Can These Bones Live

Taxes, Spending, and Revenues

2012-03-08T11:33:00.002-08:00

William Voegli has a fascinating and informative article in the City Journal on the anti-tax argument. Basically, he argues that the "anti-tax absolutists" are committed to shrinking the welfare state, which has been the main source of increases in government expenditures over the past few decades. I found Voegli's graphs, which I reproduce here, particularly thought provoking.

The first graph shows inflation-adjusted per capita spending, revenues, and GDP from 1965 to 2008. Given that the graph ends about the time that we plunged into a major recession, it would be interesting to continue this for a couple of years. But Voegli's main point here is that our spending has increasingly outpaced our revenues, except for a brief period in the late 1990s when there was a spike in revenues (probably due to income generated from the bubble economy of that period). I note that the increase in spending flattened out some during the 1990s, and then moved sharply upward throughout the 2000s. This graph also indicates that the revenue-spending gap isn't something recent, or a consequence of a particular set of policies of events, but a long-term trend. This suggests that there is a deep structural problem in the American political economy.

The second graph shows where the money went. Voegli divides spending into welfare expenditures, national defense, and "housekeeping" (basically, everything except the first two). This is where it gets really interesting. Defense did rise in the periods of the Vietnam War, the military buildup of the 1980s, and then again in the era of the Iraq-Afghanistan actions. It also fell just after Vietnam and following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the huge growth came in per capita welfare expenditures. For a brief time in the early 80s these did not go up, but they also didn't go down. After that, welfare spending rose sharply, with no evidence that it would end. So, Voegli argues that the anti-tax folks are really questioning the realism of the ceaseless expansion of the welfare state.

I'd be interested in finding out how much of the welfare growth is due to population aging, increasing both medical expenses and the number of retirees per worker. There is also the problem of how to cut spending more generally, given that every program creates an interest group. It would have been less painful (but politically problematic) to cut back in the 1990s when jobs were more abundant. Still, I think it reasonable to interpret this growth in government welfare spending as analogous to the household that puts more of its income into consumption than into investment. Ultimately, this will drive the household to bankruptcy.

Over Two Million Served

2012-03-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

An article in the current Chronicle of Higher Education points out how recently the "graduation rate" measure came into existence. Calling the graduation rate "a basic consumer fact," the article observes that the federal government didn't even begin collecting this information until the 1990s. Now that the common measure has become more inaccurate, in part because of the large number of students who transfer between colleges, the regulators are proposing improved systems of measurement. But let's consider the possibility that the very idea of the graduation rate is misleading and destructive.

Many institutions should graduate low percentages of the people who attend. Any commuter college that serves the needs of local people, for example, should be available for those who take classes at their own paces and who take the classes they need when they can take them. Some may study not to get that piece of paper at the end, but (mirabile dictu) to learn something. And the college is not a whit worse for their not having obtained the degree.

By holding up the graduation rate as a measure of quality, moreover, federal policymakers focus attention on the credential, and thereby help to drain it of its meaning. The measure turns education into the processing of numbers. The more people we can move through the system to credentials, the better we seem to be, even if they are actually learning nothing.

In order to increase the numbers of degrees we hand out, we have to make it easier to get those wall ornaments. This means lowering the difficulty of education, turning it into an intellectual junk food for mass consumption. At the same time, since graduation is redefined as the responsibility of the institution, not the individual, the concept of the graduation rate encourages passivity and entitlement by the "consumers" of supposedly higher education.

The Late James Q. Wilson

2012-03-04T14:30:00.000-08:00

James Q. Wilson (1931-2012), who has died at age 80, is best known for his “broken windows” theory of crime and policing. Social order, he argued, requires constant attention to detail. Broken windows in a neighborhood send the signal that no one cares about maintaining an orderly environment and this encourages breakers of windows and rules to smash more of both, resulting in a steady disintegration of social order. To restore order, Wilson and his colleagues proposed community policing, a strategy that would take police out of patrol cars and put them into daily interaction with people in communities, so that police could become agents in rebuilding order.

Debate about the effectiveness of community policing continues. New York City did see its crime rates drop after police began to adopt some of Wilson’s ideas, but causation is difficult to determine. I am sympathetic to the theory of “broken windows,” since it is one of the few modern social theories to recognize the importance and fragility of social order. But I wonder how much police can do to establish order. Part of my skepticism is based on agreement with another area of Wilson’s own work.

In The Moral Sense (1993), Wilson drew on biology and the social sciences to argue that human beings have an innate sense of morality. This sense, though, is not fixed; it is developed through social exchanges based on the interdependence of individuals. The most fundamental interdependent relationships exist within families, which develop the innate moral sense (and therefore social order) through the socialization of children. Beyond families, friends and neighbors shape one another’s moral sense.

I think Wilson was largely right in this book, but that is exactly what raises questions for me about how much police can do. The broken windows of a neighborhood are symptoms of an underlying problem, the disintegration of basic social institutions. This is beyond anything that the police can handle. Living and working as I do in a city in which a significant portion of the population has fallen into a Hobbesian state of crime and violence, I see this as more than an academic question. You can replace a broken window. All the patrolmen can’t put a broken society together again.

She's Not Even an Acquaintance

2012-03-03T10:28:00.002-08:00

Melissa Harris-Perry is not my friend. Although my university recently hired her, I have never met her. When and if I do meet Dr. Harris-Perry, I will be careful never to commit the offense of calling her a friend, even if our interactions are amiable. Normally, I would not be so stand-offish. My usual habit is to consider as “friends” all of those with whom I have pleasant exchanges and to refer to them as such. But this easy-going practice is likely to provoke a furious reaction from Dr. Harris-Perry.

This past September, Dr, Harris-Perry published an article in The Nation in which she claimed that the decline in support for President Obama among “white liberals” was due to “electoral racism.” Now, it seems to me that the only logical way to support this argument would be to offer evidence that there was some increase in racism, however measured, among white liberals during the period that that support for President Obama declined. Now that the President’s numbers seem to be going up again (at least for the time), supporting this thesis would require demonstrating that this mysterious phenomenon of electoral racism somehow went back down again. But Dr. Harris-Perry’s main form of “evidence” was to claim that “progressives” are disappointed with Obama’s healthcare program, but that Bill Clinton was re-elected without having passed healthcare legislation. Well, Tulane did not hire Harris-Perry as a full professor on the strength of her rather dubious analytical and methodological skills, but because she’s on TV a lot.

Joan Walsh, defending the good name of white liberals, responded to Harris-Perry in the online magazine Salon.com. Essentially, Walsh said, in more detail, what I just said, that there isn’t any evidence for the professor’s claims. But I think I’ll just ignore Walsh’s arguments. That’s what Melissa Harris-Perry did. Instead of responding to arguments, she denounced Walsh for referring to her at the opening of the Salon piece as “my friend.” This, supposedly, was an instance of a rhetorical strategy that white people use to protect themselves from the righteous indignation of black people speaking up against racism. I couldn’t see how Harris-Perry could stretch the two words “my friend” into “I’m not a racist because I have a black friend,” but the accusation does show imagination, if not logic. Harris-Perry went on to scold whites for a series of other strategies that they use to avoid facing up to the evil truth about themselves.

This past month, I received an invitation to attend the inaugural lecture of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. To the best of my understanding, this project was created to make a position for media figure Melissa Harris-Perry, who serves as its founding director. The lecturer was Duke University Professor of English and Law, Karla FC Holloway. Professor Holloway is herself no stranger to indignation and groundless accusations. She was prominent among the Duke University faculty who publicly condemned the lacrosse players accused of rape. Even after the players inconveniently turned out to be innocent, Professor Holloway continued to lambast them as perpetuating some pervasive and vaguely defined injustice.,

I’m afraid that the selection of the inaugural speaker may set a pattern for Dr. Harris-Perry’s new project: lots of moral outrage and shibboleth and very little clear reasoning. In fairness, though, I could be entirely wrong because I didn’t attend the talk. I probably would have been welcome if I had managed to avoid giving voice to any nonconformist views. But there’s always the risk of being accused of strategic friendliness.

The Fisher Case

2012-03-01T14:39:00.000-08:00

Ilya Somin has an interesting post on the Fisher case now before the Supreme Court. As Somin discusses, one of the major arguments against the use of race-based affirmative action in Texas is that Texas has another means of "diversifying" its college populations. This is the 10 percent plan, under which the University of Texas accepts the top 10 percent of students from every school district. Since school districts in Texas (and elsewhere) tend to have different racial and ethnic compositions, this already funnels students from "under-represented" groups into the state's top university. Therefore, the Supreme Court could rule that an explicit race conscious policy is unnecessary to create racial diversity. Somin warns that this could be dangerous because it would lead affirmative action advocates to seek ways of promoting racial preferences that would be nominally race neutral, but would in practice give advantages to members of protecting groups. Somin compares this to Jim Crow laws, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, that had the appearance of being racially neutral, but actually disenfranchised blacks.

I think this is a good point. Since the 1973 Bakke case made the "compelling national interest" of diversity, rather than compensatory preferences for individuals in historically disadvantaged groups, the main legally acceptable justification for race conscious policies, "diversity" has often become a subterfuge for those who believe that individuals in some minority groups deserve preferential treatment or who want to advance group interests. I remember a few years ago attending a symposium on affirmative action in which some participants openly declared that advocates had to use the language of diversity in order to achieve preferences as compensation. So, given that "diversity" has become a slippery strategy for achieving goals that are not legally permissible, it is realistic to expect that putatively "race neutral" diversity policies could become strategies for pursuing entirely "race conscious" goals.

Made of Paper: Moby Dick

2012-02-29T14:36:00.001-08:00

About thirty-five years ago, I spent a miserably cold winter in upstate New York. Of course, any winter in upstate New York is likely to be miserable for a native of Louisiana. During that time, I consoled myself with what may be the best novel ever written, Herman Melville's Moby Dick. It was more than a book. It was a revelation. There are a few works of fiction that make one feel like the authors must have been writing down the dictation of some voice greater than that of a simple human being. This story of the wandering outcast Ishmael on the ship guided by the madly questing Ahab has the quality of a parable, but a parable with many and changing points. It contains a world of literary forms, with extended soliloquies on philosophical subjects, tales within tales, and essays on cetology; all bound together by a grim fatalism.

Melville's earliest success came as a writer of adventure stories, based on his own sea voyages and life among South Sea cannibals. His most successful early book, Typee, published in 1846, told of his experiences among the cannibal islanders of the Marquesas after he deserted his ship. Omoo, which came out a year later, is a fictionalized version of his voyage to Tahiti, a mutiny there on his ship, and his observations of life on that island. Already, Melville was becoming more than an writer of adventure stories with Omoo, which may have been why it was less popular than Typee with the general reading public.

Mardi, published in 1849, is a curious book. It starts out as another sea voyage, but about mid way through, the countries visited by the main characters turn symbolic and one-dimensional, and it becomes an allegory about life in America. It is as if Melville turned from the sea-tale to the philosophical narrative, and the two don't seem to fit together. But read as a first try at what he was to accomplish two years later in Moby Dick, it comes across as Melville's striving for a novel that would be more than a novel.

Moby Dick did not sell well and Melville became one of those largely ignored by his own era and discovered by posterity, although who knows what that means in a posterity that may cease reading books. I left upstate New York as soon as spring arrived, having decided that I wanted to take a long bicycling trip through the rural parts of the eastern United States to return to New Orleans. I had to travel light, so I carried only one book in my panniers: The Portable Melville.

Money Motivates Students

2012-02-28T17:28:00.000-08:00

Should we pay people to act in their own best interest? That question occurred to me when looking at a report on the Advanced Placement Inventive Program (APIP). This program offers cash incentives to students and teachers in inner city minority schools for passing scores on Advanced Placement exams, on the grounds that this will make them more likely to succeed in college and place them in positions to earn higher incomes later in life. According to the analysis of C. Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern University, participants in the APIP were more likely to graduate from college and to earn higher wages later in life.

I’m not surprised by the fact that you can motivate people by paying them. But to the extent that motivation can produce better outcomes for students, this must mean that poor outcomes were not the result of barriers or discrimination but of lack of motivation. So, those who lack motivation to achieve should be paid to get ahead. Why? So that they will be paid even more throughout their lives.

The report does say that 70% funding for APIP comes from private donors. But that still leaves 30% paid by school districts. Private donors, of course, can donate their money however they like. But it seems strange to me that taxpayers are paying under-motivated students to improve their own lives, especially when (a) there are plenty of jobs at the bottom of the labor market that need to be filled, and (b) some of those taxpayers may be paying to motivate other people’s children to compete for a limited set of economic opportunities with those taxpayers’ own highly motivated children.

So, the author looks at one important question about this kind of program: does it work? But there is another, more essential question: even if it does work, does it make sense?

Riots in Afghanistan

2012-02-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

The latest news from Afghanistan reports that rioting over the inadvertent burning of Korans by U.S. forces has begun to wane, but that tensions remain high in the country. But the attacks on our forces should lead us to ask some serious questions about what we are doing there. We are clearly not in that country by popular demand.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan because its government, such as it was, provided a base to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaida organization. Now, bin Laden is dead. Al Qaida is less of a coherent group than a name for amorphous anti-Western radicalism. We will not root out anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan, no matter how long we stay there. We prefer the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai to that of the Taliban, but the extent of his control over the country is limited, even with our support. When we leave, as we will have to do sooner or later, Karzai will either be replaced by the Taliban or he will come to terms with them.

It is extremely unlikely that we can hope to leave a stable pro-American government in power, as we managed to do in West Germany and Japan following our occupation of those countries. Those European nations were state societies, run by governmental bureaucracies and populated by people accustomed to bureaucratic governance. After lopping off the objectionable leaderships, we could substitute them with leaders we found more congenial. Afghanistan is a tribal society. Even the ruthless Taliban could hold sway only in regions where they can coordinate with local leaders, and then only loosely. As the recent riots show, the Afghan version of Islam is not just a religious culture different from ours; it is a different social and political culture. In sum, we are not going to establish stability in Afghanistan. If we define victory as creating an order that will not collapse in turmoil as soon as we leave, then we are setting ourselves up for defeat.

Consequences of the Cold War

2012-02-26T12:36:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I commented on the new biography of George F. Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis. Kennan interests me because he used broad historical thought to understand and respond to contemporary international issues. In particular, as Gaddis tells us, Kennan’s analysis of the Soviet Union made use of Edward Gibbon’s argument about the Roman Empire, that maintaining an empire strains the political resources of an imperial power. While Kennan is often heralded as the architect of containment theory, he also became concerned that efforts to contain Communist expansion around the world would ultimately strain the resources of the United States.

As we look back at the Cold War, we may want to consider how the strains and challenges of that era re-shaped American government and society, and to think about how some of our current problems may be consequences of that re-shaping. War generally tends to concentrate power in a central government: as Randolph Bourne observed, “war is the health of the state.” The long global struggle with the Soviet Union, immediately following the hot war of the 1940s, moved more control from state and local governments toward Washington, D.C. As I’ve argued in a number of places, expanding federal control over public education had its roots in the effort to mobilize the socialization and technical training of Americans to face a foreign enemy. I think one can connect the increase in domestic centralization in all aspects of American life to the projection of American power around the world. The emergence of government as the largest employer in the nation, with concomitant increases in expenditures, resulted from the projection of American power around the world.

We won the Cold War essentially by outspending the Soviets. The USSR was always much weaker than we were in its internal structure, since it maintained itself as a superpower by forcing converting much of its inefficiently produced surplus and the inefficiently produced surplus of its subject nations into military might. The United States, with a more productive economy, could extend itself much further before going bankrupt. Nevertheless, the Cold War did place us on the path of ever-greater internal and foreign non-investment expenditures. The first crisis from these expenditures came at the beginning of the 1970s, when the effort to simultaneously fund a war in Southeast Asia and a war on poverty tended to both push up wages and prices and place a drag on productivity. We temporarily escaped from this dilemma by becoming an investment center. Cutting capital gains taxes in the 1980s, while retaining internal subsidies of consumption and external spending on our competition with the Soviets, did help in the re-starting of domestic investment and the attraction of foreign investment, but this was largely speculative investment in overvalued new communications technologies and in non-productive consumption.

The end of our struggle with the Soviet Union has not ended history, and challenges from foreign powers remain with us. But perhaps the end of the Cold War, our current recession, and present debates over the proper size and activities of the federal government should lead us to reflect on how our present situation may have resulted from strains created by the interlinked projection of American power abroad and centralization of control at home.

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis

2012-02-25T13:25:00.001-08:00

George F. Kennan has long been one of my favorite historical characters, perhaps because he combined acting on the historical stage with criticizing the play’s production. I believe I first read his American Diplomacy, 1850-1950 when I was an undergraduate, although maybe it was late in high school. Later, when I was working in the resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, I became interested in the broader geopolitical struggles behind the war in Southeast Asia, and I read Kennan’s classic 1946 “Long Telegram” from the USSR, his 1947 “X” article in Foreign Affairs, and his books Russia Leaves the War and Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. Sometime after that, I read his The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. The two volumes of Kennan’s memoirs sit on my shelf, but I confess that I have only begun the first. Kennan’s ability to bring a broad analytical perspective to the events of his own time and to the historical sources of those events, along with his talents as a writer and his reputation as one of the shapers of twentieth century American foreign policy, gave him a depth unusual among American public figures.

Biographer John Lewis Gaddis, a major authority in his own right on the Cold War, can certainly be counted as one of Kennan’s admirers. He ends this detailed but engaging biography with a brief essay arguing for Kennan’s claim to greatness. But Gaddis does not portray Kennan as a saint. He points out Kennan’s personal flaws of vanity and sensitivity (although I did wonder if these flaws might not have been normal human characteristics magnified by the self analysis in Kennan’s private journals. How vain and sensitive would we all appear if we recorded our private thoughts?) It also becomes clear in this biography that Kennan often advocated highly questionable policies, as when, in his Reith Lectures, he advocated U.S. withdrawal from a neutralized, unified Germany without sufficient guarantees against Soviet domination. Gaddis also makes clear that Kennan had little grasp of the role that domestic politics necessarily plays in American foreign policy, a strange shortcoming for a man who analyzed Soviet foreign policy in terms of the internal situation of the USSR. Gaddis acknowledges that Kennan spoke highly of President Kennedy, who flattered Kennan but largely ignored his advice and ideas in practice, and disliked President Reagan, who carried out much of the containment strategy Kennan outlined in the Long Telegram and X article, thereby hastening the collapse of the Soviet regime.

As Gaddis makes clear, though, Kennan did play a big part in many of the strategic decisions of the twentieth century. In Portugal during World War II, Kennan was largely responsible for negotiating the use of the Azores as U.S. airbases. The Long Telegram and the article he wrote for Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X” helped turn official and public opinion away from the view that the only alternative to outright war with the Soviet Union was a Henry Wallace-style faith in the virtue and goodwill of the Stalinist dictatorship. As a policy planner after the war, he was more responsible than anyone else for the Marshall Plan.

Drawing on Kennan’s own papers, interviews with family members and others close to him, and on vast archival sources, Gaddis gives a detailed view of a man he clearly admires greatly, but not without reservation. Appropriately, he concentrates on Kennan’s intellectual and public life, considering the private life and passions only insofar as these shed light on temperament and motivations. I thought it particularly interesting that Kennan’s thinking on grand strategy emerged from his wide general reading, as well as his understanding of Russian history and culture. In particular, the idea of containing the Soviet Union until it collapsed due to its own contradictions and the strain of maintaining a vast empire apparently came to Kennan from his reading of Edward Gibbon.

The Fisher Case and the Quality of Debate

2012-02-23T14:02:00.003-08:00

Affirmative action is an emotional issue, and I should probably not be surprised that some on all sides of the issue take leave of reasoned argument when they turn to this topic. Still, I was taken aback by some of the rhetoric in today's debate among putative experts in The New York Times. The worst of these is unquestionably the piece by Columbia Law Professor Patricia J. Williams. Essentially, Professor Williams argues that we have not moved beyond race in American society. But rather than constructing a logical argument based on this premise, she lectures that "we need to acknowledge the race-conscious biases and anxieties lying in plain sight" and she excoriates a "counterproductive backlash that echoes the plaints of 'reverse racism.'" She concludes, "To argue that race doesn’t matter or shouldn’t be considered at all in admissions processes that are taking place in an echo-chambered world blaring with explicitly racialized competition is not merely hypocritical but foolish." I wonder if it has ever crossed Professor Williams' mind that it is possible for someone to think differently than she does without being a fool and a hypocrite.

Ian Haney-Lopez, also arguing for affirmative action, doesn't call his opponents names. He adopts another rhetorical strategy: accuse them of bad intentions. He believes the Court will likely declare affirmative action unconstitutional, and describes this as the end result of a long political war against "racial justice" by conservative politicians and judges. Well, at least the conspirators against justice aren't hypocrites.

After these poisonous diatribes, I could almost have been won over by George Washington University Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen, also arguing in favor of affirmative action, who observes that "reasonable people can disagree about the civic effects of affirmative action." Rosen maintains that unless the Constitution clearly forbids a policy, courts should defer to the people's representatives, and that the 14th Amendment doesn't forbid race-conscious policies in some situations. Now, I am not an attorney or a Constitutional law scholar, but I would think that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment does require that all individuals receive the same treatment under the law. It does not require that the law counteract social and historical disadvantages by conferring legal advantages on members of underrepresented categories. Moreover, if it were left up to the people's representatives, as Rosen suggests, then probably affirmative action would be abolished in most places. So, I don't entirely buy the argument, but I appreciate the fact that he at least made one.

On the negative side, Peter H. Schuck, a law Professor at Yale University, engages in less demonizing than Professors Williams and Haney-Lopez, but he still inserts a dig at the "political pressure from minority activists [that] will never cease." Professor Schuck does, I think, make the very good point that the goals of affirmative action keep moving further away, observing that the University of Texas, not satisfied with achieving racial balances at the campus level, has been justifying its race-conscious admissions by seeking these balances even at the classroom level. Unfortunately, at the end of his comments he also indulges in rhetorical excess, concluding that "For the court to uphold the Texas system would compound the felony [of race-based preferences]." He doesn't accuse his opponents of being felons, I think, but I don't think the strong language helps his case.

Vikram Amar, Associate Dean and professor of law at U.C.,Davis takes a diplomatic approach. Well, he is a dean, so maybe he's acquired the habit of diplomacy on the job. He acknowledges that using race to remedy past discrimination or to create diversity may be inconsistent with the basic value of individual equality, but suggests that sometimes you just have to use race to get beyond racism, in a paradoxical formulation he borrows from Justice Harry Blackmun. Again, I am not a Constitutional scholar, but if I recall the Bakke and Grutter decisions correctly, the Court decided that remedying past discrimination is not a legitimate basis for race-conscious admissions policies, leaving only the diversity rationale. But Amar says "it is tough to know when affirmative action has outlived its usefulness." He suggests, in what I take is a line of argument similar to that of Professor Rosen that, "As wise as the court is, sometimes it should let the political processes decide when contested policies should sunset." It is nice of Dean Amar to praise the wisdom of the judges and not accuse them of being parties to a conspiracy against racial justice. But, again, I think that if affirmative action really were left up to political processes, it would have been gone long before now.

Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon, a theoretical physicist and not a lawyer, presents what I saw as the most reasoned argument. He is also the only one to introduce evidence. He argues that SAT results are reasonably good predictors of academic success and there are differences among the racial categories in average SAT results. Therefore, race-based preferences are counter to meritocratic ideals and bring in students whose abilities vary by race. I happen to agree with this argument, but if I were looking for a way to challenge it, I would probably focus on just how well SAT tests actually do predict success. I might also argue that as long as we rely on current ability distributions, we can never hope to re-distribute abilities across categories in the future. Of course, such a response would raise the problem of using law and public policy as an instrument for re-designing a society. Ultimately, though, Hsu impressed me as not only having a logical, fact-based argument, but as making his case solely on the basis of that argument, rather than on accusations of foolishness, hypocrisy, insidious motivations, and criminal actions.

Affirmative Action Goes to Court Again

2012-02-22T13:42:00.001-08:00

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case of Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas because of race-based admissions policies. The Court is unlikely to speak with one voice on this case, which will probably revolve around whether the Texas system exceeded the conditions for the use of race in decisions established by the 2003 Grutter decision. That earlier decision, like others, was a narrow 5-4 in favor of allowing racial considerations. From the time that the Court began hearing affirmative action cases, differing interpretations of equal protection and freedom from discrimination have prevented unanimity of views. Majorities have consistently allowed race-based decisions in educational admissions and employment, but have agreed that these decisions must be subject to strict scrutiny. Especially in education cases, the tendency has been to accept affirmative action as a means of pursuing a compelling national interest of diversity, rather than as a means of compensating individuals or groups for past discrimination.

Regents of Univ. Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 was the most critical Supreme Court case regarding affirmative action in education. The case originated in 1973 when Allen Bakke, a white man, applied for admission to the University of California-Davis Medical School. Under its affirmative action program, the school had reserved 16 of 100 seats for minority or socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants, who were judged by a committee separate from the one that judged regular applicants and who could be admitted with lower grade point averages (GPAs) and Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) scores than regular applicants. After Bakke was denied admission, he wrote to the chairman of the admissions committee complaining because he had not been considered for a reserved seat for the disadvantaged and because no whites received these reserved seats. Bakke applied again in 1974, this time with a substantially higher MCAT score and was again denied admission, although minority applicants were with lower scores and GPAs than his own were admitted through the separate special admissions process. Bakke sued in the California Superior Court, maintaining that he had experienced discrimination, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the California Constitution. The case went before the California Supreme Court, which decided in Bakke’s favor by eight to one. The university then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The University of California maintained that it was justified in using race as a factor in admissions and that its separate admissions program was a legitimate way of doing so. Bakke maintained, again, that reserving places violated his right to equal treatment and subjected him to discrimination. Justices William Brennan, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun supported the use of race in admissions to educational programs in order to provide a remedy to minorities for the present-day consequences of past discrimination and racial prejudice. Chief Justice Warren Burger, Potter Stewart, John Paul Stevens, and William Rehnquist, opined that the admissions policy at Davis violated Bakke’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act. Justice Lewis Powell argued that treating individuals differently on the basis of race requires a compelling state interest. That compelling state interest seen was the achievement of a heterogeneous student body.

Justice Powell wrote the opinion of the Court, in which the four justices who favored race conscious admissions joined in part. A special admissions quota, such as the one employed by UC-Davis, could not be used because it constituted discrimination. Race could be treated as a factor, but was subject to strict scrutiny. Bakke was ordered admitted and the most important Court decision on educational affirmative action entered history as a split decision in which no other Justice agreed entirely with Powell’s opinion for the Court. The Bakke decision therefore meant that educational institutions could continue to seek to increase their admissions of members of racial minorities or other represented groups but only to increase diversity, not to compensate for past discrimination. Moreover, membership in an underrepresented group could be only one of many factors in an admissions decision.

However, during the 1970s, the Court also found that whites, as well as minority members, were constitutionally protected as individuals from racial discrimination. In McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co., 427 U.S. 273 (1976), in a rare unanimous decision on this topic, the Court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination against whites, as well as non-whites. This placed the Court in a complicated position. On the one hand, Bakke allowed deciding (i.e., discriminating) on the basis of race to achieve perceived larger national ends. On the other hand, the Court also seemed to find against just this kind of discrimination.

Some members of the Court attempted to juggle this apparent contradiction through advancing the concept of "national interest" as a counterweight to individual rights and by subjecting race-based decisions to "strict scrutiny," meaning that racial decisions had to be (or present themselves as) narrowly tailored to address the specific goals of national interest. The two critical college admissions cases of the early twenty-first century were based on this juggling.

In the case of Grutter v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 306 (2003), In 1996, Barbara Grutter had been denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School, despite a 3.8 grade point average and a score of 161 on the Law School Admissions Test. The Law School maintained a policy that gave special consideration to members of minority groups, and Grutter’s attorneys argued that this policy had denied her a place and therefore constituted discrimination against her under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. At the same time, the Court considered the case of two white applicants to the University of Michigan’s undergraduate program in Gratz v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 244 (2003). Jennifer Gratz had been classified as “well-qualified” when she applied in 1995 and Patrick Hamacher as “qualified” when he applied in 1997, but both were rejected. The university maintained an undergraduate admissions policy that automatically gave 20 points to underrepresented racial minorities. Gratz had actually been rejected before the point system had been enacted, raising questions about whether she had standing to bring suit, but the Court ruled that she did.

Ultimately, the Court ruled that the Law School’s policy was acceptable, because it served the compelling national interest of diversity and simply took race into consideration, while the undergraduate admissions policy was not, because the point system was too inflexible and was not narrowly tailored to promote diversity. Grutter v. Bollinger was narrowly decided by a 5-4 majority, with an opinion written by O’Connor and joined by Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer, with Ginsberg writing a concurrence. Justice O’Connor argued that narrowly tailored race-based decisions for the sake of diversity were Constitutional. However, she also suggested that affirmative action could not be permanent in character and suggested that twenty-five years later it would no longer be necessary to consider race. Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas all disagreed and wrote dissents, with Thomas strongly suggested that the Court should not wait twenty-five years to find the practice unconstitutional.

In Gratz v. Bollinger, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the 6-3 opinion, in which he was joined by O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas. Justice O’Connor wrote a concurrence in which she was joined by Breyer, who also wrote a concurrence. The majority decided that the automatic point system was unconstitutional because it did not bring race into consideration on a flexible, individual basis. Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsberg all wrote dissents. Justice Ginsberg and Souter both said that the university should not be penalized for the openness and honesty of its affirmative action program.

The Fisher case is unlikely to end affirmative action in admissions altogether, but it does have the potential to restrict this type of policy. Its main issue will probably be whether the racial admissions policies of the University of Texas were necessary to achieve the supposedly compelling national interests. Since Texas already attempts to promote minority enrollments through a 10% plan (admitting the top 10% of each class, therefore taking in disproportionate numbers of students from mainly minority schools, regardless of the overall level of school performance), the defense will probably argue that Texas already has a system of preferences aimed at increasing minority enrollments. The good news for those who would like to see racial preferences diminished is that Elena Kagan has recused herself because she argued in favor of racial preferences in Texas when she was U.S. solicitor general. However, three justices (Sonia Sotomayor, Steven G. Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) will probably support the use of racial preferences in Texas and elsewhere. Four (Chief John G. Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas) will probably try to restrict these preferences further. This makes Justice Kennedy, who earlier opposed racial preferences in both Grutter and Gratz the swing voter, who could make the vote a tie (thus leaving in place a lower court decision in favor of race-based admissions) or join the other four in striking down the Texas policy. Even if the latter comes to pass though, there will still be the issue of whether the Court writes its decision narrowly, directed specifically toward the Texas case, or more broadly, establishing a usable precedent for further diminishing race-based policies around the country.

Made of Paper: Edward Dahlberg

2012-02-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

Edward Dahlberg was a difficult character, a perennial misfit and a touchy misanthrope. Born out of wedlock to an itinerant lady barber, Dahlberg’s mother left him in an orphanage when he was 12. He left this hard life for another one five years later, drifting around the western part of the U.S. before going into the army at the end of World War I. Back in America again, he enrolled first in U.C. Berkeley and then took a degree in philosophy from Columbia University. His extensive reading and his university studies bought him into a world apart from that of his hardscrabble childhood and youth.

Having no vocation but literature, Dahlberg made his way to Paris in the 1920s where he became part of a generation of expatriate writers. He joined the Communist Party, making his mark as a “proletarian” writer in Bottom Dogs, a novel based on the orphanage and his early bumming around his native country. Even then he was no party line conformist. D.H. Lawrence, a writer whose distinctive brand of politics aligned with no socialist agenda, wrote the foreword to this novel. Lawrence also recognized Dahlberg’s legendary pessimism, reportedly exclaiming, “For God’s sake, Dahlberg, cheer up!”

The conventions and shibboleth of Communism accorded ill with Dahlberg’s independent personality and his growing intellectual elitism. By 1936, perhaps disgusted by Stalin’s purges as well as by his rejection of ideological regimentation, Dahlberg denounced Communism as “necrophilic” and left the Party. He began to develop a unique style of writing, an elaborate and carefully wrought epigrammatic prose.

I found Dahlberg’s two masterpieces when I was rambling through the shelves of the old San Francisco public library, attempting to make up for the deficiencies of a late-twentieth century university education. The essays he first published under the title Do These Bones Live? (later re-titled Can These Bones Live?) scrutinized European and American writers from the perspective of a despairing Hebrew prophet. His autobiography, Because I Was Flesh, unsparingly examined his tawdry upbringing and his crotchety nature, but it managed to transmute these into visionary writing and to find in literature a justification for his existence. Dahlberg was certainly no saint, but Because I Was Flesh is one of the great works of confessional literature, a descendant of the Confessions of St. Augustine.

The Holiday

2012-02-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

If you ask someone down here in the New Orleans area what holiday we celebrate today, you are likely to be told, “Lundi Gras, the day before Mardi Gras.” Many New Orleanians might be shocked and surprised to hear that the Post Office doesn’t close because it is the day before Mardi Gras. The national holiday is actually Washington’s Birthday, more commonly known as President’s Day. Proclaimed in Washington DC in 1880 and five years later extended to the rest of the country, Washington’s Birthday, on February 22, became the first federal holiday to memorialize an American citizen. Unofficially, many Americans, especially in the school system, also celebrated Lincoln’s birthday on February 12. In some places during the first half of the twentieth century, people recognized a long Patriot’s Week, which included Thomas Jefferson’s birthday on February 17. Perhaps it was inevitable that the memorials of these Mount Rushmore figures would all be somehow collapsed into a single holiday. In 1968, Congress detached the celebration of Washington’s Birthday from his actual date of birth by the Monday Holiday Act, which moved the observance of the first president’s birthday to the third Monday in February, which created a three-day weekend.

I’d like to celebrate Washington, if only we did celebrate him. I’d also advocate observing Jefferson Day by staging public readings of the Declaration of Independence, Notes on the State of Virginia, and the Jefferson-Adams letters. But since the mistakenly named Presidents Day serves mainly to sell mattresses and close down government offices, I suggest the memorial has been drained of all significance. The big tourist event of Mardi Gras isn’t the old local festival, either.

Uniting America through National Service

2012-02-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

The “Sunday Review” section of today’s New York Times contains a dialogue on “Uniting America through National Service,” sparked by a recent suggestion by David Brooks that the nation needs a national service program in order to unite the separating classes in American society. Those in favor of mandatory national service point out its potential for building individual character, uniting the nation, making national leaders consider military engagement abroad more carefully, and contributing to the civic infrastructure. These arguments are generally thoughtful and moderate. Nevertheless, I remain intensely opposed to any program of mandatory national service precisely because it would be mandatory, because it would be national, and because it would require service.

A mandate incumbent upon all Americans would require a means of compulsion, a system of compulsion, and a program of compulsion. By “means of compulsion,” I mean there would have to be some way of forcing people to take part, whether they choose to or not. Force is least required when people will participate voluntarily. For most of American history, a peacetime draft was unworkable precisely because it would meet with so much resistance. Even the wartime draft during the Civil War provoked draft riots in New York. On the eve of American entry into World War I, no less a person than Speaker of the House Champ Clark declared of his home state “Missouri sees precious little difference between a conscript and a convict,” and during the war some Oklahomans rose up against the draft in the “green corn rebellion.” Although some draft resisters did go to jail in World War II, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and popular feeling that the war was unavoidable created enough support among the American public that people were willing to accept a draft as a necessary measure for conducting a large-scale war. During the Cold War that followed, Americans for the first time largely accepted a peace time draft because they tended to see this as essential to maintaining defense against what was perceived as the ever-present threat of the Soviet Union. Even then, though, the draft only worked as a “selective service system,” that did not fall on every one. This selective system fell apart when popular support for American policy would no longer suffice to maintain even the selective use of compulsion. A universal mandate would mean that even if 90% of Americans supported national service, one out of every ten people would still have to be coerced. That is a pretty big portion of the population to coerce in a supposedly free society, and every indication is that real percentage would be much greater than this.

A system of compulsion must follow from the chosen means. In the case of the military draft, the system of compulsion is usually either a branch of the service or prison. It seems to me that if one advocates universal mandatory service, one must also advocate a vast system of prison camps for dissenters, as well as companies of national service for those who support or at least accept the universal mandate. This may well contribute to the national infrastructure. During the 1930s, both the new National Socialist service programs and the prison camps contributed to building the German infrastructure. Similarly, the Gulag provided slave labor to the Soviet system, while collectivization pressed the “free” population into service. Presumably, neither the American national service corps nor the American prison camps would be as intensely coercive as these totalitarian societies, but there is no question that a universal mandate would push everyone into some sort of system of coerced labor.

While in a system of political compulsion, people undergo a program of compulsion. I note that many of the advocates of mandatory national service maintain that this would make “better citizens” of Americans. In order to achieve this goal, though, the national service companies (and the prison camps) would need to include, either explicitly or implicitly, a program of citizenship training. This would of necessity follow an organizational definition of what constitutes good citizenship, and would unavoidably be a course of indoctrination by federal officers.

This brings us to why the “national” part would be problematic. I often point to the Tocquevillean ideal of local voluntary organizations as a basis for American democracy. Along these lines, the sociologist Robert Nisbet argued that centralized national institutions tend to replace local institutions. A dictatorship arises when a polity does not consist of a nation-wide set of interconnections within local communities, but of atomized individuals connected to a powerful central state. If we want to destroy voluntary local associations and replace them with a system of authoritarianism, I can think of no better way than to force every individual into service to the central state.

The system of national compulsion would, further, entail a huge bureaucracy. This, of course, should pose no problem for those who believe that government should be unlimited in size as well as in power. It would also mean a vast expansion of opportunities for a “new class” of administrators and power brokers who would decide what all the national servants should do. It is unlikely, though, that the bureaucracy would be very efficient economically.

Finally, we come to the issue of service itself. Given the intellectual agility of the Supreme Court, I think it is entirely possible that the justices would not find compulsory service synonymous with involuntary servitude, and that mandatory national service would not be ruled as violating the thirteenth amendment. But if we turn everyone into a servant of the nation, this does not only mean we would take away every individual’s autonomy. Since the nation is an abstraction, in real terms this would mean making every person in the United States a humble servant of government officials. If that is what you want, then you should support the call for national service.

Why the West Rules - For Now, by Ian Morris

2012-02-18T10:58:00.000-08:00

Why the West Rules – For Now attempts to find the reasons for the global dominance of the West. Ian Morris begins with a little counter-history, telling the story of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert making obeisance to a Chinese envoy in 1848. Why, he asks, did history not turn out along these lines, rather as it did, with the British victorious in the Opium Wars and Asia and most of the rest of the world on the eve of being carved up into European and American colonies and spheres of interest? Morris sets out the two possible answers as long-term and relatively deterministic and short-term and relatively accidental. The first answer suggests that there is something about the West that always put it in the race. The second suggests that accidental historical conditions precipitated the industrial revolution and the rise of the west and that events could easily have turned out more like his counter-history.

The long-term versus short-term problem prompts him to take an unusually far-ranging approach to considering the rise of the west. He goes all the way back to the earliest pre-history in order to ask whether there have been fundamental differences between East and West. After arguing that there are no such differences among human populations, he then casts dominance in terms of development. This is where the book makes one of its most interesting contributions because he comes up with an original way to define development operationally, as well as conceptually. He defines social development as per capita energy consumption, organization (indicated by urbanization, or largest city size), war-making capacity, and information technology. These are sufficiently related to be parts of the single concept of development, but also sufficiently distinct to be separate dimensions.

Morris argues that only the core areas of what we now call the Middle East and eastern China provided the environmental conditions for agriculture and interrelated societies, justifying the West-Far East concentration of his book. However, the Middle East enjoyed an advantage in its potential for agricultural productivity. Later, the Mediterranean gave the rising classical cradle of the West a continuing advantage in urbanization and information exchange. He maintains, therefore, that there has been a long-term basis to Western dominance. He also claims, though, that development tends to create problems of its own, such as putting pressure on its resources, spreading communicable illnesses through increasing contacts, bringing in new and often hostile population groups, and over-extending the reach of the state. Societies sometimes push development to another level by figuring out ways to respond to these problems, but often they reach a ceiling and collapse, having communicated their development strategies to societies on their fringes, which then move to the forefront. Readers of Gibbon and Toynbee will find the ideas of state over-extension and challenge-and-response familiar.

While the West enjoyed an early long-term advantage, this was not absolute. When the Roman Empire reached its ceiling and dissolved (here the social development measure is especially useful in demonstrating that there really was a decline and fall), the West began to lag and the East, defined as Chinese civilization began to catch up and eventually moved ahead. The salvation of the West came with its shift to the politically fragmented states of the Atlantic fringe. Their competition with each other and their access to an ocean that could give passage to America gave rise to the expanding market economy that gave rise to the modern dominance of the West.

The argument that social development tends to shift to fringe societies that become new centers might suggest that China, having been absorbed into the global economic and political system created by the West, is likely to move into a position of leadership. On this crucial point, though, Morris hedges his bets, citing both those who claim that a single new entity of “Chimerica” will emerge and those who argue for a Sinocentric future. He also speculates that the old categories of “East” and “West” will become meaningless. The exponential increase of social development, especially in information technology, may create a Singularity, in which human beings merge with machines, resulting in an entirely new way of living that makes old geographic and political distinctions irrelevant. Or, the same exponential increase could produce a worldwide environmental catastrophe. In reading these alternatives, I was not sure which possible future I thought was worse.

Why the West Rules is a fascinating approach to comparative world history. Morris apparently sees his measure of social development as the part of his account most in need of defense because he gives an appendix devoted to it. I actually found this index convincing as well as creative, although it is unavoidably rough, as Morris admits. One of its limitations, I thought, was the near-exclusive focus on West and Far East. This left me wondering how Morris might account for the emergence of societies with comparatively high degrees of urbanization and sophisticated information technologies (in the form of writing) in Mesoamerica, where many of the preconditions for social development seem to be lacking. The South Asian subcontinent receives mentions only in passing, although I can imagine its access to East and West by both land and sea making it a world leader in some alternative version of history.

The definition of the West in this book is also much broader than in the normal use of the term. For Morris, this incorporates all of the civilizations that grew out of the original core on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, including what became the Muslim semi-circle of North Africa and the Middle East. Morris seems to be looking less at why the West, as a continuous entity, came to power, but how what we today call the West became what it is. In the process, he hints at why Europe and America achieved dominance over the societies associated with Islam, but never considers sufficiently how the former and the latter split apart, with consequences for the present that may be just as great as the consequences of the distinction between the West and the Far East.

Finally, Morris suggests that he looks at the past in order to draw conclusions about future trends. But then he ends on such an inconclusive note. I found his science fiction-like speculations about a possible coming Singularity of humans and technology implausible. This doesn’t mean that such a thing can’t happen. What we find implausible may be due to the limitations of imagination, rather than reality, but a line graph of technological innovation is a slender basis for this type of futurology. He also doesn’t come up with any solid suggestions about what his historical patterns suggest we should do to maintain Western dominance, encourage the growth of desired political values in a rising China, or simply maintain our own ways of life in a changing world.

Getting Back to the Social Order Problem

2012-02-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

Contemporary academic practitioners of the social sciences give little attention to questions of the nature and maintenance of social order. Insofar as they touch on it at all, they tend to assume order to be inherently unjust and oppressive. Our conferences have become celebrations of “transgression,” even while the conference goers not only conform carefully to the ideologies of their colleagues but also follow the highly patterned rituals of colloquia.

The refusal to take order seriously as a theoretical issue is a fairly recent historical development. In 1951, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils described the problem of social order as "one of the very first functional imperatives of social systems.” This problem is not only a philosophical issue, it is also a practical matter since the order or disorder of a social system has immediate consequences for the lives of its members.

Dennis Wrong’s 1994 book, The Problem of Order, was one of the few relatively attempts in the past few decades to revive examination into this fundamental subject. Wrong, the product of an older generation of social scientists, considered the forces that hold people together in social groups. Wrong pointed out that this term has two closely related but distinct meanings. It can refer to regularity or rule in human social interactions and it can refer to patterns of cooperation among actors. He argues that people develop regularities as norms, roles, and institutions in the course of recurrent interactions. In this sense, social order tends to "take care of itself," since the lives of human beings largely consist of interactions with others. These interactions, though, may differ greatly in character, since they may be products of a variety of motivations.

The second type of order problem, according to Wrong, is that of conflict versus cooperation. This is not an absolute choice, as suggested by Hobbes' unfortunate and misleading description of the natural human state as a "war of all against all." Humans in a state of total conflict could exist no longer than the time it would take parents to murder their children. Perfect cooperation, at the other extreme, seems to be a social state that exists only in the imagination. In response to classic functionalism's "oversocialized" conception of cooperative order as the product of norms imposed on individuals from an external society, Wrong argued that human beings produce particular blends of conflict and cooperation from expectations developed in the course of their dealings with one another.

It seems to me that one of the main tasks for social science today is to turn away from its obsession with advocacy and return to the issues of what constitutes order in social life, how it is maintained, and why societies vary in their combinations of conflict and cooperation.

Proposition 8, the Balance of Power, and Limited Government

2012-02-15T12:57:00.001-08:00

Seth Long has an interesting post on the judicial overturn of California's Proposition 8. He points out that a majority of the 80% of California voters who cast ballots chose to end same-sex marriage in the state. Therefore, this represented the democratic will of the majority. In overturning the proposition, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the popular will by fiat.

I believe that Long is touching on some of the central concepts in the American political system here: the ideal of majority will and that of individual rights. One of the consistent problems of democracy is the potential for the tyranny of the majority. Under a purely democratic system, if a majority of people want to disenfranchise a minority they can do so: the will of the majority holds, whatever it may be. In the early years of the Republic, concerns of majority tyranny frequently concerned debtors voting their interests over those of creditors, which could dispossess the creditors of legitimately acquired assets and create an unsound economic system. This may still be a problem: T.H. Marshall's idea of political democracy leading to economic democracy could be interpreted as majorities dispossessing minorities by voting to redistribute resources.

The members of the founding generation had two responses to the problem of majority tyranny. One was the balance of power or mixed system response. Derived from Aristotle, this involved trying to balance the virtues and vices of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy by incorporating elements of each. John Adams, uneasy about both democratic excess and elite power, was the foremost exponent of the balance of power approach. Interestingly, Adams and those of similar mind did not see the judiciary, but the upper house of the legislature as the aristocratic element in American government. This was one of the reasons that until the early twentieth century senators were appointed by state legislatures, rather than directly elected by the people. The senate was supposed to be a brake on democracy, rather than an expression of it.

However, the main structural limitation on democracy historically came to be the third branch of government, the judiciary, as the concept of judicial review developed from the time of John Marshall onward. Through judicial review, the courts exercise a veto over legislation because the courts decide whether a law or policy enacted by the people or their representatives is consistent with the Constitution. While a law or policy may be judged unconstitutional on a variety of grounds, violation of constitutionally protected rights has stood out as the most prominent. This has created a tendency for the courts to extend the idea of constitutional rights and for parties who cannot realize their political ends democratically to urge the courts to re-define those ends as rights. If, for example, marriage is a matter of legitimate state policy, then the democratically elected representatives of states (or the voters directly, in a proposition system) can define marriage in the way that the representatives and voters believe will best serve the polity. If marriage (to anyone or anything one chooses) is a matter of individual right, then the aristocratic judicial branch can intervene to annul the will of the majority. This is why same-sex marriage opponents have generally sought their goals through voting and legislation, while proponents have generally sought theirs through the courts.

The problem in the balance of power response to the problem of majority rule lies in the question of where to find the proper balance. Clearly, the courts have increased the number of rights people have, giving the courts ever greater power, creating the danger of a "kritocracy," or absolute rule of judges. There is also the problem of where judges find these rights. The founders were heir to a natural law perspective, but contemporary courts have leaned more toward the utilitarian view that rights are defined by social ends. I argue that the "compelling national interest" defense of affirmative action is a utilitarian approach to legal rights. Race-based preferences, according to this defense, can be held constitutional and efforts to end those preferences can be held unconstitutional because the preferences are assumed to serve a social end. This makes rights dependent on the social and political program of the judges. In the case of defining marriage, I think judges sometimes lean toward an unrecognized expanded version of a natural law concept of a right (people have the inherent right to be happy, getting married as they choose makes them happy [supposedly], therefore all people have the right to marry as they chose) and sometimes toward a utilitarian concept of what judges believe will lead to a nondiscriminatory society.

The other response among the founders of the Republic to the problem of majority tyranny was limited government. If Adams leaned more toward balancing the powers of government, Thomas Jefferson leaned more toward limiting what government can do. This response was essentially an argument for an equality of citizens based on independence. Jefferson in the elegance of Monticello was the equal of the poor yeoman because each could live on his own without hierarchical dependence. This response may be the most congenial to Long who would ideally prefer that government stay out of marriage altogether.

It is true that we all generally like government intervention when the government is on our side and tend to become anti-government pursues policies we don't like. Ultimately, though, I think the same-sex marriage debate does not easily fit into a "left-right" political dichotomy or of supporters of individual liberty versus supporters of government interference. Instead, I think this issue involves a range of perspectives. There are traditionalists, who believe that marriage as historically defined is correct and should be maintained by government and that judicial interference simply involves the courts imposing the wrong policies. There are democratic institutionalists, who believe that majorities define their legal and social institutions, and that aristocratic courts illegitimately extend individual rights in violation of those institutions. There are consistent libertarians, who follow the eloquent formulation of Jimmy McMillan on this topic ("If you want to marry your shoe, I'll marry you"). There are limited civil libertarians, who believe that the courts should mandate the specific kinds of rights that those limited libertarians favor. Finally, there are group-rights advocates dedicated to the advancement of group interests and willing to employ whatever legislative or judicial means will advance those interests.

Made of Paper: Travels in Arabia Deserta

2012-02-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

For a time in the second half of the 1970s I worked as a bicycle messenger in downtown San Francisco, pedaling up and down those steep hills carrying packages and letters between offices. I often spent my time off in the old San Francisco library, a beautiful old building with vaulted ceilings, wide staircases, and spacious reading rooms. The building is still there, but the library has been moved across the street, to quarters as inspiring as a warehouse. I discovered many treasures in the old place, but one of the works that made the deepest impression on me at that time was the two-volume Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles M. Doughty.

Doughty was among the most eccentric of the eccentric English adventurers of the nineteenth century. A poet and scholar, a century before I read his book Doughty made his way to the Arabian Peninsula. Although he sought the help of his own government and that of the Ottoman Empire, the officials left him on his own in his journeys among the Bedouin tribesmen, who were traditionally xenophobic and then under the spreading spell of the Wahabi sect of Islam. Unlike the swashbuckling Captain Richard Francis Burton, Doughty openly presented himself as a Christian, which won the grudging admiration of some Bedouins but inspired others to threaten his life. Doughty was often beaten and mistreated. His patient endurance of this type of treatment later led Burton to denounce Doughty as a poor representative of English manhood. But some Bedouins treated Doughty, known among them as “Khalil” with friendship and kindness. His survival was probably due to concerns about how the Ottomans would respond to the killing of a Westerner, appreciation for Doughty’s simple medical skills, awe at his sheer audacity, adherence to Bedouin customs of hospitality, and reluctance to murder someone whom some of the Bedouins viewed as a lunatic.

The adventure story is only one side of the work, though. Doughty believed that the English language was in a state of decadence and required renewal by going back to its ancient qualities. He wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta in a archaizing dialect of his own devising, drawing primarily on the style of the King James Bible, but also on Spenser and even Chaucer. The effect is of the heritage of English literary language confronting the Arab world, a marvelous model for this deeply traditional English meditative soul confronting the harshness of an alien culture.

Doughty’s mannered style crept into my own writing for a while, probably with unfortunate results. Although it draws on so many influences, his language was so uniquely his own that it only fits the world that is his book. I think Travels also contributed to my own wanderings around distant parts of the planet in the years after I read it, although I was fortunate to face none of Doughty’s hardships.

Selecting the ten best books you’ve ever read is a popular game. My own list changes from time to time, but Travels in Arabia Deserta is always on it. Without question, I would rank it as the finest travel book ever written.

A Call to National Servitude

2012-02-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

In January 2012, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and National Engagement of the Association of American Universities and Colleges released its report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future. The report called for a program of civic learning and of training in civic engagement that would pervade every aspect of higher education. This program would be linked to similar efforts at all other levels of schooling. In the words of the report, "[t]he central work of advancing civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education must, of course, be done by faculty members across disciplines, by student affairs professionals across divisions, and by administrators in every school and at every level. The fourth prominent group of actors are the students themselves [bold in the original]. The collective work of these groups should be guided by a shared sense that civic knowledge and democratic engagement, in concert with others and in the face of contestation, are absolutely vital to the quality of intellectual inquiry itself, to this nation’s future, and to preparation for life in a diverse world" (p. 2). It called for fostering "a civic ethos across all parts of campus and educational culture" (p. 31)

The report cites a breathtaking array of “pressing issues,” including “growing global economic inequalities, climate change and environmental degradation, lack of access to quality health care, economic volatility, and more.” The answer to all of these problems lies in “expanding students’ capacities to be civic problem-solvers.” The report does not go into detail about how the professors and teachers, who do not necessarily possess such great social problem solving skills, will produce this generation of superbeings, but it does recommend that institutions foster what is variously called a “democratic ethos” and a “civic ethos” on every campus through “service learning” and “community engagement.”

The AAC&U is a highly politicized organization with its own distinctive view of how American society should be reconstructed and a fondness for expressing this view in the millenarian rhetoric of “struggles” and “calls to action.” Immediately after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, the AAC&U issued a statement applauding the president’s election as a “…historic moment made possible by many years of struggle.” Not surprisingly, the AAC&U has had close ties to the Obama administration and its task forces operate as federal policy planning committees. This most recent task force issued its “call to national action” at an official White House event with the melodramatic title, “For Democracy’s Future: Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission,” sponsored by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the U.S. Department of Education.

A Crucible Moment not only demands the participation of every person involved in education, but it insists that every course in every subject incorporate its message. Issued as “a call to national action,” the social and political agenda it intends to implement in every classroom comes with the imprimatur of the U.S. Department of Education. As I read the report, I find its demands for inculcating a “democratic ethos” perplexing. Beyond the fact that in the traditional American democracy neither the government nor committees sponsored and subsidized by the government decide what type of ethos the people should have, the ideal of integrating all levels of schooling into a unified social program, and inserting this program into every subject appears to be promoting a kind of new bureaucratic corporatism, aimed at absorbing everything into the state and leaving nothing outside the state.

Made of Paper: The Golden Bough

2012-02-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

In his wonderful biography of James G. Frazer, Robert Ackermann observes that modern anthropologists often regard Frazer as an embarrassment. Aside from briefly visiting Greece, Frazer did no field work. His voluminous output owed much to the fact he spent almost his entire life at a library writing table. The Golden Bough generally takes travelers’ tales uncritically as reports of beliefs and practices in societies around the planet. Frazer had no clear concept of culture and his comparative approach wrenched ideas out of their context of meaning. Working without the idea of culture, his modern critics object, Frazer imposed the same positivistic evolution away from magic and toward science on all societies everywhere.

The Golden Bough was one of the grand explications of human life and thought that I read in my early twenties when I was reaching for some sort of comprehensive understanding. Today, I acknowledge some of the criticisms of the work, but I still believe that it is important and should be read in its entirety. Inspired by J.M.W. Turner’s painting of the golden bough incident in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which a priest of the goddess Diana was ritually murdered by his successor, Frazer made his way through a multi-volume account of mythological themes, describing how societies around the world have repeated themes such as the dying and reviving god, ritual sacrifice, and scapegoats.

At one level, The Golden Bough is a majestic compendium of myths. I think it also occupies an important place in the history of ideas, though. Frazer was educated as a classicist and became one of the founders of anthropology. He marks the turning from thinking about Greek and Roman antiquity as a canonical model to thinking about Greek and Roman society in the same way that Europeans were beginning to think about other societies. His comparative approach to these societies did largely ignore culture, but I’m not sure that is entirely a problem because in finding similar patterns that could be lifted out of different contexts, Frazer was moving toward finding common forms of human thinking, or what we would today call cultural universals. Sitting in the library may have limited his depth of understanding and led him into some factual errors, but it also made possible a breadth of vision and synthesis that would not have been possible for an anthropological specialist.

Reading The Golden Bough as a founding work of late modernity, the questions I have about it have less to do with its methodological flaws in analyzing other times and places than what Frazer may unwittingly tell us about his own time and ours. The rejection of antiquity as the measure of the present, as it had been since the Renaissance, may have left modern social thinkers without historical normative standards, placing everything that happens on the same plane. Frazer recounts anecdote after anecdote drawn from locations around the world, and these are held in place only by the fact all the anecdotes and all the locations follow the same movement away from magic and toward science.

No First Amendment for Her

2012-02-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

Crystal Dixon was the head administrator of human resources at a public university, the University of Toledo. Ms. Dixon raised controversy when she wrote a newspaper column stating her opinion that homosexuals do not need the protection of civil rights laws. Ms. Dixon is black, and her argument rested on the distinction between race and sexual preference, as well as on her own moral disapproval of homosexuality. Although she did not write the article in her professional capacity, the University of Toledo fired her. She sued, but Judge David A. Katz has now ruled that she did not have First Amendment protections from being dismissed because her job involved hiring and firing, although there is no evidence that she ever treated any employees or potential employees unfairly because of her views.

This seems to me a strange and dangerous decision. People have the right to hold their own views on morality. If a job requires them to keep these views quiet in order to carry out their tasks (as may sometimes be the case), still the job cannot encompass their entire lives. When a public employer dictates that these views cannot be aired outside of the job, though, the government attempts to define what kinds of moral views are correct or incorrect.

RIP NCLB?

2012-02-09T17:21:00.001-08:00

Today, by executive order President Obama waived the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act for 10 states, prompting writers at the Huffington Post to speculate “it could be the beginning of the end for No Child Left Behind.” One of the questions we might want to ask is: why should it be within the power of the president to say what requirements will or will not bind school districts around the nation? Beyond the issue of the limits of presidential authority, though, lies the problem of the legislation itself, an effort to use the power of the federal government to mandate educational performance and egalitarian educational outcomes.

Almost immediately after entering the Presidency in January 2001, President George W. Bush announced an educational reform program intended to “express my deep belief in our public schools and their mission to build the mind and character of every child, from every background, in every part of America.” The No Child Left Behind bill reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, setting the educational program of the twenty-first century on the foundation laid in the era of the Great Society.

No Child Left Behind prescribed the annual administration of standardized tests to children in grades 3 through 8 and required that all states develop progress objectives to ensure that all groups of students would reach proficiency (which is another way of saying at or above average) by 2014. The test results and the progress objectives were to be broken down by classifications of poverty status, racial and ethnic groups, disability status, and English proficiency. All groups were to advance at the same rates on essentially the same measures of achievement.

Following in the direction set by the initial Great Society bill, the administration of President Bush took keen interest in closing the achievement gap through testing. Indeed, closing the racial and ethnic (Latino) achievement gap, and achieving universal equality among categories, seemed to be a primary focus of No Child Left Behind. While the Bush administration opposed affirmative action in education, it made racial and ethnic categories a key part of its strategy for using testing and corrective measures in schools to eliminate group variations in outcomes.

One of NCLB’s key concerns, then, was with the idea of equity on a single scale, with school, district, state and federal efforts concentrated on the historically disadvantaged or educationally weakest groups. There were penalties for any school that failed to meet goals for any group, including special education students and students who did not speak English (on English administered tests). Students could transfer out of schools that had failed to meet standards for any group. In addition, school districts had to use federal Title I funds to pay for extra tutoring or other educational services for students in schools that consistently failed to meet overall goals or goals for specific groups. The idea that uniformly high educational achievement could be distributed by schools to all children had left schools with the responsibility, and the blame, for any shortcomings.

Critics who recognized the redistributive basis of NCLB were disturbed by the program’s concentration on what were presumed to be the weakest performing subgroups. Schools could be penalized if any groups failed to meet preset goals. For example, NCLB mandated that all students must achieve a given state’s “proficient” level in “challenging” academic standards by 2014. As already noted, “All” includes everyone from students with severe learning disabilities to Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. However, LEP students are those who by definition score low on English tests. As noted in a report by Professor Christine Rossell in 2005, “if you define a group by their low test scores, that group must have low test scores or someone has made a mistake,” Thus, it is logically impossible to ever close the achievement gap between LEP students and those fluent in English, because as soon as a LEP student becomes proficient in English, they are reclassified as fluent English students. Trying to close this gap is logically on par with lifting every student to above average academic achievement.

The No Child Left Behind legislation did recognize the role that the society outside of schools, especially family, plays in the educational success of children. However, rather than acknowledge that the family domain marked a major limitation in the effectiveness of any public schooling efforts to boost academic achievement, the education bill glossed over this inconvenient truth by attempting to re-shape families. Believing that public schools can artificially manufacture the critical family involvement ingredient in student school success, the bill mandates in Section 1118 that in order to receive federal funding under the Act, local education agencies shall implement:

“programs, activities, and procedures for the involvement of parents in programs assisted under this part consistent with this section. Such programs, activities, and procedures shall be planned and implemented with meaningful consultation with parents of participating children.”

The “meaningful consultation” with parents did not refer to discussions with parents of educationally successful children, but to educational authorities trying to involve the parents of children failing in school. The implication of this provision of NCLB was that government could somehow recreate the family involvement that leads to higher academic outcomes, and should intervene to do so. This assumed governmental authority over the families of the disadvantaged, and also assumed the power of educational planners to re-shape families and communities at will.

Meanwhile, the families of relatively advantaged children, largely avoiding the direction of planners, managed to continue to give their own children a true head start. The most dramatic example of this could be found among those outside of the school system altogether. A major policy analysis of 11,930 homeschooling families compared the academic achievement of these families’ children with students in private and public schools.. In this study, homeshoolers scored significantly higher on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) than students in private or public schools. Moreover, the greater the number of years of homeschooling (which is to say the fewer the years of formal schooling), the higher the average score of the home schooled. As for the academic credentials of the parent educators, there was no relationship between a parent having a state-issued teaching certificate and the academic performance of the homeschooled child. Home schoolers also did significantly better on the ACT than the non-home schooled.

Mobilizing the Crusaders

2012-02-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

The website Inside Higher Ed is doing its part to get all the troops in line for the civic engagement movement in American Higher Education. The website has set up an audio conference on "Restoring Civic Education" with one of the academic advocates who prepared the report "A Crucible Moment" on the urging of the Department of Education. For a mere $199 ($149 if you register early), you can phone in for a 30 minute presentation and a 30 minute question and answer session. You can learn how to integrate civic education into all aspects of education, presumably leaving no tiny bit of learning outside of the social and political program.

Seriously, though, I advise everyone to save the money and devote an hour instead to thinking about the problems with this proposed assault on intellectual diversity and independence. The civic educators begin with a fairly reasonable point: today's students are deplorably ignorant of history and government. Instead of arguing that we should teach them more about history and government, though, they urge "...colleges to teach students how to work together on public problems (at the national and local levels)." So, we aren't supposed to be satisfied with teaching them mathematics, literature, or the social sciences. We're supposed to be training them to become communitarian cadres.

Made of Paper: Gibbon, Toynbee, and Spengler

2012-02-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

In my early twenties, I developed a strange fondness for multi-volume, philosophically inclined historical works. The best of these was Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was captivated by Gibbon's literary style, the elaborate irony of his balanced clauses, that seemed the perfect expression of his cool analyses. Gibbon did not originate the idea of decline, nor was he the first to ask why the Roman Empire declined and disappeared. He was arguably thinking about his own time as he looked back to antiquity, and this adds an extra irony to the great book, since Britain was then not in decline, but at the beginning of its ascent to empire. Or maybe this just made Gibbon more prophetic.

More recent historians of antiquity have tended to reject the idea of a "decline," emphasizing instead a gradual transition to a post-Roman world. Still, the drastic decline in political order and literacy following the end of Roman Mediterranean rule does seem to indicate a diminishing of social organization. Gibbon accounted for this, in part, by arguing that the very success of the Romans introduced stresses that ultimately caused the organization to come apart. We might regard him as the true originator of the "imperial overreach" idea that Paul Kennedy revived a couple of decades ago. Rome stretched itself to the point where it could not effectively control its vast territories, in the process becoming vulnerable to attacks from tribal groups that learned its techniques of warfare and to incompletely Romanized immigrant settlers. These same tendencies may still exist for political powers today, although we can legitimately ask whether the power of political organization is today much greater as a result of our far superior technologies of communication and transportation.

Gibbon was critical of religion by the time he wrote the great work, and he attributed to Christianity a "softening" of the martial character of the Romans. In one of those phrases of balanced irony, though, Gibbon also attributed to Christianity the civilizing of the barbarian invaders and settlers: "If the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors." This may raise the question (not asked by Gibbon) of whether that same religion much later contributed to the partial displacement of conquest by economic exchange as a means of establishing political order. The ideas of culture, political coordination, and external and internal enemies continue to shape our thinking about power today and even when modern historians and political thinkers disagree with Gibbon, they still enter into a conversation with him.

About the same time that I read Gibbon for the first time, I read Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. That made a big impression on me then, although I have more recently gone back to Toynbee and found his logic shaky. The idea that civilizations arise from a challenge to which they respond comes uncomfortably close to a tautology. We know that a civilization has faced just the right magnitude of challenge from its response. In addition, Toynbee's claims that all civilizations tend to produce a universal church and to be threatened by an internal proletariat and an external proletariat may have been procrustean attempts to impose a classical Mediterranean model on all other highly developed societies. Still, Toynbee is probably worth reading because he raises the question of whether one can find repeating patterns in history and he looks for these patterns so widely.

Toynbee led me to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. It is difficult to criticize Spengler's historical logic because he essentially dispenses with the logic of causation. Spengler operated out of a kind of mystical insight, leading Ernst Cassirer to describe his work as an "astrology of history" and Spengler as a "diviner." The prophetic German historian saw civilizations as flourishing and dying like plants. Spengler still has his fans: I recall reading somewhere that Henry Kissinger gave Richard Nixon a copy of The Decline of the West (I do not know if Nixon ever read it). One of Spengler's genuine insights, I think, was the recognition that each society has a distinctive style and that this style guides its arts, it scientific perspectives, its social interactions, and its political ideologies.

The Naming

2012-02-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

They woke in a wood of leaf overlapped by leaf.

Eyes unfocused, they saw all things and none

in wakefulness not yet distinct from sleep.

Their uncombed hair twisted in rays of sun

wrapped about their heads in crazy wreaths

of light and dark completely interwoven.

Their feet touched earth, the same dirt on their feet

that covered earth. They were a man and woman

still intimate, like plants, with the soil beneath.

As quiet as the grass, the two were dumb,

wordless when they heard the rustling leaves.

The beasts, by wing and foot and fin, had come.

The cats twitched tails, the serpents hung from trees,

and frogs squatted among the loosening buds

of lotus flowers, all waiting patiently.

The names began to drop off one by one,

one word fell out to pair with every beast,

until a parallel world of words was done.

With words they knew to tell each life from each,

and since the eyes are pupils to the tongue,

they began to see as syllables would teach.

They saw each line take on new definition,

as if cut from its background in relief.

For named, this was a form of liberation.

For namers, though, the names brought limitation.

They knew their world and from this they knew grief.

By names their lives were bounded and made brief.

The Hidden Costs of Recruiting Abroad

2012-02-05T12:45:00.001-08:00

As reported in today’s New York Times, a number of U.S. universities are trying to make up their budget shortfalls by recruiting tuition-paying foreign students, especially from China. At public institutions, the foreign students pay the more expensive out-of-state tuition, usually without the discounts often available to American out-of-state students. From a budgetary perspective, this makes sense. Higher education is something that we produce that is in demand in China and other countries, and the money the pupils from abroad spend on schooling in this country can help offset our trade deficit, in addition to bringing dollars into individual institutions.

Appealing to international scholars may also become more of a survival strategy for American higher education. For the past few years, applications to colleges and universities in this country have been increasing due to the “baby boom echo.” In the 1970s, when people born between the end of World War II and the early sixties were mostly in their teens and twenties, it looked like the nation faced a drastic demographic drop because the baby boomers weren’t producing many children of their own. From about the middle of the 1980s through the 1990s, though, members of the baby boom generation apparently became aware that they were not immortal and that their biological clocks were reaching the time of post-fertility, and they belatedly produced a little boomlet of their own. The echo will soon fade into the historical distance though, and finding students from around the world may be a way that colleges can fill the spots left by diminishing numbers of young Americans.

While foreign enrollments may serve the needs of institutions, though, the trend of international recruiting may not be such a good thing for many American students. As I have discussed previously, one of the reasons the costs of higher education have risen so sharply in recent years is that rising enrollments and government subsidization have largely removed constraints on expenses. Having more high paying students from other parts of the world is like having rich people suddenly decide a neighborhood is fashionable, pushing rents and housing prices up. An institution that can find foreign students willing to pay top dollar will have even fewer incentives to bring down costs.

In addition, there are only a finite number of seats in any institution and seats that go to some people cannot go to others. While more spots may become available in the future because of the likely demographic decline, for the present admitting foreign students necessarily means not admitting some U.S. students. Under the practices at most schools today, some categories of students already have structural advantages in admissions. While higher education is under legal direction to avoid openly using quotas, effort to bring in underrepresented minorities, mainly African Americans and Latinos, automatically disadvantage individuals who are not members of underrepresented categories. While the disadvantage unavoidably falls on all those not in the preferred groups, it falls heaviest on Asian Americans, who are overrepresented as a result of high average levels of achievement.

Native born Americans who are not members of preferred groups, then, find themselves caught in a pincer. Some spots go to high-paying foreigners and the native born who belong to putatively disadvantaged groups have the best access to the remaining spots. The competition for the shrinking educational space among other Americans, especially Asian Americans, becomes much more intense.

Within universities, the foreign students and the Americans from underrepresented categories go in two different directions. As a controversial study at Duke University recently indicated, the underrepresented tend to move out of the STEM fields. These, however, seem to be exactly the areas of study that draw many foreign students. It is reasonable to suggest that the admissions pincer may ultimately push American universities toward contributing to an imbalance in training between American-born and native students. While some of the latter may remain in this country, other s will take the skills acquired in this country home with them.

Mass Movements and the "Arab Spring"

2012-02-04T10:33:00.000-08:00

As uprisings broke out in the Arab world, Western commentators labeled the events the “Arab Spring” and enthused about the imminent spread of democracy across North Africa and the Middle East. When protests later began in Russia, many saw these occurrences as the Russian version of the great democratizing trend. I’m not in favor of dictatorships by any means, but I’ve found it hard to be optimistic about the immediate future of these changing national societies.

My hesitation to cheer these mass movements is precisely that they have been mass movements, each a different sort of manifestation of what Ortega y Gasset termed “the revolt of the masses.” Large crowds of people, composed of frustrated individuals or opposing groups united only by their opposition to a regime, rampaging through the streets do not provide a stable foundation for a workable democratic order.

Recent events have only deepened my skepticism. In Port Said, Egypt, a riot by fans at a soccer match resulted in the deaths of over 70 people and in nearly 250 injuries. The rioting ultras, or fanatical soccer fans, had earlier made up part of the “democratic mass movement” that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Now, those same ultras, together with supporters, are fighting with the nation’s security forces and attacking the headquarters of the Interior Ministry. The ultras and their sympathizers blame the authorities for not having prevented the violence perpetrated by ultras. If the military government cracks down on the protesters, it will probably provoke even more violent protests. If it accedes to their demands, it hands over power not to a representative elected government, but to a mob.

A functioning democracy is not a matter of mass movements. As I see it, too much passionate “engagement” is bad for civil society. A polity works best when it grows out of the everyday interactions of citizens going about their own business in voluntary systems of associations, with minimal coercion from authorities and without large-scale, intense social movements. Something approaching this state of affairs may eventually come to pass in the many troubled parts of the world. But only after a very difficult period of transition that will probably last a long time.

Bowling and the Disadvantages of Social Capital

2012-02-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Political scientist Robert Putnam is best known of his "Bowling Alone" argument. In a widely publicized article in the Journal of Democracy in 1995, Putnam argued that networks of social engagement were in sharp decline in the United States. While Americans continue to bowl for amusement, membership in bowling leagues declined by as much as 40 percent from 1980 to 1993. This was, for Putnam, symptomatic of a larger withdrawal from the public sphere, since he maintained that town meeting attendance, membership in civic and fraternal organizations, voter turnout, and membership in PTAs also went down. In the 2000 book Bowling Alone, Putnam developed and defended this thesis in greater detail.

Putnam used the term “social capital” to describe levels of social engagement. His social capital argument was in the tradition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which maintained that widespread membership in churches, clubs, and other forms of voluntary associations provided an essential basis to American democracy. However, Putnam and many of those who have used his argument have missed another part of Tocqueville's generally favorable view of American democracy. While Tocqueville saw voluntary associations and cooperative participation as critical to the civic order of the new nation, he also saw these as pressures for conformity.

In my own work on Vietnamese American students, I used a version of the social capital perspective to account for why many of these students did so well in our schools. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and fieldwork, I found that the academic performance of students could be attributed to tight networks of interpersonal relations among children, parents, and neighbors within Vietnamese communities. These networks provided control and direction. They also, however, limited independence and personal freedom. Everything comes at a cost, and the benefit was probably worth the cost in the lives of these young people, but I would be willing to state as a general truth the equation high social capital equals high social control.

Social control by communities is not necessarily a bad thing. More social control within families and neighborhoods is exactly what our crime-ridden inner cities need. But it does have its disadvantages. I was thinking about these as I read the article "Are there Hidden Virtues to Bowling Alone?" in the online magazine The American. Peter A. Coclanis suggests in this article that the decline in bowling leagues was linked to surging bowling scores. Freedom from community enabled Americans to focus on improving their games, rather than on maintaining and deepening relationships with fellow bowlers.

Surrounded as I am by unabashed communitarians, I read this article with interest. I agree that we need communities, as long as these are voluntarily formed (as in Tocqueville's book) and not imposed by social architects. But we should remember that communitarianism and individual excellence don't fit well together.

Strange Incentives in Federal Employment

2012-02-01T12:22:00.000-08:00

Jordan Weissman has an interesting article in this month's Atlantic Magazine. Drawing on a new Congressional Budget Office study, Weissman notes that federal employees in general do slightly better than those in the private sector in wages and much better in benefits. The standard response to this type of finding is that the federal workers do better because they are more highly qualified. But Weissman's evidence indicates that the least educated federal employees do best, relative to private sector workers with similar characteristics.

Federal workers with high school or less and with some college do better in both wages and benefits than other equivalent workers. In other words, the federal government rewards people who don't have much formal education. But it also penalizes people with high levels of education. Those with professional degrees or doctorates had about 18% less in overall compensation. If you had a college degree, your salary was about the same as in the private sector, but your benefits were much better. The government may be competing with better benefits for its average office workers, then, but it offers few incentives for those most likely to be in highly specialized kinds of work.

At best, this kind of pay structure seems like it is specifically designed to produce mediocrity. But I think the real question is with the high rewards at the lower end. Because those with educations below the bachelors level do generally pay taxes, it would seem that federal jobs don't just redistribute income from high earners in private employment. They also apparently subsidize the least educated public workers at the expense of the private sector peers.

Preaching the Social Justice Doctrine

2012-01-31T10:16:00.000-08:00

Above the article entitled “Social Justice Revival: Colleges Embrace Social Justice Curriculum” in today’s Inside Higher Education is a revealing photograph. It shows a speaker in a church, behind a pulpit decorated with a banner that reads: “Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize.” Whether ostensibly secular or not, institutions of higher education across the nation have embraced “social justice” as a faith and attempted to re-define their educational missions as proselytizing and their faculties as clergy. I have no problem with priests, ministers, or rabbis preaching to the faithful. But I’m dead set against doing this in our colleges and universities.

Preaching “social justice activism” entails encouraging students to follow a social and political program. Someone must define the tenets of this program. This means that either the administration or some group of faculty promulgates an orthodox creed. Not only are students expected to adhere to this creed, but faculty (the social justice clergy) also come under pressure to conform. Marching together in their officially mandated crusades, the faculty and students leave intellectual pluralism and open inquiry behind them.

It’s fine for students to become active in causes they believe in. Members of the faculty have every right to dedicate themselves to their social and political passions. But institutions that try to direct these causes and passions replace the free exchange of ideas with doctrine.

Trends in Household Income Inequality

2012-01-30T15:27:00.000-08:00

Inequality is in the news these days. I think most of the evidence suggests that incomes in the United States are indeed more unequally distributed than in the past. However, I also think that it is a mistake to attribute the trend toward greater disparities in income to deregulation or, indeed, to any of the policies of recent years. This is because the trend is not a recent phenomenon.

The "gini coefficient" is a measure of distribution that varies between 0 and 1. When the gini coefficient of household income, for example, is "0" that means that every household has the same income. When it is "1" that means that income is completely concentrated in a single household. In order to look at income inequality in the United States, I've plotted gini coefficients for household income from 1967 to 2010, as provided by the Census Bureau's Current Population Reports, and posted the resulting figure here.

Incomes today are more unequally distributed than in the past. But this did not begin to happen in the era of deregulation. Income inequality actually began to rise in the late 1960s, stalled briefly during the stagflation era of the mid-1970s, and then resumed a steady rise, with a single sharp upward jolt in the early 1990s. Household income inequality actually rose more slowly through the 2000s than in earlier years.

As I see it, this simple chart is an illustration of the most important fact about income inequality. It is a consequence of a gradual and long-term change in the nature of the American economy, not a consequence of a one percent elite gone wild with greed. Previously, I have tried to identify this long-term change as the rise of a consumer-oriented, demand-side economy that based economic growth on deficit spending by both government and private individuals. If this is true, increasing spending, whether private or public, will tend to increase inequality, not decrease it.

Made of Paper: Szasz and Laing

2012-01-29T17:20:00.000-08:00

In the early 1970s, when I was a college undergraduate, the “anti-psychiatry” movement flourished. The libertarian renegade psychiatrist Thomas Szasz was one of its most celebrated exponents. An heir to the classical liberal tradition, Szasz criticized the practice of involuntary mental hospitalization in the United States and other democracies, as well as the use of the concept of mental illness for ideological enforcement in the Communist regimes. In The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and other books, Szasz argued that there is a fundamental difference between the physical problems properly described as disease and supposed sicknesses of the mind. The latter were not defined by bodily malfunctions, but by non-conforming behavior and beliefs. Judgments on the kinds of behavior and beliefs considered “sick,” in Szasz’s view, are no more than attempts to impose one’s own system of beliefs on others. A system of psychiatric diagnoses, according to this perspective, is a secularized religion, in which psychiatrists have taken the role of priests. Since those who diagnose mental illnesses have the enforcement powers of the state behind them, Szasz argued, the diagnoses are means of policing thought.

One of the big differences between psychiatrically enforced systems of belief and action and religious systems, is that the former deny the moral agency of individuals. Szasz’s earliest criticisms of the mental illness profession were aimed at the insanity defense in law. If an individual is not responsible for criminal actions because of incompetence to make decisions, that individual has no moral agency. Essentially, then, the insanity defense in criminal trials and the insanity concept in general are strategies for denying free will to some individuals.

I found Szasz’s ideas appealing, but also troubling. It did seem to me like the continual invention of new mental disturbances took away both personal autonomy and moral responsibility from growing numbers of people. Diagnoses of mental incapacity seemed tautologies to me: “Why does he act the way he does? Because he’s crazy. How do you know he’s crazy? Because of the way he acts.” But there are also situations in which individuals’ views of the world make it impossible for them to care for themselves, and we may be warranted in judging them mentally incompetent. One of the consequences of the decline of involuntary mental hospitalization through the deinstitutionalization trend that began in the 1960s was that the homeless population rose. My own preference would be for families or local communities to care for their own incompetents, whether the source of those individuals’ inability to care for themselves. Unfortunately, our immediate social institutions today are frequently not up to this job,

Another writer associated with the anti-psychiatry movement who influenced my thinking was R.D. Laing, although Laing repudiated the “anti-psychiatry” label. Laing’s most valuable contributions came fairly early in his career. After he achieved “guru” status, he became increasingly bizarre, although in the context of this writing it would probably not be appropriate to say that he went crazy. Laing’s The Divided Self, published in the same year as The Myth of Mental Illness, described people as having a need for selfhood or identity, connected to the identities of other people. Psychological disturbances, for Laing, were ways that people coped with insecurities about their existence as selves.

Laing was once asked if he believed that there was such a thing as madness. Yes, he answered, but it is not a sickness. He presented mental problems as what one might call spiritual troubles, rather than clinical conditions. Like Szasz, he saw the medicalization of human behavior as objectification and as an unsupportable denial of free agency. If I say that people are controlled by causes outside their own wills, he once remarked, you will say that I am a good scientific thinker. If I say that I am controlled by causes outside my own will, you will say that I am mad and lock me up.

Made of Paper: The Republic

2012-01-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

The one piece of required reading that impressed me most in my first year of college was The Republic of Plato. Part of the appeal of the book was probably its literary quality. It is a masterpiece of the art of the dialogue, a dramatization of ideas. I wonder how much irony Plato intended in his work, since he was a literary artist who argued for the banishment of poet and playwrights and a writer who, through the mouth of the Socrates character, voiced mistrust for the written word. Maybe Plato’s dialogues were thought experiments through fiction, a bit like Dostoyevsky’s novels centuries later, more than they were attempts at a philosophical system.

The Republic might have begun my turn toward social thought. Socrates begins the dialogue with the question of “what is just?’ It all starts with morality, then, with what should guide human behavior. Through the leading questions he asks his pupils and fellow thinkers, he comes to the view that for justice or good to have any real meaning, it must be transcendent, it must refer to the same quality at all times and in all situations and therefore must be outside of times and situations. This line of thought leads to the famous Platonic concept of forms, abstractions that exist in a realm of their own. In order to identify this transcendent quality, he posits that the good within an individual must be the same as the good among individuals. If we can describe the ideally ordered polity, we can use this description to understand the proper order in the lives of individuals, the good that should guide people’s lives.

Plato’s perfect directed society, with its guardians, soldiers and producers, today seems a model of totalitarianism. Max Beerbohm wrote about Plato’s republic and all the utopia’s that had followed it: “Oh, is this utopia? Well,/ I beg your pardon, I thought it was hell.” Of course, we don’t know if Plato actually meant anyone to adopt this as a plan, and it may have been just a thought experiment. But I think it is a point of departure for social theory because it asks provocative questions about what is a good society, even if we decide to reject the perspective behind those questions. Beyond that, though, I think that a version of Platonic totalitarianism underlies the main currents of modern social science, so that a critique of Plato is a good place to begin a critique of the contemporary social sciences.

The tri-partite image of society is older than Plato and continued to dominate Western social paradigms long after his era. Influenced by sociologist Emile Durkheim, the scholar of comparative religions Georges Dumézil argued, in L’idéologie Tripartie des Indo-Européens (1958), that the tripartition of Indo-European society into priests or rulers, warriors, and laborers or artisans, shaped the development of Indo-European religious and social forms. That three-part division can be seen in the earliest caste system of India (brahmanas, ksatriyas, and vaisyas); and in the early Roman system of flamines, milites, and quirites. During the European Middle Ages, this tripartition endured as three orders of medieval society (the oratores, bellatores, and laborares, or people who pray, people who fight, and people who work).

The big difference between Plato’s ideal society and the earlier and later social images was that Plato’s was not a description of how things are, but a conscious plan for how things ought to be. Plato provided us with one of the first efforts at social planning, the design of human and moral order by an expert or philosopher. This took the philosopher outside of involvement in time and history and made the planner the sole subject acting upon human relations as objects inside of time and history.

The rise of the scientific world view in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although ostensibly Aristotelian, owed a great deal to the Platonic distinction between the thinker’s participation in the undetermined realm of the eternal and the existence of the object of thought in the realm of the secular, historical, and contingent. This can be seen, for example, in Cartesian dualism, in which the objective, material world occupies an ever-increasing area of existence, while thought and agency retreat into a shrinking territory tenuously linked to the material through the pineal gland.

The development of the social sciences, mostly in the nineteenth century, by applying the scientific world view to human relations returned in many ways to The Republic. In the program of Auguste Comte, usually credited with the coining of the word “sociology,” Platonic guardians would take the form of an elite priesthood of social scientists who would seek and maintain the best social order. Modern scientific rationalism differed from the Platonic variety in the former’s empiricism, in its emphasis on a posteriori rather than purely a priori reasoning. But modern social science, especially in its applied versions, has followed the Platonic approach of distinguishing between the experts and planners, who are transcendent subjects, and the social order as an object of design. Plato’s republic was clearly totalitarian. But it also seems to me that all efforts at the conscious direction of human relations by experts are essentially dehumanizing and totalitarian.

They Call it Democracy: Affirming the Civic Engagement Doctrine

2012-01-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

The education for civic engagement crusade marches on. According to an article in Inside Higher Education, a group of educators met on Jan. 25 at the annual meetings of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to discuss how to carry out the ideas set forth in a recent report on civic learning by the AACU. Written on the recommendation of the Department of Education, this report proposed to make a program for training people in citizenship "an integral component of every level of education, from grammar school through graduate school, across all fields of study" (mathematics? biology? physics?).

Wednesday's meeting struck close to home for me because it quoted both a former faculty member of my university and the president of my university. The latter, who was the keynote luncheon speaker on Wednesday, declared that "we made a decision in 2006 ... to make sure that civic engagement was on the same pedestal (sic) as research and learning and that they were interconnected." Funny thing about the English word "we": it always includes the speaker, but it isn't clear who else it includes. I know that this usage excluded me. As I recall, no one ever took a vote on whether "we" should work some version of civic propaganda into everything we did. Our commitment to democratic engagement was, in a revealing irony, imposed from above.

Using the educational system to inculcate an officially mandated system of social values is an old aspiration among educators with a fondness for social engineering. In his pamphlet, The Schools Can Teach Democracy, initially delivered as an address before the Progressive Education Association in 1939, the "social reconstructionist" educational theorist George Counts argued that the proper business of schools was to create a democratic society through cultivating “democratic habits, dispositions, and loyalties,” as well as relevant political knowledge in students (p. 22). Through schooling, “the entire nation would be subjected to the most critical examination for the purpose of revealing submerged and exploited regions, occupational groups, and racial, national, and religious minorities” (p. 26). Counts maintained that educational programs should not simply reflect the social order. Instead, they should re-shape the social order through indoctrination along lines dictated by educational experts. He did not say how those experts would be selected or kept in line.

My own view is that in a free society individuals should choose when, how, and whether they want to be involved in social or political activities. Just as the president of my university has no business telling me what form my citizenship should take, I have no business telling my students what their "civic engagement" ought to be. The present-day program of the civic educators is more sinister than anything in Counts' day because it is a collaboration between government bureaucracy and educational activists to create a systematic, nation-wide campaign of corporatist thoughts and values permeating every school and university. They call it democracy.

Made of Paper: Huxley, Burgess, and Dystopia

2012-01-25T11:04:00.001-08:00

From high school through college, I read through the works of two British novelists, Aldous Huxley and Anthony Burgess, both of whom are best known for their portrayals of dystopia. Huxley's most famous novel, of course, was Brave New World. If George Orwell later represented the nightmare future as one of open repression, economic scarcity, and obvious thought-policing, Huxley drew this coming dystopia as scientific manipulation, planned comfort, and subtle direction of thinking in the perfected technocracy. While much of our contemporary corporate and academic environment is Orwellian (mandated speech codes, official orthodoxies, and "war is peace" phrases such as "colorblind racism"), even more is Huxleyan. I have suggested previously that social planning in general entails a Brave New World type of dehumanization.

I enjoyed all of Huxley's works, even his final novel, Island, although I re-read this last many years later and found its description of Huxley's own version of utopia somewhat creepy, dealing as it did with a society raised to ideal harmony through the use of psychedelic plants according to the guru-like guidance of a wise leader. Maybe it suffered being read in the wake of the Manson family and the Jim Jones cult. In my view, Huxley's best work was his early novel, Point Counterpoint, a complex roman a clef about English society in the 1920s. Mark Rampion, one of the major characters in that book, is an educated man from the working class, based on Huxley's friend D.H. Lawrence, who gives a rebellious outsider's view of the elite. Lawrence also, I believe, served as the model for John the Savage, the opponent of scientific utopia in Brave New World.

Burgess saw a dismal future of juvenile violence in A Clockwork Orange, the celebrated film version of which was good, but not as good as the novel. The Russian-English slang used by the juvenile delinquents in the book could be reproduced only imperfectly in the film. This, like Huxley's novel, deals with the problem of free will versus the scientific control of human beings, although a sub-theme concerns the compatibility of high aesthetic culture and evil. Alex, the protagonist, is a fan of Beethoven who, after being sentenced to prison for rape and murder, takes up reading the Bible for the sake of its violent parts. In prison, Alex enters a behavior-modification program, as a result of which he not only becomes unable to engage in violence, but also unable to endure classical music. As a consequence, he cannot protect himself from other delinquents after his release from prison. Eventually, a series of traumatic events reverse Alex's conditioning, and at the end he finds himself with his own family, pondering his child's probable coming delinquency.

The delinquency and the behavioral manipulation are two parts of a morally empty society, directed by social workers and psychiatrists, rather than by transcendent values. Interestingly, one of the lesser known works by Burgess, 1985, was a commentary on George Orwell. This book is in two parts, the first a critical essay on 1984 and the second another dystopian novella. In the essay, Burgess argues that those who see Orwell's book as a prediction of the future misread it. It was, according to Burgess really about 1948, and everything Orwell portrays in the book is an exaggerated version of England and the world after the war. Along these same lines, Burgess gives us 1985 as an exaggerated version of his own society. In the novella, humanistic education has disappeared, replaced by intellectually mediocre training in prescribed social attitudes and behavior (what we now call "civic engagement education" or "social justice education"). It is a world of dreary conformity, managed by a social work bureaucracy. The juvenile delinquents in this book cultivate whatever bits and pieces of classical learning they can acquire as rebellion against their establishment (Burgess may have repeatedly fantasized too much appeal for high culture to young criminals).

As in the case of Huxley, the books that I liked best were not Burgess's best known. The one that I would rank above all others was Enderby, which later became the first volume of a quartet and was re-titled Inside Mr. Enderby. A middle aged, eccentric poet, Francis Xavier Enderby falls into an unfortunate marriage and unable to write, becomes depressed and suicidal. His treatment in a mental institution "cures" him of writing poetry and he becomes a bartender. Enderby repeatedly comes back in later books in the series, personifying the marginal and threatened values of humanistic culture and morality threatened by feminism, liberation movements, and all varieties of political correctness, as well as by psychiatry.

Made of Paper: High School Books

2012-01-24T09:22:00.000-08:00

My teachers never knew what to make of me. During many of my early years, I was an uncooperative student with a mind that was usually somewhere other than the classroom. They couldn’t figure out why I did so badly on my assignments, when I did them, and so well on all the achievement tests. By the time I reached high school, though, I began to pay attention occasionally, when the topic happened to interest me. A few of the books that influenced me in high school were actually part of the curriculum.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was probably the best thing my sophomore class read. I don’t agree with Ernest Hemingway that all of American literature comes from this novel, but it does occupy a place of privilege in my personal canon. Every river I have seen calls up the image of Huck and Jim on the river, whether that river was the Chao Phraya, the Pasig, the Seine, or the Bogue Chitto. For all the claims that Twain’s work is “racist,” Huckleberry Finn was one of the first fictional treatments of a black man as a full human being (as opposed to the saccharine caricatures of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), in a complex relationship with a white boy. At the same time, it represented attitudes toward race in the nineteenth century realistically and truthfully, without preaching.

I was fortunate enough to have been placed in the top level of a highly graded tracking system, in spite of my orneriness as a pupil. Without tracking, I think I would have done better to quit school and go to the public library, except for the credential. My classmates and I certainly would not have read the books that we did, if we had been in a more egalitarian system. Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain was among the most intriguing of our readings. I wonder if today’s school system, with its close scrutiny of any trace of religion in the classroom would have allowed that today. As it was, my ultra-Catholic English teacher and I were pretty much the only ones in the class who did not think that Merton was completely nuts.

Another book that impressed me greatly, but that most of my classmates did not enjoy, was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Admittedly, this book does not fall into the category of “a spell-binding yarn.” But for those of us who like thinking about symbols and the problem of good and evil, Hans Castorp’s life in the sanatorium offered an evocative meditation on modern civilization.

A different German writer that I read about the same time, but outside of school, was Hermann Hesse. In my Hesse phase, I believe I went through everything he wrote, from Peter Camenzind to The Glass Bead Game. At the time, Hesse was another one of those cult writers, whose works tend to be excessively praised by followers and excessively criticized by skeptics. But I liked Hesse because he was always transforming himself and because, during a long lifetime of work, his work generally improved.

Literary high modernism appealed to me in these years. We did read T.S. Eliot in school and The Waste Land was one of my favorite poems in late adolescence, appealing, as it did, to my gloomy cultural pessimism. Today, I prefer the understated mysticism of Four Quartets. Outside of school, I read Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound, whom I liked in bits and pieces, although I have never made my way through The Cantos from front to back. I wonder how many people have.

Modernism also provided me with my senior thesis, which was something along the lines of “Language as Protagonist in the Work of James Joyce.” I argued that all of Joyce’s writings should be read as a single work, in language gradually asserts itself as the dominant actor. I did read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses for this, but I admit that I read only selections from Finnegan’s Wake. I’ll get to it someday.

As I say, The Wasteland spoke to my gloominess, but one very un-modernist work countered this mood. One day, I was sitting by myself in the audio-visual lab, where I worked as a volunteer (we threaded films onto projectors – it was how they used to show movies in that distant era), depressed about whatever depresses teenagers, when I noticed a thin hardbound book with a cheap cover decorated in leaf designs. I opened it up to find that it held some of the most inspiring poems I’d ever read that made life seem full of breath. By “inspiring,” I don’t mean “inspirational,” but something more genuine. This book was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Still it makes me feel expansive just to think lines from the “Song of Myself.”

High school also introduced me to reading outside of English. I probably would not have done this had I just spent those years in the library. I think it was in my junior year, in Fourth Year Spanish (for those of us who had begun in junior high), that we read Platero y Yo, by Juan Ramόn Jimenez, and some of the works of Pio Baroja. When I was in my senior year, there were only two of us (in a class of one thousand) who wanted to sign up for Fifth Year Spanish. One of our teachers gave up her lunch period and ate in class so that the school could offer us the class. We used to make fun of her behind her back because she teased her hair up, wore heavy makeup, and dressed (in our opinion) too young for a middle-aged woman. What ungrateful little creeps! The class topic was La Literature del Siglo de Oro and we read selections from Cervantes and Calderon de la Barca’s La Vida es un Sueño.

Made of Paper: Discovering George Orwell

2012-01-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

About the time I was 15 and 16 years old, I became fascinates with the works of George Orwell. I don't recall which book I read first, but it was probably 1984. While that may have been Orwell's most important work, I believe I liked his autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London best. Someone said of that book that "going native" is a characteristic of English adventurers (think Sir Richard Francis Burton) and that Orwell in Down and Out went native in his own land. Orwell was a perpetual outsider, which was probably what made him such an incisive critic of his own society and probably also makes him so difficult to place on our "left" "right" political continuum today. As an outsider, he penned the bitter criticisms of the vulgarity of contemporary civilization in The Road to Wigan Pier and Keep the Aspidistra Flying and as an outsider he decried the shallowness and mendacity of modern politicized intellectual life. Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" (reproduced here) is probably the best thing written on style.

Made of Paper: Books of Early Adolescence

2012-01-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

By the time I entered junior high school, I had developed the habit of reading by the author. I’d find an author I liked and then look for all of his (they were pretty much all men) works. I began to enjoy science fiction. The berserker stories of Fred Saberhagen , about the desperate fight of humans against self-replicating robot war machines gone out of control, were among the fictions that made the biggest impression. I also liked reading collections of stories from ancient mythology, especially Norse mythology. This combination predisposed me for a discovery many other young people were making at the time, the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien has suffered the fate of many “cult” writers; the excessive esteem of fans and the excessive contempt of critics reacting against popularity. When as an adult I read his books to my daughter, I could see his imperfections. Notably, his erudition led him to mimic and mix a variety of literary forms (the folk tale, the fairy story, the myth, and the heroic epic) that don’t always fit well together in a single narrative. But I would still include his books on any list of general recommended readings. The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in his trilogy, has always seemed to me his best work because of his successful evocation of the relationship among the adventuring hobbits facing a dangerous world.

About the age of fourteen, I grew more interested in social and political issues. Here, I step into perilous territory because I have to acknowledge that Ayn Rand was a big influence on me at this time. If Tolkien has supporters and detractors, Rand has devotees and denouncers. I don’t fall into either camp. The clarity of her reasoning attracted me, but I gradually came to disagree with some aspects of her perspective. Her ideals of human behavior allowed only Howard Roark-type supermen and weak, despicable cheats. As I thought more about her work, I could not see that this left any room for real human beings. She did not, in other words, have a grasp of psychological complexity or an appreciation for people, as opposed to abstract ideals. But I did not altogether reject Rand. I accepted and still accept her recognition of the importance of the individual human ego. Since the social world is composed of selves and relationships among selves, a demand that we be “selfless” is a demand for a society without people. The refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of rational self-interest is more likely to create hypocrites than saints.

Also at fourteen, I found two books in the public library that exercised a great, if not entirely healthy, influence on me. One of these was The Penal Colony : Stories and Short Pieces, by Franz Kafka. I still think of Kafka as more of a short story writer than a novelist, although I liked The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika, which I read after the stories (I think in that order). I say the influence was not necessarily healthy because reading Kafka contributed to a tendency toward introversion and self-absorptiion. The tales I liked best, “The Burrow” and “The Hunger Artist” may have been particularly notable for the sense of withdrawal from the external. The other book that I found in the library may have made an even greater contribution in this direction. This was the Discourse on Method, by Rene Descartes. I was impressed by the author’s program of accepting nothing as true but what could be indubitably proven. His method, though, was to erase everything outside of himself and turn to his own thought as the only sure proof of reality. It was a useful exercise in the history of philosophy, but doubting everything and turning inward was probably not the best psychological path for a teenager inclined toward solipsism.

I did follow some of the more standard authors. It is unfair that Thomas Wolfe has fallen into the category of writers for adolescents. I think he deserves to be appreciated as a major American writer for readers of all ages. But Wolfe’s concentration on fictionalized autobiography of his own youth does give him a special appeal for the young. I loved his expansiveness and garrulity. Since I came from a southern family that still had close links to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Wolfe’s novelistic recollections struck familiar notes for me.

I can remember taking long walks to think about the ideas, events, and images in the books I was reading and becoming so lost in thought that I’d fall into a sort of trance. I’d look around and suddenly realize that I’d been walking for hours and that I was miles away from home.

Made of Paper: The Childhood Books

2012-01-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

The seventeenth century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo made a wonderful series of portraits, representing human heads and faces as composites of objects such as fruit and leaves. Arcimboldo’s “The Librarian” is a man constructed from a pile of books, an image especially striking for those of us of literary formation. The books in Arcimboldo’s picture can’t be readily identified, though. Which books make the man?

As I think about the early books in my life, I have to confess that one of the most important texts for me was Watty Piper’s The Little Engine that Could. Although it may not sound very sophisticated, to this day when I have to face some challenge I still involuntarily hear “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can” in my mind. Sure, the lesson is simplistic and moralistic. But it’s a good lesson, and what’s wrong with a simplicity and morality?

When my maternal grandmother was a little girl, she used to buy every book by L. Frank Baum as soon as it came out. As a result, the bookshelves in my home held first edition copies of nearly all the Oz books. I have a distinct of memory of lying in bed with some childhood illness, being taken to another world by the Oz books. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion (the mind, the heart, and the spirit) today seem to me like one of the great fictional trinities of the soul, like the three Karamazov brothers.

I can recall, a bit later in life (maybe about second grade), liking the “we were there” series. These were historical novels that featured children as eyewitnesses to important events in history. The one I remember best is We Were There with Cortes and Montezuma that told the story of the conquest of Mexico from the perspective of a young boy and girl.

My favorite childhood writer was Edgar Rice Burroughs. I think I read all of the Tarzan books, the Apache books, and most of his Mars and Venus series. I still think that Tarzan of the Apes was a skillfully wrought tale, as well as an evocation of an archetypal idea. Although, of course, I did not make all of the associations when I first read the book, it echoes many of the thoughts from western intellectual history, including the image of the noble savage, concerns about civilization and decadence, and questions of nature versus nurture. Even at the time, it did strike me as strange and fascinating that Tarzan first learned to read in English (from books left in the cabin of his dead parents) and then first learned to speak in French (from a Belgian he rescued).

At the ages of maybe 11 and 12, I enjoyed other adventure writers, such as Zane Gray and H. Rider Haggard. But the writer who made the biggest impact on me at that period was Jack London. I did like The Call of the Wild, but the most important book for me was The Sea Wolf, which I first read in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. The conversations between the soft, wealthy, humanitarian Humphrey van Weyden (“Hump”) and the hard, individualistic, self-serving Wolf Larsen set me thinking about the complexities of social and political philosophy. Although London apparently meant to oppose the standpoint represented by Larsen, he and his fictional protagonist, van Weyden, were both drawn to the charismatic sea captain.

Degrees and Unemployment

2012-01-20T14:51:00.001-08:00

A recent article in Fiscal Times reported that recent college graduates with degrees in architecture had the highest unemployment rate, a fact that the periodical attributed to the housing crash. I did my own calculations on unemployment rates among college graduates under 30, which is not exactly the same as recent graduates. I also used the individual-level census data from 2009. I came up with a lower rate than the study cited in the Fiscal Times (mine was 11.8%, rather than 13.9%), but this could be because the data were a couple of years old and because I was looking at all young graduates rather than recent graduates. But it supports the contention that architecture is a high unemployment degree. I wonder, though, if this is a temporary phenomenon, since architects do have a definite occupational skill that could be in demand again in the future. In my calculations, though, the highest unemployment rate was for people with degrees in languages other than what the census classified as common languages, such as French and German (13.8%). School student counseling, which I had thought would have a low rate, came in at 13.6%. Interdisciplinary social science graduates were also pretty likely to be out of work (13.3%). By contrast, English language & literature, liberal arts and history don't look too bad (7.2%, 7.2% and 8.4%, respectively). My discipline, sociology, looks almost like an economic boom field, with a young unemployment rate of only 6.1%.

Of course, we don't know exactly what all of these folks are doing. It might be easier for English majors than architects to get jobs slinging hamburgers, or they might be more willing to take those Among the lowest earners were people with degrees in early childhood education, who had an unemployment rate of only 4.0%. This makes me think that there may be a tradeoff. Sometimes training for a potentially high paying, high prestige job may actually put you in a market in there is more supply than demand, while training in the low-paying field may give you a better bet for employment. Given the point that I have previously made about the continuing demand for workers at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, perhaps part of our problem with unemployment lies in excessively high expectations for widespread upward mobility,

FIRE and Syracuse U's Attack on Freedom of Thought

2012-01-19T09:11:00.001-08:00

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is in my opinion one of the most admirable organizations involved with higher education today. FIRE is dedicated to preserving freedom of thought and expression in colleges and universities. These institutions should require no such effort, but unfortunately many of them have dedicated themselves to policing the thinking of their students and faculty, instead of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas.

FIRE has now managed to help a student whose rights have been violated by Syracuse University's School of Education in one of the most outrageous attacks on liberty perpetrated by any academic administration. Matthew Werenczak, a white graduate student in the school, was engaged in his student teaching at a local middle school. A local community leader complained in front of Werenczak and another white student teacher that city schools should hire more teachers from historically black colleges, rather than from Syracuse. Werenczak understandably took this as a racially prejudiced remark and he described the complaint as "racist" on his Facebook page. In response to this posting, the administration of the School of Education called him to a meeting and required him to seek counseling for "anger management," attend a course on "cultural diversity," write a reflective paper showing that he had seen the error of his ways, and then have the School of Education review his paper to decide whether he could continue in the graduate program. He completed the steps required, but Syracuse effectively expelled him anyway.

This case should make any reasonable person's jaw drop in astonishment. Werenczak's "wrong-doing" was objecting to a racially offensive comment, not making one. Syracuse apparently believes that its students not only do not enjoy freedom of thought or speech in its classrooms, but that they cannot even exercise these freedoms in non-university media, giving the institution the power to police the minds and voices of students everywhere and at all times. If any student at any time expresses views inconsistent with officially mandated doctrine, the university can mandate re-education to enforce orthodoxy. Even then, Syracuse maintains no due process, so that a student can be arbitrarily expelled.

The good news is that Werenczak was readmitted to the School of Education at Syracuse within hours after FIRE took up his case. This makes me thankful that FIRE exists. But the very fact that the organization would need to defend a student against such appalling behavior by the regime at Syracuse to me indicates that there are serious problems with its commitment to the type of liberty essential to higher education. That the events at Syracuse only offer an extreme example of pressures for intellectual conformity at institutions across the nation may be an indictment of academia in the United States today.

How Well Off is the Average American Today?

2012-01-18T12:00:00.001-08:00

We are currently in a time of economic troubles and many Americans are indeed out of work or experiencing financial difficulties. The relative extent of these difficulties can be overestimated, though. If we look, for example, at the report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 issued by the Census Bureau in September 2011 we might question whether our present problems qualify this as a time of crisis.

Figure 1 in this report, on page 8, shows us the median household income of major racial and ethnic groups in the United States in 2010 dollars. The striking thing about this figure is that it shows median income, the best measure of the economic situation of the average household, rising for all groups. Today, in our time of troubles, all groups are better off than they were back in the 1970s, 1980s, or even early 1990s. Median incomes did generally peak in the early 2000s, though, and have dipped since then. Part of our perception today, then, involves our comparing ourselves to the high prosperity of the very recent past, rather than to our longer historical background. We should keep in mind, also, that inflation-adjusted dollars may underestimate present-day well-being because they attempt to hold purchasing power constant. But what would be the dollar value in 1975 of such common 2010 goods as a cell phone, an ipad, or a GPS?

It is true that the poverty rate is relatively high today. But is it at a historical pinnacle? Figure 4 in this document shows that there are indeed more people below the official poverty line than ever before. But that is because the population of the United States is larger than ever before. As a percentage of Americans, our present 15.1% poverty rate is lower than the estimated rate until the mid 1960s. The rate has gone up and down since then, but it was as high as it is today in the early 1980s and in the mid 1990s.

Finally, since insurance is such a topical issue today, we might look at Figure 7 to see if it supports perceptions of an insurance crisis. Again, the reason that there are more uninsured people today is that there are more people. Today's 16.3% uninsured is high, but only about as high as it was in the late 1990s and it is not really dramatically different from the low point in 1987. Since this chart only begins in 1987, moreover, we can only speculate that there were many more uninsured people in earlier years. It is true that health care is more expensive today than ever before, but the care also provides treatment that did not exist in earlier years (like those cell phones and ipads). This also means that the overwhelming majority of Americans (83.7%) do have health insurance.

I would not say that we have no cause for economic worry. As I've argued previously, our debt-ridden, demand-side economy raises serious questions about the future well-being of the United States. As we look at our real situation right now, though, we want to avoid exaggeration and excessive alarmism.

Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory.

2012-01-17T14:56:00.000-08:00

I recently read Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (Penguin, 2010). Lévi-Strauss may well have been the most influential anthropologist of the late twentieth century. More than any other individual, he gave rise to the theoretical approach to the humanities and social sciences known as “structuralism” and to its successor “post-structuralism.” His fundamental idea, derived primarily from the structural analysis of language, was that human kinship relations and mythological accounts expressed systems of thinking driven by the need to order the world according to binary systems of oppositions.

Although he generally expressed his theories in complex and difficult literary works, Lévi-Strauss also achieved a wider renown among members of the general reading public. His bittersweet, elegiac memoir Tristes Tropiques (roughly “sad tropics”) about his field work in Brazil, published in 1955, established him as one of the great commentators on the labors of anthropology, the questionable benefits of modernity, and the nature of the disappearing life of tribal people. Ironically, as Patrick Wilcken points out in this account, Lévi-Strauss was not much of a field worker and the explorer of the pre-literate mind always felt most at home in libraries. I was reminded of that other armchair anthropologist, the British author of The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer.

Born into a family of secular Jews of Alsatian origin, Lévi-Strauss from his youth found himself at the boundaries of different cultural worlds in the frequently anti-Semitic society of France. His father, Raymond, was a portrait painter just at the time when the adventurous movements of artistic modernism and the rise of mass photography were making realistic portrait-painting outmoded. From his father, Lévi-Strauss acquired a strong aesthetic sense and perhaps also an old fashioned fondness for tradition that would lie behind the anthropologist’s inclination toward tribal societies and that would come to the surface in the growing conservatism of his later years.

As a student, Lévi-Strauss became involved in socialist politics and studied law and philosophy. After teaching secondary school for a time and marrying Dina Dreyfus, he accepted an offer to go with his wife to Brazil as part of a French cultural mission. The two were appointed visiting professors at the University of São Paulo. Although most French expatriate intellectuals formed insular communities, Lévi-Strauss and Dina became friends with Brazilian writers and artists and they conceived the idea of a journey of ethnographic exploration into the vast inland region of Mato Grosso.

The first forays into the indigenous cultures of Brazil brought Lévi-Strauss into contact with the Caduveo and the Bororo. Prefiguring his later fascination with structural forms in cultures, he became intrigued with the elaborate facial designs of women in the former and the expressions of social relations through housing patterns in the latter. The early studies on these groups helped to establish Lévi-Strauss as an anthropologist. His, however, was far from the ideal approach to fieldwork. His stays with his subjects were brief. He did not speak their languages or have deep grounding in their cultures. The great journey into Mato Grosso that followed also showed these shortcomings, since it was more of a caravan of exploration than an immersion in indigenous cultures.

In 1938, Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss and a well-supplied team set out to follow the Rondon Line, the remains of a telegraph line that had been strung earlier in the century, making contact with the indigenous people who lived along the way. Lévi-Strauss had corresponded with the anthropologist Curt Unckel, who had adopted the Brazilian name Nimuendajú. He tried to get Nimuendajú, the foremost expert on the peoples of the region, to accompany them, but the authority was too busy working on his field notes. Although the expedition that followed was amateurish in many respects, Lévi-Strauss proved to be an assiduous note-taker and a talented photographer. Although he would never again do fieldwork after this trek, the Brazilian adventure did inspire some of the ideas that helped to form his theories and it supplied the material for his 1955 memoir.

Lévi-Strauss might well have enjoyed a distinguished career if he had spent the rest of his life in France after the Brazilian expedition, but World War II sent him to another exotic location, where he came into contact with some of the great minds of his time. When the war broke out, he was drafted into the French army. The German invasion and the rapid collapse of France left Lévi-Strauss, as a Jew, vulnerable to Nazi anti-Semitism. At first, he was so unaware of the danger that he requested an appointment to teach in Paris, which was within the German Occupied Zone. However, he soon learned the insecurity of being Jewish even in the unoccupied zone governed by the French administration in Vichy when he was fired under an anti-Jewish statute. The reputation he had made in Brazil earned him an offer of a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York, which was taking in German refugee intellectuals. Although he offered to bring his now ex-wife Dina with him, Lévi-Strauss made his way alone to America.

New York enabled Lévi-Strauss to flourish in one of the most vibrant intellectual hothouses of the twentieth century. War and oppression drove many of Europe’s most notable artists and scholars across the seas and New York held the greatest concentration. On board the ship, Lévi-Strauss formed a friendship with the surrealist André Breton and once in New York he associated with Breton and the surrealist artist Max Ernst. Lévi-Strauss and the surrealists shared interests in mythological expressions of the subconscious mind and they became collectors of tribal artifacts in the shops in New York. This environment encouraged Lévi-Strauss to move away from the specialized study of particular human groups and toward patterns of thought underlying all of the mythologies and artifacts Lévi-Strauss and his associates were collecting.

The most important of his contacts in New York may have been the Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson. Jaksobson argued that languages should be understood not as ways of representing the world, but as systems of structural relations, expressing mental patterns. Drawing on structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss developed the concept of an abstract system of oppositions and linkages lying behind specific cultural relations. This led to a doctoral thesis and to a first major book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that presented kinship as a code of relations among people.

As Wilcken presents the life, New York provided the foundation for the rest of Lévi-Strauss’s career. The time in New York not only brought him in to the currents of thought of the mid-century, it also helped to bring him into the intellectual establishment. Once back in France, he became an able administrator. As he produced a steady stream of erudite works, he became recognized as part of the post-war intellectual elite of France. He became particular friends with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although Lévi-Strauss wrote only a little directly about psychoanalysis and the unconscious, the idea of an unconscious was clearly part of his structural anthropology. In turn, Lacan incorporated some of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas into elaborate and often incomprehensible psychoanlytic theories.

Being Jewish continued to be a barrier to Lévi-Strauss’s acceptance in the inner circle of France. However, the old prejudices were weakening. After the war, he had almost been elected to membership in one of the most selective circles of the French academic hierarchy, the Collège de France. He had, though, been repeatedly blocked, apparently by the unwillingness of some members to accept a Jewish colleague. In 1960, though, he finally achieved this honor. By the early 1970s, his public appearances and his popular memoir had made him almost a celebrity intellectual, while he had become enough of an established figure that many of the new “post-structuralists” had begun to define themselves in contrast to him. In 1973, Lévi-Strauss reached the pinnacle of French intellectual life, when he was elected to the Académie Française.

Ironically, as Lévi-Strauss moved into the center of his own tribal group, he became ever more a loner. In his own work, he assembled examples and illustrations of his theories from the reports of ethnographers and travelers, some of which were not always accurate. While many were influenced by his writings, he had no close students or successors who would carry on his tradition. Also ironically, as French intellectuals in general tended to move sharply to the left, Lévi-Strauss became much more conservative socially and politically. One of the interesting points made by the biography is that his conservatism was not an aberration at all but was deeply rooted in his anthropological respect for tradition.

The biography portrays Lévi-Strauss as a polite but distant and stand-offish figure. In interviews with the biographer, Lévi-Strauss refused to provide much information on his personal life. His first wife, Dina, appears in these pages largely because of her role in the Brazilian expedition. His second wife, from whom he was also divorced, and his third receive only a few lines of text. Although it does not give a very intimate portrait of a man who apparently did not take readily to intimacy, it does give an account of the development of his ideas. Patrick Wilcken’s critical discussion of these ideas is somewhat limited. He does not, for example, give much consideration to the question of how much tribal people actually do think in terms of abstract binary oppositions, rather than in terms of coming up with practical solutions to the material and social problems that face them daily. I wondered whether Lévi-Strauss described how tribal people really think or whether he was giving his imaginative version of how tribal people would think if they happened to be French intellectuals in loin cloths. Wilcken also does not discuss the problem of how the theories of Lévi-Strauss might be verified or falsified, or, if they cannot be falsified, what use the theories might have beyond giving us pleasurable contemplation.

Ipse Dixit: The MLK Cult

2012-01-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has become a national high holy day, still somewhat behind Independence Day and Thanksgiving in importance, but well ahead of Presidents’ Day and Veterans Day. Official speeches, marches, candlelight vigils, and service activities sponsored by civic organizations, schools, and colleges commemorate Dr. King in cities across the nation. MLK Day has taken on the character of a saint’s festival, complete with processions and pilgrimages.

In the years since his tragic death, the popular apotheosis of Dr. King has translated him from the status of a fallible mortal to a paragon of moral perfection and preternatural wisdom. Debates over affirmative action, for example, frequently deviate from arguments about why race conscious policies in employment and education to competing interpretations of the great oracle’s remark about people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It is as if social and political issues can be resolved by invoking the moral authority of the martyr. I don’t know what someone who died in 1968 would think about the public issues of the twenty-first century. I also don’t think this is relevant because, however admirable his courage and public speaking ability, Martin Luther King, Jr. possessed no supernatural insight.

Mark Engler’s article entitled “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Economics” in the Feb. 1 edition of The Nation illustrates both the ipse dixit use of Dr. King’s memory and the highly questionable nature of much of his thinking. The article tells how the martyred sage would solve contemporary problems of recession, unemployment and foreclosure by describing him as favoring two broad economic programs in the United States: a federal jobs program that would guarantee employment to every individual capable of working and a universal guaranteed income. The latter would not simply maintain every person at level of minimal subsistence, but would lift everyone up to “the median income of society.”

I believe the author of this article quotes and interprets Dr. King accurately. During the last part of his activism, at least, Dr. King does seem to have moved beyond trying to assure voting rights and nondiscriminatory access to public resources and toward wider efforts at restructuring American society. That is precisely why we should reject the portrayal of this historical figure as an image of saintly infallibility. These economic proposals are at best highly debatable and arguably remarkably foolish.

On the first proposal, the sheer cost of a universal federal jobs program is incalculable. It would mean not just creating work for all, but a massive jobs bureaucracy. The cost would entail the drag on our economy of so much artificially produced employment, in addition to wages for bureaucrats and putative workers. If we wanted to ensure a long-term downward spiral for the American economy, this would be an ideal way to go about it.

In providing jobs for everyone, the government could either mandate that each person take the assigned position or provide that all get the jobs that they want. The first is a prescription for universal involuntary servitude, a strange goal for a civil rights leader. The second would mean that we would all be able to do refuse to do any work that falls short of our dreams and desires, which would make it impossible to get some of the most essential jobs in our society done.

There have been some reasonable arguments for a guaranteed minimal national income. The negative income tax plan once considered by the Nixon administration (the higher your income is above a certain amount, the more you pay; the lower your income is below that amount, the more the government pays you) was essentially a universally guaranteed income. Some have argued that such a scheme would be cheaper and more easily administered than our current hodge-podge of government assistance programs. Others have responded that the very fact of guaranteeing everyone an income would simply universalize moral hazard, and also contribute to the problem of filling the least desirable jobs. Most plans for a guaranteed income, though, make explicit the fact that the level of support would be minimal. Dr. King’s suggestion that all be supported at the “median income of society” was, to put it bluntly, looney. It isn’t just that giving everyone a comfortable standard is beyond our capability or that to attempt to do so would be as economically destructive as trying to give everyone cushy jobs. This would be logically impossible. A median is a mid-point that divides cases into half below and half above. If it were possible to make a median a new minimum, there would be a new societal median.

In pointing out that Dr. King was not a very good economic thinker, I do not mean to speak ill of the dead. But I think we should stop pretending that, whatever his virtues may have been, he was anything more than a human being of limited judgment and understanding, like all the rest of us. Speculating on what MLK would have done tells us nothing about what we should do.

Costa Concordia

2012-01-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

Those of us who have jobs with administrative duties often wake up at night worrying about doing something wrong, precipitating a disaster of some sort. As investigations of the Costa Concordia tragedy continue though, we might reflect that no matter how badly we mess up, we won’t sink a ship.

Comment on the "Too Many People in College" Debate

2012-01-14T10:17:00.001-08:00

The website “Minding the Campus” features a debate between George Leef and Peter Sacks on the question “Are Too Many People Going to College?” Leef answers “yes” to this question and Sacks answers “no.” Leef and Sacks really seem to be arguing whether policymakers, using public funds and rhetorical encouragement, should promote more people going to college, not whether it would be desirable if more individuals, left to their own wishes and judgment, would happen to decide to pursue post-secondary schooling.

Sacks clearly favors national educational planning and public investments in directing more people toward advanced schooling, although he does necessarily see this as a matter of four year degrees. This planning orientation underlies his criticisms of arguments against promoting college. He says for example, “the real argument here is whether we are over-investing in higher education leading to bachelor's degrees, and if so, how do we legitimately ration higher education opportunity. How do we decide who "legitimately" deserves this privilege?” This presumes that the decisions are always those of planners, who make decisions about how many people go to college and who those people should be.

Leef’s position, on the other hand, can be taken in two different ways. One is a different version of the planning orientation: too many people are going to college and this is directing them into the wrong occupational directions and creating credential inflation. Therefore, policymakers should plan the lives of the public differently and direct more people into vocational training or some other activity. But Leef’s position can also be taken as simply saying we should stop trying to push more people into college and let individuals make their decisions on the basis of market conditions. I’m inclined to believe this second interpretation is closer to Leef’s view. Still, it is important to be clear about whether the debate concerns what is the right type of national educational planning or the extent to which we should have national educational planning.

Sacks raises excellent questions at the beginning of his statement, when he asks “[f]rom what or whose perspective are there too many college goers? From an individual's point of view at the present time? From a societal perspective now and in the long run? From a macroeconomic viewpoint?” At heart, the perspectives may be: does the job market need more college graduates? Does it benefit individuals to have college degrees? These are radically different ways of looking at the issue.

Looked at from the first perspective, I think the answer is clearly “no.” The view that America is becoming a place in which everyone will be doing advanced high-tech work is pure fantasy. Many technical advancements, such as the cash register that computes change, actually bring down the skill requirements for work. We do need some highly trained individuals, especially in technical fields. However, the main reason that undocumented immigration is such a big issue for us today is that there is such a huge demand for low-skilled, low-credentialed labor. If the need for low-skilled labor were disappearing, it would be difficult to understand why people have been pouring across our borders to take those types of jobs.

According to a 2007 publication by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “occupations that usually require only short- or moderate-term on-the-job training … will continue to account for about half of all jobs by 2016. These occupations require little, if any, postsecondary training. Among such occupations are retail salespersons, food preparation workers, and personal and home care aides, all of which are expected to add numerous jobs over the coming decade” Along similar lines, in a skeptical discussion of “the new knowledge economy,” I recently cited a 2006 Forbes article entitled “The 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill in America.” “Engineer was indeed number 1. However, the list also included truck drivers, explaining “They are hard to recruit because they have to be away from home for long periods, receive low wages, work very long hours and put up with a fluctuating workload.” Another hard-to-fill job was laborer. Forbes explained the shortage by the fact that This is very physical, unskilled and often repetitive work at low pay.” A more recent MSNBC article by Eve Tahmincioglu quotes Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy. “If you look at the job growth distribution of the last two recoveries, it suggests we’re going to see growth of a lot more lower-income jobs.”

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Forbes recently looked at the top ten employers among 18 to 29 year olds, probably the most highly credentialed generation in history. The military topped the list, but other big ones were Walmart, Starbucks, Target, Best Buy, McDonald’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, the YMCA, CVS, and UPS. Would you like fries with that BA?

So, if we look objectively at the evidence, the answer is clearly that from the macroeconomic viewpoint we don’t need more people in college. What about from the point of view of the individual? Well, on average people with degrees make more money than people without degrees. So, it may make good economic sense for you or your child to plan on higher education. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes good sense for taxpayers to subsidize your personal good fortune or that of your family. In fact, given the competition for professional positions, your good fortune may not be in my interest at all.

But to what extent will college really promote your good fortune? That may depend on what you study. I analyzed individual level U.S. Census data from the 2009 Public Use Microdata Sample to see what people in different degree fields make. Those with at least four years of college with degrees in electrical engineering had a median income of $80,000. In geological and geophysical engineering and aerospace engineering, incomes were even higher, with medians of $85,000 and $85,500. Petroleum engineers and nuclear engineers topped this, earning $104,000 and $100,000. Getting an engineering degree pays off. However, those with degrees in early childhood education had a median income of only $34,000. Those with degrees in area, ethnic, and civilization studies were somewhat higher, at $40,000. Those with degrees in advertising and public relations and in communications were also at $40,000.

What about people who did not go to college? Obviously, given the above paragraphs on job demand, many of them were doing important and needed types of work. But in a number of fields they were also doing quite well. To see how well, I looked only at people with no college. I included workers without high school diplomas as well as those with, so the estimates of incomes are modest and understate how well one can do financially without college. Among workers with high school degrees or less, supervisors of mechanics and repairers had a median income of $46,800. This doesn’t put them in the range of petroleum engineers, but it is considerably better than those who went to college to get degrees in early childhood education. Elevator installers and repairers with no college were doing even better: their median was $58,100. Electrical power installers and repairers had median incomes of $46,000. Without dragging this list on too long, I can state as a social fact that there plenty of job categories employing people without college degrees that pay off better than many types of degrees.

As a final note, I don’t think that monetary return is the only or even the best way to look at education. It may be my professorial bias, but I think a liberal arts education is actually worth financial sacrifice. I think it makes sense to take a lower paying job in order to study subjects that are intrinsically valuable. That’s one of the arguments for keeping educational costs down so that people can afford to put their time and effort into learning if they choose to do so. But this is not any kind of an argument for national educational planning.

The Ministerial Exception

2012-01-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago, in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission et al., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision that a teacher fired by a religious school could not sue her former employer for workplace discrimination because of the Constitution’s protection for religious freedom. Although Cheryl Perich taught mostly secular subjects at her Michigan school, but she also taught some classes in religion and had received some religious training. This, in the eyes of the Court, justified a “ministerial exception” to government oversight of employment on the grounds that religious groups should be free from intervention by the state.

In an editorial, the New York Times has criticized the ruling for having an excessively encompassing conception of the ministerial exception and suggested that “it’s [the Court’s] sweeping deference to Churches does not serve them or society wisely.” I’m inclined to agree with the Court on this one and to disagree with the Times. The Americans with Disabilities Act, the anti-discrimination law that provided the grounds for Ms. Perich to sue when she sought to return to work after a period of sickness, was itself fairly sweeping in its extension of federal authority. The ministerial exception at least establishes some limits to that authority by excluding religious organizations and religious activities from federal interference.

Today's College Graduates

2012-01-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

In an earlier piece, I looked at a Forbes report on the top ten employers in the United States for people aged 18 to 29. None of these were employers of highly skilled or highly labor, considering that this is one of the best educated (or at least most credentialed) generations in history. This made me wonder what kinds of education these young people might have. I looked at the 2009 individual-level census data to see what the most common degree fields were in that recent year.

Among all young people aged 29 or under with a bachelors degree or more, the most common degree field was psychology (5.7 % of degree holders). That was almost matched, though, by business management and administration (rounding off at 5.7%). In descending order, the next most common degrees were biology(3.9%), elementary education (3.4%), communications (3.1%), marketing and marketing research (2.9%), English language and literature (2.9%), political science and government (2.9%), general business (2.8%), accounting (2.8%), and nursing (2.7%). If you are like me, and you enjoy rows of numbers, you'll probably find that interesting. But most people probably want to know what that means. One thing we might notice is that although there are some liberal arts type of degrees in the list, most of these are explicitly vocationally oriented. I've generally argued that as more people get college degrees, this creates pressure for job-oriented credentials. When very few people have completed college, you can study what you like and still get that management job. When you have to compete with many other graduates, a business management degree might give you the edge. Ironically, then, the declining place of liberal arts in higher education can be attributed to rising college enrollments.

Of course, we know that young women now make up a majority of college students and recent college graduates, but do their areas of study still differ from those of men? Among men, the top ten degree fields were: business management and administration (7 %), finance (4 %), computer science (3.9%), general business (3.7 %), political science and government (3.5%), biology (3.3%). economics (3.1%), psychology (3%), accounting (2.9%), and mechanical engineering (2.8%). Men may be less likely than women to go to college these days, but when they do, they are most likely to go into fields that they think will get them work.

Among women, the business orientation is there, but much less marked. Their major fields were: psychology (7.7%), elementary education (5.3%). business management and administration (4.7%), biology (4.4%), nursing (4.2%), English language and literature (3.5%), communications (3.5%), marketing and marketing research (3.1%), accounting (2.7%), and political science and government (2.4%). The first thing that should leap out at us is that several of the preferred fields for women (elementary education, literature, communications) are relatively low paying fields. Men and women, even when they get degrees, aim in different directions. Unless we believe that an Office of Gender Engineering should be trying to change the choices men and women make, we may need to just accept the differences.

What about race? I don't want to carry this listing too far, so I've just looked at black degree holders. Like whites, the most common degree field was business management and administration (7.5%). But there were substantial differences in concentration. The rest of the list reads: psychology (7%), biology (4.8%) , criminal justice and fire protection (3.7%), sociology (3.3%), accounting (3.3%), communications, (3.3%) general business (3.2%), marketing and marketing research (3.1%), and nursing (3.0%). Blacks and whites were not all going in two completely different directions, but there were enough differences to conclude that racial vocational concentrations and income inequalities are still big parts of our national landscape, even among college graduates. Again, since these are matters of the choices people make, there are good arguments for simply accepting the differences.

One final thought: many young people appear to be thinking about college in terms of getting jobs. But if we recall the Forbes list, we might wonder how many of those aspiring business administrators and financiers will end up marching in the military or standing behind a counter at Walmart. Or, we might wonder how many of them will be rejected from those retail and service jobs because they are seen as overqualified.

"Compelling National Interest" or "Pressing Public Necessity"?

2012-01-11T17:26:00.000-08:00

Larry Purdy, one of the attorneys for Barbara Grutter in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case, argues here that the Supreme Court should accept Abigail Fisher’s petition for certoriari and use the Fisher case to overturn Grutter. The earlier Supreme Court decision accepted the use of race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School, where Barbara Grutter had been denied admission. Similarly, Abigail Fisher was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin in a race-conscious process. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals followed the Grutter decision in accepting UT Austin’s rejection of Ms. Fisher on the basis of race.

By a margin of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race in admissions in Grutter primarily on the grounds of “compelling national interest.” Curiously, the author of the majority decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor acknowledged that the reason the national interest had to be “compelling” was that treating individuals differently because of race was indeed a problem for American legal principles. This was a curious kind of legal logic, admitting that discrimination is inconsistent with equal treatment under the law, but claiming that it is ok if only your reasons are good enough. It is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, in which Justice Hugo Black justified the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry because of “pressing public necessity.”

As I point out in this law review article on the Grutter decision, O’Connor was also sufficiently cognizant of the problem of differentiating among people on the basis of race that she claimed that doing so to serve this “compelling national interest” could only be a temporary remedy. Therefore, she stated, race-conscious programs would lno onger be necessary in twenty-five years, presumably because strategic discrimination will have ended all variations among groups by 2028. This is where the empirical difficulties come in. If affirmative action policies are supposed to diminish achievement differences among racial and ethnic groups, they haven’t started to do so yet. And there is no evidence that they will do so in the foreseeable future.

I have posted here a chart of critical reading and math SAT scores. The gaps among the groups in the twenty-three year period from 1986-87 to 2009-10, precisely the time when not only affirmative action but other national strategies such as No Child Left Behind aimed at eliminating group differences, did not diminish. In fact, some of the gaps increased. Notably Asians have almost caught up with whites in reading, and will pass whites if the trend continues. In math, Asians have been ahead of all other groups throughout the period, and their lead is growing. The scores of Hispanics, on the other hand, have gone down slightly in reading and remain flat in math. Since Asians and Hispanics are the fastest growing racial or ethnic categories in the United States, this suggests the gaps in the future will be larger among more people. Moreover, because Asians are both the highest scorers and the smallest in numbers, policies that attempt to increase the representation of the underrepresented will negatively affect Asians much more than anyone else. Maybe Grutter resembles Korematsu in a number of ways.

The Civic Engagement Doctrine

2012-01-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

“Engagement” is one of the popular buzz words in higher education these days. According to an article in Inside Higher Education, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement has issued a new report, prompted by the Department of Education as a part of “a push to make democratic engagement a national goal.” I had always thought that in a free society people could choose their own goals. Apparently, this is not the view of the task force or the Department of Education.

I believe the report confuses two very different forms of education. One of these we might call civic studies, which would entail learning about competing political philosophies, the history of government in general and of American government in particular, and current political structure and political process. This type of education pushes no position and involves no proselytizing. It simply provides citizens with the information to make up their own minds and decide whether and how they will be involved in public issues. The other form of education we might call civic engagement learning, which involves preaching the socio-political values approved by the institution and recruiting students for social crusades through mandatory "public service." This second approach is not only inconsistent with the traditional approach to liberal education, it is inconsistent with liberal democracy.

The Forbes List of Top 10 Employers

2012-01-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

Forbes has just published the top 10 employers of people aged 18 to 29 (referred to in this article as "Generation Y"). It probably does suggest that the big period of structural upward mobility (people getting better jobs than their parents because better jobs become more common) is over for the foreseeable future. Low-end service and retail occupations probably will be the future of many young people today, and there will probably be many more frustrated, dissatisfied workers with expensive educations who will see themselves as perpetually underemployed. But there are reasons to interpret this list with some caution.

First, the armed services are currently the number one employer. This will probably change, unless the United States becomes embroiled in new overseas struggles. It will mean that unemployment and underemployment will be exacerbated when the military ceases to absorb youthful labor, unless the economy turns around dramatically, which appears improbably at present. Second, even if many of these young people are stuck in life-long service or retail jobs, some will achieve upward mobility over the course of their lifetimes. I don't know what the top employers were when I graduated from college, but I spent a number of years as a bicycle messenger, janitor, and retail clerk, and worked in a variety of other positions that paid off mainly in experiences. So, the list is likely to change by the time these young people are in their forties and fifties. Third, in ten years people in this generation will be competing with a smaller cohort of workers younger than themselves because the "baby boom echo," the generation born to the large number of baby boomer parents in the 1980s and 1990s, is about to come to an end. This demographic drop may be offset somewhat by continuing immigration, but if low-skilled immigrants still predominate, then some of the young people currently in retail and service will see spots open up in professional and managerial occupations. So, I'm not sure the Forbes list tells us precisely what they future of work will look like, although it is troubling.

Publicly Funded Training and Private Enterprise

2012-01-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

Should states foot the bill for training potential employees for private corporations? An article in today’s New York Times raises this question. The article looks at the example of a North Carolina state program to pay for the training of workers for a Caterpillar factory, but it cites similar programs in Louisiana and Wisconsin. The arguments in favor of these types of tax-payer funded job-specific vocational education are that they draw employers to regions that badly need economic activity and help job-seekers obtain work. These are reasonable points and I think they deserve serious consideration. Still, I’m leery of this kind of public subsidization.

Government funding for training employees, whether it takes place at the state or federal level, entails underwriting private entrepreneurial efforts. When a business sets up a factory, it takes a number of risks, one of which is that it will be able to find or prepare the right kinds of labor for its tasks. Providing the cushion of a training subsidy socializes this risk, while privatizing profits, in somewhat the same fashion that bail-outs secure businesses against the risk of failure. Money from government, whether state or federal, also tends not to go to small entrepreneurs or mom-and-pop businesses. The big firms, like Caterpillar, not only have the potential to bring in lots of jobs, they also have the pull to convince public officials to invest in training. Since these officials can’t fund everything, they have to choose among firms, naturally inclining toward the ones that have the greatest influence. Public training for private business, then, lends itself to crony capitalism while giving lip service to private enterprise.

All public funds, of course, come from taxation and greater taxation depends on and promotes an active public sector. The subsidization of large-scale business, whether through training programs or bailouts, results in a corresponding growth of large-scale government. It also makes the distinction between public and private increasingly unclear, bringing them together as gears in a single machine of social efficiency. What is done at the level of the state can also be done at the federal level, as this type of cooperative arrangement achieves popular acceptance. Is it unrealistic to see public-private partnerships like this as steps toward the “Great Trust” envisioned in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward? I think we should think carefully about where public-private collaborations will lead, as well as assess their value as responses to current economic problems.

The West Florida Farmhouse

2012-01-07T16:16:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I drove over to West Florida to take care of some paperwork on the ancestral family seat. No, I don’t mean I travelled all the way across southern Mississippi and Alabama to the Florida panhandle. I made the much shorter jaunt across the Ponchartrain Causeway to the West Florida part of Louisiana.

It may surprise many outsiders to find that there is a West Florida in Louisiana (and also in Mississippi and Alabama). Last year, while serving on an academic committee, I happened to mention that my family came from West Florida. “Oh, West Florida is a really nasty place,” exclaimed one of my colleagues, “filled with redneck bigots living in trailers.” I’m pretty sure she was confusing us with those other redneck bigots to the east, but it might just be that as an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness she despises all white southern rural people.

The area of West Florida, better known as the West Florida Parishes (since Louisiana calls its counties “parishes”) include most of the “foot” part of Louisiana’s boot, to the west and north of Lake Ponchartrain. When the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, the boundaries of the territory were ill-defined. The French minister Talleyrand, who would get my vote for the most slippery figure in world history, remarked to the Americans, “you have made a noble bargain and I suppose you will make the most of it.” The purchasers did manage to define their new acquisition fairly broadly, but were unable to convince the Spanish, who still held what is now the state of Florida and the Gulf Coast all the way to the Mississippi, that any of those lands came with Louisiana. But occupation is often a better way to establish ownership than treaty.

Americans had been relentlessly moving west and south and settlers had migrated into the Gulf Coast region, sometimes with and sometimes without the permission of the Spanish authorities. Unlike the territory to the west that became part of Mexico when that nation won its independence from Spain, few Spanish speaking natives or colonists actually lived in the West Florida region. Following the West Florida Rebellion in 1810, the Americans created the West Florida Republic, which last a little under three months before annexation by the United States. This history is one of the reasons that I have difficulty with the idea of an open border with Mexico today, despite my sympathy for undocumented as well as documented immigrants and my recognition of the economic value of immigration.

Initially, many of the West Floridians wanted to enter the U.S. as a distinct territory. The westernmost among them did not want to become part of Louisiana, which was largely French-speaking and Catholic, while they spoke English and were mainly Baptist or Methodist. But Washington had other plans, and divided the new territory among the three adjoining ones, giving part to Louisiana, part to Mississippi, and a little sliver to Alabama. Two years later, in 1812, Louisiana became a state with its present form, although to this day it retains distinctive cultural regions. By 1815, the West Floridians felt sufficiently connected to Louisiana to form volunteer companies and cross the straits south of Lake Ponchartrain to join Andrew Jackson’s forces at the Battle of New Orleans.

I come into this story because my ancestors were among the early pioneering rednecks to move into Spanish West Florida. It was the destination of a multigenerational journey. According the story I heard from my grandfather from the time I was old enough to understand, the name “Bankston” is an Anglicization of “Bengtssen,” the name of a colonist from Scandinavia who arrived in New Sweden, along the Delaware River, in the first half of the seventeenth century. The colony fell first under Dutch New Netherland and then under the British. I don’t know whether it was anti-British sentiment, but colonists began moving south looking for new lands and opportunities. I have a Scandinavian first name because the names continued to be passed down over the years of wandering.

Some of the family ended up in Georgia, where we still have distant relatives. But in the late seventeenth century, the Bankstons reached the West Florida part of Louisiana. There being no trailers available in that era, they built wooden cabins, as did the other new arrivals. The one-room cabin that became our family home was built by someone else and, and gradually extended with new rooms over the years, was acquired by my great-great grandfather in the nineteenth century. My great-grandfather was born in that house in 1869, as was my grandfather in 1900. When the last of my grandfather’s ten siblings died this past year at age 103, we lost the last member of our family to first see light of day in the old West Florida farmhouse.

Beyond the Post-American World

2012-01-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

In this month’s issue of Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria comments on what he calls “A Post-American World in Progress.” Zakaria observes that none of the world’s rising powers, including the rapidly growing BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have been able to shape international events because of their own domestic struggles. He also remarks that the United States is no longer able to step in to influence regional or global currents due to its decline in relative world dominance.

Zakaria’s new article is an extension of the argument he made in his 2008 book, The Post-American World. In that book, he asserted that the United States was moving from world political and economic dominance, toward being an important part of a multi-polar world. He maintained that this post-American future would probably not be a matter of the decline of the U.S., in an absolute sense, but of “the rise of the rest,” a pun on William McNeill’s classic work of world history, The Rise of the West (1963). Zakaria traced the ascendance of new parts of the world to the spread of market economics, particularly during the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The financial force that has powered the new [post-American] era,” Zakaria writes, “is the free movement of capital” (Zakaria 2008: 3). The movement of capital is intimately linked to the flow of goods and services and, more to the point here, to the movement of people. In order to continue to be a major part of this increasingly multi-polar world, according to Zakaria, the United States needed to “globalize itself,” to become part of an economic and political network of nations.

Both in the book and in the new article, Zakaria may overestimate the extent to which the world was American even in the post-World War II pinnacle of U.S. influence. Plenty of nations did not do what we wanted them to do even in the 1950s and 1960s. Insofar as countries did align themselves with us or at least give lip service to following an American lead, this was largely due to the great competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the latter dominated a big part of the globe. Indeed, I think one could plausibly argue that the single greatest international achievement of the United States in its period of greatest absolute international sway was spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy.

The American effort to dominate world events did contribute to re-shaping our domestic political scene. Within the United States, political power and activity in the years following World War II became decidedly less “multi-polar” as Washington, D.C. pulled control toward the national center, away from local and state governments. The “American” role in world events was really a federal government role in both international and domestic affairs.

Perhaps in many ways the United States needs not to “globalize” itself but to “localize” itself, to allow a “rise of the rest” inside the U.S., as communities look to their own affairs. Internationally, rather than seeing the domestic challenges of other nations as impediments to their direction of regional or global events, we should see their concentration on their own internal issues as paying attention to their proper business. The less China or Russia meddles in the lives of people in other countries, the better.

Certainty at Harvard

2012-01-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Those on the staff of Harvard's student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, have finally balked at the politicization of their university. Last month, Professor Susan Suleiman, a supporter of the Occupy movement, called on the faculty of the university to make an official statement against "social inequalities." This was too much for the Crimson staff, and a newspaper editorial complained that "asking the University to issue statements about issues as broad as social inequality detracts from its educational mission." Unfortunately, the students still support many other forms of politicization.

While they acknowledge that "Harvard has a responsibility first and foremost to promote free discourse," they qualify the acknowledgement by saying "there are certainly instances when limits must be imposed." I have no idea where they get this certainty, but the word "limits" links to the Crimson's earlier support for the Harvard faculty's decision to eliminate classes taught by Economics Professor Subramanian Swamy for an editorial he wrote about Indian political issues for a publication in India. So, I guess they mean that limits "must be imposed" whenever you think you really don't like something someone says anywhere in the world. Or maybe they mean that accusations of racism, religious intolerance, or some other kind of forbidden thinking "certainly" justify suppression. That doesn't seem to me like a very strong endorsement of "free discourse."

The Crimson also writes, "to be sure [?], there are some instances in which Harvard’s political involvement is necessary and proper." The instances it cites are the DREAM Act for the education of undocumented alien minors and the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Now, it may be that every single individual on the newspaper staff agreed with the DREAM Act and supported the repeal of the U.S. military policy. If so, the paper could and should have written plenty of editorials expressing these positions. But if one is really committed to "free discourse," one must be open to the possibility that other Harvard students could conceivably have seen these political issues differently. When the university as an institution takes a position on a political issue, it puts aside its role as a forum for intellectual exchange and imposes orthodoxy.

The student journalists, moreover, don't reject entirely the idea that the university should be promoting political goals. "As an institution," they write, "Harvard should promote greater social responsibility by encouraging an ethic of public service among its students." So, the university shouldn't make political statements, but it should indoctrinate its pupils in the correct socio-political ethic. Oh, but Harvard won't call it indoctrination. It will probably call the pursuit of doctrinal uniformity something like "critical thinking."

I'm glad that Harvard students have objected to this latest faculty call to conformity. I only wish that the students at the nation's oldest and best-known university would really support freedom of thought and expression.

The 2012 Pell Grant Appropriation

2012-01-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

The single largest item in federal education appropriations for 2012 is the Pell Grant Program, with a cost of 22.8 million dollars, or one-third of total education appropriations. Although the Pell Grant funds are slightly down from last year, they still make up a sizeable amount of money. This is also a fairly recent area for federal spending, since the grant did not exist as recently as when I started college.

In 1972, Congress made new provisions for subsidizing low-income students in postsecondary schooling when it introduced Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, which became known as Pell Grants after Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, who was the primary sponsor of the legislation. Unlike the federal loans that have also come into existence in the effort to put more Americans through higher education, these grants have been free money, requiring no repayment and no particular academic preparedness or ability. The numbers of low-income students receiving Pell Grant money grew from 176,000 in the 1973-1974 academic year to 5,428,000 in 2007-2008, according to Jackson Toby in The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Financial Aid Should Be Based on Student Performance.

As Jackson Toby argues in this excellent book, distributing financial aid on the basis of need alone, without consideration of ability or achievement, lowers the quality of higher education by promoting the enrollment of less-prepared students who tend to lower the intellectual environments and the standards of colleges. In addition, I argue in my article “The Mass Production of Credentials: Subsidies and the Rise of the Higher Education Industry” that the federal subsidization of students in higher education contributes to rising tuition costs. By trying to engineer upward mobility for everyone, moreover, federal subsidies simply intensify the competition among students to distinguish themselves by attending the most prestigious possible institutions, while creating shortages at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

Our current massive budget deficit requires us to look closely at every program. Perhaps it is time to question the wisdom of the federal education budget’s biggest expense.

Utopian Gnosticism

2012-01-03T14:40:00.001-08:00

In an article in the BBC News Magazine, philosopher John Gray urges us to put aside our fantasies of achieving some ideal historical end point through politics. I sympathize with Gray’s anti-Utopianism, but I think we need to ask why modern people are so often drawn to the idea that we are moving toward some yet to be realized state of social and political perfection. Ultimately, I think the illusion lies in a kind of secular mysticism that rejects the worldly present in favor of an imagined worldly future. Leszek Kolakowski, the great analyst of Marxism, traced the roots of Marxist theory to Gnostic teachings of an otherworldly salvation, and presented Communism as an eschatological worldview that promised to one day return humanity to the true state of being.

Along similar lines, political scientist Eric Voegelin distinguished between “transcendent religions,” which placed the focus of worship outside of human institutions, and “immanent religions,” which made the human institutions themselves the focus of worship. A refugee from Austria after the 1938 Anschluss with Germany, Voegelin used the term “immanent” not to imply that the quality of transcendence was absent from movements such as Nazism, but that transcendent themes of ultimate good versus ultimate evil, the mission of a chosen people, and the end of history in an ultimate salvation had become absorbed into the worldly project of secular politics.

While Kolakowski traced Marxism from Gnostic roots, Voegelin identified all of the major extreme secular ideologies of the twentieth century with the Gnostic heresies of antiquity. Gnosticism, in all its varieties, had contrasted the chaotic, contingent material world with the absolute order and truth of the spiritual world from which the material had fallen and to which the Gnostics hoped to return. The immanent religions, in Voegelin’s view, posited a future realm of purified class or state which had all of the reality that the merely conditional present lacked. The classless society and the rule of the master race were eschatons within the immanent, destined end states of the world that were outside the present state of things and for which any actions in the rejected, chaotic present were justified.

Few of our dreamers today go as far as the Nazis or Marxists. But still the utopians seek visions of a realm that is both secular and mystical.

Universities and the Prestige Economy

2012-01-02T17:44:00.000-08:00

Student writers at the Boston University Daily Free Press have recently expressed their concernover celebrity Professor Isabel Wilkerson, who reportedly receives a hefty salary and rarely finds the time to fit showing up for class into her busy book promotion schedule. The celebrity professor is just one of the by-products of the strange world of higher education economics. As increasing numbers of Americans have obtained college degrees in recent years, students have sought to differentiate themselves by attending the most prestigious institutions that will admit them. At the same time, both universities and public officials have been successful in convincing the American public (and perhaps even convincing themselves) that investing in a college degree is one of the most valuable investments one can make and that it will be worth whatever one pays for it. Easy loan policies have made it possible to borrow heavily for this purpose. As a result, college tuition costs have risen at a rate that makes the housing bubble look tiny (see my earlier discussion of the mortgage and student loan bubble and the fascinating illustration of tuition vs. housing costs by Gregory White and Kamelia Angelova). Tuition costs have risen so rapidly precisely because colleges over the past few decades have experienced no pressure to keep costs down. In this environment, colleges compete to attract students looking for brand-name distinction not by offering affordable education, or even necessarily good education, but by selling prestige. This promotes the hiring of celebrities who in some cases may contribute nothing to the schools but recognizable names.

Reality TV on the Chinese Airwaves

2012-01-01T12:29:00.000-08:00

The front page of today’s New York Times carries an article on one of the most popular television shows in China, “If You Are the One” (online version, with video, here). In this Chinese version of “The Dating Game,” “the men boasted of their bank accounts, houses and fancy cars. The women were svelte and sassy, dousing suitors with acid putdowns.” If that sounds shallow, this type of entertainment does, according to the paper, contain what we in the United States would call redeeming social value, since “mixed into the banter were trenchant social issues that urban Chinese from their 20s to 40s grapple with, if not always so publicly: living together before marriage, the unabashed pursuit of wealth or the government’s one-child policy. “

We might console ourselves by reflecting that if this kind of cultural junk food doesn’t reach of the heights of the Confucian classics, at least it doesn’t also plummet to the psychotic depths of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Still, this kind of vulgarity apparently troubles the Chinese authorities enough that the regulators and censors have tried to rein in “excessive entertainment.” “A conflict has arisen: On the one hand, they’re [the Chinese authorities] pushing for the building of a commercial industry, but on the other hand they wonder if this commercialization has led to an overall decline in cultural quality and moral cultivation,” said one Chinese professor quoted in the article.

I confess that as much as I oppose censorship and regulation of communication, I have a certain amount of sympathy with the inclinations of the Chinese Communist Party on this issue. After all, “cultural quality and moral cultivation” are now in pretty short supply in our own share of global popular culture. But I don’t think the Chinese state is going to be able to raise the quality of people’s thoughts and lives by command and control. There, as here, individuals and small social groups will have to make their own decisions about whether they will be swept along in the polluted stream of popular culture or swim to the shore and walk away.

An End of Year Look at School Vouchers

2011-12-31T11:47:00.000-08:00

In an end of the year article in City Journal, Marcus A. Winters celebrates 2011 as “The Year of the Voucher.” After a decade of slow movement on expanding the voucher approach to school choice, Winters reports, suddenly 2011 saw legislatures in 12 states adopt voucher policies or expand existing programs, and the U.S. Congress saved the D.C. voucher program at the last minute. This is good news for many families, especially those with low incomes, but I’d caution against seeing vouchers as the solution to educational shortcomings in the United States.

Vouchers and charter schools are two kinds of market-based approaches to schooling. Vouchers subsidize demand. Their purpose is to increase buying power among consumers of education (families) and give those consumers the power to choose among providers (schools). Charter schools subsidize supply. Their purpose is to increase the range of school types by funding institutions with competing strategies for education, with the idea that the consumers can then choose among many different providers. Both of these market-based approaches represent efforts to break down state monopolies on public schooling. State monopolies, choice advocates argue, have no motivation to provide high quality or varied goods to consumers. Just as the stores in the old Soviet Union were scantily stocked with inferior merchandise, so a monopolistic school system stocks its classrooms with shoddy curricular offerings and mediocre teaching.

The poor in this market perspective suffer the greatest damage because they are most subject to monopoly. Higher-income families can opt out of low-performing schools by moving to other school districts, by enrolling in private or parochial schools, or by home-schooling. In effect, then, our present public school system is a competitive market for those who have sufficient resources, but a monopoly for the disadvantaged.

I cautiously support vouchers (and charters) as ways of improving schooling for some families in some places. But I don’t have as much faith in them as Winters and other choice advocates. This is because, although I do see schools as competitive markets, I think most exponents of school reform of all varieties misunderstand just what kind markets they are. Specifically, voucher and charter advocates tend to describe students at different times as consumers of schooling and as products of schooling. But students (and the families and communities from which they come) are also, very importantly producers of schooling. The quality of a school depends, more than anything else, on the efforts and dedication of the students, who bring their capacity to learn to the school from their families and communities. Each student shares whatever capacity for learning he or she brings to the school with all other students. For this reason, when parents have the opportunity to seek a good school what they really want is a school with highly motivated, well-prepared students who will create a desirable environment for their own children. By giving low-income families choice through vouchers or some other kind of subsidy, we essentially offer ambitious, committed poor families a chance to escape from concentrations of bad students.

Ironically, even market-based subsidies can worsen the problem of education by encouraging misplaced accountability. If we maintain that students don’t learn because their schools are failing them, we are preserving the myth that students succeed or fail because of something that systems or policies give them or don’t give them. By adhering to the illusion that everyone can and will achieve some accepted level of learning if only officialdom gives them the right program, we move responsibility away from the social structures that primarily shape children. It will probably help some people in 2012 if there are voucher programs in more places, and those programs won’t be worse than the present system. But let’s hope in 2012 we can get away from the idea that tinkering with the education industry can enable schools to crank out the right kinds of products.

Remembering the Amerasian in the Saigon Coffee Shop

2011-12-30T14:25:00.000-08:00

The tropical glare squats at the edge of the shade,

studying arcs traced by our coffeecups

in the rise and fall between crude wooden tables

and our lips. Our rhythms are regular as heartbeats.

Overhead, coconuts are swelling to self-sacrifice.

We're taking a break from history.

All the singers in the boom-box

are maidens wailing for soldiers,

soldiers wailing for maidens;

there's no telling which war is in which song;

the same enemy keeps changing uniforms.

Jagged bits of your unknown father's face

keep falling out of disoriented features.

I try to fit them together,

as I try to assemble the words I know

in sentences and reshape them to my tongue.

When you talk the words dash out like small birds

and your hands swoop after them like birds of prey,

a quickness acquired from years of street-life,

selling peanuts and yourself and cadging petty coins.

What will it be like in the country of my waking,

the country of your dreams?

When will you wake up there?

Will you wonder, like Chuang-tzu,

whether the dream was before or after the waking?

You search my round eyes and long nose

for pieces that will fit your face.

Every my (your name for us means "beautiful")

is a father in your eyes. Listen,

when I smile, it means I have no face to lose

or share.

After the sweet coffee, the shopkeeper

brings a jar of bitter Chinese tea.

Note: Amerasians (children of U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese mothers) were often despised outsiders in Vietnam, known as “the dust of life.” They began relocating to the United States under the Orderly Departure Program in the 1980s and their numbers increased greatly after the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988 by the U.S. Congress. When I worked with the U.S. refugee program in the 1980s, Amerasians begging and selling peanuts were a common sight on the streets of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). The last time I visited, in 2004, I saw none. The youngest Vietnamese Amerasians are now in their thirties.

History Ends or Turns Again

2011-12-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

Francis Fukuyama has moved on since his 1989 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Most recently, he has finished the first volume of a massive study of the origins of political order. Earlier this year, I heard Fukuyama give a somewhat disorganized presentation of the new work. I’ll have to read the book before I decide what I have to say about it, but I was intrigued by his suggestion that religious beliefs and institutions have been critical in driving political and social change. But no matter how many hefty tomes he piles on our library shelves, he’ll probably always be known as The End of History Guy.

The 1989 book enjoyed three big advantages in the competition for public attention. First, it had an impressive and prophetic title. Second, it proclaimed the world was reaching a historical resolution just when Soviet Communism was collapsing. Third, it made grand assertions that begged for debate, creating a Fukuyama cottage industry for professors and political commentators. The industry continues even today, with John Arquilla offering one of its latest products in the journal, Foreign Policy.

Fukuyama did not argue that history would end because we would all sit down and stop doing things. To oversimplify his claim, “history” is not just one thing happening after another but the competition of social and political ideas and systems. Drawing on Hegel, Fukuyama saw history as having a direction, and argued that the direction ran toward liberal democracy. History was ending because this end point was becoming clear.

In his cleverly titled, The (B)end of History, Arquilla argues that Fukuyama was wrong to say that political systems have reached a resolution and that the events of 2011 demonstrate how he was wrong. Arquilla maintains that we may have reached the end of conflicts between ideologically based nation states, but that this represents a turning toward a new kind of historical action. The Arab Spring, the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and even al Qaeda represent the bend in history toward “loose-knit, largely leaderless networks.”

I sympathize with the view that history (even history narrowly understood as competing political goals) doesn’t end so much as it shifts and changes. But I think Arquilla also might be making excessive world-historical claims for today’s headline news. We do see a lot about networked social movements, but these are not entirely novel, in spite of their use of new social media technology. I think about, say, the Grange movement among American farmers and the populism it created, and even about the pre-internet movements that ended the Soviet Union. Since today’s networked movements are such a new turning, moreover, we don’t know which ones will end up being incorporated into more traditional political organizations, which ones will operate as external pressure groups, which ones will disappear entirely, and which ones will transmogrify into different movements. If they are to be effective, movements must somehow be formalized. If the uprisings in Egypt are to produce a new kind of government, for example, then they must end in an elective parliament. And that would be a traditional political form.

Ultimately, it seems to me just too early to say that loose networks have become the new direction in history. As Hegel observed, the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk. Who can say when we’ve reached the end of a world-historical day?

The New Knowledge Economy?

2011-12-28T10:40:00.000-08:00

Josef Joffe’s review of Thomas Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum’s new book, That Used to Be Us, contains the following bizarre but common claim about how America’s current economic difficulties differ from those of the past: “Back in the Eisenhower days, Little Johnny couldn’t read so well, but so what? He could still take his place in the country’s humming industrial machine. Today, he can’t get a job because (a) net job-growth has been zero for the past decade and (b) low-skill, high-wage jobs are disappearing forever. Nor is this just Johnny’s problem. Behind him lurks an education system that isn’t equipping children with the intellectual capital in demand in the new knowledge economy.” Yes, we’ve heard that over and over. Today’s America needs only high-skilled, knowledge intensive workers and we aren’t producing enough of them. That claim, however, is patently false.

Back in 2006, Forbes published an article on-line entitled “The 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill in America.” “Engineer was indeed number 1. However, the list also included truck drivers, explaining “They are hard to recruit because they have to be away from home for long periods, receive low wages, work very long hours and put up with a fluctuating workload.” Another hard-to-fill job was laborer. Forbes explained the shortage by the fact that This is very physical, unskilled and often repetitive work at low pay.”

How have things changed since the Forbes’ article? A recent MSNBC article by Eve Tahmincioglu quotes Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy. “If you look at the job growth distribution of the last two recoveries, it suggests we’re going to see growth of a lot more lower-income jobs.” The jobs the article lists as the 8 lowest paying jobs in the country, including food preparation workers, cashiers, and home care aides, are those you can see in the help-wanted pages every day. So, maybe the problem is not that our schools aren’t successfully turning everyone into highly skilled information workers. Maybe the problem is that we expect everyone to be a highly skilled information worker in an economy that really needs laborers, truck drivers, cashiers, restaurant workers and home health care aides.