The difficulty in a number of Western democracies is that the playing field is being tilted. For many in the middle class, prosperity seems unattainable because a good education - today's passport to riches - is unaffordable.
Interpretation
Access to quality education is crucial for middle-class prosperity, yet many find it increasingly unaffordable.
In this quote, Raghuram Rajan highlights the challenges faced by the middle class in Western democracies, where the promise of prosperity is eroded by the rising costs of education. He suggests that education has become essential as a means to achieve financial success, yet its inaccessibility for many poses a significant barrier to upward mobility, creating an uneven socioeconomic playing field.
In practice
This quote can be used to spark a discussion at a community forum about the importance of making education affordable for everyone.
The U.S. should worry about the effects of its polices on the rest of the world. We would like to live in a world where countries take into account the effect of their policies on other countries and do what is right, broadly, rather than what is just right given the circumstances of that country.
Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.
The problem with forbearance is that it always looks like a good thing to do until it stops working.
Perhaps the hardest challenge has been to persuade the public, impatient for rapid growth, of the need to ensure stability first. Growth, it is argued, is always more important, regardless of the looming economic risks.
Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.
The gap in India has always been between the promise and the execution.
It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Over the past five years, I've met several presidents, several secretaries of education ... and there is no plan. If you want to save your children, you're going to have to do it yourself. It's just us.
Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world.
A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.
No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn.
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