credo

There are a couple of things that I have come to believe, and perhaps first among them is this:  positive freedom, the unrestricted ability to do what one can do, is necessary, but insufficient to morality.  This is essentially a Kantian idea, and comes down to a simple assertion that one can must be free to choose between moral and immoral actions for the distinction to have meaning.  Positive freedom, in and of itself, is a moral value only in this a priori sense, but we also recognize that additional conditions must apply if the choice is to be a moral (or an immoral) choice, perhaps first among them that the choice is "rational."  We do not hold those incapable of rationality -- the very young or the mentally incompetent -- morally culpable in quite the same way that we hold those capable of rationality morally culpable.  Just what does (and does not) count as "rationality," however, is deeply disputable, and I will come back to it, but  let me just say that "rationality" in and of itself is likewise insufficient if the choice is to be a moral choice.  We can make a perfectly "rational" calculation around an action that is wholly centered on its utility -- pursue a path, for example, that makes us happy, but does so at the considerable expense of others.  Yet additional conditions beyond "rationality" must apply if the choice is to be a moral choice, and perhaps the most significant among them is the so-called golden rule -- do to others as you would have them do to you.  It is neither moral nor immoral to act on behalf of utility, unless of course the utility comes at the "considerable expense of others."  Morality has a social dimension from the outset, and there can no more be a "private morality" than there can be a "private language."  If one were entirely alone in the universe, actions could still be "judged," but they could be judged only relative to their utility to some given end, and the distinction between moral and immoral would lose meaning.  This is essentially Wittgenstein's idea, and it comes down to the simple assertion that moral judgement is a public judgement within a particular cultural context.

That is the basic outline, but a couple of sidebar notes on unsettled matters might be necessary.  First, there are the "universalist" vs the "contingent" lines of thought.  On the universalist side, there is the desire to find that which is "true" once and for all.  There is a strong tendency in this direction, and it begins on the secular side with Plato and is reinforced on the sacred side within the thinking of most major theistic religions.  Kant is clearly within this line of thinking, and the so-called "categorical imperative" I am vastly simplifying, but the categorical imperative is golden-rule rendered universal, as in act in such a way that one's actions should become the template for a "a universal law without contradiction."  While Kant's argument is compelling in more ways than I can enumerate here, it's one of those things easier said than done.  It is easy enough to articulate a "universal law," but to do so "without contradiction" proves to be extraordinarily difficult in the messy contingency of life as most live it.  If one thinks of the legal code as an enactment of the moral imperative "thou shalt not kill," we have created any number of fine and arguable distinctions between murder and manslaughter to wrestle with the contradictions inherent within what at first blush seems a perfectly clear universal law.  On the contingent side, there is the recognition that moral values are at best messy, at worst irreconcilable one to another.  Most so-called post-modernist thinking falls off on the "contingent" side -- that is to say, the morality of a decision is contingent upon the circumstances within which it is being made.  Here again, the analogy to language is formative.  Just as a statement in a language is contingent for its meaning on the myriad of the syntactic and semantic relationships within the language, so too the morality of a decision is contingent for its force on the myriad of relationships within the culture.  The moral "truth" of an action cannot be determined once and for all, but only here and now, an assertion that opens as well an historical dimension insofar as the "here and now" today is not the "here and now" of yesterday, nor will it be the "here and now" of tomorrow.  It is a "whole" and must be considered as a "whole," but the "whole" of it is in constant flux.

Second, implicit in the above are the deeper questions about rationality itself, and might be labeled "science" vs "religion."  There are many shades of thinking here, and I would not presume to capture them all, but most are, to one degree or another, what I would call "domain specific."  As a broad commonsensical approach, for example, few would deny commonsensical rationality, the sorts of behavior we do (or don't do) engage because we desire (or fear) the consequences of our actions.  Few of us believe that we can flap our arms and fly, and hence do not leap from tall buildings for fear of plummeting to the pavement below.  To hold that belief, and to engage in that behavior, in short, is irrational.   Likewise, we recognize the differences, for example, between the rational behavior of the average commuter who is worried about making his eight o'clock meeting and the schizophrenic who is ranting about the coming apocalypse on the street corner.  Within the domain of the commonsensical, there are hundreds of background beliefs that we hold to be true (or true enough) to guide our everyday behavior.   Here I want to say, the domain of the commonsensical roughly corresponds with the domain of the scientific -- that is to say, observable and verifiable truth about the world we inhabit -- and it forms the dominant form of thinking today.  There is a universalist tendency within science, but again at the risk of over-simplification, it is a "contingent universalism."  There is a search for universal laws of nature, but those "laws," once "discovered," can be (and often are) supplanted by finer and more encompassing distinctions.  That search, as Kuhn and others have detailed, takes place on an historical scale, and while there might be an historical arch to how  "discovery" takes place, the historical arch itself isn't predictive of future "discovery."

One difficulty, of course, is that science, as such, says nothing about morality.  It can say a good deal about how we behave, and it can even say a good deal about why we behave in certain ways (and not in others) but science itself cannot make the transition from descriptive to prescriptive.  This is not to say that some writers have not tried to find a scientific base for morality or more precisely -- moral behavior -- but in doing so they commit a fundamental error.  Science, as an enterprise, is deterministic.  As a result, most discussions of morality within science are tautological.  For example, evolutionary biology is quite adept at explaining how we came to be as we are, and to suggest that there is an evolutionary base for such moral behaviors as altruism or self-sacrifice are important to the science of evolution because, as human beings, we are altruistic.  If the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then by definition it must account for our altruistic and self-sacrificing nature.  I say this because the original Darwinist formulations of evolutionary theory with the red in tooth and claw struggle for survival would seem to mitigate against behaviors like altruism, and so there has been some considerable thought given to the adaptive value of such behaviors.  By the same token, however, if the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then too by definition it must account for our  selfish behavior, and it must do so "without contradiction," otherwise the theory must be modified to resolve the contradiction.  As it progressively resolves such contradictions, the descriptive validity of science becomes tighter and tighter, more and more true, but in the end it is confined to the domain of descriptive validity, and science as an enterprise does little or nothing to resolve the choice between altruistic or self behavior.

One could start over with the varieties of magical thinking.  Although certain forms of religious fundamentalism are very much with us today, I want to rather quickly set them aside.   I want to say that religion offers another form of "contingent universalism," but it is contingent only insofar as it's historical origins can be traced to a certain time and place.  I also want to say that religion represents its contingent point of origin as the end of contingency, a representation that requires considerable "denial" of what comes after.  To maintain the literal truth of the Bible, for example, requires extensive denial of a good deal that makes modern life possible, not least, of course, most of modern science.  Beyond that, however, are the more basic concerns that are implicit to the notion of "denial."  There is little or nothing in in theocentric religion, particularly the varieties of fundamentalist religion, that might be called democratic.  The basic belief structure asserts, "I am right, and those who do not share my faith are wrong," and then "wrong" on at least a couple of levels.  Not only "wrong" in one's beliefs, but also "wrong" in one's being.  If we are right, and there can be no doubt that we are right, those who hear the testimony, those who do not likewise believe, those who are not as we are, must be, in one way or another, fundamentally flawed as human beings.  There is a leap here between moral behavior, as such, to moral being and it is this leap that provides justification for many horrors.  If such fundamentalist thinking is coupled with political power, no matter how the power is attained, the results are rather predictable and wholly unfortunate for those who are not of the right sort, who are not moral beings.  If neither of the twentieth century horrors of nazism or communism were religious in their origins -- unlike, perhaps, the twenty first century horror of the Taliban -- most of the arguments that Hayek advanced against the ideological excess can be advanced against the theocentric excess.  Both, as it were, attempt to remake mankind for idealized vision of society, not a society for the pluralistic reality of mankind, and in so doing "impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate."

In short, one can arrive at morality neither through science, nor ultimately through religion.  One wants to say that it was the great genius of our constitutional framers to prohibit a state sanctioned religion.  Although I have railed some against the emergent plutocracy, and I do believe it poses a greater immediate threat, the imposition of a state religion poses a more traditional threat.   Although the latter begins with an affirmation of divinity and a vision of morality, when coupled with political power, it ends with autocratic denial and violence, both figuratively and often literally, of those and against those who cannot conform.  I would say the same of the religion of science -- that is to say, a "science" that believes it has escaped its contingency and found the final solution to the last question.  Fundamentalist, evangelical religion is much with us, in part because of the recent presidential politics that have elevated several of the most sanctimonious to the national stage, an equally evangelical religion of science -- or perhaps more precisely, of technology -- is very much with us.  For lack of a better term, one might call them the techno-utopians, people like Parag and Ayesha Khanna, authors of the pamphlet How to Run the World or Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization.  There is the persistent belief that a technology solution will redeem mankind.  Eugeny Morozov review the pamphlet in a recent New Republic, to devastating effect, and there is a lengthening tradition of dystopian literature from Brave New World to The Matrix, all of which suggests that the religion of technology, no less than religions of revelation, end in the borg-like denial and violence against the necessary condition of our moral being, our freedom.  Having said that, religion is nevertheless a fundamental liberty.  To deny religion is to deny something fundamental in the pluralistic reality of mankind.  I do not count myself as a religious person, a church going person, and I am willing to credit, to borrow a phrase, many varieties of religious experience, and I can do so because there are times when my soul lifts and I feel myself dancing at the edge of the universe with dragons and angels.  To deny my experience of divinity is to deny something fundamental to my being, regardless whether it is an epiphenomenon of my brain chemistry or a sidelong glimpse of God herself.

Yet freedom, in and of itself, is not a moral value.  Freedom must freely limit itself if it is to become a moral value.  Limitation is inherent in living insofar as living is a perpetual choice of this (over the universe of other possibilities).  Such choices, of course, locate themselves within a variety of spectra, from the self-conciously deliberate to the automatic unconscious, but they remain choices of this (over the universe of other possibilities) and to borrow a phrase, "that makes all the difference."  We recognize the tyrannical, not in the limitation of freedom freely limiting itself, but in the prescription of choice, that which sets out in advance what may (and what may not) be chosen.  We might, for example, talk about the tyranny of circumstance, the existential fact that one is here and now (and not there and then) or perhaps even more fundamentally the existential fact that we are, such as we are, in the given conditions of our existence -- that we grow hungry, thirsty, weary -- that we are short, unattractive, shy -- all of which set out in advance limitations on how we can (and cannot) act.  Since I have touched on technology, and the sorts of techno-utopianism that pervade the literature, perhaps it bears mentioning that technology in the broadest sense is designed to free us from the tyranny of circumstance.  If we can talk about a progressive development of technology, the progression resides in our expanding freedom from prescribed limitation on our freedom to act.  Insofar as it is impossible to imagine a moral individual or a moral society without a broad freedom to act, the utopian strain in the techno-utopian thought resides in precisely this progressive expansion of the domain of freedom and the imagined vanishing point where the technology frees us wholly from the tyranny of circumstance and sets us wholly free to define ourselves self ethically and morally.  It is a vision of the perfectly equitable, the perfectly just society.  In the end, however, the deeper irony is this:  technology changes, but does not free us from the tyranny of circumstance.  Technology itself becomes part and parcel of the circumstance and exercises its own forms of tyranny, and it is perhaps not by accident that the protagonists of the techno-dystopian literature battle to free themselves from the circumstantial tyranny of technology.      

Yet here again, in and of itself, freedom is not a moral value, even in its heroic opposition to tyranny, in part because we intuit rather quickly that my freedom to act is one thing, your freedom to act is quite another, and in the presumptive state of nature that Hobbes described my freedom will ever be a threat to your freedom and your freedom ever a threat to my freedom.  It is also the presumptive state of nature that the various forms of social Darwinism have described, if not exactly red in tooth in claw, then certainly barbaric in the fight for ascendancy, the free exercise of prowess over others to limit or eliminate their being as a threat.   As Veblen put it, "in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests itself in two main directions -- force and fraud."  Though force and fraud are the virtues of Achilles and Ulysses, and we might find them both admirable types, perhaps even superior types worthy of our jealous emulation, but the free exercise of prowess over others, ascendancy, even superiority, portends nothing beyond itself.  Prowess is nothing more than prowess, and it is deeply erroneous to ascribe transcendent value to those who exercise prowess.   Prowess is not beyond, but before good nor evil, and the romantic turn of thought that would extol the Napoleanic escapades, that would posit a Nietzchean ubermensch, is deeply regressive and conservative, as Veblen's choice of barbarian would imply, of the primitive in our nature. We worship what we fear, and the Republican turn of thought that would reinstate the fully unfettered freedom of the free market is likewise regressive and conservative of a more Hobbesian, a more Darwinian state where the heroic struggle to survive produces the heroic type, where the free exercise of force and fraud results in the Achilles and Ulysses of the modern industrial and post-industrial economies, the CEO as a randy Nietzschian ubermensch, whose ascendancy would portend a transcendent value beyond the fact of and fear of those in a position to exercise their prowess over us, to demand deference and jealous emulation.

No, freedom is necessary, but insufficient to a moral life.  One must freely limit freedom, but the question that is always before us is just this -- "how so?"  There has been some discussion of late on the end of history, not as the end of chronology because presumably we go on accumulating events of interest, but rather as the arrival at a "process" once and for all.  For Francis Fukuyama and others, the "process" is liberal democratic deliberation on the order of the western democracies.  I wouldn't disagree with him too vehemently, though I would point out that western democracies are more fragile, less inevitable than he might believe. The history of mankind has been marked less by democratic deliberation, more by the exercise and institutionalization of prowess.  If one does not accept the simple proposition that might makes right, then the background question, "on whose authority?" comes to the foreground.  The answer to this question most in evidence is "on God's authority."  There are, globally, a variety of Gods to whom one can defer, but the pattern in evidence is largely the same, and it serves a two-fold purpose.  On the one hand, "on God's authority" does provide an authoritative answer, indeed the authoritative answer once and for all, to the "how so?" question.  Deference to the Koran, deference to the Bible, each provide more or less definitive limitations on one's individual freedom in the form of sacred law.  If there is to be a secular law, it is an elaboration on and the implementation of sacred law which ultimately takes precedence.  On the other hand, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question of luck or fortune.  It is probably not lost on most that both of the conservative candidates for president in this election cycle were winners of the so-called genetic lottery.  Insofar as they are the progeny of "self-made men," it is probably not lost on most that both of the "self-made men" happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and were in a position to benefit from their good luck.  One doesn't want to wholly discount their achievement.  Being in a position to benefit is not quite the same thing as benefiting, and there are heirs to good fortune that descend into lethargy and licentiousness, but nevertheless, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question, why Romney and not me?  If the winners in the struggle for ascendancy are not simply random result of sheer chance, if the winners in the genetic and circumstantial lottery are those elected of God in fulfillment of his plan, we have something resembling the divine right of Kings, the divine right of plutocrats to exercise broad authority over others.  It is perhaps not entirely by accident that the Republican party is also the party of "god's authority," insofar as God's inscrutable distribution of good and bad fortune justifies the sorts of tyranny all too familiar through human history.  In an oddly Nietzschian transvaluation of Christianity -- or perhaps more precisely a Randian transvaluation of Christian ethics -- Paul Ryan "is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand's worship of the successful and contempt for the 'moochers," as Paul Krugman put it.  The rich are rich because they deserve to be rich, the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and Mr. Ryan is "also quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor -- for their own good.  In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, 'We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls the able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.'"

Another answer to the question "on whose authority?" is, of course, "on the people's authority," and it is this authority, not God's authority, to which the framers of our own constitution deferred.  There are, however, any number of difficulties.  "On the people's authority" does provide something of an answer to the "how so?" question, but it is a maddeningly partial answer.  This "how so?" is, of course, both a process and results question. "On the people's authority" suggests rather clearly that some form of democratic deliberation is necessary, as process, if we are to freely decide how to limit freedom.  It was perhaps the peculiar genius of the framers to prohibit limitations on the freedom of the press and the freedom to worship as forums for deliberation, but deliberation in and of itself implies differences of opinion, and just how those differences are to be resolved is another matter, particularly insofar as some differences ultimately are irreconcilable.  The ballot and majority rule provides one answer, and it is perhaps the most expedient means available to resolve without resolving those irreconcilable differences, and enough has been said about the tyranny of the majority that I do not need to repeat it here, but it does lend itself to a moral vision informed more by Ecclesiastes, less by Leviticus -- more that is by a sense of moral and ethical churning than to definitive answers once and for all.  To everything turn, turn, turn, he majority today may be the minority of tomorrow, a particularly distressing state of affairs for those who have, or believe they have, attained a state of moral and ethical certainty.  Democratic deliberation, as process, does nothing to guarantee a particular result or even a particular type of result, and "on the people's authority" produces a result that is forever mutable, transient, contingent.  If democratic deliberation represents an "end to history," it clearly does not put an end to disputations and events, but it does represent an end to any real sense of progression.  It is social darwinism, but it is social darwinism divorced of any victorian sense of social progress or social optimism.            

As an aside here, there is a certain mindset that would ask, "why not social progress?"  As rational beings, it would seem that government could approached as we approach science and technology, and to do so would fuel an optimistic social progress -- just as our cell phones become better and better, our government could become better and better -- and one doesn't doubt that thoughts around the great society are fueled, as Hayek put it, by "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and engineer."  One could say the same of those habits of though engendered by the preoccupation with business problems as well as military problems, insofar as both business and military challenges are often allied with technology, and both are dedicated to the solution of a hedgehog problem -- making the institutional machinery work more effectively, more efficiently, and ultimately for the businessman more profitably and the military man more victoriously.  That was the mindset most disturbing to Hayek, who went on to remark that it "tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are inappropriate."   For Hayek, of course, the sphere to which the mindset of the natural scientist and the engineer were least appropriate was the marketplace and the sorts of government action that would control the marketplace, and here one must give Hayek credit.  If the history of the 20th century is a history of anything, it is the history of imposed ideals of organization, wholly rational and ultimately wholly ineffectual, for some of the reasons that Hayek enumerated, but for the reason suggested famously by Isaiah Berlin, that dedication to the solution of a hedgehog problem, one which presupposes a governing intentionality, one that posits a proper end for mankind.   The theocentric presupposes a kingdom of heaven on earth, and in the meantime, as John Winthrop put, "we have entered into a covenant with Him for his work" to effectuate that "city on a hill."  The communist presupposes, if not a kingdom of heaven on earth, nevertheless a wholly rational state predicated on the wholly equitable distribution of goods and serves, and if we have not entered into a covenant with god, we are nevertheless engaged within the inevitable march of history to effectuate the wholly communal state.  In either case, as both Hayek and Berlin have suggested, dedication to the solution of the hedgehog problem, achieving the proper end for mankind, has engendered the greatest atrocities of history.

As a secondary aside, it is one thing to posit a personal governing intentionality, another to posit an institutional governing intentionality, and yet another to posit a universal governing intentionality for humanity proper.  One can set out a purpose for an individual life, and indeed the framer's first amendment protection of the right to worship as one sees fit gives broad latitude for the individual to frame and pursue an individual end, an individual "happiness."  Within the American character at least, there is a strong sense of both entitlement and obligation to frame one's own proper ends, even to the point of ascetic withdrawal from the social life of the times.  Thoreau and the Unabomber were not distinct in their rejection of the social life of the times -- to include the technical, business, and military mindsets of the time.  The fundamental difference was, of course, that the latter extended his personal pursuit of happiness into that which out to be the governing intentionality for humanity, the ontological 'this is my happiness' for the deontological 'this ought to be everyone's happiness,' and was willing to use violence to effectuate the extension of the personal to the universal.   While I would not want to completely discredit the individual intentionality -- the individual will to ends if not absolutely unique to the individual, then sufficiently nuanced in its differences to count as unique --  I do want to discredit the notion of a universal governing intentionality.  Here I want to make the analogy to language, more or less along the line of Wittgenstein, that a wholly private language might be possible, but it would not be comprehensible to others.  Thoreau and the Unabomber each might have a unique perspective on life and how it should be lived, but to make their interiority, as it were, comprehensible, to make it recognizable to others for what it is, they had to express that interiority within the established social conventions of English grammar and that, of course, implies some sort of socialization within the conventions of English grammar.  It is possible, as a thought experiment, to imagine Thoreau and the Unabomber sharing a "private language" and debating the efficacy of violence within that private language (as, say, two children raised in complete social isolation might develop a "private" language between them) but the point is simply this -- the interiority of a wholly personal and private governing intentionality must find its expression in social conventions if it is to be recognizable and comprehensible to others.  To use Wittgenstein's term, it must find expression within a form of life.  To be wholly comprehensible, one must act within the normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations, and therein lies the rub.  The normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations are always, to one degree or another, arbitrary and limiting.  One might speak English, one might speak Chinese, and one might even translate more or less successfully between the two, but one cannot speak both at once without lapsing into incomprehensible gibberish.  One must choose.

I am suggesting that the framer's particular genius lay in two things.  The first being a willful refusal to name one proper end for mankind, as evidenced for the most part by the willful refusal to name a state religion and the subsequent prohibition against the same.  The second being an 18th century faith, not in the individual, but in the collective rationality of mankind.  As a third and final aside, Rawl's condition of ignorance ...



                                      

Out of time ... more later ...               

  

distributional effects

In my previous post, I rather disparagingly wrote that "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."  I say disparagingly because clearly implied in the statement is the idea that most Americans would not understand even if the issue was engaged broadly.  A recent example played briefly on the news.  It was reported that the Tax Policy Center had just published a report that examined the Romney tax proposals and found that they favored those in the upper income brackets, and actually increased taxes for those in the middle and lower brackets.  The paper itself, entitled "The Distributional Effects of Base-Broadening Income Tax Reform," is quite technical, as one might imagine, it draws the following conclusion:  "This paper examines the tradeoffs among three competing goals that are inherent in a revenue- neutral income tax reform—maintaining tax revenues, ensuring a progressive tax system, and lowering marginal tax rates—drawing on the example of the tax policies advanced in presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Our major conclusion is that any revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower- income taxpayers."  


I will let those that are interested read the actual report (it can be found at www.taxpolicycenter.org) but I strongly suspect that those reporting on the report didn't actually read it.  Even had they read it, one suspects, they would not have been fully competent to examine with any sense of confidence the technical details of the report, and though I have read the report through, I have to say with some humility that I am not prepared to argue against the way in which the authors of the report -- Brown, Gale and Looney -- came to their major conclusion.  I do, however, understand the conclusion itself clearly enough, and one would suspect that it is bad news for Mr. Romney.  It plays rather directly into the principle stand of the Democrats -- that the Republicans, and American economic conservatism generally tend to play into the hands of the rich at the expense of those in the middle and lower ends of the income distribution.  Rather predictably the news media noted the report, noted that it played into Mr. Obama's hand, and out of fairness solicited comment from the Republicans.  Again, rather predictably, the Republicans questioned, not the report itself, but the bias of its authors and of the Tax Policy Center.  Within the Aristotelian schema, when confronted with a disconfirming and discomforting argument, one can attack the argument itself, its inherent consistency and accuracy, or one can attack the credibility of those advancing the argument.  By any measure, the latter is the easier course, and the road most traveled, but it really does nothing to advance "government by discussion," and it certainly won't lead to pragmatic solutions to on-going problems.  It does a good deal to deepen the predisposition divide.  Those predisposed to support Mr. Obama will credit the report, those predisposed to support Mitt Romney will chalk it up as another example of liberal bias, and we are no further down the road to a tax policy that makes sense for the problems confronting the American people today.  


Lest I be misinterpreted, and I am often misinterpreted, I am not advancing the sort of argument that would turn government over to technocrats.  To assume that the problems facing the American people are simply or only technical is to engage in utopian thinking, and the difficulty with utopian thinking, with any utopian thinking, is to assume that the solution to this problem, this particular problem, is the solution to all problems.  The particular problem will always exist in a context that is, as I have been suggesting all along, political and ultimately moral.  The argument advanced by the Tax Policy Center above, for example, was really an intellectual exercise, a thought experiment of sorts, because why would we assume "revenue neutrality" as a desirable goal in tax policy.  One could have tax cuts across the board, and the resulting loss of revenue would be acceptable because, ultimately, the intent is to reduce the size and scope of government.  If we reduce medicare, eliminate medicaid, privatize social security, abolish the department of education, and so on, there will be plenty of money left to sustain the department of defense.  The efficacy of dismantling the federal government in favor of state or private interests is one thing, the desirability of doing so another, and both are political decisions.  The effects of doing so will not be felt equally by all.  Some will benefit more than others, and ultimately politics and the resulting government are all about the distributional effects of policy.     

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.