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!"                      

Basic Human Dignity Continued

If labor is indeed to be redemptive, both materially and ethically, it must be available, and therein lies the first rub.   There is, of course, the persistent belief that America is the land of opportunity.   I won't unpack it fully, but the basic outline is this:  the American economy may not produce equal results, but it does offer up equal opportunity to all who apply themselves, those who are able and willing to work hard in pursuit of happiness or as the contestants of American idol, one after another, put it, "in pursuit of my dream."  Anyone who spends over five minutes thinking about it realizes that the American economy produces neither equal results, nor does it offer up equal opportunity, if by opportunity we mean something less grandiose than rock stardom and more conducive to day-to-day life -- the availability of "jobs with decent wages and good benefits."  Even though employment of late has shown some signs of recovery after the great recession of 2008, there remain significant causes of concern.  The Economic Policy Institute headlined a recent report that "The US labor market starts 2012 with solid positive signs, but fewer jobs than it had in 2001."   The most discouraging sign is job growth relative to population.  As the Institute reports, "the labor force has grown by less than half a million workers since the recession started, though working age population has grown by 10 million in that time."  If the number of jobs available does not keep pace with the population, and it shows few signs of doing so, then a significant percentage of our population does not now, and may never have opportunity for legal employment of any sort, much less "jobs with decent wages and benefits."

I should point out that a significant percentage of our population has not had access to work for some time now, and the disappearance of opportunity disproportionately afflicts those who have been historically at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, particularly the African American community.  In this regard William Julius Wilson's study, When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor, is instructive.  He describes what is, in effect, a vicious cycle of despair, noting "where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs, and where there is a disruptive or degraded school life purporting to prepare youngsters for eventual participation in the workforce, many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy."  When pundits like Krugman express alarm that "long-term unemployment -- the percentage of workers who have been out of work for six months or more -- remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression," there is a clear and present danger that more and more neighborhoods will be sucked into the vortex, described by Wilson, that more and more Americans will "no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives," and that such "circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income, thereby further weakening their attachment to the legitimate labor market."  It is perhaps a mark of our clandestine racism that writers like Murry, in Coming Apart, when the blight associated with inner-city, black ghettos seems to be spreading into white neighborhoods and the increasingly meth-infested small town America.  When the blight is confined to the inner-city ghetto, it is easier to focus current policy discussions of the welfare state on "the shortcomings of individuals and families and not on the structural and social changes in the society at large that have made life so miserable for many inner-city ghetto residents,"  changes in society that have produced "certain unique responses and behavior patterns over time" of the sort reflected in hardcore hip hop.   When the blight is no longer the problem of third world America and is bleeding into the larger population, the conservatives it seems are doubling down on the "shortcomings of individuals," with Rick Santorum talking about "the narcotic of dependency" and Mitt Romney suggesting that government programs "foster passivity and sloth."  This may well be true, but the path to redemption is narrower of late, and there is little to suggest that dismantling the various safety net programs will do much to foster engagement and industry without improving opportunity.

To be Continued

Basic Human Dignity

As an addendum to the previous discussion, Paul Krugman in a recent editorial (NYT, 2/101/12) writes, "so we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals."   He engages in his own form of snooty and dismissive argumentation familiar to most academics, but behind it is an implicit egalitarianism.  We shouldn't be too quick to reject the rationality of the uneducated.  If the legitimate jobs available are so poorly remunerated that they do not in themselves support a decent life, why then would one subject oneself to the often demeaning and demoralizing conditions of work?  It is a rational calculation that most would make, particularly when there are other means of support available, and there one can take one's pick -- the anemic socialism of the existing welfare state or the shadow capitalism of the drug trade.  It is a question of which comes first, the moral failings or the lack of meaningful opportunity, and how you answer that question, of course, puts you on one side or another of the ideological divide in this country.  Krugman, who falls off on the liberal side, tells us, "reject the [conservative] attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind.  Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause."

In American culture, if we are to look for a moral core, one that transcends the theocratic table thumping of comprehensive religious doctrines, one that transcends the ideological head thumping of comprehensive political doctrines, one that ultimately mitigates differences of ethnicity and race, it is the redemptive value of labor.   The hard working man, the productive man, is the good man, and one sees that mythos reflected in any number of cultural artifacts.  I am thinking at the moment of the Clint Eastwood film, Gran Torino.  It is set in a diminished Detroit.  The background is the sort of urban blight Murray describes in Coming Apart, and the story line is rather simple, a young Asian immigrant is subjected to every form of stereotypical bigotry imaginable from the white and retired auto-worker played by Eastwood, but the character is ostensibly sympathetic because he also represents a set of "traditional American values," the self-sacrifice of patriotism and hard work.  The young Asian is redeemed in Eastwood's eyes, not by a sudden conversion to Christianity and Christian values -- the folk religion practiced by the immigrant family was portrayed sympathetically as a set of traditional family centered values -- but by his willingness to work hard.  A pivotal scene shows the young immigrant struggling in the rain to remove a dead stump from his neighbor's yard.  In the end, the young immigrant inherits the Gran Torino, the symbolic exemplar of America's hardworking, industrial legacy.  The hardworking man, the productive man, is the good man, and while Krugman takes the argument one step further, suggesting that a good society is one which provides the opportunity for productive work, it is nevertheless the labor that redeems.

To be continued.        

  

The Bell Curve Revisited Conclusion

I like to think of myself as a cautious optimist, but the prognosis may be more intractable than Murray can admit to himself.  I do not want to draw too close a connection between education, money, and basic human dignity, but most would concede that they are entangled, if not causally related.  The sorts of jobs that one can do without an education are not very many, are growing fewer, and regardless are not particularly conducive to human dignity.  They do not pay well, and while money cannot buy happiness, its absence makes the pursuit of happiness altogether, shall we say, more challenging.  Nearly universal access to education, including higher education, has done little to change the basic dynamic.  That a few are up to the challenge and a growing majority are not should come as no particular surprise.  At all but the most selective institutions, any administrator at any college will tell you that a significant number of students arrive, as we like to say, under-prepared.  They lack the basic intellectual skills, the numeracy and the literacy necessary to even begin developing expert thinking and complex communication skills.  They are consigned to remedial education courses in math and English, high school and in some cases even grade school level courses, where a few find they are up to the challenge and develop the necessary skills, but most founder for a while and drift away.  The euphemism, "under-prepared," is a convenient one for those of us in higher education.  It allows us to defer responsibility to those who struggled before us -- if only the high schools had done a better job of "preparing" the students for college.  Even better, we can avoid making invidious judgments about the students themselves.  To say one lacks proper preparedness is one thing, to say one lacks intellectual capacity for full participation in the economic life of the country is quite another, and yet as technology keeps "upping the ante" for a growing number of our students that may well be the necessary judgment, and again, the question becomes, "what to do with them?"

Murray's argument seems to be deeply flawed in at least one respect.  On the one hand, he seems to credit genetics as the underlying cause of the widening gap between the poor and the wealthy.  Like is attracted to like, and under an assumption of homogamy within the marriage market, the smartest people are drawn to each other because they share similar tastes, interests, and values.  The smartest people tend to accumulate the most wealth and gather together in communities of the wealthy reflecting and reinforcing those tastes, interests and values.  The smartest people tend to have the smartest children who are socialized to those tastes, interests, and values, and because they have the means, the smartest people send their children to the best schools, where the virtuous cycle repeats itself.  On the other hand, he seems to blame the modern welfare state for a good deal of the decay in the moral and ethical standards of industriousness, honesty, family, and religiosity among the lower income Americans.   The modern welfare state has trapped the American poor and working poor in a Pavlovian cycle of dependency and entitlement, drugs and crime, and single parent (or even worse absent parent) households.  Those in the upper income tiers don't seem to share in those problems, at least not to the same degree, or in the same way.  It is the nature/nurture argument writ large.  Nature and the invisible hand of the marriage market is responsible for the virtuous cycle.  Nurture and government social engineering is responsible for the vicious cycle.  It is questionable, however, if a dismantling of the welfare state will produce anything like a great awakening of personal responsibility.  In the absence of even the most modest of alternative proposals, the welfare state seems to be wrapped in an ideological chicken and egg dispute.  Has the welfare state caused the decline in moral and ethical standards or has it emerged as a palliative answer to the pragmatic question, "what to do with those who have been intellectually and economically alienated from the modern economy?"   The answer is likely "yes."

The Bell Curve Revisited Continued

If indeed cognitive capacity is an inheritable trait, how then should we feel about education?  Can school work overcome our native stupidity?  At the most general level, of course, nearly everyone can benefit from one from of education or another.  It is a truism that both democracy and capitalism needs an educated citizenry, and as a matter of policy and priority, most states provide for public education at the elementary, the secondary, and at the collegiate levels.   Education too holds a more or less unique place in the ideological dispute over social justice.  School work creates opportunities, and both ideological camps accept that getting an education is a necessary, though hardly sufficient, prerequisite for a human being to reach their full potential.  Both camps accept that an educated citizenry is necessary, not only to informed decisions at the polling booth, but also for their full participation within the economic and social life of their communities.  We believe, or we want to believe, that school work overcomes native stupidity to the degree necessary, and if students stick it out, it does so more or less universally.  School work, in short, is no different than any other sort of work and is subject to the same mythologies that inform our attitudes about work.  It is inextricably redemptive and remunerative.  Those that apply themselves to their studies, those who burn the midnight oil and work hard at them, as most students do, those developed habits of mind and heart will not only save one from a life of penury, but will reward one with happiness and success, however one might want to measure happiness and success.    

There is some truth to the mythologies, else they wouldn't survive as mythologies, and we in higher education are fond of trucking out the statistics that show higher life time earnings for those who achieve higher forms of education.  We worry over "retention" and tsk-tsk the fate of those who fade from the education system, in high school, in college, ostensibly before reaching their full potential.  We worry even more profoundly if we accept the results of recent research into employment, the suggestion that nearly 66% of the adult population needs some form of collegiate education, whether technical or academic if the US is to maintain a viable economy.   We worry, and we tinker, but part of the on-going dissatisfaction with the education systems might have little or nothing to do with the system per se.  It will always subject to ever more tinkering and correction, and there are few political bodies that do not feel some urge to propose simplistic solutions to intractable problems.  Rather, the on-going dissatisfaction might have more to do with the failed promise of education itself, and the on-going denial that its failure may be as inevitable as entropy.  If cognitive capacity is heritable, and if there are limits to the degree that school work can over-come native deficiencies, the education system may well be failing to produce the desired results, not because it is systemically broken, but because it is being asked to do what it cannot do -- change the cognitive capacity of students.  I taught in an open access institution, a community college, and had a broad cross section of students of all abilities.  To buck myself up, with all the enthusiasm I could muster, I would say to my wife before going off to teach, "I am off to fight the forces of ignorance and apathy," and to a certain extent I could address both.  I could give them facts to bank, and for some I could even be inspiring, but for those students who lacked the cognitive capacity for collegiate work, for the creative analytical and synthetic work that will be more and more in demand in the emergent economy, I could not begin to exercise capacities they lacked.  They were often fine young men and women, personable and sincere and willing enough to work hard, but their hard work produced little or no appreciable difference in the past and would produce little or no appreciable difference in the future.  Too often, they lacked the discernment to even grasp the difference between their own work and the work of their more capable peers.

To be continued.          

The Bell Curve Revisited

I have been reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart: the State of White America, a book that I find more than a bit disturbing, not because I believe it to be false, but because in large part because I believe it to be correct.  The prima facia thesis that there is an ever-widening gulf between the classes in America is not particularly starting or unique.   The gulf has been apparent for some time to anyone who has been paying attention, and it can be seen in any number of ways, perhaps most obviously in the differences between the social milieu portrayed in a television series like The Good Wife and that portrayed in something like Raising Hope.  For Murray, it is not simply a matter of money, though of course money has its role to play.  It is more an attitudinal and behavioral divide predicated on the foundational American virtues of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity.  I won't enter into a critique of either television show, but it would take only about five minutes of viewing of each to see the differences between the upper middle class lawyers that populate the The Good Wife and the lower middle class grocery workers that populate Raising Hope.  Although the latter are held up for ridicule -- it is after all a situation comedy -- Murray I think would agree that the illegitimate child that gives its name to the show's title and the prevailing slacker mores, the if-I-can-get-away-with-it-why-not duplicity, provides a more or less accurate portrayal of the attitudes and behavior that Murray uncovers in survey after survey.  That the characters of raising hope are white is to Murray's point.  He focuses on the state of white America, in part to avoid the controversy that surrounded his earlier work and to keep presuppositions about race from tainting his underlying premise which hasn't changed from The Bell Curve.

The differences in income can be explained easily enough by the increasing premium placed on cognitive capacity, or as he put it, "the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy."  I will not debate any particular measure of cognitive capacity.  The whole notion that it can be measured is tainted of late, in part because any measure reveals uncomfortable data that we would prefer to discount than confront.  Nevertheless, suffice it to say, any measure of cognitive capacity is inadequate and culturally biased if one's goal is to measure against what is most likely a mythical absolute standard of intelligence.  If one's goal is more modest -- simply to measure one's ability to function within a given intellectual context within a given culture -- then there are many thoroughly adequate measures that reveal significant differences between individuals and make predictions about their likelihood of success.  My previous college used the compass, my current college uses the ACT, and both are statistically reliable as predictors of success within a collegiate context.  Most of us concede the statistical reliability of such measures, for others, and if they provide disconcerting data about our own ability, well then we are the individual exception to the statistical rule.  Murray's follow on assumption is a bit more disconcerting, and it is buried in his use of "homogamy" above -- that cognitive capacity is as heritable as athletic ability.   It is one thing to say, "he's inherently clumsy," quite another to say, "he's inherently stupid."  Neither may be completely permissible in a cultural context that demands "eumenical niceness," as Murray puts it, but it is clear enough that "being clumsy" may limit one's opportunities with the Chicago Bulls, but it does not limit in any appreciable way one's opportunities for the good life in the same way that 'being stupid' limits them.

To be Continued