A few weeks back, I posted a talk on the collapse of the middle class. In that talk, rising education expenses were identified as a major contributor to the fiscal fragility of the middle class family. In this article from The Chronicle Of Higher Education, Marty Nemko talks about how much of a waste college is for many, despite greatly increased spending. Nemko writes

... most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

HT: EconLog

NYT article: A Different Kind of Homework for Singapore Students: Get a Date

In a successful, benevolent, conformist, paternalistic state, risk avoidance is an optimal strategy for personal success. However, those who succeed may come to apply this strategy much too widely. Having kids is a big investment entailing lots of risk, no matter who you are. It is a risk which managed society in Singapore has not yet formulated an effective insurance policy for.

The decision to enter a marriage and have children is a personal one, the expense and success of which are determined in large part by how your personal conditions for happiness are structured. If you were truly conformist, there would be no problem with settling, but I would guess that that is hard to jibe with the self-image of the young single professional. People underestimate the difficulty of being happy AND unique.

Hoover Institution Policy Review

Peter Thiel writes the coolest apocalypse story that I have read in a while. It draws the opposite conclusion from Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers, but from pretty much the same observations. The observation common to both - globalisation has provided amazing boosts in human wealth, but the resulting complexity has also made holistic understanding impossible, leaving blind optimism as the only motivating factor. That lack of understanding, according to Seabright, lends a certain robustness to the dynamics, whereas Thiel claims that it perches the world on a cusp dividing utopia from apocalypse, an unstable point from which the smallest deviation would bring either eternal paradise or the terminal abyss.

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I imagine the suspicion that international macro finance is an elaborate fraud to be a natural response from those aspiring to take charge, but who reach the bridge and find no controls available. Those with responsibility act regardless of ignorance, and the great power exerted by central banks is often done with little certainty as to the consequences. Steve Waldman on Interfluidity writes

Each central bank, while trying to stabilize its own bit of the world, found itself with little choice but to support and expand unsustainable financial flows on a scale so massive they have reshaped the composition of every major economy on the planet.

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Corporate entities and government agencies are agents too, but more rational and with less risk adversity. That is one thing that doesn't percolate up too well, I guess.

HT: Marginal Revolution