Malcolm Harris > Quotes

“Under this framework, it’s a kid’s job to stay eligible for the labor market (not in jail, not insane, and not dead—which is more work for some than others), and any work product beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But Millennials’ extra work hasn’t earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Silicon Valley has never been interested in slow and steady growth—an early winning appearance is key to the Palo Alto System.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“We aren’t dumb, we’re adaptable—but adapting to a messed-up world messes you up, whether you remain functional or not.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Parents are treated like consumers, and “Think of the children” usually means “Think of your kid” and “Be afraid” and “Buy this or else.” Maybe that’s good advice for maximizing an individual kid’s chance at success in a winner-take-all market, but we can see what kind of society—and person—results.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“As Chris Rock famously put it: “Do you know what it means when someone pays you minimum wage? I would pay you less, but it’s against the law.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“No one puts their whole self into their job like a Millennial who never learned to separate work and life enough to balance them, especially if they’re wired on uppers and get anxious when they’re too far away from their phone.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“In a reversal of the traditional ideas about childhood, it’s no longer a time to make mistakes; now it’s when bad choices have the biggest impact.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“The working activities during childhood moratorium are disguised by pedagogical ideologies…. Learning is not understood as a type of work, whereby children contribute productively to the future social and economic development of the society. Only the adult work of teachers is emphasized as productive contribution to the development of human capital. The corresponding learning activities of pupils are thus defined, not as work but as a form of intellectual consumption. 5”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Wars, revolutions, market crashes, shifts in the mode of production, transformations in social relations: These are the things generations are made of, even if we can only see their true shape in the rearview mirror.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Capitalism has always rewarded those who have found ways to monetize new life processes, but technology combined with the growth of the finance sector has accelerated this process.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“How can you know what you want or feel or think—who you are—if you don't know which way history's marionette strings are tugging? [...] People aren't puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion. Maybe we're more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history's collage.

If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it's necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“stirred up nationalist sentiment among Anglo settlers in Alta California, implying (but not declaring) that he was”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Safety” is a broad, nebulous concept, even as it’s anxiously central to child-rearing. And kids could always be safer. “The ultimate question then becomes,” Mose writes, “how do parents choose ‘safe’ people with whom to hold a playdate? ‘Safe’ in this context really means people/ parents who are selected based on potential social and cultural capital.” 19 The true risk of nonorganic food isn’t that it’s going to poison anyone, it’s that the kids whose parents are buying it might not make for the best professional connections down the line, which means if your child plays with them, your child is less likely to get a crucial future promotion than they would be if they had played with peers who ate fancier corn puffs. This may or may not be an accurate analysis, but it must be confusing for young kids at first. That is, until they absorb the attention to class hierarchy. Childhood risk is less and less about death, illness, or grievous bodily harm, and more and more about future prospects for success.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“The junior Bush’s administration was full of unresolved conflicts of interest, but the officials didn’t need quid pro quo corruption to make sure their buddies prospered—that was an unavoidable consequence of their declared policy agenda. Hell, that was an unavoidable consequence of the Democrats’ declared policy agenda, too.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.” 15”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“Kids are told, “Treat school like your job.” But when it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum wage laws, down come the pedagogical masks, and students go back to being students rather than workers.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Nongrade measures of educational output—like students taking Advanced Placement classes or tests, or kids applying to college—have trended upward, along with labor productivity in other sectors. It’s a twisted system that aspires to train every student for “A” work, then calls it a crisis when the distribution shifts in that direction.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“the worst off might very well be those in the category “some college,” which means debt without the degree.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“they talked to many working-class mothers who were totally invested in giving struggling children their best shot, even if that just meant keeping them in a mainstream high school program. Being a vigilante is of course easier for moms of means, but they’re a minority. The stereotype further buries the uncompensated labor of those working-class mothers who add full-time child advocacy to their list of jobs. Blum points out that single mothers find a special lack of support and extra judgment in a culture that still treats two-parent families as normal. All types engage in maternal bureaucratic vigilantism, but what happens to kids who don’t luck into having Erin Brockovich for a mom?”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“This shift and its justification were foreshadowed once again by Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine: When the class groans about how much homework they’re given, Miss Arnold answers, “You all know that the class has grown a good deal in the last couple of years. That means I can’t work with each one of you as much as I used to. It means high school will be overcrowded, too. It also means that there will be more competition for college admissions. It’s not easy to get into college these days.” 14 The fact that there are more of them doing more work doesn’t reduce the collective burden the way division of labor does in a group project. Rather, it increases the work each of them must do to keep up with each other and avoid being left behind.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“This was the era of young men with “potential,” especially in California, but potential to do what? For whom? As Yoneda’s example shows, potential meant more than courage, intelligence, and a winning smile—he had all three, and they earned him grief from authorities on two shores. It’s worth retracing our steps to the Palo Alto System, in which potential counts for everything—but only a specific kind of potential. A colt that won’t pull a cart is no good to the system, no matter how fast. And a colt that organizes all the horses to strike? That’s no potential at all.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return. And those four years are expensive.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“An investor may want an asset to achieve its full potential, but the investor doesn’t particularly care whether that kid is happy while they do it. A caring parent, on the other hand, balances an interest in a child’s future achievement with the child’s present wellbeing. If the changes in childhood over the past decades have really been made “with the interests of all children in mind,” as the Harley Avenue letter said, then they should, at the very least, not be actively making children unhappier. Evidence, however, suggests that even this small hope is in vain.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Between the 1984–85 and 2011–12 school years, there was an increase of 921 percent in the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses, as well as an increase in the number of tests per student, from 1.37 to 1.76.11 While you might expect that such an expansion would have a negative effect on scores, the percentage of students scoring the top marks of 4 or 5 on their tests stayed constant. 12 A passing score on a high school AP exam counts for credit at over four thousand institutions of higher education, and many of the schools that don’t count them for credit still de facto require them for admission. They are supposed to have the rigor of college classes. The rate of AP class expansion is both example and index of the larger trend: A lot more kids are working a lot harder. For a more micro”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Senator Warren’s hope has been that the government could set borrower interest rates in advance to precisely and consistently balance federal revenues and costs. This was a hope the GAO quickly dashed in their report, helpfully titled “Borrower Interest Rates Cannot Be Set in Advance to Precisely and Consistently Balance Federal Revenues and Costs.”28 It’s the oldest play in the book when it comes to pretending to address an intractable policy issue: Commission a report that says it’s not feasible to do anything at all.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Before the Obama administration’s reform, most student lending was done through the ill-advised Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, under which the federal government backed an intricate private system of dispersed lending agencies at a totally unnecessary cost to taxpayers. There was no sense in the government using its credit rating to support private lenders while the fat cats profited off students.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“Zero tolerance imagines that kids are at risk of being victimized (violence, drugs, general hooliganism), but it also imagines kids as risks to the school and other students. The APA’s research found that zero-tolerance school policing “affected the delicate balance between the educational and juvenile justice systems, in particular, increasing schools’ use of and reliance on strategies such as security technology, security personnel, and profiling, especially in high-minority, high-poverty school districts.” 34 Children—black, indigenous, and Latinx children in particular—are overpoliced, especially within schools (more on this later). When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials