Generation Bubble

Appetite for Obstruction: Fattening Resistance to the Mortgage Crisis

Good ole American-style overeating might just prove the most effective mode of home-foreclosure resistance; because it’s one thing to throw someone out of his house, but to have to cut him out is another thing entirely.

Holiday Hiatus

Today begins Generation Bubble’s holiday hiatus. We’d like to thank our readers for helping GenBub grow by leaps and bounds in the months since its inception.

Look for posts to resume after shortly after January 1, when we’ll return refreshed and ready for what promises to be a tumultuous 2010.

Until such time, we invite newer readers to peruse our back pages. They offer, we think, a unique chronicle of the events of the past nine months or so.

And we encourage you to consider following Generation Bubble’s link feed on Twitter (account name “GenBub_tweed“) and joining us on Facebook (group name “Generation Bubble“).

Little Big Home: Dr. Free's Unique Housing-Crisis Solution

You’ll count heap big coup with your tent-city neighbors when they see you packin’ pelts and poles instead of tarps and old hoardings. Whatever the campsite equivalent of curb appeal is, you’ll have it with your very own teepee.

Detroit Nosh City: Glemie Beasley and the Future of Food

The one-two punch of de-industrialization and real-estate devaluation, though it dealt grievous injuries to the city’s two-footed denizens, has, strangely enough, set Detroit on a path toward becoming a veritable bushmeat Eden.

Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress

It’s no secret that Generation Bubble’s political slant tilts to the left. Which is as it should be, I believe most days. But like any idealist, I suffer the occasional dark night of the soul. At such times I’m reminded of some words of Samuel Johnson’s. “None of the cruelties exercised by wealth and power upon indigence and dependence is more mischievous in its consequences, or more frequently practised with wanton negligence,” Johnson wrote, “than the encouragement of expectations which are never to be gratified, and the elation and depression of the heart by needless vicissitudes of hope and disappointment.” It is in the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s maxim that I present the following three theses.

Nonprofit Squeeze: Tax-Exempt Institutions Feel the Recession's Pinch

One would suppose these institutions held nothing but reliable, blue-chip stock on their portfolios, stock that, while certainly not generating spectacular returns, at least produced reliable ones. No, these nonprofits were after sexier stuff — all gamine gyrations of puts, calls, strikes and options. And I begin to speculate myself. I wonder if these nonprofits weren’t up to something altogether venal, exploiting their tax exempt status as a way of increasing their profit margin.

Impractical Necessity: Selling Millennials on the Humanities

The latter particularly — knowledge work — would seem to throw a spanner in the distinction Nussbaum wishes to draw between pursuing knowledge for a job and pursuing it for more edifying, spiritual reasons. In an era like ours, in which work and play become increasing entangled (and not necessarily for commendable reasons), it’s hard to see how knowledge pursued for a career’s sake isn’t also knowledge pursued for one’s own good. Americans are famously beholden to the idea of self-actualization through work. That’s why they work harder, work longer and take less time off than their counterparts in other advanced nations. This mentality, though it might to some extent be rooted in Americans’ national character, hasn’t exactly been discouraged — and, indeed, had even been helped along — by corporations. So naturally thought about the whole of one’s life will at the same time be thought about one’s career; the two are in many cases indistinguishable, because, according to the master narratives of primetime one-hour dramas, advertising, and corporate in-services, reaching career benchmarks and reaping the fruits thereof, they tell us, are expressive of a life, in a very real yet vulgarized Nietzschean sense.

Creative Class Consciousness: The Stimulus­­­­—Hipster Daisy Chain

Maybe the answer lies in a vibrant, robust ancillary economy devoted to aesthetic and cultural development. We can beautify, and beautify more, while keeping people busy in the bargain. This way they can give the lie to snooty ol’ Keynes’ presumption of their having no special talent. It will, of course, require great many more stimulus dollars than have heretofore been disbursed, but I, for one, would rather see fortunes go to starving artists and out-at-the-sleeves scholars than to fat cats.

All This Useless Duty: The Publish or Perish Imperative and Value Erosion in Higher Education

The perception that higher education has become an increasingly elaborate and costly hustle is perhaps to be expected in era when no one’s ever quite sure if her pension is perched on a Ponzi scheme that’s ready to blow. In an economy in which few actual things are made, and in which more experiences, services and social relations are monetized, value calculations begin to admit more variables, and people become more suspicious.

Lax Americana: Higher Education and Innovation Stagnation

There’s no way to demonstrate positively that the mind which can move from Moliere to microchips designs better microchips than the mind which concerns itself solely with microchips. This could, at best, be demonstrated over a long period of time, with sustained attention and infinite patience (maybe something along the lines of Michael Apted’s Up series), as a generation liberated from liberal-arts curricula show themselves easily buffaloed by tasks that do not perfectly conform to their limited repertoire of technical aptitudes. But until such time as one can assess that critical appreciation of just this number of Botticellis or that number Bach fugues equals this optimal number on a creativity index, suspicion of disutility will continue plague humanities.