and with it will be the interpersonal appeal. - Braden
It hardly feels like its been five years since that devastating storm ripped through the gulf coast. I remember being a freshman in high school, coming home and turning on the TV to see boats traveling what used to be streets, helicopter rescues from rooftops, and of course the Superdome where thousands took refuge. Now, five years later, there is no water engulfing New Orleans, the looting has stopped, and new levees have been erected. But the scars of what happened are visible nearly everywhere you go. GOOD compiled a picture slide show of graffiti throughout the city, expressing and reminding us of the feelings felt by New Orleanians during and after the hurricane. -Braden
This is interesting. I grapple with this stuff a lot, we all do at Invisible Children. It’s one of our favorite topics. The idea of our world, the economy, and our role in changing it for the better. I’m not sure I agree with him, and, he points out the system with a critical voice without really offering a solution. I am optimistic that a we can find a solution that blends the compassion of socialism with the pragmatism of capitalism. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis…that combines the truths of both.” Anywho… watch this and let’s discuss. - Jedidiah
Do you buy organic apples because you think they taste better or because you’re trying to buy redemption for your own participation in a pernicious capitalist system? In this lecture, compellingly illustrated by the RSA Animate crew, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek criticizes charity and what he calls “cultural capitalism”—think TOMS shoes or Fair Trade coffee—as palliatives that only perpetuate an immoral economic system.
Zizek’s views actually aren’t that radical. His point isn’t that socially or environmentally enlightened buying habits aren’t good. He’s just arguing that there’s an “element of hypocrisy” involved because those acts also support the economic structures that cause environmental and social problems in the first place.
As far as I can tell, Zizek would prefer you to buy Fair Trade coffee as long as you recognize it isn’t the ultimate solution to the injustices suffered by coffee growers.
This transparency from Good explores the connection between war-related PTSD (a result of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan) and stateside murders committed by veterans. The Times published a frightening article in 2008 that revealed 121 post-war cases of veterans being charged with murder after they’d returned to the US. Since then, another 43 vets have been charged. We’ve all seen pictures of servicemen fitted with cutting edge prosthetics; mainstream media has taught the world about IEDs, Walter Reed, and phantom limbs. What’s less common to read about, however, is the enduring mental shift that war foists upon its victims. The echoes of wartime memories stay with veterans for years—even decades—after soldiers have returned home to their families, friends, and jobs. –Andrew
