High Def meets Low Set

This is the weekend where the TV broadcast channels are cutting over to high def. Maureen Dowd, who has an excellent biting style, wrote an entertaining Op-Ed in the NYT- Pixilated Over Pixels, wherein she talks about high-def eye glasses, high def make-up and other entertaining high-def inventions.

In the same NYT, however, Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her piece titled "Too Poor to Make the News" that "The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing. Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due."

It's partly a question of priorities. Someone carrying an iPhone and complaining about not finding a job does not evoke much compassion. For decades, really smart, hardworking young people in the so called "developing" or "underdeveloped" countries have had to struggle mightily to make ends meet, while the laziest of the people in the developed world had better standard of living. My father was a good example of one who had a Master's degree, worked extraordinarily hard, sacrificed a lot, and did not accumulate much assets when he died. He led a hard life while plenty of others with less effort made a lot more money and enjoyed more luxuries. No one called it an ethical problem then. As this writer has mentioned before, the current problem is not due to a credit crisis, but due to an ethics crisis. There is something lacking in the "liberal education" model that is prevalent at Harvard and at many other schools including my own- an opportunity for the students discuss ethics, equality, and social justice deeply.