"The Moral Stage of Wall Street"

George Packer wants Wall Street executives to grow up and apologize for their behavior:

The Moral Stage of Wall Street, by George Packer: Swiss bankers are not known as paragons of transparency and moral accountability, so it’s a nice surprise to read that the top officials of UBS, the foundering financial institution recently bailed out by the Swiss government, will forgo twenty-seven million dollars in compensation and bonuses. It appears that these Swiss bankers have a faint pulse of shame.

It has not gone remarked upon enough that their American counterparts apparently have none. Having brought the American and global economy to its knees through their reckless, short-sighted, downright stupid investments, and then looked to the government for a very expensive lifeline, the leaders of Citigroup, A.I.G., Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman, and other financial giants are maintaining a carefully nonchalant public posture. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, had to hold a threatening press conference on Wall Street in order to frighten A.I.G. into announcing that raises, bonuses, and lavish retreats will be suspended. But fear is not the same thing as shame. Morally speaking, it’s inferior.

The moral code of these Wall Street executives corresponds to stage one of Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous stages of morality: “The concern is with what authorities permit and punish.” Morally, they are very young children. The Swiss bankers are closer to stage four, most common among late teens, where a concern for maintaining the good functioning of society takes hold. Stage six, an elaboration of universal moral principles based on an idea of the good society, is a distant dream for the titans of global finance.

In private life, extreme indebtedness, bankruptcy, the ruin of those close to you, and dependence on the government dole are generally thought to be causes for anguish, self-denial, and a degree of shame. But if you’re a financial executive with an exalted title, a big enough salary, a deep enough debt, and a vast enough handout, these same disasters entitle you to go on living and feeling about yourself much as you did before. You even have a right to think that the taxpayers owe it to you—that it’s for their own good, not yours. You don’t have to explain yourself; you certainly don’t have to apologize.

I would like to see these malefactors of great wealth apologize to the country. I would like to see them organize their own press conference in a lineup on Wall Street and, in the manner of disgraced Japanese officials, bow low to the pavement, express contrition, and beg their countrymen’s forgiveness. Such a scene would go some way toward cleansing the smell of the financial crisis.

Of course, nothing like this is going to happen. So instead, like the parents of two-year-olds, the next Congress should summon them to Washington and publicly punish these executives who, in Kohlberg’s terms, “see morality as something external to themselves, as that which the big people say they must do.”

Update: Arnold Kling comments:

I tend to agree with Tyler Cowen that individual moral propensities are less important than overall social context. To borrow from a different branch of social psychology, I would say that Packer is committing the Fundamental Attribution Error.

In my view, the problem comes from trying to use what I call letter-of-the-law regulation in finance. Call it L regulation. With L regulation, the regulator lays down specific, quantitative boundaries (think of risk-based capital requirements, with fixed numerical weights for various types of assets). The managers of financial institutions are told to stay within those boundaries.

In contrast, think of something I might call S regulation, for spirit of the law. With S regulation, the manager of a financial institution that enjoys some government protection would take an oath to maintain the safety and soundness of the institution. With S regulation, it is wrong to just tiptoe along the edge of the quantitative boundaries, without considering the potential risk to the firm.

Suppose we take it as given that government is going to protect some of the liabilities of some institutions, because of deposit insurance, implicit guarantees, "too big to fail," or other reasons. I would like to see such institutions be covered by S regulation even more than by L regulation.

I would like to see managers of government-protected institutions take an oath to safeguard the soundness of their companies. I would like to see them subjected to prison terms for violating that oath. The oath is a general promise, not satisfied simply by staying within the boundaries of L regulation.

I believe that S regulation would change the motives of bank managers. They would be looking for ways to avoid failure, rather than for ways to stay within the letter of the law.

There can be plenty of risk-taking institutions in our society. But they should not at the same time be institutions that enjoy government protection when they fail.

Comments

[calmo]

Well, I don't know writer/author George Parker (note to rdf), but I like his views here (The New Yorker):
“The concern is with what authorities permit and punish.” Morally, they [Wall St CEOs] are very young children. I do believe he's right about something going haywire early in child rearing to make a hash of "fine moral upstanding character", that moral behavior is reduced to obeying rules and not born out of genuine respect for others. The much touted American work load (24/7 just kills me...but I do know people working 60hr/wk) gets you congratulations you're wealthy sociopathic parents who raise (or don't really) amoral or immoral children (my ear doesn't like the sound of "(a(im))moral" being attached to anything but actions, you?)...unlike Japan?
I would like to see them organize their own press conference in a lineup on Wall Street and, in the manner of disgraced Japanese officials, bow low to the pavement, express contrition, and beg their countrymen’s forgiveness.This blog has been here before and I am very partial/susceptible to Japanese people/culture and believe that this is the model...but for no good reasons, not having 1st hand experience. Nonetheless, the note that Parker strikes, the social enforcement through honor/disgrace of your society and not merely your peer group may be the difference.
So the band wagon (not just GOP) for family values has this extension: energy/cognizance/responses are diverted from the larger community to a smaller unit: the family, the relatively more sociopathic family. Inheritance used to be more widely disseminated and now generally issues to surviving children, yes?

[ken melvin]

Endemic this group of CEOs, etc.(and libertarians in genral) is the believe that it whatever you can get by with. Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Addington, Ralpie, DeLay, et al, be fellow travelers.

[TigerPaw]

It's also an illustration of the attitude of "it's only bad if you get caught". You find this sort of thing at all levels of North American society, i.e. sorry as can be they were caught, not that they did it.

[ken melvin]

Many think, myself included, that the phenomenon's more prevalent since the election of St. Ronnie. If 'tis so, what happened around this time to cause the change? What role Rand? CATO?

[Markel]

Had a conversation with a hedge fund manager last year about CEO compensation. We agreed on what was happening.

The CEOs of his acquaintance and mine were not the best managers, the boldest leaders, the most visionary thinkers, or the best money makers for their shareholders. They were simply the people who elbowed their way to the front of the line. All of them had started their career rises by stealing credit, throwing colleagues under the bus for their own mistakes, shamelessly self-promoting, networking instead of working, jockeying instead of managing. All the behaviors that now make American corporations intolerable for the truly competent and talented.

So it is hardly any surprise that the people at the top have no morals. Having no morals is how they got there.

[Alan]

I think the attitude Packer describes extends well beyond the CEOs in the financial industry. My impression is that there is a widespread attitude that upper-level employees are expected to seek to maximize their own interests exclusively, and that it is up to the enterprise to draft an employment contract which will channel that self-interest so that it coincides with the interests of the enterprise. The enterprises themselves, and their boards of directors, seem to share this view. The idea that executives have fiduciary responsibilities that go beyond what the law requires is absent even from a startling proportion of business ethics classes.

[howard]

this is rich: george packer, supporter and apologist for the war in iraq, is going to tell us about morality.

i think that george packer should demonstrate his concern for morality by retiring from punditry and doing some good somewhere. what an ass.

[Jrossi]

I'm listening to Robert Shiller's online financial markets course (Google Yale Econ 252 to find it). There were guest lectures from Carl Icahn and Steven Schwarzman, two titans of finance. Listening to these guys, it was clear to me that they are selfishness personified, pure greed, very little room in them for the gentler emotions. I suspect many other Wall Streeters are similar.

[bullbust]

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/20081114TDY08309.htm

Toyota Motor may cut directors' pay in FY09

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Toyota Motor Corp. will consider cutting the pay of its directors in fiscal 2009, it was learned Wednesday....
The company is expected to pay 3.92 billion yen in total to the executives as salaries and bonuses in fiscal 2008, up 17 percent from the previous year. (US $41 million)
(Nov. 14, 2008)
________________________________________

Even before this auto sales meltdown, the Japanese automaker’s top ten execs earned less money COMBINED than Ford’s Alan Mulally, Chrysler’s Bob Nardelli and GM’s Rick Wagoner (individually).

[Pri]

"Having brought the American and global economy to its knees through their reckless, short-sighted, downright stupid investments, and then looked to the government for a very expensive lifeline..."

Private banking with public guarantees has proven to be a disaster. Its time to end the experiment. Absent the guarantees, most of the banking sector would close up shop. It is completely worthless. We might as well just put all of the institutions that would be insolvent absent a public guarantee under public control. Stick to bread and butter lending, with no ridiculous forays into ventures that initiators don't understand.

I'm weary of a declining general public standard of living so that a few fat cats can get paid millions to wreak havoc.

[RW]

William F. Buckley once wrote: "Every ten years I quote the same adage from the late Austrian analyst Willi Schlamm, and I hope that ten years from now someone will remember to quote it in my memory. It goes, 'The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.' ..."

On its face this is exceptionalist and incoherent -- systems one doesn't like possess intrinsic problems whereas systems one does like merely produce poison fruit -- but it does limn one of Packer's implicit points (I wouldn't expect him to be explicit): If the system can indeed be poisoned and possesses no inherent mechanism to prevent it then strong external refereeing is required, not just to prevent the amoral from destroying the system but to provide an environment in which the moral can freely get their work done; i.e., the amoral have a productivity cost that requires amelioration.

That aside an apology from a narcissist or sociopath would have no meaning to the one apologizing by definition and not much more meaning to those actually harmed after the fact so Packer's explicit point appears senseless; a little PR and ego boost for the congress-critters involved perhaps but not much more.

[Julio]

I think all this misses the point big time.

Capitalism is a machine. A very productive machine, in part because morality doesn't enter into it.

It's the flip side of being a system of laws: what the law does not forbid, becomes acceptable.

The machine might be tethered by morality when it operates on a small scale: you deal differently with your customers if they're your neighbors. But on a large scale, by definition anything goes if it's legal.

The czars of industry are right when they claim they have nothing to apologize for. That is precisely the issue -- how do we, as a society, supervise and control them.

To carry the metaphor beyond its usefulness: they're at the moral level of two-year-olds, with the ability to act of young adults. We've had a philosophy that says parents are the problem, not the solution. Until we thoroughly abandon that ideea, we will not change the system

[paine]

george packer
a malefactor of great pomp and small consequence

i suppose one my wonder at the sort(s)
of mental system that rises inside
one of our great corporate organizations
these days if not all the way
to the ececutive suite's top desk
at least to one of its ajoining offices
vs say
the sort(s) that build a corporate organization
from scratch

jack walsh vs meister gates

or earlier similars

jack walsh vs slick watson say

but shame moments seem an odd fantasy

our notions run more to milton's satan
defiant to the end
angry proud willfully self righteous to the end etc etc

politics is more the venue
for the shameless among us
joe liebermuppet par example
or the shah of shamelessness
bill jefferson clinton

[paine]

"Capitalism is a machine. A very productive machine, in part because morality doesn't enter into it."

provocative choices of words there j

the mundane re write

the management teams
running our biggest for profit corporations
are by size and structure supra personal organizations

compartmentalized segmented partitioned
into n processes with m sub routines
co ordinated as much by habit's momentum
like a system of specialized automated machines
except unlike a mechanical system
there exists not just malfunction
but insubordination and uncertain self correction

producing a problematic but essential output
positive earnings
-- aka captured surplus value---

the code of behaviour
the company ethos
attempts to align unit interests
with organizational mission
ie bottom line paths that max
the present value
of the earnings stream

prolly this mission no matter how baldly profiteering it ultimately is
can hook up folks operating
on any one of the stages ...except number 6

one thinks of starbuck number two guy on
the revenge voyage of the pequod
at ahab's shoulder the whole way
a good quaker
a stage 5 guy ....and yet....

[calmo]

Ok howard ("this is rich: george packer, supporter and apologist for the war in iraq, is going to tell us about morality.") I did not google this author (you and rdf are reforming my somewhat sloppy ways), but I, too, expect some consistency.
Still, the day he wrote this piece, his one non-ass day, (ok, maybe not the entire day even), is maybe the start of his climb out of the hole?
Do we fall into the trap of following his example maybe by condemning him on his past history/reputation...or give him a chance by listening to this piece.
I absolutely don't do this with every writer...there are so many good writers and I can only read so much.

Greetings Pri (izat sounded "pree" or "pry"?), I liked this language:I'm weary of a declining general public standard of living so that a few fat cats can get paid millions to wreak havoc. That standard referring generally to material possessions but I wonder if it also refers (or should refer to) less tangible things that "quality of life" might capture. Not clean air, water, parks, etc so much as ...being stuck behind this monitor right now instead of a cup of coffee at some little cafe chattinitup with you...as calmo disses the entire value of the internet.

[paine]

"give him a chance ......there are so many good writers and I can only read so much "

so toss packer over board

or at least 97 out of hundred packers

the forgive em big tent
is full of cheek turners cal
you need not do more then wish
mr p well
in his new skin
and without a moment lost return your eyes
to your fellow scribblin' saints

leave the redemption of sinners
like packer
to lady clio's
tribe of deep future historiographers

[calmo]

paine pokes me for bein/becomin/aidinanabettin a cheek-turner
somewhat missing somewhat glancingso toss packer over board

or at least 97 out of hundred packers

the forgive em big tent
is full of cheek turners cal
I can (do...in fact, like to)
listen to JWs (fuggetabout the rest)
Real canvass in those tents
Real leather on their worn-out shoes
But there is nobody mo atheist than me
And yet they and their mendin ways
Put up with me, somewhat amused
By itall, this challenge from God:
Pipsqueak and upstart Reason vs
Mighty Faith
We laugh alot
which means we're winning
Fellow cheek-turners.
Spread the word
and some do --shrinking
Armageddon, yes?

Have to sign onto this one
politics is more the venue
for the shameless among us
joe liebermuppet par example
Another baseball I wish I could get
a paine autograph on, you?
I'm prayin Obama is the exception
You hear me, you cheek-turners?
46% may not B with us
And the real and rough road is
Gettin them to help
Not hinder.
That is the steep part.

I need to believe that we can (note to anne)
And that it happens here with pretty ordinary people
Not extraordinary leaders so much.

[outsider]

Ah...an observation,

one dog in ten becomes an attack (killer) dog though you train all ten. The Mayans had a system where ten households reported to one overseer, ten of which reported to one above, and so on to the supreme leader. Mongol calvary fought in cadres of ten as did Roman Legionnaires.

there are ten men in a modern army squad. Add a mortar man and heavy machine gunner and feeder, you break the squad into two fire teams. A recent article on management gave the famous one in ten ratio for leader to underlings.

My point? One in ten of us are leaders (attack dogs). I've seen peers promoted for obeying their supervisor, faking reports, putting others in impossible situations (if they fail it's their fault) in order to make said supervisor "look good". Their sole job. Also the time honored practice of sexual favors. Competence scares many leaders. It shows enough pride to buck them and not forward their agenda which is to continue to accrue power. Kiss a larger ass, and more kiss yours in reward.

Morality? That's an added leash for the dumb underlings. Doesn't apply to Wall Street.

[Steven Earl Salmony]

Concerning moral bankruptcy on Wall Street..........

GUEST COLUMN by Steven Earl Salmony

November 26, 2008

Chapel Hill(NC)News

http://www.chapelhillnews.com...

Billions end up paying for excesses of the wealthy on Wall St.

Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the "wonder boys" on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.

Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of the human community's banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the "brightest and best" among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.

How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.

Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.

Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously "manufactured" a subprime "asset bubble" and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The subprime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.

Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling (i.e., deleveraging) of the worldwide subprime swindle are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that 30 percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The "bankstas" among us evidently think so.

In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a "trickle-down" economy. We have been repeatedly told how this 'rational' economic scheme is good because it "raises all ships." And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The 'ships' carrying these billions of less fortunate people (i.e., more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth) do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.

Steven Earl Salmony

AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,

established 2001

http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/content.html?contentid=1176

[roger]

I'd agree that those with a stunted moral imagination are generally not the best managers of the economy. In one of the NYT's innumerable puff pieces on Larry Summers (the fluffing has gotten so bad that children under the age of 18 are now advised not to read any David Leonardt piece on Summers), published in 2003, when the fluffing was about what a great Harvard President our Sumers was, Traub, the fluffer, wrote this:

"Larry Summers is not just an economist but, as one of his critics put it, an economist economist. His friend Andrei Shleifer, also an economist, put it more diplomatically: ''It's fair to say that he's into facts.'' Almost all of Summers's friends are economists or policy types (though he is currently dating a Harvard English professor, Elisa New); he does not read serious fiction; he shows few signs of aesthetic sensitivity; he is a slovenly dresser and not a terribly tidy eater."

One immediately spots the non-reading of serious fiction. I would bet we are talking about a vast ignorance of literature tout court, from drama to poetry to novels.

Now, such ignorance (while it should heavily against the giving Summers the post of President of Harvard) doesn't necessarily make for a bad economist, but certainly a narrow one. Literature is the school that lifts the economist out of the prison of rational choice, making her understand that the economy serves the social, and the rich social imagination, rather than the social serving the economy. Alas, those economists who think the latter, blind to art, blind to any value, in fact, that can't be put into a calculus in which more of it is better, which includes almost all values that make life worth living, grind out a picture of society that is a sort of spiritually empty hell of self-advantaging automatons. Of course, this hell will collapse under its own impetus, but even if it didn't, it would still be hell, an anti-human place that only a Hummer owner could love.

Without an imagination that reaches beyond economics, the economist is a highly learned dolt.

[roger]

ps - should be "which excludes almost all values that make life worth living...

[howard]

calmo, you raise a helluva good question that i think about a lot: broadly speaking i agree that all of us get things wrong sometimes, and some of the things we get wrong are somebody else's pet issue, and none of us would like to be ruled of somebody else's world on account of getting this one particular thing (whatever it may be) wrong.

but iraq is a special case, in my estimation, and if we don't shame the people who helped us into the war, we are never going to be able to shame anyone.

so i don't deny that packer is onto something here, but in the scheme of things, i think his license to punditry should be revoked.

but yes, throwing out the baby with the bath water is a mistake, and i may be somewhat making it.

[calmo]

O howard you are too kind...I express my ignorance of the author beforehand knowing that rdf might be reading, waiting for me to salute rather than clobber...the piece seems fine (not brilliant, but confirming my outlook generally) so I salute...and, unlike baseball where you can check your swing and hope the umpire agrees that you didn't swing, Stttriiiike!
This is not a case of Truth issuing from any lips is still the truth.
No, this is opinion/orientation/attitude and although this piece seems to strike most of the right notes, I would (just not at the moment...when I regain my composure) review the other pieces by the author to establish a broader, deeper (more personal) context, which my friends here warn me is not going to be pleasant. I feel that rdf is training me by remote control, you know?

[save_the_rustbelt]

During the 60s the boomer generation split in half, with one half deciding that morality was old-fashioned and repressive and a hindrance to the freedom to "do my own thing."

(It appears to me that the anti-morality groups settled on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum)

It does not surprise me that many of the wild children I knew in the 60s and 70s eventually settled in finance, hippies turned investment bankers. The last frontier perhaps?

[Julio]

paine,

"prolly this mission no matter how baldly profiteering it ultimately is
can hook up folks operating
on any one of the stages ...except number 6 "

Let's say UBS had apologized, and agreed to make restitutiom to all the people it had harmed.

You'd see even the High Brahmins running, not walking, to sell their UBS stock.

While still carefully checking the ground so as not to step on any sentient beings, of course.

A machine. Morality is not part of it. It is an external concept, superimposed on it; a separate discussion.

[reason]

STR
As by many counts a boomer I find that categorisation too simple by half. There was a moral revolution in the 60s, but that does not imply that the result was a large a-moral population. Certainly the Vietnam war was a big influence. As a part of generation of young Australians who faced the prospect of, on the basis of a lottery (and the absence of connections Bobby Fulton and Doug Walters - look them up - for instance were spared), of being blown up in a war which not only had nothing to do with us, but on which we had no vote, we became highly politicised. We also became sexually active at the same time as the pill became pervasive. In a largely urban and secular country (as Australia was and is) the result was a vast change in relationships between men and women, rewriting rules that had ruled the society for many generations, in a single generation. A new morality was born, but it definitely didn't feel like an absense of morality. We cared intensely about what was right and wrong, but our values were completely different.

I think things are much more subtle than you want to believe they are.

[reason]

STR
Generally I'm not much in any attempt to delinearate by people by broad categories such as generation, nationality, race or gender. Yes, there are tendencies to be seen, but they tell us very little about individuals. Groupism is mostly just intellectual laziness.

[reason]

I'm inclined to think Merkel had to say has a lot of truth in it, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as Chris Dillon does to say that the problem is entirely down to heirachy as such. I think that ideological justifications of a limited morality (that trace clearly back to the Chicago School - Milton Friedman "the business of business is business") are at least partly to blame. I would prefer the more complex view of moral systems and interrelationships examined in Jane Jacobs "Systems of Survival" was more widely understood.

All that said, re-examining the health of our systems of (as David Brin calls it) "reciprocal accountability" is called for.

[Blissex]

My usual quote on USA culture, as described by Newt Gingrich:

http://classwebs.SPEA.Indiana.edu/bakerr/v600/a_new_look_at_environmental_poli.htm
«If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that's telling us something. We have laws that matter-murder, rape, and we have laws that don't matter. [ ... ] The first thing that every good American says each morning is "What's the angle?" "How can I get around it?" "What does my lawyer think?" "There must be a loophole!" Then he proceeds to work the angle, and the bureaucracy spends its time chasing that and writing new regs to stop him. America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.»

[Steven Earl Salmony]

A culture that defines its very raison d'etre by endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources, demonstrably declares to all the world that greed is good.

Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?

Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs...... all signatures of success in a culture borne of the 'goodness' of greed?

Consider for a moment what greed has wrought.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

[Real Person from the Real World]

I work for a foreign-born business man. Tech staffing is a commodity business. Some companies now use VMS portals to handle submissions, and when your company is a continual loser, with little explanation, the feeling is the system is "biased" against you, and to look for ways to bypass the system by going under the table.

State and local gov't put in place laws to promote "minority" businesses, and suddenly wives are the head of the business where the husband runs things.

Marketing and sales and advertising are all pervasive, and technology is allowing companies to track what we buy, how we buy, how much we pay, where we bought it, how much we bought, what ad we looked at when we decided what to buy, who our pals are, etc....

When times get tough, compassion becomes limited to one's nearest and dearest. Who cares about the body lying on the street, as long as you and yours are safe indoors. AND, why should you pay for someone else's health, when you are struggling to cover your own family OR perhaps are healthy and young enough NOT to need it yourself?

Education, Inc. promotes what pays. Finance and business classes, technology classes - barely time to take them all, why waste it on philosophy or ethics? And besides, career classes and training are more lucrative than the Classics or Humanities. And there is the bright idea... why not charge $100+ for a one or two use text book that will be updated each semester?

This country is racing toward a two tier system, of uber-wealthy who own everything in sight, and get the best life has to offer, and everyone else, left struggling and at the cold heartless mercy of technology and poverty.