I've blogged before about one of the most influential moments in my academic life: reading State Of The World 1988 as a callow seventeen-year-old, in a Contemporary Social Problems class at Lansing Community College. Since that time, there have been new editions each year, but I'm still struck by the biggest lesson I culled from that class and that text: the myriad problems of overpopulation, from the resulting resource depletion and increases in religious fundamentalism to the deleterious effects on personal and collective self-esteem for each of our increasingly crowded and frantic denizens of Earth.
One of those factors that directly impacts self-esteem, of course, is money. While some recent research has actually put a dollar amount on the upper limit of effectiveness of long green on day-to-day and longitudinal happiness, what has always interested me (as a person with a history of lower socioeconomic status, or SES) is the effect of winning a lottery, or coming into a vast sum of cash. Happiness researchers (and yes, there are such things) have data on the affective crashes and social disruptions that often occur when people from low SES suddenly get rich by the caprice of chance, while other researchers (such as the wonderfully named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the seminal Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which is critiqued at a blithe superficial level here) make the case that the procurement of capital is independent of such flights of positive emotion.
And yet. As a nation, we're currently trending towards some pretty ugly disparities between SES categories, as outlined in this post from Mother Jones that has more disquieting infographics than five years of The USA Today put together. At the same time, we have educational trends that draw the gap between the real self and ideal self into stark relief; one such finding, as the recent ace documentary Waiting For "Superman" illustrated, is the gap between the confidence in one's ability in mathematics (#1 globally among industrialized nations) and the actual assessment of one's ability in mathematics (far, far down the list from #1) for our K-12 students. While the number of students increases along with the general population, so too does the distorted belief in the overall awesomeness of each and every student, a reflection of the exceptionalism that makes special snowflakes of us all, despite the harsh heat of an ever-warming planet.
So what are the takeaways? Well, we need to either reduce the global population or increase the available resources (land, fuel, food), both of which being highly problematic and unlikely. Failing that, we need to reduce the income inequities within the United States and between the U.S. and the rest of the world. And failing that, we need to reconfigure K-12 education to better align student expectation of performance with actual performance. If we address those distortions of personal and collective self-esteem, we can create a vibrant, happier, intellectually engaged population of young people that can meaningfully address issues like SES injustices and population issues.
And if we had real politicians who wanted to facilitate the public good instead of what we have -- show business for ugly people who have no greater ambition than to become another suction pod on the tentacles of the Great Vampire Squid that is crushing the money and self-esteem and future out of the vast majority of Americans and, by extension, the citizens of the Earth -- this blog post would actually impact policy and products instead of doing what it's going to do: be lost in the overpopulated blogosphere, a final cruel irony in a discussion of the pernicious effects of too many damn humans.
So maybe, just put a brief smile on my face, I should go get a lottery ticket.
One of those factors that directly impacts self-esteem, of course, is money. While some recent research has actually put a dollar amount on the upper limit of effectiveness of long green on day-to-day and longitudinal happiness, what has always interested me (as a person with a history of lower socioeconomic status, or SES) is the effect of winning a lottery, or coming into a vast sum of cash. Happiness researchers (and yes, there are such things) have data on the affective crashes and social disruptions that often occur when people from low SES suddenly get rich by the caprice of chance, while other researchers (such as the wonderfully named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the seminal Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which is critiqued at a blithe superficial level here) make the case that the procurement of capital is independent of such flights of positive emotion.
And yet. As a nation, we're currently trending towards some pretty ugly disparities between SES categories, as outlined in this post from Mother Jones that has more disquieting infographics than five years of The USA Today put together. At the same time, we have educational trends that draw the gap between the real self and ideal self into stark relief; one such finding, as the recent ace documentary Waiting For "Superman" illustrated, is the gap between the confidence in one's ability in mathematics (#1 globally among industrialized nations) and the actual assessment of one's ability in mathematics (far, far down the list from #1) for our K-12 students. While the number of students increases along with the general population, so too does the distorted belief in the overall awesomeness of each and every student, a reflection of the exceptionalism that makes special snowflakes of us all, despite the harsh heat of an ever-warming planet.
So what are the takeaways? Well, we need to either reduce the global population or increase the available resources (land, fuel, food), both of which being highly problematic and unlikely. Failing that, we need to reduce the income inequities within the United States and between the U.S. and the rest of the world. And failing that, we need to reconfigure K-12 education to better align student expectation of performance with actual performance. If we address those distortions of personal and collective self-esteem, we can create a vibrant, happier, intellectually engaged population of young people that can meaningfully address issues like SES injustices and population issues.
And if we had real politicians who wanted to facilitate the public good instead of what we have -- show business for ugly people who have no greater ambition than to become another suction pod on the tentacles of the Great Vampire Squid that is crushing the money and self-esteem and future out of the vast majority of Americans and, by extension, the citizens of the Earth -- this blog post would actually impact policy and products instead of doing what it's going to do: be lost in the overpopulated blogosphere, a final cruel irony in a discussion of the pernicious effects of too many damn humans.
So maybe, just put a brief smile on my face, I should go get a lottery ticket.
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