Exactly. It's terrible to frame the "third-worldification" based on how the consumer (or student) behaves in this case. It's only "cheating" when consumers act in their own self interest, but not when a powerful university like Stanford puts a mandatory meal plan in place.
Institutions are always permitted to act in the own self-interest, but not individuals. Always just blame the little people.
> When the system rewards cheating, the rational choice is to cheat—or be disadvantaged.
Doesn't the current president of the U.S. and indeed his posse sorta of espouse this when you look at their backgrounds? This feels like a bigger cultural issue around what the advantaged folks have been doing all along
This has been endemic for a long time. I’ve always known folk who game the system, regardless of politics or demographics
The change I feel is that nobody even cares to be honorable any longer. There is no benefit, even culturally. As the article says, you’d have to be stupid not to do it. I’ve always tried to be honest idk
But laws don’t matter anymore. There is no shaming bad actors. It’s all blatantly out there and no consequences have been doled out so here we are.
Awesome article. Please read the entire thing. Gary takes a well-deserved shot at the US false use of "third‑worldification" as a stand in for "our own low-trust society".
This crap will only stop when there is:
1. A ton of new housing for all people.
2. Treat everyone the same. Same amount of test time etc.
Otherwise, our society is just a race to see who can claim the most special 'privilege' via some form of 'issue' or 'need'.
It would be great to see detailed demographic breakdowns of exactly who's making these heavy special-privilege claims, as the details may surprise a variety of commentators on this forum. Though I don't think Gary has access to that data.
Test time shouldn't be an issue if the test is designed well and you learned the material. I'd support unlimited test time, but the proctor won't sit there forever so it won't work.
> The gaming doesn’t stop at disability. Stanford requires undergrads to purchase an $7,944 annual meal plan—unless they claim a religious dietary restriction the cafeteria can’t accommodate.
Isn’t the mandatory meal plan also a game by the university? A really frustrating trend I’ve seen more companies do nowadays is to tack on mandatory charges for crap that I don’t need or want, and it’s happening everywhere.
If declaring a disability is what it takes to get out of a compulsory meal charge, then it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.
It’s not just students or consumers playing a game, companies (or universities in this case) are playing one too, and it’s called: how to get as much money out of our customers as possible.
That’s because it’s smart business when you abuse your captive customer base, totally different thing. When pesky customers do the same back to you, well, time to complain about the ‘third worldification of American institutions,’ or something.
In Tan's partial defense, I don't think he would be complaining about "third worldification of American institutions" just over evasion of meal-plan rent-seeking. The original, much higher-profile story was about the failure modes of using the disability accommodations process to allocate broadly desirable things that are rivalrous or positional (as opposed to narrowly-scoped accommodations), and then Tan tacked on a tangent about the meal-plan thing because it has surface similarities and also doesn't make the students look great, without considering whether it's really an instance of the same core issue.
Remember that Garry Tan believes in a largely illiberal society where our institutions are organized around CEOs rather than democratic control. Of course the people exist to be turned into goo to be extracted as dollar bills.
Yeah, my step-daughter is a vegetarian. She cannot opt out of the several thousand dollar a year meal plan at her college despite the campus dining facilities having often only one not-particularly-good vegetarian option (I'm not vegetarian but when visiting I've tried the options).
So we're left with paying her credit card to buy groceries and a largely unused meal plan.
> it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.
Well, that's often because Aramark and Chartwells (Compass) require that in their contracts. My partner is the Accounting Manager for another university in our state and that's mandated in their contract (along with other clauses like "any event on campus must be offered to us for catering first, and we will either cater it or decline, and only then can you use another caterer").
There can be debates on why that is allowed in the negotiation, though.
I agree the US is trending towards third-world mentalities. Statistics aren't good. >50% of Americans now see homeownership as out of reach. Studies keep cropping up stating at 30-40% of young Americans will never marry. Never mind that many people need to pass 5-10 rounds of interviews to get a junior level role.
This all seems to stem from one demographics greed or another. Our parents generation and suppressing housing builds. The corporations using monopolies of dating applications which at this point seem to be suppressing relationship formulation more than increasing it. The political classes using tariffs for unclear purposes to shrink our economy.
Doesn’t the “third world” (maybe better referred to as the “Global South” now that the Berlin Wall has fallen) has very high marriage rates? Models of home ownership are probably different enough to be incomparable to what it is the US. Nevermind mortgages, but things like running water as well. I would almost imagine “apprenticeship” is much more common and healthy (“junior roles”) in a lot of the more prosperous places in the Global South as well.
I think by "third world mentalities" he just means devolving into "fuck you, I got mine" low trust societies where everyone is stealing and scamming everyone else because there's no upwards mobility, no social contract where hard work and honesty gets you ahead, it's either scam or be scammed by unscrupulous people who will take advantage of your hard work and trust in the system against you, so that they can get ahead and then rug-pull you.
I see the same sentiment from his comment on young people everywhere in the developed west US, Canda, EU, Australia, etc.
I like to say low trust-worthiness societies. High trust societies are often exploited by con artists and the like who if sufficient then become low trust.
Funny, “fuck you, I got mine” has always been, imo, one of America’s core defining cultural values.
/s, a little bit. I find all of this lacking analytical or quantitative rigor and it’s bringing racists and bigots with preconceived worldviews out from their hiding spaces (not necessarily you, but definitely the elsewhere in this thread).
Anyway, we should all bake bread for our neighbors a bit more and make the world a nicer place to live in.
We were founded by deeply religious Christians who were exactly the opposite of that mindset. Your perspective is one of ignorance about well established historical facts that most children learn in grade school. Free market liberalism was not the goal of puritans. Tough they may have traded with natives, they were quite religious, arguably to a fault.
> We were founded by deeply religious Christians who were exactly the opposite of that mindset.
This is ahistorical nonsense. You’re really saying the country of “Manifest Destiny” had no attitude of “Fuck you, I got mine” because they were deeply religious Christians?
Not to mention “Christian” has been bastardized so hard that I find it hard to imagine there’s really much overlap between what a “Christian” today believes vs what they believed in 1776. Let’s take, for example, their recorded views on the “personhood” of indigenous peoples (and Africans!) and whether they were capable of being saved by Christ. Never mind the absolute multitude of sects that existed then but don’t exist now and vice versa.
Your perspective is one of myth-building and religious supremacy, which is well-refuted by the significant evidence in the form of history books as well as primary sources.
> Tough the may have traded with natives
How benevolent.
You should really read about what it actually means to perform a genocide on indigenous peoples. The ugly side. Read the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a self-proclaimed Christian. Let me know how you feel about the passage where he forced an enslaved person to defecate into another enslaved person’s mouth.
> I agree the US is trending towards third-world mentalities.
Ok, and which means...
> 50% of Americans now see homeownership as out of reach
What lol. It makes no sense. The correlation between a country's GDP and home ownership rate is the opposite of what you're implying here. Usually in poorer countries more percentage of population own their own houses.
> Studies keep cropping up stating at 30-40% of young Americans will never marry
And this makes even less sense. Third-world is where new babies come from right now.
You literally just described first-world problems.
Having registered disability is not the same as getting generous accommodations. The article has no data on accommodations themselves. At best, it has a few anecdotes about rooms allocations.
I am totally fine with people avoiding expensive or bad meal plan. The fact that you have to pay for an expensive or bad meal plan should be the scandal, not the fact that students avoid it.
And I am even fine with accommodation from class participation. Too much of it is activity for points only which wastes everybody's time.
Room allocations - from what I understand, there is a pre-assignment process for housing.
Students are “gaming the system” by getting access to buildings in specific locations (to lower their campus commute times) or by forcing single occupancy for themselves in 2+ occupancy dorms (which then creates a housing crunch elsewhere as you might end up with a triple or a quad elsewhere to compensate for it).
To be clear, the evidence here is that one student tweeted and that many more Stanford students have a registered disability (which doesn't not even mean that they are receiving accommodations) than students at community colleges.
For me to buy this moral panic I need to see more compelling evidence. Can we see the students that clearly are getting undeserved accommodations? That is the actual thing people are worried about. But zero of the articles whinging about this can point to data here.
Could it be, I dunno, that rich students are vastly more likely to have access to the medical system that can identify and document various things like ADHD?
