MFA vs. NYC

On the two distinct literary cultures in the US.

Beware - it's a mega article - but very interesting. Has some parallels to the film school. A scathing point:

MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students' work—especially shocking if you're the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

Not much of the article addresses it - but is the dirty little secret of the Western world with America at the center - that technology has gotten to the point where our human labor simply isn't needed? Sad fact: we don't have shit to do? Can our society run on basically only 10-20% of the top people performing functions and the rest just being consumers? Oh boy.