Stay tuned to the Ask Dr Ross podcast. It's created to give you info to succeed at college. Our hosts are highly qualified. Dr Catherine Ross is a member of the University of Texas System's Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She's also a popular professor of 19th century English literature. Co-host and multimedia editor Nathan Wood provides a student perspective. Ask Dr Ross is a community service of the University of Texas at Tyler.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Katherine Ross and this is a podcast for parents, students in school who are thinking about going to college, college students who parents students in school who are thinking about going to college, college students who are already here, adults who are thinking of maybe going back to college and really anyone who wants to know more about what life in colleges and universities is like today in the US of A. I'm here with my friend, nathan Witt, who's a student here.
Speaker 3:If you'd like to ask Dr Ross a question, you can email us at adrquestions at gmailcom. Today we're going to talk more about hope, so we've got a mini series covering the question how am I, as a college student, supposed to have hope for the future? And so we're going to dive a little deeper into that, specifically talking about the finances, the state of the economy and what are we walking into. What have we been handed as this new generation walking into the working class?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and part of the reason why we've got this series going is that Nathan and I've talked a lot about how it just seems like everything's really gone wrong in the last couple of years ever since COVID and people are talking about so many bad things measures of the politics, of the economy, of the job situation and so on.
Speaker 2:So doom and gloom. And whereas people like me can see it from a little bit larger, longer view, it's harder for young folks to think about it. I'm introducing a colleague and friend of mine, Professor Susan Doty, who is a distinguished teaching professor at University of Texas, at Tyler, in the College of Arts and Sciences, specifically in the social sciences department. That's correct. She is also a distinguished senior lecturer, the executive director of the Center for Economic Education and Financial Literacy at the university here, and she's the past president of the National Association of Economic Educators. So she comes to us with all sorts of hats still on her head and kind of in her back pocket, and I think she's got a lot to tell us Great.
Speaker 2:Having said all that, Susan, do you want to start talking to Nathan about economic hope?
Speaker 4:Oh, economic hope. First of all, thank you so much for inviting me. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk to you. Before we started today, we were saying what an exciting time of the year it is. The first week of the new fall semester especially is just so full of energy and, I think, hope.
Speaker 3:I think so too. Yeah, I would definitely. I use the word excitement when we're talking. It's, there's a, there's an like, An energy, yeah, an energy. It's like the air is vibrating a little bit, which is cool.
Speaker 2:And so folks who listen to this may not realize, but we are recording this the first week of classes in the fall 2023 semester. Yeah, where are we going from here?
Speaker 3:Professor Doty, I think we can start really broad and then let's start chipping away at it. Young people I guess I should specify first and say that I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here. Right, I am representing the hopeless youth right now, and so let me ask you this question Are they all hopeless?
Speaker 3:I don't know if they're all hopeless, but I think that there's certainly a demographic out there that's pretty large and holds a big representation in my generation. So it looks like everything is stacked against us. It looks like systematic decisions were made to put us at a disadvantage the incoming working class. Is that a misconception?
Speaker 4:Oh, I certainly think that it is, and I think it's important to acknowledge that you are representing people who feel that way and those feelings are important. But one of the things that happens at university is that we look at the data okay and we look at primary sources, and we learn to distinguish between rumor and fact.
Speaker 3:Right, what you see on a headline on some kind of site or blog or website and what the research articles are finding.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Absolutely Sure. So let me ask you first of all, what is the bad news that you're talking?
Speaker 3:about To start with a hot-but button topic, I think the. What was the? I'm trying to think of a short, easy term for it, I guess. To start, I'll say the minimum wage compared to the rise of inflation and how those two have not grown as a pair. Okay.
Speaker 4:So that's certainly valid, but let's think about what minimum wage is for. Are you in college because and sacrificing your time and investing in yourself so that you can earn minimum wage?
Speaker 3:No, but that could rabbit hole into a place of the college diploma has less weight than it did before, because even I personally know a lot of peers who have gotten out of college with that diploma and only been able to find a minimum wage job. But we won't go there yet. Yes, of course my intention with getting this diploma is that it will platform me to get a better salary at the end of the day. That sounds cold, but of course that's definitely part of the equation.
Speaker 2:I want to add here I don't think it is cold. I think all of us have to recognize that one of the main reasons everybody goes to college is to make a good life.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that includes finding a really interesting career that you're good at and where you get paid pretty well. So there's no shame in saying that.
Speaker 3:I like that you say that here.
Speaker 4:Yeah, okay, that we have seen over the past, you know, maybe five, six decades a change in college graduation rates from about 7% to about 37%. Okay, so there's something that is encouraging people to seek higher education. Sure, we have on my tagline, you know, on my university email. We have on my tagline, you know, on my university email. My tagline is education is the ultimate economic multiplier, and I believe that, okay, and that's more than money, that's more, it's quality of life. Sure, okay, and so there's a lot of measures of quality of life that show improvement over time and again.
Speaker 4:It's hard for someone who is not feeling the love to show those sorts of statistics, but one of the things is, you know, people talk a lot about now is inflation, but our inflation rate now is about 4%. A year or two ago when it was so very high, it was 8%, but it wasn't very long ago, you know, decades ago, where it was double digit inflation. So we like to see it a little bit lower than the 4% that it is now. You know, 2% would be better, but this is not a high inflation rate and it's not an unexpected inflation rate, given what happened, you know, just three years ago during.
Speaker 2:COVID. So one of the things I would like to insert here, then, is that there's a piece of knowledge, of understanding about the way the history, the recent history of our economic situation has been going along, so that it puts that number, which seems real scary, into perspective within the last two years, even right.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and if we think about what were you doing in 20? In 2020?
Speaker 3:2020. Like before the pandemic happened.
Speaker 4:Where were you in your life in 2020? You were in high school or college.
Speaker 3:I was in college. Yeah, I was living on campus at a college in Dallas.
Speaker 4:Okay, all right. In 2020, after COVID hit we did some incredible things in terms of pumping money into the economy. We did it with aid to families, we did it with aid to businesses, and we did it. That's fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is government policy, it's taxing and spending decisions. But we also did it with monetary policy, federal reserve policy, where interest rates were lowered so that people and businesses had access to funds at low to almost zero interest rates. There was a cost to doing that. We chose to do it. We as a nation chose to do it because there was an emergency that we responded to. But the cost of that was pumping so much money into the economy. That increases demand. What does an increase in demand do? It raises prices. Okay, so that inflation that we've seen since was not unexpected. It was the cost We've talked about this before. It was the opportunity cost of the decisions we made to help a nation in crisis.
Speaker 3:So it was not unexpected by the educated and I think that's going to be one of a few main headlines that we're going to circle around a lot for this conversation is how important economic education is to feeling hope Be still my heart. But really, because I think that's again why a lot of my generation and young people in general felt upset because the people making these decisions right. When you say we decided to do to take this opportunity, you didn't decide, I didn't decide, that you know and I. Now we can discuss, we can rabbit hole and discuss who's to blame for this reason, but I don't think it's worth it. For whatever reason. I think in mass, my generation was not informed that these decisions were being made and certainly you were in high school?
Speaker 2:You probably wasn't. It wasn't on your radar Right.
Speaker 3:And didn't feel like we had any influence over these decisions being made. And yet we feel like we are feeling the most the heaviest of the brute force from that, you know, opportunity cost.
Speaker 2:But let me remind you one thing Weren't college debt, wasn't college debt held for a long time?
Speaker 3:It was.
Speaker 2:So that there were some college students who recognize it. Now I know college debt is another whole issue, but at least they didn't.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was like do we want to go there?
Speaker 2:Well, but I think that's an important piece of it. It did impact the young people to hold off. I've got a daughter-in-law who's still paying off some of her law school loans, but it held off for a couple years and it really made a big difference.
Speaker 3:It did. But this podcast is not for college students. Our target audience for this podcast is people coming into college, so people who would not have enjoyed those benefits. The other thing is and this is more of a, this is more Polly Psy, but I'll just say, because we've had that conversation already, it was a great conversation. Remind me his name, dr Bryant. So we had that conversation with Dr Bryant. But there is definitely a feeling of the people who are making these decisions, for these cost opportunity decisions, right, they are in a financial position to not nearly feel the sting of this side of the decision.
Speaker 2:And a lot of you didn't vote for him either.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly, we didn't vote for you. It doesn't affect you nearly as much with the tax bracket you're in and now I'm eating, you know, $5 ramen because you thought it was worth it and I didn't feel like I had any choice in if I was willing to take on the brunt of that or not. But before we go into it, I think that we need to take a step back and you need to tell us the Doty mantra, because, of course, dr Ross and I know it, because we've had many conversations about economics with you, but our listeners haven't heard it, and it's one of my favorite things, so you have to tell it.
Speaker 2:And we're going to have to revise this a little bit. Yeah, we'll toss some things around, so that this will be at the front and there may be some things all of us have said we don't want to say, but go ahead.
Speaker 3:So give the intro.
Speaker 4:Okay. So the Dodie mantra is this I have never taught a class or conducted a workshop or given a presentation. I don't believe without starting with this, it's a framing, economic way of thinking, framing to start a conversation Everything we value is scarce. Because everything we value is scarce, we can't have it all. Because when we can't have it all, we have to make choices. Every choice we make means giving up something else. That most valued alternative that we give up when we make a choice is our opportunity cost, and that opportunity cost is the real cost of the choices we make. Could you give an example? Absolutely, you know. We can apply this to individuals and households making decisions, or managers and business firms making decisions, or to politicians and government making decisions. Every time we choose to do something, we are choosing not to do something else. That could be as simple as a business that is choosing.
Speaker 3:Can we actually can we do a student choosing to go to college?
Speaker 4:Abs, what a great one. Okay, so we have, you know, a high school student who is making one of the most important decisions of life, and it's not just a financial decision. But that student is saying if I go to college, what am I giving up to do? It's not the cost, the price tag of the education, the education, it's the. What else could I be doing? Could I be an apprentice to become a plumber? Could I go into the military? Could I go work, you know, in the oil fields? What is the cost of education in terms of what I would give up to get it?
Speaker 2:Another example I can live at home and save a lot of money and have to drive an hour into campus and miss out on a lot of stuff that happens in the college life. Or I can suck it up and pay a little bit more money to live on campus in the dorm and eat dorm food and be able to be in the middle of things, where things are happening.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So the way Dr Ross just added to that is reinforces this idea of constant decision-making and divergent paths all along. I'm talking with my hands, which your viewers will not be able to see, but her hands are going wide.
Speaker 4:She's making branches, and each one of those decisions becomes a choice and a refusal. If you will, we can apply the economic way of decision making to really any sort of choice we make, again in households and business firms and government, because individuals are always making these choices. So we, often people, tend to think about good and bad choices. Sometimes we are making what we believe is the better of bad choices or the not quite as amazing of great choices. Right, okay, and so you? You grasped immediately the idea of opportunity cost and so it's a weighing. It's a weighing and a deliberate process of thinking about what we're going to do. Let's assume for a minute that the student who chooses four-year college has made that choice deliberately, rationally. Then we've got to believe that student believes that the benefits are greater than the costs, or it wouldn't be rational.
Speaker 3:Great, so you've introduced the Doty mantra. So now.
Speaker 2:By the way, I want you to send it to us in a complete sentence so that we can post it in quotation marks on the website. Yeah, we'll have that. With the Dodi mantra. The Dodi mantra.
Speaker 3:Now we can circle back around to where I cut us off. So we're talking about this political decision I guess you would call this economic decision made by our elected officials, made by our elected officials, and young people are feeling maybe a little disenfranchised, maybe a little cut out of the loop, right, maybe a little bit of, you know, same vein as taxation without representation, kind of stuff you know. So how do you respond to that perception that the young people have? What is your take on it?
Speaker 4:I think Dr Ross would agree with me. You know, we don't tell students, we show students and we create opportunities for students to aha. You know, come to aha moments on their own by doing, and you know, part of the way I would deal with this question in a class, for example, is I would present economic problems and have students work in teams to figure out how to solve them. So here you know, let's go back to COVID for just a minute, because things happened at that time that were so dramatic. And so if we say, you know, the scenario that students are going to work on is we have families who cannot pay their bills, Okay, what are we going to do? That's the problem.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 4:So let the banks foreclose on their homes, let their credit scores be ruined, affecting them for years to come. Let them perhaps be evicted by landlords. Let children not have food. Okay, you know I'm giving a horrible case scenario, but I'm doing it for a reason. And if we have the means to make that situation better by oh dear, it's over our budget. More deficit spending. So the government borrows to get stimulus payments out. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? That's a normative question, economists would say. But do we perhaps choose to do something like that to get money out quickly, because we don't have a lot of time to think about this? So maybe we're not coming up with the best program, but we're getting money out and we're getting it out quickly now, before people lose their homes.
Speaker 4:And so students in a class talking about this. What would they choose?
Speaker 3:I'm not sure that it would look too different from what the US government did. Again, it's more just the feeling of you know, you feel a little screwed. You feel a little, hey, they made this decision. I don't know if it was the best or the worst or if there could have been better, if it was relatively good or not. It almost kind of doesn't matter, because it wasn't my decision, I wasn't a part of it.
Speaker 4:And now but the time will come when it is your decision, and maybe the empathy that you would hope people have for how you're feeling would be what would I do? What if I were the decision maker in that situation? So if the result of that is a number of things you know deeper federal debt, higher taxes, result in inflation, whatever those problems were, were they worth it? I don't know the answer to that and I don't think any of us do, but the process of deliberate decision-making by smart people and here we need to talk a minute because it's so trite and easy to say, oh no, we had a bunch of idiots who made these decisions. Sometimes you make the best decisions you can in the times that you can make them.
Speaker 4:So I've never really presented it this way to students, but I think I try to create empathy about macroeconomic decisions. Sometimes. You know, let's look at what the problem was that needed to be solved and what were our options. Would we have made the same ones? Would we have made different ones? Even if we would have made different ones, don't we feel a little bit for the people who had to make those tough?
Speaker 3:choices Do you at least recognize? I hear that perspective. I really do.
Speaker 2:I think this is where it's hard for people even like me who haven't studied economics, is to understand the interplay between all these different macroeconomic factors Inflation, deficit spending, the interest rates and all these different things.
Speaker 2:So that not understanding and I can remember as an undergraduate taking a macroeconomics class and my eyes started rolling in my head some days because I didn't always get it but that notion that there's this interesting pattern of many events Absolutely that most students and most adults don't always understand, and so there again we're kind of going back to your education can maybe help you overcome some of this hopelessness. Just like when Dr Bryant was talking about how we have these periods of great civil rights, positive things in civil rights, and then we have negative reactions and back and forth, and how we've had that from everything from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement and the Reagan years to Obama and the things we're in right now. So again, that's long before you were born, long before we were born, and so that's not very comforting. But knowing that there is a pattern and that there's some sensible reason to some of this can help there's some sensible reason to some of this can help.
Speaker 3:You know, this is certainly not my field, but I admire the people who capture stories in history, the stories that talk about how people felt in the moment, any age, because in some way we connect, we say, oh, I felt that way and that's from 100 years ago, or 50 or 20 or 10, whatever, or before the pandemic, and maybe that's a good point towards hopelessness, because, you know, I think it's easy, especially for a young person, to say gosh, if this is how they felt about the state of the economy a hundred years ago and it's how I feel about it what is there any hope that in a hundred years it's going to change? In a hundred years they still feel this way. You know, that's the thing that professor Bryant said was. You know, his kind of takeaway was yes, some things are worse, some things are better, and it's kind of this. It's somehow stayed at like the same level.
Speaker 2:But do you remember he also said one way to not let it stay at the same level is to fight.
Speaker 3:He definitely said to fight and that's a great call to action and I loved it.
Speaker 2:Fight, not with your hands and guns and things like that, but to fight for right, right right.
Speaker 3:Fight with your voice, fight with your vote, and I definitely see that.
Speaker 2:And fight with arguments.
Speaker 3:With your mind, with your mind.
Speaker 4:You know, let me—this is going to sound a little silly, but do you know who Mr Rogers was? Of course, from the neighborhood, from the neighborhood, yeah. Do you know that? He used to tell a story about being scared when he was a little boy and his mother would say to him look for the heroes. I'm going to go back to what you said a minute ago, about 100 years ago. Oh my goodness, if we were helpless 100 years and hopeless 100 years ago and we're hopeless now, we're always going to be hopeless. What happened in that 100 years? Didn't incredible wonderful things happen in that 100?
Speaker 3:years and despite all those amazing people, those heroes of time, despite all of their work over a hundred years, we still feel just as hopeless. So doesn't that taint the belief in your heroes? If you can be this hero to time, your heroes, if you can be this hero to time, a hundred years later, we can still chant your name and yet.
Speaker 4:So people are just as hopeless. See, I have to argue with the premise here Okay, hopelessness, okay, and I need to do that while acknowledging your feelings. I've said that a couple of times. But there are all kinds of metrics that argue against that. Okay, okay, the increase in the world happiness metrics. Okay, out of the United Nations. Okay, okay, Read those reports. The decrease in the misery index.
Speaker 3:Is that global? But what about a little more micro? Has it gone up in the US as well?
Speaker 4:I'm so very glad that you asked that, because in one of the graphics in the 2023 report it shows is it a chloropleth map? I think the geographers call it. It shows a map of happiness in the US, and do you know one of the states that is the happiest? Oh, wow, that's.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry to tell you, I feel like that's not good news. We're not that happy.
Speaker 4:It's interesting because I'm envisioning the map right now, but it's, you know, orange is not as happy as green, and we've got orange along the eastern and western coasts and down the middle of the country, from north to south. It is more green, it is happier. Okay, so you walked into it, I let you do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that's fun, that's fun.
Speaker 2:Well, and the other thing too, I would just add, and this is a hard pill for anybody to swallow, but I can remember having this starry-eyed belief when I went off to college that you know I had this great life ahead of me. And then you get to college and you realize there's some people there that are smarter than you. You used to be the smartest person in the room.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and there's more competition out there than you thought. And then you get to find out oh, I just come from this part of the country and a whole bunch of people from the east and west coast, and they have a whole different way of being, and so what I valued and what they valued were different, and so that was disillusioning and confusing. An adult is bringing your awareness of what's possible both to a little bit more realistic level at the same time not losing your hope that you can aspire beyond your parents or what you see is going on around you. That's a tricky thing to do, but, but again, I come back to something that both of us really believe in is that the more you learn about your own intelligence, the more you learn about the things that scare you, the more likely you are to have a balanced and more hopeful viewpoint. Balanced and more hopeful viewpoint. Now I have to say this too I feel as though there's this thing that we've talked about before, called doom scrolling.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think, doom scrolling. I personally have experienced it and I can get into that, you know. And you know you can let me and look at myself and or look at me and look at into that, you know, and you can let me and look at myself and look at me and look at Professor Doty and see, you know, we've both got pretty good lives. We've both got good jobs. I've got a PhD. She's a distinguished professor, I'm a distinguished professor. We've got kids that are pretty successful, a house that I'm still paying off on, but I don't know about yours. But I am driving a 22-year-old car that's beat up on every side of it and I have to roll down the window to open the door from the outside. But that's a choice I make. I don't want to spend the money right now to buy a fancy new car. It's an opportunity choice.
Speaker 3:Cost yeah.
Speaker 2:Opportunity cost. But where I was going is that we also don't have something. You have which is 50, 60.
Speaker 4:Oh my, did you just hit on the most valuable of those scarce resources that we've talked about time?
Speaker 2:You've got time. And so when I hear you say you're hopeless about the time in front of you, I want to say but you, but you can change your hope. You can't give me some of your time, you've got it. And so both of us, I think, are deeply sympathetic with you, and one of the reasons why I said let's devote as many of these podcasts as we can to helping people in your group to feel more hope without saying well, you just, you know, just grow up and get you know, put on your big boy pants.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:We're not saying that at all, but it's easy to make generalizations without information, and so people like Dr Doty Professor Doty can give you information that can help you sort through your hopelessness, at least in terms of your economic. I know that when Professor Bryant was here he helped me sort through some of my hopelessness about some of the social attitudes in our country. He reminded me of some things that helped me remind. You know, wait a minute. You know, don't just doom scroll, think about all the heroes that you know.
Speaker 3:Hard to say, but hard to tell people not to doom scroll. Yeah, Professor Doty, I have a question. Certainly so. If you were a college student today, you started class yesterday where would your hope come from?
Speaker 4:How do I do this and not be self-serving, I would say, oh my goodness, you get to take Dr Doty's class. I had the most amazing first day of class and I want to change my major and be an economics major because I love it. I think the energy that you spoke of, the excitement that you spoke of earlier, feeds on itself, and I had optimistic students in class and I don't mean to make it an N of one, you feel it. You said the air was vibrating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 4:And I think we capture that energy. Let me talk to you. I talked about a little bit about the happiness index and the decline, you know, and misery index. But there's some other things, things. There is so much service, volunteer work, philanthropy in this world, okay, and you said, no, bring it down. You know, make it local, locally, okay, statewide, nationwide, worldwide. We're seeing it and it does so much good. It does good, of course, for the beneficiaries of the philanthropy, but it also does good for the people who are giving. And then what happens to the people who are watching the givers and watching the beneficiaries? That's inspiring. We've talked a little bit before about personal finance. In my personal finance courses I talk about giving back and service and charity and volunteerism and philanthropy. And when you see the people engaged in those sorts of outreach activities, they're inspiring. Those are heroes. And when you see the good, okay, sometimes they're dealing with misery but they're doing something positive and that's empowering.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. I think that's a place to genuinely. I think that's a place to genuinely find some hope is in the nonprofit. I say this as someone who is in nonprofits but I really do feel that way. If you feel like the economy is effed and you feel like things are stacked against the working class, the people who are really trying to address those issues are the nonprofits and are the service organizations and programs and stuff like that. And if that's something that's really on your heart, I feel like that is, professor Doty, I really like that. I had not thought about it, but that is a place to find hope is these programs. Whatever your what your rare resource is, whether it's time, it may not be finances, but maybe it's energy. If you're a doom scroller, maybe just make it a priority to interact with you know a handful of nonprofits social media accounts and that'll help their algorithm Like I'm a big believer of like get in where you fit in, so like.
Speaker 2:I don't know if this will apply to what we're talking about. You can always cut it out if it doesn't. But today in my first class I had my I read, read with my students. At them reading, I read a poem written by Lord Byron, written in about 1825. Okay, and what's that? 200 years ago?
Speaker 2:But before I read the poem I said how many of you all have had a bad breakup or seen a bad breakup? Boy, I got some nods. And then I said how many of you all have been the victim of gossip? And boy, there were some nods there. And boy, there were some nods there. And then we got into this poem and they realized this man, 200 years ago, had experienced almost the same feelings and had to deal with people gossiping about them. And then, when we got even more into it and discovered that there were some real interesting things going on there about the way he created the language so that people in the know would recognize how intimate and loving it had been, and little sparks went off in the room and I think a lot of people realized, you know, just like they're heroes every century and every decade hopefully almost every year there's human feelings that aren't too different from year to year to year Sure.
Speaker 2:And this is a man whose father died before he was born and who had a title and a fancy estate but no money, spent his whole life in debt, the most famous poet of the period, and you know he died in a heroic cause. He went to help the Greeks fight against the Turks. He built his own, he raised his own money for an army Talk about philanthropy. It's a different kind of philanthropy, but he died of malaria leading the Greeks against these repressive Turks 200 years ago.
Speaker 2:Golly, that sounds familiar and even if it seems old, I think the human heart is the same Nate. I think the human heart is the same. I think the hurts and the feelings are not that different from your generation, to your parents' generation, from the generation of children that you'll have, and there's nothing, a whole lot, that's really new under the sun. It seems really dark right now. Let me tell you something it seems real dark to a lot of us that are older than you. So you're buying into or you know, picking up on that vibe is a sign of your astuteness, of your sensitivity. But you're doing the right thing right now, which is you're learning, you know and you're asking the questions of experts, and I've been trying to bring experts to you to help you. That's where you're going to find him is a place like this and ultimately you can get yourself out of it. Now I happen to know you have a theory.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want to get into that, I'm hoping you'd like to get to one of these, yes, yeah, because we've been talking for almost an hour now.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we're close, we're 40, 41 minutes. But Could I just talk about something from my first day yesterday? Yeah, so you did something similar to what you did and how funny this is. You know in English literature and in economics. But I asked my students have you ever made a mistake? How many hands went up?
Speaker 3:Right Everybody.
Speaker 4:In economics we ignore sunk costs. Sunk costs you can think of as mistakes. Whatever's been done in the past, whatever we've spent, whatever happened in the past, is a sunk cost. In economics there's a marginalism principle. It's one of the four principles we talk about in economics and the marginalism principle is we make decisions on the margin, on the additional, on the next one, on the supplemental, going forward. So how empowering is that? To say what happened before is irrelevant to what I'm going to do from this moment onward. Talk about empowering. It really is Shake it off.
Speaker 3:Go forward. Yeah, it is hard. It's hard for young people who don't have the advantage of a seasoned perspective of life to see how much the human spirit can recover from, just how resilient the human spirit is. Spirit can recover from. You know just how resilient the human spirit is. I think that's why I'm doing the things with my life that I am today is that like I just had a really I'm going to cut all this out, but I had a really strange path growing up, a very you know, really dark, you know storied path growing up, and one of the main things that it taught me through all of it was exactly that just how resilient the human spirit is and how much you can recover from and how far you can recover from terrible things. And so I think for most people my age, however, they have not seen that yet. Y'all have seen that. Y'all have experienced you have friends who have come back from, you know, thousands in debt to or died, or killed themselves.
Speaker 2:That's not the direction I was going.
Speaker 3:I have Me too, but what I'm saying people who didn't go that far and came back what I'm saying is we're going to cut some of that.
Speaker 1:We're going to cut a lot of this.
Speaker 2:That's the thing about podcasts. What?
Speaker 3:I'm saying is y'all have seen people come within inches of financial ruin and recover. Y'all have seen the economy fall and recover. We have only seen the economy fall. Some of us come. Our first developmental years were the 2008 housing crisis. You have to remember that in our very, very narrow scope of what is the American economy has not been positive.
Speaker 4:Oh, but it has.
Speaker 2:Oh, but it has, oh, but it has.
Speaker 4:That's where your perception, the crash, the great recession that we talked about starting in 2007, and the housing crash in 2008,. We recovered oh man, did we recover? And then there was COVID, and so even we're tired of talking about COVID. We're done, we're beyond it. But isn't that great, because even the high inflation that we saw post-COVID last year has come down 4%, when the average over decades is between 3% and 4%.
Speaker 3:Right, we never addressed.
Speaker 2:So it came down from 8% to 4%. But see, that doesn't feel meaningful to you it doesn't, and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:It matters, but it takes the power, it steals a little oomph away from it, to know that, whether inflation is 8 or 4 or 2, minimum wage has not followed it for a long time. And that's the issue.
Speaker 2:But is minimum wage the best standard to make your measurement by? It's what I'm wondering.
Speaker 3:It's your paycheck it is. I think that's a big standard. I think that, while there are many companies who have decided to, despite the minimum wage, pay better because that's what the market demands that's the fun of capitalism, right there are a lot of companies who still pay minimum wage. Or here's a side tangent that we don't have to go down, but just to acknowledge it the whole tipping system in America and how that robs a lot of people of their fair pay. But I can tell that you have some numbers.
Speaker 4:When we've had these kinds of conversations before, we've tried to figure out which demographic do we want to talk about. You know where do we want to capture our numbers, because this is a big issue, so I wanted to share just one with you, please. If we take it when we look at the income categories in the nation, we talk about quintiles 5-20% groupings of income. If income were equal along those five groupings, then each 20% would have the same amount. Okay, the first 20%, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth would all have the same income. Now Let me just get a feel for you here.
Speaker 4:Is that what you would like to see? No, okay, good, we don't have to go any further than that right now. So let me take that middle quintile, okay. So we're not talking about the bottom 40% and we're not talking about the top 40 percent. We're talking about the middle 20.
Speaker 3:The middle, that's middle class, correct I?
Speaker 4:don't like to talk about class, let's talk about income. It's the middle income. Okay, so middle income has grown over from, say, about mid 60s to 20, from, say, about mid-60s to looking just at 2021, from about a mean average of $7,000 to $77,000. That's middle income, middle of the middle.
Speaker 2:They used to make $7,000, and now they make $70,000.
Speaker 4:Right. Okay, in that same period of time because I know we talked about these things housing prices have increased about that same amount. It's not everything that is the same and I'm not trying to say that it is, but the data show us that this is not the doom and gloom that many people are talking about. Look at the Census Bureau information, the Bureau of Labor Statistics information, the Federal Reserve Bureau of Economic Analysis In 2023, right now.
Speaker 4:I was actually looking at the 2021 numbers, and the reason for that is we're often finalizing a couple years backward. When I talked about the happiness values, they were spring 2023. So they were pretty recent.
Speaker 3:So my question is so you said that from seven to 70,000, right, that's income for the middle group. Yes, do we know? And you said housing has increased at that same rate, about that same rate. What is that rate? So that?
Speaker 2:means that if people 20 years ago, or when was your first date, 60? Okay, so that would be.
Speaker 4:I'm actually looking 67 to 21.
Speaker 3:What would the relationship of that increase be to the increase of inflation?
Speaker 4:Inflation over that period of time has averaged about 3.8% annually. Okay, but you have to remember that inflation is an annual number, so we don't talk about inflation over decades because it's an annual change. What we do talk about is the consumer price index. Okay, and the consumer price index is the market basket of goods you know. Assume to be relatively constant year to year. Sure, okay, and that I have data from 1913. Okay, okay, to 2023. Okay, and this is consumer price index data that comes out of the Federal Reserve Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's all the same.
Speaker 2:Which are believable sources.
Speaker 4:Credible sources we're going to use here. Okay, that is all over the place in these years. Sometimes it's as high as 17, 18. I think once it was 21%, and sometimes it has actually fallen. Ok, so it's a negative. Negative couple percent. Ok, and one year is as bad as you know negative 10.3. Ok, so that's, we would call that deflation, and in many ways that's more serious than inflation, you know. And these averaged, okay, get us to that. You know, average inflation number of 3.8%. Okay, so my point was just we could look at years where it was terrible and years where it was wonderful.
Speaker 3:How has it been the past couple years?
Speaker 4:Okay, so I'm so glad you asked. So we look at 4% this year, 8% last year, 4% the year before, 1.2%. The year before that, 1.8%. The year before that. The year before that, 1.8. The year before that, averaging in the twos and threes for a couple decades.
Speaker 3:So it's been twos and threes.
Speaker 2:Went up to eight.
Speaker 3:Went up to eight and now it's at four Right. So this experience that you're feeling, that young people are feeling, and eight was last year, wasn't it?
Speaker 4:Or two years ago. It is a nearness, you're feeling it because it's so current and you don't have the institutional memory. You don't have the experiential memory, and that's some of what we can do in education. I don't teach these numbers. This is not important on its own, but it's contextual and it helps to say oh, it's not the doom and gloom.
Speaker 2:It was worse last year than it is already. It's better this year.
Speaker 3:Let's pause because you're so right about that sentence. It just needs the smallest edit.
Speaker 2:Face it.
Speaker 3:Here's what it needs, because for the past is this a four as well? So for the past three years it's been four and eight and four. So the sentence is you're right, it feels it's bad right now, but it's not doom and gloom. So you're right to say it's not doom and gloom in the grand scheme of things. Look, it's going to get back to where it was. It is this we have this long-term trend of it's normally here, but you're right, right now it actually is terrible. That doesn't mean it will continue to be terrible and have hope that it'll come back around.
Speaker 2:But this year it's half as terrible as it was last year.
Speaker 3:Sure, but half Sure, but it's still twice as terrible as it used to be.
Speaker 4:I can play with that again if you'd like.
Speaker 2:No, I like, Don't play with it. Go ahead. No, he doesn't want you to Go ahead.
Speaker 4:No, that's okay. That's all right. Oh, you wanted you were doing the correction.
Speaker 3:I thought you wanted me to do the correction. You're fine. I just I think that's. And I'm in this weird position because, you know, I must expose. I do have hope. I do have hope for the future.
Speaker 4:I want that on the podcast it will be on there.
Speaker 3:I do have hope for the future. My hope came from a weird place and I think maybe at the end of this entire series I'll explain that part. But I do have hope. So I'm in a weird position of playing devil's advocate for the hopeless, and that is how I have rationalized it. All is to know. Wait, it feels hopeless because it's presenting as hopeless. It feels hopeless because if you take this little slice of the pie that we have lived, then it looks hopeless. It's only when you contextualize it with it all, but only yes, you know when you're down here.
Speaker 4:Yes, it feels hopeless.
Speaker 2:She's drawing a graph, and you know, and a mountain, and now we're down in the valley.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and this we recover. We always recover from this.
Speaker 3:Yes, life is ebbs and flows and while we are, you know, on the bottom side of this wave, if you're born within this bottom side of the wave, things feel hopeless and then it comes back around. It's true, it's normally the case, it's just hard.
Speaker 2:It's just hard. And it's especially hard when you're not sure what you want to do and if you'll get a job doing it. When you get there and people say there's some jobs that haven't been invented yet, that doesn't help you much, right, but I'll tell you this. Right, but I'll tell you this my two sons, one of whom is just barely employed for his first job, is making more than his father makes, and he just got out of college and he's not nearly as skilled as his father. And you talk about his old father going. Damn, you know that's hopeless. No, don't put that in there. But the point is that hold your breath, keep exercising, get your sleep, eat well, love your friends and wake up tomorrow. Wake up tomorrow, yeah, and wake up tomorrow. Wake up tomorrow, yeah, and you've got 20, 40, 50, 60, 70 years of tomorrow.
Speaker 3:At least I won't go into it. That's a hopeful statement for some people I know. I used to really struggle with mental health and the idea of having 60 more years was terrifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hear you, I hear you.
Speaker 3:Here's a takeaway I have Because we didn't go as much into the social media's influence of this as maybe we could have, because it's where a lot of the feeling of doom and gloom comes from. A lot of our fear about the economy comes from these fear mongers who are sitting there on your phone everywhere you look, saying everything is horrible, the Rome is falling, and all this kind of stuff so they'll get more, more clicks.
Speaker 3:Because it yeah, it sells. And it's hard because we're in this weird place of algorithms are just becoming a thing, and right now it's commonplace for them to take advantage of your subconscious feelings, where they don't just show you good things. They show you things because they know it scares you and they'll keep popping it up, Even if you don't want to see it. They show it things because they know it scares you and they'll keep popping it up, Even if you don't want to see it. They show it to you anyway, and so one of the takeaways that I feel like worth mentioning tell me if I'm wrong. I would say to students about the economy we're freaking out. It's hard to look away, but look away and trust that it's going to get better and just live every day economically smart.
Speaker 2:Keep building your own house, keep building the bricks in your own education.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Keep following the things that interest you and learn absolutely better and maybe just let go of that worry of this grand state of the economics and trust that there's very good reason to believe that things are going to get better. The trend is there that things recover, and so trust in that trend. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 4:I think that's fair to say. And now I'd go a little bit beyond that to look at what's in your control and choose to do the things in your control that give you hope, and you know what they are. Whatever you and the greater you out there, the things that make you happy, the things that make you feel worthwhile and productive and like you're making a difference, those things will empower you.
Speaker 3:And if you haven't found that yet. Stop what you're doing and find it. Drop everything and go find those things that make hard days a little easier.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things I talk about the first couple weeks of class are the seven vectors of student development.
Speaker 2:The first one is developing competencies, and then it goes next to building. You know, breaking away from your family, becoming autonomous, but then learning how to be interdependent. But it also gets down really got down up to finding the things that you value the most, finding what you care about the most and, ultimately, what are your values, finding your integrity. And, in the midst of all that, you're developing your identity as well. And this is the time when you get to do that. And this is the time when you get to do that. You know, once you get out there and you're working away after you've graduated and you're trying to get a job, hopefully a lot of that's already started to get in place. So this is a great time to be doing those things Working on you, but not in a selfish way. Working on you so that, when you're finished, you're a finer human being to give more back to the world and to whom people want to turn and in whom people have hope.
Speaker 4:Cool, I like that. Something that is very practical along those lines are that core courses at the university teach six very distinct competencies outside of our content, and they are critical thinking and quantitative analysis, and communication in oral, written and technology forms.
Speaker 2:Cultural knowledge.
Speaker 4:Teamwork, social responsibility and personal responsibility Okay, and those are very powerful skills that we take out of a college education beyond content and there are things you can work on.
Speaker 2:You can change those Right, you can change those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and there's always hope in that. And focusing on your scope of influence yeah, and a lot of those things are your own personal finances. Yep, yep and maybe you have a little hope if your money's right you know, let's have another podcast about personal finances, yep, yep. And maybe you have a little hope if your money's right, you know.
Speaker 4:Yeah, let's have another podcast about personal finance.
Speaker 3:I would love to do that. That's a whole different.
Speaker 2:I love the whole. You have sunk costs. That's you know, because a lot of times that's one of the worst things that young people experience is they make a mistake and they can't live a day.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah it just.
Speaker 2:And and economics tell you it's sunk cost. Just forget about it.
Speaker 4:Today is the first day of the rest of your life. That's an economics concept.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I like that. That could be another episode. Professor Doty, do you have anything else?
Speaker 4:I don't, but thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3:I've enjoyed this. Thanks for being on Great. How do you feel?
Speaker 2:I feel good, I actually feel hopeful. But most of all I want you know, over the time of working on this together, I've become I thought I understood students real well, and I want to always learn better about what my students care about. And this is something that has troubled me too is that I don't want you all to feel hopeless, because I don't feel that hope and yet I get that you do. So we'll just keep on trucking away on this. We'll keep on inviting smart people like Professor Doty to help us think about it Great.
Speaker 3:Well, here let us end out the episode. This has been the Ask Dr Ross podcast. If you have any questions, you can always email us at adrquestions at gmailcom. Thanks so much for listening.