Modern Society Archives - Page 20 of 21

Looking Anew at the Progressives

If you want to make sense of the Presidential Election, then you should definitely pick up Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit.

The Progressive Movement has been much discussed by pundits and intellectuals in the last decade. Much discussed.

Suddenly the word “progressive” became chic in some circles. It became anathema in other circles

This was one of the interesting phenomena generated by the Obama Presidency. I have no idea who started the wave of articles about how the Obama Administration was in the Teddy Roosevelt/Woodrow Wilson vein, but there has been a ton of articles about that in the last decade.

The Roosevelt/Wilson line is the first interesting thing to note: do you notice who is missing in there?

Also, why are TR and Wilson lumped together? According to the recent literature, they were the starting place for Big Government, a government which moved beyond the bounds which it had known before.

Yet, are Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson actually the same? Not really, and therein lies the tale.

Was the Progressive Movement all bad? I am risking losing my Conservative credentials by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: The Progressive movement had costs and benefits. (Gosh that makes me sound like an economist.)

[It is well worth noting that if you are ever talking with someone who claims the Progressive Movement was all good, just slowly back away. The eugenics arguments much beloved by the Progressives are downright chilling.]

At its inception, the Progressive Movement was attacking many things which one would think Conservatives would also attack.

Take Upton Sinclair (please!). He was a socialist hack and The Jungle is a really lousy novel with overwrought conclusions and way too many maudlin tales of woe. But, I sure wouldn’t want to eat the meat coming from the meat packing plants described (accurately, it turns out) in that novel. Nobody would want to eat that meat. Getting some sanitary standards in the food industry is a good thing.

Before the 20^th century, it wasn’t necessary. You would get your meat locally. You knew the butcher and if he was a disgusting slob, he would be out of business. (Or, hard as it is for some people to believe, you just killed the cow yourself.)

But, with the coming of the railroads, suddenly meat is being packed on a mass scale, shipped long distances, and you no longer know your butcher.

So, it would be a public good if someone (read: the government) was making sure that when I walk into a grocery store and buy hamburger, it is cow flesh and not tainted rat flesh. Yes, I have heard the argument that we could do away with that now because a private firm could provide a seal of approval. But, in the early 20^th century? Who would have monitored the seals of approval?

Similarly, take Standard Oil. Monopolies are bad. That’s Economics 101. Rockefeller was building a monopoly. It’s hard to blame him for that; it is good to be a monopolist. But, who can stop a monopoly from forming? Again, it’s good if the government does such things. It improves economic efficiency.

I’m not sure why it is so hard for conservatives to explicitly acknowledge that the origins of the Progressive Movement are founded in correcting some very bad trends in the American economy which was undergoing a massive economic transformation.

(And, also, in the American political system. Does anyone want to bring back the days of the Political Bosses? Or remove Women’s Right to Vote?)

But, then, after taking care of the blatant problems, the Progressive Movement does go on and on and on and on. It is that later development, the move from legislation on which we would all agree to an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which is the problem.

So, who caused the transformation of the Progressive Movement from something we can all embrace to something which divides us? Why our dear friend Teddy Roosevelt!

At the start of his career, Roosevelt is the type of Progressive a modern conservative could embrace. He, and not incidentally his good friend William Howard Taft, are full of all sorts of ideas which would make this country a better place.

But, then a funny thing happens. Taft becomes President, and keeps right along with that nice set of really desirable polices.

Roosevelt, who needs to be center stage—he really, desperately needs to be center stage—has to come up with things that are even more radical than before. He has to become ever more Progressive in order to get the attention he craves. And the Progressive movement gets more radical.

Making the connection to the 2020 Democratic Primary is left as an exercise for the Reader.

It’s a fascinating tale when you step back and look at it. The motto: Beware of people who demand to be constantly in the limelight.

Making the connection to the 2020 Republican Primary is left as an exercise for the Reader.

By the way, William Howard Taft’s mother went to Mount Holyoke. So, I guess that makes the solution to our political woes obvious…

Time to Abolish Tenure?

If you are looking for a book which describes the modern college, Naomi Schaefer Riley’s The Faculty Lounge is a good choice.

The subtitle tells all: The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For.

There are two problems with that title:
1) It ends in a preposition—a grammatical failing which always causes me pain, and
2) it is terribly misleading.

The Book should really be called: The Faculty Lounge: Why Tenure Should Be Abolished. That title is honest, but wouldn’t sell as many books as the title the book actually has. Such is capitalism.

This book, predictably enough, is not well liked by academics. I decided to read it because I kept hearing people castigate it. I don’t think the people castigating it have read it.

On the whole, there isn’t really all that much shocking in it; it’s not a terribly polemical book at all.

It takes a long and critical look at the rise of adjuncts (visiting faculty) and the problems of the tenure system. I really have a hard time imagining anyone disagreeing with Riley’s assessment of the situation.

The debate is thus not whether there is a two-tiered system in the academy with a Select Few getting Lifetime Jobs and the Masses ending up in low-paid, low-prestige jobs with absolutely no job stability at best and a guarantee that the job won’t last more than 5 years as the norm.

The debate is what to do about it.

On the one side the well-meaning liberal academics think the solution is just to tenure more faculty. Such an answer shows a rather shocking ignorance about the cost of such a plan.

On the other side is Riley and people like her, who argue that Tenure should be abolished. After all, nobody else gets permanent jobs, so why should academics? Abolishing tenure, Riley argues, would free up the academy, making it more flexible and responsive to students.

(Not surprisingly, when you say to faculty that maybe tenure should be abolished, faculty get really agitated and make disparaging remarks about your book even if they haven’t read it.)

Am I persuaded? Nope. And neither, I suspect, are many other conservative academics.

You see, in the modern academy, tenure protects not just deadwood (the technical term for faculty who have retired on the job), but people with opinions which are really unpopular in academic circles. That would be people like me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I honestly don’t think I will get fired from Mount Holyoke because of my views. Indeed, I think Mount Holyoke as an Institution likes having me around. It’s like at the zoo when they have one of those prehistoric-looking birds and everyone can say, “Oh, look at the strange bird over there.” Having one religious conservative on campus is kinda cute. And it shows how committed to diversity Mount Holyoke really, truly is—they even have a member of the Religious Right in the Economics Department.

So, the reason that I would argue strongly in favor of keeping tenure at MHC is not that I am worried about losing my job.

It is the other side of the coin—if I was wrong about that and I did lose my job, finding another job would not be as easy as it should.

The problem is the way the academic job market works. Because schools cannot have a mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty, when schools go out to hire, they want to hire young faculty. If you don’t hire young faculty at every chance you get, then you run a real danger of having a very old faculty down the road. So, the market for professors over the age of, say, 45, is very, very thin.

This problem is what economists call a coordination failure. If every school abolished tenure simultaneously, then the market would free up and there would be a market for older professors. Perhaps a big one.

But, now we are living in Fantasyland. And that is where Riley missed the point—even if she is right that it would be better if there was no tenure, as a policy prescription it is DOA. How is anyone going to coordinate a massive simultaneous abolition of tenure?

Moreover, Riley spends too little time thinking about what that new world would be like. I have no idea how things would change in that new world, but it is not obvious that things will get better in any way that Riley or I would like.

The problem is that the academy, unlike most industries, has no real measure of productivity. So, in the new post-tenure world, schools may scramble to adopt productivity measures to decide when to keep faculty,

And it is quite possible that the productivity measures many schools will adopt will be counter-productive. Class sizes? Student teaching evaluations? Performance on standardized tests?

I am not at all persuaded that tenure is really the biggest problem facing the Academy these days. The bigger problem is the very real question: What exactly am I getting for $70,000 a year? To that question, schools have no good answer.

We need a new articulation of the benefits of a 4-year undergraduate education, but the Powers that Be have not yet developed a language to describe it, partly, I suspect, because they don’t really know the answer themselves. It’s a shame.

It’s not hard to articulate a reason why an expensive undergraduate education is the best thing you can do for yourself or your child, but I think many schools no longer believe in themselves, deep down they think they are frauds, so they buy off the students with nice dining halls and hope nobody notices. Tenure is irrelevant to that larger problem.

Indeed a school which could forcefully articulate why it exists and charges so much and then put together a curriculum to back up that claim would do very well, even with a bunch of tenured professors.

Madness or Mockery?

I have, for reasons unknown, a vivid memory of a media sensation from way back in 1991.

About a book. But, not a conventional book by a well-known author.

The book: Griffin & Sabine, by Nick Bantock.

What made this book unusual was that it is a Picture Book.

The story was of a correspondence between the two people in the title. Most of the correspondence is postcards, but there are a few letters.

The gimmick: The right hand page is the front of the postcard, and then you turn the page and the left hand side is the back of the postcard. Get it? Just like a postcard.

For the letters, the right hand side is the front of the envelope and then when you turn the page…try to contain your excitement here…there is an envelope—a real envelope, which you open and inside there is a letter.

As I said, I have vivid memories of the rapturous of joy with which this book was greeted I remember seeing it in a bookstore, picking it up and realizing—wow! There sure aren’t a lot of words for a book selling for $17.95. Sure, lots of pictures, but we aren’t talking Raphael here.

I have vague memories of there being a sequel. Very vague. I haven’t thought about this book for probably two decades.

Then, one day I was at the local library book sale, when what to my wondering eyes did appear? A boxed set of the Griffin & Sabine trilogy. Nostalgia City. The books were in mint condition. Insanely cheap price (I do love library book sales). Done.

Unless you have a story similar to that above, you may safely skip this trilogy. All gimmick.

Griffin is an artist in England. Sabine is a woman on some non-existent island in the South Pacific. Sabine can see what Griffin is painting while he is painting. Griffin is amazed. They try to meet and fail. Many postcards and letters later, what was pretty obvious at the end of volume 1 is obvious.

I’d call this a spoiler, but you won’t ever bother to read this book (or more properly, trilogy) so nothing is being spoiled. Griffin is insane. Sabine is purely a creation of his mind. He goes increasingly mad over the course of the books, and finally vanishes. So, the books are, in the end, a portrait of madness.

I can’t think of any particular reason this portrait of madness rises to the level of being even remotely interesting.

When I was done, I googled the book. Shock.

Much, and I mean much, to my surprise there are two other interpretations floating around the internet.

First, Sabine is real and this is a beautiful love story. You must be kidding me. Some people just can’t read.

Second, Sabine is a malicious demon who ends up possessing Griffin. Oddly, this is more plausible than the books being a love story. That being said, if that interpretation is correct, then these books are even less interesting than if it is merely a portrait of madness.

And, therein lies the real problem with Griffin & Sabine. Who cares which is the right explanation?

But, there is another way to look at Griffin & Sabine. It is a book with pictures and words. It is, in other words, a comic book.

It doesn’t look like a comic book, and it sure isn’t treated like a comic book, but it really is a comic book. And not a very good comic book.

However, if you were reading Griffin & Sabine in public and others saw you reading it, you could pass it off as literature and not be embarrassed at all.

But, if you were reading The Superior Foes of Spider-Man: Getting the Band Back Together in public and people saw you, what would they think?

People would have it exactly wrong. Griffin & Sabine is silly tripe. The Superior Foes of Spider-Man is funny.

You’d probably have to be an aficionado of comic books to get the jokes, but trust me, this is easily one of the funniest comic books out there. A set of two-bit minor villains team up; they think they can be great, but they are really obviously never going to amount to anything. This is a comic book which gets that comic books are supposed to be fun. It is something that knows how to make fun of geeks because it is itself really geeky.

Self-awareness is a rare thing in the modern age.

Even rarer is the ability to laugh at oneself. Why do people take themselves so seriously? Given the choice between the self-mocking world of The Superior Foes of Spider-Man and the madness of Griffin and Sabine, why is the latter the one that gets the accolades?

Conflicting Visions

A question prompted anew by Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy:

Imagine a municipality which levied taxes in order to pay for a state-supported brothel. Think of it like a public park. Also imagine that the workers in the brothel are conscripted. Think of it like the military draft.

Now imagine a society where 51% of the people think that such State Brothels are a good idea and 49% think they are morally repugnant. What should that society do?

I have discussed this question with students a number of times. Suffice it to say that my students all think the idea is terrible, but they have a hard time articulating a persuasive argument that it should be prohibited.

Sowell doesn’t discuss the brothel question, obviously. No self-respecting scholar would ever raise such a topic for serious consideration.

Sowell has a very different agenda. Sowell’s book is an exercise in skewering the zeitgeist, the attitude of the modern American Left to see the world as if they are the Anointed Ones and They know the Truth unlike those Benighted Folks who disagree with them. Sowell spends page after page taking apart the idea that the view of the Anointed is obviously right.

Sowell thinks the opposite to the View of the Anointed, what he call the Tragic View, is better. He argues those with the Tragic View at least are willing to try to understand the Views of the Anointed, but the reverse is not true.

Sowell manifestly has little patience for the Anointed. Similarly, if you were part of the Anointed, this book would seriously irritate you.

At one point in the midst of reading the book, I got to wondering to whom this book was written. It would have a nice appeal to people who agree with Sowell and just want the reassurance that someone who knows a lot of stuff agrees with them.

Then I realized that Sowell’s real audience is people who have not yet formed a world view. He wants to save everyone from joining the Dark Side.

And that led to the question which started this rumination. What does a society do if there are two diametrically opposed world views? How do you achieve compromise on things which the two sides view as moral absolutes.

You value Freedom. I value Moral Restrictions. How do we compromise? Either prostitution is allowed or it is not. Either infanticide is allowed or it is not.

The side which does not have its preferences enshrined into Law will think the social order is unjust.

But, does anybody really think we should just put laws against murder up for a vote and say “Majority Rules”?

The Vision of the Anointed is thus a mixed bag. It is full of great examples and studies and arguments. It is in some ways a Handbook on Social Science Research which can be Used by Conservatives in a Debate. (Hard to believe the publisher didn’t think that would make a good title for the book. But it is an accurate title.)

On the other hand, it is a frustrating book for settling the larger issue of why someone should choose Sowell’s Vision or the Vision of the Anointed.

It isn’t clear how to address that question though. Do you pick your underlying vision of society on the basis of social science research?

At some point, we have to acknowledge that a society can only function as a society if there is a shared moral-cultural order underlying it.

What do you do when that shared set of beliefs disintegrates? We are in the process of finding out.

The College Carnival

Whenever a school year winds down, nostalgia creeps in.  There is a sameness to the rhythm of college.

While the individuals change, the nature of the average student doesn’t change much.

Indeed, it hasn’t changed much since at least 1920.  That was the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise.

This novel is one of those inter-war expressions of the hopelessness of the modern age. And after a century of unbelievable change, I was shocked at how much Amory Blaine would fit right in at a college like Mount Holyoke.

Nearly a century after Fitzgerald’s book was published, college students are still chasing after the same things with the same hopes and fears and the same ennui nagging at the fringes of consciousness.

Amory ends the novel with the declaration: “I know myself, but that is all.” In that phrase is captured all of the angst and problems of the 21^st century undergraduate college.

Amory, of course, does not understand himself at all. He just thinks he does. But he does know that he knows nothing beyond himself, nothing greater than himself. His whole life is reduced to the Self:

“I am selfish,” he thought.
“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’
“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend — all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”

That is, of course exactly what the modern college teaches students. Live for the Greater Good because then you will fully express yourself. Study hard because then you will be able to do great things and feel self-fulfillment.

What about all those classes and things those professors make you learn? Knowledge is dead. As Eliot put it in 1934:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

What does the modern college student learn? We talk about teaching “critical thinking” and “life skills,” but never wisdom.

So, what is the modern college? It’s just like the frenzy of social activity described by Fitzgerald in a subchapter entitled “Carnival.” It’s also just like the Carnival (“Karn Evil 9, First Impression, Pt. 2”) Emerson, Lake and Palmer described in 1973.

It doesn’t have to be like that, of course. But, the fact that the college Fitzgerald describes and the college my students attend are more alike than it is comfortable to admit, must give one reason to pause in hoping for a dramatic change in the culture of higher education.

Yesterday’s Fad

When it was all the rage back in 2014, I was asked and asked and asked and asked again what I thought about Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. After a few months of the incessant question, I read it.

All the way through.

Every single word.

I also read more reviews of it than I think I have ever read about a contemporary book. The reviews had an interesting pattern.

The first wave of reviewers were the enthusiasts and the haters. Neither set had read the book (more about that anon).

Then along came the economists. They read the book and starting doing what economists do best; they take it apart into tiny little pieces and hold up each piece to see if it is a good piece. No book ever survives that kind of scrutiny. Capital did not survive that kind of scrutiny. There are many reviews like that out there now—my favorite was Larry Summers’ review because Summers liked the book and took it apart anyway.

My first temptation after reading the book was to join the chorus. Lots of details in the book annoyed me; some things really annoyed me; some things I thought were interesting; some are really interesting.

But, the sort of technical review is just treating this work like it was a technical bit of economics. But, technical bits of economics don’t make bestseller lists and, more importantly, nobody ever asks me what I think about them.

So, how good is Capital? Not as a technical paper in economics, but as a book. I never saw it reviewed on that criterion. Is this book any good?

Sadly, the book as a book is terrible. I have seen it praised for being readable, but the comparison set being used is articles written by economists.

So, let’s state up front: this book is much easier to read than an article selected at random from The American Economic Review. Normal people (i.e., not economists) could, theoretically, read Capital. But, compare this book to books normal people read and there is no doubt: it is an awful book. Unreadable. It is a slog, a real slog and the punchline is already known.

You don’t have to take my word for it, by the way. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article after the book came out in which they used data from Kindle to estimate how far people got when reading books. Clever idea. Kindle records when people highlight passages. So, you can look where people stop highlighting. Best-selling novels: people are still highlighting close to the end. Nonfiction: people don’t get as far. Capital? The lowest of the books they looked at: 3% of the book.

That seems about right—I suspect few people have read past page 25. If someone made it to page 100, they must be determined. If they read the whole thing, they are almost certainly an academic economist who is thinking about the technical economics and is determined to get through the whole book and has too much time on their hands.

Most economists don’t read regular books, so most economists may not know this, but anyone who says this book is really readable and good needs to read more non-economics books.

Let me repeat—this is not an assessment of the economics in Capital; it is an assessment of the book as a book. In other words, I would have liked this book vastly more if Piketty had just taken the interesting data and put it all in a 100 page article in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. But, then, if he had done that, he wouldn’t be a star, so you have to admire his choice at that level.

How bad is the book? Well, let’s take the much discussed fact that Piketty uses literary references in his work.

The fact that it is shocking that Piketty mentions literature shows how low economists have sunk in being generally readable. Look! An economist who has read a novel! Serious Carnival Freak Show material here!

But here is the dirty little secret nobody mentions when saying how exciting it is that Piketty mentions literature. From the evidence of this book, one can safely conclude that he has read exactly one novel (Pere Goriot) and some summaries of a couple of Jane Austen novels.

Now, I am sure Piketty has read more novels than that. But, for all the discussion about the literature in this book, it is surprising how few literary references there are.

And even what literature is actually mentioned was incredibly poorly used.

The endlessly repeated literary reference: there is a character in Pere Goriot who tell another character that it is better to marry a rich woman than to try to work your way up through the professions.

Piketty uses this quote to show that in the Old Days, the only way to wealth was to marry rich, that working people could never get rich, and so they all would be better off just marrying rich.

This, Piketty argues, is Bad, really Bad. And, Piketty says, those Olden Times are Back. Piketty doesn’t like that fact. So he quotes that passage from Balzac. A lot.

But, here is the thing: that character in Balzac’s novel is wrong. Even if we grant that marrying a wealthy woman will make you richer than, say, going to law school ever could, that doesn’t mean you should skip law school. Because, you see, there are a limited supply of available wealthy women. Sorry to break this to you, but not everyone can marry a wealthy woman.

If your main goal in life is to become wealthy and you have the chance to marry a multi-billionaire, then don’t hesitate. No matter what era, no matter what else is going on in the economy, don’t hesitate.

But, again, sorry to break this to you, but not only are there few multi-billionaires available for marriage, the ones that exist do not want to marry you. So, you might want to go ahead and work after all.

Piketty doesn’t seem to have enough literary sense to realize that just because a character in a novel says something, that doesn’t make it true.

A similar sort of thing happens with his economics. There is a great deal of bluster in this book. Bluster is not the sort of thing which is normal in economics articles, but this book is full of bluster.

Piketty knows the answer, and thus he sees evidence for his conclusions everywhere, even when it isn’t there. Again, at one level this is the sort of technical stuff the economists are picking apart. But, as a book, it makes the argument shockingly weak.

Anyone who actually read this thing with a critical eye would notice holes in the argument everywhere—there is way too much of the “As we all know” sort of thing going on.

As we all know, inherited wealth is immoral, but wealth you earn by working is moral. You knew that, right? Because, that is the sort of thing that is underlying the entire tone of this book. And Piketty never pauses to even notice that simply because Piketty thinks wealth acquired by writing long economics books is moral and wealth inherited from your parents is immoral doesn’t in fact mean that this is true.

Unless, of course, Piketty is God and gets to set the moral standards for the rest of the universe. What if, crazy thought, there is nothing inherently immoral about inherited wealth. Then is there still a problem here? That is the sort of question which Piketty doesn’t manage to address in 577 pages of text.

Anyway, I could go on and on and on. I have lots of marginalia in this book. But, as I said, watching economists be economists is a bit dull for the rest of the world.

So, instead I’ll say this. If you haven’t read Capital, you are safe to skip it.