In collecting $400,000 from a Wall Street investment firm to make a single speech, Barack Obama is following in the Gucci-clad footsteps of past presidents. Ronald Reagan landed a $2 million speaking gig in Japan. George W. Bush, on his way out, announced it was time to “replenish the ol’ coffers.” Bill and Hillary Clinton reported making more than $235 million after leaving the White House.
But to acknowledge that Obama has plenty of precedent on his side is not to say that his choice is wise. Indeed, it’s unfortunate.
.. It comes after a campaign in which Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speaking fees became a symbol of entitled elitism. So imagine the powerful message Obama would have sent — the reverse precedent — had he chosen to renounce this road to riches.
.. Or, imagine this, had he chosen to speak publicly, at as many places and on as many topics as he liked. Just not behind closed doors, for an amount equivalent to his White House salary — and seven times what the typical household makes in a year.
.. But is this rapaciousness really the image he wants to cultivate — for himself or for fellow Democrats? Having left his party in such terrible condition, does he really have to offer opponents ammunition to attack him as hypocritical?
.. Hogwash. This isn’t about holding the black guy to a higher standard — it’s about trying to hold everyone to a higher standard. Times have changed, and what was once placidly accepted as post-presidential business-as-usual may no longer be.
.. A wise man once said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.
The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think
We crunched the data on where journalists work and how fast it’s changing. The results should worry you.
To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity.
.. No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.
.. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote
.. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years?
.. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme
.. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.
.. The newspaper industry has jettisoned hundreds of thousands of jobs, due to falling advertising revenues.
.. In late 2015, during Barack Obama’s second term, these two trend lines—jobs in newspapers, and jobs in internet publishing—finally crossed. For the first time, the number of workers in internet publishing exceeded the number of their newspaper brethren.
.. Where newspaper jobs are spread nationwide, internet jobs are not: Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix.
.. almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton.
.. specialized industries like to cluster. Car companies didn’t arise in remote regions that needed cars—they arose in Detroit, which already had heavy industry, was near natural resources, boasted a skilled workforce and was home to a network of suppliers that could help car companies thrive.
.. Seattle’s rise as a tech powerhouse was seeded by Microsoft, which moved to the area in 1979 and helped create the ecosystem that gave rise to companies like Amazon.
.. Economists call these “non-tradable goods”—goods that must be consumed in the same community in which they’re made.
.. Newspaper jobs are far more evenly scattered across the country, including the deep red parts. But as those vanish, it’s internet jobs that are driving whatever growth there is in media—and those fall almost entirely in places that are dense, blue and right in the bubble.
.. The people who report, edit, produce and publish news can’t help being affected—deeply affected—by the environment around them.
.. The Times thinks of itself as a centrist national newspaper, but it’s more accurate to say its politics are perfectly centered on the slices of America that look and think the most like Manhattan.
.. Their reporters, an admirable lot, can parachute into Appalachia or the rural Midwest on a monthly basis and still not shake their provincial sensibilities
.. the media bubble reflects an established truth about America: The places with money get served better than the places without. People in big media cities aren’t just more liberal, they’re also richer
.. his trash talk was always directed at the national press, not the local.
.. It’s worth mentioning that Fox and Breitbart—and indeed most of the big conservative media players—also happen to be located in the same bubble. Like the “MSM” they rail against, they’re a product of New York, Washington and Los Angeles. It’s an argument against the bubble, being waged almost entirely by people who work inside it.
.. It’s hard to imagine an industry willingly accommodating the places with less money, fewer people and less expertise, especially if they sense that niche has already been filled to capacity by Fox.
.. Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them. If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won’t change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.
Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever
Liberal-arts majors often trail their peers in terms of salary early on, but the divide tends to narrow or even disappear as careers progress
It’s no secret that liberal-arts graduates tend to fare worse than many of their counterparts immediately after college: According to PayScale Inc., a Seattle-based provider of salary data, the typical English or sociology graduate with zero to five years of experience earns an average of just $39,000 a year.
.. The story tends to change, however, as careers play out. Over time, liberal-arts majors often pursue graduate degrees and gravitate into high-paying fields such as general management, politics, law and sales
.. Using Census Bureau data, the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project analyzed lifetime earnings for each discipline’s top 10% of moneymakers. It found that computer science’s stars rang up lifetime earnings of at least $3.2 million. Nice work, but not as impressive as philosophy majors’ $3.46 million or history majors’ $3.75 million.
.. “College shouldn’t prepare you for your first job, but for the rest of your life,” says John Kroger, president of Reed College in Oregon, the liberal-arts school that famously served as a starting point for Steve Jobs. Although Mr. Jobs dropped out of Reed in the early 1970s, the Apple Inc. founder often credited the school with stretching his horizons in areas such as calligraphy, which later influenced Apple’s design ethos.
.. In the short-term, employers still say they prefer college graduates with career-tailored majors.
.. A recent survey of 180 companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that at least 68% want to hire candidates who majored in business or engineering. By contrast, only 24% explicitly want communications majors, 21% want social-sciences majors and 10% humanities majors.
When asked to define the résumé traits that matter most, however, the NACE-surveyed employers rated technical skills 10th. Four of the top five traits were hallmarks of a traditional liberal-arts education: teamwork, clear writing, problem-solving aptitude and strong oral communications.
.. “It’s easier to hire people who can write—and teach them how to read financial statements—rather than hire accountants in hopes of teaching them to be strong writers,”
.. PayScale’s data shows that for people with 10 to 20 years of experience, degrees in communications, political science, history and philosophy yield average annual income of $70,000 or more. By contrast, degrees in French, anthropology, creative writing and film fit into a band of $60,000 to $69,000. Fields such as theology, photography and music bring up the rear; they pay less than $60,000 on average.
The ‘H-Bomb’ Fizzles: The Harvard Brand Takes a Hit
There exists a species of person — typically a well-groomed overachiever — who, when asked where he or she went to college, rather than state its name directly, will provide a Russian nesting doll set of geographical responses.
In New England. Massachusetts. Well, Boston. Um … Cambridge.
Finally, sotto voce, with an apologetic wince or sheepish smile, anticipating the word’s being volleyed back in an affected
.. that formerly contrived embarrassment may be ceding to sincere shame and a reassessment of the merits of a Harvard education.
.. Harvard had the sixth-most-reported rape cases on campus in 2014, and its law school figured prominently in the controversial documentary about campus sexual assault
.. Daniel Golden’s 2006 book, “The Price of Admission,” about how the rich buy their way into elite schools, has become newly relevant for its disclosure that Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, received acceptance to Harvard despite an unremarkable academic record, possibly thanks to his father’s donation of $2.5 million.
.. A spokeswoman for Mr. Kushner denied the allegation, noting that Mr. Kushner graduated with honors; Mr. Golden observed that, in a climate of rampant grade inflation, so did about 90 percent of Mr. Kushner’s graduating class of 2003.
.. The acquisitive-rather-than-inquisitive Harvard grad is not a baseless stereotype: Nearly two-fifths of the class of 2016 said they were going into finance or consulting
.. By comparison, just 6 percent went into nonprofit or public service work, and 4 percent into education.
.. In fairness to Harvard, it asks no contribution from families making less than $65,000 per year and provides sliding-scale tuition for those earning more. The New York Times 2015 College Access Index, measuring schools’ efforts to promote economic diversity, ranked it 11th over all and fourth among private colleges, far ahead of places better known for their diversity, such as Oberlin (ranked 132nd).
However, its ratio of federal Pell Grant recipients (for low-income students) to endowment per student is much less impressive.
.. over a third of the student body comes from families earning more than $250,000 a year (the wealthiest 4 percent of households), with more students from the $500,000-and-up 1 percenters than $40,000-and-below families.
.. A 2005 book, “Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education,” determined that, all else being equal, top schools do not offer any admission advantage to low-income students, despite lip service to the contrary.
.. Some parents, though, including alumni, are rebelling against the Harvard-or-bust mentality, not only because of the stresses it places on their overworked children, but from misgivings about the conformist and careerist atmosphere of the Ivy Leagues.
.. “I would like my kids to find their passion, take risks and be curious, engaged, educated people,”
.. “Elite schools discourage kids from being that; they want them to build résumés, to build careers, to be cautious. The kinds of people who go to Harvard tend to be people who succeed by traditional metrics, and that continues after Harvard. I’d like my kids not to be so beholden to those metrics.”
.. “only privileged people” like himself “can afford not to be concerned” about the attainment of privilege.
.. he encounters more students who question whether going to a prestigious school “is something that’s really going to make me happy and lead to a fulfilling life.”
“But there’s a feeling like you don’t have a choice” in an increasingly aristocratic society in which one’s college is a primary determinant of status, he added.
.. what privilege says about each of our characters — makes us uncomfortable. Our privilege forces us to question our worthiness and our merit, two of the things most highly valued at an institution like this one.”