Causes, Obvious and Not

"I put a subtraction problem on the board: 2020 minus 1990 equals 30. Taking those as years, it meant that (at that point) nobody under about 35 had any living memory of the Cold War. It ended before they were born, or before they had any sense of the world beyond their family. Without exposure to the anticommunist propaganda in which many of us had been steeped, they didn't develop the knee-jerk rejection response to the label "socialist" that older generations had."

"Longtime readers know my affinity for using Baumol's cost disease as an explanation for chronically squeezed education budgets. It's one of those basic mathematical facts that explains a lot once you see it, but is easy to miss in the day-to-day. Being aware of it offers an immune response to more superficial and/or ideologically driven explanations. (No, it's not about lazy rivers or climbing walls. It never was.)"

A community education session examined why a very conservative participant could not understand Bernie Sanders' appeal. Many young people face unaffordability of middle-class basics, increasing openness to policies labeled socialist. A significant generational gap exists because those under about 35 lack living memory of the Cold War and therefore did not absorb pervasive anticommunist messaging. Recognizing long-term structural trends yields clearer explanations than surface or ideological accounts. Baumol's cost disease serves as a concrete mathematical explanation for chronically squeezed education budgets and resists simplistic attributions to amenities or mismanagement.

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