money and the marketplace of ideas

I have never really thought deeply about money -- that is, how to make more of it.   Early on, while I certainly didn't attach a moral value to money in and of itself, I saw it as a medium of exchange, and beyond a certain level of sufficiency, most of what I valued, couldn't be exchanged for money.  The Beatles lyric, "I don't care too much for money, 'cause money can't buy me love," summed up symbolically, if not comprehensively, pretty much how I felt.  I was, of course, aware of the ironies.  The Beatles had more money than I could begin to imagine, and were not particularly averse to making more of it, but for myself, if I had sufficient income to cover the traditional necessities of food, clothing and shelter, I could happily pursue other, more important matters.  Because I was in government service, where the salary scale reigned supreme, most of my peers made about the same amount that I made, so there was little cause for the truly invidious comparison.  The little discretionary money we did have, we often spent differently than one another, but those differences were differences in kind, not scope, and revealed individual differences in values before and beyond the monetary exchange -- the camping trip to Wyoming as opposed to the down on a new sports car.  While I might have been envious of the new car, neither my wife nor I were envious enough to choose it over the camping trip, and generally speaking, we knew that life was simply a matter of choices.    

Having said all that, there were a number of attitudes toward money that I did disdain.  As a "medium of exchange," money was merely instrumental to an end.   The "merely" set an important attitudinal boundary.  The pursuit of money for the sake of money struck me as a perversion.  The important thing, the most important thing, the moral decision, were the ends one chose.   There was always the possibility that one could choose immoral ends, but morality, the proper end for mankind, was a matter of political debate aimed at a broad consensus.   I have never felt that this broad consensus was a matter that could be settled once and and for all -- not by the Bible and certainly not by Marx -- and the always emergent consensus was like the weather, sometimes violent, sometimes calm, but always changing.   Different people, and different peoples, would have different ideas about the proper ends for mankind, and that was all to the good, because the differences informed one another, enriched one another.  The notion of "political debate" did bring forward what might be called an "instrumental value" -- free speech within the marketplace of ideas -- without which there would be no emergent consensus around morality.  Language was the "medium of exchange" within the marketplace of ideas, and money, or so it seemed to me, was the medium of exchange within the marketplace proper.  Language was worthy of study, so too was money, but ultimately neither could be valued as an end unto itself, only as a means to an end -- the pursuit of an idea -- the pursuit of values -- and likewise, if the pursuit of an idea required free speech within the marketplace of ideas, then too the pursuit of values required free exchange of money within the marketplace proper.

There are, however, differences between the domain of money and the domain of speech that might best be summed up by the phrase "money talks, bullshit walks." On the one hand, though I doubt it was what Aristotle had in mind, if rhetoric is finding the best available means of persuasion, most would admit that money is not only a form expression, but also, short of an immediate threat of violence, the most efficacious means of persuading others to a particular behavior.  The reasons, or course, are straight forward.  Money, or more perhaps more precisely the expenditure of money, while expression of a sort, also has dominion beyond expression and it is beyond expression that "money talks."  If I were to come to someone in a position of power -- a legislator -- and were to offer him a large sum of money to "change his mind" on a certain piece of legislation and vote against it, there would be a question whether my expenditure of money actually "changed his mind," actually persuaded him to think otherwise, or whether it simply changed his behavior when the negative vote was cast.  Indeed, whether he actually changed his mind or not is irrelevant once the proffered money is accepted, and most would recognize this as a form of bribery.  The person in power -- the legislator -- was either corrupt in the first place or had been corrupted by the offer of money.  As we all know, the corrupting effect of money is possible, in part, because it can be translated into goods beyond the particular decision in question, if not wine, women and song, then the moral equivalent thereof.  I am, or rather the one offering the bribe is corrupt, or corrupting, in part because I am expending monies to purchase something that should not be for sale.  The "should not" in the previous sentence points to the moral imperative that would limit or ban certain types of market place transactions.  It is clear enough from the simple example that "political power" can be bought and sold, that one holding power can hold it up for sale to the highest bidder, and in a perfectly free market place, one with no moral or ethical restrictions, there would be little reason to object to the transaction.  We do, however, object to the transaction, and even in that most corruptible of corrupt domains, we place limits on what is available for sale within the market place.

On the other hand, more consonant with what Aristotle had in mind, and what the framers of the constitution had in mind when they prohibited Congress from making laws to limit speech, to include the inordinate amount of bullshit that passes between people and over the public airwaves.  We can mount any hobby horse we choose and rock it furiously until we wither from exhaustion or triumph in persuasion.  I am suggesting something similar to Michael Walzer's defense of pluralism and equality, when he writes that "democracy is a way of allocating power and legitimating its use -- or better, it is the political way of allocating power.  ... What counts is argument among the citizens.  Democracy puts a premium on speech, persuasion, rhetorical skill.  Ideally, the citizen who makes the most persuasive argument -- that is, the argument that actually persuades the largest number of citizens -- gets his way.  But he can't use force, or pull rank, or distribute money; he must talk about the issues at hand."  Ideally, of course, we would be persuaded by those arguments that have pragmatic efficacy and are consonant with our shared sense of cultural and ethical norms.  Faced with a problem, we want to do something, but not just anything.  We want to do something that will not only help fix the problem, but in doing so will also contribute to our common sense of self-respect.  Ideally, of course, the electoral process is founded on rhetoric.  The candidates for office argue it out, and the one who persuades the majority of the people prevails in the election.  He or she is given the mandate to use the power inherent to the office to effectuate the proposed solution.

There are several things wrong with this ideal picture, but it is still something to be desired.  When we bemoan the fact that elections do not focus on the issues, we are bemoaning a lost opportunity to hear arguments around those solutions that may have some pragmatic efficacy.  We want arguments with substance, but there are several reasons why we don't get them.  The first and most obvious is the increasing technicality of the problems.  The economy is at the instant a perceived problem.  It is, as has been said repeatedly, the worst since the great depression.  What to do?  It takes some humility to make this admission, but in truth, I am not entirely sure.  I suspect not one in a thousand Americans, for example, can understand what is meant by a "derivative," and how it functions within the market place and whether the buying and selling of those "financial instruments" should be left unregulated within the market or whether they should be tightly regulated, and if regulated then precisely how they should be regulated.  The problems only get more complex from there.  What is the effect of "derivatives" on the mortgage market, and what is the effect of the mortgage market on jobs?  I am reasonably certain that the vast majority of Americans have little inclination to dig into the intricacies of the financial system, and those that do have motives beyond simply making it work more effectively in the interests of the people.  Those that do are much more likely to be motivated to make it work more effectively toward their own self-interests, toward their own personal profit.  Although the problems we face are increasingly technical, and require a sort of specialized knowledge not possessed by the majority of Americans, we cannot simply turn the problem over to experts.  We can suspect the motives of those proposing solutions without fully understanding the problem or how it might be solved, so most problems, to include the problems of the economy, remain, properly speaking, political.

This lack of substance, coupled with a deep seated distrust,  contributes to the decay of political rhetoric into ad hominem attacks.  When we bemoan the fact that elections have become more virulently negative, we are bemoaning the growing impression that government is peopled with little more than a parade of charlatans.  That judgement is a bit overweening, and I have no doubt that there are many career politicians who are genuine public servants, but there are trends that should be noted.  One might be characterized as the growing disparity between "becoming president" and "being president."  The process of "becoming president" resembles more and more the process of "becoming a celebrity" -- indeed, there is virtually no difference in the means and manner, only in the ostensible end, "being president," and I hedge even that insofar as celebrity status affords them the opportunity, if not the official entitlement, to "rule" on various issues.  Not everyone can become a celebrity, and there are those that are selected out of the crowd so there is a something to celebrity, some substance that is captured and critiqued by the pundits, and ends with a confirming national vote.  Think of the American Idol auditions, or even more tragically the America's Got Talent auditions, and the parade of wannabes and gottabes who line up in hopes of fulfilling their "dream," and from there the grinding process of winnowing on the national media stage that results in a winner.  There are differences, of course, but the arc is recognizably the same, and there is some recognition that the wannabes are not being advanced to celebrity on the strength of their merits alone, but because they represent an investment.  As with any investment, the object of investment is more or less irrelevant, so long as it provides a return on investment, and while I don't really doubt the sincerity of the celebrity politician's "dreams," those investing in his or her celebrity, those plunking down the cash for the enormous media exposure, are doing so because they hope for a particular sort of return on their investment.

I am suggesting simply that the domain of money and the domain of speech have collapsed into each other in ways that the framers of our constitution would have found difficult to imagine.  On the one side, in the domain of money, we are prepared to accept a greater degree of inequality between people -- in part because we want to believe that money follows from and rewards talent and tenacity, which is justified by a corresponding belief in a game bound by rules played out on a level playing field.  We also want to believe that there are things that money just can't buy, our "love" being one such thing.  I can plunk down a considerable sum of cash, and I suspect there are plenty of escorts willing to provide a simulacra of the "girl friend experience," but no mater how successful the simulacra, there is the understanding that it extends no further than the cash allows.  In the American Idol game, we are OK if some rise to the top, because we recognize not only the grind to get there, but also the disparity of talent between the contestants.  They are, at least within the limits of the contest, deserving.  It is also to the point that, beyond the limits of the contest, few go on to become actual American Idols once the infusion of network cash comes grinding to a halt.  We have been offered a simulacra of idolatry, and perhaps its fun while it lasts, but outside the enormous expense of their weekly media exposure, neither their talent nor their tenacity counts for much, and their "dream" counts for nothing.

I would not presume to draw a direct analogy between escorts, the American Idol contestants, and our emergent political culture, but I would suggest that money amplifies and distorts political discourse.  While the "campaign contribution" is not exactly petty bribery, given the hoards of cash let loose by Citizens United, I am rather certain there are those who will stand up and provide the desired "political commitment experience."  I am also rather certain there are those who have the talent and tenacity to "make it real," or real enough for the duration of the contest, but regardless of a candidate's actual sincerity in pursuit of their "dream," the very presence of the money imbues it all with the aura of the counterfeit, provides a real and compelling motive that draws into doubt even the most authentic and sincere "dream," and this aura of the counterfeit, this nagging background doubt, is in itself inherently corrupting.   I should say though the campaign contribution isn't exactly petty bribery  The investors are investing in a politician already predisposed to take the sort of action they desire, whether out of sincere conviction or outright chicanery, and so there should be no surprises when those same politicians tend to serve their investors interests over others once in office.  The corruption is more subtle and more pervasive.  Candidacy for public office has been reduced to a commodity, or perhaps more precisely nearly reduced to a commodity.  A candidate's ability to "raise cash" seems increasingly to be a pre-requisite for success, and indeed newscasters have used it as a way of keeping score -- Mitt Romney has raised so many millions, President Obama so many millions, and there is a direct correlation between the amount of cash and their ability to spread their message.  Here again I would not go quite so far as to say the candidates are offering their "desirability" up directly for sale, but they have turned themselves into something resembling an "political product" for packaged donors, who must make two decisions, the first being the candidate's complicity with their goals, the second being the candidate's desirability on the open market.  Will the people, so to speak, "buy into this guy" with their vote.  If donors resemble anything, they resemble venture capitalists calculating the degree of risk and the expectation of return once the candidate is in office.  I would suggest that the commodification pertains even if the transaction is sincere, even if it attempts to purchase a good beyond the self-interest of either the candidate or the contributor -- a monied contributor investing in a candidate she believes will protect environmental interests.  

Should candidacy for office be commodified?  I would, of course, answer in the negative, in part because the collapse of speech into money -- or perhaps more precisely, the assumption that the free expenditure of monies is the moral and ethical equivalent of free speech -- corrupts both money and speech and ultimately democracy.  Amartya Sen, quoting Walter Bagehot in a recent issue of the New Republic, defined democracy as "government by discussion."  Sen, like others, sees "government by discussion" as essential to public reasoning, and "public reasoning is not only crucial for democratic legitimacy, it is essential for a better public epistemology that would allow the consideration of divergent perspectives," and that same public reasoning "is also required for more effective practical reasoning."  The collapse of speech into the expenditure of money leaves us, not with public reasoning, or anything that might resemble public reasoning within the public sphere, but rather competing commercials.  While the competition clearly brings to the foreground the fact of divergent perspectives, the reasons one might have for selecting the view of one paid spokesman over another paid spokesman, to include the consumer's own self-interests, are left well in the background.  Public office has been reduced to a product, and the competition for public office a competition for brand preference and loyalty.  It is a vision for America, even a vision for a "free" America, but it is one that should give us pause.  As I said, I wouldn't want to extend the analogy between the escort, the Idol contestant, and the political candidate too far.  The differences are these.  At the end of the day, the escort, having provided the "girl friend experience," goes on to another client -- the wannabe Idol, having provided the "aspiring artist experience," fades into the background of the next year's contestants -- but the candidate for political office takes office, and the office has consequence well beyond the contest.  I probably don't need to detail the nature of that consequence on our lives, and besides it differs with the different offices, and it distracts from the question at hand -- the consumer preference that will result in a President.             

technology

I have been having many discussions around technology of late, and when I say technology, I am referring to digital and digital media technologies.  Underlying those discussions is  an assumption, or a premise, that technology is transforming our lives in ways we can't quite predict or control.  This is something of a truism, and technology has always been transforming lives in ways that couldn't quite be predicted or controlled, but the subject has taken on a sort of gravitas of late that wasn't present when I entered higher education.  The camps then were fairly well divided between those who just didn't give a damn so long as it didn't affect them, and those who took a science fiction interest in the matter.  Then, of course, the transformation was something in the offing, not something that was happening, and the discussions had that odd fascination of utopian promise coupled with apocalyptic dread that permeates our response to Hal 2000 or the Cylon Empire.  There were visionaries at the extremes with Nicolas Negroponte on the one side and the Unabomber on the other, but among those paying attention, there was also a strong presentiment that resistance was futile, that the brave new world was coming, and that higher education would need to adopt and adapt to the emergent technologies.

I really want to talk about technology in higher education, but if you will permit me a brief aside on manufacturing, I think it will help make my fundamental point clearer.   As everyone knows, manufacturing within the United States is in decline, but like most things that everyone knows, it is not exactly true.  In the beginning, manufacturing was a labor intensive enterprise, and required thousands of hands to person the assembly lines.  Most of those jobs, the un-skilled and semi-skilled labor that made up the bulk of line employment, has indeed been shipped overseas where labor costs are a fraction of what they were in the United States.  We could bemoan that trend, but it strikes me as inevitable.  The intervention of labor unions, of course, drove the price of labor up and secured what were, essentially, middle-class lives for those un-skilled and semi-skilled workers.  Today, we can wax nostalgic about our grandfather's work on the factory floor -- the sort of "Made in the USA" nostalgia that permeates a movie like Gran Torino -- but we need to remember that the middle-class children of those factory workers, many of them college educated, had no desire to follow their parents into the factory.  The work was demeaning, dirty, and often dangerous, and one suspects that, had the jobs not been exported, we would need to import labor (illegally) to meet the demand, just as we do in the more site specific construction and agricultural sectors.

There is talk of late about bringing manufacturing back, but manufacturing will come back transformed from a labor intensive operation to a technology intensive operation.  The mantra goes something like this -- if a procedure or process can be automated, it will be automated -- in part because the machines today, controlled through digital technologies, are more accurate, faster, and smarter than their human counterparts of yore.  I say "smarter," of course, with a caveat.  The machines reflect the cumulative intelligence of the engineers who designed and programmed them, and I say "cumulative intelligence" because the design and programming itself has been subjected to advanced, technology-infused management technique, captured under the euphemism of "continuous quality improvement."  The manufacturing that comes back will no longer require the un-skilled and semi-skilled worker, but rather a handful of skilled technicians to maintain the machines, and engineers to design and program them.  At least part of the anxious educational imperatives surrounding the so-called STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is to have in place a work-force not only appropriate to the research and development efforts that engender new product, but the transformed manufacturing that will be required to produce those products.

This detour through manufacturing provides a tighter analogy to education than we might like to admit. Although I can hear the objections from my colleagues in the humanities now, the current structure of higher education, particularly within the United States, reflects 19th century industrial thinking.  We complain about the agrarian calendar of higher education, as if the whole enterprise were a throw back to the 16th and 17th centuries, but the so-called agrarian calendar reflects other social realities as well, not least that July is a better time to have time off to play than February.  Regardless, I am not talking about the calendar, but the structure of higher education, its processes, and there the student is input to an assembly line process of course treatments that results in a graduate, who, as the product, is subsequently subjected to the vicissitudes of the market, the job market.  That the input raw material is a human being, rather than wood or plastic, complicates the assembly line process of course treatments, insofar as we expect the raw material to assist in the effort of their transformation in ways that we would not expect wood or plastic to participate, but in the end, it is all about moving through a specified number of stations in a specified amount of time, the specification of which is reflected in the right number of the right credit hours.

The whole education manufacturing paradigm is, of course, being challenged on any number of levels, and technology has contributed to those challenges.  The typical higher education response to any sort of challenge is to absorb it as a program of study and crank up the assembly line.  There are any number of programs in technology studies.  In my own college, we have a whole division dedicated to digital technologies, and these assembly lines, these programs of study, ostensibly produce graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to be a competitive product in a competitive job market.  I say "ostensibly," because the effectiveness of the assembly line process itself is being challenged.  Academically Adrift is one such challenge that has received wide attention, but it is a paean dedicated principally to the purpose of rescuing the current structures by improving the processes -- by insisting that the assembly line workers within each of the requisite stations do what they are being paid to do -- on the assumption that, should they do so, the results will be better.  There are, however, other more insidious challenges.  You have those like Peter Wood, for example, writing about the higher education bubble.  He quotes the conservative columnist George Will's definition of the bubble as "what happens 'when parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality.'"  In truth, the actual costs have not been rising, but as state subsidies for education have declined, the students' and parents' share of costs have been rising, but there is some uncomfortable truth in Wood's assertion that "tuition paying parents are buying prestige, atmosphere, identification with a community [and football team] and a conception of what it means to be an alumnus of a particular college more than they are buying what the college actually teaches.  That's why so many colleges get away with teaching hot-buttered nonsense for $40,000 or $50,000 a year."  The assumption behind Wood's assertion is that "quality" and "curriculum" are aligned, but that is like assuming that "quality" and "reliable transportation" are aligned in the production of automobiles, and that consumers are only, or are principally, concerned to purchase reliable transportation.  They are, as a minimum standard, but we also know that automobile purchasing consumers, not unlike tuition-paying parents, are purchasing what they can afford -- a Caddy or a Chevy -- a Harvard or a community college.  If neither the Caddy version or the Chevy version of higher education provide "reliable transportation" to educational outcomes, as Academically Adrift portends, then he status differentiation makes little or no difference and the bubble may well pop because the process itself is untenable.

Enter technology.  Unlike manufacturing, we did not outsource education, though I suspect we could have.  At one point in my career, while traveling in India seeking international partners, one private, for-profit provider of instruction assumed that we were there seeking ways to circumvent high labor costs (those pesky faculty unions).  Their product was a set of highly mediated, highly automated instructional program in digital technologies.  Students moved through well designed modules, were assessed both formatively and summatively, and setting aside concerns around the "college experience," it provided "reliable transportation" to a set of instructional outcomes well aligned with employer needs.  The conversation produced, not a partnership, but a crises of faith.  I am a humanist by training, if not wholly by inclination, and the prospect of a dehumanized education was disconcerting.   I wanted to believe, along with one of Wood's commenters that "students who can analyze , discuss, and write cogently about issues presented by, say, 'post-colonial identity studies,' s/he can analyze and communicate clearly about nearly anything, and that includes the complexities of the marketplace that Wood venerates," but that assumes students have engaged in analysis, not just the banking of information -- that students have engaged in discussion with other students that actually challenges and reforms their beliefs -- that students have actually been required to write, and that faculty have helped them through the successive drafts that make for cogent writing.  Academically adrift and frankly my own undergraduate experience, and even more frankly what I have observed in the classrooms up and down the halls of every college I have administered.  To do what the commenter suggests requires an enormous expenditure of dedicated effort, particularly with those students who are not academically inclined, who have no presumptive desire to "THINK FOR THEMSELVES," as the commenter loudly put it, at least not in the sense prized by academics where learning becomes an end unto itself.  For the vast majority of students, education is not an end unto itself, but is merely instrumental to another end, employment.  We should not dismiss employment, because education for the sake of education may well be desirable, but it is a luxury few can afford.  For most graduating students, burdened with upwards of $25,000 in student loans, employment of the sort that repays the investment in education is a necessity.

To do what the commenter suggests is enormously labor intensive, and requires of faculty at each stage of the manufacturing process something resembling an apprentice-craft approach, in each classroom a dedicated faculty effort over-the-shoulder of each individual student, but higher education has become, whether we like it or not, a mass enterprise.  Higher education has scaled up and out, the bubble has expanded outward, and higher education has done what it can to preserve the illusion of the craft approach, the dedicated effort on behalf of each student, but the student's experience is something quite different.  The large lecture hall is something of a case in point, and it forms a ubiquitous part of every undergraduate's experience.  Whether by default or by design it is a format dedicated to the banking concept of education, the dissemination of information, where the quality students most prize in the lecturer is not depth and breadth of knowledge, but rather their ability to entertain memorably.  A good deal of the scaling up and out within higher education has taken place at community colleges, where now over half of all undergraduates receive their first college experience, and where one can still find pride in the small classroom, but most students do not encounter a full-time instructor, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, but rather an adjunct instructor.  As higher education scales out further and further, absorbing more and more students, the adjunct faculty, who comprise the majority of the community college faculty, are of increasingly dubious qualification, particularly when one considers that the system must absorb ever greater number of students who have dubious academic ability, or at the very least who have little motivation to see education as anything other than an instrumental response to the real and pressing need for employment.  Unlike Richard Vedder, I have not "long been a proponent of Charles Murray's thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attitudes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning" -- and I have not been a proponent in part because there are environments, other than the collegiate environment, where one can aspire to quite high levels of learning, and there are abilities, other than cognitive abilities, like empathy and compassion, that are more to be prized than analytical skills or rhetorical skills -- but I do agree that "as more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down .. or drop-out rates will rise" or more likely some combination of the two.   The adjunct instructor of dubious academic skill meets the student with dubious academic motivation, and both think, "what the hell?"

Enter technology.  Were I to sit down today with those eager Indian ed-tech entrepreneurs, I might be more inclined to sign up.  The manufacturing mantra -- if it can be automated, it should be automated -- and a good deal of what a faculty member does in the classroom, depositing information with our students, can be automated.  If one thinks of "the book" as a piece of information technology, my capitulation is not much more radical than asking students to read the text, except that the state of information technology today extends "the book" in ways that are, for most students, more engaging, and more interesting than print technologies alone.  The text has become a multi-media environment, and more often than not, a well-designed multi-media environment, an environment subjected not only to a more rigorous set of instruction design principles, but an environment continuously improved by assessing its effectiveness in achieving the sorts of student outcomes that have been validated either by content experts in the discipline or employers or some combination of both.  It is not my generation's film strip, and while it is easy enough to critique it for being "canned," as if that ended the conversation,  I am not sure how that represents a condemnation relative to the scribbled notes of even the most sincere and dedicated adjunct X, drawn from the text, which he or she repeats over the course of 50 minutes to a room full of students distracted by Facebook on their phones.  It not only can be automated, but the ethical imperative implied by the "should" in "should be automated" has another dimension when we ask whether the automated or the adjunct provides the better instructional experience.

While I might agree that it dehumanizes education, that it would be altogether better if each student had a teacher, expert in their discipline, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, nudging him or her toward improvement in the third draft of their paper, the reality of such an experience for the masses in an era of mass higher education is remote.  I might also suggest that it opens the possibility that we might re-humanize education, that it might be altogether better if faculty were relieved of the mundane responsibility of information dissemination, if they could, in their one-on-one's, in their face-to-face encounters with students, focus on what is most valuable in education.  Information is important, exercise of analytical skills is important, and there is no need to water down curriculum in either respect because the machine, with the infinite patience of a machine, can iterate and reiterate information and can provide multiple and branching opportunities to practice their analytical skills.  Cognitive ability, and the extension of cognitive ability, is important, but more important and what is most often valuable in education, however, is neither information, not the ability to manipulate information -- what is most often most memorable is that moment of recognition.  I am not referring to the aha! moment of discovery, although that can be exciting, but rather the sense that someone recognizes something significant in us, something of value, and then actually extends the empathy and compassion to actually value it.  While that Master Card commercial goes through a litany of things that money can buy, and ends with that which money cannot buy, the priceless, higher education can engage in a market place transaction around information dissemination and receive a more effective and less expensive product than most faculty can produce on their own.  Information technology, however, is not the end, but simply the pretext.  Relieved of the tyranny of information dissemination, faculty might actually rededicate themselves to what is most valuable in education, that moment when a faculty member, even one of dubious academic qualification, recognizes something of value in a student, something before and beyond the market, that which is priceless, and both think, "what the hell!"                      

rich and poor

Paul Krugman, in a recent editorial, makes the statement that "this election really is -- in substantive, policy terms -- about the rich versus the rest."   Mitt Romney, for his part, refuses to apologize that he is successful in his private economic life, and Obama, for his part, refuses to apologize for making his record at Bain Capital and what we know of his tax history a matter of campaign rhetoric.  Some of the current rhetoric surrounds the Bush era tax cuts, where predictably the conservatives want to maintain all the tax cuts, while the progressives want to maintain those for those at the middle and bottom of the income spectrum and raise them for the rest.  While neither solves the deficit problem, at least in terms of direct revenues, the progressive plan puts more money in the coffers while the conservative plan, as Krugman notes, makes a promise to close tax loop holes.  There is, really, little reason to believe that the conservatives will do much in the way of closing tax loop holes -- in part because most of the so-called loop holes are either incentives to behavior that we ostensibly value (e.g. deductions for mortgage interest because we value the social effects of home ownership) or benefit the very constituency that form the contributing position of the conservative base (e.g. the differential tax rate for capital gains).  The closure of each loop hole, I'm certain, would simply provide new fodder for political contention and gridlock.

The tax code is, of course, far too complex to comprehend, with intentional and unintentional effects scattered throughout, and that is why the notion of a "flat tax" has some appeal, principally among libertarians and conservatives.  Just for the sake of argument, and to highlight the issues involved, let's assume that we have a flat tax of 10% on income.  As a matter of calculation, this is absolutely equitable, and that is part of its common appeal, and anyone who has divided snacks among eight year olds knows the appeal of absolute equity.  When one considers the effects, however, the equity tends to disappear.  The effect of a 10% cut on an income of $30K, leaving $27K, is much greater than the effect on an income of $100K, leaving $90K.  The cost of most goods and services are the same -- a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk will set both back equally -- which means that, after necessities, the person with $27K will have far less to spend than the person with $90K.  One could expect the latter to spend on "upgrades," a better dwelling or car, and on luxury items like an iPhone.  Altogether, this seems straight forward, and seems to provide no disincentives to increase one's incomes.

There are a couple of tipping points, however, one obvious, one not so obvious.  At the low end of the scale, there is a point where the confiscation of the tax would tip a person into real poverty, a point at which the 10% means the difference between affording and not affording the basic necessities of life.  One could define this with some precision, but again for the sake of argument, let us say that it requires an income of $20K to provide just the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, transportation to and from work, and the like.  If we confiscate the $2K in taxes from someone making $20K, leaving $18K, they can no longer provide for themselves.  Assuming, of course, that we do not want to reduce people to abject poverty, there seems to be a couple of options.  On the one hand, we could say that, for incomes below $22K we would not confiscate the tax.  Or, on the other hand, we could go ahead and confiscate the $2k, and return it to them in the form of entitlements -- say, food stamps.  The first, of course, opens the door to a progressive tax rate, and at certain income levels provides a direct disincentive to increase one's income.  For example, if one is making $21K, with no tax, one would be wise to decline a raise to $22K, with a tax leaving $20K.  The second just pushes the same issue off on the value of the entitlement.  On the assumption that the entitlement disappears at some income level, one would be equally wise to decline a raise that wiped out the entitlement.

At the high end of the scale, the tipping point is not so obvious in part because it relies on an individual standard.  We could ask, for example, "at what point does an increase in income make no appreciable difference in those things that one might reasonably value?"  At an income level $100K, the 10% tax leaving $90K may well make an appreciable difference, say, in one's ability to afford a better home in a better neighborhood with better schools.  At an income level of $1000K, the 10% tax leaving $900K would make no appreciable difference in one's ability to afford a better home, or much of anything for that matter.  At even higher income levels, it makes even less appreciable difference.  We might never reach the point where it makes no appreciable difference at all to specific individuals -- after all, someone might highly value the third $20 million home, particularly if their neighbor has three --  but we could ask the initial question a bit differently.  At the low end of the scale, there are more or less obvious reasons to provide incentives to earn more.  At the high end of the scale, however, at what point do we say, enough is enough?  Steve Jobs died a very very wealthy man, not because he created money out of nothing, fortuna ex nihilo, but because people like you and me made contributions to that fortune in the way of iPhone purchases, among other things.  At what point do we say, "you win.  You have taken enough."

I might be accused of class envy, but in truth I really don't envy Mitt Romney the good fortune of his parentage, or the fortune he was able to leverage.  Except perhaps envy for the overwhelming sense of security a fortune of his scope must provide, I have given it very little thought really.  I might also be accused of fomenting class warfare, and that comes closer to the truth, but I would not advocate the violence that warfare tends to imply.  At the moment, I am simply a voice in the wilderness, advocating for the sorts of redistributive justice that would make us not only a society of moral individuals -- and it is important, of course, that we be moral individuals -- but more generally, and collectively, a moral society.  There are any number of fraught notions within the previous sentence, not least "redistributive justice" and "moral society," and those notions are fraught because we have not yet achieved a consistent set of values that could garner universal consent.  Michaiel Walzer in his Spheres of Justice comes close to articulating the space I want to occupy when he writes that the aim of "redistributive justice" and of "political egalitarianism is a society free from domination."  He recognizes that to free a society from anything requires some level of coercive force, and to free a society  from domination gets stuck at the universal level in sophomoric paradox that we must exercise coercive force over domination.  We must, as it were,  dominate domination, and we must do so within an advanced democracy, if by no other means, through the coercive force of the "will of the people" as it emerges within the deliberative process of our electoral politics.  As some have noted, if the extremes of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements have a common core, it is this egalitarian impulse to be "free from domination."  The question that is hotly to be debated, is this:  "domination by what?"

The extreme right, of course, fears domination by the government, particularly the federal government.  They seem to have less compunction about seizing control of local government and using its coercive power to legislate a particular vision of the moral society.  They nevertheless have a point, and their fear of central governments is not entirely misplaced.  I needn't reiterate Hayek's arguments here to suggest that the 20th century experiments to coerce communal egalitarianism from a central government were neither communal nor egalitarian, but were bathed in the blood of millions.  No one I think wants to resurrect those experiments, but the reflexive fear of government domination, captured in the word "socialism," still prevails.

The extreme left, of course, fears domination by the plutocracy within oligarchy.  They too have a point, and their fear of corporate dominance is not entirely misplaced, and seems altogether more imminent than government dominance, which brings me round again to Krugman's point that this election is about the rich and the poor.  Anyone who doubts that money is power hasn't yet stumbled far enough through life.  The ability to give or withhold a loan, for example, is a direct exercise of power with considerable influence on the quality of most Americans' lives.  The ability to set the terms of that loan deepens the power and the influence, and the use of force, even violent force, to coerce obedience to those terms completes the picture.  One need only conjure the picture of a mobbed up loan shark to understand why "usury" is morally challenging.  The difference, and really the only difference between the mobbed up loan shark and Bank of America are scale and government.  Under the regulatory sway of the federal government, they are not entirely free to set the terms of the loan, nor are they free to deploy their own enforcers.  They must use the courts.  Government, in short, stands between the vast majority of Americans and dominance by the Plutocracy within an Oligarchy.

I have some empathy for both sets of fears, though in this day and age I know of no one who credibly advocates for anything that might actually resemble a socialist government.  There are those, of course, who believe that government may well be the solution to pressing social problems, and not the problem itself, and President Obama would be within this camp, but they tend to advocate for government solutions proposed within and made legitimate by democratic institutions.  This hardly counts as "socialism," unless any government solution to any social problem is by definition socialism, and there are those, of course, who believe just that.  The reflexive cries of "socialism" are not intended to engage discourse around the nature and type of government, not even discourse around the nature of a specific government policy, but rather emerge from a broad distrust of government itself, in all its dimensions -- or, and this is more to the point, self-interest.  On the one hand, we are familiar enough with the conspiracy theorists, the one's who form militias in northern Michigan, but anyone who has held a position of leadership within a large complex organization knows how difficult it is to keep the ducks marching in the same general direction, much less mount a true conspiracy.  On the other had, we are familiar enough too with the government bashers, those who assume that any government operation is inefficient and ineffectual, but here again anyone who recognizes a grain of truth in the Dilbert strip would need to admit that the inefficiency and ineffectuality are characteristics not simply of government organizations, but of human organizations, the too-big-to-fail banks with their billion dollar losses being no exception to the rule.  Whether one's belief tends toward the hyper-efficient conspiracists or the bumbling ineffectuality of the bashers, there is plenty of reason to distrust government, per se, and it was perhaps the peculiar circumstance and genius of the framers to build this distrust into the constitution itself, but they also recognized that government, though problematic, was also necessary.

I am not concerned with those that distrust government in and of itself, and even feel they serve a broadly socratic role as gadflies, but I am concerned with those who capitalize on that distrust out of self-interest.  It's a good rule in life to follow the money, and that pertains especially in politics.  If we believe that government is necessary -- if we believe, along with Hamilton, that "the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes" to fulfill the ends imposed upon it -- then we should concern ourselves with the question of ends -- what is our tax money actually being used for? -- and with the question of equity -- do we have a fair and equitable system of taxation to accomplish those ends?  I suffer under no illusions that current tax policy tends to benefit the very wealthy more than the merely wealthy, and the merely wealthy more than the rest of us.  According to Roberton Williams from the Tax Policy Center, for example, "the very rich may be 'different from you and me,’ as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, but they are also different from the ordinary rich, as new IRS data on the 400 tax filers with the highest adjusted gross incomes show. Not only do the top 400 taxpayers have much more income than others with [adjusted gross incomes] exceeding $1 million — nearly 75 times as much on average in 2009 — but they get far more of their income from investments and thus pay lower effective individual income tax rates."  


I probably don't need to point out that Mitt Romney is among those that pay lower effective individual income tax rates.  While across the board tax cuts of the Bush era do put more money in the pockets of most Americans, they also put a disproportionate share back in the pockets of the very wealthy and the merely wealthy.  Whether those tax cuts and Mr. Romney's tax rate have had a salutary effect on job creation has yet to be conclusively demonstrated, but they have effectively increased the deficit.  It is also accepted, more or less as common wisdom, that reductions in the deficit will come at the expense of social programs.  As C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute points out, however,  "the nation’s real tax system includes not just the direct statutory rates explicit in such taxes as the income tax and the Social Security tax, but the implicit taxes that derive from phasing out of various benefits in both expenditure and tax programs. What I have labeled 'expenditure taxes' are like tax expenditures in the sense that both tend to hide the full impact of government and are seldom dealt with on a consistent basis."  He also points out that "although low- and moderate-income households are especially affected, middle income households face these expenditure taxes, too, as in the phase out of Pell grants and child credits."  In short, reductions within and access to social programs, like Pell grants and food stamps and medicare, increase household expenditures on education and food, and it's not difficult to see how that would have a disproportionate effect on those who can least afford it.


So, yes, this election really is about the rich and, if not the poor, then rich and the rest of us.  It will not likely play out that way however.  While American voters tend to vote the state of the economy, the votes comes more a "throw the bums out" reflex than a consideration of one's real economic interests, and there are plenty of other divisions to distract us -- evangelical social conservatism being perhaps the biggest of the big distractions.  Those who are for Jesus, against socialism (and gays, and illegal immigration, and abortionists, and government handouts in general) will line up at the polls and vote against their own economic interests while saying, "it's the economy stupid."    
  
       
        





  

inequality

On July 15th Larry Summers published an insipid editorial in the Huffington Post entitled "inequality of opportunity a more important focus than inequality of income."   He begins his piece by saying, "there is no question that income is distributed substantially more unequally than it was a generation ago - with those at the very top gaining share as even the upper middle class loses ground in relative terms. Those with less skill, especially men who in an earlier era would have worked with their hands, are losing ground, not just in relative but in absolute terms."  Since there is no question, I won't dwell on it, but I call his piece "insipid" mostly because, of all people, Larry Summers, an ex-Harvard president, should know that this same inequality of income has a profound effect on inequality of opportunity.  By most measures, America is becoming stratified within social classes, and there is less movement between those classes than our faith in a meritocratic "land of opportunity" might suggest.  With a few merit scholar exceptions, of course, the children of the wealthy go to Harvard for a rich educational experience, while the children of the poor go to the local community college and work while they do so.  I do believe it is important to address inequality of opportunity, particularly for our rising generations, but how can one focus on inequality of opportunity without first focusing on inequality of income, insofar as income is the principle means of capturing that opportunity and making it one's own?  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/larry-summers-inequality-of-opportunity_n_1675564.html    


There are any number of questions that face us as a nation, but I do believe the increasing stratification of America into classes is having, and will continue to have a profound effect on the American character as the differences between what we want to believe of ourselves gets more and more out of sync with the realities of the world we inhabit.  On the one side of the political debate, as Dr. Summers would have it, "Progressives argue that widening inequality jeopardizes the legitimacy of our political and economic system. They contend that at a time when the market is generating more inequality, we should not be shifting tax burdens from those with the highest incomes to the middle class, as has taken place over the last dozen years."  On the other side, "conservatives argue that in a world where everything is increasingly mobile, high tax rates run more risk of driving businesses and jobs overseas than they once did. They point out the central role of entrepreneurship in advancing economic growth and note that since most new ventures fail, the returns of success have to be very large if entrepreneurship is going to flourish." 


Mr. Summers sees this as an impossible divide, and perhaps it is, and I don't think many would argue that the divide is part and parcel of the political reality we now inhabit.  The divide, of course, goes much deeper than simply tax policy, a fault line that runs back to the origins of our constitutional republic.  It concerns the legitimacy of federal taxes at all, which in turn raises questions about the legitimacy of a federal government at all.  You find an earlier editorialist, Hamilton, arguing, with more than a hint of exasperation, "what is a power, but the ability or faculty of doing a thing?  What is the ability to do a thing, but the power of employing the means necessary to its execution?  What is a legislative power, but a power of making laws?  What are the means to execute a legislative power but laws?  What is the power of laying and collecting taxes, but a legislative power, or a power of making laws, to lay and collect taxes?  What are the proper means of executing such a power, but necessary and proper laws?"  


The question, of course, is this:  "what is necessary and what is proper?"  A good deal of Hamilton's argument throughout what has come to be known as the Federalist Papers focused on the need for a tax-supported federal government to provide for the common defense, and there are few conservatives (or progressives for that matter) who would argue against the necessity for a strong (or at least a strong enough) military presence.  Beyond that, determining just what a necessary, much less a proper government service becomes a bit dicier.  I would recast Dr. Summers' divide between progressives and conservatives along a different fault line.  On the one side, that is, progressives argue that we have a collective responsibility for certain things like education, health care, and the basic needs of food and shelter, particularly for the infirm, the elderly and the young.  There is no question that all have been commodified, and there are invidious comparisons to be made between, say, the education one receives in the public schools and certain private schools -- between, say, the health care one receives at a public clinic and certain private hospitals.  If one can afford the best, if one has the necessary means, one can get the best.  On the other side, at the extreme end of the spectrum, the conservative would argue that we have no (or very little) collective responsibility, only an individual responsibility.  If to the extent that something can be commodified, it should be commodified, and government should butt out of the picture.  Those who desire an education, health care, and the basic needs of food and shelter should find the individual means to procure them.


In fairness, this is what I call a spectrum issue.  There is an extreme progressive view, where all things are considered a collective responsibility, but one rarely hears extremist argument at the far end of the progressive spectrum.  The argument among progressives is the diminished one that some things like education et cetera are a collective responsibility and it is fitting and proper to collect taxes to insure that those things are adequately provided for all.  One is, however, hearing extreme arguments on the conservative side, and hearing them within what might pass for the mainstream, the notion that one should starve the government, particularly the federal government, until one can drown it in a bathtub.  


When Summers writes, "unfortunately, the points on both sides of the argument have considerable force" is perhaps true when we are close to the center of the spectrum, but the points on both sides grow more and more absurd, and his argument becomes even more disappointing, more a shoulder shrug than of resignation as we move to the extremes. "The reality," he tells us, "is that inequality is likely to remain high and rising even in the face of all that can responsibly be done to increase tax burdens on those with high income and redistribute the proceeds."  If the best argument one can muster for a progressive tax policy, in both senses of the word progressive, is to play Robin Hood, to take from the rich and "redistribute the proceeds," then we may as well concede the debate, in part because such a simplistic view of "redistributive justice" violates individual autonomy while evading the crucial question of just what is necessary and proper as a collective responsibility.  The fundamental issue is not the redistribution of income from the rich to the poor, but whether it is a collective responsibility to insure that all Americans have access to education, health care, or the basic needs of food and shelter. 


I believe, in short, that Summers', not unlike many others, miss the point entirely.  Having said that, I don't want to evade his point.  He writes that "perhaps the focus of debate and policy needs to shift from a focus on inequality in outcomes, where attitudes divide sharply and there are limits to what can be done, to a focus on inequalities in opportunity. It is hard to see who could disagree with the aspiration to equalize opportunity or fail to recognize the manifest inequalities in opportunity today."  At first blush, this shift from "equalizing one's present circumstances" to "equalizing one's opportunities" would seem to be the middle ground between collective and individual responsibility, and of course he is correct in suggesting that few would disagree in principle with "equal opportunities."  We have, in other words, a collective responsibility to "create opportunity" and the individual responsibility to capitalize on those opportunities through diligence and hard work.  We are, after all, the "land of opportunity," and the myths surrounding those who have "made it big" -- the Carnegies and Rockefellers of a previous era -- the Gates and Jobs of our era -- have served to trap any number of discussions in a circle.  


Summers recognizes that "a serious program to promote equal opportunity must both seek to enhance opportunity for those not in wealthy families and to address some of the advantages currently enjoyed by the children of the fortunate."   Summers has a point, if an enhanced opportunity would mean upward income mobility, and there is plenty of evidence that upward income mobility is not what it once was.  We can all think of an exception to the rule, but the exceptions are exceptions because the rule has some force.  I am suggesting that, for too many Americans, their present circumstances determine their opportunities, particularly for those at the bottom of the economic heap.  While studies of income mobility are tricky to interpret and the import of the statistical data sometimes unclear, Scott Winship of the Brookings Institute draws the following conclusion: "What is clear is that in at least one regard American mobility is exceptional: not in terms of downward mobility from the middle or from the top, and not in terms of upward mobility from the middle — rather, where we stand out is in our limited upward mobility from the bottom. And in particular, it’s American men who fare worse than their counterparts in other countries. One study compared the United States with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom.   It found that in each country, whether looking at sons or at daughters, 23 to 30 percent of children whose fathers were in the bottom fifth of earnings remained in the bottom fifth themselves as adults — except in the United States, where 42 percent of sons remained there."  One could cite other studies, but the Brookings Institute, and the National Review can hardly be accused of left leaning sentiments, and while they would resist gloomy interpretations, if Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, is correct, if  “upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise,” then we are not doing exceptionally well at creating opportunity.  http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2011/11/09-economic-mobility-winship   


The difficulty arises when we ask, "what exactly creates opportunity?" Or as important, when we ask "what exactly forecloses opportunity?"  We already know the answer to those questions.  Things like education, health care, basic needs tend to create opportunity, while the lack (or discernible disparities in the quality) of the same tend to foreclose opportunity.  Summers tells us, for example, that "by far the most important step that can be taken to enhance opportunity is to strengthen public education," but I am pessimistic that this most important step will be taken, either at the primary, secondary, or post-secondary levels.  Indeed, for those who have drifted further and further to the right of the political spectrum, where individual responsibility has become in essence every man for himself, the way to "strengthen public education" is to remove the collective responsibility of "public" from the equation, and to the absolute extent possible, commodify education and release it within "the survival of the fittest" ecology of the free market.   The liberal impulse to let parents choose is fine, of course, but parental choice will be driven by their available means to choose, their income.  A commodified education is unlikely to equalize the quality of education for all, but rather distribute students between a Walmart education and a Nieman-Marcus education.  If education and opportunity are as intimately linked as Summers and others believe, that distribution will foreclose opportunity and reinforce inter-generational class structures, particularly for those at the bottom who, in a commodified world of every parent for themselves, will be unable to afford even the modest Walmart education.


In the end, I do believe that Summers is correct at least in his sentiment, that we should focus on creating opportunity, but the suggestion that this may be a way out of the current political impasse is, well, insipid.  One cannot discuss the creation of opportunity without discussing the growing disparity of income distribution, and even more pointedly the growing despair of those at the bottom of the income distribution.   In the end, I also believe that Scott Winship is correct at least in sentiment, that "in a narrow sense, the sputtering economy and ballooning deficits are likely to dominate the 2012 election season. But while every election has its own particular concerns, fundamentally it is to the American Dream that our politicians must tend — that libertarian and egalitarian bundle of values and hopes that transcend our partisan, economic, and social divisions."  In the end, however, I am less than hopeful that we can, short of a full blown crises, transcend our divisions.    

education and employment

I just spent two days with a room full of higher education leadership, and as one might imagine, there were several topics of discussion.  We are educators, after all, accustomed to parsing issues minutely.  There was one topic, however, that stopped conversation short, and that was the issue of higher educate finance. There were two strands to the conversation, and they kept entangling, which gave us plenty of fun in disentangling them.  One strand might be labeled ROI -- that is to say, does education have a sufficient return on investment to merit the investment in time and treasure?  The other strand, might be labeled "who pays?" -- this was the broader question of higher education finance, a question of particular concern to those of us who serve in public institutions.

The first question, on ROI, begs a follow on question -- "a return on investment for whom?"  Education at any level is highly politicized, and as anyone who has sat through meetings that involve legislators and educators knows, the major differences are definitional.  The notion of "return," for example is fraught with difficulty, some educators wanting the notion of "return" to include the social benefits of higher education -- the sorts of things like "citizenship" evidenced by the greater likelihood that holders of degrees will vote or volunteer -- like "self-sufficiency" evidenced by the lessor likelihood that holders of degrees will attach public welfare programs like food stamps.  All to the good, of course, but the social benefits of higher education are difficult to quantify, and even when one can find common ground on a quantification, they remain fraught.  It is hardly persuasive for those on the right, who believe themselves to be in the right, that higher education reduces public expenditure on welfare programs, in part because welfare programs, to their way of thinking, should not be offered at all.

I do, of course, believe such discussions are important, and if one buys into the traditional arguments of educators, it helps justify public expenditure on public higher education.  It is, in other words, a public benefit, but it is also a private benefit.  Here again there are various ways of parsing the notion of private benefit, some similar to the notion of social benefit.  There is reasonably good evidence to suggest that degrees contribute to the pursuit of happiness -- that people with degrees are happier in their marriages and their careers.  It is even more difficult to quantify a person's individual happiness, and most attempts to do so are always somewhat suspect and vaguely irrelevant as a public concern.  The other way of parsing the "private benefit" brings us around to a more tangible form of ROI -- earnings expectations.  Here again, there is substantive evidence that an investment in higher education in general provides a substantive return on investment in immediate employment prospects, salary on entry, and life-time earnings.  There is a sort of win-win in the equation of higher education and higher wages, the complementary equation of higher wages and higher tax returns, both a private benefit and a social benefit.

It is perhaps not surprising that much of the conversation between educators and legislators have been around the equation of higher education and high wages, but it also begs the question of who should make the investment.  If the principle ROI of higher education resides in a private benefit to the individual, shouldn't then the individual, not the public, make the principle investment?  The question is largely rhetorical, and to most legislator's minds the answer obvious.  They are nudged along by competing pressures on the state budgets for police and prisons, for roads and public transportation, for medicare and medicaid, and a host of other public goods.  Unlike public higher education, which has always had the revenue stream of tuition to offset some of the expense, most of the public goods do not have revenue streams associated with them, and when they do, it is rarely wise to ask for "increased revenues."  The periodic outcry when police are suspected of quotas on traffic stops, for example, points to some of the difficulty for raising "police revenues."  Public transportation might be an exception, where there is a clear fee for service, but increased fares disproportionately affect the working poor.  There are, in other words, all sorts of reasons to shift the priority balance away from higher education toward other more immediate public goods, particularly when individual investments in higher education return to the individual the substantiated expectation of higher wages.

It is perhaps not surprising as well that most state legislators have reduced the public expenditure and asked students to bear a greater and greater portion of the cost of the higher education.  While around 80% of the cost of higher education is largely centered in the faculty and staff, contrary to popular belief, increased tuition costs have not gone into escalating faculty costs.  At my own institution, for example, there have been salary increases of 1% per annum over the last five or so years. Those increases are below the increases of the consumer price index, and have been coupled with some rather significant increases in the cost of and their contribution to benefits, particularly health care benefits, which have been eroding over the same period.  In short, faculty, like most middle-Americans, have seen their real wages declining.  Most of the tuition increases at most public institutions have gone to off-set declines in state legislative support.   I say "most" of course because I am sure there are exceptions which would give someone somewhere the pretext of saying "there! there!  you see!"  I can say this ALL of the institutions with which I have been associated, either as an employee or as a colleague, have struggled to keep tuition costs down, and have raised them only as a matter of institutional survival, a matter of keeping essential faculty and staff employed, a matter of keeping valued instructional programs going, a matter of keeping the lights and heat operating.

While public tax-based support diminishes and tuition increases, there is an escalating increase in expectations.  First that higher education will absorb ever greater numbers of students, and second that they will actually deliver on the promise of higher wages.  On the first, completing the private ROI of life-time wages, there is a body of literature that suggests that attaining ONLY a high-school diploma relegates one to a life-time of economic struggle.  The evidence for that is compelling and beyond controversy.  The sorts of jobs where one could learn the skills necessary on-the-job are rapidly disappearing.   Whether one wants to blame off-shoring, the incursion of technology or both, there is considerable evidence that SOME post-secondary education is necessary to attain a middle-class income and life-style.  Just how much post-secondary education and what kind is still a matter of debate, but it is clear enough that SOME is necessary, and so higher education is increasingly seen as both a necessity and an entitlement for all.

Consequently, while public tax-based support diminishes and tuition increases, public institutions, particularly public community colleges, are expected to educate more and more students, many of them ill-prepared for collegiate work.  They are ill-prepared academically and attitudinally -- there has been plenty of press around that -- but often they are ill-prepared fiscally.  The traditional picture of "college" -- that students graduate from high school, go off to college and study for four years, then enter into adulthood and careers -- pertains to a small and shrinking minority of students.  Most are working part time at least, many are working full time or more at working poor wages, with the all familial and fiscal pressures that implies, and they are studying "in between" all the other obligations.  One young woman, Maria Sanchez, slept and slept soundly through the entirety of my 8 o'clock class (how awful!).  When I woke her at the end, she apologized and tried to make her escape, but indignantly I asked for an explanation.  She had worked her customary mid-shift (6 p.m. to 2 p.m.) and had gone home to find her child ill, which meant a lengthy wait at the emergency room (no insurance).  She had gone straight from there to my class, where she couldn't manage to stay awake.  Yet she was there.  I was still indignant, but not at her.  College in the traditional sense is increasingly an elite indulgence.  Maria needs better English skills to succeed in College, but she doesn't need a better, more committed attitude.  She has that.  What Maria needs to be successful in College is money, pure and simple, and she certainly cannot take a risk and ask her parents for that money.

On the second, when you consider students like Maria, it is rather important that higher education make good on its promise of an ROI on investment for the student. It is good, of course, that there have been some steps of late to curtail the predatory marketing practices of the for-profit sector of higher education with the Gainful Employment Act, which puts some pressure on all to provide evidence that attaining such and such a certification or degree will make the advertised difference in one's life prospects.  In fairness, for-profit institutions are, well, for profit.  Their business models are predicated on student demand, and they have been successful in adapting to that demand in ways that public higher education has not been successful, particularly the adult working students.  Their business models are also predicated on low overhead, so generally speaking, their programming tends to be low overhead, high demand programming.  One does not find too many for-profits entering fields where over-head tends to be high, as it is in most so-called STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).  The exceptions might be digital technologies, where over-head is moderate, and allied health programming, where student demand exceeds the capacity of most public institutions, and the perceived pay-off is so high that students will pay the premium in tuition.   Beyond those exceptions, one will find instead a concentration on fields where over-head is low, as it is in business, public administration, and criminal justice -- fields where the for-profits can, well, make a profit.

Whether students can make a better living with low-prestige, high-cost education in those fields is another matter, but the cost is certainly high both for students and tax-payers.  The business models of the for-profits are also predicated on the existence of various federal and other subsidies for students.  If you make inquiry at a for-profit institution as a potential student, your first conversation is with an admissions counselor, but the admissions counselor is much less concerned (and often not at all concerned) with your academic ability, much more concerned with your eligibility for federal financial aid and guaranteed student loans.  Just as some health care institutions will provide care to the limits of insurance, many of the for-profits will provide education to the limits of the available financial aid and student loans, and beyond that the student is on their own.   Most drift away or drop out under financial pressure.   While there is no doubt fat in public higher education budgets that could be trimmed away -- things like high-cost athletic programs, which includes football at all but a small handful of institutions  -- and we find more with each round of budget cuts.  While the "privatization" of higher education is popular in some quarters, and the decreases in direct tax-subsidies from the states is incrementally "privatizing" higher education, it is mis-leading to think that the for-profits can provide education more efficiently.   On a program for program basis, the costs in the public and private sphere are roughly equivalent.  The difference is this:  they will offer only programs where there is a likelihood of profit, regardless of social need, and those profits will come from high tuition rates that are buttressed by federal subsidies, and loans.  Take away the subsidies, take away the loans, and the for-profits disappear tomorrow.

Of course, so would many of us in the public sector.  Frankly, we are not so different.  If higher education were priced at its actual cost of delivery, very few (perhaps the so-called 1%) could afford it.  In truth, even with existing subsidies, few can afford it.   The declining state support, off set by increasing tuition costs, will have a long-term impact on the student population graduating today as they enter the job market.  In a recent editorial in USA TODAY, Diana Furchtgott-Roth suggested that "huge tuition increases have also left those new workers with substantial debt.  The graduating class of 2011 left school with student loans of almost $23,000, the highest on record."  If default on exaggerated mortgage debt had a devastating impact on the middle-class in 2008, I suspect default on exaggerated student loan debt will have an equal, but more insidious impact on the middle-class in the future, particularly as education is increasingly commodified, and the commodity is increasingly devalued.  The same editorial reports that "even those with bachelor's degrees don't have it easy.  The unemployment rate in 2011 for new graduates with a bachelor degree was 9%, nearly double the 4.9% rate the same group experienced in 2006."  Of course, that 9% does not include the number of baccalaureate holders who are significantly under-employed -- the communications major, for example, working as an administrative assistant, not as the sportscaster she might have imagined -- and so have only marginal ability to make a decent living, much less pay off student loans.

When one begins to match the increasing cost and diminishing expectations of higher education, it does raise the question, "is it worth it?"  While a big pay-off for higher education is more and more difficult to guarantee, one thing is clear -- not pursuing higher education pretty much guarantees a life of diminished expectations on scales both human and economic.  The plane, so to speak, is significantly over-booked, but one thing is certain -- over booked or not, without a ticket you cannot get on the plane.  So there will be people clamoring to buy tickets, and people with tickets clamoring to get on the plane, but I have little faith that either political party will significantly increase the number of seats available.   While graduation ceremonies are appropriately congratulatory, the ultimate success of our students resides in what might be called "out-put demand," a factor largely beyond the control of higher education proper.  While we might take some steps to match "in-put demand," those clamoring for tickets, with "out-put demand," the employer needs that determine the number of seats on the plane, for the moment that is an elusive goal because the analytics that might allow us to predict the job market two, four, six years hence are less accurate than weather forecasts.  For those with modest memories, consider what the world looked like in 2007 and what it looks like today as the class of 2007 graduates.

In the meantime, here's hoping the student loan bubble doesn't pop, and that there are no riots at the gates as the numbers of modestly educated, but largely disenfranchised young people clamor for their place in the clouds.            
      

fund raising

USA today has reported that "Obama releases his list of fundraisers every three months, but Romney has refused to do so."  As they go on to point out, "Romney is not required to name his bundlers, with the exception of those who work as federal lobbyists.  Presidential nominees, however, have voluntarily disclosed the names of their top fundraisers for a dozen years, starting with Republican George W. Bush."  Many have noted that Romney has been secretive about many things, to include his tax returns, among other things, and one wonders why such secrecy is necessary.

It could be, of course, that he feels as my wife feels about such things in our private life -- that it's nobody's business but his own -- but then too, once when I suggested running for public office with some seriousness, she ... well, let us say, she was not receptive to the idea.  That by way of saying, there is a diminished expectation of privacy when one holds public office, and the expectation diminishes the further up the food chain one climbs.  Romney, as a presidential candidate, should know that there is virtually no expectation of privacy, so even on that score his secrecy is troubling.

It could be, of course, that he feels disclosure would be more politically damaging than his secrecy, but then one needs to wonder about his own wisdom.  Secrets have a way of coming out, and one doesn't need a secret on the order of Sandusky's for it to have significant implications, and a certain part of Romney's secret has emerged through the sleuthing of USA TODAY, which reports that "more than 300 people" or about 25% of the total 1,200 fundraisers "come from the world of finance, more than any other sector," and more than a dozen come from Goldman Sachs.  Of course, there's not much that's surprising in this, insofar as Romney toes the Republican line and has "pledged to dismantle financial-industry regulations enacted during the Obama administration."

In fairness, President Obama has his financial sector fundraisers as well (77 of  532 to be exact) but one suspects that Obama will not have the success in the sector that his rival, and the real success will not be within the boundaries of campaign finance.  As the article also points out, "Romney's most prolific supporters also have performed double duty -- writing large checks to Restore our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC that can raise unlimited amounts to aid his White House bid as long as it operates independently of his campaign."  The question -- how independent is independent -- has not received an adequate answer, but it may be moot regardless.  Ninety of Romney's fundraisers have "donated nearly $18.4 million to the group, which has spent more than $53 million to promote Romney and attack his rivals."

Altogether, this comes to the point of my previous entry.  The chicken egg question of whether the financial industry has bought Romney's support, or whether Romney's position has garnered the financial industry's support, is irrelevant so long as the alignment is clear, unmistakable, and mutually reinforcing.  There is nothing new in this, except that the supreme court decision around Citizens United, by allowing unlimited contributions to super PACS, have significantly magnified the influence of corporate interests, like Goldman Sachs.

Individual citizens can still make up their own minds, and vote accordingly, but if we honest with ourselves, really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that advertising works, and a good deal of the money spent by either political camp does little to promote dialogue around the best solutions for the problems facing America today, certainly not the continuing problem that the financial sector poses for the vast majority of Americans, and does a whole lot more to reinforce existing attitudes, not all of them pretty.  Romney spoke before the NAACP, for example, not because he expected a warm welcome, or to convert the black community to his vision, but to demonstrate and reinforce the worst racial attitudes and stereotypes.  The ploy is so transparent as to be laughable, except that, I suspect, it will work with those voters who turn out to his rallies.

The money, in short, not only magnifies the influence of certain sectors who want a receptive face in the oval office, and their methods for putting him there are perhaps rhetorically effective, picking the scabs of the deepest wounds in the American psyche, but most are a diversion from what is actually at stake.  We have, in effect, almost fully commodified our electoral process within a largely unregulated market.  To a greater and greater extent, those who own America are running American, if not directly, then by proxy, and it is not surprising that fewer and fewer people are owning more and more of America.  The real danger to American democracy is not socialism, certainly not communism -- those are the bogey men of the past.  The real danger is oligarchy, and perhaps that is the secret Romney wants most to keep.  He is emergent type of the emergent oligarchy.

Citizens United

I have been meaning for some time to comment on Citizen's United, or perhaps more precisely, the 2010 Supreme Court decision rendered in Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission.  It is reasonably clear that the decision was ideologically motivated, and insofar as it removed restrictions on the liberty of corporations to use their money as they pleased, the decision represents an advance for liberty and liberalism.  It seems oddly counter-intuitive to say as much, because clearly the decision is more celebrated than  reviled among the conservative wing of our party politics, so it perhaps bears pointing out that Citizens United is not so much an advance for individual liberty, more an advance for corporate and economic liberty.  It perhaps also bears pointing out that liberty, as such, is neither ubiquitous nor uniform, and liberty itself is bestowed unequally between people.  We know intuitively that some are more free than others to do as they please, and that increasing liberty for some might well mean a decrease in liberty for others.  We need a more nuanced understanding of liberty, but there is a considerable fog that obscures both nuance and understanding, much less a nuanced understanding, and Citizens United has done much to underwrite the cost of bigger and better fog machines to enhance the spectacle of election year politics.

Let me make the first nuanced distinction, one that has been made before (though in honesty, I can't remember by whom, so must leave it unattributed) but one that is crucial -- the distinction between freedom and liberty.  In certain crucial respects, as a sentient being, endowed by nature, or by God, or by nature's God with free will, I am free to do whatever I can do.  I am not, however, at liberty to do whatever I can do.  There are legal restrictions within the state that prevent me from doing all that I might want to do and all that I could do. If we imagine for a moment the worst possible circumstances for human beings -- let me call it the prison state -- where there is a person in charge, with minions to assist him, and the remainder of the population are held as if in prison.  The closest analog to the prison state might well be North Korea, but for certain populations, the realized fascist and communist states came close.  In the prison state, the person in charge has both the greatest possible freedom and, insofar as the law is coincident with his whim, he also has the greatest possible liberty.  His citizens, however, feel the distinction between freedom and liberty.  In even the most repressive regimes, one suspects, the citizens know their own mind, are perfectly capable of speaking their mind, and in some absolute sense are perfectly free to speak their own mind.  In much the same way, I am perfectly free at the instant to find the tallest building and jump off.  Prudence prevents me from doing so, and prudence would prevent the citizen of a police state from speaking their mind, not because they lack the freedom to do so, but because they don't want to invite the consequences of having done so.

Having said that, of course, the consequences of jumping off a tall building and speaking one's mind in a prison state stem from different sources.  In the one instance, it's just natural law and its operative enforcement through gravity.  In the other instance, it's political law and the enforcement of that law through the minions.  They are free to speak their mind, and there are no "natural" consequences for doing so, but they are not free to speak their mind because there are consequences for doing so.  The latter consequences stem, if not from natural law, then something very closely akin to it, the ability of the strong to impose their will on the weak through one form of violence or another.  

We do not exist in a prison state.  We exist in a free nation, but not because we have a paucity of legal restrictions on our behavior.  If one were to collect the municipal, the county, the state, and the federal statutes under one cover, I suspect it would be a rather lengthy tome, and all of them -- and I emphasize ALL of them -- place consequential restrictions on our behavior.  I suspect we may have even more consequential legal restrictions on our behavior, per se, than the most virulent of prison states, and in the way of paradoxical statements, we are a free people because of those legal restrictions.  Our founding fathers were quite aware of this, and as Hamilton put it in what has come to be known as the Federalist Papers, "nothing is more certain that the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers."  All governments -- and I emphasize, ALL governments -- are coercive, the question is not whether, but how they are coercive.  We are a free people, because we have ceded our natural rights, our freedom, to an absolute legal authority.  We are an absolute dictatorship, not of the prison warden and his whim, but of the law.

I am splitting hairs here, and then splitting the split ends, but it is important to do so.  I could have made the equally paradoxical statement that the prison state, in one respect, represents an absolutely free state.  I would be making a Hobbesian or Darwinian argument, one that sees a "state of nature" as a competition for survival and dominance.  Within nature, the "fittest" survive and dominate, and if one extends that metaphor to the state, the "fittest" survive the climb to the top and dominate.  If everyone is absolutely free to compete for survival and dominance, with no restrictions on that competition, then the result is one or another version of the prison state.  One hears this argument most often within the economic sphere.  We should remove restrictions on competition, and safety nets for failure, so the "fittest" of the bunch can survive and thrive.  You will note, however, that this is just a way of saying "might is right," and I hope I would not need to argue long that it says little or nothing about compassionate or moral behavior.  If lions suddenly developed a communal conscience around the suffering of antelope, lions would not be long among us, and our intuition tells us that the least compassionate, the least ethical, the least moral beings are the one's that, in the absence of consequential restrictions on our behavior, rise to the top.  I am always surprised that people are surprised when it is discovered that people on the top actively advocated, or willfully ignored, the harm they were doing to others in their ascendency.  When Hamilton reminds us of the "indispensable necessity of government," he is reminding us of its inevitability.  Unless you are the one with the biggest club, you will be governed.  He is reminding us as well that "good" government is to be desired, in the multiple senses of the word good -- efficient government, compassionate government, moral government.        

If all governments are coercive, if all governments proceed through consequential restrictions on our behavior, then what we want is a government that is coercive in a "good"way.  The genius of our founding fathers resides within the articulation of our constitution.  In the parlance of the day, it is a meta-document, one that governs the government and, as such, transcends the particular actors within the government.  It articulates the fundamental law of the land, and all citizens, including those who serve in political office, especially those who hold political office, are subject to the restrictions it lays out.  There are, of course, many restrictions on the behavior of our lawmakers, and I cannot begin to deal with them all here, but one is of particular interest to the Citizens United decision, and that is the first amendment to the constitution:  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  We are both free, and at liberty, to practice religion, to speak our mind, and in particular to speak our mind about the "goodness" of our government.  We are a free people, in short, because the government itself is subject to the rule of law, and it is in that sense that I make the somewhat paradoxical claim that we are a free people, that we are not subjects within a prison state, not for paucity of law, but for the existence of specific laws that place consequential restrictions on the government itself.

Contrary to popular belief, however, the First Amendment does not read, "yo! Chris!  You can say whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, to whomever you want, and you will suffer no consequences if you do so."  In the first place, while we are free to speak our mind, and have the legal liberty to speak our mind, most of us recognize that the constitution does not, and really cannot, wholly protect us from the consequences of our own ill-advised speech.  I cannot, in other words, tell my boss that she is a pig-headed idiot and expect to remain long employed, and most employers, as a condition of employment, regulate and restrict speech in any number of ways, not least rather strict regulation about who can (and who cannot) speak to the press.  One cannot violate company policy and expect to remain long employed.  While in some absolute sense, I might be free to speak my mind, nearly all of us exist with consequential restrictions, whose point of origins are outside the government, where prudence might nevertheless suggest we say, "I am not at liberty to comment."

This is important to keep in mind for a couple of reasons.  Corporate structures have sway over individuals that exceed the powers of government and are, in many respects more immediately consequential.  Corporate structures are not in the least democratic.  They are autocratic.  The monetary contributions of a corporate structure to the war chest of a candidate, their corporate lobbying efforts, do not reflect the opinion of the people in any rational way, but rather the opinion and the economic interests of the narrow monied elite who control the corporation.  Neither the people generally employed by a corporation, nor the people at large, have much say in how that influence is applied to the political process, but the influence is nevertheless real.  A modern political campaign is hugely expensive, and a good deal of the expense goes into offensive advertising -- offensive often in the petty virulence of its content, but offensive too in the way that it attacks the opponent.  There are any number of things that render one vulnerable to attack, but all candidates are vulnerable to attack, and despite our objections, our desire for a more issue focused politics, more solution-based party platforms, the number and repetition of offensive ads counts has enormous sway.  The larger one's war chest, all the more offensive ads fill the public media, and all the more influence one has.   While I would not go so far as to say that the monied elite have bought and paid for our politicians, the fewer the restrictions on the gathering and use of campaign money, the more the interests of the politician and the monied elite are aligned.                                        

One wants to say this alignment between the interests of the politician and the monied elite is both real and corrupting, but it is corrupting only if you suppose the politician has moral and ethical obligations that extend beyond the economic interests of the monied elite, and that the politician would have pursued those moral obligations had it not been for the enormous expenses associated with the modern political campaign and the corrupting influence of the big donor, a corrupting influence extended by the Citizens United decision that opens the flood gates on campaign donations.  I want to make a somewhat subtler point, one that I have made elsewhere.  In the economic sphere, contrary to the social sphere, American conservatism would have us dismantle regulatory structures.  The argument, of course, is that excessive regulation impedes economic growth, and there may be some truth to that claim, but regulation also represents the moral and ethical interests of the people.  The fewer consequential legal regulations we have, the fewer the enforceable restrictions on the behavior of the actors, the more economic and other activity comes to resemble a Hobbesian war of all on all, a Darwinian survival of the fittest, where immediate individual interest trumps any on-going social interest, where the ends justify the means.  It is a world, not so much immoral as amoral, and its inevitable result is not so much the triumph of virtue, but the triumph of power within an autocratic, or perhaps oligarchic, prison state.  The demise of democracy will not come from an excess of regulation, but an excess of freedom, which will allow those with the means to exercise power over those without.  The demise of democracy will not come from deliberate and reasonable constraints on electoral politics, but the exaggerated influence that comes with wealth, the greater alignment of the interests of the monied elite and the politician.

The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is not so much the disease, but a symptom of the disease that will bring our representative republic into decline.  I doubt that Hamilton and the framers of the constitution could foresee modern media and the influence it would exercise on the tastes and habits and opinions of the populace.  When they prohibited government's ability to regulate or control speech, one suspects they had individual, in the proper sense of individual, speech in mind.  When they prohibited government's ability to regulate or control the press, one suspects they had something more like Tom Paine's pamphlets, not Fox News, in mind.  out of time .... more later ...