Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.
All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.
There is a reason people in America are disappointed and restless. If opportunity seems like it's been slipping away, that's because it has. And liberal progressive ideas have done exactly nothing to help.
I suspected economics was irredeemable as a policy tool for citizens groups. I saw economics lead its practitioners and citizens alike into a form of brain-damaging indoctrination.
I think we need to find out why the citizens of the world's wealthiest, most envied, most powerful country are so cynical, so distressed, so angry, so ticked of about so many things.
One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.
The promise of Western capitalism of ever rising rates of pay has turned out to be the cheque that bounced
I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America were largely untrue.
The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.
The young people I teach now know they are being sold down the river before we even start studying the trends and numbers. That's the toughest part of being a high school economics teacher... being a witness when our children realize that the greatest deficit of all is a deficit of leadership.
I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.
Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though this system has given men the greatest material comforts.
The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
