On my visit to the MIT Campus today, I picked up the latest issue of our official newspaper, Tech Talk. I figured that the great minds of MIT would collectively have some hope to offer a world in the throes of economic collapse. The three cover stories were about saving energy in buildings on campus, a camera that helps blind people take pictures, and “Institute launching diversity and inclusion site” (“MIT will launch a new web site dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion at the Institute”).
7 thoughts on “MIT’s response to the worldwide economic collapse”
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Are they finally going to include people-of-less-brain-power? I was hoping to go back to school.
Maybe MIT is mum on the subject, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that a famous alumn has recently been supeanoed…. for contributing to our economic crisis, not helping to solve it.
http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N55/merrilllynch.html
Perhaps it would be pernicious for admissions, especially while Harvard is happily boasting about the appointment of Cass R. Sunstein to lead Obama’s regulatory reform efforts.
Maybe The Great Minds are just lying low, or they don’t want to completely depress the student body with pessimistic (albeit) realistic forecasts of our economic woes.
According to MIT’s own web site, nine months’ tuition and fees for 2008–2009 is $36,390. Additionally, undergraduate room and board is approximately $10,860, dependent on the student’s housing and dining arrangements. Books and personal expenses are estimated to be about $2,850.
That sets MIT at a minimum of $50,100.00.
Maybe, just maybe, the economic conditions will finally convince more than just a few that this type of cost is just not worth it and that a quality engineering education can be achieved for much less.
Unbelievable. “Green” and “Diversity,” the two most idiotic ideas of our time. The Ivy League is such an embarrassment. How did this happen?
“Diversity” is shoved down our throats everywhere we go. It’s supposed to be the answer to everything. As if reveling in our differnces is a good thing, and assimilation is bad. (If so, why were the previous generations so much better off, and why was American civilization so much nicer?)
My favorite anti-diversity slogan is this. Picture the last word written in a “ransom” font, with each character a different color:
DIVERSITY
KEEPS US
DIVIDED
Sam: Now that we’ve lit $700 billion in cash on fire, I think it is fair to say that there is a lot of competition for “most idiotic idea of our time”. Another strong competitor for idiotic idea was that the U.S. could afford to rebuild Iraq in America’s image. I just finished “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” and the book quotes a lot of Iraqis as attributing much of the ethnic and sectarian violence in Iraq to the American occupation establishing U.S.-style ethnic and religious quotas. Apparently Saddam discouraged people from proclaiming their Kurdish, Sunni, or Shiite identity and wanted everyone to “think Iraqi”.
I’m inferring from your email address that you’re an undergraduate at an Ivy League school. I don’t think it is fair to blame the fact that your generation has been totally screwed on affirmative action and other celebrations of diversity. Mostly, I think, your grandparents and older aunts/uncles had it easy because the U.S. population was half of what it is now. With half the population, housing costs were low, traffic jams were infrequent, and the natural resources of the U.S. were being divided up among a smaller group (getting back to Iraq; they were incredibly rich in the 1970s because they hadn’t gone on a baby spree; electricity, gas, health care, food, and education were free while imported goods were heavily subsidized; part of the reason that U.S. occupation was hated so much by Iraqis is that they assumed the end of Saddam would mean a return to the good times of the 1970s, but those are truly impossible given the expanded population and the fact that Iraqis cannot compete in any industry with China, India, or the developed nations).
MIT is not set up to encourage intelligent thinking. It is set up to promote gimmick and hype and herd thinking. It’s a public relations machine, not a place of intellectual inquiry. It’s a grant-getting enterprise, not a place where the right thing gets done. The worst thing that ever happened to MIT was that MIT became successful. Just ask Harvard.
Phil,
You’ve got it exactly backward: we’re much better off now than when we had fewer people. Housing costs are always low where people don’t want to be, and high where they do want to be. Traffic jams were infrequent partly because (a) families could only afford one car, (b) only one family member commuted to a job, and (c) housing was mostly built in areas served by trains and streetcars. (Traffic jams predate automobiles, by the way: one of the reasons Park Street Station in Boston was put underground back in 1897 was that streetcar and horse-drawn carriage traffic was clogging downtown Boston.)
Natural resources are a piddling part of American prosperity (however important they may have been 200 years ago). What’s a more prosperous country: the Netherlands, which is so poor in natural resources they even have to make their own land, or Saudi Arabia, which sits atop almost inconceivable oil wealth?
If we had half as many Americans, we’d have fewer than half as many specialists — the scientists, doctors, inventors, entrepreneurs, and engineers that drive real progress. Have you really considered how much worse medical care, for example, was just thirty years ago? It would be literally illegal to provide that level of care today.
If you want to think clearly about economics, you’ve got to get away from the zero-sum mindset, where there’s a fixed-size pie and we’re all fighting over the size of our piece. Specialization and trade let us grow the pie — and in the 20th century, we grew it a stunning amount.