According to Matthew Yglesias, quite a few people are making the effort to go to yoga classes when “it would clearly be cheaper and more convenient to just unroll your yoga mat in your living room and work out while watching yoga videos.”
We are informed that “when possible, people simply prefer to do this in person with a live human being standing in front of them.”
Yglesias concludes that “affluent American parents will continue to foot the bill for their kids to get schooled in person” rather than making use of online learning.
His analysis would be totally persuasive were it not for the fact that 97 percent of all people who do yoga do their exercises at home, either with or without yoga videos. When possible, people stretch and bend and twist at home, because they do not like other folks staring at them when they are contorting their bodies in a variety of embarrassing ways, especially when their yoga skills are under-developed. A tiny percentage—no more than 3 percent—prefer to have someone coaxing them along or like to snigger at their less proficient classmates.
From these facts it can be concluded that Americans—both affluent and otherwise—will be insisting that their children take their high school classes online so that they are not bullied or embarrassed in the classroom when they are not as skilled as others.
You may wonder where I got my data. I picked it up from the same place Yglesias got his info—the distant corners of nowhere.
-Paul E. Peterson
