This piece originally appeared here in the Troy Messenger.
“Young Americans are starting out with more credit-card debt than generations before them,” reports Oyin Adedoyin in The Wall Street Journal. She notes that the “average credit-card balance for 22- to 24-year-olds was $2,834 in the last quarter of 2023, compared with an average inflation-adjusted balance of $2,248 in the same period in 2013.”
Debt has become a growing problem across the United States, affecting more than just credit card users and Gen Z.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that aggregate household debt balances rose by $212 billion in the final quarter of last year and have surged by $3.4 trillion since 2019. Those figures likely increased since the report was issued in the first quarter of 2024.
Recent college graduates face a difficult job market and high student loan balances. Decades of ready access to federal loans enabled universities to hike tuition and hire expensive administrators, passing costs onto students.
Government monetary policy, targeting inflation driven by pandemic-era measures, resulted in high interest rates. Rising prices and interest rates cause young people to delay marriage and homebuying while accumulating large credit card balances for everyday expenses like groceries or gas.
Are you struggling with credit card debt?
I’m no financial-planning expert, but here are some tips I learned while managing credit card debt as a young professional.
Whenever you receive a surprise check, like a work bonus or birthday gift, put some of it toward paying off your credit card.
If you have multiple cards, prioritize clearing the one with the highest interest rate first. Then tackle the card with the next highest rate until you’ve satisfied all debts.
You could try the snowball method, paying off the card with the smallest balance and then moving on to the next highest balance, and so forth, until you are debt-free.
Make more than the minimum payment whenever possible.
Beware of credit card debt service providers or counseling agencies. I know people who paid these companies every month, only to discover later—after their credit card company sued them—that the payments weren’t used to pay off their debt as promised.
Remember, these companies charge you to help with your debt, which is problematic when you’re already struggling financially.
Look around your house. What do you own that you don’t need? Host a garage sale or use Facebook Marketplace to sell items.
Debt, like trouble, is easy to get into, but hard to get out of. Heed the sage advice of Henry David Thoreau, who supplies this month’s “Word to the Wise”: “Simplify, simplify.”
An idealist who stressed individualism and self-reliance, Thoreau famously lived in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on land owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. His prescription for wellbeing was straightforward: possess fewer things, depend less on pricey goods or services, cultivate your own food, spend less money, and define yourself by your beliefs rather than your belongings.
Don’t clutter life with things; enrich it with experiences. Spend time outdoors with loved ones. Rank quality over quantity when making purchases.
Don’t live above your means. Do more with less. Downsize. Dollar stores offer similar products to high-end grocery stores. Choose fuel-efficient, budget-friendly cars, as all vehicles lose value once driven off the lot.
Children don’t need expensive gifts to have fun. When my kids were little, I bought them expensive Christmas presents, but they preferred playing with the boxes the gifts came in.
Liberate yourself from financial burdens and lead a more fulfilling life. The bottom line is, we overcomplicate rather than simplify. But simplifying alleviates unnecessary stress.
This piece originally appeared here in The Alabama Political Reporter and here in AL.com.
It’s graduation season, yet controversy has overshadowed the end of the academic year at colleges across America.
You’ve likely seen troubling images from college campuses where students express anger over the Israel-Hamas conflict, which began when Israel retaliated against a surprise attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli civilians last October.
Riot gear, tasers, tear gas, mass arrests, handcuffed students, white students calling black cops the KKK, chants of “from the river to the sea,” police dragging away zip-tied faculty—these illustrate the escalating chaos.
How did we get here?
On April 17, Columbia University’s president testified before Congress on antisemitism at her institution. Meanwhile, students at Columbia staged a prolonged campus sit-in, demanding divestment from Israeli ties and businesses. They set up tent encampments, sparking a movement that spread from Ivy League schools to prominent public ones like the University of Alabama.
Passions run high on contentious issues like Gaza. Let’s set them aside, arguendo, to concentrate on legal and normative considerations regarding controversial speech regulation. Campus protests, after all, present a learning opportunity on permissible conduct and expression.
In a universe of purely private interactions, speech regulation is straightforward. If you insult me in my home or business, I can ask you to leave or limit what you may say. Unless private individuals or businesses act on behalf of the government or serve as its surrogate, their restrictions on speech are constitutional.
The First Amendment prohibits only government-imposed speech restrictions. However, many private universities commit to safeguarding free speech in their policy manuals, promotional materials, and student handbooks. They must be held accountable to the standards they establish in these documents.
The First Amendment does not shield students from criminal liability for acts like theft, vandalism, destruction of property, assault, or battery. Committing crimes does not fall under First Amendment rights, and students cannot evade punishment for such actions.
As long as students protest peacefully and within lawful guidelines, committing no crimes or violence, their speech is generally protected on public campuses.
What of these lawful guidelines?
Government, including public universities, can regulate speech’s time, place, and manner with content-neutral rules that serve a significant government interest while allowing alternative communication channels.
Government typically regulates speech that conflicts with others’ rights to speak or act. For example, it may restrict protests on public highways to ensure access for medical emergencies such as a pregnant woman going into labor or an ambulance rushing a heart attack patient to the emergency room. Disruptive behavior near healthcare facilities can exacerbate patients’ conditions, warranting regulation.
Certain regulations on time, place, and manner facilitate rather than impede speech. For instance, a university might differentiate between expressive and disruptive behavior to allow a visiting speaker hosted by a student group to articulate his views without interruption, cancellation, or deplatforming.
Other time, place, and manner regulations protect against violations of rights to health, peace, or safety. A university may forbid bullhorn use near dorm rooms at night or intervene if a mob tries to incite a riot or block a Jewish student’s path to class while shouting antisemitic slurs.
Even ardent libertarians will call the police if agitators disturb their sleep by shouting threats outside their home at 1:00 a.m.
Under First Amendment jurisprudence, the government cannot regulate speech because of its message or subject matter. Laws restricting speech based on its content are presumptively invalid. Accordingly, one’s opinions on events in Gaza are irrelevant when determining the legality of speech or protests about that subject at public universities.
Courts and legislatures have established numerous exceptions to the principle of unrestricted speech. Fraud, perjury, incitement of imminent lawless action (“fighting words”), distribution of child pornography, defamation, false police reports (consider, e.g., the Carlee Russell situation), and unauthorized sharing of highly classified information are prohibited.
Performative expressions that aren’t written or spoken utterances deserve protection but can be regulated. Wearing an armband to protest war is permissible whereas setting off fireworks in a Latin classroom isn’t.
Universities are unique among institutions in their dedication to advancing knowledge. Their administrators face the challenging task of protecting speech and academic freedom while ensuring the safety of students and staff. They risk losing funding or donations by permitting offensive behavior. Addressing demands for political action, such as creating a Palestinian state or providing aid to Ukraine, is beyond their scope and involves national security and foreign policy.
As hubs of intellectual curiosity, universities should adopt a broad definition of speech that they enforce impartially to allow students and professors to express controversial views. Open inquiry contributes to the accumulation of knowledge by stimulating further study and research.
Universities must allow protest and assembly in public spaces. While prioritizing free speech, they must recognize that the threat of violence can deter others from expressing themselves. When students feel safe to share their beliefs, speech thrives. However, if their security is at risk, students may hesitate to voice ideas.
Private universities of course have wider latitude to limit speech. Christian universities can prohibit the promotion of atheism in classrooms or mandate that faculty affirm belief in the Trinity.
Public or private universities implementing valid speech policies should ensure that penalties are proportionate to the offense, avoiding excessive punishment. They can encourage high standards of speech and conduct without resorting to coercion or compulsion. The key is to ensure that student compliance with lawful speech regulations is voluntary.
Context matters; what’s acceptable in one situation may not be in another. Burning the American flag in protest outside the State Capitol Building may be constitutionally protected. Doing the same on a neighbor’s property without his permission is unlawful.
Freedom of speech, an Enlightenment ideal, doesn’t enjoy a long history. British common law historically did not value free speech. It criminalized seditious libel. The American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries penalized blasphemy. Some Founders who ratified the First Amendment later supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which punished criticisms of the government.
Although principles of free speech emerged during Revolutionary America, they didn’t gain widespread legal protection until the 20th century. Today, Americans can criticize their government with impunity, and the government may not discriminate against specific viewpoints. Alabama’s public universities are no exception.
Summoning the police or riot force on student protestors is a last resort, even if those engaged in civil disobedience aim for their eventual arrest.
Funny how the political pendulum swings. In the 1960s and 70s, young leftist activists advocated free speech for peace and nonviolence. Recently, conservatives have championed unfettered expression following campus crackdowns against conservative speakers. However, some conservatives now call for strict measures against student protestors, including those critical of Israel.
The political right should not pressure universities to censor disagreeable or objectionable speech. Instead, it should foster constructive dialogue and respond to expression with expression.
Our Word to the Wise comes from a quote probably erroneously attributed to Justice Holmes: “My right to swing my first ends where your nose begins.” This axiom reflects the libertarian essence of our free speech jurisprudence, which strives to facilitate speech while ensuring it doesn’t violate others’ rights.
University administrators who appreciate the wisdom of Holmes’s words will be better equipped to handle potentially volatile situations involving speech controversies.
This piece originally appeared here in the Troy Messenger.
Are you a jerk?
You probably answered no. Yet you know jerks.
When we imagine jerks, it’s usually others we envision, not ourselves. We almost never say, “I’m a jerk.”
A jerk, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an unlikable person,” especially “one who is cruel, rude, or small-minded.”
Picture the jerks you know. Do you dislike them? Is it because they think you’re a jerk?
Adam Smith, known as the Father of Economics, was chiefly a scholar of moral philosophy. Celebrated as the author of The Wealth of Nations, he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an earlier book in which he described “sympathy” in terms of the “impartial spectator,” an ideal, conjectural third party whose imagined judgment of our actions influences our behavior.
Aversion to offense and desire to please are both selfish and unselfish qualities, Smith postulated. “Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own,” he declared, “and as he is fitter to take care of himself, than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.”
Paradoxically, though, self-regard activates regard for others.
Smith explained that when we assess ourselves as we’re conscious that others assess us, we realize we’re insignificant, just one person among many, and we humble ourselves accordingly. Preferring ourselves to others, we understand that others do likewise. Therefore, we treat others as we wish them to treat us.
If Smith is correct, then why is it difficult to recognize personal errors or unkindness? Isn’t the tendency to double-down on our presumed rightness, to insist that those who criticize us are mistaken?
Often, yes. Why?
Perhaps because Smith’s moral calculus requires two conditions: willingness and effort. One must be open to self-critique, which, in turn, involves intellectual labor. We may intuit our fallibility, but we must work to overcome priors and biases to examine ourselves as would hypothetical, neutral observers.
It’s easier to avoid guilt, shame, or reproof—which accompany correction and instruction—than to challenge assumptions, question convictions, build character, and conform to high standards of conduct.
We prefer comfort to discomfort. But we mustn’t be idle. We must emulate excellence.
Smith himself furnishes this week’s Word to the Wise.
“We must endeavor,” he mused, to view impartial spectators “with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. When seen in this light, if they appear to us as we wish, we are happy and contented. But it greatly confirms this happiness and contentment when we find that other people, viewing them with those very eyes with which we, in imagination only, were endeavoring to view them, see them precisely in the same light in which we ourselves had seen them.”
As relational creatures, we set and measure standards by others’ deeds. Our longing for praise derives from the aspiration to be praiseworthy. We don’t want to be jerks. With will and work, we don’t have to be.
Note: This piece is adapted from Allen Mendenhall’s regular segment “Word to the Wise” on Troy Public Radio.
This post originally appeared here in The Troy Messenger.
A recent report by ResumeBuilder.com found that 31% of employers won’t hire Gen Z candidates. Another 30% claimed they fired Gen Z employees who were on the job a month or less.
Why is this happening? The proffered reasons are that youth dress inappropriately, communicate poorly, request higher pay than is warranted, and avoid necessary tasks.
The company TrueBlue warns that 90% of human resources managers believe half their workforce needs retraining within five years. Why? Talent shortages and skills gaps.
“Kids these days” is a perennial complaint, but maybe there’s more to this story.
The new generation of workers—say, ages 18-25—grew up on social media and smartphones and suffered through the coronavirus pandemic, an alienating period of distancing and isolation, lockdowns and quarantines, downturn and depression, stagnation and strife. Early career professionals have trouble assimilating into the workforce because their social habits are unlike those of Millennials and Boomers. Reared on memes, tweets, and soundbites, they prefer online to face-to-face interaction.
Is this bad? Perhaps. It’s too early to tell.
Some eras undergo dramatic changes that shock older generations. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized Europe, enabling the mass production of books, the dissemination of groundbreaking ideas, mass literacy, scientific progress, and resurgent arts and culture. It also caused religious wars and class conflict.
The Industrial Revolution shifted the commercial focus from agriculture to manufacturing and urban technology. Although it tolerated poor working conditions and pollution, child labor and rising inequality, it also sparked ingenuity and modernization, vastly improving living standards across the world.
Even during periods of radical disruption, life goes on. Humans adapt to their circumstances and adjust practices to meet novel challenges. Exigencies require invention and entrepreneurship. “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils,” declared Sir Frances Bacon, “for time is the great innovator.”
On the other hand, history isn’t a continuous sequence of inexorable progress. Sometimes it involves regress and degeneration. Civilizations once august and glorious collapsed: the Egyptian, Mayan, Khmer, Aksumite, Hittite.
The Fall of Rome led to economic downturn, the loss of infrastructure, and political upheaval that undermined material and intellectual advancement.
Whether our age is one of improvement or decline remains to be seen.
Let’s return from the grand to the practical. If I were a “Gen Zer,” I would use the past as my guide for the future. Historical examples, good or bad, contribute to personal and professional growth. You needn’t reform society writ large; just reform yourself.
Start with small things. Dress appropriately for an interview. Suitable attire is contextual or situational. A job at a law firm is different from occupations on the farm or in factories. Anticipate your audience’s expectations for your appearance and meet them. Don’t expect employers to conform to your standards.
Remain open to continuous learning and different perspectives. Don’t presume you know better or more than others. You may have fresh ideas and unique proficiencies, but stay humble and use those to lift up your peers and organization.
Admit weaknesses and highlight strengths. Collaborate with colleagues who complement your talents. Seek answers. Don’t be ashamed to be wrong or confused.
Monitor your online presence. Do your social media accounts feature words or images you wouldn’t want your grandmother seeing? If so, edit or remove them.
Show gratitude and deference while maintaining confidence and poise. Be diligent and tenacious and don’t presume some task is beneath you. Most importantly, work hard! Complete assignments with excellence.
The novelist Robert Lewis Stevenson furnishes our “Word to the Wise” this week. “The obscurest epoch,” he submits, “is today.” We’re as likely to be as mistaken about essentials as our ancestors were and our posterity will be. In work as in life, for young as for old, we do well to remember that abhorring other generations only invites abhorrence upon ourselves.
Gen Z will grow old and become gatekeepers. The question is, of what?
Note: This piece is adapted from Allen Mendenhall’s regular segment “Word to the Wise” on Troy Public Radio.
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