Workers of above-average beauty earn about 10 to 15 percent more than workers of below-average beauty. The size of this beauty premium is economically significant and comparable to the race and gender gaps in the U.S. labor market.
Markus M. Mobius; Tanya S. Rosenblat. Why Beauty Matters. The American Economic Review, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 222-235
I just finished an hour long run and was walking home through the West Village thinking about ice cream. I passed an old homeless man begging for change on Bleecker. Usually I’ll buy these guys pizza or a sub, but I don’t give them money because when I was a kid my mom told me they’d just buy alcohol and I wouldn’t be helping them. The street is overflowing with drunk twenty-somethings. This time I think: if he wants to get drunk he’s just like these people, no better, no worse. So I give him some quarters from my pocket. Then I turn into my local supermarket, now distracted by what I want to buy.
Kiwi’s for tomorrow breakfast, some hummus for the leftover pita bread, should I get that ice cream too? I wander towards the check out. I probably shouldn’t get the ice cream because I’d have to eat it all in one go since I’m leaving town tomorrow. From the line I can see the freezers. I really would enjoy coffee heath bar crunch, but then I have those Popsicles left. I should finish those first. The cashier starts to ring me up and to my surprise, the homeless man from outside gets in line behind me. He puts a pint of coffee heath bar ice cream on the counter. He’s got my quarters in his left hand and a couple wrinkled bills and a plastic spoon in his right. How strange that we desire the exact same thing at the exact same time. We’re not so different after all.
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” (Ch. 6 : Work, p. 100, Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol)
My generation (sometimes “Y”, sometimes “Millennial”) has been getting a bad rap. Just look at the Adbusters article that has 4039 comments (adbusters) and declares the hipster movement the “end of Western civilization,” or the Thomas Friedman article in the New York times that dubs us “Generation Q,” for quiet (nytimes). These articles (15 thousand Google hits on “Gen Y apathetic”) usually miss the essential characteristics of our generation because the writers can’t seem to imagine the world from our perspective. Things older people find novel and amazing —the Internet, cell phones, mass media, international culture of consumerism, American hegemony — are second nature to us. While these writers are distracted by the fact that we all dress alike, write daily blogs, and are more educated and privileged than any other generation, they don’t understand that these are relatively unimportant side effects of the phenomena listed above.
We have been called “a lost generation…[not] giving birth to anything new” and “too quiet, too online.” In fact the opposite is true. There is a deafening roar in cyberspace. If a presidential election can be won through the support of an online movement, if articles and ideas can reach tens of millions of people overnight, and create a four thousand person discussion, if youtube can receive 200,000 new videos a day, then being “too quiet” and “too online” is the opinion of someone who doesn’t understand what it means to be online. Not creating anything new and not being loud enough are not our problems. So why the disrespect from the famous 60s generation? Because we aren’t doing what they want us to do.
Most of us were born after the end of the Cold War or were too young to remember it. The political climate we grew up in was one of supreme hypocrisy. One President nearly got impeached for a superficial sex scandal and then another later broke international laws to pre-emptively start a war without UN support and was re-elected to serve 2 full terms without so much as a breath of legal retribution.
The problem my generation faces is inheriting a world that baffles us: a world of hypocrisy and crisis; a world on the brink of collapse yet at the height of human civilization.
Imagine for a moment being one of us. Taught in school that all people are created equal, that all countries are sovereign, that freedom, democracy, and capitalism are embraced by all people and nations because they are ultimate ideals that allow us to prosper and live as we choose in the pursuit of happiness. Old enough to read the New York Times online and blog on Huffington Post, we see a very different world. Equality? Not for the poor, not for LGBT. Capitalism? It appears to have been a house of cards recklessly constructed by greed for the benefit of a few. Sovereignty? Not for resource-poor or oil-rich countries. Ideals? Not for the media or our political and business leaders.
Now we must navigate a world where a concentration of power, wealth, and media often conflicts with every ideal the Western world is supposed to stand for. If you think we are too quiet and too online you should consider that we have two choices. One, to accept the values we were taught to believe in and totally redefine and reconstruct the way our government/economy/society works so that these ideals match reality. Or two, to accept the world we live in and think up a new set of values to justify our lives.
Neither is easy or obvious. Hopefully we pick number one, and figure out how to sort out the hypocrisy. But for now we are faced with nearly insurmountable problems and need the cooperation of the untouchable elite. Friedman says global warming is our problem and we ought to be screaming for our leaders to do something. Perhaps you don’t hear our screams because we gave up long ago on a having a government that listens to citizens, or on the ability of that government to take on big business by kicking it out of the bed. Friedman should be shouting at his own generation. The ones who own Haliburton and run the Whitehouse, the Rupert Murdochs, the Robert Rubins, the Bernard Madoffs, the lawyers and the doctors he wants us to aspire to who haven’t done much to change the 60 million uninsured Americans, the declining rate of high school completion, the 10,000 who die every day in Africa, the much needed CO2 emissions reductions, or publicizing Ban Ki Moon’s 3 year window.
Take global warming, perhaps the biggest issue our generation faces. If worldwide CO2 emissions don’t start coming down in the very near future, my generation will be saddled with the “catastrophic effects” predicted by the IPCC: more starvation and death in Africa and elsewhere, resource wars, mass immigration, mass extinction, and many more unimaginables.
But the example that the generation in power has modeled for us is that it doesn’t matter. Being an American is having the opportunity to buy that huge house and oversized SUV, become an investment banker, and get huge annual bonuses with no basis in value creation. And the consequences for everyone else? Irrelevant. That’s how you defined freedom and success.
The problems and the contradictions being left to us are so big that there are no easy answers. It appears that everything has to be undone, before it can redone. So let us figure out how we want to proceed. Let us “waste” our time like Mark Zuckerburg building a 150 million person online network because it may be the only hope we have. Your generation doesn’t know what it means to be a global citizen the way our generation will have to. And those values you taught us, they seem pretty empty when you don’t act on them yourselves. If you want us to change the world, don’t look at your sixteen-year-old listening to an ipod while writing on Facebook and watching youtube and yell at him that he’s wasting his privileges. Instead, start cleaning up your own messes. Lead by example. End your own hypocrisies. Start caring about the rest of the world and not just yourselves.
Meanwhile, let us figure out how we can use these tools that enable mass distribution and organization of ideas. It’s likely that these will be the tools we need.
One of Funny and Interesting’s readers, Omair, sent me this link to GapMinder . I’ve used the site for a couple of my blog posts but I forgot to share it. So go forth and find out who has the most oil, the best teeth, the fewest children, and the most money!
He also directed me to the TED talk given by Hans Rosling. And no matter what you’re interested in there’s a TED talk you should watch!
…I was doodling. What do Columbia’s economics, writing, and statistics classes all have in common? Inspired doodling. After you look through the highlights of my semester, decide if you spend your time better than I did. Then send doodles to funnyandinteresting@gmail.com to enter the WHILE YOU WERE STUDYING worldwide contest! Winners will receive their own personal doodle by email.
Around 75th and 9th I hear children yelling, “fresh lemonade, twenty
five cents!” I can’t imagine a lemonade stand taking place on these
manicured city blocks with their awnings and doormen, so I follow the
yelling. I turn on to 76th and find two five year old girls who are in
fact selling lemonade. Unlike the stands I had when I was little, from
the back of a wagon or top of a milk crate I would pull down the block
as my mom shouted after me “You need to pay me back for the juice
concentrate,” this stand was the phantom tollbooth of lemonade stands.
It was a giant plastic contraption with chairs, cooler, cup dispenser,
and awning built in. Two nannies stood behind the stand and watched as
the two girls yelled out to Saturday morning temple goers in heels and
dress clothing, “25 cents!” The whole thing seemed an awful business
model, but I’ll get back to that.
I continued past the stand, walking uptown on Lexington, and ended up behind a mother and daughter.
“What did other kids wear for dress-like-it’s-a-work-day?” the Mother asked.
“Jenny went as a CEO like her dad,” the little girl said.
“Oh yeah. And what did she wear?”
“A black coat and some fancy shoes.”
“How about Tita?”
“She was..an umm…an investment banker!”
“Like her mom. And she wore…?”
“A tie.”
It was apparent from this conversation that these uptown children are well
exposed to the business world. However, it’s obvious from the lemon girls that they aren’t benefiting from this exposure. With a $200 dollar lemonade stand, and two $25/hour nannies, how can selling 25 cent glasses of lemonade to passing strangers ever get them out of the red? Not even a black coat and fancy shoes, like the kind Jenny wore, could save them. Maybe Tita’s mom can.
If you decide to read the UNOP, the United New Orleans Plan, you will have to download fourteen PDFs, some over seventy pages long, and then struggle through hundreds of pages of overlapping plans and extensive tables. Now imagine that you only have a dialup connection at a school an unreliable bus ride away and you are functionally illiterate. If you still think you would read the plan, then you are the citizen the New Orleans planning board has imagined. If you don’t think you would read the plan, you are like most displaced New Orleans’s residents.
Since I have high-speed Internet, know how to read relatively well, and was assigned the five sections of UNOP as reading for an MIT urban planning class, I did read the UNOP. The plan is receiving $85 billion (UNOP Section 5) from the government to rebuild. By simply taking that number and dividing it by the number of displaced New Orleans residents (approximately 223,000 according to the 2006 US census, US census), I found that if the New Orleans community were to forgo rebuilding, each resident could receive $382,000. $382,000 is enough for any family to relocate and rebuild nearly anywhere they want—of course ruling out rebuilding in Aspen, the center of Luxembourg, or next to Central Park.
So my question is, are we really helping displaced New Orleans residents? Given the choice between $382,000 — which individuals could invest back into the American economy in general and even specific cities if encouragement was provided — or move back to New Orleans, a city that didn’t offer them good public services before the storm and cannot possible rebuild safely if global warming is taken into consideration, would they choose to move back? The residents of New Orleans barely have access to the plan to rebuild their city. And so I wonder if the enormous sum of money is really being spent on their behalf.
This question leads into the public versus private goods debate. In response to those who say the rebuilding of New Orleans is a “public good” (because it brings money into Louisiana, because it is a cultural and historic site) I would quote from the UNOP plan. The plan says as few as forty percent of residents are returning because they face a “lack of …information about future conditions, …of medical care, uncertain public school situation, job loss, fear of crime, and other family members unable to return,” (UNOP Section 1, 7). On top of simply rebuilding, the plan must provide incentives (UNOP Section 1, 7) for these residents to return. Are we as a nation willing to trade the public good of having New Orleans rebuilt at the cost of leaving 60% of the displaced residents unassisted? And if we are, do we really believe that the future economic profit New Orleans will create outweigh the cost of rebuilding today, keeping in mind that the future could only be only fifty years long before it floods again. And finally, the culture of New Orleans was a beautiful part of America, but it was also a hotbed of racism, poverty, and corruption. Might we give the people who created the good parts of that culture an opportunity to move elsewhere?
I hope to encourage discussion with this article, and not to offend anyone. Please, if you disagree, post your comment. I posed my ideas as questions because there are many different answers and these thoughts are neither perfectly informed nor ultimately correct.
Average cost of an Ivy League undergraduate education = $50,000 per year (including tuition, books, room and board)
Four years at an Ivy university = $200,000
For the same price you could buy….
= 800,000 gumballs. If you eat three gumballs a day, that is one for each meal, you would have 730 years of bubbilicious fun. Now assuming you only live to about 80 — you are after all surviving on gumballs, how long do you think you’re going to live? — then you have a surplus of 650 years of gumballs. If you write your own diet book about your amazing gumball diet and accrue at least 8 followers then you can sell your gumball surplus for a 50% mark up. This way you’ll live to 80, eating gumballs, and have made $266,906 for a profit of $66,906. Combine that with interest and some clever investing, and you could probably live off of it in a Turkish suburb.
= 400 Heifer cows which can deliver four gallons of milk every day and change the life of a hungry family. The milk can provide nourishment for children and income from selling surplus milk, which can in turn pay for tuition, medicine, clothing, and better housing. Heifer cows can help crops grow. And a healthy cow can have a calf every year and so one cow can eventually help an entire community move from poverty to self-reliance. (www.heifer.org)
=7,407 Bratz dolls. (www.toysrus.com)
=20 years of rent for a studio apartment in Paris next to Opera. Certainly a more romantic option than the others, I envision this trade off being made by aspiring artists or writers. Maybe subtract a couple years so you can pay for food and what not, but since you aren’t in school you can get a job as a Parisian waitress. (www.craigslits.com)
= Oral re-hydration salts that can save 606,060 children from dying of diarrhea. (www.theguardian.co.uk)
=245 year subscription to the steak of the month club (www.amazingclubs.com)
=800,000 meals for Bolivian children. Hopefully they’re not feeding them gumballs. (www.whs.org)
=A new car and condo in Cambridge, MA. Why wait until after college to settle down? (www.honda.com, www.realtor.com)
=The medicine to make 1,025,641 children safe from malaria. (www.theguardian.co.uk)
=73 full scholarships to in-state students at state universities. This one is a toughie because unlike in the other hypothetical situations where two disparate purchases are compared, such as one million children protected against malaria versus one ivy league education, in this example the trade-off between two types of education begs the question is the ivy league bachelors degree really 73x better than the state one? (www.collegeboard.com)
So if you could do it all over again, would you? What would you spend your 200,000 dollars on? One million children or one Ivy League education?
