Economics 101: Learning in Life What I Didn't Learn in College

The only reason I did well in Econ in college is that I took the courses with my friend, Bill, who had a mind for all the charts and graphs about guns and butter that I lacked, and he was generous enough to pull me along. 

But even as I've tried to deny the daily damage being inflicted on my retirement account--I've been tossing the unopened statements in the trash for the past several months--the economy has risen to become THE conversation. It pops up in headlines in the daily papers and on my phone. It comes up on walks and over dinner with friends and even during Ralph's and my pillow-talk time at night. We who have Greatest Generation envy are finally to be tested, it seems, by the Great Recession. 

Since history never repeats itself precisely, however, I find myself obsessing about what form the paradigm shifts our lives will take. About the only change I've made so far is to stop acquiring and start whittling: I've made a deal with myself that for every day I don't go to Starbucks, I transfer $5 toward my credit card balance (Last week when I was in bed with the flu and only craved tea, I "made" a whopping $35!) 

This nonetheless represents a big change for me. I have lived my entire adult life by an approach that Calvin Trillin calls "Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow." That's the principal by which if you think you absolutely must buy a fabulous new flat screen TV that cost $5,000 but then remember that if you do there will be no money to pay the mortgage, feed the kids, or train the dog and so you forego it, you have in effect "saved" $5,000 that you can then spend on something else. 

But surely this is only the first of many adjustments, small and large. If few can afford to send their kids to college in the manner to which we upper-middle-class aspirers have planned, will the Harvards and Yales somehow become devalued, replaced by windshield stickers for Georgia State? Will we be blown back a generation, so that we raise our kids the way our parents grew up--living with multi-generations? taking in boarders? We will we start mending the clothes we buy from Target? Will we never be able to retire?

All of this is still in the realm of fantasy right now, and I hope that's where it stays. But in my imagination, what I picture from the turmoil we're in is a more communal life, with greater reliance on and interdependence among friends, family, and neighbors, less waste, and more of a focus on what we really care about because choices have to be made. 

I'd love to hear how the economy has affected you, and where you think we're headed?

Public School? A Private Matter (But It Shouldn't Automatically Be Discounted, Either)

As anyone who's ever read Friends Talking in the Night knows, I struggle mightily with parental guilt--that just-kicked-in-the-gut feeling that comes on unbidden each time you think you might be failing your kids, however temporarily or slightly. I'm agonizing at this particular moment over the fact that Julia is in daycare on what for many kids in Washington is a snow day, while I'm at home blogging and doing research for a speech--never mind that she was happy to be there, kicking about in her boots like the little boy in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day. So I'm totally sympathetic with a piece in yesterday's New York Times "SundayStyles" about the hard calculus many parents are currently facing over whether or not to keep their kids in private-school education in this grizzly economy. 

Still, as the mother of a child in public school, I took umbrage at the writer's utter failure to question--even in a single throw-away line--the possibility that public-school education has any positives. If we hadn't made different decisions with the money we earn would Sam be in a private school? Maybe. But each morning when I hug him goodbye and give him a good luck pat on his backpack, I also feel that he's in a pretty perfect situation and that our family--and, in some tiny way, our neighborhood--benefits from being a part of the school down the hill. That sense is reinforced at pickup each afternoon by the engaged boy who hurls himself into my arms, talking without a breath about Harriet Tubman or Grandma Moses or his science teacher's voyage on an ice-cutter in Alaska.

I learned all I need to know about feeling that your child may be in the wrong place in the few weeks of kindergarten last year when Sam wailed every day, apparently over the stepped-up demands of academia: I couldn't have lived like that for long without making some changes in one direction or another. It's one thing to be unhappy yourself and altogether another to see your child in distress. It's primal. But I'm also reminded of a lesson I learned as a newlywed back in my twenties that seems so obvious now as to never have needed learning: you can't get everything you need out of one relationship--or one school.

I'm not preaching that public school is for everyone. Obviously, we don't know what, if anything, we're missing. And since we won't ever have a control group, only life will tell.