Increasing Productivity

Look, it's whatever it takes to get us going and help us be productive, right?

And if sugary fruit snacks from children's cartoons improve my productivity, no one should judge. Hey -- they do have those box top that contribute to schools. That sort of makes up for all the high-fructose corn syrup, right? Right?

Generation Y and "Entitlement"

Amen Mr. Weinstein.

I have a PhD from one of the finest universities in the country and I've taught more classes than many tenure-track professors have, but after applying for 85 academic jobs in two years, I've come up empty. It's a simply terrifying experience for most of us on the market --we're generally far better qualified than our peers who graduated in the 1960s and 1970s were, but we're being shut out. I'll be writing more on the problems of contingent short-term labor in academia over the coming months, but they're pretty similar to the ones journalists and others of our generation face.

And Weinstein nails my attitude toward people who look at us in the 22-35 crowd with contempt:

This state of affairs does not exist because we're entitled and have simply declined to work as hard as the people that birthed us. American workers have changed from generation to generation: Since 1979, the alleged Dawn of the Millennial, the average U.S. worker has endured a 75 percent increase in productivity...while real wages stayed flat.

Any lecturer with a PhD. patching together a 4-4 course load across three different universities for $19,000 a year gets it.

As I've written, I'm one of the lucky ones -- no student debt, decent health, a soon-to-be spouse with a decent job.  I always wonder if I have the right to complain -- well, here's Weinstein's answer to that question:

So no, we shan't be doing as well as our parents, and no, we shan't be shutting up about it. If anything, those of us who have been cowed into silence because college-educated poor problems aren't real poor problems should shed our fears and start talking about just how hard it really is out there, man.

 So, complain it shall be, though with the awareness that some one is always worse off -- and an emphasis on effective action as well.

As usual, invoking Atrios' sentiment in the titles of his posts sums up the point pithily.

In which I climb into the Monkey Cage

So I write things for other places too. I suppose it makes sense to link to this piece in the Monkey Cage, which highlights some of the work in my dissertation about the relevance of public broadcasting for increasing political knowledge. Despite our best efforts as political scientists, political science actually remains a relevant discipline for making public policy from time to time.

Now if some one would tell Tom Coburn. Actually don't -- the problem is that he understands all too well that political science has found  some uncomfortable truths about how modern democracy works -- or might not work -- in the United States.