Lately I’ve been thinking about my nephew’s first semester in college and my son’s applications to grad school, and as it happens, also reading Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris. The book analyzes an entire system, in this case the education and labor system of the US between the 1970s and now. I enjoy analyzing the quantitative evidence behind big trends during my lifetime, some of which I suspected were happening.

Unfortunately, most of the news in this book so far is bad. No parent of a millennial will be surprised to learn that this generation of young people had to work much harder in school, compete more for admission to college, and pay more to attend college, only to graduate into a polarized, wage-flat job market designed to steer the results of their training and effort into shareholders’ pockets.

What did surprise me was the venality of the Obama-era student loan changes. Now that all student loans are processed by the government, there is no way to escape: Big Brother can garnishee your wages, social security and disability benefits, and tax returns, or place a lien on your property. These loans are a huge source of income to the government, so this is one Obama change that Republicans won’t be repealing. Even the forgiveness after twenty years of payments was a trap: in most cases, twenty years of payments will total much more than paying off the entire loan sooner.

I also did not realize that hedge fund manager salaries are not included in salary surveys because there is a law allowing them to report their salaries as investment earnings, at much lower tax rates. How sweet is that! Very poor people often work off the books, so the numbers showing growing salary inequality actually understate the case, with the highest and lowest earners not represented.

The world is so mean now. It has been getting meaner for years, but meanness seems to be strangling us at the moment.

Sadly, low wages and looming loans seem like trivial problems when faced with the case of Daniel Shaver. From what foul depths crawl the jurors who acquit the paramilitary police cowards who gun down unarmed citizens? Would it be justice if those jurors’ adult children were terrorized and murdered, their grandchildren deprived of a parent? Or is that, finally, too mean?