Ideology and the Left Blogosphere (19 Jan 2011)

This post by Freddie deBoer about the rightward drift of ostensibly left-wing bloggers names names and has generated a lot of responses. DeBoer writes that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere, both intentionally and not, while those writing within it congratulate themselves for having answered all left-wing criticism." That's not to say you can't find socialists and the like blogging here and there; it's just that the conversation-defining pundits online don't read them or respond to them. Instead there is a Potemkin left wing made up of moderates. "The nominal left of the blogosphere is almost exclusively neoliberal," deBoer argues. It subscribes to "the general paternalistic neoliberal policy platform, where labor rights are undercut everywhere for the creation of economic growth (that 21st century deity), and then, if things go to plan, wealth is redistributed from the top to those whose earnings and quality of life have been devastated by the attack on labor." Some of the prominent moderates may have begun further left, but career incentives have driven them to the neoliberal line, which secures "professional entitlement" in punditry circles.

The gist of his critique is that unless you are willing to assent to the broad tenets of neoliberalism (antiunion, anti-regulation, pro-neoclassical economic interpretations, etc.) you are not regarded as an "adult" in American political discourse. "The neoliberal economic platform is enforced by the attitude that anyone embracing a left-wing critique of that platform is a Stalinist or a misbehaving adolescent," he writes. And sure enough, deBoer himself had his maturity questioned. DeBoer cites a few examples in his postscript, and today at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen, after referring to deBoer target Matt Yglesias by his first name only (an annoying trait of the consensus-sphere; as if we are all chums and should all automatically know who is being referring to) writes somewhat condescendingly:

Freddie deBoer seems to be very smart. I had never heard of him before, which I suppose means he is not extremely famous as a blogger. So let's see how he evolves when it comes to his critique that "labor rights are undercut everywhere for the creation of economic growth" in an ongoing debate with some people who know more about it than he does. he shows a much better rhetorical skill than he does an understanding of labor economics.

Whether or not you agree with that marketplace-of-ideas approach to credibility, it's worth considering whether it's appropriate to dismiss rhetorical skill so quickly. Part of what deBoer claims is that left-wing argument is dismissed out of hand as mere rhetoric as opposed to the more "pragmatic" arguments of neoliberals. Left-wingers spout ideology while neoliberals have "real" policy discussions. But "real policy" is constrained by the rhetorical climate that is allowed to prosper; empiricism doesn't occur in a ideological vacuum. Instead ideology dictates to some degree the terms of the "ongoing debate" Cowen mentions, and deBoer is pointing out how restrictive that ideology has been. Mike Konczal puts this well in his response:

deBoer thinks that policy wonks create solutions within the context of a neoliberal capitalism, solutions that reify the naturalness of the current economic order, and that ignore the real problems. These solutions broadly fight for scraps that are left over from what the elites divide up, and don’t address more fundamental problems existing within our economic order.

To overcome that "reified naturalness" requires explicitly ideological effort of the sort that conservatives have never been embarrassed to engage in, at various levels of Straussian deception and bad faith. Ideological vigor (preferably of the good faith, nondeceptive variety) is not the only thing the left needs, but it needs it to some degree, and that means allowing views further to the Left than Gerald Ford into the "adult" conversation.

It's interesting to compare that Cowen passage with one from a recent post by Steve Waldman, whose has been arguing against complacent technocracy for several months now.

The empirical evidence is clear. Ideology is malleable, over years and decades rather than generations and centuries. If you have to choose one — smart policy and indifference to ideology or sloppy policy and careful ideological work — you are better off choosing the latter.

Waldman makes the claim that ideology is "path-dependent" -- that is, what's currently hegemonic affects the scope of what can become ideologically persuasive in the future. After some game-theoretical analysis he concludes that the side that focuses on "rhetorical skill" will be able to shape the "ecosystem of constraints" that dictates future policy more than the side that regards ideological work as unnecessary or somehow disreputable. In a fitting piece of rhetorical jujitsu, Waldman accuses the tepid moderates and technocrats of immaturity:

It is childish, and wrong, to imagine that acknowledging the ideological aspects of one's work and self makes one less trustworthy or more dangerous than those whose work is equally ideological, but who mistake their ideology for objectivity or truth and who therefore deny any role for ideology. Many of history’s most dangerous ideologues have been “true believers”, and others have pretended a “scientific” perspective while advancing claims we now recognize as ideological. Being acted upon by, and acting upon, prevailing ideology are part of what it means to be human. It is not just the province of economists or policymakers, or a fabrication of Svengalis in the propaganda ministry. Nevertheless, politicians and economists and other “opinion leaders” probably do have disproportionate influence over ideological change. As far as I’m concerned, they (we) ought to be doing a better, more careful, and more conscious, job of it.

Doing policy or doing ideological propaganda is not an either-or proposition. To be effective, one arguably must do both, with as much rhetorical skill as possible. But the existing crypto-left instead seems to sacrifice ideology to get along career-wise in the neoliberal media world as it already stands, rather than take advantage of the internet's potential to build an alternative forum to subvert it.

Merit pay for teachers (7 June 2010)

Matt Yglesias is confused at why merit-based compensation schemes for teachers are seen as "teacher bashing".

That said, nobody I know who advocates for paying teachers based on demonstrated efficacy rather than simply based on experience is interesting in “bashing” teachers. If anything, it’s the reverse and union opponents of these proposals tend to traffic in arguments that are ultimately contrary to the interests of the profession. After all, the whole point of what reformers are saying is that teacher quality is very important to educational outcomes and the long-term trajectory of students’ lives.

Paying teachers more in general seems like a fine idea. But merit pay "bashes teachers" by crowding out the sort of incentives required for effective teaching (selfless devotion, thankless dedication, a willingness to be the human face of an institution that many people see as not good enough for their precious offspring, etc.) with the financial incentive. My experience with teaching was that no amount of money would make it worthwhile, absent those other humanistic incentives. But merit pay sends the message that teachers should be motivated by money, not by some nebulous conjunction of good will and meeting students needs and so on.

The point of merit pay seems to be to improve the "productivity" of teachers, even though that sort of metric makes no sense for something so elusively qualitative. Students aren't parts that teachers assemble on the line. Education doesn't manufacture skills-enriched people; if anything, the "product" of education is a relationship between the student and teacher, which is extremely contingent on context and can have any number of difference valences. (I didn't learn much about how to write or think from my AP English class, but I did come away with very valuable lessons in how not to be pretentious by using the teacher as a negative example.)

So "demonstrated efficacy" with regard to these relationships is a very hard thing to pin down. Is it a matter of students' performance on standardized tests? Then you are asking teachers to surrender their idiosyncratic praxis and autonomy over their methods and materials for cash -- you are asking them to sell themselves out, for a test that functions more or less to limit what kids learn rather than open them up to the process of learning, of becoming engaged, curious about the world, capable of finding ways in which they can make a difference. Is it a matter of student evaluations? Then you are undermining the teachers' authority in the classroom, making them servants to student's whims -- essentially entertainers rather than educators. And you are putting teachers in a position where they have (a degrading) incentive to shop for the most tractable and capable students, and only the worst (or most impossibly idealistic) teachers will consent to teach the most difficult-to-reach students.

Merit pay reminds me of how Gawker pays its writers by how much traffic their posts draw -- which has the effect not of improving their writing but of driving the level of discourse down to what is popular and easy. Here's how Maureen Tkacik summed up her experience at Gawker:

Organizationally, Gawker could not have been a purer embodiment of nothing-based dystopia at work in the media. For most of my time there, bloggers earned bonuses that were tied to the page views their posts received, so the leisurely three minutes required to download a haggard image of Amy Winehouse from a celebrity photo agency and post it with a five-word caption was rewarded as generously as the frenzied hour and a half spent compiling the daily roundup of celebrity gossip, and at least twice as generously as anything I actually wanted to spend an hour and a half writing about. Beyond that, awarding page-view bonuses clearly encouraged bloggers to fight over tips and news items that fell into the realm of “obvious traffic getters,” and discouraged us from collaborating in any effort more substantial than the odd round of company-subsidized drinks.

Merit pay does something similarly demoralizing and trivializing to the teaching corps. The satisfaction of teaching is not about outcomes; it's about the process. Compensation schemes are ultimately about getting teachers to surrender autonomy for money.

Power Elite Redux (22 Feb 2010)

I tend to complain about meritocratic myths on this blog because it strikes me as a smokescreen for the perpetuation of preexisting social relations. The pretense is that capitalism provides a level playing field, when in fact it serves to provide conditions for capitalists to continue to accumulate capital at the expense of workers -- middle class people who haven't seen wages increase in several generations, for instance. Meritocracy myths tend to attribute merit to individuals after the fact based on social standing, but encourages us to see that merit as a causal agent retroactively. Similarly, merit tends to get redefined based on the context; it becomes whatever it needs to explain the status quo as a fair arrangement. And the institutions of power transmission and conservation -- elite universities -- like to cloak themselves in quasi-meritocratic procedures, like their nontransparent admission processes, to justify their esteem in a putatively democratic society. Perhaps the most pernicious assumption in meritocracy is that individuals' merit requires no social support, as though individuals can fulfill their potential entirely on their own, with no support or collaboration whatsoever. (This is the quintessential problem with Randian dogma.) Whatever "human capital" one might have in terms of innate talent is bound to be squandered without an adequate portion of "social capital" to activate it, make it actually efficacious in society. You can't be meritorious in a vacuum. In practice, merit is a product of organizations or, if you prefer, it emerges from networks, the members of which can then assume personal credit for its achievements. America is full of myths of the individual succeeding through raw effort and ability, but real success stories always hinge on having the right sort of access to money and support and publicity at the critical moments. Success stories are generally about knowing how to network; we do a disservice to children if we teach them otherwise, if we lead to them to believe that ability can be abstracted from association.

Anyway, this is all preference to calling attention to David Brooks's critique of meritocracy from a very different angle. He seems to be arguing that meritocracy is confusing to the plebes and peasants because they don't know who they are supposed to be deferential to anymore, and it makes them trust institutions less when the same white men who have always run them aren't always in charge anymore.

Here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

That there should be elites is never to be questioned, naturally. The problem is that the "new" elites lack what Brooks calls "empathy," but would better be described as comfortable familiarity with the entitlement of domination, so that they can make it palatable to those dominated. He rolls out this defense of noblesse oblige: "If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking." Now though, those selected for their merit -- for having more talent than social capital -- have to prove their worthiness by short-term results, lest the blue bloods kick them out of the seats of power. Another problem is "transparency," which has revealed the unpleasant mechanisms of domination in the power struggles among elites. Better to have a uniform group of elites who rule as a class, an aristocracy, rather than this unseemly fight for power.

Brooks is not necessarily wrong about all this; if elite hegemony was more uniform, there would less discontent and more resignation, apathy and acceptance of the "natural order" of social hierarchy. If you rule out social mobility altogether, of course society is more stable. If in nearly all cases, birth assigns you to your station in life, there is little space for disruption. But hereditary class has proven an untenable principle for social organization, and incompatible with the requirements of capitalist ideology. Social mobility justifies its exploitative practices.

Brooks ends by shrugging his shoulders and disavowing the conclusion he has been building toward in the column: "This is not to say that we should return to the days of the WASP ascendancy. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, our system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems, which are more evident with each passing day."

Chris Lehmann at the Awl is understandably unhappy about this column. Correcting Brooks's abuses of Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Lehmann makes the useful point that today's power elite may not look uniformly WASPy but is nevertheless homogeneous in that they derive power from controlling key institutions in the modern corporate-capitalist state. "Hence the overlapping directorates of the military, the corporations, and the government served, in Mills’ view, as the most critical forcing beds of plutocratic interest. Mills’ power elite got its marching orders from the impersonal mandates of the government contract or corporate board—not via the exchange of sly winks and elbow nudges at the Harvard Club." Aristocracy, that is to say, has dissolved into pseudo-meritocratic institutions, which depersonalizes blue-blood connections. In practice, the capitalist state transforms social capital by depersonalizing it, making it seem more meritorious in the form of state power, direct corporate control, or plain old cold, hard cash.

As Meritocracy Fades, Social Networks Rise (18 Feb 2010)

A key to getting people to indiscriminately share online is to convince them that the "merit" of what they're sharing is irrelevant -- that they don't need a reason to share, that sharing is intrinsically rewarding. Many of the arguments in favor of using Twitter, for example, can be reduced to this, usually with the winking implication that sharing is also good self-marketing in partial disguise. If we worry about having something important to say, we will miss out on the chance to say something potentially valuable to someone else. Hence every moment we stay silent, we are destroying value! Sealed lips sink ships!

The ideology of meritocracy, I think, is incompatible with this ideology of sharing, which belongs to a vision of a "networked society." We are shifting away from the idea that we accomplish success through special personal merit (the much-hated elitist model), toward the idea that we achieve success through maximum publicity (the much lauded and enjoyed Jersey Shore model). Populism, the contempt for expertise, the championing of reality TV, the futility of "going Galt" -- they are all connected. But to explain why, it helps to debunk the meritocracy myth first. In this Forbes opinion piece, Reason Foundation analyst Shikha Dalmia uses Hayek to make a libertarian case against the idea of markets rewarding merit. This is unusual, as libertarian/Randian types tend to see market rewards as proof of virtuously selfish conduct, which makes most sane people think they are out of their minds. Dalmia's case hinges on the difference between merit -- a moral idea -- and value, an economic concept. Markets reveal value, not merit. And value, if you follow Hayek's argument in "The Use of Knowledge", is mainly generated by happening to have vital, local information at a fortuitous time -- not because you are a genius inventing brilliant information for market consumption. Dalmia:

The beauty of the market, Hayek brilliantly pointed out, is that it allows people to use knowledge of their particular circumstances to generate something valuable for others. And circumstances, he emphasized, are a matter of chance -- not of gift. Furthermore, since no two people's circumstances are ever identical, every producer potentially has something--some information, some skill or some resource--that no one else does, giving him a unique market edge. "[T]he shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others," noted Hayek.
In a functioning market, Hayek insisted, financial compensation depends not on someone's innate gifts or moral character. Nor even on the originality or technological brilliance of their products. Nor, for that matter, on the effort that goes into producing them. The sole and only issue is a product's value to others. Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip. The painter could become just as rich as the computer whiz so long as the savings from spills that the lid offers are as great as the productivity gains from the chip. It matters not a whit that the lid maker is a drunk, wife-beating, out-of-work painter who stumbled upon this idea through pure serendipity when he tripped over a can of paint. Or that the computer whiz is a morally stellar Ph.D. who spent years perfecting his chip.

Most people instinctively don't like this sort of definition of value, as Dalmia points out. It smacks of postmodernism, of contingency and relativism, of a whimsical world without justice. It makes a mockery of the idea of use value as a basis for economic value. There is only exchange value, which can seem to imply that in a market society, everything is negotiable, even what heretofore seemed like absolute truths.

Meritocracy is a ex post facto rationalization that helps mask this somewhat terrifying reality about capitalism -- it provides us a first line of psychological defense when we are in danger of recognizing that "all that is solid melts into air," as Marx memorably put it in his description of capitalism's relativizing force in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Of this, Dalmia insists, we need not be afraid. Shine sweet freedom, shine your light on me: "Markets don't just expand and democratize the concept of merit; they render it moot," Dalmia argues. "No longer does it matter what great qualities reside in you. What matters is if you can make them work for others. The concept of merit is replaced by that of value. Merit is intrinsic, concentrated and atomistic; value is relational, decentralized and social." In other words, market yourself well and you don't need any intrinsically worthy qualities, be they the aristocratic chimeras of breeding, the moral virtues sanctified in religion, or the cold, hard cash worshiped by capitalists. Instead you just need to share what information you have without necessarily understanding its value or believing that it has intrinsic merit, but overrating its importance all the while. Then society will return the "real" value of it to you, apparently.

And in that we have a pretty good explanation of the rise of social networks -- which have the magical property of making markets for information appear as nonmarket forums for sociality. Part of the rise of the "networked information economy," as Yochai Benkler calls it, involves using the word network as a screen for the word market so that the players in that market will rip themselves off and contribute labor and content for nothing.

What would happen, though, if networks actually supplanted markets -- if people stopped leveraging the unique contextual information they possess to game markets and instead shared it compulsively, without a view to undermining competitors but out of a quest for social recognition? Do we have to have markets providing an incentive to exploit information to make that information useful and efficacious, to translate it into "value"? Or could masses of volunteered information be sorted according to some other principle ("merit"?) in order to derive facts about the conditions of the economy at various times and places?

Meritocratic Alibis (13 Jan 2010)

Grooming for the habitus of command begins early, and most of the kids who go to the elite schools probably have no idea that they have been conditioned to presume their own significance, to assume authority as if by some instinct of entitlement, to never doubt the value of the contributions they have to make. The rest of us, we derive that attitude vicariously from various representations of celebrity and heroism, which serves to reinforce the idea that such presumption has no place in our everyday lives. What the privileged experience as entitlement, we experience as ambition, a fire that must be continually stoked and for which fuel can be scarce.

This Boston Globe op-ed by Neal Gabler about college admissions to the elite schools states it pretty baldly:

So here’s the bottom line for all those exceptional middle-class and lower-class high school seniors who will doubt their own worth when the near-inevitable rejection letters arrive: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in you. The fault lies in the system, and the system isn’t going to change, because it benefits the people it is designed to benefit - people who understand how much a real meritocracy would threaten their power.

Elite institutions exist to reproduce the elite class as it is presently constituted. Social mobility is held as close as possible to the point at which the elites and their prerogatives remain undisturbed but the nonelites still feel they have a chance to pursue their ambitions, if they are strong enough. But Gabler, I think, is wrong when he says that children are aware that meritocracy is a sham:

They know that America, for all its professions of meritocracy, is a virtual oligarchy where the graduates of the Ivies and the other best schools enjoy tremendous advantages in the job market. They know that Harvard or Stanford or MIT is a label in our “designer education’’ not unlike Chanel or Prada in clothes.

We are instead balancing a contradiction in our minds; the oligarchy and meritocracy coexist and we can selectively recognize evidence to support either, based on our mood and based on our situation. The ideal of meritocracy lingers on so that it can serve to always plant that doubt in the minds of the nonelites: "Perhaps the social structure is rigged for the benefit of elites, but you could have tried harder, you could have done more, as other aspirants before you were able to do." It's always there to help us redirect our discontent at ourselves. Arguably, the culture industries controlled by these elites tend to do what they can to reinforce the salience of meritocracy while casting suspicion on the idea of oligarchy. Gabler's op-ed is a respite from that, one of the reasons it seems sort of blunt.

The shock that in some quarters has greeted Roger Lowenstein's NYT essay about walking away from your mortgage when you owe more than the house is worth has to do with this as well -- we regular folk are meant to be abiding by a code of ethics and mutual responsibility that doesn't apply to elites and the institutions they run; after all this is what is supposed to make us "better than them" in the final judgment. It should make us feel that way, anyhow. "No power for you, but you're better off with dignified suffering anyway."

Class and classism and the meritocratic fantasy (19 Aug 2009)

Most people would not agree that it's okay to cross the street if you are spooked by the race of someone approaching. But fewer people, I suspect, would feel the same way if you cross because you think the person coming toward you is a lot poorer than you are. In that case, you can ascribe a socially sanctified line of reasoning to the situation -- rationally, that person has a pretty obvious reason to assault you for your money, thus it makes sense to try to avoid them, and if they feel bad about it, well, they should try harder not to be poor.

The idea is that classism is often tolerated where racism (and sexism and bigotry against gays and so on) is not, because prevailing neoliberalism makes it seem okay to ascribe "rational" incentives to other people and discriminate accordingly. After all cynicism about other people's motives is a positive common-sense virtue in a society ruled in all aspects by a free market. An ability to think in terms of costs and benefits and find the applicable way of applying such an analysis to any scenario is the mark of a mind thinking at its clearest. At the same time, when we discriminate along those lines and not along the old racist, sexist, etc. lines, we can congratulate ourselves for how far we have come, regard our existing social order as progressive, and assure ourselves that our own advantages are merited, and not the product necessarily of racism. Eschewing bigotry and promoting diversity strengthens our ideological faith in the meritocracy that hardly exists in reality, as Walter Benn Michaels argues in this LRB book review of a collection called Who Cares about the White Working Class?.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.

This is an argument spelled out in his book The Trouble With Diversity. In the LRB piece, he pushes the book's argument further, detecting a similar mechanism in the worries about classism manifest in Who Cares About the White Working Class?:

It’s thus a relevant fact about Who Cares about the White Working Class? that Ferdinand Mount, who once advised Thatcher, is twice cited and praised here for condemning the middle class’s bad behaviour in displaying its open contempt for ‘working-class cultures’. He represents an improvement over those who seek to blame the poor for their poverty and who regard the culture of poverty rather than the structure of capitalism as the problem. That is the view of what we might call right-wing neoliberalism and, from the standpoint of what we might call left-wing neoliberalism, it’s nothing but the expression of class prejudice. What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’. Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt.

Michaels wants the left to worry more about income inequality and fight for the eradication of the income differences that make for social classes. (I wonder what Will Wilkinson would make of that.)

Built into the idea of meritocracy -- an ideal often conflated with the American Dream -- is the corollary that the poor deserve contempt. It's easy to see how people could overrate their own hard work and its relevance to their own success (such as it is) and believe that hating poor people is a way of providing crucial tough love. We can jumble up the causal links and think that hating hte poor will help make the meritocratic dream more real. It serves as a way of voicing our belief in the meritocratic ideal.

The treadmill of ambition (20 April 2009)

A recent series of posts by sociologist Lane Kenworthy takes a sober look at the problem of income inequality and what policies might mitigate it. I'll summarize the gist here, but obviously they should be read in full. Often income inequality is dismissed as irrelevant by conservatives, who regard it as the just outcome resulting from varying levels of individual effort. (The econojargon for this is a reference to "skill-biased technical change." That basically means income distribution is biased toward those with socially necessary skills -- you know, like creating CDOs and issuing subprime debt.)

They argue also that we don't live in a zero-sum society -- if we are all prospering, no one should engage in "class warfare" and resent that others are prospering more. (Kenworthy presents a chart that gives the lie to this idea; it shows that those at the top had, as many have long suspected, in recent years begun to thrive at the expense of those in lower income brackets.) This is followed by the all-too-familiar argument that we shouldn't jeopardize the beneficial innovation that high earners supply the economy with by punitively taxing them. Without money and the ability to bequeath a legacy to motivate them, the best and brightest in our society would prefer to "go Galt" and refuse to make any social contributions at all. Because that is the "rational" thing to do, right? Neglect our talents because a just society owes us more than a place within which to express them? It owes us entitlement and privilege in return for our god-given ability?

If there's a problem at all with income inequality, conservatives argue, it would be if there weren't equal opportunity for aspirants. (But as the founding fathers assured us, we are all created equal, so that's not a problem either.) Often this seems like a bad faith argument, because the people making it often have the most to lose in any state-mandated redistribution of wealth; their investments in various methods -- financial, social, and cultural -- to preserve their privilege would be vitiated. And it seems silly because the inequality of opportunities is so glaringly obvious, something we live with intimately in every prejudicial reaction we have in day-to-day life. The rich are born with clear advantages that are then levered up by means of the cultural codes that are second nature to the entitled but confront outsiders as a series of dauntingly high hurdles if not an impenetrable maze. These codes are what Bourdieu is referring to in discussing social and cultural capital -- the often subtle ways in which we signal class origin and the methods by which classes almost instinctively seem to coordinate themselves to strengthen class barriers. The promise of equal opportunity that seems guaranteed constitutionally turns out in practice to be abrogated by these nebulous cultural considerations, which in themselves are small enough to evade legislative correction.

For example, the education system, typically regarded as a means to even out the "skill biases" among a population (an idea Kenworthy undermines here), can often in practice reinforce privilege. As Chris Dillow points out here (where he also links to papers supporting these points)

it’s quite plausible that education spending is actually for force for inequality, for four reasons:
1. Kids from richer families are more likely to stay on at school. This is because they get better schooling before the age of 16. Children of professional and managerial workers are almost four times as likely to get 5 or more GCSEs as those of unskilled manual workers are only
2. Education is partly a positional good. This means those with less of it than others might be worse off as a result.
3. Schools can act (inadvertently) as a means of legitimating inequality and hierarchy.
4. Although romantics like to think of schools as a means whereby some kids from poor backgrounds (like me) can escape poverty, they often serve the opposite function. They might be ways of crushing the aspirations and abilities of poorer students, especially if they are black.

Schools are where one is confronted with what society would like to prescribe for you, often regardless of the ability you demonstrate. To escape self-fulfilling prophecies that stem from institutional racism, for instance, proves to be a continual problem. Social institutions, in other words, are not erected to establish equality; they are built bureaucratically to preserve the status quo. The groups with the power to maintain social institutions tend to build their biases into them as unwritten rules and common-sense operating procedures. Dillow suggests that the state itself works along those lines: "all leftists should agree that the state doesn’t do as much as it should to reduce inequality. The question is: is this failing a bug, as big-state leftists believe, or - as I fear - a feature?"

As far as political solutions to income inequality, assuming the state is not inherently incapable of pursuing them, Kenworthy argues for a negative income tax (along the lines of the U.S.'s current earned-income-tax credit) and a concerted effort to improve state-provided services.

Imagine an America in which high-quality public services raise the consumption floor to a high level: most citizens can put their kids in high-quality child care followed by good public schooling and affordable access to a good college; they have access to good health care throughout life; they can get to or near work on clean and efficient public transportation or roads with limited congestion; they enjoy clean and safe neighborhoods, parks, roads, museums, libraries, and other public spaces; they have low-cost access to information, communication, and entertainment via reliable high-speed broadband; they have four weeks of paid vacation each year, an additional week or so of paid sickness leave, and a year of paid family leave to care for a child or other needy relative. Even if the degree of income inequality were no less than today and we still had CEOs, financiers, and entertainers raking in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, that society would be markedly less unequal than our current one.

That does sound like a better place to me. The problem that will remain, I think, has to do with ambition as a mode of personal fulfillment. If the state works to supply all those improvements to standards of living while at the same time preserving class boundaries, the Betas, Episilons, and Deltas of our Brave New World would have to find a way to nourish themselves on the culturally sustained illusion/imperative of social mobility and not become immiserated by it. As the alibi for inequality, ambition becomes a fundamental personality trait, an index to one's cultural fitness. But that same trait makes absolute living standards immaterial, since the rate of personal progress is the only metric that matters to the ambitious. Just as there is a hedonic treadmill, then, there may be an class-climbing treadmill; if you buy into Veblenesque arguments about consumption, signaling, and fashion cycles, then these treadmills are virtually one and the same.

The promise of social mobility would seem to be the engine of capitalism. It's what authorizes inequality in a democratic society. Yet that same promise renders inadequate the compensatory improvements in living standards meant to mitigate what we are always discovering and forgetting, that social mobility is ultimately just a necessary fiction. Because a healthy show of ambition is what seems to be required to find a secure place in capitalist society -- because stability in capitalism is the state of perpetual striving -- most of us will spend our lives striving for near imperceptible advantages that tend to dissipate under the most tentative of cursory analyses.

Is college a waste of money? (17 May 2007)

In their inimitable style, Becker and Posner, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of dry libertarian analysis, take on the question of the value of higher education, having earlier discussed the dubiousness of the U.S. News and World Report school rankings (schools can game the system in response to the more or less arbitrary way they are determined). Posner finds that college is mainly a way for businesses to offload the costs of screening potential applicants to the state and the potential employee.

Colleges and graduate (including professional) schools provide a screening and certifying function. Someone who graduates with good grades from a good college demonstrates intelligence more convincingly than if he simply tells a potential employer that he's smart; and he also demonstrates a degree of discipline and docility, valuable to employers, that a good performance on an IQ test would not demonstrate. (This is an important point; if all colleges did was separate the smart from the less smart, college would be an inefficient alternative to simple testing.) An apprentice system would be a substitute ... but employers naturally prefer to shift a portion of the cost of screening potential employees to colleges and universities. Because those institutions are supported by taxpayers and alumni as well as by students, employers do not bear the full cost of screening.

Because college performs this screening function regardless of whether what you learn has any relevance to anything -- the substance of education is meaningless since its function is primarily to signal how well you can follow directions and work the bureaucracy. So if Posner is right, fights over the canon of what gets taught is essentially an academic parlor game with little ramifications beyond whose ego is assuaged.

Posner also argues that college is privately useful but far from a collective good, as the ceaseless calls from politicians for more college graduates might lead you to believe.

I am skeptical that it should be a national priority, or perhaps any concern at all, to increase the number of people who attend or graduate from college. Presumably the college drop-outs, and the kids who don't go to college at all, do not expect further education to create benefits commensurate with the cost, including the foregone earnings from starting work earlier. This would be an entirely rational decision for someone who was not particularly intelligent and who did not anticipate network benefits from continued schooling because the students with whom he would associate would not form a valuable network of which he would be a part, either because he could not get into a good school, in the sense of one populated by highly promising students, or because if he did get into a good school the other students in the school would not consider him worth networking with.

He's perfectly to leave the "not particularly intelligent" to their rational choices -- one thing this line of argument illustrates is the difference between intelligence (a socially useful ability) and rationality (mental biofeedback). But it is also pretty harsh, indicative of the Brave New Worldish thinking that inevitably haunts meritocracy, a sense that there is a biological destiny behind one's place in society and it does little good -- is downright irrational -- to fight it by, say, trying to get an education.

The marginal students are unlikely to be kids who, with a little more education, would make the kind of contribution to society that a worker is unable to capture in his wage. Nor are these marginal students likely to be educated into an interest in political and societal matters that will make them more conscientious voters or otherwise better citizens.

These marginal types are society's Epsilons, and we shouldn't waste money trying to change that even if they don't have the good sense to accept it.

Income inequality and returns to ability (10 May 2007)

Economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy recently mounted a defense of income inequality on the grounds that it is a sign of increased returns to human capital -- in other words, better-educated and higher-skilled people made more, which is as it should be. Hence they view progressive taxation as being tantamount to a tax on ability.

For many, the solution to an increase in inequality is to make the tax structure more progressive—raise taxes on high-income households and reduce taxes on low-income households. While this may sound sensible, it is not. Would these same indi­viduals advocate a tax on going to college and a subsidy for dropping out of high school in response to the increased importance of education? We think not. Yet shifting the tax structure has exactly this effect.

This seems hardly an exact analogy. Those in favor of progressive taxation would likely favor redistributing some of that money so that others could afford to acquire the skills and education that created the gap in the first place.

But the underlying question of whether an egalitarian distribution of outcomes rather than opportunities is possible (and desirable) remains -- can these concepts be neatly separated, as is often the tendency? Becker and Murphy's argument relies on the idea that merit is on the whole rewarded and they have an impressive battery of graphs and statistics to support that case that I'm not remotely qualified to critique. The implication that we live in a merit-rewarding society seems to require many codicils and exceptions and hedges, most of which revolve around what constitutes merit (being born rich and connected -- this has obvious value and constitutes a kind of human capital; is it being lumped in with the human capital of education? If this kind of old-boys network facilitates productivity, should it be condemned or does it have merit, by that definition?)

So my mind turned to a more abstract question: Is inequality a matter of the return coming from relative differences in skills in a population, or is the return absolute to the skills themselves, no matter how widely they are distributed? If the former is the case, then this would ultimately impinge on equal opportunity, as those with advantages will in accordance with rationally seek to consolidate them rather than let others catch up. Those left behind initially will remain behind, because the meaning and value of the skills they acquire is always defined in relation to those ahead of them, who are presumably maintaining their skills lead.

This is especially the case with education, where the abilities acquired are less significant than the signaling value of the institutions involved. At the Economist's blog, Will Wilkinson, citing Bryan Caplan, makes the point

that university diplomas mostly function to signal prior competence, and that time and money spent in school is largely wasted. If [Caplan]'s right, Becker and Murphy's emphasis may be misguided, and I suspect Bryan may in fact be right, despite the fact that he's never won a Nobel or Clark prize and wears shorts in the winter. In which case it strikes me that there is a huge entrepreneurial opportunity for whomever can come up with an alternative scheme of credible human capital certification. Who cares if people develop their skills by attending classes at their local college, listening to free lectures from MIT, learning on the job, or by sitting in their mom's basement gaining mad hacking skilz? I don't. But employers do.

The point is, signaling communicates relative rather than absolute values -- the Harvard degree has more credibility than the State U. degree, and if we made it such that everyone could get a Harvard degree, some new elite institution would arise to take its place. Whereas the human capital that enhances productivity and quality of life relates not to the signals, which preserve class distinction, but to the actual skills -- the ability to build useful machines and develop useful medicines and so on. The question then becomes do we need the class system to motivate people to pursue the skills, and does coasting on the signaling power at one's disposal -- the habitus and social capital and networking connections -- inhibit the development of their actual capabilities such that they are incompetent when they wind up in power (a certain North American world leader comes to mind). All of this makes me wonder if an alternative human capital certification program is even possible given our current set of social relations -- the University of Phoenixes of the world don't seem in any danger of supplanting Princeton and Yale anytime soon, but the blogosphere may prove a viable arena for autodidacts to build their reputation. (Or destroy it.)

Credentialism and critical thought (3 May 2007)

In discussing Marilee Jones, the former dean of admissions at MIT who resigned after it was discovered that she had doctored her own résumé more than 25 years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich offers this cynical interpretation of college education:

My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white-collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end--whether in library carrels or office cubicles--does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned--although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

As Christopher Hayes notes in linking to the piece, this is "credentialism run amok."

Credentialism is when employers require things like college degrees (from preferred schools) for their own sake, not for any skills they guarantee. This prerequisite serves a filtering function to weed out superfluous people -- those who can't game the admissions system, or haven't been docile enough to be trained from an early age to prepare for it, or lack the money or the know-how to get it out of the existing aid systems -- and allows meritocracy to be undermined by the very act of trying to institutionalize it. Certainly, credentialism explains why so many college students pointedly lack the love of learning one might idealistically expect from those electing for more education; they just want the degree the system requires. To them, college is just an especially obscure bureaucratic apparatus. Learning is so insignificant to students that it doesn't even reach the point where it can be debased by being instrumentalized. (The need for diplomas for their own sake has opened up the lucrative business of online colleges, which streamline the process and strip it to its essentials, the fulfillment of the essential paper shuffling and the rather arbitrary requirements to spend so many hours exposed to so much standardized material. The rare spontaneous moment you'll encounter in classrooms is perfectly suppressed, making the credentialing process much more businesslike.) Instead college education functions like cultural taste; the things one claims to know, just like the things one claims to appreciate, are a bit beside the point of being able to plausibly and convincingly state to someone else that you know or appreciate them. The object of the learning or the appreciating disappears, becomes a mere algebraic variable in an equation computing one's social capital.

Because credentialism is so widespread, employers don't seem to expect anybody to know how to do anything; they merely expect new employees to attend orientation meetings and follow pre-established procedures. This makes an employee's willingness to defy established procedures and at the same time articulate why they needed to be defied -- a capability of thinking about the process while making sure it is carried out -- all the more valuable. Jumping through hoops gets you credentialed, but it won't get you promoted; ambition seems to be a matter of ignoring the procedures or testing them for cracks that you can slip through, since if the procedure was airtight, everyone who serviced it would be fixed in place; the whole system would be static. Anyway, this is to say aspirants are wise to learn how to think about processes rather than results and to consider how they can profitably do more than what they are told to do. I felt I could generally tell the best students by how far they were willing to go without explicit instructions, and I often was aware of the paradox of teaching "critical thinking" as I often pretended to do -- it basically means teaching disobedience, preparing students to ultimately recognize the limits of what you say. It was more important that they learn something other than what I would spend my time talking about and they would take down in their notebooks. If they only learned what I tried to teach, I would see that as a mark of our mutual failure. No wonder I had to quit teaching.

Ones and zeros (21 December 2006)

Continuing on the theme from the last two posts of class boundaries that prevent people from joining the conversation about what is culturally significant. One of the obvious changes in the shape of public sphere in the past decade is the Internet's permitting user-generated content to be widely and (virtually) freely distributed. Has that change -- opening media up to anyone's participation -- done anything to mitigate the feeling of systemic exclusion that Sennett and Cobb analyze in The Hidden Injuries of Class or has it simply broadened the playing field to make what Sennett and Cobb see as the zero-sum game of social recognition even more inescapable?

Their main contention is that the ideology of meritocracy creates a burden of responsibility in individuals for whatever class disadvantages they have inherited from birth. Individuals want to believe that they can merit success and climb the social hierarchy, but this belief also forces them to see their own current inferior position as deserved. The solution seems to lie in the freedom to live one's life independent of society, to uses one's talents to transcend social limitations and become autonomous, self-sufficient -- this, which is often a matter of Spartan self-sacrifice, becomes a source of personal dignity. However, this solution cuts one off from social recognition and undermines that dignity. No one respects you for your sacrifices; you can see they see your hand was forced. (This reflects Graeber's point in Harper's about working-class kids joining the Army for the same reasons upper-middle class kids go to Antioch College.)

The terrible thing about class in our society is that it sets up as a contest for dignity. If you are a working-class person, if you have to spend year after year being treated by people of a higher class as though there probably is little unusual or special about you to catch their attention, if you resent this treatment and yet feel also that it reflects something accurate about your own self-development, then to try to impugn the dignity of persons in a higher class becomes a real, it twisted, affirmation of your own claims for respect.... [Working-class people] too are individualists concerned with their right to be exempted personally from shaming and indignity. In turning people against each other, the class system of authority and judgment-making goes itself into hiding; the system is left unchallenged as people enthralled by the enigmas of its power battle one another for respect.

So is the limitless public space opening up on the Internet just broadening the war zone in this battle for respect? It seems that as the blogosphere has progressed, quasi-democratic social-network-driven forms of filtering have been battling with the more traditional forms, in which the cognoscenti nominate worthy material and consign the rest to anonymity. The class struggle plays out, according to Sennett and Cobb, in the feeling that you need put someone else in your class down to garner the respect you seek -- to stand out from the mass (gain respect) you have to highlight how dull those around you are as well as do something extraordinary.

But rather than competition, blog culture seems on its face to be about linking, of highlighting connections and promoting the interesting work of others in hopes that it won't be lost in the proliferating fog of cultural output. However, that egalitarian aspect is tempered by how the Internet makes audiences for your recommendations measurable; personal influence becomes more quantifiable than it has ever been, and the vague notion that your opinion matters can actually be assigned a pretty precise number. (You were one of x Diggs for a story; you drew x hits for your commentary on that NYT editorial; etc.) In the digital world of ones and zeros, you are even more likely to be aggregated into a mass rather than be afforded your individual dignity; in cyberspace, you are literally just another number. The permeability of the Internet as a social medium is just another mask for the class system, another "enigma" to "enthrall" us. It seems wide open, it seems like anew and better meritocracy, but really it's just a better system of disguises for the networks of power and pre-existing relationships of privilege that are slowly but surely replicating themselves there. A few success stories -- the Lonleygirl15s of the world -- will continue to be touted as proof of a great new era of people-powered media in which the cream can rise to the top, but in fact advantages in real life will continue to be more efficiently leveraged in the online world to reproduce the power relations and class structures we all know and love and count on for our lives to be comprehensible.

Alas, this cynical rant would be what capitalist ethnographer (i.e. marketer) Grant McCracken would classify as leftist moral panic, as a kind of elitism that refuses to recognize the glorious contributions made by everyday people all the time.

The Left was persuaded that capitalism, like the TV that was its crudest cultural expression, was a waste land. Nothing could come of this, they assured us. And along came Silicon Valley, an improved independent film industry, and risk taking television, to name a few. Another favorite notion of the Left is that innovation and cultural commotion must come from the avant-garde, the margin of society. It cannot come from the mainstream. But now of course it comes routinely from the mainstream, which proves ever more inventive. (Scrap booking is a case in point. Women in the mainstream reinvented the photo album.) This is not the way the world is supposed to look! And the Left has embraced a moral panic of their own, which now expresses itself in an intellectual rigidity, accusation and name calling, and extra laps on the high horse of indignation.

Yes, thank God for scrapbooking; where would we be without that "reinvention" of the photo album. And thank god for blogging, which has reinvented journalism. But virtually no one wants to see your scrapbook anymore than they want to read my blog. The more media attention they attract, the more blogs are made out to be technologically glorified hobbies, but perhaps this is a good thing, reducing them back to the scale on which one can feel recognized by a community. But the limitless ability to scale up is there, teasingly available to the small-time blog and making it seem piddling compared to those which have successfully secured massive readerships with the same WordPress technology. McCracken seems to think "elites" can't handle the idea that the masses make interesting things. In fact, they handle it just fine; in fact, they exploit it. This is the genius behind reality TV, where you get poorly paid amateurs, desperate for social recognition that will forever remain fleeting -- even more so as their 15 minutes testifies to how watered-down and evaporative what is available has become -- to provide professional caliber ratings and sell more advertised goods. Whatever innovations are generated by the mainstream in this arena are there to be harvested by those who can use them to build brands (entertainment brands or otherwise) -- that capability remains beyond the power of the individual and that fact is what meritocracy hides. Of course ordinary people drive innovation; it's just that they don't get the recognition for it that they perhaps seek, which is more than being another face in the blurry gimmick mirror on the cover of Time. As many have pointed out, If everybody is the "Person of the Year," than nobody is.

Meritocracy and likability (14 September 2006)

At the American Prospect's blog, Ezra Klein and Garance Franke-Ruta combine to refute the myth of meritocracy David Brooks conjured in his NY Times op-ed of September 3. (Elsewhere economists Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein dispense with his specious use of statistics.) Responding to the econo-blogo-sphere debate about income inequality Brooks attempted to buoy the conservative line that inequality (pre-tax) is the natural consequence of differing skills and education, exacerbated by technology (i.e., educated people use computers and get better-paying jobs; poor people fear computers and continue to sweep floors and pick vegetables) rather than any governmental policy (like union-busting, globalization, de facto wage freezes). Arguing that "higher education pays off because it provides technical knowledge and because it screens out people who are not organized, self-motivated and socially adept" and that the "high social and customer-service skills" the well-to-do possess explains the inequalities, Brooks claims that if anything, "the meritocracy is working almost too well."

Well, not really. As Klein explains, we're supposed to "believe that the top one percent now gets paid 16 percent of the total income in this country because they developed 'high social and customer-service skills.' " (Brad Plumer has more statistics that illustrate the ludicrousness of this here as well as a good reminder of why this all matters: economic inequality produces political inequality, which reinforces and worsens the economic inequality.) Klein sees Brooksian meritocacy as a transparent alibi for gross inequality: "In Brooks-land, riches come from being likable, and who could argue with that? All of us think of ourselves as likable, or at least imagine we have the potential to become so. And so all of us can clamber atop that massive income gap and become rich. It's a comforting fiction. To bad it's so wildly wrong." Hence he dubs Brooks's fantasy world "the likability economy," which is extremely apt considering that much of what goes into "likability" are those aspects which can be used to suppress merit, to thwart the premises of meritocracy -- the social and cultural capital that allows merit to become operable, the networks and the habitus of the well-to-do that distinguishes them immediately from the lower classes (which is why mixed income housing is an effective way to reduce poverty -- the middle-class habitus rubs off on the poor). Franke-Ruta links to the relevant data in this post, where she argues that "merit is a product of social position" -- that is "what America's powerful institutions today call 'merit' is the manufactured product of a lifetime of education, training, and invested social capital, and that what the leaders of institutions prefer is also a product of their own biases. This is especially true when personality characteristics are used as employment criteria."

So I'm more skeptical than Klein about the usefulness of the likability economy as alibi, of our being able "to imagine we have the potential to become" likable people. We don't see likability as a means to social mobility unless we already have the social and cultural capital to make it so. Otherwise we just notice how we are inexplicably unlikable to prospective connections and employers. Likability seems a primary way inborn merit is separated from the socially produced version; it's what is used to strain out those who threaten existing class boundaries without having the discrimination become too overt.

The issue, as Reihan Salam gets at in this post, is whether average Americans retain their believe in social mobility despite statistics which dispute it. Part of the problem may be a simple skepticism of economic data, which are often confusing and easily distorted to suit the rhetorical and ideological aims of whoever is using them. Salam suggests that Americans have a "deep-seated bias against zero-sum politics" and reject the idea that the top one percent's good fortunes have anything to do with their situation. That seems possible; it would naturally result from an ideology that rejects the interconnectedness of social life and permits individuals that illusion of total autonomy and responsibility; but I don't think it holds for those who butt up against the likability bias, who discover that no amount of good-naturedness can overcome the ingrained biases of class to protect its own privilege, the values of which reside in their positional and exclusive status.

Update: Read here and here for an elucidation of this kind of nebulous discrimination in action -- Ivy League schools' efforts to avoid admitting too many Jewish and then Asian American students, rejecting them on the basis of their "lacking character."